Parenting & Family Quote by Saint Jerome

Jerome isn’t offering a quaint reading list; he’s sketching an entire moral operating system, one built to run reliably inside a turbulent late-Roman world. The pairing is strategic. Psalms is “holiness of heart” because it trains the inner life: desire, fear, shame, praise. It teaches a rhythm of feeling that can be prayed rather than performed. For Jerome, that interior discipline matters precisely because it’s hard to police from the outside. If the heart can be formed, the rest follows.

Then comes Proverbs, the manual for “godly life,” where virtue turns into habits: speech restrained, appetites managed, relationships navigated with prudence. The subtext is bluntly pastoral and quietly political. Jerome is writing in a culture where women’s education and agency were contested, and Christian households were busy distinguishing themselves from pagan elite norms. He grants a daughter access to literacy and scripture, but he channels that access toward compliance with a Christian ideal of order: piety that is legible in conduct.

The phrase “first of all” signals priority, not breadth. This isn’t an invitation to intellectual exploration; it’s catechesis aimed at formation. Jerome’s genius is rhetorical: he dignifies a girl’s education by rooting it in sacred texts, then narrows the purpose to sanctification and social stability. Read against the period’s anxieties about sexuality, status, and family honor, the quote becomes less about books and more about safeguarding a community by shaping a person from the inside out.