we have the fact that, by order of Constantine, the empress was seized
by her women, shut up in a hot bath, and smothered."
It must be admitted, however, that all the information that we have on
this subject is very hazy. The treatment which the ancient authors gave
to the reputation of Fausta depended very considerably upon their
purpose of either eulogizing or denouncing Constantine.
While some
justify him by declaring that the empress was discovered in the arms of
a slave of the stables,--a most incredible story as told of a
middle-aged empress,--others speak of her as the most divine and pious
of empresses. There is in existence a bronze medallion showing a
portrait of Fausta; the strongly marked Grecian features are those of a
woman who is evidently fully conscious of the dignity which pertained to
"the daughter, wife, sister, and mother of emperors."
After these tragedies had taken place, it is not surprising that Helena
decided to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, this being considered, even
in times so early, as one of the most effective of moral purgatives. It
is asserted that she was directed by dreams to repair to Jerusalem and
there search for the Holy Sepulchre. The difficulty of this task was so
great that there need be no wonder that the ancient chroniclers believed
that she was divinely led. The place of the tomb had been covered with
earth, and a temple to Venus erected thereupon. This, Helena caused to
be destroyed; and, after much excavating, the sacred cave was found.
What emotion, what pious promptings she must have then felt as she stood
where, a little over three centuries earlier, the trembling feet of the
holy women of Galilee had halted as they fearfully wondered how they
should remove the great stone from the mouth of the Sepulchre, when lo!
the stone was removed, the entrance was open, and before them stood an
angel all in white who announced to them that the Lord had arisen!
Some authorities assert that, believing the Jewish inhabitants possessed
definite knowledge that would solve her difficulties, she determined to
secure it by the means usually employed by Christians in dealing with
reluctant Jews. First, she commanded that all the Jewish rabbis should
be assembled. They came in great fear, suspecting that the object of her
visit was to find the Cross. The whereabouts of this precious relic they
knew; but they had pledged themselves not to reveal it, even under
torture. When they would not satisfactorily answer Helena's questions,
she commanded that they should all be burned. This sufficiently overcame
their resolution to induce them to deliver up Judas, their leader,
saying that he could give the desired information. At first he was
obstinate; but Helena gave him the choice of either telling what he knew
or of being starved to death. Six days of total abstinence was
sufficient to bring him to terms. He was conducted to the place which he
indicated; and after prayer by the Christians, there occurred an
earthquake, and a beautiful perfume filled the air, because of which
Judas was converted. Then he set to digging vigorously, and at a depth
of twenty feet came upon three crosses. But how to know which was the
cross of the Saviour was the next puzzle to be solved.
Macarius, the
Bishop of Jerusalem, was equal to the occasion.
According to Socrates:
"A certain woman of the neighborhood, who had long been afflicted with
disease, was now just at the point of death; the bishop therefore
arranged that each cross should be brought to the dying woman, believing
that she would be healed on touching the precious Cross.
Nor was he
disappointed in his expectation: for the two crosses having been applied
which were not the Lord's, the woman still continued in a dying state;
but when the third, which was the true Cross, touched her, she was
immediately healed, and recovered her former strength."
Helena then set Judas to work at searching for the nails. They were
found shining like gold. These, with the larger portion of the Cross,
she sent to Constantine. The nails he converted into bridle-bits, and
the wood of the Cross he secretly enclosed in his own statue, which was
set up in the forum at Constantinople.
Helena erected a magnificent church on the site of the Holy Sepulchre,
calling it New Jerusalem. She also built a Christian temple at
Bethlehem, and still another on the Mount of the Ascension.
Sozomen tells us that "during her residence at Jerusalem, she assembled
the sacred virgins at a feast, ministered to them at supper, presented
them with food, poured water on their hands, and performed other similar
services customary to those who wait upon guests." It is no wonder that
the Christian devotees of celibacy came to believe that virginity
conferred upon them a rank superior to that obtained from nobility of
birth.
It is also recorded of Helena that she not only enriched churches, but
that she liberally supplied the necessities of the poor, and released
prisoners and those condemned to labor in the mines.
Sozomen writes: "It
seems to me that so many holy actions demanded a recompense; and indeed,
even in this life, she was raised to the summit of magnificence and
splendor; she was proclaimed Augusta; her image was stamped on golden
coins, and she was invested by her son with authority over the imperial
treasury to give it according to her judgment. Her death, too, was
glorious; for when, at the age of eighty, she departed this life, she
left her son and her descendants masters of the Roman world. And if
there be any advantage in such fame--forgetfulness did not conceal her
though she was dead--the coming age has the pledge of her perpetual
memory; for two cities are named after her, the one in Bithynia, and the
other in Palestine. Such is the history of Helena."
