HistoricalChristian.Faith

Did Jerome hold that the stars are living, ensouled beings (as Aquinas catalogues)?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: weak — the attribution rests on a single hedged “as if” gloss on Ecclesiastes 1:6 that Jerome floats but does not adopt, and it is outweighed by Jerome’s own treatment of the ensouled luminaries as an Origenist error deserving condemnation (Letter 124) and his plain angels-reading of the star-agency texts (Judges 5:20). Jerome is not a genuine witness for ensoulment · the attribution is advanced by Thomas Aquinas (ST I.70.3)

Related arguments: see also Did Origen teach that the sun, moon, and stars are living, ensouled rational beings? (the companion attribution question — where the answer is yes) · the ensoulment reading itself.

The claim

In the article that is the scholastic locus classicus for the whole question — “Whether the lights of heaven are living beings?” — Aquinas canvasses the divided tradition and lists two Fathers on the living side:

It was the belief of Origen (Peri Archon i) and Jerome that these bodies were alive, and the latter seems to explain in that sense the words (Ecclesiastes 1:6), “The spirit goeth forward, surveying all places round about.”

— Summa Theologiae I.70.3.¹ On the strength of this sentence Jerome is repeatedly filed, alongside Origen, among the witnesses for the ensoulment of the luminaries. The question weighed here is whether that filing is accurate: did Jerome actually hold that the sun, moon, and stars are living, ensouled beings — or has a cautious “seems” been hardened into a witness he is not?

Who advances it, and its one real toehold

The attribution is Aquinas’ own, and he pegs it to a specific text: Jerome’s Commentary on Ecclesiastes on 1:6, the verse on the sun’s southward and northward course (“It goes to the South and rotates to the North; turning, revolving, the wind goes and returns upon its circuits”). And the toehold is genuine — Jerome there does entertain a living-sun reading, in language coloured by the pagan world-soul:

But he actually says “turning, revolving, the wind goes and returns upon its circuits” as if he calls the sun itself a breath, like an animal that breathes and lives, completing its annual orbit in its course, just like the poet Vergil says: “Meanwhile the sun flies around the great year”… “The breath nourishes within: and the intelligence stirs the whole mass infused through the limbs, and mingles itself with the mighty body.”

— Jerome, Commentary on Ecclesiastes, on 1:6. The closing quotation is Aeneid VI.726–727, the Virgilian anima mundi. So Aquinas is not inventing a witness: Jerome does float the idea that Ecclesiastes’ “spirit” treats the sun as a breathing, living thing, and Aquinas’ hedged “seems to explain in that sense” faithfully registers that he found the reading there.²

Adversarial assessment

What holds. The peg is real. Jerome’s Ecclesiastes gloss does raise the living-sun reading and reaches for the poets’ ensouled cosmos to gloss it, so Aquinas’ “seems” is not a fabrication — there is a sentence in Jerome that, read alone, points the way Aquinas points. To that extent the attribution is not baseless.

What is overstated. Three things pull decisively the other way, and together they sink the attribution.

(1) Jerome floats the reading; he does not adopt it. The living-sun gloss is one construal among several in the very same paragraph, tagged to Virgil rather than asserted, and Jerome at once turns away from it: “He is not speaking about the annual course of the sun, but its daily path,” and he offers a plainly physical alternative — the sun “closer to the Earth” when southward, “raised to higher orbits” when northward. An “as if” canvassed and then set aside is not a doctrine held. Aquinas’ own “seems” is the tell: he reports a possible sense, not a professed belief.

(2) Where Jerome treats the ensouled luminaries head-on, he treats them as an error to be condemned. His Letter 124 to Avitus (c. 409–410) is an epitome of Origen’s First Principles (Peri Archōn) written expressly to expose its heresies. There Jerome sets down, as one of Origen’s objectionable tenets, precisely the ensouled-stars doctrine — “The sun also and the moon and the rest of the constellations are alive… The soul of the sun—or whatever else you like to call it—does not date its existence from the creation of the world; it already existed before it entered its shining and glowing body” — and files such passages among those that “deserve the church’s condemnation.” Jerome is the doctrine’s hostile cataloguer, not its holder; on the one occasion he states the ensouled sun in full, he states it to reject it. (This is the likeliest root of the mis-catalogue: an epitomist who reports a view can be mistaken, at a distance, for one who holds it.)

(3) On the star-agency proof-texts, Jerome reads angels, not ensouled bodies. His Commentary on the Song of Deborah, on “the stars in their courses fought against Sisera” (Judges 5:20), is explicit: “The stars are understood to be the angels who fought against Sisera from heaven.” That is the angels-reading — the very alternative to ensoulment — from the same pen. A man who glosses the fighting stars as angels is not a man who thinks the luminaries are living souls.³

Assessment

Weak. Jerome is not a genuine witness for the ensoulment of the sun, moon, and stars. The attribution rests entirely on one hedged “as if” gloss on Ecclesiastes 1:6, which Jerome canvasses with a borrowed Virgilian phrase and immediately sets aside for a physical reading — a possible sense reported, not a doctrine professed, as Aquinas’ own “seems to explain in that sense” concedes. Against that thin toehold stand two far weightier facts from Jerome’s own pen: he sets out the ensouled luminaries as an Origenist tenet “deserv[ing] the church’s condemnation” (Letter 124), and he reads the star-agency texts as angels (Judges 5:20). The correct verdict is that Aquinas over-catalogued a cautious reader — a mistake gentle in his own wording and magnified by later citation of the bare pairing “Origen and Jerome.” This rates the attribution (did Jerome hold it?), not the ensoulment reading itself, which is weighed as weak on its own page; and it is the mirror of the companion question about Origen, where the same kind of charge comes out sound because Origen, unlike Jerome, plainly held the view.

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