in a prepared catalog, lest, since there are many from very many cities of Italy, I perhaps pass over someone without praise; but I give thanks to one and all, and I wish for the benevolent readers to owe them much when they have read the libraries over which they preside. But I should not, without the fault of an ungrateful mind, remain silent about the most illustrious man, Marquis Scipio Maffei, a singular ornament of our fatherland. He first promoted this entire labor of mine with his own aid, and although far away and prolonging his absence long in Gaul, he continues to support it with constant favor: a new ergodioktes overseer of work/taskmaster of Jerome.

Preface

TO THIS VOLUME.

A horizontal ornamental divider with a central floral or shell-like motif and symmetrical leafy flourishes.

1. The qualities of the Epistles of St. Jerome. — In the judgment of prudent men, the Epistles of illustrious men are considered far superior to their other writings, for the main reason that the persona of the writer himself moves so closely before the eyes of the reader that we seem to embrace the man as if he were reborn and to look upon his very face. This, if it is the prerogative of anyone, is certainly the prerogative of Jerome’s Epistles, whose silent characters carry the image of his genius and virtues and represent the secret state of his mind and that fire of the breast which his living body, were it present, would not exhibit. But that dignity is far greater because the most holy doctor, having exercised the greatest offices of the Christian Republic—just as in his very youth he had assisted original: "Damasum Romanæ Urbis Episcopum in Chartis Ecclesiasticis juverat, et Orientis atque Occidentis Synodicis consultationibus respondebat (Epist. CXXIII)" Damasus, Bishop of the City of Rome, in ecclesiastical records, and responded to the synodal consultations of the East and West (Epistle 123)—was afterwards consulted as if he were a common oracle of the age on the most grave and difficult matters; and, which is the head of the matter, he was consulted by those who, whether by holiness, knowledge, or dignity, held the first place at that time even in far-distant regions. Examples are the great Augustine, whom it would be enough to name alone, from Africa; Lucinius and Exsuperius from Spain; Minervius, Alexander, Riparius, and Rusticus from Gaul; Sunnia and Fretella from the more remote Germany; Epiphanius from the East; and Theophilus from Egypt and the very Alexandrian see, to say nothing in the meantime of those from Italy and the leading men of Roman nobility, whose names are countless and often more august. Wherefore his Epistles encompass not only the learned affairs of a private man but also the most significant questions, exceptional monuments for the explanation of the Scriptures, and indeed almost the entire ecclesiastical history, dogmas, and deeds of that century, which a man desirous of learning—if he wishes to learn from the purest sources—must study diligently.

2. The confusion of the old editions in reviewing them. — Therefore, in order that this most abundant fruit may return to the reader, I have applied effort not only to those things which I set forth in the previous Preface, but also to the review of each Epistle, so that they might be disposed in the correct order according to the times. For the old editors exhibit a series of Epistles that is adapted not to the order of time, but rather to the order of subjects; and since they classify Epistles of such varied subject matter into only three classes—and not accurately at that—they labor under such a vice of perturbation in that arrangement that they often mix the laudatory with the polemical, the critical with the moral, and the familiar with the theological. The Benedictine edition, while it strives to cure this evil (may there be no envy in the word), confuses everything all the more; for it tore many Epistles, which it calls critical, from their native soil by force and transferred them elsewhere, and inserted and dispersed them throughout the entire body of Jerome’s works here and there in every volume with commentaries. If you wish to take an example of this intolerable confusion from a few letters inscribed to one and the same Damasus: the one that explains the vengeance of Cain is in the second volume after the Questions on Genesis; the one that treats the Seraphim is in the third volume after the Commentaries on Isaiah; the one that explains the word Hosanna is in the first part of the fourth volume, and they are placed under the exposition of Matthew; then others of that sort are omitted, and others are placed outside their own place, so that it is evident that the material was not arranged happily even in their own judgment. Furthermore, in all the rest, which they collected into the second part of the fourth volume, they used a fine plan when they judged each by the laws of time; yet the success was not equally happy, since the one that occurs immediately at the beginning to Rufinus suffers from a seven-year anachronism, and Innocent—who offered himself as a companion on the journey to Jerome—is said to have finished this fate, while he is addressed as alive after sixteen other intervening Epistles. When the editor tried to emend this error in the prolegomena and pull that letter to Innocent back to the year 364, he heaped it up with a new error. From there, however, he accommodated the rest of this first class to the hypothesis which he had conceived in his mind from a prejudiced opinion. Nor do the other classes sin any less, provided that earlier Epistles often follow later ones, and some are preferred or postponed by one, two, or three years—sometimes even more—against what is proper, not without great inconvenience to the reader, whom he drags sideways along with him as often as he confuses the accounts of the times with disordered calculations.

3. The necessity and method of a new order. — Wherefore, since it was not permitted to repeat the inconvenient arrangement of the ancients, nor to insist upon the often-deviating footsteps of the Benedictine Monk—although it was my wish not to depart from either of the published orders, lest the introduced change cause some trouble to scholars—I have nonetheless found a better order.