IV

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 passed many moments in the converse of his

friends and helpers, though his instructions were largely given by

letter. These pastoral pictures, however, with their dark shadings, did

not tempt the Roman lady from her chosen work. With her clear and sane

intellect she saw her duty to those among whom she was born.

After seventeen years of unselfish labor for the poor and suffering,

varied by the study of which we have the fruit, Paula died and was

laid away in the grotto at Bethlehem. In her last moments she replied

in Greek to a question of St. Jerome, that she felt no pain, and that

everything before her was calm and tranquil. All Palestine flocked to

her funeral, which was conducted by the Bishop of Jerusalem, and people

of every rank and grade looked with tears on her grave and majestic

features. “Illustrious by birth,” says St. Jerome, “more illustrious by

her piety, first in Rome by the wealth of her house, then more honored

by Christian poverty, she scorned pomp and glory, exchanged gilded

walls for a cabin, and won the esteem of the entire world.”

Her mantle fell upon Eustochium, an earnest, sincere woman of serious

education but less strength and individuality than her mother, who

filled her place with dignity and ability for sixteen years. In the

first days of his grief St. Jerome was unable to take up his work, but

this sympathetic helper turned his thoughts by carrying to him the Book

of Ruth to be translated. At her death she was succeeded by her niece,

another Paula, who had been long associated with her. The younger

Melania, who had followed in the footsteps of her own grandmother, the

first woman to leave Rome for an ascetic retreat in the East, was there

also, and it was these women who, not long afterward, closed the eyes

of St. Jerome, already dimmed with age.

But the close of Marcella’s life came some time before this last

light went out in the Syrian monastery, and it was tragical enough.

For thirty years she had devoted herself and her large wealth to the

unfortunate, and to the interests of the church she loved. During the

siege of Alaric and the terrible days that saw the ruin of Rome, she

was beaten and tortured to compel her to tell where she had hidden her

treasures; but these had all gone for the relief of the suffering, and

there was nothing to tell. A soldier with a kinder heart than the rest

helped her to reach the old Church of St. Paul without the walls,

together with Principia, the only companion left to her, whom she had

saved with great difficulty from the fury of her brutal captors. A few

days later she died of these tortures, and the maiden was left alone to

tell the tale. The Ecclesia Domestica appears no more in history. The

little group of devoted women was already scattered. Many were dead.

Some had found refuge in the convent at Bethlehem, some in the cells

of the Thebaid, and some had gone to carry the seeds of their faith to

remote places where we cannot trace them. Strictly speaking, this was

never a convent, as there were no vows and women went in and out at

pleasure. But it has been called the “Mother of Convents.”

V

The revolution effected in Roman society through these intelligent

patrician matrons, whose names had great prestige, and whose wealth

seems to have been inexhaustible, was a vital and important one.

The women also show us, even in their often intemperate zeal, the

magnificent possibilities of the Roman character. But their value to

us lies largely in the results of the work they began, which expanded

into the vast system of convents that soon overspread the known world.

That these have been an unmixed good no one will contend to-day, but

that they fulfilled a mission which was, on the whole, a blessing in

its time, few, I think, will deny. For centuries they furnished an

outlet for the administrative talents as well as the surplus energies

and emotions of women. They were also a refuge for multitudes who had

no secure place in the world, and for those who did not wish to subject

themselves to the slavery of a forced and loveless marriage. If they

were not the best things possible, they were the best things available.

So far as these women led lives of active charity, and forgot their own

comfort in gentle ministrations to the poor and suffering, the results

were good for themselves and the world. When they lost their poise in

ecstatic visions, spent long hours in useless austerities and morbid

introspection, crushing every natural impulse in the effort to attain

an impossible holiness that was as airy and unsubstantial as the fabric

of a dream, they became abnormal, and the results were distinctly

bad; it was in the last analysis the apotheosis of emotionalism. The

old extremes of sensuality were followed by equal extremes in another

direction. To glorify pain, to neglect the person, to substitute states

of exaltation for family ties, was a mark of piety. The movement

started with an ideal of virgin purity that depreciated any life but

that of a celibate. The immoralities that early began to creep in with

the theories of spiritual marriage, even among the cenobites of the

desert, to the dismay of the fathers themselves, were doubtless due in

part to the repression of tender human affections, and in part to the

vow of obedience which placed pure and saintly women at the mercy of

the wolves in sheep’s clothing that speedily overran the church and the

world.

The Christian ideals are essentially feminine ones. They exalt love,

not force, and glorify the finest and most distinctive traits of

womanhood. “Heavens, what wives these Christians have!” said a pagan

ruler, struck with their spirit of supreme self-sacrifice. “Kill me,”

said Eve to Adam, as they were being driven from the Garden of Eden;

“then perhaps God will put you back into paradise.” So wrote a man

centuries later who was trying to illustrate the unselfishness of woman

at the crucial point of her history. But the obedience which was so

beautiful to the husband was quite another matter when demanded by a

spiritual director, and family life began to suffer. Perhaps this state

of affairs is partly responsible for the bitter denunciations of women

in the writings of the fathers, though by no means confined to them.

