His next conflict was with the Emperor Theodosius. A synagogue had been burnt, and the Count of the East reported that this had been done at the instigation of the local bishop. The Emperor ordered that the actual incendiaries should be punished, and that the guilty bishop should rebuild the synagogue. Saint Ambrose neither admits nor denies the bishop’s complicity, but is indignant that the Emperor should seem to side with Jews against Christians. Suppose the bishop refuses to obey? He will then have to become a martyr if he persists, or an apostate if he gives way. Suppose the Count decides to rebuild the synagogue himself at the expense of the Christians? In that case the Emperor will have an apostate Count, and Christian money will be taken to support unbelief. «Shall, then, a place be made for the unbelief of the Jews out of the spoils of the Church, and shall the patrimony, which by the favour of Christ has been gained for Christians, be transferred to the treasuries of unbelievers?» He continues: «But perhaps the cause of discipline moves you, O Emperor. Which, then, is of greater importance, the show of discipline or the cause of religion? It is needful that judgement should yield to religion. Have you not heard, O Emperor, how, when Julian commanded that the Temple of Jerusalem should be restored, those who were clearing the rubbish were consumed by fire?»
It is clear that, in the Saint’s opinion, the destruction of synagogues should not be punished in any way. This is an example of the manner in which, as soon as it acquired power, the Church began to stimulate anti-Semitism.
The next conflict between Emperor and Saint was more honourable to the latter. In A.D. 390, when Theodosius was in Milan, a mob in Thessalonica murdered the captain of the garrison. Theodosius, on receiving the news, was seized with ungovernable fury, and ordered an abominable revenge. When the people were assembled in the circus, the soldiers fell upon them, and massacred at least seven thousand of
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them in an indiscriminate slaughter. Hereupon Ambrose, who had endeavoured in advance to restrain the Emperor, but in vain, wrote him a letter full of splendid courage, on a purely moral issue, involving, for once, no question of theology or the power of the Church:
«There was that done in the city of the Thessalonians of which no similar record exists, which I was not able to prevent happening; which, indeed, I had before said would be most atrocious when I so often petitioned against it.»
David repeatedly sinned, and confessed his sin with penitence. * Will Theodosius do likewise? Ambrose decides that «I dare not offer the sacrifice if you intend to be present. Is that which is not allowed after shedding the blood of one innocent person, allowed after shedding the blood of many? I do not think so.»
The Emperor repented, and, divested of the purple, did public penance in the cathedral of Milan. From that time until his death in 395, he had no friction with Ambrose.
Ambrose, while he was eminent as a statesman, was, in other respects, merely typical of his age. He wrote, like other ecclesiastical authors, a treatise in praise of virginity, and another deprecating the remarriage of widows. When he had decided on the site for his new cathedral, two skeletons (revealed in a vision, it was said) were conveniently discovered on the spot, were found to work miracles, and were declared by him to be those of two martyrs. Other miracles are related in his letters, with all the credulity characteristic of his times. He was inferior to Jerome as a scholar, and to Augustine as a philosopher. But as a statesman, who skilfully and courageously consolidated the power of the Church, he stands out as a man of the first rank.
Jerome is chiefly notable as the translator who produced the Vulgate, which remains to this day the official Catholic version of the Bible. Until his day the Western Church relied, as regards the Old Testament, chiefly on translations from the Septuagint, which, in important ways differed from the Hebrew original. Christians were given to maintaining that the Jews, since the rise of Christianity, had falsified the Hebrew text where it seemed to predict the Messiah. This was a view which sound scholarship showed to be untenable,
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* This allusion to the Books of Samuel begins a line of biblical argument against kings which persisted throughout the Middle Ages, and even in the, conflict of the Puritans with the Stuarts. It appears for instance in Milton.
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and which Jerome firmly rejected. He accepted the help of rabbis, given secretly for fear of the Jews. In defending himself against Christian criticism he said: «Let him who would challenge aught in this translation ask the Jews.» Because of his acceptance of the Hebrew text in the form which the Jews regarded as correct, his version had, at first, a largely hostile reception; but it won its way, partly because Saint Augustine on the whole supported it. It was a great achievement, involving considerable textual criticism.
Jerome was born in 345—five years after Ambrose—not far from Aquileia, at a town called Stridon, which was destroyed by the Goths in 377. His family were well-to-do, but not rich. In 363 he went to Rome, where he studied rhetoric and sinned. After travelling in Gaul, he settled in Aquileia, and became an ascetic. The next five years he spent as a hermit in the Syrian wilderness. «His life while in the desert was one of rigorous penance, of tears and groans alternating with spiritual ecstasy, and of temptations from haunting memories of Roman life; he lived in a cell or cavern; he earned his daily bread, and was clad in sackcloth.» * After this period, he travelled to Constantinople, and lived in Rome for three years, where he became the friend and adviser of Pope Damasus, with whose encouragement he undertook his translation of the Bible.
Saint Jerome was a man of many quarrels. He quarrelled with Saint Augustine about the somewhat questionable behaviour of Saint Peter as related by Saint Paul in Galatians II; he broke with his friend Rufinus over Origen; and he was so vehement against Pelagius that his monastery was attacked by a Pelagian mob. After the death of Damasus, he seems to have quarrelled with the new Pope; he had, while in Rome, become acquainted with various ladies who were both aristocratic and pious, some of whom he persuaded to adopt the ascetic life. The new Pope, in common with many other people in Rome, disliked this. For this reason among others, Jerome left Rome for Bethlehem, where he remained from 386 till his death in 420.
Among his distinguished female converts, two were especially notable: the widow Paula and her daughter Eustochium. Both these ladies accompanied him on his circuitous journey to Bethlehem. They were of the highest nobility, and one cannot but feel a flavour of
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* Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Vol. VI, p. 17.
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snobbery in the Saint’s attitude to them. When Paula died and was buried at Bethlehem, Jerome composed an epitaph for her tomb:
Within this tomb a child of Scipio lies, A daughter of the far-famed Pauline house, A scion of the Gracchi, of the stock Of Agamemnon’s self, illustrious: Here rests the lady Paula, well-beloved Of both her parents, with Eustochium For daughter; she the first of Roman dames Who
hardship chose and Bethlehem for Christ. *
Some of Jerome’s letters to Eustochium are curious. He gives her advice on the preservation of virginity, very detailed and frank; he explains the exact anatomical meaning of certain euphemisms in the Old Testament; and he employs a kind of erotic mysticism in praising the joys of conventual life. A nun is the Bride of Christ; this marriage is celebrated in the Song of Solomon. In a long letter written at the time when she took the vows, he gives a remarkable message to her mother: «Are you angry with her because she chooses to be a king’s [Christ’s] wife and not a soldier’s? She has conferred on you a high privilege; you are now the mother-in-
law of God.» â€
To Eustochium herself, in the same letter (XXII), he says:
«Ever let the privacy of your chamber guard you; ever let the Bridegroom sport with you within. Do you pray? You speak to the Bridegroom. Do you read? He speaks to you. When sleep overtakes you He will come behind and put His hand through the hole of the door, and your heart shall be moved for Him; and you will awake and rise up and say: ‘I am sick of love.’ Then He will reply: ‘A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.'»
In the same letter he relates how, after cutting himself off from relations and friends, «and—harder still—from the dainty food to which I had been accustomed,» he still could not bear to be parted from his library, and took it with him to the desert. «And so, miserable man that I was, I would fast only that I might afterwards read Cicero.» After days and nights of remorse, he would fall again, and read Plautus. After
