The Dream of St. Jerome

Ciceronianus es, non Christianus.  "You are a Ciceronian, not a Christian."

According to the story, this was the judgment St. Jerome heard when he dreamed he was before a heavenly tribunal.  How history repeats itself.

Not long ago I had a dream, whose details I cannot recall, in which I realized, by contrast with the innocence of our son, just how far I have drifted.  I am not a murderer or drug dealer, mind you, but as I said in a recent post, the many-sided oppression of contemporary American life, especially as lived out in American public schools, has affected me in ways I do not like.  I am distrustful, suspecting the worst in the world around me.  There is a hardness and an edge that was not there when I was a boy of eleven, like our son.

This morning I was listening to a reading of the Latin text of Luke 1:46-55, the Magnificat, and I paused to consider how close I am to what matters, and yet how far.  I spend my days reading and teaching Classical Latin and writing about the authors of Rome's golden era.  My life is the language of the Church, but at times it feels as if I am walking past a great cathedral, mere paces away on the sidewalk, yet miles distant.  St. Jerome's judgment could be applied to me, and I know well of what St. Augustine speaks when, in Book 1 of his Confessions, he rebukes himself for having lamented the loss of love between Dido and Aeneas in the Aeneid, while never giving thought to the loss of his own soul.

And then it was that my wife shared with me her dream.  Our Lord has blessed my wife with the gift to hear Him more clearly than I do, both awake and in her dreams.  She said she dreamed last night that we were in our kitchen and that a piece of paper was floating in the air.  She knew that Jesus was present, and when the paper landed on the table, there was a picture of Jesus that our son had drawn.  In her dream I challenged this and said it was a picture of Apollo.

It does not take Joseph in an Egyptian jail to interpret this dream.  There, in Technicolor glory, was my wife and her gift of discernment, our son in his innocence and closeness with Jesus, and me in my challenges, doubts, and Classical bravado.

We have hanging in our living room this painting by Salvador Dali, titled Corpus Hypercubus.  I have always loved it for its depiction of Jesus as Lord of all, including dimensions of space and time of which we cannot conceive.  I have also always been struck the man in the Classical garb gazing at this ineffable truth before him.  While there is much beauty in the Classical world, and I am convinced it has much to teach us, that world no less than ours is, on its own merits, separated from God.  While I continue to walk in both the modern and the Classical world, I long to do so as one who knows, deep in his flesh, that his citizenship is not here, but in heaven.