Fatal Discord

by Michael Massing

  After Christians were granted tolerance by Constantine, the New Testament could at last be openly transcribed. But, with Church membership swelling and the demand for texts growing, translations proliferated, each with its own errors and embellishments. The Vetus Latina used in Rome was very uneven, with many clumsy and untidy passages.

  Around the year 383, Damasus decided he wanted a more reliable text of the Gospels, and he called upon Jerome to prepare it. Then in his midthirties, Jerome had impressed the pope with his forceful character, writing skills, and vast learning. His entire life to that point had seemed one long apprenticeship for the great task now before him. “In Latin, almost from the very cradle, I have spent my time among grammarians and rhetoricians and philosophers,” he would later write. Raised in the town of Stridon, in the province of Dalmatia, at the head of the Adriatic Sea, Jerome did so well in grade school that when he was twelve his parents sent him to Rome to study in a school run by Aelius Donatus, the most renowned schoolmaster of that time. Reading Cicero and Terence, Virgil and Sallust, Jerome developed not only a love of classical literature but also an obsession with grammatical precision that he would later use to rip into his adversaries for their poor syntax. He also began to amass a library that would become famous for its size and quality.

  During his eight years in Rome, pagans and Christians were competing for the support of the population, and Jerome, like so many others, felt torn. From his letters, it is clear that he sampled the city’s pleasures, but he was also drawn to the new faith, with its monotheistic God, redeemer Son, and promise of salvation. Visiting the city’s catacombs and seeing the burial sites of the Christian martyrs, he was deeply moved by their sacrifice, and he decided to undergo baptism—a sign of serious commitment in those days.

  Considering a career in public affairs, Jerome moved to Trier, a provincial capital in eastern Gaul on the “half-barbarous banks of the Rhine,” as he put it. Gradually tiring of professional striving, however, he began studying theology. The ascetic ideals of withdrawal and renunciation—long popular in the East—were catching on in the West, and Jerome felt their pull. After several years in Trier, he returned to Dalmatia to see his family, but he spent much of his time in nearby Aquileia, an episcopal capital with a growing community of devout Christians. Jerome might have settled down there had he not become involved in a violent blowup that blackened his reputation in the community and soured his relations with his family. Though the exact cause of the explosion is not clear, it was no doubt linked to his hair-trigger temper. Forced to leave, he decided (probably in late 372) to head eastward, to Jerusalem.

  It was a bold decision, for the Levant at that time was a remote and untamed land and the journey to it long and difficult. This was, however, the birthplace of the faith, and it remained home to its most prominent theologians, its most learned scholars, its most rigorous ascetics. Many were following the path of St. Anthony, the Egyptian hermit who in the late third century had spent years in self-punishing seclusion in the desert and whose exploits had been popularized in a widely circulated hagiography. Jerome wanted to similarly test himself. The Roman roads were so well maintained that he was able to take his library along with him. The trip was nonetheless grueling, and the long trudge in midsummer across the Anatolian plateau left him near collapse. Reaching Antioch, the great Syrian metropolis, Jerome decided to remain there while recuperating. Greek was the main language, and for the first time he began systematically to study it.

  During Lent of 374 or thereabouts, Jerome had a dream that would prove one of the most famous in Christian annals. It was his habit, after long bouts of fasting, to refresh himself with some pages from Cicero; after punishing nightlong vigils, he would seek relief in Plautus. When he read the Hebrew prophets, they seemed crude and boorish by comparison. As his commitment to Christianity grew, however, Jerome became uneasy at the pleasure he took in heathen writers. One night, while in the grip of a fever so severe that preparations were being made for his funeral, he felt himself hauled before the judgment seat. “Who art thou,” the Judge demanded. “A Christian,” Jerome replied. “Thou liest,” the Judge said; “thou art a Ciceronian, not a Christian.” He ordered Jerome whipped, and as the lashes fell, Jerome begged for mercy. Some bystanders dropped to their knees and urged the Judge to take pity on Jerome and allow him to repent. The beatings stopped, but Jerome was warned that they would resume if he ever again opened the books of the Gentiles. “O Lord,” Jerome in his terror swore, “if ever again I possess worldly books or read them, I have denied thee.” When Jerome opened his eyes, he found that his shoulders were black and blue, and he ached from the bruises long after he had awakened. From that time on, he would later observe, “I read the books of God with a greater zeal than I had given before to the books of men.”

