![]() A century ago, on the fifteenth centenary of his death, Benedict XV dedicated his Encyclical Letter Spiritus Paraclitus (15 September 1920) to Jerome, presenting him to the world as “doctor maximus explanandis Scripturis”. My predecessors have honoured Saint Jerome on various occasions. The Christian iconographic tradition presents him, in the company of Augustine, Ambrose and Gregory the Great, as one of the four great Doctors of the Western Church. In the East, he knew Gregory of Nazianzus, Didymus the Blind and Epiphanius of Salamis. A youthful friend of Rufinus of Aquileia, he knew Ambrose and was frequently in correspondence with Augustine. He served as a bridge between East and West. Thus, in the pursuit of knowledge that marked his entire life, he put to good use his youthful studies and Roman education, redirecting his scholarship to the greater service of God and the ecclesial community.Īs a result, Saint Jerome became one of the great figures of the ancient Church in the period known as the golden age of patristics. ![]() It gave his life a new and more decisive orientation: he was to become a servant of the word of God, in love, as it were, with the “flesh of Scripture”. That experience inspired Jerome to devote himself entirely to Christ and his word, and to strive through his translations and commentaries to make the divine writings increasingly accessible to others. Jerome had loved from his youth the limpid beauty of the Latin classics, whereas the writings of the Bible had initially struck him as uncouth and ungrammatical, too harsh for his refined literary taste. ![]() But the Judge retorted: ‘You lie! You are a Ciceronian, not a Christian’”. As he himself recalled: “Questioned about my state, I responded that I was a Christian. That dream proved to be a decisive turning point in his life, an occasion of conversion and change in outlook. He thus entrusted himself to the Lord whom he had always sought and known in the Scriptures, the same Lord whom, as a Judge, he had already encountered in a feverish dream, possibly during the Lenten season of 375. On 30 September 420, Saint Jerome died in Bethlehem, in the community that he had founded near the grotto of the Nativity. Jerome’s profound knowledge of the Scriptures, his zeal for making their teaching known, his skill as an interpreter of texts, his ardent and at times impetuous defence of Christian truth, his asceticism and harsh eremitical discipline, his expertise as a generous and sensitive spiritual guide – all these make him, sixteen centuries after his death, a figure of enduring relevance for us, the Christians of the twenty-first century. That “living and tender love” flowed, like a great river feeding countless streams, into his tireless activity as a scholar, translator and exegete. Now, on the sixteen hundredth anniversary of his death, those words taken from the opening prayer of his liturgical Memorial give us an essential insight into this outstanding figure in the Church’s history and his immense love for Christ. I want to investigate and understand the ecosystems - both natural and social that these objects exist within.Devotion to sacred Scripture, a “living and tender love” for the written word of God: this is the legacy that Saint Jerome bequeathed to the Church by his life and labours. Additionally looking at the materials or ingredients that these objects are made of - the bouquet made of flowers immersed into the water to sustain it, to the brick which is made up of this water, earth and all the nutrients they contain which then becomes a part of a home where the bouquet is first made. Brick stacks on the road from different construction sites I see when I drive, brick kilns in close proximity to my house, and bouquets made by different families for their Bathukamma celebrations make up the raw materials I will be working with as I look to document the different forms these two objects take on as they are being affected by external forces (in my case a human hand). Both involve the foraging of locally available materials, engaging local communities in their production processes and the materials have to be assembled by hand. Two items from completely different aspects of life are in my opinion approached and handled with similar gestures. My interest lies in exploring the set of rituals governing two objects I have been engaging with recently - first being locally made brick as I have been working on the renovation of my family home and the second a bouquet made of metabolic materials for the festival of Bathukamma. It is the ability to observe and to identify with another’s situation or condition and to then care for it and protect it, in the hope to provide it with what it needs to be itself Derived from the Latin word affectio based on affectus meaning “to affect or influence“, which is in turn is based on the root word facere meaning “do, make”.
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