Featured Content Page about: jerome

Saint Jerome (c. 347 – September 30, 420) (Formerly Saint Heirom) was a Roman Catholic priest and Roman Catholic apologist best known for translating the Vulgate. He is recognized by the Catholic Church as a canonized saint and Doctor of the Church, and his version of the Bible is still an important text in Catholicism. He is also recognized as a saint by the Eastern Orthodox Church, where he is known as St Jerome of Stridonium or Blessed Jerome. He is presumed by some to have been an Illyrian.

In art, he is often represented as one of the four Latin doctors of the Church along with Augustine of Hippo, Ambrose, and Pope Gregory I. As a prominent member of the Roman clergy, he has often been portrayed anachronistically in the garb of a cardinal. Even when he is depicted as a half-clad anchorite, with cross, skull and Bible for the only furniture of his cell, the red hat or some other indication of his rank as cardinal is as a rule introduced somewhere in the picture. He is also often depicted with a lion, due to a medieval story in which he removed a thorn from a lion's paw, and less often with an owl, the symbol of wisdom and scholarship. Writing materials and the trumpet of final judgment are also part of his iconography.

Jerome sometimes seemed arrogant, and occasionally despised or belittled his literary rivals, especially Ambrose. But Jerome himself came under attack, especially from Rufinus, for falsely claiming to have read many authors whose works he had in fact never laid eyes upon. One notorious example was when he claimed to have read the works of Pythagoras. When Rufinus pointed out that Pythagoras had not in fact written anything, Jerome replied that he was speaking ''de dogmatibus eorum, non de libris , quae potui in Bruto discere'' (''not about his books, but his teachings, which I learnt about in [the philosopher] Brutus''). The writings of Brutus, however, had been lost for centuries.

He showed more zeal and interest in the ascetic ideal than in abstract speculation. It was this strict asceticism that made Martin Luther judge him so severely. In fact, Protestant readers are not generally inclined to accept his writings as authoritative. The tendency to recognize a superior comes out in his correspondence with Augustine (cf. Jerome's letters numbered 56, 67, 102-105, 110-112, 115-116; and 28, 39, 40, 67-68, 71-75, 81-82 in Augustine's).

Despite the criticisms already mentioned, Jerome has retained a rank among the western Fathers. This would be his due, if for nothing else, on account of the great influence exercised by his Latin version of the Bible upon the subsequent ecclesiastical and theological development.