"Love is not to be purchased, and affection has no price"
About this Quote
A fourth-century Christian has no time for romance-as-transaction, and Saint Jerome lands the point with the clean force of a proverb: love refuses the logic of the marketplace. The line is blunt on purpose. “Purchased” and “price” drag affection into the world of ledgers, dowries, patronage, and influence-peddling, then slam the door on the whole arrangement. Jerome isn’t merely idealizing emotion; he’s policing a boundary between what can be exchanged and what must be freely given.
The subtext is a warning to his own era’s wealthy converts and ecclesiastical climbers. Late antiquity ran on gift economies: favors, introductions, alms, and patron-client obligations that could look suspiciously like virtue while functioning as social leverage. Jerome’s wording implies how easily spiritual life can be corrupted when generosity becomes a bid for loyalty, or when intimacy becomes another form of status acquisition. If affection can be bought, then the buyer is in control; Jerome’s theology can’t tolerate that, because Christian love is supposed to mirror divine grace: unmerited, uncoerced, not “earned” by payment or performance.
Rhetorically, the sentence works because it’s symmetrical and economical. Two clauses, two key nouns, two commercial verbs. The repetition turns the thought into a moral litmus test: whenever you see money trying to secure devotion - in family arrangements, in politics, in the church - you’re watching affection get counterfeit. Jerome’s point still bites because modern life keeps inventing new ways to call buying “caring,” and he refuses the euphemism.
The subtext is a warning to his own era’s wealthy converts and ecclesiastical climbers. Late antiquity ran on gift economies: favors, introductions, alms, and patron-client obligations that could look suspiciously like virtue while functioning as social leverage. Jerome’s wording implies how easily spiritual life can be corrupted when generosity becomes a bid for loyalty, or when intimacy becomes another form of status acquisition. If affection can be bought, then the buyer is in control; Jerome’s theology can’t tolerate that, because Christian love is supposed to mirror divine grace: unmerited, uncoerced, not “earned” by payment or performance.
Rhetorically, the sentence works because it’s symmetrical and economical. Two clauses, two key nouns, two commercial verbs. The repetition turns the thought into a moral litmus test: whenever you see money trying to secure devotion - in family arrangements, in politics, in the church - you’re watching affection get counterfeit. Jerome’s point still bites because modern life keeps inventing new ways to call buying “caring,” and he refuses the euphemism.
Quote Details
| Topic | Love |
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