§ 177. THE WOKKS OF JEROME. 987
with the scoiii'ge of cutting sath'e. And his writings are every where strewn with the pearls of beautiful moral maxims and eloquent exhortations to contempt of the world and godlj conduct.'
TV. The Epistles of-- Jerome, with all their defects, are uncommonly instrnctive and interesting, and, in easy flow and elegance of diction, are not inferior to the letters of Cicero Vallarsi has for the first time put them into chronological order in the first volume of his edition, and has made the former numbering of them (even that of the Benedictine edition) obsolete. He reckons in all a hundred and fifty, including several letters from cotemporaries, such as Epiphanius, Theophilus of Alexandria, Augustine, Damasus, Pammachius, and Rufinus ; some of them written directly to Jerome, and some treating of matters in which he was interested. They are addressed to friends Kke the Roman bishop Danuisus, tlie senator Pammachius, the bishop Paulinus of ISTola, Theophilus of Alexandria, Evangelus, Rufinus, Heliodorus, Riparius, I^epotianus, Oceanus, Avitus, Rusticus, Gaudentius, and Augustine, and some to distinguished ascetic women and maidens like Paula, Eustochium, Marcella, Fm*ia, Fabiola, and Demetrias. They treat of almost all questions of philosophy and practical religion, which then agitated the Christian world, and they faithfully reflect the virtues and the faults and the remarkable contrasts of Jerome and of his age.
Orthodox in theology and Christology, Semi-Pelagian in anthropology, Romanizing in the doctrine of the church and tradition, anti-chiliastic in eschatology, legalistic and ascetic in ethics, a violent fighter of all heresies, a fanatical apologist of all monkish extravagancies, — Jerome was revered throughout tlie catholic middle age as the patron saint of Christian and ecclesiastical learning, and, next to Augustine, as maximns doctor ecclesicB ', but by his enthusiastic love for the Holy Scriptures, his recourse to the original languages, his classic
' Comp. a collection of the principal doctrinal and moral sentences of Jerome n ZiiCKLEK, p. 429 ff. and p. 458 fll
088 THIRD PERIOD. AJ\ 311-590.
translation of the Bible, and his manifold exegetical ments, ht also played materially into the hands of the Reformation, and as a scholar and an author still takes the lirst rank, and as an influential theologian the second (after Augustine), among the Latin fathers ; while, as a moral character, he decidedly falls behind many others, like Hilary, Ambrose, and Leo I., and, even according to the standard of Roman asceticism, can only in a verv limited sense be re^rarded as a saint.'
§ 178. Augustine.
\. S. j^uRELii AuGTJSTiNi Ilippoiiensis episcopi Opera . . . Post Lovaniensium theologorum recensionem [which appeared at Antwerp in 1577 in 11 vols.] castigatus [referring to tomiis i)rhnus, etc.] denuo ad MSS. codd. Gallicanos, etc. Opera et studio monachorum ordinis S. Benedict! e congregatione S. Maarl [Fr. Delfau^ Th. Blampin, P. Constant, and Gl. Guesnie]. I^aris, 1679-1700, xi toin. in 8 fol. vols. The same edition reprinted, with additions, at Antwerp, 1700-1703, 12 parts in 9 fol. ; and at Venice, 1729-'34, in xi torn, in 8 fol. (this is the edition from which I have generally quoted ; it is not to be confounded witli another Venice edition of 1756-'69 in xviii vols. 4to, which is full of printing errors); also at Bassano, 1807, in 18 vols.; by Garnnc fratres, Paris, 1836-39, in xi torn, in 22 parts (a very elegant edition); and lastly by J. P. Migne, Petit-Montrougc, 1841-''49, in xii torn. (Patrol. Lat. tom. xxxii.-xlvii.). Migne's edition (which I have also used occasionally) gives, in a supplementary volume (torn, xii.), the valuable Notitia literaria de vita, scriptis et editionibus Aug. from Schonemann's l^ibliotheca historico-literaria Patrum Lat. vol. ii. Lips 1794, the VindiciiB Augustiuianas of Norisius, and the writings of Augustine first published by Fontanini and Angelo Mai. But a thor-
' Comp. the various estimates of Jerome at ^41 (p. 214) above; in Vallaksi, Opera Hier., torn. xi. 282-300, and in Z<>cklkk, 1. c. pp. 465-47C. In the preface to his valuable mouograph (p. v) Zockleu says : " Jerome is chiefly the orator and the scholar am(mg the fathers. His life is essentially neither the life of a monk, nor a priest — for monk and priest he was only by the way — nor that of a saint — for he waa no saint at all, at least not in the sense of the Roman cliurch. It is from beginning to end the life of a scholar, a life replete with literary studios and all sorts of scholarly enterprises." This judgment we can subscribe only with two qualifications: he was as much a monk as a scholar, and exerted an extraordinary influence on the spread of monasticism in the West; and his re[)utution as a saint i >sts precisely on the Romish overestimate of asceticism, as distinguished from th€ evangel ical Protestant form of pietv