Commentary on Galatians

Book Three (Galatians 5.7–6.18)

203 BOOK THREE (GALATIANS 5.7–6.18) Preface HAVE FORGED this third installment of the commentary, Paula and Eustochium, bearing in mind my own limitations and recognizing that the little sputtering stream of my meager talent barely makes a sound. Nowadays in churches the purity and simplicity of the Apostle’s words are done away with, and other qualities are in demand. We congregate as if we were in the Athenaeum or in lecture halls and we long for the thundering applause of bystanders and a speech that, like a dolled-up harlot strolling in the streets, is decorated in the deceit of rhetorical artifice and aims to win the favor of the masses rather than to instruct them,1 soothing the ears of the listeners like a sweet-sounding psaltery and flute.2 Truly applicable to our times is that passage from the prophet Ezekiel in which the Lord says to him, “You have become to them like sound of the lute that is well1 . In this paragraph Jerome borrows some of his concepts and Latin phrases from Cyprian’s Ep. ad Don. 2 (ANF 5:275): “The poor mediocrity of my shallow understanding produces a very limited harvest, and enriches the soil with no fruitful deposits. . . . In courts of justice, in the public assembly, in political debate, a copious eloquence may be the glory of a voluble ambition; but in speaking of the Lord God, a chaste simplicity of expression strives for the conviction of faith rather with the substance, than with the powers, of eloquence. Therefore accept from me things, not clever but weighty, words, not decked up to charm a popular audience with cultivated rhetoric, but simple and fitted by their unvarnished truthfulness for the proclamation of the divine mercy.” See A. Cain, REAug 55 (2009): 45–46. 2. Other patristic writers (e.g., John Chrysostom) complained about Christian congregations craving only sermons that were heavy on rhetorical fluff and light on substance. See B. Leyerle, Theatrical Shows and Ascetic Lives: John Chrysostom ’s Attack on Spiritual Marriage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 63–64 (with references to primary sources). 204 ST. JEROME made and that sings beautifully, for they hear your words but do not act on them.”3 But what should I do? Should I keep quiet? It is written, however , “You shall not appear empty-handed in the sight of the Lord your God.”4 And Isaiah laments, “Woe to me, a wretch, because I remained silent”5 (this at any rate is how it translates from the original Hebrew). Shall I speak? I could, but my reading of Hebrew , a harsh and guttural language, has ruined all the elegance of my style and the charm of my Latin prose.6 You yourselves know that it has been more than fifteen years since Cicero, Virgil , or any writer of secular literature has fallen into my hands.7 If anyone by chance should call me to question about this,8 I only vaguely recall the details of my dream.9 How far I have advanced in my unceasing study of Hebrew, I leave to others to judge; I know what I have lost in my own language.10 To add to this, I do 3. Ezek 33.32 (LXX). 4. Ex 23.15. 5. Is 6.5. 6. As I noted in the Introduction, Jerome’s claim that his Latin was ruined is a conceit meant to imply that he had an extremely advanced knowledge of Hebrew and that consequently his Hebrew philology in the Commentary can be trusted. Thus this seemingly benign statement is actually a subtle but potent affirmation of his authority as a Biblical scholar. 7. An allusion to Jerome’s famous Ciceronian dream-vision (told at Ep. 22.30), in which he was dragged before the throne of God and harshly rebuked for preferring Cicero and the Latin classics to the stylistically uncouth Latin Bible. In the dream he vowed to God never again to read the classics (“Lord, if I ever again possess secular books or read them, I have denied you”). Scholars disagree about exactly when and where the dream took place. Some have placed it in Trier as early as the 360s; others locate it in Antioch in the early or middle 370s. Whatever the case, if taken at face value, Jerome’s comment about it happening “more than fifteen years” ago enables us to fix the date to no later than 371. On the...