The blog of a Middle Anglican

The “saintly history” of the past few posts will resume shortly.

I have been debating with a former evangelical, now an atheist, on the web, and he can’t get it out of his head that I am trying to convert him. It seems to me that evangelicals far too easily forget that conversion is the work of the Holy Spirit. The most that they can do is bear witness to what they believe. And that doesn’t mean knocking on people’s doors so that you can deliver a theological lecture whilst they are busy doing something else; it means living as though you believed what you profess. It was that which finally got Christianity accepted in the Roman Empire.

The death of Jerome brings us to the year 420. The Roman Empire is on the point of collapse, the Dark Ages are about to descend upon Western Europe, and extant records about the lives of saints, or anything else, start to become thin on the ground. Nevertheless, one character of whom a little is known, dating from this period is Patrick, patron saint of Ireland. The exact dates of his birth and death are disputed, but one dating puts them in 390 and 461 respectively. Since the 1940’s it has generally become scholarly orthodoxy that what had, up until then, been accepted as the details of Patrick’s life is in fact a conflation of two saintly biographies; Patrick and Palladius. together with some exagerated claims, which were later made for him by prelates with political motives. Most of the accepted details of Patrick’s life now drawn from the writings of the saint himself.

Patrick was born somewhere in the western half of what later became Britain. (In the fifth century, Britain was a collection of minor fiefdoms such as the Angles, Picts and Britons). Patrick was the son of a deacon and had a priest as his grandfather. Whilst still in his youth he was captured by Irish pirates, and taken to Ireland where he was sold as a slave. Patrick spent six years as a slave, mostly tending his master’s herds. It was during this period that he became a Christian, as he gradually abandoned the paganism he had previously embraced.

After six years in captivity he had a dream in which he was told that he would soon escape his captivity, and a ship was waiting to take him back to his homeland. Subsequently he decamped, and broke free from his master. He made his way to the Irish coast, from whence he was able to persuade some sailors to take him with them when they sailed for Britain.

He returned to his family a changed man. Deciding to train for the priesthood, he acquired a basic knowledge of Latin, although the Latin style of his writing is regarded as inelegant. After another dream, resembling that of St Paul when he found himself being called into Macedonia, Patrick decided to return to Ireland. He there ordained priests, and encouraged many people to become monks and nuns. Limerick and Armagh are both put forward as places where he spent much of his time. As in Britain, paganism was still widely embraced amongst the Irish population of the fifth century, and Patrick was much concerned to bring it to an end - although without the more forceful methods employed by the Church in later centuries. Not that much more is known about the Patrick of history, rather than legend; even the place of his burial is unknown. Many locations lay claim to him; including Glastonbury in England. The currently accepted date of his death is 461.

Most famous for his translation of the Bible into Latin, Jerome was born in Stridon, Dalmatia in the year 341. Although a scholar of great learning, Jerome could also be sarcastic and scornful towards other people. Consequently he had no difficulty acquiring enemies.

Sometime in the early 360’s Jerome made a journey to Rome, where he devoted himself to the study of philosophiy, rhetoric and learned Greek.  Subsequently he converted to Christianity,  and was baptised  After leaving Rome he travelled to Trier,  there studying theology, and then to Aquileia, where he seems to have temporarily lived a semi-monastic style life with a group of friends. There was some kind of quarrel, possibly the result of Jerome’s abrasive temperament, and he and some friends left Aquileia, travelling in the general direction of Palestine. They arrived at Antioch in 374, and there some of his friends died; Jerome himself suffering several bouts of serious illness. During one of these episodes he had a vision which led him to spend five years living in the Syrian desert as a hermit, during which time he learned Hebrew, and otherwise devoted himself exclusively to the study of the scriptures.

For some reason, in 379 the Bishop of Antioch seems to have put pressure on Jerome to become ordained. Apparently with some reluctance, he agreed to this, but never undertook any priestly duties. His next move was to Constantinople where he studied under St Gregory Nazianzus and undertook his first work as a translator.

In 382 there were two rival claimants to the See of Antioch, so in that year Jerome found himself in Rome again, invited to attend the synod called to deal with the resulting schism. For some time after that he was in Rome effectively working as the Pope’s secretary. He then set out upon the enormous task of translating the entire Bible into Latin; a task which was to take  him many years to complete. He spent a total of three years in Rome. During this time he became intimately acquainted with a group of widows leading a semi-monastic life, and acted as their spiritual director.

However, Jerome’s sarcasm had earned him many enemies, and upon the Pope’s death, in December 384, rumours began to circulate that his relationship with the women was not as proper as it should be. The following year he was forced to leave Rome again, and he returned to Antioch; the women he had been directing following along soon thereafter. After spending some time in Egypt, experiencing the life of the desert fathers, Jerome returned to Palestine, and at Bethlehem founded a monastery for monks, as well as a convent for the women who had followed him into Palestine. There he spent the rest of his life, teaching, studying, giving spiritual direction, completing the Vulgate version of the Bible, and dying in 420.

Cyprian died in 258,  seven years after Antony’s birth in 251. Antony, one of the first of the Desert Fathers, was one day in church he heard these words of Christ:

“If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell all that thou hast, and give to the poor, an thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.”

So, when he was about twenty years old,  he followed this injunction to the letter, sold all his possessions, donated the money to the poor, and joined himself to a group of ascetics living nearby. After about fifteen years he left this community for an old Roman fort, which he found at Pispir, and there spent the next twenty years living in complete solitude.  Over the years he gradually acquired a group of disciples, who lived in nearby caves and who regularly begged him to come out from his hermitage so that he could guide them. When eventually he yielded to their pleas, and emerged from solitude, far from being shrivelled an emaciated, as everybody had expected, he was found to be hearty both in body and mind.

After spending five years instructing his disciples in the ways of the spiritual life he once again retreated into solitude. He emeged from hir retreat once, in 311 when he went to Alexandria to encourage Christians who were suffering in the persecution of Maximinus., and again in 355, when he emerged at the instigation of Athanasius to preach against the Arian heresy; still a force thirty years after the Council of Nicea. The following year he died whilst still living in solitude.