Of the fact that Helena is rightly regarded as a prominent character in
the history of women there can be no question; that she was the mother
of Constantine and the first avowed Christian empress is enough to
warrant this opinion. Her virtue and charity may also be regarded as
unimpeachable. Her canonization as a saint, however, is founded upon her
alleged discovery of the Cross. Apart from the other difficulties which
a sceptical mind may find in this story, there is the fact that
Eusebius, who in the lifetime of Constantine wrote the account of
Helena's journey to Jerusalem, makes no mention whatever of the Cross,
notwithstanding his recital of the appearing of the sacred sign to the
emperor and its adoption as the Roman ensign. But the legend, be it true
or false, has highly glorified the name of Helena in the religious
history of the world.
V
POST-NICENE MOTHERS
It requires a considerable amount of imagination, coupled with a
facility for overlooking untoward historical facts, to enable one to
draw an honest and at the same time an entirely pleasing picture of the
Church in the fourth and fifth centuries. And yet this may rightly be
looked upon as the heroic age of Christianity; it was the period of the
Church's greatest victories. It is true that, emerging from the
sickening asceticism and rising above the theological squabbles of the
time, are mighty men and women of didactic and also of moral renown.
"There were giants in those days." Nevertheless, the average moral
character of the "Christian" Empire was raised such a slight degree
above that of the pagan regime that it is barely perceptible in the
records of history. Both Constantine and Constantius stained their
palaces with the blood of their innocent relatives. The populace still
gloated over gladiatorial combats. Courtesans were licensed in order
that their trade might help to replenish the imperial treasury. The
rigor of slavery was somewhat softened; yet if a man beat his
bondservant to death, he was considered to be acting within his right,
providing that he declared that the killing was not in his intention.
For offences which to-day are treated with great leniency, slave women
were then punished by having melted lead poured down their throats.
Moreover, it was during the first centuries of the Christian state that
the fetters of feudalism were forged, by which the poor were bound down
to their hopeless wretchedness. Of the artisans the law said: "Let them
not dare to aspire to any honor, even if they might deserve it, the men
who are covered with the filth of labor, and let them remain forever in
their own condition."
The leaven of Christian morality was present in the lump of traditional
social conditions; but it had not yet begun to work extensively.
Nineteen centuries have produced only the immature results we see at
present. The evolution of human kindliness is slow, though, as we may
believe, inevitable. A learned and lively English writer of the
beginning of the last century, referring to those Church doctors who
would have the world venerate the Nicene period as the ideal age of
Christianity, says that if "they could but be blindfolded (if any such
precaution, in their case, were needed) and were fairly set down in the
midst of the pristine Church, at Carthage, or at Alexandria, or at Rome,
or at Antioch, they would be fain to make their escape, with all
possible celerity, toward their own times and country; and that
thenceforward we should never hear another word from them about
'venerable antiquity' or the holy Catholic Church of the first ages. The
effect of such a trip would, I think, resemble that produced sometimes
by crossing the Atlantic, upon those who have set out, westward,
excellent Liberals, and have returned, eastward, as excellent Tories."
There never has come to the world an opportunity to make substantial and
unusual progress in its moral development, but that there have been
plenty to turn the newly-acquired wisdom into foolishness. The great
opportunity in the history of Christianity came in the century marked by
the Nicene Council and in that succeeding it.
With the exception of the interlude during the reign of the reactionist
Julian, Christianity was the established religion of the Empire. It was
popular; the whole world was becoming Christian. Wealth poured into the
Church: kings and princes came into its pale bringing their presents.
The learned men of the world were the champions of the religion of
Jesus. But truly judging from its moral effect on the age, the Church
"knew not the day of her visitation." However much honor we may owe them
for settling the faith of Christianity, it must be acknowledged that the
Nicene and post-Nicene Fathers spent their strength in advocating and
glorifying an unnatural virginity--a pitiable substitute for a higher
social morality and purer morals for the ordinary individual. Without a
first-hand acquaintance with those ancient writers, it is impossible to
conceive to what a degree the idea of celibacy was exalted in their
teachings. It overshadowed everything else. It overturned every
establishment of reason. It vitiated all the pure springs of life. It
proceeded on the assumption that everything that is natural is
monstrously evil. Gibbon is too indulgent when, as it were with a smile
of careless contempt, he thus characterizes this maudlin asceticism:
"The chaste severity of the Fathers, in whatever related to the commerce
of the two sexes, flowed from the same principle: their abhorrence of
every enjoyment which might gratify the sensual, and degrade the
spiritual nature of man. It was their favorite opinion, that if Adam had
preserved his obedience to the Creator, he would have lived forever in a
state of virgin purity, and that some harmless mode of vegetation might
have peopled Paradise with a race of innocent and immortal beings. The
use of marriage was permitted only to his fallen posterity, as a
necessary expedient to continue the human species, and as a restraint,
however imperfect, on the natural licentiousness of desire. The
hesitation of the orthodox casuists on this interesting subject betrays
the perplexity of men unwilling to approve an institution which they
were compelled to tolerate."
