Jerome As Priest, Exegete, and 'Man of the Church'

CHAPTER 10 Jerome as Priest, Exegete, and ‘Man of the Church’

Philip Rousseau

There is a Jerome who remains immovably significant in the eyes of the honest observer. His idiosyncratic ‘identity’—so deliberately maintained, so resolutely resistant to category or expectation—redeems him precisely from embittered isolation and snatches him away across the centuries from the limitations of a ‘difficult’ temperament. There is a risk of misjudging, however, such release from circumstance: we have to define carefully his relevance to our own times. A scholar beyond doubt, it is hard to see him as a saint; scarcely likeable, he is not even obviously a model.1 We tend to overlook his belligerent contempt by concentrating on his brilliant erudition, his eye for detail, his fearless skill in disclosing hypocrisy or careless thought. In doing so, however, we lock him away in books, his own included; we feel less of a need to respect his varied experience, his unsettled, rough-surfaced and shifting persona. Our bound editions and our learned reflections upon them lull us into thinking that we know him by heart, so that he does not blunder around dangerously in our own world. My argument here, by contrast, is that we should let him do so, let him out of his bookish cage. His voice is not and should not be silenced. It is as if, on an instrument not quite in the best of condition, we still hear music of great beauty, which commands as much as it captivates. That is the Jerome I want to identify: a figure of contemporary value; a critic, certainly, and learned; but

1 The best studies may compound a sense of distance by their attention to context: the still indispensable Ferdinand Cavallera, Saint Jérôme: Sa vie et son oeuvre, Spicilegium Sacrum Lovaniense Études et Documents, fasc. 1–2 (Louvain: ‘Spicilegium Sacrum Lovaniense’ Bureaux, 1922); Stefan Rebenich, Hieronymus und sein Kreis: prosopographische und sozial- geschichtliche Untersuchungen, Historia-Einzelschriften, Bd 72 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1992); the numerous papers by the late Yves-Marie Duval; Yves-Marie Duval, ed., Jérôme entre l’Occident et l’Orient. XVIe centenaire du départ de saint Jérôme de Rome et de son installation à Bethléem. Actes du colloque de Chantilly, Septembre 1986, CEASA, vol. 122 (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1988); and the steadily engaging Megan Hale Williams, The Monk and the Book: Jerome and the Making of Christian Scholarship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). See also my “Jerome’s Search for Self-Identity,” in Prayer and Spirituality in the Early Church, vol. 1, ed. Pauline Allen, Raymond Canning, and Lawrence Cross (Brisbane: Centre for Early Christian Studies, 1998), 125–42.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��5 | doi ��.��63/9789004301573_011 jerome as priest, exegete, and ‘man of the church’ 187 above all a man of feeling and insight, who broke through the impedimenta of conformity. Let me survey briefly how I think this might be done. We look first at Jerome the priest—the critic of priests and of priesthood itself as understood by many in his day. The ordained Jerome was paradoxical in his esprit de corps, sparing little venom for the bulk of his peers; but, while we are familiar with the satire thus unleashed, we may underestimate the commitment to reform—to the clear notion of a figure needed in the church, whom Jerome called the ecclesiasticus uir, the ‘man of the church’. Second, we try to identify the sphere of such a man’s activity, which had much to do with interpreting scripture but also with identifying and uprooting heresy. Jerome clearly thought of himself as an ecclesiasticus uir, possessing the right to argue theological issues without exposing himself to the bullying or shallow-mindedness of the theologically self-righteous. This called for a forum difficult to define and a privilege even harder to preserve. Then comes a third level, that of a man possessed of an intimacy with what Jerome called the sensus of the text; a level of understand- ing that brought him close to the text’s creator. Something of priesthood is retained, but this ever more richly conceived churchman becomes essentially a seer, with the instincts of prophet and poet. Priesthood need not detain us long. We take easy delight in Jerome’s brilliant caricatures of clerical pretension, brazenly directed against men who mirrored his own attendance upon the households of the Christian élite in Rome. They were, indeed, competitors, and had to contend not only with Jerome himself (the confidant of Bishop Damasus) but also with less obviously priestly exemplars like Pelagius. It was still difficult to settle into a pastoral role as yet unstable in the 370s and 380s. Effete, high-falutin’ and over-sexed some of them might have been, but those priests had a job to do, at a time when religious leadership was ripe for opportunistic seizure. Jerome did not like that world very much, and was never seriously intent upon playing a role on such a stage. The ‘church’ in its more dramatic splendour could boast of a new ‘history’ since the interventions of Constantine; but Jerome thought poorly of its representative value. He betrays at any number of points in his corpus his disquiet at the tenor of the post-Constantinian church. Writing its history might prove interesting, but in the end he regretted its most recent growth in power and wealth and its accompanying decline in virtue.2 We are right, nevertheless, to find his behaviour odd. With Arianism rid- ing high, his acceptance of ordination at the hands of the orthodox Paulinus of Antioch in the late 370s must have appeared pig-headed and partisan,

2 Jerome, VM 1.3 (SC 508.186): “potentia quidem et diuitiis maior, sed uirtutibus minor facta sit.”