Jerome of Stridon was brilliant, ambitious, and deeply conflicted. Born around 347 AD to a wealthy Christian family in Dalmatia, he received the finest classical education Rome could offer. He devoured Cicero, Plato, and Virgil with passion. But he also knew the Scriptures—and the tension between his two loves would come to a crisis in the Syrian desert.
Conflicted in the Desert
After years of wandering between Rome, Trier, and Aquileia, Jerome retreated to the desert near Antioch around 374 AD. There, among the hermits and ascetics, he hoped to discipline his restless soul. But even in the wilderness, he could not escape his books. He fasted during the day but feasted on classical literature at night, finding the rough simplicity of Scripture distasteful compared to Cicero's elegant prose.
Then came the dream that shattered everything.
The Dream Vision That Changed Everything
During a severe illness that brought him to the brink of death, Jerome experienced a vision that would haunt him for the rest of his life. He found himself dragged before the judgment seat of Christ. When asked his condition, Jerome answered confidently: "I am a Christian."
But the Judge replied: "You lie. You are a follower of Cicero, not of Christ. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."
Jerome was ordered to be flogged. As the blows fell upon him, he cried out for mercy: "Have pity on me, O Lord, have pity on me!" Those standing by interceded for him, asking the Judge to give the young man time to repent of his error. Jerome, desperate, began to swear an oath: "Lord, if ever again I possess worldly books, or if ever again I read such, I have denied You."
He awoke from his fever with his shoulders bruised and swollen from the beating he had received in his vision. "This was no mere sleep or idle dream," he later wrote. "I call as witness the tribunal before which I lay, and the terrible judgment which I feared."
A Scholar Transformed
From that moment, Jerome devoted himself entirely to sacred learning. He mastered Hebrew—almost unheard of for a Western scholar—and spent the next three decades producing the Vulgate, the Latin translation of the Bible that would shape Western Christianity for over a thousand years.
The man who once preferred Cicero to Scripture became the Church's greatest biblical scholar, never forgetting the night when Christ Himself demanded his heart's undivided allegiance.
