SOURCE: "O Tempora! O Mores!" in St. Jerome as a Satirist: A Study in Christian Latin Thought and Letters, Cornell University Press, 1964, pp. 20-64.

In the following excerpt, Wiesen discusses Jerome's writings as commentaries on the state of his contemporaries. According to Wiesen, "St. Jerome's sense of the decline of civilization and his disgust with the vices of 'the world' form an important theme in all categories of his writings, from the letters written in the desert of Chalcis when he was a young man to his late exegetical and homiletic works. "

It is a commonplace for satirists to castigate the age in which they live, to compare contemporary society unfavorably with the past, and to declare that the vices which they lampoon are peculiar to their own time. In his first satire Juvenal expatiates on the question, Et quando uberior vitiorum copia?¹ The satirist goes as far...