HistoricalChristian.Faith

Jerome and Augustine: a correspondence across the Mediterranean

This is the story of a friendship built entirely out of letters. Augustine of Hippo (c. 354–430) and Jerome (c. 347–420) — the two greatest Latin churchmen of their age — never met. For a quarter-century they wrote to each other across the sea between Roman Africa and Bethlehem, and the exchange began badly: a respectful young bishop's criticism of the famous old scholar's exegesis, letters that went astray or circulated behind Jerome's back, and a decade of prickly, wounded, half-suspicious replies. Yet it ended as one of the warmest friendships of the early Church, the two men allied against a common enemy and longing, across the miles, to embrace.

Unlike the belief-timelines elsewhere on this site, this page is a relationship told through its dated moments: the letters that passed between the two, set down earliest first, each footnoted to its source. Two disputes run through it — how to read Paul's public rebuke of Peter at Antioch (Galatians 2:11–14), and whether the Latin Bible should be translated from the Hebrew or the Greek — and around them a slow thaw from rivalry into reverence.

Related doctrines: Controversies among the Fathers — see also the Origenist controversy (Jerome and Rufinus) · Theophilus of Alexandria and John Chrysostom · Cyril of Alexandria and Nestorius · the condemnation of Origen · was Tertullian a heretic?.

Timeline

Augustine opens the correspondence — and the letter is lost (c. 394/395)

Not long after his ordination, Augustine — soon bishop of Hippo — wrote to Jerome, then in his monastery at Bethlehem, opening the correspondence with a respectful but pointed objection to Jerome's commentary on Galatians. Jerome had read Paul's rebuke of Peter at Antioch (Gal 2:11–14) as a staged, mutually-agreed performance — a “useful” pretense in which neither apostle really erred. To Augustine that opened a fatal breach in the truthfulness of Scripture:

For it seems to me that most disastrous consequences must follow upon our believing that anything false is found in the sacred books: that is to say, that the men by whom the Scripture has been given to us, and committed to writing, did put down in these books anything false.

— Augustine, Letter 28 (to Jerome), §3. The letter never arrived: its bearer, the priest Profuturus, was made a bishop and then died before he could carry it east, and for years Jerome heard nothing of it.¹

A second letter, and a request for a “palinode” (c. 397)

Some two years later Augustine wrote again, pressing the same objection harder and asking Jerome outright to recant the reading — to sing, in the Greek phrase, a palinode:

Wherefore I beseech you, apply to the correction and emendation of that book a frank and truly Christian severity, and chant what the Greeks call παλινῴδια.

— Augustine, Letter 40 (to Jerome), §7. This letter also miscarried in delivery — but a copy escaped into circulation, passing through many hands in Italy and at Rome long before it ever reached Bethlehem. Criticism of Jerome's work was being published to the world behind his back.²

“A book against you”: Augustine denies the rumour (402)

Word reached Augustine that Jerome had been told something worse than criticism — that the African bishop had written and published a whole book against him. Augustine wrote at once to deny it:

… I have heard that some brethren have told your Charity that I have written a book against you and have sent it to Rome. Be assured that this is false: I call God to witness that I have not done this.

— Augustine, Letter 67 (to Jerome), §2. Where he did differ, he insisted, he had written “not with a view of contradicting you, but only of stating my own views,” and he begged for correction in return — and simply for contact: “Do not refuse to write me in return, however seldom.”³

Jerome's guarded first reply: an unauthenticated letter and “do not challenge a veteran” (402)

When Jerome at last answered (402), friendship and suspicion were mixed — and the first thing he raised was not the exegesis but the paperwork. He had never received a letter from Augustine; what he had were the loose copies of the palinode letter, brought east by a deacon named Sisinnius, and he would not treat an unsigned copy as authentic:

… by our brother Sysinnius, deacon, copies of a letter addressed by some one apparently to me have come hither. … Although the style and the method of argument appeared to be yours, I must frankly confess to your Excellency that I did not think it right to assume without examination the authenticity of a letter of which I had only seen copies …

— Jerome, Letter 102 (to Augustine), §1. He asked for either an acknowledgment or “a more accurate copy,” pleaded the long illness of Paula as a further cause of delay, and sent his reply back with his kinsman Asterius, a subdeacon, who was leaving for the West as Augustine's note arrived. Then he parried the young African's challenge with a veteran's hauteur:

… do not because you are young challenge a veteran in the field of Scripture.

