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| Saint Jerome, El Greco (1590) The Frick Collection |
The recently published book on St. Jerome, written by Dom Basil Nixen, OSB, of the monastery of San Benedetto in Monte in Norcia, Italy, certainly “reckons with” St. Jerome but in an unusual way. Its title is The Last Communion of St. Jerome.
It certainly can be classified as a biography. But it is very different from the well known biographies of this saint such as Jerome: His Life, Writings, and Controversies by J. N. D. Kelly. For its vantage point is a fourteenth legend about the last Communion of St. Jerome, which was the subject of two famous paintings of this supra-historical event, one by Botticelli, the other by Domenichino. In this way the life of St. Jerome is seen through the prism of these paintings, and the first two chapters are devoted to eucharistic theology with ample quotes from St. Jerome that links strongly St. Jerome’s understanding of the relationship between belief in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist and the proper exegesis of Scripture itself.
The first two chapters of the book could stand alone as a treatise on the Holy Eucharist. That it is written by a contemporary monk about a fourth century monk-scholar is important, for Dom Basil offers insights that a secular writer, even a secular priest, could not offer. This is very important at this time in the Church, in which there are real and good signs that the Traditional understanding of the Eucharist is becoming once again a real part of Catholic teaching and practice after the many years following the Second Vatican Council of liturgical chaos and devaluation of eucharistic piety.
In this section of the book the author discusses at some length Jerome’s strong words on fasting before receiving Holy Communion. Such a discussion is sorely needed in a time when the eucharist fast has for all practical purposes disappeared in the Church today. Jerome does not insist, at least in words, on the traditional fast from midnight on Sunday, but he does insist that fasting is a necessary preparation for the reception of the Eucharist. But the author goes on to discuss St. Jerome’s extension of the fast of abstaining from food and drink to a fast of married couples abstaining from sexual intercourse the night before receiving Holy Communion. For a priest today to talk to his parishioners about fasting from food from midnight to Sunday morning takes a bit of courage. But to speak about fasting from marital relations the night before receiving Holy Communion would seem to require a courage that is truly heroic and to be judged as “insensitive”.
How Dom Basil treats the relationship between Jerome’s understanding of the monastic life and his relationship to the priesthood is quite masterful. This is indeed a difficult subject to approach, since there seems to be a contradiction between Jerome’s firm instance on the absolute priority of his monastic life in relationship to the priesthood. And yet Jerome knew that the grace of ordination to the priesthood would allow him to pursue his vocation both to the monastic life and his dedication to the translation of Holy Scripture. And so, with some reluctance on his part, he was ordained by the bishop Paulinus, whose orthodoxy in a time of heterodoxy Jerome recognized and trusted. And yet it seems that Jerome never offered Mass as a priest. This is difficult to understand, and yet the grace of the priesthood was surely part of the grace that enabled him to do the work for which he was born: the translation of the Scriptures into Latin, which became the foundation of the Catholic understanding of both the Old and the New Testament that formed an integral part of the Tradition. And yet Jerome identified himself so absolutely as someone who needed to be fed and not the one who feeds. And it was his calling to be a monk that formed the very center of his being as a follower of Jesus Christ.
Chapter 3 begins what could be seen as the main section of the book, as far as length goes. This chapter is biographical in content but never departs from the spiritual foundations of the first two chapters. It is from the very beginning of his manhood that Jerome was strongly attracted to the monastic life in the form in which it was being practiced in the fourth century by those who became known as the Desert Fathers, some of whose ascetic practices were considered by some even then as extreme and are certainly considered now as excessive or extreme by many Catholics. But it was to this understanding of monasticism to which the young Jerome was attracted, and he lived this life for several years. And while in later life he was called to live his life in towns and cities, he never lost that sense of the need for the desert, at least in his mind and heart.
In these chapters dealing with Jerome’s life, Dom Basil provides extensive quotes from Jerome’s own writings, that not only trace his development as a writer and scholar and monk but also gives us great insights into the problems--doctrinal, social and moral--that were part of the life and development of the teaching Church. Jerome’s position as secretary to Pope Damasus--meaning the Pope’s close right-hand man--and his involvement in opposing the Antiochian schism affords us a real glimpse of what the religious and intellectual life was like in the late fourth and early fifth centuries. This section may be most valuable to the laity of the Catholic Church, for reading these chapters affords one a real feeling for that time in the Church during which the fundamental understanding of the answer to the question “who is Jesus Christ?” was being debated and defined in the first four Ecumenical Council that lie at the very heart of the Catholic faith.
Dom Basil does not gloss over Jerome’s use of strong invective in his letters to those whom he saw as deserving of such language, such as those charlatans in priests’ robes, those who espoused heretical views of the Faith, and those who despised him because of their jealousy of his remarkable knowledge of Latin and Greek (and later Hebrew) that he displayed in his translations of the New Testament, which became the foundation for all such translations up to the modern era. Dom Basil quotes the letter to Helvetius as an example of Jerome’s use of invective. He situates the style of the letter within the Classical tradition that Jerome inherited from writers like Cicero, one of the masters of this art in his Orations against Catiline. Dom Basil suggests, with humility, that perhaps such methods of argument may not be appropriate in the world in which we live. I hope that Dom Basil and I can have a conversation about his suggestion.
Jerome’s remarkable relationship to the deeply pious and intelligent Christian women living on the Aventine in Rome in that period of his life when he lived in Rome affords a view of him that has been often overlooked. His devotion as a spiritual guide and a true friend grounded in the person of Jesus Christ is one of the stars in his crown as a saint of the Church. His treatise addressed to one of these women, Eustachium, remains as one of the great spiritual treatises in the treasury of the Catholic Church.
The last chapter of this book is perhaps where not only the chapters in Jerome’s life come together as writer, as inspired translator, as a spiritual friend, as a man of the formative years of the Church, but also above all as a monk. For being--in the deepest sense of that word--being a monk was at the very heart of the person that Saint Jerome was and still is.
Dom Basil returns towards the end of this final chapter to the mystery of Jerome’s renunciation of the power of his priesthood, which for some, perhaps most, would be seen as a waste of grace. Dom Basil quotes once again Jerome’s comment to Heliodorus in his relative youth:
The objective, however of Monks, is different from that of clerics....
Clerics feed the sheep; I am fed. They live from the altar; but mine
\ is the fate of the barren tree, to whose base the ax is laid, if I fail to
bring a gift to the altar.
And that, for St. Jerome, is the heart of the matter and the matter of the heart.
