Saint Jerome Biography Quotes 23 Report mistakes

Early Life and Background
Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus - later Saint Jerome - was born around 342 in Stridon, a small town on the contested frontier between Dalmatia and Pannonia, a region repeatedly shaken by late-Roman wars and migrations. His family was Latin-speaking and comfortable enough to send him far from the borderlands. Though later tradition sometimes loosely associates him with Rome, Jerome's earliest horizons were provincial: the pressure of imperial taxation, the vulnerability of towns, and the uneasy coexistence of old civic religion with an ascendant Christianity.

The fourth century was an age of conversion and coercion: Constantine's settlement was giving way to fierce doctrinal conflict, and emperors increasingly treated theology as public policy. Jerome's temperament was formed in that crucible. He grew up ambitious, intellectually hungry, and self-scrutinizing - a man who could admire classical eloquence while fearing its moral dangers. The tension between worldly culture and spiritual austerity, so characteristic of his mature voice, began as a young provincial's attempt to master the empire's language of power without losing his soul.

Education and Formative Influences
Jerome was educated in Rome, studying grammar and rhetoric under the celebrated Donatus, and absorbing the full classical canon - Virgil, Cicero, Sallust - with the intensity of someone who believed mastery of words could reorder a life. He was baptized in Rome, then traveled widely (including Trier and Aquileia), drawn into circles of ascetics who sought a stricter Christianity than the city's respectable piety. A decisive formative episode followed in the East: in the Syrian desert near Chalcis he attempted the eremitic ideal, battling desire, loneliness, and the memories of Latin literature even while learning Greek and beginning Hebrew. That desert apprenticeship - part spiritual experiment, part linguistic boot camp - gave him the tools and the abrasiveness of a polemicist who had wagered everything on discipline.

Career, Major Works, and Turning Points
Ordained a priest in Antioch and increasingly valued as a scholar, Jerome was pulled into the high politics of the church, serving as secretary to Pope Damasus I in Rome (382-384). There he began the revision of the Latin Gospels and Psalter, a project that expanded into the Latin Bible later called the Vulgate, translated largely from Hebrew for the Old Testament and from Greek for the New - a daring choice in an age when many Latin Christians treated the Septuagint as sufficient. Damasus's death ended Jerome's Roman patronage; controversy over his ascetic rigor and his relationships with aristocratic women devoted to the religious life, especially Paula and her daughter Eustochium, made his position untenable. He left for the East, and in Bethlehem founded monasteries and a scholarly workshop where, until his death around 420, he produced biblical commentaries, translations (including Eusebius's Chronicle), biographies of monks (Paul of Thebes, Hilarion), and fierce letters against theological opponents, from Origenists to Jovinian.

Philosophy, Style, and Themes
Jerome's inner life reads like a mind at war with itself: sensitive to beauty, yet suspicious of the ease it brings; hungry for approval, yet compelled to rebuke. He distrusted haste because he distrusted the unexamined self, insisting that time and attention were moral disciplines as much as practical ones: "Haste is of the Devil". His asceticism was not merely bodily; it was a theory of cognition. "A fat stomach never breeds fine thoughts". In that line is the psychology of his scholarship: fasting as a way to sharpen perception, translate more honestly, and force the will to obey the mind's highest commitments.

His prose style fused Roman rhetorical force with monastic severity - capable of affectionate spiritual direction, then suddenly volcanic in controversy. The thematic center is conversion as an ongoing labor: renunciation, study, and self-correction repeated daily. He urged a work ethic meant to starve temptation of opportunity and to turn restlessness into prayerful industry: "Keep doing some kind of work, that the devil may always find you employed". That principle explains his vast output and his dependence on libraries, scribes, and patrons; scholarship itself became a form of vigilance. Even his pastoral counsel to women and families - sometimes tender, sometimes severe - reveals a consistent aim: to bend education, language, and habit toward holiness, especially through Scripture memorized, prayed, and argued over until it remade the person.

Legacy and Influence
Jerome's enduring influence rests on a paradox: he was simultaneously the church's greatest translator and one of its most combative personalities. The Vulgate shaped Western Christianity's vocabulary of sin and grace, prayer and poetry, for a millennium and more, becoming the Bible heard in monasteries, universities, and cathedrals. His commentaries modeled philological close reading, his letters helped define Latin ascetic ideals, and his willingness to learn Hebrew signaled a respect for textual sources that later humanists would hail as proto-critical scholarship. Remembered as the patron of translators and scholars, Jerome left a portrait of sanctity that is not serene but strenuous - holiness as relentless attention to words, motives, and the costs of truth.

Our collection contains 23 quotes who is written by Saint, under the main topics: Motivational - Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Friendship - Love.

• St Jerome miracles: No widely attested miracles; famous legend of healing a lion’s paw.
• St Jerome feast day: September 30.
• St Jerome books: The Latin Vulgate; biblical commentaries; letters; De Viris Illustribus.
• St Jerome and the lion: Legend says he removed a thorn from a lion’s paw; the tamed lion stayed with the monastery.
• St Jerome School: Educated in Rome (rhetoric under Aelius Donatus); later studied Scripture in Antioch and Bethlehem.
• St Jerome cause of death: Natural causes (old age), in Bethlehem, 420.
• St Jerome patron saint of: Translators, librarians, and biblical scholars.
• How old was Saint Jerome? He became 78 years old

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