MARCELLA, PAULA, AND THE FIRST CONVENT
· Woman’s Need of a Faith ·
· Rome in its Decadence ·
· The Reaction of Roman Women ·
· Marcella · The Church of the Household ·
· Asella · Fabiola · Paula ·
· Eustochium · Blæsilla · St. Jerome · Melania ·
· The Convent at Bethlehem ·
· Translation of the Latin Vulgate ·
· Hebrew Studies · Death of Paula ·
· Tragical Fate of Marcella ·
· Revolution in Roman Society ·
· Spread of Convents · Christian Ideals ·
· Value of Able Women in the Early Church ·
· St. Chrysostom · Olympias ·
· Intellectual Decline of Women in the Dark Ages ·
· Influence of the Renaissance ·
· Condition Tempered by Chivalry ·
· Elevated by the Renaissance ·
“The majority of men, and especially of women, whose imagination is double, cannot live without a faith,” said the Abbé Galiani, “and those who can, sustain the effort only in the greatest force and youth of the soul.” How far this may be true it is needless to discuss here, but it is certain enough that women have been the strongest agents in the religious movements of the world. A tender heart may go with a skeptical mind, but the fine type of womanhood, in which reason is tempered with love and imagination, inevitably turns to some faith for support in seasons of moral decadence as in moments of sorrow and despair. This has never had a more striking illustration than in the reaction of a large class of Roman women from the vices, follies, and debasing pleasures of a civilization falling into ruin, toward an extreme asceticism. At this moment in its history the golden age of Rome was long past, and the world was to wait more than a thousand years for another brilliant flowering of the human intellect on the same soil. But glory of a different sort set its seal upon the women of the darkening ages. To the enthusiasms of patriotism and passion, culture and ambition, succeeded the enthusiasms of religion.
In the fourth century the images of the pagan gods, white and silent on their stone pedestals, still kept guard over the city. Their temples were comparatively fresh, but the gods themselves were dead. The seventy thousand statues that made Rome a forest of marbles in the days of its glory had not lost their majesty, their beauty, or their grace; but the spirit which had made them alive had gone with their virgin purity. Pan held his flute as of old, but it was mute. Bacchus still wore his vine-leaves and his air of rollicking mirth, but the bands of roistering men who had once paid him homage no longer cared for a god to preside over their plain worship of the senses. Venus had taken off her divine halo and gone back to the foam of the sea whence she came, leaving only the smiling face of a beautiful woman. The Muses had ceased to dance to the lyre of Apollo, and the god of light was asleep like the rest. Men and women had thrown aside the thin veil of idealism with which they had once invested their sins, and Rome was become a sink of iniquity without even the leaven of the Hellenic imagination. Between a life of the senses and a life of the intellect, it gravitated from a wild orgy to a passionless philosophy that held its own pulse and counted its own heart-beats as it drifted curiously and mockingly into the unknown.
But women do not carry easily the burden of a cold skepticism, and philosophy failed to satisfy them. When the age became hopelessly corrupt, and men scoffed at morals, sending one another to death for inconvenient virtues, they had been swept along with the current, and many plunged into a life of the senses with the recklessness of an ardent, virile temperament. But there was still a large number of intelligent matrons who preserved the waning traditions of an educated womanhood, and these revolted at the hopeless vacuum of a life devoted to intrigue and the tiresome mysteries of the toilet. The jewels, silks, and embroidered gauzes of fabulous cost had no more charm for them. Nor did they care to please the curled and perfumed sybarites who gambled or discussed the last bit of scandal in their pillared halls, fanned by slaves, and crying out at the crumple of a rose-leaf. The Roman women had been distinguished for the stronger qualities of character. Their bounding energies had been shown in deeds of heroism. They had to a large degree the ardors of the imagination. These traits, together with the moral sense that lies at the base of the feminine nature, though often submerged for a time, vindicated themselves in the passionate devotion with which so many turned from a beautiful but bad world toward things of the spirit.