— Jerome, Letter 102 (to Augustine), §2. He reminded Augustine of “the proverb, The tired ox treads with a firmer step,” and pleaded his age: “I have had my time, and have run my course to the utmost of my strength. It is but fair that I should rest.” He also enclosed his freshly written reply to “Calphurnius, surnamed Lanarius” — his mocking nickname for Rufinus, whose attacks he complained were being circulated in Africa too, so that the other great quarrel of his life entered this correspondence in its very first letter.⁴

A trusted courier at last: the asterisks, the Septuagint plea, and the riot at Oea (403)

In 403 Augustine tried again, this time by a bearer he trusted to get an answer — the deacon Cyprian, “a most faithful servant and minister of God” — and he enclosed fresh copies of both earlier letters, since “I suppose that they never reached you.” He also opened a second front. Jerome's older Latin Old Testament, made from the Greek, had marked with asterisks and obelisks every word present in the Hebrew but missing from the Greek and the reverse; the new version straight from the Hebrew abandoned that scrupulous apparatus, and Augustine wanted to know why: it “perplexes any thoughtful reader.” Behind the technical question lay the larger worry — that a Latin Bible following the Hebrew would split the Latin churches from the Greek. He begged Jerome to render the Septuagint instead, and told the story of the uproar in a North African congregation when a bishop read out Jerome's unfamiliar rendering of a plant in the book of Jonah:

… there arose such a tumult in the congregation, especially among the Greeks, correcting what had been read, and denouncing the translation as false, that the bishop was compelled to ask the testimony of the Jewish residents (it was in the town of Oea). These, whether from ignorance or from spite, answered that the words in the Hebrew manuscripts were correctly rendered in the Greek version, and in the Latin one taken from it. … The man was compelled to correct your version in that passage as if it had been falsely translated, as he desired not to be left without a congregation — a calamity which he narrowly escaped.

— Augustine, Letter 71 (to Jerome), §5. It was a caution that a scholar's “Hebrew verity” could cost a bishop his flock — the same Septuagint-versus-Hebrew question the Latin and Greek churches would argue for centuries (see the Septuagint's origin). All three questions the incident raises — which text a Latin Old Testament should be made from, whether a congregation's settled text constrains its reviser, and what the plant actually was — are weighed as arguments in their own right.⁵

Jerome's grievance: the letter is all over Rome, but not with me (403/404)

Jerome's patience frayed. He had still, he protested, never received an authenticated letter from Augustine — yet the criticism was everywhere:

I am at a loss to express my surprise that the same letter is reported to be in the possession of most of the Christians in Rome, and throughout Italy, and has come to every one but myself, to whom alone it was ostensibly sent.

— Jerome, Letter 105 (to Augustine), §1. He suspected the whole exercise was a bid for fame at his expense, and asked to be left alone — to have his critic “desist from annoying an old man, who seeks retirement in his monastic cell.”⁶

Augustine owns the letter and asks pardon — and grieves the quarrel with Rufinus (404)

Augustine's answer of 404 finally closed the authenticity question and, with it, nine years of misdirected post. He acknowledged the palinode letter as his own and did not defend himself:

… it remains for me to confess, as I now do, my fault as having been the first to offend by writing that letter which I cannot deny to be mine. Why should I strive to swim against the current, and not rather ask pardon?

— Augustine, Letter 73 (to Jerome), §3. He set out plainly how the years had been lost: “I remember writing to your Holiness regarding these words in the Epistle to the Galatians when I was young; and behold I am now advanced in age, and have not yet received a reply, and a copy of my letter has reached you by some strange accident earlier than the letter itself … For the man to whom I entrusted it neither delivered it to you nor returned it to me.” Bracing himself for the reply, he cast himself as the rash Dares of the Aeneid facing the fists of a second Entellus — and answered Jerome's own wistful line from 402, “Would that I could receive your embrace, and that by converse we might aid each other in learning,” by saying he read it “with the utmost affectionate yearning.”

