Saint Jerome

Around the year 384 Jerome, then living in Rome, wrote a long letter to a young woman, Eustochium, and told her about a dream. Years earlier, gravely ill, he had seen himself dragged before the judgement seat of heaven. Asked what he was, he answered that he was a Christian. The judge called him a liar. You are a follower of Cicero, he said, and where your treasure is, there is your heart. Jerome was flogged, and swore never again to own or read worldly books. The scholar who woke from that dream went on to translate the Bible into Latin.

Guido Reni painted him around 1640, in the last years of his own life, as an old man bent over a book, at half length on a canvas less than a metre tall. The vow did not hold for ever. Years after the letter his former friend Rufinus, by then an enemy, accused him of breaking it, and Jerome answered that no one could be held to a promise made in a dream.