They had already been captivated in numbers by the mystic cults of the Orient. Out of the East, whence came the pagan gods as well as the luxury and sensualism which had sapped the moral life of Rome, came also the “still small voice” of a new faith, with unfamiliar messages of hope and consolation. It had been singing its hymns for nearly three hundred years in that great under-world, of which little note had been taken, except in periodical outbursts of persecution. In the vast network of dark passages and lighted cells which lay far from the light of the sun; beneath the shining temples and statues of the gods they were undermining; beneath the groves, and gardens, and fountains, and palaces in which vice reigned and idle voluptuaries were inventing new refinements of sin to spur their jaded senses—the disciples of a lowly faith which trampled upon all that these Epicureans loved, making a sin of pleasure and a joy of suffering, had met to offer incense at strange altars. It was women, with their natural tendency toward a personal devotion and a self-sacrifice strengthened perhaps by the forced self-effacement of centuries, who embraced with the most passionate fervor a religion that deified all that was best and most distinctive in their own natures. This religion, with its spirit of love, its trust in some other existence that would compensate a thousandfold for the sorrows of this, appealed to them irresistibly. Already it had brought peace and a martyr’s crown to multitudes of the poor and ignorant who had little to lose but their lives. It had gained, too, a firm foothold among the cultivated classes, who did not always forsake the things of the world in their acceptance of things of the spirit. But the fact that it had become a State religion had not made it a fashionable one, though its later votaries often outdid their pagan neighbors in luxury and worldliness.
One day in the later years of the fourth century, a rich, noble, educated, and able woman withdrew in weariness and disgust from the vanities and unblushing vices of Roman society, fitted up an oratory in her stately palace on the Aventine, and asked her friends to join her in the worship, duties, and sacrifices of the Christian faith. This was the germ of the Church of the Household, the Ecclesia Domestica, on which St. Jerome has thrown so bright a light—the small beginning of the vast combinations of women, in which one of the greatest religious movements of the world found its strongest instrument and support. Nothing shows more clearly the strength and moral purity of the large body of Roman womanhood than the numbers who flocked to a standard that offered no worldly attractions, and imposed, as the first of duties, self-renunciation and the denial of all pleasures of sense.
It is not likely that Marcella had any thought of the vital significance of a step that opened a new field to women, which absorbed their talents and energies for ten centuries, sometimes for good, sometimes for ill, and still holds a powerful attraction for certain temperaments. She belonged to one of the noblest families of Rome, and had led the life of the more serious of the rich patricians of her time. Her mother was the Albina who had entertained Athanasius many years before, and shown great interest in his ascetic teachings. He held up solitude and meditation as an ideal, and no doubt his words, which she must have heard discussed afterward, made a strong impression on the imagination of the thoughtful child. They came back with a new force later, when she lost her husband a few months after marriage. In spite of much criticism, she retired from a world which no longer had any attractions for her, gave away her jewels and personal adornments, put on a simple brown robe, and gave herself to religious and charitable work. At first she sought seclusion in her country villa, but she was of too active and wholesome a temperament for a life of solitary brooding and introspection. It was after the early days of her grief were passed that she opened her palace on the Aventine, and made it a center for the devotional women of Rome.
There was nothing in the life she planned to tempt her ambition. Nor did she abdicate the world and its pleasures on account of the waning of her charms. She was still in the fullness of life, young, beautiful, rich, and much sought in marriage by men of the highest rank and position. In her persistent refusal of their brilliant offers she met with great opposition from her family, who evidently preferred the ascetic life for some one outside of their own circle. But she was a woman of strong, vigorous intellect and firm character, as well as fine moral aims and religious fervor. Born to lead and not to follow, she was never the reflex of other minds. We find in all the known acts of her life the stamp of a distinct and well-poised individuality. If she started on a new path, it was through the reaction of a pure and conscientious nature from a society in which the virtues seemed dying, the need of an outlet for emotions suddenly turned upon themselves, and the going out toward humanity of the unsatisfied longing of motherhood.