Augustine was pained by more than the exegesis. In the same letter he grieved openly over Jerome's ruinous quarrel with his oldest friend, Rufinus — then at its bitter height (that story is told on its own timeline) — and longed to see the two reconciled:

This is a great and a lamentable wonder, that you should have passed from such amity to such enmity: it would be a joyful and a much greater event, should you come back from such enmity to the friendship of former days.

— Augustine, Letter 73 (to Jerome), §8. He even took up Jerome's own self-portrait, addressing him as “an ox worn out, perhaps, as to your bodily strength by reason of years, but unimpaired in mental vigour.”⁷

Jerome's great reply: Hebrew verity and the Antioch defense (404)

Then came Jerome's long-delayed answer to all three earlier letters. On the translation he defended his “Hebrew verity”; on Galatians he stood his ground, insisting that in reading the Antioch scene as a prudent arrangement he had only followed the Greek fathers before him — Origen above all, and “John, who has long governed the Church of Constantinople” (Chrysostom). Peter, he argued, had neither truly sinned nor Paul truly rebuked; the apostle only seemed to keep the law:

… Peter was thoroughly aware of the abrogation of the law of Moses, but was compelled by fear to pretend to observe it.

— Jerome, Letter 112 (to Augustine), §8. And he begged the younger man to leave him in peace: “have some consideration for a soldier who is now old and has long retired from active service, and not to force him to take the field and again expose his life to the chances of war.” Whether Jerome's reading of Antioch holds — a genuine rebuke, or a staged pretense — is weighed as a pair of rival arguments in their own right.⁸

Augustine's irenic answer: only the canonical books are without error (405)

Augustine's reply (405) conceded nothing on Galatians but framed the whole disagreement with a principle that would outlast them both. He held Scripture inerrant — and reserved that reverence for Scripture alone:

For I confess to your Charity that I have learned to yield this respect and honour only to the canonical books of Scripture: of these alone do I most firmly believe that the authors were completely free from error. And if in these writings I am perplexed by anything which appears to me opposed to truth, I do not hesitate to suppose that either the manuscript is faulty, or the translator has not caught the meaning of what was said, or I myself have failed to understand it.

— Augustine, Letter 82 (to Jerome), §3. On Peter he held firm: the rebuke was real, because Paul, a steward of truth, had recorded it — “I read that Paul wrote this, and I do not believe that he lied.”⁹

The thaw: “letters not of controversy, but of mutual charity” (405)

With that, the heat went out of the quarrel. Jerome's next note struck a wholly different key, proposing they lay down their arms:

… let there be sincere brotherliness between us; and henceforth let us exchange letters, not of controversy, but of mutual charity.

— Jerome, Letter 115 (to Augustine), §1. “Let us, if you please,” he added, “exercise ourselves in the field of Scripture without wounding each other.”¹⁰

Rome falls, and Jerome starts sending inquirers to Augustine (410)

Alaric took Rome in August 410, and the shock reached Bethlehem in the form of refugees. Jerome had promised his readers a commentary on Ezekiel; he could not write it:

… at the time when I had just begun to dictate the proposed exposition, my mind was so much agitated by the devastation of the western provinces of the empire, and especially by the sack of Rome itself by the barbarians, that, to use a common proverbial phrase, I scarcely knew my own name; and for a long while I was silent, knowing that it was a time for tears.

