The Pastoral-Performative Function of Scripture in Jerome's Consolation Letters

In this paper, I will examine the pastoral-performative function of Scripture in St. Jerome’s consolation letters, considering how Jerome deploys Biblical texts to assuage his recipients’ grief. In particular, I ask how the function of these texts exceeds their semantic meaning as sources for theological information about death and grief. Put simply, how does Scripture itself, not the meaning which Jerome or his recipients extract from it, serve to console? How do these texts, and the process of reading them, function socially as a means for Jerome to provide pastoral support to grieving people?

As a prominent exegete, theologian, and spiritual leader, both Jerome’s letters and his use of Scripture have received considerable scholarly attention. Most commonly, historical approaches mine the letters for evidence of Jerome and his correspondents’ life and thought, while Latinists investigate his style and aesthetics. In The Letters of Jerome: Asceticism, Biblical Exegesis, and the Construction of Christian Authority in Late Antiquity (2009), Andrew Cain takes a different approach. The book examines “Jerome's idealized self‐presentation across the whole range of his extant epistolary corpus,” asking how he uses letters to construct and propagate the image of himself as a spiritual leader worth heeding. Jerome’s Biblical exegesis is key, since this was an area in which he claimed expertise.

While Cain attends to the social dimension and purpose of Jerome’s writing, he focuses neither on consolation letters in particular nor on how Scripture itself functions in the correspondence. For Cain, Jerome quotes and discusses the Bible in order to demonstrate his Biblical knowledge. Whether this use of Scripture might have effects on his recipients beyond impressing them with Jerome’s brilliance is left unexamined.

Works which deal specifically with consolation letters, like Cain’s Jerome’s Epitaph on Paula: A Commentary (2013) or J.H.D. Scourfield’s Consoling Heliodorus: A Commentary on Jerome, Letter 60 (1993), consider Scripture primarily for the information Jerome draws from it. Certainly, Jerome quotes Biblical stories in order to make arguments about death and grief. Semantic meaning matters. But these treatments stop short of asking if Scripture functions as more than a source of theological conclusions. Understandably focused on Jerome himself, they do not consider whether Biblical texts do more than what Jerome makes explicit.

Catherine Chin’s “Through the Glass Darkly: Jerome Inside the Book,” in The Early Christian Book (2007), rises above semantic meaning to investigate how Jerome uses Scriptural texts to invite readers into an imagined Christian landscape. In effect, sacred texts and the act of reading do not just convey information. They create an “ideal Holy Land accessible only through reading” (108), a Christian social space which readers, led by Jerome, can enter for their spiritual upbuilding. The process of reading therefore takes on an indispensable function; the goal is not to extract information from the text but to enter the world which the text creates.

While Chin’s chapter does not focus on consolation letters, her attention to the function of texts beyond their semantic meaning provides a model. If Scriptural texts can function in Jerome’s work to invite readers into an imagined space, might they perform other social functions in different contexts? If comforting a grieving friend is the goal, how might these texts function towards this goal?

To this end, my paper will focus on Letters 23 and 39, addressed, respectively, to Jerome’s close friends Marcella and Paula. Each woman had recently lost a friend, and Jerome wrote, following Late Antique convention, to commiserate, console, and dissuade them from excessive grief. Much of what he says is conventional, including stock arguments common either to his Roman culture or Christian faith.

Jerome’s use of Scripture in these letters includes support for these arguments, but this alone cannot account for the sheer quantity and detail of the Biblical material. For example, Letter 23 opens with an extremely long, meandering, and seemingly irrelevant consideration of Psalm 72, which Jerome had been discussing with Marcella when news of their friend Lea’s death reached them. Is Jerome simply being “tactless” with this “dense exegesis,” as Philip Rousseau suggests (“‘Learned Women’ and the Development of a Christian Culture in Late Antiquity,” Symbolae Osloenses 70.1, 1995, 139)?

No, because Marcella, like Jerome, was an avid Biblical scholar. I argue that Scripture here serves the social function of pastoral care by mediating the activity of Bible study. The point is not to extract information from Psalm 72 but to enjoy this shared activity, finding consolation in the doing, not the end result. Scripture itself, as the object of study, performs pastoral care by refocusing Marcella’s attention from her friend’s death to God’s Word. And it mediates Jerome’s pastoral presence as a fellow student of Scripture. In effect, the texts create a social space for Biblical study within which Marcella can escape grief.

Biblical quotations in Letter 39 function similarly. They invite Paula to ponder them, to discover what they mean for herself in her situation of grief. In this letter, Jerome works dialectically through contrasting passages to model his own response to the shared loss. These passages invite Paula to do the same and thereby to find a deeper consolation than she could get if Jerome got straight to the point and told her what the texts ‘mean.’ It is through this process of study that the texts perform a pastoral role, consoling Paula not with information alone (which Jerome could easily give) but with a hard-won, personal appropriation of their comforting power.

Late Antique consolation letters were a way to “speak words of comfort” (Dio Chrysostom, Discourses 27:9). But grief is not dispelled, nor comfort conveyed, by a clever argument. To understand Jerome’s consolations, then, we need to attend to more than the semantic information he extracts from Scriptural texts. We need to consider how they function holistically as means of pastoral care, not just persuading the intellect but comforting the heart through the shared activity of Biblical study.