To this quiet but palatial retreat on the Aventine—which tradition places not far from the present site of Sta. Sabina—many women fled from the gay world of splendor and fashion. They were mostly rich and high-born; some were widows, who consecrated a broken life to the service of God and their fellow-men; a few were devoted maidens. The oldest of the little group was Asella, a sister of Marcella, who had been drawn from childhood to an ascetic life. She dressed like a pilgrim, lived on bread and water with a little salt, slept on the bare ground, went out only to visit the graves of the martyrs, and held it a jewel in her crown that she never spoke to a man, though she evidently did not object to receiving letters from the good St. Jerome. He speaks of her as “an illustrious lady, a model of perfection,” and says that no one knew better how to combine “austerity of manner with grace of language and serious charm. No one gave more gravity to joy, more sweetness to melancholy. She rarely opened her mouth; her face spoke; her silence was eloquent. A cell was her paradise, fasting her delight. She did not see those to whom she was most tenderly attached, and was full of holy ardor.” But hardships and low diet seem to have agreed with this saintly woman, as she was well, in spite of them, through a long life, in which she won praises from good and bad alike. Lea is a dim figure at this distance, but she was spoken of as “the head of a monastery and mother of virgins,” who died early and was greatly honored for her goodness, her humility, her robe of sackcloth not too well cared for, her days of fasting, and her nights of prayer.
More noted was Fabiola, a member of the great Fabian family, who had been divorced from a vicious husband and made a second marriage which seems to have lain heavily on her tender conscience when she became a widow shortly afterward. Indeed, she went so far in her remorse as to stand in the crowd of penitents at the door of the Lateran on Easter Eve, clad in coarse sackcloth, unveiled, and weeping, with ashes on her head and hair trailing, as she prostrated herself and waited for public absolution. It is said that bishop, priests, and people were alike touched to tears at the humiliation of the young, gay, and beautiful woman, the idol of a patrician society. But her religious enthusiasm was more than a sudden outburst of feeling. This pale devotee gave her large fortune to charity, built the first Christian hospital, gathered from the streets the sick, the maimed, and the suffering, even ministering with her own hands to outcast lepers. Her charities were boundless, and extended to remote islands of the sea. St. Jerome calls her a heroine of Christianity, the admiration of unbelievers. But her intellect was clear and brilliant, and her close questionings spurred him to write of many things which would otherwise have been left in darkness. In her later days she surprised him one evening in the convent at Bethlehem, where she was visiting her friends, by reciting from memory a celebrated letter in praise of a solitary and ascetic life which he had written to Heliodorus many years earlier. It was the letter which had brought so much censure on the austere monk, as it sent great numbers of noble women and many men into the ranks of the hermits and cenobites.
This woman of talent and fashion, who left the gay world to become saint, philanthropist, nurse, and pilgrim, died shortly before the terrible days came to Rome, and its temples resounded with psalms in her honor. Young and old sang her praises. The galleries, housetops, and public places could not contain the people who flocked to her funeral. So wicked Rome, in the last days of its fading glory, paid homage to women of great virtues, great deeds, and unselfish lives.
But the most distinguished of the matrons who frequented the chapel on the Aventine was Paula, a descendant of Scipio and the Gracchi on one side, and, it was claimed, of Agamemnon on the other. The Romans did not stop at myths or probabilities in their genealogies, and her husband traced his ancestry to Æneas. But it is certain that Paula belonged to the oldest and noblest family in Rome. She had an immense fortune, and had passed her life in the fashionable circles of her time. A widow at thirty-three, with five children, and inconsolable, she suddenly laid aside the personal insignia of her rank, exchanged cloth of gold for a nun’s robe, silken couches for the bare ground, gaiety for prayers, and the costly pleasures of the sybarite for days and nights of weeping over the most trivial faults, imaginary or real. Even the stern St. Jerome begged her to limit her austerities; but she said that she must disfigure a face she had been so wicked as to paint, afflict a body which had tasted so much delight, and expiate her laughter with her tears. She dressed and lived as poorly as the lowest of her servants, and expressed a wish to be buried as a beggar. Full of a sweet and tender humanity, however, she was no less pitiful to others than severe to herself.
