Jerome on Praying

Moreover, although the apostle bids us to pray without ceasing, and although, to the saints, their very sleep is an orison, yet we ought to have fixed hours for prayer so that if, perchance, we are occupied with any business, the time, itself, may remind us of our duty.  Everyone knows that the set times are the third, the sixth, and the ninth hours, at dawn and at evening.  No food should be taken except after prayer and, before leaving the table, thanks should be rendered to our Creator.  We should rise from our beds two or three times in the night and go over those passages of Scripture which we know by heart.  Let prayer arm us when we leave our lodging.  When we return from the streets, let us pray before we sit down nor give our miserable bodies rest until our souls are fed.  In everything we do, in every step we take, let our hands trace the sign of the Lord’s cross.

From: “Letter XXII: To Eustochium” in Select Letters of Saint Jerome, translated from the Latin, and with an introduction and notes, by F. A. Wright; The Loeb Classical Library series (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1933), pp. 143, 145.  The letter quoted from was written in AD 384.

Jerome (345-420) was an older contemporary of Augustine and a prolific author.  He is best known today for having made the most-used translation of the Bible into Latin, the Vulgate.  He lived in Bethlehem for the final 34 years of his life, where he built a monastery, of which he was the head.

 

Advice

When you are giving alms, let God alone see you.  When you are fasting, keep a cheerful face.  Let your dress be neither elegant nor slovenly, and let it not be noticeable by any strangeness that might attract the notice of passers-by and make people point their fingers at you.  If a brother dies or the body of a beloved sister has to be carried to burial, take care that you do not attend such funerals too often, or you may die yourself. 

Do not try to seem very devout nor more humble than is necessary.  It is possible to seek glory by avoiding it.  Many men who screen from view their poverty, charity, and fasting, reveal their desire for admiration by the very fact that they spurn it and, strangely enough, seek praise while avoiding it.  From the other perturbations of the mind, from exultation, despondency, hope and fear I find many free; but desire for praise is a fault which few escape, and that man is best whose character, like a fair skin, is disfigured by the fewest blemishes.

Jerome, in a letter to Eustochium, dated AD 384.  (Letter XXII, Section 27)  Jerome (345-420) was one of the early church fathers, and is best known for having made the Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible.  Does the last sentence of the first paragraph demonstrate that Jerome was superstitious?

From: Select Letters of St. Jerome, translated from the Latin and edited by F. A. Wright; the Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1933), p. 115.

 

The Bible in the Vulgar Tongue

The sermons which thou readest in the Acts of the Apostles, and all that the apostles preached were, no doubt, preached in the mother tongue.  Why, then, might they not be written in the mother tongue?  As if one of us preach a good sermon, why may it not be written?  Saint Jerome, also, translated the Bible into his mother tongue.  Why may not we, also?  They will say it cannot be translated into our tongue, it is so rude [undeveloped].  It is not so rude as they are false liars.  For the Greek tongue agreeth more with the English than with the Latin.  And the properties of the Hebrew tongue agreeth a thousand times more with the English than with the Latin.  The manner of speaking is both one so that, in a thousand places, thou needest not but to translate it into the English, word for word, when thou must seek a compass [go round] in the Latin and, yet, shalt have much to translate it well favouredly, so that it have the same grace and sweetness, sense, and pure understanding with it in the Latin, as it hath in the Hebrew.  A thousand parts better may it be translated into the English than into the Latin.  Yea, and except my memory fail me and that I have forgotten what I read when I was a child, thou shalt find, in the English chronicle, how the king, Athelstan [reigned 925-939], caused the Holy Scripture to be translated into the tongue that, then, was in England, and how the prelates exhorted him thereunto.

From: The Obedience of a Christian Man (1528) by William Tyndale (1494-1536); the Penguin Classics edition (2000), p. 19