HistoricalChristian.Faith

Augustine in the correspondence with Jerome

Dates: c. 354–430 · Wikipedia
Summary: Augustine of Hippo — the younger man, and by far the junior in biblical scholarship — opened the correspondence and set its two great questions: how to read Paul's rebuke of Peter at Antioch, and whether the Latin Bible should follow the Greek Septuagint or the Hebrew. This page follows his side of the exchange: the earnest, blunt challenge of the 390s and the nine years of miscarried letters it cost him; the apology of 404; the classic principle of canonical inerrancy he framed in 405; the warm alliance against the Pelagians two decades on; and the place he gave Jerome, after his death, among the authorities of the catholic faith.

The opening objection: Paul's rebuke of Peter (c. 394–397)

Newly ordained and soon bishop of Hippo, Augustine wrote to Jerome — the most celebrated biblical scholar of the age — with a respectful but firm objection to Jerome's commentary on Galatians. Jerome, following the Greek fathers, had read the confrontation of Peter by Paul at Antioch (Gal 2:11–14) as a staged, pre-arranged scene in which neither apostle really erred. Augustine thought that reading catastrophic for the authority 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, source. Admit one dutiful falsehood into “such a high sanctuary of authority,” he warned, and “there will not be left a single sentence of those books” that could not be explained away by the same rule.¹ A second letter (c. 397) pressed harder still, asking Jerome outright to recant — to “chant what the Greeks call παλινῴδια” — and insisting that “Peter was truly corrected, and Paul has given a true narrative of the event.”² Whether Augustine had the better of this exegetical quarrel is weighed on its own page, his real-rebuke reading (assessment: sound) against Jerome's staged-pretense reading (assessment: weak).

Nine years of miscarried letters (c. 395–404)

Both letters miscarried — the first because its bearer, the priest Profuturus, was made a bishop and then died; and a copy of the second escaped into circulation, reaching Rome and Italy before it ever reached Bethlehem. The result was years of delay and a badly-started friendship: Jerome, hearing his work criticized behind his back, suspected the young African of courting fame at his expense, and would not accept an unsigned copy as genuine.³

Augustine worked patiently at the mechanics. Hearing in 402 a report that he had written and published a book against Jerome, he denied it under oath — “I call God to witness that I have not done this” — explaining that where he differed he had written “not with a view of contradicting you, but only of stating my own views,” and asking only for contact: “Do not refuse to write me in return, however seldom.”⁴ In 403 he sent a bearer he could vouch for, the deacon Cyprian, with fresh copies of both earlier letters. And in 404, rather than dispute Jerome's suspicion, he simply conceded the point:

… 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, source. He set out how the years had gone: “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 … For the man to whom I entrusted it neither delivered it to you nor returned it to me.” Bracing for the answer, he cast himself as the rash Dares of the Aeneid facing the fists of a second Entellus — blows “certainly fitted to do me good.”⁵

The Septuagint plea, the asterisks, and the riot at Oea (403)

Augustine's second great worry was Jerome's new Latin Old Testament, rendered directly from the Hebrew rather than from the Greek Septuagint the churches had read for centuries. He began with a technical puzzle: Jerome's earlier version from the Greek had marked with asterisks and obelisks every word present in the Hebrew but absent from the Greek and the reverse, “with such astonishing exactness” that even “the smallest grammatical particles” were flagged; the new version from the Hebrew abandoned the apparatus, which “perplexes any thoughtful reader.” Behind it lay the real fear — that if Jerome's version came into general use “differences must arise between the Latin Churches and the Greek Churches,” and a disputed Latin reading could no longer be settled by producing the Greek. So he begged Jerome to translate the Greek instead — “I would much rather that you would furnish us with a translation of the Greek version … known as the work of the Seventy translators” — and, to show the pastoral danger of unfamiliar renderings, told the story of a North African bishop who read out Jerome's new version 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). … 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, source. Augustine's instinct here — that the Septuagint carried its own churchly authority — is the same one that runs through the ancient debate over the Septuagint's origin and the Old Testament canon.⁶

Two years later he restated the objection in its sharpest and its weakest form at once. The sharp form is an argument about accountability: a Latin version made from the Greek can be checked by anybody, since Greek is “a language very widely known,” whereas one made from the Hebrew leaves a disputed reading resting on the translator's own word — and at Oea, where they did consult the Hebrew-speaking residents, they got the wrong answer. That case is weighed on its own page (assessment: contested), as is Jerome's countervailing decision to go to the Hebrew (assessment: sound), which Augustine himself came to accept in principle: “you have now convinced me of the benefits to be secured by your proposal to translate the Scriptures from the original Hebrew.” The weak form is the sentence immediately following, on the Jonah plant:

… if in the Hebrew it is neither “gourd” nor “ivy,” but something else which stands erect, supported by its own stem without other props, I would prefer to call it “gourd” in all our Latin versions; for I do not think that the Seventy would have rendered it thus at random, had they not known that the plant was something like a gourd.

