Jerome’s Dream and His Oath Against Pagan Books

After this digression, so to speak, I will now return to the point I had set out to make, for the sake of which I had to mention this treatise. I will show that he regards perjury as lawful, so much so that he does not care if it is detected in his writings. In this same treatise he warns the reader that it is wrong to study secular literature, and says, “What has Horace to do with the Psalter, or Virgil with the Gospels, or Cicero with Saint Paul? Will not your brother be offended if he sees you sitting at table in that idol’s temple?” Then, after more of the same kind, in which he declares that a Christian must have nothing to do with the study of secular literature, he tells of a revelation made to him by God on the subject, full of fearful threats. He reports that after he had renounced the world and turned to God, he was still held in a tight grip by his love of secular books, and found it hard to put away his longing for them. Then he says: [a]

“Suddenly I was caught up in the spirit and dragged before the judgment seat of the Judge. Here the light was so bright, and those who stood around were so radiant, that I threw myself on the ground and did not dare to look up. When I was asked who and what I was, I replied, ‘I am a Christian.’ But he who presided said, ‘You are lying. You are a follower of Cicero, not of Christ. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.’ “At once I fell silent, and amid the strokes of the lash, for he had ordered me to be flogged, I was tortured still more severely by the fire of conscience, as I turned over in my mind the verse, ‘In the grave, who will give you thanks?’ Yet even so I began to cry out and to lament, saying, ‘Have mercy on me, O Lord; have mercy on me.’ Amid the sound of the lashes this cry still made itself heard. “At last the bystanders fell at the knees of him who presided and begged him to have pity on my youth and to give me time to repent of my error. He could still, they urged, put me to torture if I ever read the works of the pagans again. Under the stress of that terrible moment I would have been ready to make even larger promises than these. “So I took an oath and called on his name, saying, ‘Lord, if ever again I own worldly books, or if ever again I read them, I have denied you.’ When I had taken this oath I was dismissed, and I returned to the world above.”