![scripturae sacrae affectus scripturae sacrae affectus](https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-h36ZiL2v6Ck/YF8n4b9AaLI/AAAAAAAAOls/HHj7VCJFit4NMPX-i8_mCmu74kXKPtJzQCLcBGAsYHQ/w1200-h630-p-k-no-nu/passion%2Bof%2Bjesus%2Bmark.png)
In the East, he knew Gregory of Nazianzus, Didymus the Blind and Epiphanius of Salamis. A youthful friend of Rufinus of Aquileia, he knew Ambrose and was frequently in correspondence with Augustine. He served as a bridge between East and West. Thus, in the pursuit of knowledge that marked his entire life, he put to good use his youthful studies and Roman education, redirecting his scholarship to the greater service of God and the ecclesial community.Īs a result, Saint Jerome became one of the great figures of the ancient Church in the period known as the golden age of patristics. It gave his life a new and more decisive orientation: he was to become a servant of the word of God, in love, as it were, with the “flesh of Scripture”. That experience inspired Jerome to devote himself entirely to Christ and his word, and to strive through his translations and commentaries to make the divine writings increasingly accessible to others. Jerome had loved from his youth the limpid beauty of the Latin classics, whereas the writings of the Bible had initially struck him as uncouth and ungrammatical, too harsh for his refined literary taste. But the Judge retorted: ‘You lie! You are a Ciceronian, not a Christian’”. As he himself recalled: “Questioned about my state, I responded that I was a Christian. That dream proved to be a decisive turning point in his life, an occasion of conversion and change in outlook. He thus entrusted himself to the Lord whom he had always sought and known in the Scriptures, the same Lord whom, as a Judge, he had already encountered in a feverish dream, possibly during the Lenten season of 375. On 30 September 420, Saint Jerome died in Bethlehem, in the community that he had founded near the grotto of the Nativity. Jerome’s profound knowledge of the Scriptures, his zeal for making their teaching known, his skill as an interpreter of texts, his ardent and at times impetuous defence of Christian truth, his asceticism and harsh eremitical discipline, his expertise as a generous and sensitive spiritual guide – all these make him, sixteen centuries after his death, a figure of enduring relevance for us, the Christians of the twenty-first century. That “living and tender love” flowed, like a great river feeding countless streams, into his tireless activity as a scholar, translator and exegete. Now, on the sixteen hundredth anniversary of his death, those words taken from the opening prayer of his liturgical Memorial give us an essential insight into this outstanding figure in the Church’s history and his immense love for Christ. Devotion to sacred Scripture, a “living and tender love” for the written word of God: this is the legacy that Saint Jerome bequeathed to the Church by his life and labours.