Wounded Lion
The story of St Jerome and the lion reached its canonical form in The Golden Legend. It must have circulated long before, but its textual origin is shrouded in mystery. In the medieval telling, a lion turned up at Jerome’s monastery in Bethlehem one might. The brethren were aghast, but Jerome saw that the beast needed help. Its paw was wounded, pierced by a thorn. The saint extracted it, and the lion was delighted. It ‘ran joyously throughout all the monastery and kneeled down to every brother and fawned them with his tail, like as he had demanded pardon of the trespass that he had done’. The motif has been amply reproduced in art. I recently saw this charming depiction on the Lübeck altarpiece in St Nicolaus’s church in Tallinn. St Jerome looks as crusty as by all accounts he was, yet what precision and gentleness in his surgery. The thorn has become a nail fit to run through a portcullis. The fierce lion stands before us like a cub. The lesson is clear: sometimes we are fearful of things that are in themselves innocent; at the same time, small stings can have disproportionate impact.