Of her four daughters, Eustochium, a serious girl of sixteen, sympathized most with her ascetic views and was closely associated with her life-work. She was the first patrician maiden to take the vow of perpetual virginity. But the flower of the family was her sister Blæsilla, “older in nature, but inferior in vocation,” said St. Jerome. Beautiful, gay, clever, young, and a widow after seven months of marriage, she loved things of the world and had small taste for the austerities of her mother. She found time for study, however, as she spoke Greek fluently and learned Hebrew so rapidly that she bade fair to equal Paula, who liked to sing the psalms of David in the rugged and majestic language in which they were written. But a violent fever turned her thoughts from mundane vanities to a life of asceticism. No more long days before the mirror, no more decking of her pretty little person. She put on the brown gown like the others, and devoted her brilliant youth to the same service. But so excessive were her penances, so rigorous her fastings, and so severe her austerities, that she died of them at twenty, asking God to pardon her because she could not carry out her plans of devotion and self-sacrifice. Her funeral was hardly in keeping with these plans. All the world did honor to the beautiful, accomplished woman who had forsaken a life of elegant ease for the hardships of a self-imposed poverty. They covered her coffin with cloth of gold, and the most distinguished men in Rome marched at the head of the cortège. Her untimely death brought an outburst of indignation against the mother who had encouraged a self-denial so hard and unnatural. But this mother had fainted as she followed her idolized daughter to the tomb. St. Jerome dwells upon the piety, innocence, chastity, and virtues, as well as the more brilliant qualities, of the dévote who had gone so early, but while the tears flowed down his own cheeks, he reproved Paula for permitting the mother to overshadow the religieuse. He adds a curious bit of consolation, however, for a spiritual adviser who has renounced all worldly motives and interests, when he tells her that Blæsilla will live forever in his writings, as every page will be marked with her name. This immortality he modestly thinks will compensate her for the short time she spent on earth.
These brief outlines indicate the character and position of a few of the best-known women who gathered about Marcella. Some of them lived with her; others came from time to time, or were constant attendants at the Bible readings and prayers. Saintly women, and worldly ones who were doubtless eager to flock to the little chapel in a palace that represented to them a great name, if not a living faith, had been going in and out for some years before St. Jerome came from the East at the summons of Pope Damasus, and was invited by Marcella to stay at her house, after the manner of famous divines of all ages. It is to this most interesting and learned of the early fathers that we are indebted for the blaze of light that was thrown upon the Church of the Household. It was also to this group of consecrated women that St. Jerome owed the inspiration and the intelligent criticism that led him to give the world some of the works on which his greatest fame rests. The circle that listened to his persuasive eloquence, born of a keen intellect, an ardent imagination, a passionate temperament, and an exalted faith, was not an ignorant one. Most of these ladies spoke Greek and were familiar with Greek letters. Some had learned Hebrew, which was not included among the fashionable accomplishments of the day. A few were women of brilliant ability and distinct individuality, who could not live in the world without leaving some trace of themselves. The discriminating mind of Marcella exercised itself on every new problem. “During the whole of my residence at Rome she never saw me without asking some question about history or dogma,” said St. Jerome. “She was not satisfied with any answer I might give; she never yielded to my authority only, but discussed the matter so thoroughly that often I ceased to be the master and became the humble pupil.” It would have been better for him if he had given more heed to her gentle voice when she tried to temper his bitterness and restrain his unruly tongue. We have another proof of the solid fiber of her intellect in the fact that she was consulted on Biblical matters by Roman ecclesiastics, even by the Pope himself; indeed, it was her counsel that led Pope Anastasius to condemn the heresies of Origen in the synod.
It may easily be imagined that the pale, slender, ascetic monk of thirty-four, with the light of genius in his eye, the fire of sublimated passion in his soul, and the vein of poetry running through his nature, had a strange power over these women who lived on moral heights quite above the heavy worldly atmosphere about them. This spiritual exaltation has swayed women of ardent imagination ever since the days of the apostles, and doubtless swayed them before. It was the secret of Savonarola’s influence. Under the inspiration of the persuasive Nicole, the earnest Arnauld, and the austere Pascal, the great ladies of France put off their silks and jewels with their mundane vanities, and knelt in the bare cells at Port-Royal, with the haircloth and the iron girdle pressing the delicate flesh as they prayed. Fénelon found his most ardent disciple in the mystic Mme. Guyon. The pure soul of Mme. Swetchine responded to the earnest words of Lacordaire as the Æolian harp vibrates to the lightest breath of wind. “I cannot attach to your name the glory of the Roman women whom St. Jerome has immortalized,” he says, “and yet you were of their race.... The light of your soul illumined the land that received you, and for forty years you were for us the sweetest echo of the gospel and the surest road to honor.” It is needless to recall the power of many spiritual men of our own race and day in leading the serious and gay alike into paths of a rational self-renunciation. Perhaps the little coterie in which St. Jerome found himself was more permanently severe in its self-discipline than most of the later ones have been. Doubtless there was a little blending of the church and the world, of literature and prayers, of gilded trappings with the nun’s robe and the monk’s cowl. But when these Roman women came into the devoted household on the Aventine, they usually renounced the world very literally, though it is not unlikely that they had a following of those who mingled a pale and decorous piety with their worldly pleasures, as did many of the priests whom St. Jerome attacks with such biting sarcasm.