— Jerome, Letter 126 (to Marcellinus and Anapsychia), §2. In the prefaces to that commentary he described the monastery overwhelmed — “the quiet of the monastery has been changed into the bustle of a guest house” — as he received “every day … in this holy Bethlehem men and women who once were noble and abounding in every kind of wealth but are now reduced to poverty.” The note he did manage to send Augustine that year is three sentences of exhausted gloom about men who “go halting upon both feet, and refuse to bend their heads even when their necks are broken,” with greetings to Alypius and Evodius.¹¹

The same letter to Marcellinus shows how far the relation had shifted in eight years. Asked where the soul comes from, the veteran who had told Augustine not to challenge a veteran now sent his correspondents to Africa to consult him:

… you have in Africa that holy man and learned bishop Augustine, who will be able to teach you on this subject viva voce, as the saying is, and expound to you his opinion, or, I should rather say, my own opinion stated in his words.

— Jerome, Letter 126, §1.¹²

Allies against Pelagius; Orosius carries the letters (c. 415–416)

A few years later the two were allies. When the Pelagian controversy broke, Augustine sent the young Spanish priest Orosius east to Jerome (415), carrying two long letters that consulted the old scholar as an authority — one on the origin of the soul, one on the meaning of James 2:10. Jerome, whose own Bethlehem community was already under threat from Pelagian partisans, answered with unguarded warmth:

I am resolved to love you, to look up to you, to reverence and admire you, and to defend your opinions as my own.

— Jerome, Letter 134 (to Augustine), §1. He welcomed Orosius, he wrote, “both on his own account and in obedience to your request” — but he would not answer the two treatises at length, because “a most trying time has come upon us, in which I have found it better for me to hold my peace than to speak, so that our studies have ceased.” A postscript answers, at twelve years' distance, the question Augustine had put in 403 about the asterisks and obelisks: that annotated Septuagint could no longer be supplied, for “we have lost, through some one's dishonesty, the most of the results of our earlier labour.”¹³

The Pelagians sack the monasteries at Bethlehem (416–417)

After the synod of Diospolis acquitted Pelagius, partisans of his cause fell on Jerome's monasteries. Augustine reported it — carefully, at second hand, and from a great distance — in the closing chapter of his account of the synod:

Certain followers of Pelagius are said to have carried their support of his cause after these judicial proceedings to an incredible extent of perverseness and audacity. They are said to have most cruelly beaten and maltreated the servants and handmaidens of the Lord who lived under the care of the holy presbyter Jerome, slain his deacon, and burnt his monastic houses; while he himself, by God's mercy, narrowly escaped the violent attacks of these impious assailants in the shelter of a well-defended fortress.

— Augustine, On the Deeds of Pelagius, §66. He declined to press the matter, thinking it belonged “to the discipline of the episcopal authority on the spot.” Bishop Innocent of Rome, written to by Jerome and by Paula's daughter Eustochium, rebuked John of Jerusalem for the “ravages, murders, fires and outrages of all kinds” suffered in his district, while noting that the reports “have reached my ears in the shape of rumours rather than as specific accusations” and that Jerome's own letters “name no individuals and bring no specific charges.” Jerome himself told the story only in code, writing that he had “thought it better to change my abode than to surrender the true faith,” because his attackers “would either have insisted on my instant submission or would else have summoned me to support my opinions by the sword.”¹⁴

“The restorer of the ancient faith” (418–419)

In his last letters Jerome, embattled and aging, hailed Augustine as the Church's champion against the Pelagians:

Go on and prosper! You are renowned throughout the whole world; Catholics revere and look up to you as the restorer of the ancient faith, and — which is a token of yet more illustrious glory — all heretics abhor you.

— Jerome, Letter 141 (to Augustine). And across the sea he longed for a reunion that could never come: “if it were possible, I would take the wings of a dove and fly to be folded in your embrace.” Their “co-operation and … leadership,” he wrote in 419, had “succeeded in strangling the heresy of Celestius.”¹⁵

Jerome dies; Augustine enrols him among the authorities (420–430)

