HistoricalChristian.Faith

Jerome in the correspondence with Augustine

Dates: c. 347–420 · Wikipedia
Summary: Jerome of Stridon — monk of Bethlehem, translator of the Vulgate, and the foremost biblical scholar of the Latin world — was the elder and the expert in this exchange, and at first its prickliest party. This page follows his side: the guarded, wounded, sometimes waspish replies of 402–404, in which he refused to authenticate an unsigned letter, defended his reading of the Antioch dispute and his translation from the Hebrew, and warned the young Augustine off; the thaw of 405; the collapse of his working life after 410, when refugees from the sack of Rome filled his monastery and he began sending inquirers to Augustine instead; and the unguarded warmth of his last years, when the two were allies against the Pelagians and Pelagian partisans burnt his houses down.

“A letter of which I had only seen copies” (402)

By the time Augustine's criticisms reached him, Augustine was a rising bishop and Jerome a famous but aging and embattled scholar, lately scarred by his war with Rufinus. His first instinct was not to argue but to withhold assent to the document itself. What had reached Bethlehem, by the hand of a deacon named Sisinnius, was not a letter but loose copies of one, unsigned; Jerome would not treat them as Augustine's:

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, lest perchance, if offended by my reply, you should with justice complain that it was my duty first to have made sure that you were the author …

— Jerome, Letter 102 (to Augustine), §1, source. The caution was not merely procedural. Jerome had lately been fighting a war conducted through circulated manuscripts, and he asked Augustine either to own the letter or to “send me a more accurate copy” so that they might proceed “without any passionate rancour.” In the same letter he enclosed his reply to “Calphurnius, surnamed Lanarius” — his sneering byname for Rufinus — complaining that his old friend's writings were being disseminated “in Africa also.” The other quarrel of his life was present in this correspondence from its very first letter.¹

The old scholar challenged (402–404)

Nor did he take correction from a younger man gracefully. The same reply mixed friendship with a veteran's condescension:

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

— Jerome, Letter 102 (to Augustine), §2, source. He cited “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.”² What especially rankled was that Augustine's criticism seemed to reach everyone before it reached him:

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, source. He suspected the whole affair was a young man's bid “to become famous at my expense,” and asked to be left in peace — that Augustine “desist from annoying an old man, who seeks retirement in his monastic cell.”³

The Galatians defense (404)

Jerome's long reply of 404 met the exegetical charge head-on. He had read the confrontation of Peter by Paul at Antioch (Gal 2:11–14) as a matter of prudent management, not real fault — Peter only pretending to keep the law he knew to be abrogated, Paul only appearing to rebuke him — and he insisted he had not invented this but inherited it from the Greek fathers, Origen chief among them, along with Didymus, Apollinaris of Laodicea, Eusebius of Emesa, Theodorus of Heraclea, and “John, who has long governed the Church of Constantinople” (Chrysostom):

… 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, source. So, he concluded, “neither did Peter sin, nor did Paul rebuke presumptuously a greater than himself.” Yet he held the reading loosely, telling Augustine he had “not adopt[ed] finally and irrevocably that which I had read in these Greek authors, but had propounded what I had read, leaving to the reader's own judgment whether it should be rejected or approved.” Whether that reading holds — and it does not, on its best case — is weighed on its own page (assessment: weak), against the rival real-rebuke reading (assessment: sound); Jerome's loss of the exegetical argument, and his honest hedge, are noted there.⁴

Hebrew verity — and the old-soldier plea

On translation Jerome was unmovable. Against Augustine's plea that he render the Greek Septuagint, he defended his new version from the Hebrew — the Hebraica veritas — explaining that “translating from the Hebrew itself, I have expressed what I understood it to mean, being careful to preserve rather the exact sense than the order of the words,” and defending his “ivy” for the plant in Jonah (against the old Latin “gourd”) from the Hebrew ciceion. And he begged the younger man, again, to let him be:

… 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.

— Jerome, Letter 112 (to Augustine), §22, source. Jerome's Hebrew–versus–Greek stand is the same one at issue across the wiki's pages on the Septuagint's origin and the Old Testament canon, where his “Hebrew verity” is weighed at length.⁵ His central decision — translate the Old Testament from the Hebrew, not the Greek — is sound, and his best reason for it is the one he gives in the same letter: there was by then no single Septuagint text to render, only three competing regional recensions and Origen's composite.