  No other passage in patristic literature more vividly captures the tension many early Christians felt between the siren call of the pagans and the austere demands of their faith. “Jerome’s Dream” (as it came to be known) would for centuries be invoked by traditionalists seeking to seal the ears of the pious against the lure of the secular. For many years, Jerome kept to his vow. Later, however, he would stray, citing as justification a passage from Deuteronomy in which the Lord granted the Israelites permission to take captive beautiful non-Israelite women for their wives if they shaved the heads of these women and sheared off their eyebrows. By similarly cropping secular wisdom to his needs, Jerome wrote, he had made it his “handmaid.” Nonetheless, Jerome’s Dream would remain a powerful argument in the hands of those seeking to suppress pagan literature, as Erasmus would later learn.

  Determined to cure himself of worldly desires, Jerome decided to follow through on his plan. Not far from Antioch began the Syrian Desert, a menacing wilderness of ravines, cliffs, and gorges that was home to clusters of filthy, emaciated hermits engaged in spectacular acts of self-mortification; some lived atop pillars so as to be closer to heaven. Jerome lived in a cave, slept on the ground, and followed such a meager diet that he, too, turned skeletal. Even in this forbidding setting, however, he was able to continue his studies. Remarkably, he had his library with him and was able to expand it, hiring a team of copyists as well as messengers to ferry his requests for books to be transcribed.

  In addition to polishing his Greek, Jerome learned some Syriac and studied Hebrew with a local Jewish convert to Christianity. Having no Hebrew grammar texts to guide him, however, he struggled mightily with the harsh and alien tongue. Even more vexing were his sexual urges. In his heightened rhetorical style, Jerome (in a later letter) would describe his torment: “How often, when I was living in the desert, in the vast solitude which gives to hermits a savage dwelling-place, parched by a burning sun, how often did I fancy myself among the pleasures of Rome!” Sackcloth hanging from his shrunken limbs, scorpions and wild beasts his only companions, Jerome often felt himself “amid bevies of girls. My face was pale and my frame chilled with fasting; yet my mind was burning with desire, and the fires of lust kept bubbling up before me when my flesh was as good as dead. Helpless, I cast myself at the feet of Jesus, I watered them with my tears, I wiped them with my hair; and then I subdued my rebellious body with weeks of abstinence.”

  Sometimes Jerome would cry aloud and beat his breast all night. Dreading his cell, he would make his way alone into the desert:

  Wherever I saw hollow valleys, craggy mountains, steep cliffs, there I made my oratory, there the house of correction for my unhappy flesh. There also—the Lord Himself is my witness—when I had shed copious tears and had strained my eyes toward heaven, I sometimes felt myself among angelic hosts, and for joy and gladness sang: “Because of the savor of thy good ointments, we will run after thee.”

  Like many early Christians, Jerome felt that satisfying the demands of the flesh undermined the effort to exalt the spirit. Remorseful over his earlier licentiousness, he began in this period to develop the creed of extreme chastity that would come to dominate his writing an
d, ultimately, affect his work as a translator.

  After two years in the desert, Jerome—tiring of the pounding sun, the empty expanses, the vainglory of the monks, and the raving “frenzy” of the Arians, whose questioning of Christ’s divinity was plunging the Church into chaos—decided to rejoin civilization. In 379, he returned to Antioch, then traveled to Constantinople. There, for the first time, he ventured into the field of religious translation, putting into Latin Eusebius’s famous Chronicle, a valuable but highly sensationalized and error-ridden history of the world from the time of Abraham on. With it, Jerome showed a knack for creating arresting turns of phrase—for endowing even the most prosaic expressions with a sense of majesty and uplift. He also showed his willingness to enhance the text—highlighting his own special interests, adding gossipy details about people, giving free rein to his prejudices. He was very careless as well, dictating in haste to a stenographer, and as a result, the translation was filled with errors.