Jerome died at Bethlehem in 420. Augustine outlived him by a decade and honoured him to the last. Answering Julian of Eclanum about a year after Jerome's death, he set against the Pelagians a bench of dead witnesses — ten bishops and, punctiliously, one presbyter: “Irenaeus, Cyprian, Reticius, Olympius, Hilary, Ambrose, Gregory, Innocent, John, Basil, to whom I add, whether you wish it or not, the priest Jerome.” He anticipated the obvious objection — that Jerome was a combatant in this very war — by restricting himself to what Jerome had written “free from all partisanship, before your damnable doctrine sprang up.” The correspondence that began as a young man's challenge to a prickly elder ended as one of the great friendships of the Latin Church — carried on entirely by letter, between two men who never met.¹⁶

Arguments

Off-timeline questions this correspondence raises, weighed on their evidence:

Related arguments — the Antioch clash

Two rival readings of the same scene, Paul's public rebuke of Peter at Antioch (Galatians 2:11–14): whether Peter really lapsed and Paul really corrected him, or whether the whole confrontation was a staged “economy” in which neither apostle sinned. Each has its own proponent and its own proof-texts — the staged reading resting on a Greek-patristic pedigree and the accommodation motive, the real-rebuke reading on the vocabulary of fault and the oath of Galatians 1:20 — and they are best read as a set.

A staged pretense, in which neither apostle really erred? (assessment: weak)

The staged “economy” reading — weak: the interpretation Jerome took from Origen and the Greek fathers, that Peter only feigned to keep the law and Paul only appeared to rebuke him. It had a genuine patristic pedigree and answered the pagan critic Porphyry, and Jerome himself declined to hold it “finally and irrevocably” — but it does not hold on its best case: it reads the vocabulary of fault Paul chose as its opposite, suspends the oath of Galatians 1:20, and buys apostolic dignity at the ruinous price of an inspired writer endorsing a deception.¹⁷

A real rebuke of a genuine error? (assessment: sound)

The real-rebuke reading — sound: the interpretation Augustine defended in Letters 28, 40, and 82, that Peter genuinely erred and Paul genuinely and truthfully corrected him in public. It is the plain sense of the passage and the near-consensus of later interpretation, resting on the vocabulary of fault (“fearing,” “dissimulation,” “walked not uprightly”), the oath of Galatians 1:20, and the principle — the classic Latin statement of the point — that admitting one dutiful falsehood into the sacred books unravels the whole.¹⁸

Related arguments — translating the Old Testament

The other front of the quarrel, and the one on which the two men never fully agreed: from what text a Latin Old Testament should be made, what a translator owes the congregations who will have to receive it, and — the single word that set the whole thing off — what the plant was that shaded Jonah. The three questions are entangled, because the riot at Oea was used by both men as proof of opposite things.

Should the Latin Old Testament be translated from the Hebrew rather than the Septuagint? (assessment: sound)

Jerome's Hebraica veritas — sound: by 400 there was no single Septuagint text left to render — three regional recensions competed, and the one nearest to hand was Origen's composite — a translation of a translation compounds error, and the New Testament quotes readings found in the Hebrew and not in the Greek. The Church came round to it entirely. The slogan nonetheless claims more than the warrant: the Hebrew of Jerome's day was not the autograph, and in Jeremiah and Samuel the Greek renders an older Hebrew text than the one that became standard.¹⁹

Is the churches' settled text a legitimate constraint on a new translation? (assessment: contested)

Augustine's pastoral objection — contested: he objected to the new version not as inaccurate but as unfamiliar, and added a sharp point about accountability — a Latin version made from the Greek can be checked by anyone, one made from the Hebrew rests on the translator's word alone. As a rule for how a revision is introduced the argument is strong and has largely been followed; as a rule of rendering — and Augustine pressed it that far, preferring “gourd” even if the Hebrew says otherwise — it gives habit a veto over the sense of the text.²⁰

The plant of Jonah 4:6: the castor-oil plant, and neither “gourd” nor “ivy”? (assessment: sound)

The word that emptied a church — sound: the Hebrew qiqayon is, on the Egyptian and Akkadian cognates, the rabbinic gloss, and Jerome's own eyewitness description, the castor-oil plant — so that neither the Old Latin's “gourd” nor Jerome's printed “ivy” names it. Jerome identified the shrub correctly and then set down hedera anyway, “that I might not differ from all other translators.”²¹

Sources