SOURCE: "Jerome's Attitude: Principles and Practice" in Latin Fathers and the Classics: A Study on the Apologists, Jerome, and Other Christian Writers, Elanders Boktryckeri Aktiebolag, 1958, pp. 309-28.

In the following excerpt, Hagendahl discusses Jerome's ambivalent attitude toward his predecessors, concluding that he struggled with an apparent conflict between his Christian asceticism and the cultural legacy of pagan literature.

… Jerome's attitude towards the cultural legacy left by the ancients cannot be defined in a plain and unequivocal formula. It is inconsequent, inconsistent, reflecting opposite tendencies, fluctuating like the currents of the tide.

On the one hand it shows the same negative rigorousness which, since Paul, had distinguished the old church, and which found a sonorous expression in Tertullian:' Quid ergo Athenis et Hierosolymis? quid Academiae et ecclesiae? quid haereticis et Christianis? This renunciation is echoed in Jerome's equally famous antithesis: Quid facit cum psalterio Horatius? cum evangeliis Maro...