Was the Easter 397 reconciliation at the Holy Sepulchre genuine?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: weak — as a lasting healing of the friendship (the peace was conditional, externally arranged, and broke within a year); the hand-joining itself was probably a sincere gesture in the moment · the “genuine reconciliation” reading is advanced by Rufinus.

The claim

— Rufinus, in a now-lost private letter, quoted by Jerome, Apology against Rufinus, III.24, link.¹ The assertion is that the hand-joining at the Church of the Resurrection at Easter 397 — before Rufinus sailed for Italy — was a true peace, one Jerome then broke by sending accusers after him to Rome. The question here is whether that reading holds: was the reconciliation a real healing of the friendship, or a diplomatic gesture that papered over an unresolved breach?

Who advances it

The “genuine reconciliation” reading is Rufinus's own: his whole grievance — that Jerome, having exchanged the signs of peace, betrayed him — presupposes that the peace was real. Against it stands Jerome's insistence that the peace was conditional, and the judgment of the standard modern accounts, which treat the reconciliation as genuine at the moment but short-lived: as W. H. Fremantle records the scene, the two “joined hands in token of reconciliation”; as the Catholic Encyclopedia puts it, “a reconciliation was effected … but it was not lasting.”²

The evidence for

The event is well attested, and the gesture was substantial. Fremantle's account has “the two old companions who had been so long parted by ecclesiastical strife” meeting “at the Church of the Resurrection at a solemn eucharistic feast, and joined hands in token of reconciliation,” after which “Jerome accompanied his friend some way on his journey before their final parting.”² Jerome himself never denies the hand-joining. Years later, answering Rufinus, he grants it plainly — “we joined hands, we accompanied you as you set forth on your journey” — and says of the moment, “When we parted as friends I believed you a true believer.”¹ And in 398, after the first sparks had flown, Jerome still wrote Rufinus a private, conciliatory letter (Letter 81), protesting that when reconciled to a man he did not “while offering him bread with one hand, hold a stone in the other” — evidence that he did not yet regard the bond as past repair.³ So the reconciliation was neither invented after the fact nor, at the altar itself, plainly insincere.

Adversarial assessment

What holds. The hand-joining happened, and there is no good reason to read either man as playing false in that moment: both left it on record as a real act of peace, and Jerome's 398 olive branch shows the bond was not, in his mind, yet dead. As a description of Easter 397 — a mutually-intended gesture of reconciliation — the claim stands.

What is overstated. As a healing of the friendship, it fails on three counts.

It was conditional, not unreserved. Jerome's own gloss on the scene, given when the war was in full cry, undoes any reading of it as an unqualified peace: “we gave you the signs of peace, but not to embrace heresy; we joined hands, we accompanied you as you set forth on your journey, on the understanding that you were catholic not that we were heretical.”¹ A peace pinned to the other man's orthodoxy is a truce awaiting a test, not a mended friendship.

It was externally arranged. The personal reconciliation came in the wake of a wider ecclesiastical settlement between Jerome's Bethlehem monastery and Bishop John of Jerusalem — a settlement in which, the older accounts note, Theophilus of Alexandria and Melania had a hand — not a spontaneous mending of the friendship sought for its own sake.²

It broke within about a year. Rufinus reached Italy late in 397; there his preface to the Latin Peri Archon named Jerome as the translator who had softened Origen before him, and when it reached Rome in 398 Jerome answered at once — a strictly literal Peri Archon to expose the softenings and a furious open letter (Letter 84) to Pammachius and Oceanus. The conciliatory Letter 81 was itself double-edged (a denial of bad faith presupposes the suspicion of it) and never reached Rufinus: Pammachius “treacherously suppressed it.”⁴ Each side then blamed the other for the collapse — Rufinus that Jerome “threw missiles … from behind our backs” by sending accusers to Rome; Jerome that the presbyters he sent went for unrelated reasons and “before you had committed the crime,” and that it was Rufinus's heresy, not his own malice, that forfeited a peace conditioned on orthodoxy.¹ That mutual recrimination is itself a sign the “reconciliation” never settled into a friendship.

Assessment

Weak — as a claim that the friendship was truly healed. The peace was conditional on Rufinus's orthodoxy, arranged amid a bishops' settlement rather than sought for its own sake, and broken within a year of the parting. Two narrower claims fare better and should be kept distinct from it: that the hand-joining was a sincere gesture in the moment is probable — both men recorded it as real, and Jerome's 398 olive branch shows he did not yet count the bond dead; and the opposite charge, that the scene was cynical theatre from the start, is itself weak, resting on nothing in the sources. What deserves flagging is not the event but the framing each man later laid over it: Rufinus's implication that a settled peace was betrayed, and Jerome's retrospective insistence (Apology III.24) that he had parted wholly blameless and that the presbyters who followed Rufinus to Rome bore him no ill will — a claim Rufinus disputed and the timing strains. Those overstatements are noted on the two men's own pages; the moment itself is best read as a real but conditional truce that events, and Jerome's temper, quickly overran.

Sources