The Scholar Conquered by the Word
MASS In médio Ecclésiæ
LESSON 2 Timothy 4:1-8
GOSPEL St Matthew 5:13-19
HOMILIST Mt Revd Jerome Lloyd OSJV
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
There is something almost providentially severe about the Mass which Holy Church gives us today for St Jerome. The Introit does not praise brilliance, originality or literary accomplishment. It says: “In the midst of the Church he opened his mouth; and the Lord filled him with the spirit of wisdom and understanding.” Notice the order. He opened his mouth in the midst of the Church, and the Lord filled it. Jerome is honoured not because he was clever, but because an immense natural intelligence was finally subjected to something greater than itself. His learning became fruitful when it ceased to belong to Jerome and became an instrument of Christ. His tongue became useful when it spoke from within the Church. His scholarship became holy when the scholar himself consented to be judged by the Word he studied.
Jerome had not begun that way. Born at Stridon on the Dalmatian-Pannonian frontier in the middle of the fourth century, he received the finest literary education available in the Roman world. He studied at Rome under the celebrated grammarian Donatus, absorbed the Latin classics, and acquired that formidable command of language which would later serve the Church. Yet the young Jerome loved Cicero before he loved Isaias. He possessed books before the Book possessed him. He could relish the elegance of pagan literature while finding the style of Sacred Scripture rough by comparison. The problem was not learning itself. The problem was order. Created beauty had captured him before uncreated Truth had conquered him.
Then came the experience which marked him for life. During a grave illness he believed himself brought before the judgement seat of Christ. Asked who he was, he answered that he was a Christian. The reply came: “Thou liest: thou art a Ciceronian, not a Christian”; and with it the terrible accusation of the Gospel: “Where thy treasure is, there is thy heart also.” Whatever we say of the precise nature of that experience, its spiritual force is unmistakable. Jerome was confronted not merely with what he professed, but with what possessed him. Not simply: “What name do you bear?” but: “Where is your treasure?”
That is the question which his feast places before us. We call ourselves Catholics. We may know the Faith, defend the Faith, love the traditional Mass, deplore doctrinal confusion, and recognise the disorders of the age. But what possesses us? What commands our imagination when the mind is left free? What receives the first energy of the day and the last thought of the night? What do we pursue eagerly, and what do we postpone? It is possible to possess correct opinions without possessing the mind of Christ. It is possible to defend Christianity while allowing the heart to be discipled by the world. It is possible even to spend much time speaking about the Faith while seldom allowing the Faith to rebuke us.
Jerome therefore went into the desert of Chalcis near Antioch. He learned Hebrew with great labour, embraced an ascetic life, was ordained priest by Paulinus of Antioch, studied in Constantinople under St Gregory Nazianzen, and eventually returned to Rome, where Pope St Damasus employed his remarkable gifts in the service of the Apostolic See. After Damasus’s death he departed once more for the East and, in 386, settled permanently at Bethlehem. There, near the cave where the eternal Word had been made flesh, he spent the remainder of his life in prayer, study, penance, translation, controversy and the service of Sacred Scripture.
This is why today’s Epistle from St Paul to Timothy fits Jerome so perfectly. “Preach the word: be instant in season, out of season: reprove, entreat, rebuke in all patience and doctrine.” Then comes the warning: “There shall be a time when they will not endure sound doctrine; but, according to their own desires, they will heap to themselves teachers having itching ears.” Men do not usually abandon truth because truth has become unintelligible. More often they abandon it because truth has become inconvenient. Once the conclusion has been chosen, teachers can always be found to bless it.
Jerome was temperamentally incapable of treating doctrine as negotiable. He fought Helvidius in defence of Our Lady’s perpetual virginity; Jovinian over the excellence of consecrated virginity; Vigilantius over the veneration of relics and the ascetical life; Rufinus amid the controversies surrounding Origen; and later the Pelagian error. He could be severe, sometimes excessively so. Holy Church canonises Jerome’s sanctity and honours his doctrine; she does not require us to imitate every severity of his polemical temper. That distinction is important. Grace does not abolish personality, and even in saints nature must be purified progressively. Jerome’s zeal reminds us that truth must be defended; his faults remind us that truth must be defended as Christians.
