Jerome and Paula
The women who funded the scholar
Jerome's translation work was funded by a network of wealthy Roman women who had become serious students of the Bible and serious practitioners of the ascetic life — and who found in Jerome a teacher as demanding as they were serious.
The most important of these is Paula, a wealthy Roman widow of senatorial rank who becomes Jerome's student, supporter, and closest collaborator. She and her daughter Eustochium follow him to Bethlehem after he leaves Rome under a cloud of controversy — his unguarded letters about the Roman clergy had made too many enemies.
In Bethlehem, Paula funds the construction of Jerome's monastery and a parallel monastery for women. She runs the women's community. She manages the finances. She learns Hebrew to read the Old Testament in its original language — an extraordinary undertaking for a Roman noblewoman in the fourth century.
Jerome dedicates several of his commentaries to her. He writes in one dedication that she had mastered the original languages better than he expected, and that her corrections of his translation work had been genuinely useful.
When Paula dies in 404 AD — exhausted, impoverished by her extraordinary generosity, at peace — Jerome is unable to attend her burial because he is too overwhelmed with grief. He writes a long letter of consolation to Eustochium that is also a biography of her mother, one of the most moving portraits of a laywoman in early Christian literature.
He writes: Paula has left me poor, but she has made the poor rich.
“She has left me poor, but she has made the poor rich.”
— Jerome, Epitaph on Paula, c. 404 AD
“and Joanna, the wife of Chuzas, Herod's steward, Susanna; and many others; who ministered to them from their possessions.”
Paula made Jerome's work possible. Without her funding, her management, her intellectual collaboration, the Vulgate Bible may never have been completed.
She is not in the footnotes of most church histories. Jerome is. But Jerome knew better — he said she made the poor rich, and he meant it about more than money.
The history of the church is full of Paulas: the people who made the visible work possible through the invisible work of funding, organizing, managing, and sustaining. They are not in the footnotes because no one thought to write them in.
Whose invisible work is sustaining the visible work you are doing or benefiting from? Have you named them? Have you thanked them?