I have just finished re-reading the late J. N. D. Kelly’s wonderfully readable biography of Jerome and it made me a bit sad. St. Jerome was, of course, the greatest Christian scholar of his day and he deserves immense credit for soldiering ahead with his translation of the Old Testament from the Hebrew when he knew that he would get all kinds of grief for it. But for all his scholarship and brilliance he was hard to like—at least as he survives in history books. He was famously abusive in his literary opposition to those he considered his foes and quick to take offense, which combines to make a pretty toxic cocktail. But what made me the most sad was his ferocious opposition to sex.