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From Dalmatia to the Holy Land: Jerome and the World of Late Antiquity

Few forthcoming volumes can have aroused the degree of expectancy which anticipated the publication of Dr. Kelly's Jerome. Habitues of the Patristics Reading Room of the Bodleian, themselves a cross-section of the multifarious disciplines of late Roman and early Christian studies, had become accustomed to the sight of this book, literally, in the making; surrounded by the works of his predecessors in the subject, and perusing the texts of Jerome, Dr. Kelly was putting pen to paper before the eyes of the other readers. To public view there was no sign of quantities of notes, no boxes, no index-cards: Jerome and his interpreters were all that lay on the table. The finished product confirms its author's enviable talent for such an apparently ' direct' method of composition. The first impression is of a beautifully written book, its text marked by clarity of thought and elegance of expression, wide-ranging in its learning, yet delicately worked and immensely readable. It is wellserved, too, by the elegant format which the publishers have, justifiably, provided. Dr. Kelly sets himself to remedy the previous absence of a systematic English study of Jerome; hitherto it has been European scholars (Griitzmacher, Cavallera, Penna) who have paid attention to him, as the father of the Vulgate, and bulwark of popular Catholicism. Yet such is the current interest here in the late Roman period, and such the pace of progress, that we could not long do without an authoritative and up-to-date biography. Jerome towers among his contemporaries, a figure whose scriptural learning and capacity for polemic made him a focus of attention in the empire at large, west and east; whether exercised in noble households in Rome itself beneath the eye of the bishop, or from a monastic cell in Bethlehem, his impact was never negligible and often, for good or ill, decisive. The student of early Christian times finds it impossible to avoid confronting Jerome, and, with the appearance of this book, he will now be better equipped. Dr. Kelly's subtitle, ' Life, Writings, and Controversies ', points the way to the contents. The biographical structure provides the framework, and the continuity of the narrative—from the opening line recording Jerome's birth at Stridon in Dalmatia ' almost certainly' in 331 to his death in Bethlehem in 420. (Despite a defence of Prosper's early date for his birth in the book's only appendix, uncertainty is not dispelled. Jerome's early years have to be ' stretched ' almost beyond belief, with long periods which cannot be accounted for; Dr. Kelly is forced to admit that ' a whole decade and more of his life is lost to us ' , p. 24.) The narrative embraces his upbringing and education, his ascetic conversion, his entry into highly-placed Christian circles in Constantinople and Rome, and his final establishment as a monk in Bethlehem, where he was to remain for the entire second half of his long life. It is this last setting, not unnaturally, which dominates, as the place which saw the bulk of his literary output—the stream of letters to correspondents in the West, the biblical translations and commentaries, and the polemical treatises with which he waged war on his opponents in controversy, be they critics of the asceticism he championed, or members of the opposing camps in ecclesiastical squabbles (devotees of Origen or supporters of Pelagius). The writings, inevitably, are the key to the man; and Dr. Kelly has built his portrayal of Jerome around the astonishing and diverse amount of material which he produced. This is surely the only approach: for, unlike an Ambrose or an Augustine, active bishops deeply influenced by and influencing the day-to-day pattern of the society which immediately surrounded them, Jerome's local role among his fellow-monks (though not without its importance) fades by comparison with the far-reaching impact of everything that he wrote. Once the author has Jerome settled in Bethlehem, the course of the book is dictated by his literary output—and punctuated by those turns of events which particularly affected this output: the arrival in the Holy Land, for instance, of bishop Epiphanius preaching against Origen, or of the sudden flood of refugees (including Pelagius) from the barbarian invasions in the West.