by Fr. Richard Cipolla
from the Roman
Catholic blog Rorate Cæli
The Frick Museum in New York City
is not too far from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And yet the venues are
radically different. The Met is a large art museum with many rooms and lofty
corridors and grand staircases. But the Frick building was once a
home, a large and lovely home indeed, one of the great mansions in New York
City. The Frick mansion was built for the industrialist Henry Clay Frick in the
mid-1920s in the Beaux Arts style. Frick built the home to house his art
collection, mainly paintings, and planned for it to be an art museum after his
death, which directive his wife and daughter fulfilled some years after his
death. The collection is amazing, including paintings from the late
medieval period through the nineteenth century. My favorite room is the Living
Hall, which includes paintings by Holbein, Giovani Bellini and
Titian. Above the fireplace in this room is the portrait of St.
Jerome by El Greco. The artist paints St Jerome in full Cardinal’s robes. His
face is somewhat gaunt, his hair and long beard are white, his cheek bones
stick out, and his dark eyes gaze intently at someone or something just to his
left. His face is a face of someone to be reckoned with.
The recently published book on
St. Jerome, written by Dom Basil Nixen, OSB, of the monastery of San Benedetto
in Monte in Norcia, Italy, certainly “reckons with” St. Jerome but in an
unusual way. Its title is The Last Communion of St. Jerome.
It certainly can be classified as
a biography. But it is very different from the well-known biographies of this
saint such as Jerome: His Life, Writings, and Controversies by
J. N. D. Kelly. For its vantage point is a fourteenth legend about the last
Communion of St. Jerome, which was the subject of two famous paintings of this
supra-historical event, one by Botticelli, the other by Domenichino. In this
way the life of St. Jerome is seen through the prism of these paintings, and
the first two chapters are devoted to eucharistic theology with ample quotes
from St. Jerome that links strongly St. Jerome’s understanding of the
relationship between belief in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist and
the proper exegesis of Scripture itself.
The first two chapters of the
book could stand alone as a treatise on the Holy Eucharist. That it is written
by a contemporary monk about a fourth century monk-scholar is important, for
Dom Basil offers insights that a secular writer, even a secular priest, could
not offer. This is very important at this time in the Church, in which there
are real and good signs that the Traditional understanding of the Eucharist is
becoming once again a real part of Catholic teaching and practice after the
many years following the Second Vatican Council of liturgical chaos and
devaluation of eucharistic piety.
In this section of the book the
author discusses at some length Jerome’s strong words on fasting before
receiving Holy Communion. Such a discussion is sorely needed in a time when the
eucharist fast has for all practical purposes disappeared in the Church today.
Jerome does not insist, at least in words, on the traditional fast from
midnight on Sunday, but he does insist that fasting is a necessary preparation
for the reception of the Eucharist. But the author goes on to discuss St.
Jerome’s extension of the fast of abstaining from food and drink to a fast of
married couples abstaining from sexual intercourse the night before receiving
Holy Communion. For a priest today to talk to his parishioners about fasting
from food from midnight to Sunday morning takes a bit of courage. But
to speak about fasting from marital relations the night before receiving Holy
Communion would seem to require a courage that is truly heroic and to be judged
as “insensitive”.
How Dom Basil treats the
relationship between Jerome’s understanding of the monastic life and his
relationship to the priesthood is quite masterful. This is indeed a difficult
subject to approach, since there seems to be a contradiction between Jerome’s firm
instance on the absolute priority of his monastic life in relationship to the
priesthood. And yet Jerome knew that the grace of ordination to the
priesthood would allow him to pursue his vocation both to the monastic life and
his dedication to the translation of Holy Scripture. And so, with some
reluctance on his part, he was ordained by the bishop Paulinus,* whose
orthodoxy in a time of heterodoxy Jerome recognized and trusted. And
yet it seems that Jerome never offered Mass as a priest. This is difficult to
understand, and yet the grace of the priesthood was surely part of the grace
that enabled him to do the work for which he was born: the translation of the
Scriptures into Latin, which became the foundation of the Catholic
understanding of both the Old and the New Testament that formed an integral
part of the Tradition. And yet Jerome identified himself so absolutely as
someone who needed to be fed and not the one who feeds. And it was his calling
to be a monk that formed the very center of his being as a follower of Jesus
Christ.