Two things he said in that defense go past what he could show. The first is the charge, repeated as a habit, that Greek–Hebrew divergences are things “omitted or tampered with by the Jews”; Augustine asked him directly which Jews were meant, the pre-Christian translators or later ones, and got no answer. The second is the Jonah word itself. Challenged over hedera, Jerome described the plant accurately — a self-supporting shrub with vine-like leaves, neither gourd nor ivy — and then defended the rendering he had printed, admitting in the same breath that he had chosen it only “that I might not differ from all other translators.” His identification was right and his rendering was not, a distinction his reply to Augustine blurs; the botany is weighed on its own page (assessment: sound), and Augustine's countervailing pastoral objection on its own (assessment: contested).⁶

The thaw (405)

Once Augustine's irenic Letter 82 arrived — conceding nothing on the substance but framing the whole quarrel with grace — the heat went out of Jerome. His answer proposed a truce:

… 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, source. “Let us,” he added, “exercise ourselves in the field of Scripture without wounding each other.”⁷

After the sack of Rome: the work stops (410)

The fall of Rome to Alaric in 410 broke Jerome's scholarly routine and, with it, much of his combativeness. He had promised his readers a commentary on Ezekiel and found 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, source. Refugees came with the news. “The quiet of the monastery,” he wrote in the prefaces to that commentary, “has been changed into the bustle of a guest house” — so that he had either to “close our doors, or abandon the study of the Scriptures on which we depend for keeping the doors open,” and took to dictating by lamplight in the stolen hours of the night.⁸

The same letter marks how far his estimate of his correspondent had travelled in eight years. Asked where the soul comes from, the man who in 402 had told Augustine not to challenge a veteran now referred the question to Africa:

… 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, source. The deference is real but characteristically hedged: Augustine's opinion is commended as, properly speaking, Jerome's own.⁹

The warm alliance — and the burning of Bethlehem (416–419)

The truce ripened into friendship. When the Pelagian controversy drew the two together, Jerome welcomed Augustine's envoy Orosius and wrote with an affection his earlier letters had withheld:

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, source. He would not, however, answer Augustine's two long consultation letters at length: “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 settles, at twelve years' remove, the technical question Augustine had put to him in 403 — why the asterisks and obelisks had gone: that annotated Septuagint could no longer be furnished, for “we have lost, through some one's dishonesty, the most of the results of our earlier labour.”¹⁰

The trying time was literal. After the synod of Diospolis acquitted Pelagius, partisans of his cause attacked Jerome's monasteries, killed a deacon and burnt the buildings; Jerome escaped into a fortified tower. He never described the raid plainly in writing, cloaking it in Catilinarian allusion instead — he had, he told Riparius, “thought it better to change my abode than to surrender the true faith” — and Bishop Innocent of Rome, appealed to by Jerome and by Eustochium, complained that the accounts reaching him were “rumours rather than … specific accusations.” It was Augustine, at a safe distance in Africa, who set the fullest report down.¹¹

In his last letters he hailed Augustine as “the restorer of the ancient faith,” renowned “throughout the whole world” and abhorred by “all heretics,” and longed, across the sea, to “take the wings of a dove and fly to be folded in your embrace” — crediting Augustine's “co-operation and … leadership” with “strangling the heresy of Celestius.” Jerome died at Bethlehem in 420; the old rival had become, at the last, his dearest correspondent.¹²

Notes

• Jerome's other great falling-out — with his boyhood friend Rufinus, over Origen — ran through these very same years; Augustine wrote grieving it and urging peace. That story is told on its own timeline, where Jerome also has a detail page.
• The pattern of Jerome's conduct here rhymes with his Rufinus quarrel: a scholar quick to feel slighted, sharp in reply, and slow to forgive a challenge to his learning — yet capable, once the pressure eased, of real warmth. With Augustine the reconciliation held; with Rufinus it never came. His demand in 402 that Augustine authenticate the letter is the same instinct read charitably: a man burned by circulated manuscripts refusing to answer one he could not verify.
• Jerome's Antioch reading is the losing side of the dispute — his staged-pretense argument (weak) against Augustine's real-rebuke argument (sound) — but it is treated there as a pedigreed and self-qualified reading, not a blunder: it descended from Origen and the Greek mainstream, answered a live pagan objection, and Jerome himself refused to make it a dogma.
• See the correspondence timeline and Augustine's parallel page.

Sources