‘Chastening in the Hour of Pride’

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, October 04, 2020

 

 Saint Jerome, who died 1,600 years ago Wednesday, is — this may surprise you — in the news. Pope Francis has him on the brain and last week published an insightful meditation on the saint in the form of the apostolic letter Scripturae Sacrae Affectus, “Devotion to Sacred Scripture.” It is good reading in these dark and anxious times.

 

Who was Saint Jerome?

 

You might be tempted to call him an effete intellectual, a man who spent his life with his nose in a book and whose most lasting contribution to the world was translating the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into Latin. “How many divisions does the pope have?” Joseph Stalin is supposed to have quipped. None from Jerome, who produced nothing more world-shaking than Latin prose.

 

If not an effete intellectual, then maybe an unsparing fanatic — the pope’s account of the saint is admiring, but he also describes him as “polemical,” “impetuous,” and “harsh,” as well as “vehement” and “explosive” and often “inflamed.” (Saints — they can be a bit much.) He turned his unsparing judgment on himself and was shaken by a dream in which he found himself condemned at the Last Judgment for preferring the words of Cicero to the Word of God, which, as Jerome observed, is written in inelegant, unlovely, and often ungrammatical language. Jerome the Latinist was, as the pope writes, “homo Romanus,” a man with a special personal connection to the Eternal City. But he left Rome to study Scripture and live a life of ascetic discipline and poverty in the desert.

 

So, maybe he was a chump, “renouncing all human satisfaction.” In the desert, Pope Francis writes, “he discovered the importance of tears.”

 

(Not exactly a man of our times.)

 

Politically, he was a loser: Jerome returned to Rome for a few years while Pope Damasus I employed him for his intellectual gifts. But, after the pope’s death, Jerome was driven from the city by his enemies among the Roman clergy, whose worldly ways he had pointedly — and publicly — criticized. He eventually ended up living in a cave in Bethlehem, adjacent to the site where Jesus was born. It was here that he did his most important literary work, his illuminating manuscript.

 

And what did that amount to? Pope Francis writes:

 

The result was a true monument that marked the cultural history of the West. . . . Medieval Europe learned to read, pray, and think from the pages of the Bible translated by Jerome. In this way, “sacred Scripture became a sort of ‘immense lexicon’ (Paul Claudel) and ‘iconographic atlas’ (Marc Chagall), from which both Christian culture and art could draw.” Literature, art and even popular language have continually been shaped by Jerome’s translation of the Bible, leaving us great treasures of beauty and devotion.

 

(That the pope in 2020 is comfortable quoting a Catholic conservative and a Jewish modernist in the same sentence to the same end is a reminder that, in spite of humanity’s constant exertions, some things really do get better over time.)

 

“This, too, shall pass” is a proverb that we remember during hard times, but it is equally illuminating advice for good times, too. Abraham Lincoln cited it in a speech, marveling at its wisdom: “How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!” Caravaggio was called upon to paint Saint Jerome at least eight times, and in the three surviving paintings the saint is depicted in much the same attitude, working or meditating at his writing table, his only company a skull — the memento mori — to remind him that even a work for the ages will pass away, because the ages themselves must pass away.

 

The skull on Saint Jerome’s desk, like the example of his life, points us in the direction of the question: “What matters? If everything I know and love, and everything I fear and hate, and everything I have and everything I want will, in the end, be dust, and then not even dust — then what matters?” Great men suffer affliction, empires fall. The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius was haunted by the many tombstones he saw inscribed: “The last of his house.” The questions make us uneasy.

 

So do the answers.

 

Pope Francis advises understanding Jerome in the context of “the most authentic prophetic tradition,” his fanaticism and harshness pointing to “a model of uncompromising witness to the truth” that “shows the courage of a servant desirous not of pleasing others, but his Lord alone, for whose sake he expended all his spiritual energy.”

 

This points us back again to our own predicament: “No man can serve two masters,” Matthew’s gospel says — much less the 10,000 masters among whom we contemporaries must divide our attention. Our world is very loud, very crowded, full of terror and temptation. Saint Jerome had to retreat to the desert to “discover the importance of tears.” And the same is true for us.

 

But we do not need to pack up for the Holy Land to find the desert: We are already there, if only we would take a moment to notice the fact. “How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!”