History is About Weird People

..St. Jerome [was]...born about 343 in Dalmatia, a coastal strip along the Adriatic in what is now part of Croatia and was then part of the Roman empire. He was to become the most learned Scripture scholar of the patristic age and is honored not only as a “Doctor,” but also as a “Father of the Church,” the polymath who produced the “Vulgate,” the most famous Latin translation of the Bible from its original languages.

As a teen-ager in Rome, Jerome became a master of Greek and Ciceronian Latin. In his early 30’s he lived for four or five years as a recluse in a part of Syria that he called “a wild and stony desert.” It was during this period of solitude and prayer that he began the study of Hebrew, partly, he said, to distract himself from erotic temptations.

He emerged from that sandy waste to devote himself to an intense life as a theologian, writer, teacher, consultant to bishops and spiritual director of wealthy Roman women, some of whom would themselves be acknowledged as saints. Unfortunately, but not infrequently, Jerome was also a fiery controversialist who took no prisoners.

The last 35 years of his life were spent in Bethlehem, where he lived in the manner of a monk, although not in a monastery, while completing his translation of the Old and New Testaments. By this time, he was one of the most celebrated intellectuals in the Mediterranean world; and, like many intellectuals and artists, he did not relish contradiction. What Philip Hobsbaum, the British critic, said of Dickens could have been said of Jerome: “Opposition, even of a trifling kind, was apt to arouse his fiercest passions.”

One case was particularly notorious. For many years, Jerome’s closest friend was a certain Rufinus from what is now northern Italy, who was, like himself, a theologian and translator. After a quarter-century, this great friendship was torn apart when Jerome and Rufinus disagreed about the orthodoxy of certain positions held by the third-century Egyptian theologian, Origen.

In the course of this dispute, Jerome wrote a brilliantly witty but mean caricature of Rufinus. Its rhetoric has had Latinists squirming with delight. For instance, Rufinus is described as snorting like a pig when he conversed and walking like a tortoise when he promenaded.

“It is a good piece of prose,” said Helen Waddell (1889-1965), the Oxford medievalist who was herself a master of prose, and Rufinus “walks his tortoise walk in it forever. But it would have been better for Jerome if he had never written it….” For Rufinus had died in 410 or 411, and Jerome knew that when he wrote so unkindly. This does not mean that Jerome, so austere and so tirelessly dedicated to the service of God, was not a saint. It only means that when he wept for his sins he had those seizures of irascibility to mourn.

Cyril of Alexandria, who was about 30 years younger than Jerome, has also been recognized both as a doctor of the church and an unamiable personality. He became archbishop of the Egyptian city of Alexandria in 412 and held that office until his death in 444. There may well have been a general sigh of relief when Cyril was called to glory. Butler’s Lives judiciously observes: “He was a man of strong and impulsive character, brave but sometimes overvehement, indeed violent.”

As soon as he became archbishop, he used his authority to secure the closing of the churches of certain schismatic Christians called Novatians. He was also instrumental in having Alexandria’s Jewish population driven out of the city on the grounds of beating up Christians.

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