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| To Pope Damasus.
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Letter XVIII. To Pope Damasus.
This (written from Constantinople in a.d. 381) is the earliest of Jerome’s expository
letters. In it he explains at length the vision recorded in the sixth
chapter of Isaiah, and enlarges upon its mystical meaning. “Some
of my predecessors,” he writes, “make ‘the Lord
sitting upon a throne’ God the Father, and suppose the seraphim
to represent the Son and the Holy Spirit. I do not agree with them, for
John expressly tells us326
that it was
Christ and not the Father whom the prophet saw.” And again,
“The word seraphim means either ‘glow’ or
‘beginning of speech,’ and the two seraphim thus stand for
the Old and New Testaments.327
| 327 Jerome greatly
prides himself on this explanation, and frequently reverts to it. | ‘Did not
our heart burn within us,’ said the disciples, ‘while he
opened to us the Scriptures?’328
Moreover,
the Old Testament is written in Hebrew, and this unquestionably was
man’s original language.” Jerome then speaks of the unity
of the sacred books. “Whatever,” he asserts, “we read
in the Old Testament we find also in the Gospel; and what we read in
the Gospel is deduced from the Old Testament.329
| 329 Cf.
Augustine’s dictum: “The New Testament is latent in the
Old; the Old Testament is patent in the New.” |
There is no discord between them, no disagreement. In both Testaments
the Trinity is preached.”
The letter is noticeable for the evidence it affords of
the thoroughness of Jerome’s studies. Not only does he cite the
several Greek versions of Isaiah in support of his argument, but he
also reverts to the Hebrew original. So far as the West was concerned
he may be said to have discovered this anew. Even educated men like
Augustine had ceased to look beyond the LXX., and were more or less
aghast at the boldness with which Jerome rejected its time-honored but
inaccurate renderings.330
| 330 See Augustine’s
letters to Jerome, passim. |
The letter also shows that independence of judgment
which always marked Jerome’s work. At the time when he wrote it
he was much under the sway of Origen. But great as was his admiration
for the master, he was not afraid to discard his exegesis when, as in
the case of the seraphim, he believed it to be erroneous.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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