— Augustine, Letter 82 (to Jerome), §35. Granting that the familiar word may name the wrong plant and keeping it anyway is more than pastoral caution: it gives custom a veto over the sense of the text, and it would make any correction unrevisable, since every correction is by definition unfamiliar. His accompanying guess — that the Seventy must have had grounds — is fair enough as far as it goes, but the plant itself was neither of the two words Latin readers were fighting over.⁷

The great principle: inerrancy for the canonical books alone (405)

When Jerome finally answered at length and unbendingly, Augustine's reply (405) conceded nothing on Galatians but lifted the disagreement onto higher ground, in what became the classic Latin statement of biblical inerrancy — and of its limits:

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, source. All other authors, however holy, he read as fallible. On Peter he would not yield: “I read that Paul wrote this, and I do not believe that he lied.”⁸

Grieving the quarrel with Rufinus (404)

Augustine's letters were not all rebuke. In the same letter of 404 in which he asked pardon he wrote to grieve, gently, over Jerome's ruinous breach with his oldest friend, Rufinus — then at its bitterest — and to wish the two reconciled: “it would be a joyful and a much greater event, should you come back from such enmity to the friendship of former days.” He addressed the aging Jerome with affection, taking up his correspondent's own image of himself as “an ox worn out … by reason of years, but unimpaired in mental vigour.”⁹

Allies against Pelagius (c. 415–419)

Twenty years on, the wary correspondents had become allies. When the Pelagian controversy broke, Augustine sent the young priest Orosius east to Jerome (415) with two long letters that consulted the old scholar as an authority — one on the origin of the soul (Letter 166), one on the meaning of James 2:10 (Letter 167). He addressed Jerome now as “my brother Jerome, esteemed worthy to be honoured in Christ by me,” and Jerome answered in kind, resolving “to love you, to look up to you, to reverence and admire you.”¹⁰

When Pelagian partisans attacked Jerome's monasteries after the synod of Diospolis, it was Augustine who put the fullest account of it on record — and he did so with conspicuous restraint, reporting the beatings, the murdered deacon, and the burnt houses twice over as what the attackers “are said to have” done, and declining to pursue the matter himself because discipline for such deeds “belongs to the discipline of the episcopal authority on the spot.”¹¹

After Jerome's death: a witness for the defence (c. 421)

Augustine outlived Jerome by a decade. Answering Julian of Eclanum about a year after Jerome died, he set against the Pelagians a bench of dead witnesses to original sin — 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 had been a combatant in this very war, and so was hardly a neutral witness — by confining himself to what Jerome had written “free from all partisanship, before your damnable doctrine sprang up.” The man he had once asked to sing a palinode he now cited as one who “held and expressed no other doctrine on this matter.”¹²

Notes

• Augustine appears across this wiki as a witness on many timelines — among them the Old Testament canon, the Septuagint's origin, and infant baptism. This page is confined to his correspondence with Jerome.
• Augustine's inerrancy principle (Letter 82, §3) is often quoted as a landmark; note that it does two things at once — it affirms the canonical books' freedom from error and, in the same breath, locates every apparent error in the manuscript, the translator, or the reader, never the text. It is a rule of interpretive humility as much as a claim of inerrancy.
• On the Antioch dispute Augustine had the sounder reading, and won it in the long run; but he pressed the underlying claim broadly — that any dutiful falsehood anywhere unravels all of Scripture — and that broad claim is a strong one that later readers have sometimes thought overstated. On this text, however, the evidence is with him: see the real-rebuke argument page.
• The care Augustine takes in Against Julian to quote only Jerome's pre-controversy writings, and in On the Deeds of Pelagius to mark the Bethlehem raid as report rather than established fact, are worth noticing together: on both occasions he was handling evidence in his own favour and visibly discounted it.
• See the correspondence timeline and Jerome's parallel page.

Sources