For cowardice is not charity. Silence is not prudence merely because it avoids unpleasantness. Our Lord says in today’s Gospel: “You are the salt of the earth.” Salt which has lost its savour is useless. He says: “You are the light of the world.” A lamp is not lit in order to be hidden. And then, lest anyone imagine that Christian enlightenment means liberation from commandments, Our Lord adds: “Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall not pass of the law.” The Christian must therefore hold together what the modern world continually tears apart: truth and charity, firmness and patience, clarity and humility.
But Jerome’s enduring greatness lies not principally in the number of controversies he entered. It lies in his service to the sacred text. Encouraged by Pope Damasus, he revised the Latin Gospels; later, at Bethlehem, he devoted himself increasingly to the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, comparing manuscripts, consulting learned men and drawing upon the great resources of Greek and Hebrew scholarship. His labours formed the central body of what became the Latin Vulgate, the Bible which nourished the Western Church for centuries, filled her liturgy, shaped her theology and gave language to generations of saints.
Yet Jerome did not approach Scripture as an antiquarian. For him, the sacred page was a meeting-place with Christ. His famous maxim, Ignoratio Scripturarum ignoratio Christi est—ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ—means precisely that. The written Word leads us to the Incarnate Word. It is fitting that Jerome spent his final decades at Bethlehem, beside the place where the Word became flesh, labouring over the words through which God has revealed Himself.
And here his feast becomes uncomfortably practical. We must not merely read Scripture; we must allow Scripture to read us. We must not merely interpret the Word; we must allow the Word to interpret our lives. Before we use the Gospel to condemn the age, we must allow the Gospel to condemn what is disordered in us. Before we apply St Paul to bishops, politicians, theologians or neighbours, we must ask what St Paul is saying to us.
Ask, then: what possesses me? Not merely what do I believe, but what possesses me? For Jerome, the danger was not an obviously wicked thing. It was something excellent loved out of order. That can happen to us as well. News may possess us. Politics may possess us. Ecclesiastical controversy may possess us. Books may possess us. Even traditional liturgy, theology, apologetics or apostolic work may become substitutes for interior conversion if they fill the mind while leaving the heart untouched. One may spend hours discussing the crisis in the Church and minutes in prayer. One may know every controversy and scarcely know the Psalms. One may defend fasting without fasting, defend penance without penance, defend reverence without becoming recollected, defend the saints without imitating them.
The answer is not less doctrine, less study or less attachment to Tradition. It is that doctrine must descend into life, study must become prayer, and Tradition must become obedience. The Word must first judge the disciple before the disciple presumes to wield it before others. This is Jerome’s great lesson. His sanctity was not that he knew much, but that, over a lifetime, he permitted what he knew to conquer him.
The traditional liturgy itself teaches us the same thing. We can admire its antiquity, beauty and theological precision while resisting the conversion which its prayers demand. We can speak of sacrifice while avoiding sacrifice; of mortification while indulging ourselves; of the four last things while living as though death were indefinitely postponed; of the Real Presence while approaching the altar distracted and unrecollected. We can possess the forms of Catholic life while refusing their inward demand. Jerome’s life warns us that the Faith is not truly ours until it has begun to remake us.
At the end of today’s Epistle St Paul gives us the measure of the matter: “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.” Not invented it. Not improved it. Not adapted it to the prejudices of the century. Kept it. And because he kept it, he could hand it on. That is the law of Catholic Tradition: we receive what we did not create, guard what does not belong to us, and transmit what was entrusted to us.
And because Providence has joined my own name day and priestly anniversary to this feast, I ask one thing of your charity: pray that I too may finish my course able to say, however unworthily, “I have kept the faith.” Pray that the priesthood may never become a possession, a platform or an identity, but remain what it is in truth: a stewardship of mysteries belonging to Christ. Pray that neither fear nor weariness, human respect nor vanity should cause anything received from the Church to be diminished in its handing on.
St Jerome died at Bethlehem on 30 September 420, close to the cave of the Nativity, after a long life in which a brilliant, restless and formidable man had gradually been conquered by the truth he once found too rough for his cultivated taste. Cicero had once possessed Jerome’s admiration; Christ finally possessed Jerome. The scholar became a disciple. The controversialist became a Doctor. The lover of words became the servant of the Word.
May St Jerome obtain for us that same grace: not merely to know the Faith, defend the Faith, admire the Faith or inherit the Faith, but to allow the Faith to judge us, purify us and possess us; and so, when our course is finished, to be able to say with the Apostle whose words the Church gives us today: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith.”
St Jerome, Confessor and Doctor of the Church, pray for us.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
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