§ 41 ST. JEROME AS A MONK. 201
iibraiy. On Suudajs he visited, with Bonosiis aiid ether joung friends, the subterj-anean graves of the martyrs, which made an indelible impression upon him. Tet he was not exempt from the temptations of a great and corrupt city, and he lost his chastity, as he himself afterward repeatedly acknowledged with pain.
About the year 370, whether before or after his literary tour to Treves and Aquileia is uncertain, but at all events in his later youth, he received baptism at Rome, and resolved thenceforth to devote himself wholly, in rigid abstinence, to the service of the Lord. In the first zeal of his conversion he renounced his love for the classics, and applied himself to the study of the hitherto distasteful Bible. In a morbid ascetic frame, he had, a few years later, that celebrated dream, in which he was summoned before the judgment seat of Christ, and as a heathen Ciceronian,' so severely reprimanded and scourged, tliat even the angels interceded for him from sympathy with his youth, and he himself solemnly vowed never again to take worldly books into hie hands. "When he woke, he still felt the stripes, which, as he thought, not his heated fancy, but the Lord himself had in flicted upon him. Hence he warns his female friend Eustochium, to whom several years afterward (a. d. 384) he recounted this experience, to avoid all profane reading : " What have light and darkness, Christ and Belial (2 Cor. vi. 14), the Psalms and Horace, the Gospels and Yirgil, the Apostles and Cicero, to do with one another ? . . . We cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of the demons at the same time." * But proper as this wanaing may be against overrating classical scholarship, Jerome himself, in his version of the Bible and his commentaries, affords the best evidence of the inestimable value of linguistic and antiquarian knowledge, when devoted to the service of religion. That oath, also, at least in
• "Mentiris," said the Lord to him, when Jerome called himself a Christian, " Ciceronianus es, non Christianus, ubi enim thesaurus tuus ibi et cor tuum." Ep. xxii. ad Eustochium, " De custodia virginitatis " (torn. i. p. 113). C. A. ETeumann has written a special treatise, De ecstasi Hieronymi anti-Ciceroniana. Comp. &lnq Schrockh, vol. vii. p. 85 sqq., and Ozanam : " Civilisation au 5e Siecle," i. 301.
" Ep. xxii. eJ. Tall. (i. 112).
2u8 THIRD PERIOD. A.D. 311-590.
later life, he did not strictly keep. On the contrary, he made the monks copy the dialogues of Cicero, and explained Virgil at Bethlehem, and his writings abound in recollections and quotations of the classic authors. When Kufinns of Aquihiia, at first his warm friend, but afterward a bitter enemy, cast up to him this inconsistency and breach of a solemn vow, he resorted to the evasion that he could not obliterate from his memory what he had formerly read ; as if it were not so sinful to cite a heathen author as to read him. "With more reason he asserted, that all was a mere dream, and a dream vow was not binding. He referred him to the prophets, " who teach that dreams are vain, and not worthy of faith." Yet was this dream afterward made frequent use of, as Erasmus laments, to cover monastic obscurantism.
After his baptism, Jerome divided his life between the East and the West, between ascetic discipline and literary labor. He removed from Kome to Antioch with a few friends and his library, visited the most celebrated anchorets, attended the exegetical lectures of the younger Apollinaris in Antioch, and then (3Y1) spent some time as an ascetic in the dreary Syrian desert of Chalcis. Here, like so many other hermits, he underwent a grevious struggle with sensuality, which he described ten years after with indelicate minuteness in a long letter to his virgin friend Eustochium.' In spite of his starved and emaciated body, his fancy tormented him with wild images of Roman banquets and dances of women ; showing that the monastic seclusion from the world was by no means pro*f against the temptations of the flesh and the devil. Helpless he cast himself at the feet of Jesus, wet them with tears of repentance, and subdued the resisting flesh by a week of fasting and by the dry study of Hebrew grammar (which, according to a letter to Kusticus,"" he was at that time learning from a converted Jew), until he found peace, and thought himself transported to the choirs of the angels in heaven. In this period probably falla the dream mentioned above, and the composition of severaJ
» Ep. xxii. (i. p. 91, ed. Vallars.)
* Ep. cxxv., ed. Vallars. (al. 95 or 4.)