Jerome’s Complaint of New Teachings Turned Back on Him

I will speak to the Master in one of his own phrases. Why, after nearly four hundred years, do you give teachings like these to the Latin people, with their peaceable and simple minds? Why do you force on unaccustomed ears new-sounding words which no one finds in the writings of the apostles? I beg you, spare the ears of the Romans; spare that faith which the apostle praised. Why do you bring out in public what Peter and Paul were unwilling to publish? Did not the Christian world exist without any of these things until, not, as you say, the time I made my translations, but the time you wrote what I have quoted, that is, until some fifteen years ago? [a]

For what is this teaching of yours, that in the world to come there will still be risings and fallings, that some will go forward and some go back? If that is true, then what you say, that in this world life is either gained or lost, is not true, unless it has some hidden meaning. I do not find that you repent of any of the doctrines these Commentaries contain.

Again, you teach that the church is to be understood as one body made up not of men only but of angels and all the powers of heaven. Commenting on the passage of the same book where the words occur, “And gave him to be head over all the church,” you say a little further down: “The church may be understood as made up not of men alone, but also of angels, and of all the powers and reasoning creatures.” Again, you say that souls, because they knew God in that former life, now know him not as one they never knew before, but as though, after forgetting him, they came to recognize him again. These are the words used in a passage of the same book: “The words he uses, ‘In the knowledge of him,’ some explain by recalling that between gnōsis and epignōsis, that is, between knowing and recognizing, there is this difference: knowing has to do with things we did not know before and have since begun to know, while recognizing has to do with things we remember afterward. Our souls, then, they say, have a kind of awareness of a former life, after they have been cast down into human bodies and have forgotten God their Father; but now we know him by revelation, according to what is written, ‘All the ends of this world will remember and turn to the Lord’; and there are many similar passages.”