If it did not inspire sadness to discover that human minds, of
intelligence above the average, can be capable of such fatuity, it would
provoke one to laughter to read the Fathers as they gravely asseverate
that they do not consider marriage as being necessarily sinful--providing that it were not committed more than once. Jerome, who
was the great advocate of monasticism in the early Church, says that
virginity is to marriage what the fruit is to the tree, or what the
grain is to the chaff. Seizing upon Christ's parable of the sower, he
asserts that the thirty-fold increase refers to marriage; the sixty-fold
applies to widows, for the greater the difficulty in resisting the
allurements of pleasure once enjoyed the greater the reward; but by the
hundred-fold the crown of virginity is expressed. Was there no one to
suggest to him that in the natural expectation of increase his order is
reversed? As a sample of the turgid rodomontade with which those Fathers
of the Church induced the women of their time to sacrifice, for the
glory of God, the duties of wifehood and motherhood which the Creator
ordained that they should perform, we will quote from Cyprian at length:
"We come now to contemplate the lily blossom; and see, O
thou, the
virgin of Christ! see how much fairer is this thy flower, than any
other! look at the special grace which, beyond any other flower of the
earth, it hath obtained! Nay, listen to the commendation bestowed upon
it by the Spouse himself, when he saith--Consider the lilies of the
field (the virgins) how they grow, and yet I say unto you that Solomon
in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these! Read therefore, O
virgin, and read again, and often read again, this word of thy Spouse,
and understand how, in the commendation of this flower, he commends thy
glory. In the glory of Solomon you are to understand that, whatever is
rich and great on earth, and the choicest of all, is prefigured; and in
the bloom of thy lily, which is thy likeness, and that of all the
virgins of Christ, the glory of virginity is intended.... Virginity hath
indeed a twofold prerogative, a virtue which, in others, is single only;
for while all the Church is virgin in soul, having neither spot, nor
wrinkle; being incorrupt in faith, hope, and charity, on which account
it is called a virgin, and merits the praise of the Spouse, what praise,
think you, are our lilies worthy of, who possess this purity in body, as
well as in soul, which the Church at large has in soul only! In truth,
the virgins of Christ are, as we may say, the fat and marrow of the
Church, and by right of an excellence altogether peculiar to themselves,
they enjoy His most familiar embraces."
The effect of this senseless exaltation of virginity, and of persuading
great numbers of maidens to forswear the pleasures and the duties of
matrimony, in the conviction that they thereby rendered themselves far
more pleasing to God than were their mothers and married sisters, was
unquestionably injurious to the morals of the time. The result was as
bad for the "lilies" themselves as it was for the women who elected to
abide on the natural, but despised, plane for which the Almighty
intended them. Too many of the former gave scandalous proof that their
ambition for virginal sanctity was unequalled by their steadfastness in
the contest. Nature has a way, when insulted, of making reprisals. The
writings of the Fathers are full of lamentations and exhortations which
indicate that the youthful female saints of their time found it one
thing to aspire to the glory of virginity and quite another to live
consistently with its character. All were not satisfied with the
indemnification provided by the joys of conscious holiness for the loss
of those pleasures which they denied themselves by their vows. Very
early there sprang up among the celibates of the Church a fashion of
choosing spiritual companions, the choice usually being made from among
the opposite sex. The canons of many of the first councils dealt with
the _agapetæ_ who professed to be the spiritual sisters of the unmarried
clergy. Even in the days of persecution this had become prevalent;
Cyprian wrote severe strictures on the custom, but did not succeed in
bringing about its abolishment. Jerome speaks of it in unrestrained
terms: "How comes this plague of the _agapetæ_ to be in the Church?
Whence come these unwedded wives, these novel concubines, these
prostitutes, so I will call them, though they cling to a single partner?
One house holds them, and one chamber. They often occupy the same couch,
and yet they call us suspicious if we fancy anything amiss. A brother
leaves his virgin sister; a virgin, slighting her unmarried brother,
seeks a brother in a stranger. Both alike profess to have but one
object, to find spiritual consolation from those not their kin.... It is
on such that Solomon in the Book of Proverbs heaps his scorn. 'Can a man
take fire in his bosom,'" he says, '"and his clothes not be burned?'"
These insurrections of nature continued until Church celibacy became a
fully organized system and the women devoted to perpetual virginity were
shut away in convents; even then, if all reports be true, the enemy,
though cast down, was not effectually destroyed.