Then this monk of many dreams and visions, with his halo of saintship, was fresh from the hermits and cenobites of the Thebaid. The even-song that went up from countless caves and cabins under the clear Egyptian sky still lingered in his ear as he expatiated on the paradise of solitude. Forgetting in his zeal the violent moral struggles he had passed through himself, he appealed to them in impassioned words to immolate every natural affection on the altar of a faith that invited them to a life of prayer and meditation far from the tempting delights of a sinful world. It was under this teaching that the ascetic spirit grew so strong as to call out the indignation of the pagan society of Rome. People of the fourth century were as fond of gossip as are the men and women of to-day, and no more charitable. Malicious tongues were whispering evil things of the gifted and famous monk who exercised so pernicious an influence over the wives and daughters of illustrious Roman citizens, inciting them to fling away their fortunes for a dream and seclude themselves from the world to which they belonged. He had spent three years in an atmosphere that must have been grateful to his restless and stormy spirit. But now he found that he was bringing reproach upon those he most revered and loved, so in the summer of 385, when Pope Damasus died, and his occupation was gone, he bade farewell to his friends, and went back to the East, leaving a letter to Asella in which he bitterly denounces those who had dared to malign him. Of Paula he says that “her songs were psalms, her conversations were of the gospel, her delight was in purity, her life a long fast.” Yet his enemies had presumed to attack his attitude toward the saintly woman whose “mourning and penance had touched his heart with sympathy and veneration.”
But his pleadings for a life of penitence and sacrifice had not been in vain. A few months later Paula carried out a plan which had been for some time maturing, and followed him, with her daughter Eustochium and a train of consecrated virgins and attendants. The power of religious enthusiasm was never shown more clearly than in this able and learned matron, who had all the strength of the Roman character together with the mystical exaltation of a Christian sibyl. That she was a woman of ardent emotions is evident from the violence of her grief at the death of her daughter and her husband. But in spite of her family affections she was firm in her purpose to leave home and friends for a life of hardship in the far East. The tears of her youngest daughter, Rufina, who begged her to stay for her wedding day,—which, alas! she never lived to see,—were of no avail. Her little son entreated her in vain. The words of St. Jerome were ringing in her ears. “Though thy father should lie on the threshold, trample over his body with dry eyes, and fly to the standard of the cross,” he had said. “In this matter, to be cruel is the only true filial affection.”
Several years before, Melania, a widow of twenty-three, had sailed away to the Thebaid, on a similar mission. She too had passed through great sorrows. With strange calmness and without a tear, she had buried her husband and two sons in quick succession, thanking God that she had no longer any ties to stand between her and her pious duties. And for this hardness St. Jerome had applauded her, holding her up as an example to her sex! She too had turned away dry-eyed and inflexible from the tears of the little son she left to the tender mercies of the pretor. Did Mme. de Chantal recall these women, centuries after, when she walked serenely over the prostrate body of her son, who had thrown himself across the threshold to bar her departure from her home to a life of spiritual consecration and conventual discipline under the direction of St. François de Sales?
We cannot follow the wanderings of these fourth-century pilgrims among the hermits of the desert and the holy places of Syria. They were among the first of a long line of women who have given up the luxuries and refinements of life for a hut or a cave in the wilderness, and a bare, hard existence, illuminated only by the “light that never was on sea or land.” Melania established a convent on the Mount of Olives, with Rufinus as the spiritual director, and here it is probable that Paula visited her before settling finally near the Cave of the Nativity at Bethlehem, where she built three convents, a hospital, and a monastery, which was superintended by St. Jerome. It was here that the rich descendant of the Scipios, who had gone from a palace to a cell, gave herself to prayer and menial duties, while she scattered her fortune among the poor.
