Against Jovinian

About this volume

The monk, the polemicist, and the first Christian literary historian

The volume opens with the three Lives. The Life of Paul the First Hermit, written around 376 AD in the Syrian desert, gave the West a hermit older than Antony; the Life of Hilarion made a Palestinian Antony; the Life of Malchus is a short captivity tale with a moral. Beside them stand Jerome’s translations of the Rule of Pachomius and the letters of Pachomius and Theodore, made in 404 AD for the Latin monks of Egypt, and his Latin of Didymus the Blind’s On the Holy Spirit — the only form in which that book survives.

Then the quarrels. Against Helvidius (383 AD) defends the perpetual virginity of Mary; Against Jovinian (393 AD), in two books, argues virginity above marriage and fasting above feasting with a violence that embarrassed his own friends; Against Vigilantius (406 AD) defends relics, vigils, and the celibate clergy; Against John of Jerusalem and the Apology Against Rufinus are Jerome’s side of the Origenist controversy whose other side, Rufinus’s Apology, is in Volume 21; the Dialogue Against the Pelagians (415 AD) is his last major work. Theodore of Mopsuestia’s reply survives in fragments printed here.

The second half is scholarship. On Illustrious Men (392 AD) is 135 notices of Christian writers from Peter to Jerome himself, the first literary history of the church. The Book of Hebrew Names, the Sites and Names of Hebrew Places (his adaptation of Eusebius’s Onomasticon), the Hebrew Questions on Genesis, and the Commentary on Ecclesiastes show the Hebraist at work. Migne’s appendix of works printed under Jerome’s name — the Hebrew Questions on Kings and Chronicles, the Job excerpts, the Deborah commentary and the rest — is kept as printed, with its attributions flagged. As across the whole project, we translate the original works only, in fresh English, and give them away free to read.