Hello and welcome to Literature and History, Episode 98, The Life and Works of St. Jerome.

In this program we will discuss St. Jerome, who lived from roughly 347 to 420 CE.

The St. Jerome's generation had an enormous impact on the future of Christianity.

Their parents had lived through the conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine in 312,

the Edict of Milan in 313, which had legalized Christianity in the Empire, and they had attended

the Council of Nicaea in 325, which had stabilized some of Christianity's core doctrines.

As St. Jerome and his contemporaries themselves saw in the Edict of Thessalonica in 380,

which made Nicene Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, and they took

advantage of the opportunities that this all-important Edict offered.

Although the turn from the 300s to the 400s was a disastrous time for the Roman Empire,

it was a remarkable time for Christianity.

St. Jerome not only saw some of the first Roman emperors and statesmen practicing the new religion.

Jerome also witnessed first hand Christianity flowering throughout the Empire in some new,

and very different places and ways.

One of these ways was the monastic movement.

Monasticism and religious desert hermits or aromites had become sources of intense interest

to Christians by the middle of the 300s.

When the most famous of all of these desert hermits died in about 356, a distinguished

bishop wrote a biography about him, and the book in question, Athanasius' Life of Antony,

became widely popular.

Jerome discovered this biography at a formative time during his intellectual development,

and as a result, Jerome himself wrote three different biographies of other desert hermits.

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