Ordo Praedicatorum

Br. Anthony Giambrone, O.P., a Student Brother and Deacon at the Dominican House of Studies, is currently pursuing advanced studies in Scripture through Catholic University of America. On Monday, September 30, he preached an outstanding homily  on St. Jerome. In his homily, Br. Anthony refers to the sculpture of St. Jerome located in front of the the Albanian Embassy here in DC (pictured above).  What follows is the text of the homily:

I find the open tome particularly striking. You have noticed, no doubt, that while all of the four great doctors on the wall behind me have a book in hand, only one is actually reading it. It brings to mind a certain saying about men who write more books than they read. Of course, even if others hold the quills, Jerome was no stranger to writing; his own works fill nine full volumes of the Patrologia latina, second only to Augustine. It takes very little acquaintance with Jerome’s style, however, to discover how vast and wide this writer’s reading was. His treasured personal library was one of the best in the ancient world (he is in fact the patron of librarians), and every page he wrote overflows with the gathered wisdom of those Illustrious Men whose lives and publications he eventually complied in a book by that title. If Jerome could produce at a remarkable rate, it was because he was able first to ingest such huge amounts of intellectual matter.

The man’s sheer appetite for learning and the capacious tenacity of his memory are at times staggering. His drive to master Hebrew shows the mettle of his mind as well as anything. It is small wonder he became, effectively, the sole Hebraist of Christendom: there were no dictionaries; no grammars; no concordances; not even vowel points, which were still several centuries away (and trust me they do make a difference). How deeply he absorbed the language and its literature might be judged from a stray remark in one of his epistles. Speaking of the obscure word Rissah, he recalled no other occurrence of it but Numbers 33:21—no concordance mind you—and one use in the apocryphal book of Jubilees; and as BibleWorks electronic search engine can now confirm, his memory did not fail him. 

Clearly, intellectual consumption on this level belongs exclusively to a life of leisure, in the classical sense. And here we touch the major mark distinguishing Jerome from the three great bishop saints whose company he keeps. The monk Jerome was given over fully to the life of contemplation and study, a life those doctors saddled with pastoral duties ever lamented that they had lost. 

It is, then, not merely an anachronism, but a gross distortion to see our doctor dappled in red and crowned with a galero. It is true he put his scholarship in service of the pope; he was, you might say, the original Pontifical Biblical Commission; and (I dare say) his monumental bequest to the Church in the Vulgate makes the PBC’s recent remarks on the vegan diet of Adam and Eve seem, somehow, rather pale. Jerome was a man of ecclesial service, yes; and he freely gave his life and labors to the good of the institutional Church; yet, he was always and above all a monk, or better an ascetic. Even scholarship, as powerful as its attraction was for him, was always only secondary. We would hardly find him as a hermit in the Syrian desert, parched by the fire of the sun, with (as he says) only scorpions and wild beasts and for company, if the pursuit of an academic life had ever been his principal end. No, in all things Jerome’s consuming passion was to be purged of every sinful longing that might pull him away from Christ. He was a penitent, fired by that same Zeitgeist of zeal that impelled so many Christian souls of that renowned generation to seek their salvation with tears in the desert.

Max Scheler somewhere describes asceticism as the modulation of appetites into a higher key, “the spiritualization of hunger” I think he calls it. In Jerome, uniquely, we see this spiritual sublimation not only with bodily appetite, but with the highest natural appetite: the desire to know. Jerome disciplined his mind as he disciplined his body, in order that it too might be drawn up into the life of the spirit. “The flesh I might try to break with frequent fasting,” he wrote, “but my mind was still seething with imagination: so to tame it, I gave myself up for training.” Seeking something harsh and barren to chasten his rebellious mind, the sensitive lover of Quintilian and Fronto fed himself on “words that hissed and gasped.” (He means Hebrew.) This asceticism of the mental appetite is Jerome’s most marvelous discovery and the root of his entire greatness.

“You are a Ciceronian and not a Christian.” To the very end of his life, these words were more bitter to him than his most austere fasts; and they prompted from him an act of intellectual renunciation as great as any in recorded Christian history. With a generosity born of both love and sorrow, Jerome relinquished his vain love of worldly learning and subordinated his intellect entirely and forevermore to the sole study of Christian truth. 

Jerome’s life and priorities challenge us, who also aspire to integrate learning with the pursuit of perfection; for it was this great man who forged and fused in his person the first synthesis of Origen and Anthony; at once exegete and athlete of Christ. In this, Jerome teaches us our own weakness by revealing the focus, rigor, and energy of a man truly crucified to the desk. If we would have sanctity through study and find the Lord at the end of our learning, this wise man of Bethlehem shows that our way must lead through the desert.

Jerome is often pictured, as in our chapel, with a lion as his companion. It is not, to be sure, the emblem of his temper. The legend tells, rather, that he once saw the beast limping and tenderly removed a thorn from its paw. The story gives us an apt metaphor, I think, for how Jerome came to tame his own ferocious yet noble nature. His delicate sensitivity to the wound of another is the key, and it shows us how we might love like him.

As neglectful and cruel as he was to his own body, Jerome could not endure to see the honor of his king, the Lord Christ, suffer the slightest pin-prick of shame. This is what so often summoned his wrath: not that he had been wronged, but that the truth of Christ’s Gospel was imperiled by error. He was like the prophets of old, whom Heschel said roared with divine pathos. This is not to say it was never personal; but only that it was never petty. He was noble; and if at times he felt betrayed in his friendships, he felt, quite keenly, that honor and virtue had somehow been betrayed. Jerome insisted, demanded that all the world be upright before God. This ruthless loyalty and virile, impetuous love is what finally focused all the wild energy of his mind on one steady aim and opened him to receive the discipline of grace. The lectionary has not, in fact, led us astray. Jerome was quite like those sons of Zebedee, who bristled and raged at an insult suffered by their Lord. Yet the simple mollifying lesson our Lord taught those sons of thunder was in no way lost on the Church’s Greatest Student. For loving attention to the honor of another, easily becomes careful attention to the every word of another; and Jerome, who preferred to reading to writing, was that Doctor who understood above all how to listen. He knew how to open his ear, if not when to close his mouth.

So, in the end, there can be no doubt what book it is that lies open on his lap. For a man who does not live on bread alone, but on every word that falls from the mouth of God, only one book can feed the soul’s hunger. It is the Book of Life which is spread like a meal before our starving scholar saint. And Jerome fed on its fruit as Ezechiel once swallowed the scroll. Commenting on this very scene in the Gospels, the penitent doctor offers us this:

“If fire was sent from heaven to protect the servant Elias from harm and to consume, not Samaritans, but Jews, how much more should the flames ravage the impious Samaritans, who had showed contempt for the Son of God. But the Lord, who had come, not to judge but to save, not in power but in humility, not in the glory of his Father but in the lowliness of man, rebuked the disciples because they did not remember His teaching and the merciful precepts of the Gospel.”

May we learn to love with the loyal force of this son of thunder and great Father of the Church. By our study and self-denial may we, like Jerome, learn to hear, digest, and remember the Lord’s teaching, to find the sweet fruit of His mercy, ripe on each page of His Word. Amen.’

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