Chapter 3 begins what could be
seen as the main section of the book, as far as length goes. This chapter is
biographical in content but never departs from the spiritual foundations of the
first two chapters. It is from the very beginning of his manhood that Jerome
was strongly attracted to the monastic life in the form in which it was being
practiced in the fourth century by those who became known as the Desert
Fathers, some of whose ascetic practices were considered by some even then as
extreme and are certainly considered now as excessive or extreme by many
Catholics. But it was to this understanding of monasticism to which the young
Jerome was attracted, and he lived this life for several years. And while in
later life he was called to live his life in towns and cities, he never lost
that sense of the need for the desert, at least in his mind and heart.
In these chapters dealing with
Jerome’s life, Dom Basil provides extensive quotes from Jerome’s own writings,
that not only trace his development as a writer and scholar and monk but also
gives us great insights into the problems--doctrinal, social and moral--that
were part of the life and development of the teaching
Church. Jerome’s position as secretary to Pope Damasus--meaning the
Pope’s close right-hand man--and his involvement in opposing the
Antiochian schism affords us a real glimpse of what the religious and
intellectual life was like in the late fourth and early fifth
centuries. This section may be most valuable to the laity of the
Catholic Church, for reading these chapters affords one a real feeling for that
time in the Church during which the fundamental understanding of the answer to
the question “who is Jesus Christ?” was being debated and defined in the first
four Ecumenical Council that lie at the very heart of the Catholic faith.
Dom Basil does not gloss over
Jerome’s use of strong invective in his letters to those whom he saw as
deserving of such language, such as those charlatans in priests’ robes, those
who espoused heretical views of the Faith, and those who despised him because
of their jealousy of his remarkable knowledge of Latin and Greek (and later
Hebrew) that he displayed in his translations of the New Testament, which
became the foundation for all such translations up to the modern
era. Dom Basil quotes the letter to Helvetius as an example of
Jerome’s use of invective. He situates the style of the letter
within the Classical tradition that Jerome inherited from writers like Cicero,
one of the masters of this art in his Orations against Catiline.
Dom Basil suggests, with humility, that perhaps such methods of argument may
not be appropriate in the world in which we live. I hope that Dom
Basil and I can have a conversation about his suggestion.
Jerome’s remarkable relationship
to the deeply pious and intelligent Christian women living on the Aventine in
Rome in that period of his life when he lived in Rome affords a view of him
that has been often overlooked. His devotion as a spiritual guide and a true
friend grounded in the person of Jesus Christ is one of the stars in his crown
as a saint of the Church. His treatise addressed to one of these
women, Eustachium, remains as one of the great spiritual treatises in the
treasury of the Catholic Church.
The last chapter of this book is
perhaps where not only the chapters in Jerome’s life come together as writer,
as inspired translator, as a spiritual friend, as a man of the formative years
of the Church, but also above all as a monk. For being--in the
deepest sense of that word--being a monk was at the very heart of the person
that Saint Jerome was and still is.
Dom Basil returns towards the end
of this final chapter to the mystery of Jerome’s renunciation of the power of
his priesthood, which for some, perhaps most, would be seen as a waste of
grace. Dom Basil quotes once again Jerome’s comment to Heliodorus in
his relative youth:
The objective,
however of Monks, is different from that of clerics....
Clerics feed the
sheep; I am fed. They live from the altar; but mine
is the fate of the
barren tree, to whose base the ax is laid, if I fail to
bring a gift to
the altar.
And that, for St. Jerome, is the
heart of the matter and the matter of the heart.
Source:
https://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2026/07/the-last-communion-of-st-jerome-book-to.html
* It should be noted Bishop Paulinus
of Antioch was a “parallel bishop” and leader of the so-called "Eustathians" (supporters of the unjustly exiled St. Eustathios of Antioch) who was recognized by the Orthodox West (that is,
the patriarchal Sees of Rome and Alexandria), while the Orthodox East generally
recognized St. Meletios of Antioch, the East being internally divided between
Orthodox believers and Semi-Arians at the time. - Blog Administrator note.
