Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Classical theories of friendship
- 3 Some problems of Christian friendship
- 4 Friendship in the lives and thought of Basil and of Gregory of Nazianzus
- 5 John Chrysostom and Olympias
- 6 Synesius of Cyrene
- 7 Ambrose of Milan – Ciceronian or Christian friendship?
- 8 St Jerome
- 9 Paulinus of Nola
- 10 Monasticism and friendship
- 11 St Augustine
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Editions and translations of primary sources
- Select bibliography
- Index
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Classical theories of friendship
- 3 Some problems of Christian friendship
- 4 Friendship in the lives and thought of Basil and of Gregory of Nazianzus
- 5 John Chrysostom and Olympias
- 6 Synesius of Cyrene
- 7 Ambrose of Milan – Ciceronian or Christian friendship?
- 8 St Jerome
- 9 Paulinus of Nola
- 10 Monasticism and friendship
- 11 St Augustine
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Editions and translations of primary sources
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
He and I were together right from our tender infancy until we grew up: we were suckled by the same nurses and lovingly carried in the same arms. And when we had completed our studies at Rome, we shared lodgings and ate our food together on the semi-barbarous banks of the Rhine.
Love cannot be bought, affection is priceless and friendship which can cease cannot have been genuine.
These extracts from one of Jerome's early letters show that friendship was something of which he had intense experience and which he valued highly in his youth; yet this is a view of him which is easily obscured by his later experiences and writings, offering a portrait of this brilliant but difficult man as one suspicious, sensitive and closed to the charms of friendship, a man for whom the saying ‘Loyalty is rare among men’ became as it were a personal motto. Throughout his life, it would seem, Jerome was able to engage in close relationships only with people who were willing to show him due respect and who would not contradict him. Woe betide anyone who criticised Jerome or refused to fit in with his way of thinking! But as a young man, at home in Stridon (in what is probably now Croatia), while studying at Rome, and then at Trier (one of the new cities of imperial residence) and Aquileia, Jerome was surrounded by a number of close friends who apparently shared his interests and his way of life, men such as Bonosus (the friend referred to in the first quotation above), Heliodorus, Rufinus, Chromatius and the aristocratic Pammachius.
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- Christian Friendship in the Fourth Century , pp. 129 - 145Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1992
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