He "stands at the close of the old Græco-Roman civilisation: the last Roman poet of any repute, Claudian, and the last Roman historian, Ammianus Marcellinus, died before him. [[St. Augustine|Augustin]] survived him, but the other great Fathers, both in the East and in the West, had passed away before him."<ref>https://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf206.iv.V.html</ref>
He is a [[Doctor of the Church]], one of only 33 to be so honored in [[Roman Catholicism|Catholicism]].
His writing of a single Latin translation of the [[Bible]], directly from the [[Hebrew]] [[Old Testament]] and the [[Greek]] [[New Testament]], was enormously beneficial to the development of the early [[Christian]] church and to other writers, including [[St. Augustine]] who gradually made use of it.