History of Western Philosophy - Bertrand Russell [195]
It is clear that, in the Saint's opinion, the destruction of synagogues should not be punished in any way. This is an example of the manner in which, as soon as it acquired power, the Church began to stimulate anti-Semitism.
The next conflict between Emperor and Saint was more honourable to the latter. In A.D. 390, when Theodosius was in Milan, a mob in Thessalonica murdered the captain of the garrison. Theodosius, on receiving the news, was seized with ungovernable fury, and ordered an abominable revenge. When the people were assembled in the circus, the soldiers fell upon them, and massacred at least seven thousand of them in an indiscriminate slaughter. Hereupon Ambrose, who had endeavoured in advance to restrain the Emperor, but in vain, wrote him a letter full of splendid courage, on a purely moral issue, involving, for once, no question of theology or the power of the Church:
'There was that done in the city of the Thessalonians of which no similar record exists, which I was not able to prevent happening; which, indeed, I had before said would be most atrocious when I so often petitioned against it.'
David repeatedly sinned, and confessed his sin with penitence.4 Will Theodosius do likewise? Ambrose decides that 'I dare not offer the sacrifice if you intend to be present. Is that which is not allowed after shedding the blood of one innocent person, allowed after shedding the blood of many? I do not think so.'
The Emperor repented, and, divested of the purple, did public penance in the cathedral of Milan. From that time until his death in 395, he had no friction with Ambrose.
Ambrose, while he was eminent as a statesman, was, in other respects, merely typical of his age. He wrote, like other ecclesiastical authors, a treatise in praise of virginity, and another deprecating the remarriage of widows. When he had decided on the site for his new cathedral, two skeletons (revealed in a vision, it was said) were conveniently discovered on the spot, were found to work miracles, and were declared by him to be those of two martyrs. Other miracles are related in his letters, with all the credulity characteristic of his times. He was inferior to Jerome as a scholar, and to Augustine as a philosopher. But as a statesman, who skilfully and courageously consolidated the power of the Church, he stands out as a man of the first rank.
Jerome is chiefly notable as the translator who produced the Vulgate, which remains to this day the official Catholic version of the Bible. Until his day the Western Church relied, as regards the Old Testament, chiefly on translations from the Septuagint, which, in important ways, differed from the Hebrew original. Christians, as we have seen, were given to maintaining that the Jews, since the rise of Christianity, had falsified the Hebrew text where it seemed to predict the Messiah. This was a view which sound scholarship showed to be untenable, and which Jerome firmly rejected. He accepted the help of rabbis, given secretly for fear of the Jews. In defending himself against Christian criticism he said: 'Let him who would challenge aught in this translation ask the Jews.' Because of his acceptance of the Hebrew text in the form which the Jews regarded as correct, his version had, at first, a largely hostile reception; but it won its way, partly because St Augustine on the whole supported it. It was a great achievement, involving considerable textual criticism.
Jerome was born in 345—five years after Ambrose—not far from Aquileia, at a town called Stridon, which was destroyed by the Goths in 377. His family were well-to-do, but not rich. In 363 he went to Rome, where he studied rhetoric and sinned. After travelling in Gaul, he settled in Aquileia,
and became an ascetic. The next five years he spent as a hermit in the Syrian wilderness. 'His life while in the desert was one of