#st jerome

12. Jusepe de Ribera: Saint Jerome and the Angel, 1626

262 x 164 cm.

Perhaps the most famous of all the letters. In it Jerome lays down at great length the motives which ought to actuate those who devote themselves to a life of virginity and the rules by which they ought to regulate their daily conduct. Thirty years later Jerome wrote a similar letter to Demetrias (CXXX.). Written at Rome 384 A.D.

1.Hear, O daughter, and consider, and incline your ear; forget also your own people and your father's house, and the king shall desire your beauty. (...) It is not enough for you to leave your own land unless you forget your people and your father's house; unless you scorn the flesh and cling to the bridegroom in a close embrace. Look not behind you, he says, neither stay thou in all the plain; escape to the mountain lest you be consumed. Genesis 19:17. (...) He that commits sin is of the devil. 1 John 3:8 (...) But you will say to me, I have left the home of my childhood; I have forgotten my father, I am born anew in Christ. What reward do I receive for this ? The context shows : The king shall desire your beauty.

2. My purpose is to show you that you are fleeing from Sodom and should take warning by Lot's wife. Genesis 19:26. There is no flattery, I can tell you, in these pages. A flatterer's words are fair, but for all that he is an enemy. You need expect no rhetorical flourishes setting you among the angels, and while they extol virginity as blessed, putting the world at your feet.

3. Let us fear lest in us also the prophecy be fulfilled, Good virgins shall faint. Amos 8:13 Notice that it is good virgins who are spoken of, for there are bad ones as well. Whosoever looks on a woman, the Lord says, to lust after her has committed adultery with her already in his heart. Matthew 5:28 So that virginity may be lost even by a thought. Such are evil virgins, virgins in the flesh, not in the spirit; foolish virgins, who, having no oil, are shut out by the Bridegroom.

'4. When lust tickles the sense and the soft fire of sensual pleasure sheds over us its pleasing glow, let us immediately break forth and cry : The Lord is on my side : I will not fear what the flesh can do unto me. When the inner man shows signs for a time of wavering between vice and virtue, say : Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me ? Hope thou in God, for I shall yet praise Him who is the health of my countenance and my God. You must never let suggestions of evil grow on you, or a babel of disorder wind strength in your breast. Slay the enemy while he is small; and, that you may not have a crop of tares, nip the evil in the bud.

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10. Care must be taken, thus, that abstinence may bring back to Paradise those whose satiety once drove out.

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15. The fruit which is a hundredfold and that which is sixtyfold both spring from one seed, and that seed is chastity. Matthew 13:8.

16. Do not court the company of married ladies or visit the houses of the high-born. Do not look too often at the life which you despised to become a virgin. Women of the world, you know, plume themselves because their husbands are on the bench or in other high positions. And the wife of the emperor always has an eager throng of visitors at her door. Why do you, then, wrong your husband ? Why do you, God's bride, hasten to visit the wife of a mere man ? Learn in this respect a holy pride; know that you are better than them. And not only must you avoid intercourse with those who are puffed up by their husbands' honors, who are hedged in with troops of eunuchs, and who wear robes inwrought with threads of gold. You must also shun those who are widows from necessity and not from choice.

--> Side Note : notice how St Jerome sides with "blackpilled" individuals saying that virgin women are indeed superior to wives / women who sleep with men ? Lol. He was a real one. This is also a response to all the women saying that there is no difference between a woman sleeping with a man and a woman who has never done the deed nor ever wants to. "Losing your virginity" is far from being an archaic concept or pseudoscience. There are physiological (losing your hymen, bleeding, taking contraceptives killing your body) and psychological consequences (becoming an hardcore handmaiden, semen chemical warfare, increased submissiveness) no one can deny.

18. Yet, should we not weep and groan when the serpent invites us, as he invited our first parents, to eat forbidden fruit, and when after expelling us from the paradise of virginity he desires to clothe us with mantles of skins such as that which Elijah, on his return to paradise, left behind him on earth ? 2 Kings 2:13 Say to yourself : What have I to do with the pleasures of sense that so soon come to an end ? What have I to do with the song of the sirens so sweet and so fatal to those who hear it ? I would not have you subject to that sentence whereby condemnation has been passed upon mankind. When God says to Eve, In pain and in sorrow you shall bring forth children, say to yourself, That is a law for a married woman, not for me. And when He continues, Your desire shall be to your husband, Genesis 3:16 say again : Let her desire be to her husband who has not Christ for her spouse. And when, last of all, He says, You shall surely die, Genesis 2:17 once more, say, Marriage indeed must end in death; but the life on which I have resolved is independent of sex. Let those who are wives keep the place and the time that properly belong to them. For me, virginity is consecrated in the persons of Mary and of Christ.

--> I also interpret this like a blackpilled individual would : married women / lustful women / OSA women are condemned to be and feel "opressed" for eternity. Once you shun your innocence and autonomy to prostitute yourself for a man / husband, you will feel inferior to him and consider yourself to be opressed. That is when you will feel the need to become a "feminist" in order to reduce your inferiority complex while continuing being defiled by your partner. It was true 2000 years ago and it still holds true to this very day. For instance, I have never felt oppressed in my life yet I always come across feminists telling me that I supposedly am... And I have never dealt with a man in a sexual or "romantic" context... So there is obviously a link between me never having felt oppressed by men and also preserving my dignity / not sexually desiring them...

19. In paradise Eve was a virgin, and it was only after the coats of skins that she began her married life. Now paradise is your home too. Keep therefore your birthright and say : Return unto your rest, O my soul. To show that virginity is natural while wedlock only follows guilt, what is born of wedlock is virgin flesh, and it gives back in fruit what in root it has lost. There shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a flower shall grow out of his roots. The rod is the mother of the Lord — simple, pure, unsullied; drawing no germ of life from without but fruitful in singleness like God Himself. The flower of the rod is Christ, who says of Himself: I am the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valleys. Song of Songs 2:1 In another place He is foretold to be a stone cut out of the mountain without hands, Daniel 2:45 a figure by which the prophet signifies that He is to be born a virgin of a virgin.

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23. Be then like Mary; prefer the food of the soul to that of the body. Leave it to your sisters to run to and fro and to seek how they may fitly welcome Christ. But do you, having once for all cast away the burden of the world, sit at the Lord's feet and say: I have found him whom my soul loves; I will hold him, I will not let him go. Song of Songs 3:4 And He will answer: My dove, my undefiled is but one; she is the only one of her mother, she is the choice one of her that bare her. Song of Songs 6:9.

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--> To conclude, lust free individuals are free beings who cannot be mentally oppressed while lustful beings are meant to be the bottom of society, being treated like the animals they are (providing children for the elite, destroying their health with countless STIs, being mentally tortured by their lust, sinking deeper into Hell because of their unstoppable increasing depravity, not knowing what True Love is etc...). This letter can also be linked to the previous post I made stating that Saints always recommanded being Celibate / Virgin as one of the primordial ways to reach God.

(via Saint of the Day – 28 August – St Eustochium (c368-c419) Virgin)

Saint of the Day – 28 August – St Eustochium (c368-c419) Virgin, daughter of St Paula a noble matron of Rome. Guided by the teachings of St Jerome, Eustochium practiced asceticism and committed her life to perpetual virginity. Also known as – Julia Eustochium