The effect of this laudation of virginity upon the women who chose to
remain in the world was equally detrimental to good morals. The natural
result of the system might have been easily imagined, if the good sense
of the teachers of that age had not been dulled by the conception of the
human body as being hopelessly evil. Out of a large family of girls,
one, "Priscilla," or "Agnes," has been induced, by the fervid
representations of some apostle of celibacy as to the glorious sanctity
of virginity, to devote herself to this "higher life."
What will be the
effect upon the "Marthas" and the "Elizabeths" who decide to remain in
the world? Believing, as they also do, in the greater sanctity of
virginity, they will necessarily consider themselves less pure and
chaste than they would if such a comparison with their seraphic sister
had not been thrust upon them. A line of demarcation is drawn between
the once united band. On the one side stand chastity and angelic purity
personified in the professed virgin; on the other side is marriage, not
forbidden, but merely tolerated; a little lower down, according to the
Nicene scale, is concubinage, and lower still, but on the same side, is
prostitution. The "Marthas" and the "Elizabeths" were given the
alternative of either following the example of "Agnes"--
- against which
their good sense rebelled--or of considering themselves only at the top
of a class at the bottom of which were the notoriously impure. No
greater injustice than this was ever done to womanhood.
In a society where the chaste love of a wife for her husband and the
privileges and duties of a mother were regarded as placing a woman upon
an inferior moral grade, it is not surprising to find that a large
proportion accepted the rating of their time and lived down to it.
Largely in consequence, then, of the substitution of a fantastic
holiness for unromantic goodness, though the Church grew strong in the
world, morals remained much what they had been under paganism. True,
there were many of those professed virgins whose names are recorded in
history, and who, as the result of what seems to have been a prodigious
contest, maintained their character and withal achieved a noble and
deserved reputation; but it is at least open to question whether or not
the influence of these shining marks of sanctity was not offset by the
otherwise pernicious effect of the system.
Before we proceed to the individual mention of some of these early
saints, we will glance at the secular women who were their
contemporaries.
Constantine had thoroughly orientalized the imperial court, and all the
officials and aristocracy of the empire followed the fashion according
to the degree of their ability. Gorgeous apparel, trains of eunuchs,
barbaric splendor, and ostentatious titles replaced the white toga and
the stately, though severe, grandeur of the Roman citizen of former
times. The Roman spirit was dying out in sloth and effeminacy; it was
fitting that a new capital of the Empire should be erected in the East,
for the new times were strange and unrelated to the manes of the Roman
ancestors. Nobility of thought had likewise perished, at least from the
secular life of the Empire. As Duruy says: "Courts have sometimes been
schools of elegance in manners, refinement in mind, and politeness in
speech. Literature and art have received from them valuable
encouragement. But at the epoch of which we are writing, poetry and
art--those social forces by which the soul is elevated--
no longer exist.
With an Asiatic government and a religion soon to become intolerant,
great subjects of thought are prohibited. There is no discussion of
political affairs, for the emperor gives absolute commands; no history,
for the truth is concealed or condemned to a complaisance which is
odious to honest men; no eloquence, for nowhere can it be employed
except in disgraceful adulation of the sovereign....
Only the Church is
to have mighty orators,--but in the interests of heaven, not earth; and
so, in this empire now exposed to countless perils, the little mental
activity now existing in civil society will occupy itself only with
court intrigues, the subtleties of philosophers aspiring to be
theologians, or the petty literature of some belated and feeble admirers
of the early Muses."
The three sons of Constantine, among whom, by will, he divided the
Empire, were adherents of the Christian religion; but Constantius, who
soon became the sole ruler, though a weighty factor in the evolution of
the Church's doctrine, was no very edifying example of the moral effect
of her teaching. His jealousy and implacability almost exterminated the
race of Constantine, numerously represented as that sturdy emperor had
left himself. The closest ties of relationship did not avail to save the
lives of those who might stand in the way of the new ruler's ambitions.
Constantina, the sister of Constantius, had been married to
Hannibalianus, his cousin, but in spite of this double relationship the
latter cruelly perished.
Constantina was a woman of whom it would be interesting to know more
than the few references which history affords. She must have been a
person of able as well as ambitious character, for her father had
invested her with the title of Augusta. After his death, she deemed that
the purple ought not to clothe a woman with mere powerless dignity, but
that the right was hers to take a hand in the affairs of the Empire. In
this view of her privileges she lacked the support of her three
brothers: the situation was sufficiently disturbed by their own
inharmonious claims. But after the death of Constans and Constantine,
the way was cleared for Constantina to push her own interests. This she
did by creating a puppet emperor out of Vetranio, a good-natured and
obliging old gener