  While in Constantinople, Jerome, who had begun corresponding with Damasus, received from him a request to comment on the sixth chapter of Isaiah. The chapter’s central image—of the Lord seated on a throne and attended by two six-winged seraphim—had long befuddled biblical commentators. In his reply, Jerome drew on two biblical techniques he had learned while in Constantinople. One was the use of allegory. This involved finding in every name, body part, historical event, and human activity in the Bible a sign of God’s higher purposes and Christ’s sacred presence. This approach was frequently criticized for allowing readers to find in Scripture whatever they wanted, but Jerome would master it. He also learned the value of comparing old manuscripts of scriptural texts to determine the correct reading—an approach largely unknown in the West. After examining several Greek and Hebrew versions of Isaiah, Jerome concluded that the two seraphim represented the Old and New Testaments and that Isaiah’s description testified to their perfect harmony. When the Hebrew prophet declared that “the whole earth is full of his glory,” he was referring to the coming of Christ. The commentary heightened Damasus’s esteem for Jerome’s learning.

  Damasus would soon get to meet him in person. In 382, he convened a synod in Rome to discuss issues of papal succession, and Jerome came to serve as an interpreter and adviser. Though Damasus was more than twice as old as Jerome, the two quickly became close, and when the pope decided to commission a new version of the Gospels, he turned to Jerome.

  Sensitive to the pull of tradition, Damasus wanted not an entirely new translation but a revision of the Old Latin Bible based on early manuscripts. Even so, Jerome hesitated, for he knew the uproar that such a venture would surely cause. “Is there a man, learned or unlearned,” he wrote, “who will not, when he takes the volume into his hands and perceives that what he reads does not suit his settled tastes, break out immediately into violent language, and call me a forger and a profane person for having the audacity to add anything to the ancient books, or to make any changes or corrections therein?”

  But Jerome shared Damasus’s concern about the debased state of the New Testament, complaining that “there are almost as many forms of texts as there are copies,” and so he signed on. Taking up the Gospels, he sought out early Greek codices that could suggest the text of the originals (which had long since disappeared). If truth was the main goal, he wrote, “why not go back to the original Greek and correct the mistakes introduced by inaccurate translators, and the blundering alterations of confident but ignorant critics, and, further, all that has been inserted or changed by copyists more asleep than awake?” Wary of being attacked, however, Jerome proceeded with caution, restricting himself to smoothing rough phrases, correcting obvious solecisms, and pruning provincialisms. In all, he made changes in some 3,500 places.

  In the process, however, he created many new problems. Always in a hurry, Jerome became sloppier as he went on. For instance, he converted finite verbs into participles far more often at the beginning of Matthew than at the end. In translating individual words, Jerome was often inconsistent. He thus translated the Greek word archiereus (“high priest”) as princeps sucerdotum in Matthew, as summus sacerdos in Mark, and as pontifex in John. He gave doxazo (“glorify”) sometimes as glorificare, sometimes as magnificare, and at other times as honorificare. So, while Jerome’s hand was light, it was also erratic and arbitrary, creating many headaches for future exegetes.

  Initially, his revision met with little protest, owing in part to his having the pope’s blessing. Incapable of avoiding controversy, however, he soon found himself under fire for his personal conduct. Though now celibate, Jerome craved female company, and he became close to two patrician widows, Marcella and Paula. Marcella’s palace, located on the Aventine Hill, was a meeting place for well-to-do Christian women. Eastern-style asceticism, while still relatively rare in Rome, was growing in appeal, especially among aristocratic women who wanted more control of their bodies. Jerome was well known to these women through the letters he had written from the East, and Marcella invited him to discuss the Bible with them. Quickly developing a hold on the group, Jerome impressed on them the importance of prolonged fasting, incessant prayer, and chastity. Mesmerized, Paula took to wearing sackcloth, sleeping on the ground, and forgoing bathing, and, at Jerome’s insistence, she pledged her adolescent daughter Eustochium to a life of virginity.

  To encourage Eustochium, Jerome wrote her a sixteen-thousand-word letter that was actually a small treatise on the subject of women and chastity. Of all the values for which Christianity stood, he declared, female virginity was by far the greatest. “Assuredly no gold or silver vessel was ever so dear to God as is the temple of a virgin’s body.” Bodily abstention was not enough, since virginity “may be lost even by a thought. Such are evil virgins, virgins in the flesh, not in the spirit.” To make sure Eustochium did not stray, Jerome issued a series of admonitions: She should shun contact with not only men but also married women and even widows who had had sexual relations. Her companions should be “women pale and thin with fasting, and approved by their years and conduct.” She should live in seclusion, abstain from wine, fast daily, pray throughout the day, and rise two or three times during the night to recite Scripture. She should further avoid all displays of vanity, keep her face hidden, and stop up her ears against music. Virginity, Jerome asserted, was superior even to marriage: “I praise wedlock, I praise marriage, but it is because they give me virgins.”

