Read the document
“I praise wedlock, I praise marriage, but it is because they give me virgins.”
Jerome, Letter 22 (to Eustochium) · §20 (NPNF translation)
Jerome's own summary of his scale of values.
Jerome, Adversus Jovinianum · book I (PL 23)
Summarized rather than quoted: the treatise defends virginity's superiority so hard that friends withdrew it from circulation; second marriages are treated as barely tolerable, and the patriarchs' households as an embarrassment to be explained.
Put it in context
Jovinian had argued that married and virgin believers stand equal in honor. Jerome's answer was so severe that his own allies thought it disparaged marriage outright.
This ascetic climate is part of the setting in which Western marriage commentary developed. Jerome also produced the Latin Bible through which the West would read Exodus 21:10, although the document cannot tell us whether his ascetic commitments caused any particular translation choice.
What is disputed
Whether Jerome's ascetic commitments shaped his rendering of particular passages is an inference about motive, and this site does not assert it. What can be shown is what he translated and what the Latin West inherited from it.
How I read this record
This is my conclusion from the source, not part of the quotation.
Jerome's work shows how strongly the ideal of virginity shaped influential Western reflection on marriage. That background helps explain the questions later commentators asked, while leaving the meaning of any biblical passage to be tested on its own.
Open the sources
- Letter 22 at New Advent ↗ · Section 20 for the sentence above.
- Adversus Jovinianum at New Advent ↗ · Book I; judge the register yourself.