[Illustration: Decorative image]
· 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 ·
[Illustration: Decorative image]
I
“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.