Monasticism has attracted many mature men and women who are rightly credited with great spiritual and humanitarian achievements, both in Europe and the East. But many Christians, living monastic lives in this wicked world, have failed to achieve such physical and spiritual maturity. Sexuality runs wild and distorts them. Fearful and jealous of sex, they persecute the filthy woman, the lazy mob, all sinful mankind. To them the 'worldly-wanton' Jew embodies and magnifies every sexual impulse, in the same way that the Devil was depicted in the Middle Ages as a Jew, and as the father of all Jews with oversized genitals. If Christians of the male sex happen to be intellectuals as monks, their sharp intelligence tends to combine with their undeveloped, repressed and brutalized sexuality to produce a harsh and bitter enemy to those devilish adversaries - women and Jews.
St. Jerome appears to us the archetype of such a neurotic, monastic intellectual. Modern monks who realize the potential dangers know that immature, undisciplined sexuality can lead to murder and suicide. For this reason, a study of St. Jerome's sexual problems by a doctor, Charles-Henri Nodet, was incorporated by French Carmelites in their Études Carmélitaines (1952).
There is a close link between St. Jerome's savage condemnation of the Female sex and His denigration of the Jew. St. Jerome knew from experience what the wealthy, licentious women of the Roman aristocracy were like, and he may well have based his portrayal of sexy women on them. Like many other neurotics, he made a distinction between love and sexual lust. Love was divine, virginal, manly, asexual. Sexual lust was obscene, fit for pigs and dogs, rather than human beings. In marriage a woman should become as a man, practice continence and serve Christ - but only after the children were born. Why have children, in any case? Childbirth was a dirty, strenuous affair and brought nothing but worries. Even before the advent of Christianity, a wave of hatred of sex swept the last days of the Ancient World. St. Jerome took it up and intensified it. The Ancient World foundered on a low birth-rate.
To St. Jerome marriage was the Old Testament, the Law. It was 'carnal' and thus stood condemned. Virginity, however, was the Gospel To be Christian meant to be or to become virgin - as a widow or a man to renounce sinful life. Adam and Eve had a sexual relationship only after the Fall. Marriage and sex were dominant from the Fall to Salvation through Christ. Christ was man living without sex.
Rebirth in Christ conferred 'virginity'. Time and again St. Jerome invokes St. Paul in his attacks on sex, sensuality and women.
St. Jerome displays the colossal egotism of the bachelor who refuses to have anything to do with the 'filth' that is woman. His invective betrays the fear of the neurotic who had never been able to follow his own sexual nature to maturity. Often he compares marriage with Sodom. A husband could love his wife only if he abstained from all sexual intercourse with her. Fear of sex induced St. Jerome to speak out even against bathing.
St. Jerome gave vent to his pent-up aggressiveness, the evil fruit of his warped sensuality - and also supplied a model for the next fifteen hundred years - in furious attacks on all and everything he considered his enemies: camels, dogs, pigs, forgers, madmen, scorpions, hydras, wild boars, sows - such was the vocabulary Jerome applied to his dear neighbours.
In such surroundings there was no place for Jews. He was now and for ever more the 'carnal', 'lewd' and 'materialistic' Jew. This is well worth noting. Long before the Jew was condemned for his business acumen and denounced as a devilish capitalist, he had been unmasked theologically as a materialist, a child of the wicked carnal world and the product of filthy sexual lust.
Translator Extraordinaire : Jerome and his Vulgate
Modernity's huge debt to the monks and translators
The New Martyrs
Friedrich Heer
Gottes erste Liebe [1967], translated by Geoffrey Skelton as God's First Love: Christians and Jews over two thousand years, 1970. Pages quoted : 38-39.
Heer's Dedication. "This book, by an Austrian Catholic, is dedicated to the Jewish, Christian and non-Christian victims of the Austrian Catholic, Adolf Hitler."
