An outline of the religious issues during Jerome’s life

Jerome’s reading of the Old Testament was not innocent. As an active Christian, he was alert for anything that could be interpreted as foreseeing the coming of the messiah, Jesus. I have seen no evidence that this affected his work as a translator but it very possibly did. It certainly affected his writings and commentaries on the Bible, many of which are of interest while some seem farfetched.

Another important issue was ascetism and the monastic lifestyle. Up to this point, ascetics who isolated themselves from everyday life mostly did so as individual hermits/reclusive anchorites. During Jerome’s lifetime, monasteries and nunneries developed for those wishing to focus their lives on their religion but to do so with others in an organisational form. At the same time, Christianity had become the state religion of the Roman empire and large numbers of people, who wished to live ordinary lives, had converted, Jerome’s intense advocation of the monastic/ascetic lifestyle was not universally popular.

As far as theology was concerned, the trinitarian structure of the Christian religion with God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit continued to cause problems, in particular with regard to the similarity/identity or superiority of the three. Many early Christians were Arians, who regarded Christ as divine but not a deity. To quote Wikipedia, “According to the teaching of Arius, the pre-existent Logos and thus the incarnate Jesus Christ was a begotten being; only the Son was directly begotten by God the Father, before ages, but was of a distinct, though similar, essence or substance from the Creator”. Arian’s opponents argued that this was heretical as it would make Christ lesser than God.

A compromise was attempted at the First Council of Nicaea summoned by Emperor Constantine. This Council condemned Arian’s doctrine as a heresy. By 325, the controversy had become significant enough that the Emperor Constantine called and defined the relationship between the Father and the Son, as Homoousios or Consubstantiality, meaning “of the same substance” or “of one being”. According to the Wikipedia article, all copies of Arian’s works were to be burned and anyone found in possession of a copy was to be executed.

The compromise formulation and the exact nature of the relationship between God, Christ and the Holy Spirit, particularly with regard to the nature of Christ, was intensified by the gliding of meaning between Latin and Greek and the power relationships between the Vatican and Constantinople. ‘

The concept of hypostasis was developed, mainly in the east, where the incarnation of Christ was constituted as a complex person with both a human and a divine nature. St Jerome was very much involved in these discussions.

It was agreed, at least in the West that hypostasis meant substance or essence and to speak of God who is one and indivisible as three distinct substances or essences must lead to the Arian heresy.

There were many meetings and discussions. I was amused to read a from a work quoted in the Wikipedia article, Schaff, Philip, The Complete History of the Christian Church: The pagan Ammianus Marcellinus says of the councils: “The highways were covered with galloping bishops;” and even Athanasius rebuked the restless flutter of the clergy.

The nature of the Trinity caused problems for long after Jerome’s death and was also part of the ultimate split between Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy in the filoque issue (although again power relationships between Rome and Constantinople and the Papacy’s demand to be regarded as the supreme authority played a significant role).

St Jerome was much influenced by Origen (185-253), a very active and productive theologian, who would undoubtedly have been regarded as one of the fathers of the church, had he not been declared a heretic in 543. St Jerome became critical of some of the results of Origen’s allegorical method but still regarded much of his production as worthwhile. Jerome’s critics were unable to make this fine distinction. Origen developed theories about God creating the souls of intelligent beings before making the Universe (it seems doubtful that he could back this hypothesis up with empirical evidence). The souls then fell away from God and assumed material form. This seems to point in the direction of gnosticism, believing in the lower value of the material world and the only true path being to free oneself from the material to approach the unknowable God (though Origen didn’t as far as I know have any tendency to split the deity into a good and evil deity).