§ 41. ST. JEROME AS A MONK. 209
a&retic writings, full of lieatod eulogy of the monastic life.' His biographies of distinguished anchorets, however, are very pleasantly and temperately written.^ He commends monastic seclusion even against the will of i)areuts ; interpreting the word of the Lord about forsaking father and mother, as if monasticism and Christianity were the same. " Though thy mother " — he writes, in 373, to his friend Heiiodorus, who had left him in the midst of his journey to the Syrian desert — " with flowing liair and rent garments, should show thee the breasts which have nourished thee ; though thy father should lie upon the threshold ; yet depart thou, treading over thy father, and fly with dry eyes to the standard of the cross. This is the only religion of its kind, in this matter to be cruel. , . The love of God and the fear of hell easily rend the bonds of the household asunder. The holy Scripture indeed enjoins obedience to parents ; but he who loves them more than Christ, loses his soul. . . . O desert, where the flov/ers of Christ are blooming ! O solitude, where the stones for the new Jerusalem are pre- ]iared ! O retreat, which rejoices in the friendship of God ! What doest thou in the world, my brother, with thy soul irreater than the world? How Ion o; wilt thou remain in the shadow of roofs, and in the smoky dungeon of cities ? Believe me, I see here more of the light." ' The eloquent appeal, liow-
' De laude vitse solitariae, Ep. xiv. (torn. i. 28-36) ad Hcliodorura. The Roman .ady Fabiola learned this letter by heart, and Du Pin calls it a masterpiece of eloquence (Nouv. Bibl. des auteurs eccl. iii. 102), but it is almost too declamatory and iurgid. He himself afterward acknowledged it overdrawn.
^ Gibbon says of them : " The stories of Paul, Hilarion, and Malchus are admirably told ; and the only defect of these pleasing compositions is the want of truth and 3ommon sense."
' Ep. xiv. (t. i. 29 sq.) Similar descriptions of the attractions of monastic life we meet with in the ascetic writings of Gregory, Basil, Ambrose, Chrysostom, Caaaian, Nilus, and Isidor. " So great grace," says the venerable monk Nilus of Mount Sinai, in the beginning of the fifth century (Ep. lib. i ep. 1, as quoted by Neander, Am. ed. ii. 250), "so great grace has God bestowed on the monks, even in anticipation of the future world, that they wish for no honors from men, and feel no longing after the greatness of this world ; but, on the contrary, often seek rather to remain concealed from men : while, on the other hand, many of the great, who possess all the glory of the world, either of their own accord, or compelled by misfortune, take refuge with the lowly monks, and, delivered from fatal dangers, obtain at once a temporal and an eternal salvation."
210 THIRD PERIOD. A.D. 311-590.
ever, failed of tlie desired effect ; Heliodorus entered the teiu'liing order and became a bishop.
The active and restless spirit of Jerome soon brought liini again upon the public stage, and involved him in all tlic doctrinal and ecclesiastical controversies of those controversial times. He received the ordination of presbyter from the bishop Paulinus in Antiocli, without taking charge of a congregation. He preferred the itinerant life of a monk and a student to a fixed office, and about 380 journeyed to Constantinople, where he heard the anti-Arian sermons of the celebi-ated Gregory Nazianzen, and translated the Chronicle of Eusebius and the honiilies of Origen on Jeremiah and Ezekiel. In 382, on account of the Meletian schism, he returned to Rome with Paulinus and Epiphanius. Here he came into close connection with the bishop, Damasus, as his theological adviser and ecclesiastical secretary,' and was led by him into new exegetical labors, particularly the revision of the Latin version of the Bible, which he completed at a later day in the East.
At the same time he labored in Rome with the greatest zeal, by mouth and pen, in the cause of monasticism, which had hitherto gained very little foothold there, and met with violent opposition even among the clergy. He had his eye mainly upon the most wealthy and honorable classes of the decayed Koman society, and tried to induce the descendants of the Scipios, the Gracchi, the Marcelli, the Camilli, the Anicii to turn their sumptuous villas into monastic retreats, and to lead alifeof self-sacrifice and charity. He met with great success. "The old patrician races, which founded Rome, which had governed her during all her period of splendor and liberty, and which overcame and concpiered the world, had expiated for four centuries, under the atrocious yoke of the Cajsars, all that was most hard and selfish in the glory of their fathers. Cruelly
' A.8 we infer from a remark of Jerome in Ep. cxxiii. c. 10, written a. 409 (eA Vallars. i. p. 901): " Ante annos plurimos, ciuum in chartis eeclosiasticis" (i. e. prol> ably in ecclesiastical documents ; tho'jgh Schriickh, viii. p. 122, refers it to the IIolj iJcriptures, appealing to a work of Bmamici unknown to me), "juvarcm Damasum, Romanas urbis opiscopum, et orientis atquc occidentis synodicis consultationibus re spondercm," etc. The latter words, which Schriickh does not quote, favor the com mon interpretation.