The most immediate and important outcome of the Church of the Household was this convent at Bethlehem, which had its origin in the brain of Paula and was managed by her until her death. The little community, with its austerities, its studies, its lowly duties, its charities, and its peaceful life, was clearly visible while St. Jerome lived to electrify the world periodically with some fresh outburst of rage at its follies, or its presumption in differing in opinion from himself. It was here that he did his greatest work, and it is of special interest to us that he depended largely upon the intelligent aid of Paula and Eustochium in his revision of the Septuagint and the invaluable translation of the Bible known as the Latin Vulgate. His instructions to them were minute, and his confidence in their ability is shown in the preface to one of his works, where he says: “You, who are so familiar with Hebrew literature and so skilled in judging the merits of a translation, go over this one carefully, word by word, so as to discover where I have added or omitted anything which is not in the original.” They also revised with him and largely settled the text of the Psalter which is in use to-day in the Latin churches. He said that they acquired with ease, and spoke perfectly, the Hebrew language, which had cost him so much labor. He was censured for dedicating so many of his works to the women who had given him such efficient help. His reply is of value, as it expressed the opinion of the most scholarly and brilliant of the early fathers on the intellectual ability of the sex which they seem, as a rule, to have taken the greatest pleasure in denouncing.
“As if these women were not more capable of forming a judgment upon them than most men,” he says. “The good people who would have me prefer them to you, O Paula and Eustochium, know as little of their Bible as of Greek and Roman history. They do not know that Huldah prophesied when men were silent, that Deborah overcame the enemies of Israel when Barak trembled, that Judith and Esther saved the people of God. So much for the Hebrews. As for the Greeks, who does not know that Plato listened to the discourse of Aspasia, that Sappho held the lyre beside Alcæus and Pindar, that Themistia was one of the philosophers of Greece? And, among ourselves, Cornelia the mother of the Gracchi, Portia the daughter of Cato and wife of Brutus, before whom the virtue of the father and the austerity of the husband paled, do we not count them among the glories of Rome?”
Through the correspondence of these women with their friends, we have various glimpses of their life, as well as of the changes that came to the group on the Aventine. The heart of Paula was first saddened by the death of her daughter Paulina, who had married a brother of Marcella, and lived a life of great devotion in the world. Perhaps she found a grain of consolation in the fact that Paulina’s large fortune was left to her husband to be distributed among the poor. We have a glowing account of the great funeral at St. Peter’s, where this sorrowing husband scattered the gifts with his own hand to the starving multitude, after turning his wife’s jewels and fine, gold-embroidered robes into plain garments for the naked and needy. Then he went to his desolate home, took the vows of poverty, and put on a monk’s cowl, though he still held his seat in the Senate, where he doubtless felt that he could render the best service.
This grief was tempered for Paula by the glad tidings that the little son she had left weeping on the shore had married Læta, a Christian, who, with his approval, consecrated their daughter, a second Paula, to the service of religion. It was the wife who wrote to her for direction as to her child’s education; and we have an interesting letter from St. Jerome giving careful instruction on all points that concern the training of a young maiden. This Paula helped to cheer the last days of her grandmother, and became the third abbess of the convent.
Fabiola came once to visit them, and spent two years, entering into all their duties, and brightening the little community with her quick and eager intellect. But she died soon after her return to Rome. They urged Marcella to join them, and sent vivid descriptions of their idyllic life among the hills consecrated by so many sacred memories. “In summer we seek the shade of our trees,” they write; “in autumn the mild weather and pure air invite us to rest on a bed of fallen leaves; in spring, when the fields are painted with flowers, we sing our songs among the birds.” To be sure, they had the hospital work, the menial duties, the prayers, and the penances, but they had, too, long and pleasant hours to study the holy books. Then they were free from the “need of seeing and being seen, of greeting and being greeted, of praising and detracting, hearing and talking, of seeing the crowds of the world.” The monastery and the convent were quite separate, but it is likely that St. Jerome pa