  Widely circulated, Jerome’s letter to Eustochium was part of an ardent campaign he would wage for the rest of his life to promote virginity and celibacy. Though Jerome was hardly the only Church Father to push these values—Ambrose and Augustine were his equals in this regard—his polemics would play a central part in implanting them in Western Christendom. And the doctrine of Mary’s perpetual virginity, which he insistently proclaimed, would become a foundation of Western Mariology.

  At the time, however, many Romans were repelled by such teachings. To them, Jerome seemed intent on snatching away their women and girls and turning them into unwashed recluses. Jerome simultaneously came under attack from the Roman clergy, whom he had repeatedly charged with lechery, avarice, and ambition. In the spring of 384, the first protests were raised against his revision of the Gospels. (In translating the New Testament, Jerome seems not to have gone beyond those four books.) With typical vitriol he dismissed his critics as “two-legged asses” who preferred to drink from the “muddy streamlet” of the Old Latin version rather than water drawn from the “clear spring” of the Lord’s words.

  Jerome’s situation grew more dire when, in December 384, Damasus, his main protector, died. Around the same time, Blesilla, Paula’s eldest daughter, died after prolonged fasting. Under Jerome’s hectoring, she had in effect starved herself to death. Widely blamed, he was denounced as the leader of “the detestable tribe of monks,” and rumors spread about his close ties with Paula. An investigation was launched, and in August 385 Jerome was ordered to leave the city. He decided to head once agai
n to the East. “Let Rome keep her bustle for herself, the fury of the arena, the madness of the circus, the profligacy of the theater,” he wrote. “I thank my God that I am held worthy of the world’s hate.” Paula decided to join him, even though it meant abandoning her two youngest children, and a few months later she and Eustochium met up with him in the East.

  For two years they toured the Holy Land and Egypt. In the Nile valley, they saw thousands of ascetics living in secluded communities, and they decided to set up a monastic community of their own, in Bethlehem. It consisted of three convents, a monastery, and a school. The rules were punishingly strict, with Paula policing the fifty or so girls under her supervision for the slightest signs of sexual stirring; the penalty was invariably prolonged fasting. Though little more than a hamlet at the time, Bethlehem was beginning to attract tourists, and Jerome and Paula set up a lodge to receive them. Carrying their impressions back home, these pilgrims helped spread the monastic ideal in the West.

  Despite his many responsibilities as the head of the community, Jerome kept up his studies. He reassembled his library in Bethlehem and began pouring forth a torrent of commentaries, translations, homilies, and histories. To tutor him in Hebrew, he hired a local Jew who—fearing the wrath of his fellow Jews—visited only at night. To deepen his knowledge of biblical sites, Jerome crisscrossed Palestine with an experienced guide, surveying its hills and river valleys, visiting its ruins and historic sites. He prepared a dictionary of biblical place-names, which, despite being full of mistakes, became a popular guidebook for Christian tourists.

  All of this was a prelude to Jerome’s next great undertaking: translating the Old Testament. Jerome had initially intended to revise the Old Latin version of the Old Testament much as he had the four Gospels; that is, by bringing it more closely into line with the underlying Greek text. That text was the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible produced in the third century B.C.E. According to legend, the work was carried out by seventy-two translators (six from each of the twelve tribes) brought from Israel to Egypt by King Ptolemy Philadelphus, who wanted a copy of the Hebrew Scriptures for the library at Alexandria. The translators were taken to an island and set to work in isolation from one another. After months of labor, they all miraculously produced identical Greek texts. (Septuagint means “seventy” in Greek.) From its earliest days, the Roman Church had considered the Septuagint divinely inspired and hence the only authorized text of the Old Testament. Whenever Jerome discussed it with Jews, however, they laughed at the many places where it diverged from the Hebrew. Comparing Greek and Hebrew texts, he reluctantly came to agree. The passages contained in the Hebrew and omitted from the Septuagint were “so numerous,” he wrote, “that to reproduce them all would require books without number.”