St. Jerome is whipped before Christ's judgment seat for reading Cicero

ROME, 384 AD — Saint Jerome has sent Saint Eustochium a long letter of advice on keeping her vow of virginity, and in the middle of it he tells her a story against himself. Years ago, in a fever that nearly killed him, he stood before the judgment seat of Christ and was condemned for his reading. He was whipped until he swore never again to own or read a pagan book.

St. Jerome is a priest and scholar who has lived at Rome since 382 AD as secretary and counsellor to Pope St. Damasus. St. Eustochium is the daughter of St. Paula, a widow of the Roman nobility. About 382 AD St. Eustochium put herself under St. Jerome’s direction and made a solemn vow of virginity. St. Jerome calls her “daughter” in the letter, a name he says refers to “your age.” The letter sets out at length why a woman should give her life to virginity and how to live it day by day in the city.

In the paragraph that leads into the dream, St. Jerome tells St. Eustochium not to try to sound clever or to play with verse, and asks: “How can Horace go with the psalter, Virgil with the gospels, Cicero with the apostle?” Then he writes: “Let me relate to you the story of my own miserable experience.”

The story goes back about ten years, to 374 or 375 AD. St. Jerome had given up home, parents, sister and relatives for the kingdom of heaven, and was on the road east toward Jerusalem. He had loved the Latin classics since his youth and could not give up the library he had built up at Rome. He tells St. Eustochium: “And so, miserable man that I was, I would fast only that I might afterwards read Cicero.” After nights of prayer and tears over his sins he would go back to Plautus, another of the pagan authors he loved. When he did turn to the prophets, their style struck him as “rude and repellent.” St. Jerome writes of that failure: “I failed to see the light with my blinded eyes; but I attributed the fault not to them, but to the sun.”

About the middle of Lent a fever wasted him to skin and bone. The people around him began to prepare his funeral. His body grew cold, and the only warmth left in him was in his chest.

Then, he writes, he was caught up in the spirit and dragged before the judgment seat. The light was so bright, and the figures standing round so radiant, that he threw himself on the ground and did not dare look up. Asked what he was, St. Jerome answered: “I am a Christian.” The Judge replied: “You lie. You are a follower of Cicero and not of Christ. For ‘where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.’” In St. Jerome’s Latin the charge reads Ciceronianus es, non Christianus (you are a Ciceronian, not a Christian).

St. Jerome could not speak. The Judge ordered him whipped, and St. Jerome writes that his conscience hurt more than the lash as he turned over the psalm verse “In the grave who shall give you thanks?” Under the lash he cried out: “Have mercy upon me, O Lord: have mercy upon me.” At last the bystanders fell at the Judge’s knees. They begged the Judge to pity St. Jerome’s youth and give him time to repent, on condition that he be punished again if he ever went back to the pagan authors. Then St. Jerome swore, calling on the Lord’s name: “Lord, if ever again I possess worldly books, or if ever again I read such, I have denied You.”

St. Jerome opened his eyes, to the surprise of the people who had been getting ready to bury him. His eyes were so full of tears, and his distress so plain, that even the doubters in the room believed what had happened to him. He swears to St. Eustochium, by the court he had stood before, that this was not one of the empty dreams that so often deceive people. His shoulders were black and blue, and he felt the bruises long after he woke. St. Jerome ends the story: “thenceforth I read the books of God with a zeal greater than I had previously given to the books of men.”

The oath came back to St. Jerome years later. At the end of 400 AD his old friend Rufinus, by then his opponent, wrote a defence of his own conduct at Aquileia. In it Rufinus quoted the dream in full and accused St. Jerome of perjury. Rufinus complained that even in works written for “girls and weak women” St. Jerome still wove in lines from Horace, Cicero and Virgil.

St. Jerome answered from Bethlehem in 402 AD. He explained the oath he had sworn before the Judge: “I said that I would thenceforward read no secular books: it was a promise for the future, not the abolition of my memory of the past.” Then he raised the obvious objection: “How, you may ask me, can you retain what you have been so long without reading?” St. Jerome wrote that he must answer “by recurring to one of these old books,” and quoted a line of Virgil: “'Tis much to be inured in tender youth.”