“You are the devil’s gateway,” says Tertullian, “the unsealer of the

forbidden tree, the deserter from the divine law. You persuaded him

whom the devil was not brave enough to attack. You destroyed God’s

image, man.” “Eve was the principle of death,” wrote St. Jerome; but

remembering, perhaps, how far the work of his life had been aided by

women, he adds that “Mary is the source of life.” His attacks elsewhere

are frequent and merciless. “Woman has the poison of an asp and the

malice of a dragon,” is the kindly tribute of Gregory the Great. “Of

all wild beasts the most dangerous is woman,” says St. Chrysostom, who

owed so much to his own mother and loved her so devotedly. “It brings

great shame to reflect of what nature woman is,” writes Clement of

Alexandria. One might fill a book with similar quotations. “A woman

is an evil.” “A woman is a whited sepulcher.” This is the burden of

priestly complaint from St. Augustine to the Protestant Calvin and

John Knox, who sang variations on the same theme in a different key.

Not even the classic Greeks were more abusive. All this is specially

surprising, since we find no such spirit in the words of Christ, who

was invariably gentle toward women and tender even to their faults. St.

Paul was disposed to keep them in a very humble place, but, after all,

he was never incurably bitter.

In spite of these persistent attacks, however, the church has availed

itself, throughout its history, of the talents of great women, from

the first St. Catherine to her namesake of Siena, from Marcella to

the gifted St. Theresa and Mère Angélique, the thoughtful saint of

Port-Royal. Women were associated with all the humane movements of

the primitive church. They held honorable and prominent positions as

deaconesses, were intrusted with grave responsibilities, and venerated

to an extent unheard of before. Salvina officially protected the

Eastern churches, and supplications for favors were addressed to her on

account of her ability and her influence at the court of the emperor.

St. Chrysostom always spoke of Olympias, the ablest of his deaconesses,

as his “dear and trusted friend.” A rich woman, noble, and a widow,

she had given up her life to the service of religion, and managed the

affairs of the great archbishop, who depended upon her as St. Ambrose

depended upon his sister Marcellina. When he was driven into exile, and

the flames were bursting from St. Sophia, it was to her, not to the

bishops, that he gave instructions for the government of his church in

his absence, which was destined to be final.

It is worth while, perhaps, to quote a few lines from a letter written

by this celebrated man to a Roman lady whose influence he asked in

the interest of a general council. After a few generalities about the

sphere of her sex, he continues: “But in the work which has the service

of God for its object, in the church militant, these distinctions are

effaced, and it often happens that the woman excels the man in the

courage with which she supports her opinions and in her holy zeal....

Do not consider as unbecoming to your sex that earnest work which in

any way promotes the welfare of the faithful.... I beg you to undertake

this with the utmost diligence; the more frightful the tempest, the

more precious the recompense for your share in calming it.”

There were a great many other able women, and some wicked ones,

connected with the earlier movements of Christianity, especially in the

Eastern Church, but they do not fall within the scope of this paper. I

mention these few simply to show that it was by no means the emotional

enthusiasm of women which gave them so much influence in a field for

which they were peculiarly fitted, though this may account for much of

their subsequent power over the masses, and many of their errors. Most

of the leaders had great force of intellect and a special talent for

organization.

The ultimate effect of conventual life on the minds of women is open

to serious question. The founders of the movement were matrons of

pagan education. The little circle on the Aventine, as we have seen,

was versed in the knowledge of the time. But learning was already

in its decline. About the time that Marcella was a victim to the

barbarians who destroyed the glory of Rome, the last great feminine

representative of the genius and culture of the classic world, the

beautiful and gifted Hypatia, was dead in Alexandria, a sacrifice to

the mad passions of a fanatical mob that marched under the banner of

One who came into the world with a message of peace and good will to

men. Even the semi-mythical St. Catherine, the patron saint of science,

philosophy, education, and eloquence, who lived not long before,--if

at all,--was brought up on Plato and taught by pagan masters. So clear

was the intellect of this prodigy of wisdom and knowledge that she was

called upon to dispute with fifty of the most learned pagans, and, if

the legends are to be trusted, vanquished them all on their own ground.

The philosopher and the saint were trained in the same schools, and

they were alike martyrs to their own learning and talents, though one

was a partizan of the old order of things, the other of the new.

But those who followed them do not seem to have equaled the early

women who were the product of pagan schools. Polite letters were

discouraged, if not forbidden. St. Jerome himself mourns over the lost

hours spent over Cicero and the poets, though, fortunately for his

fame, he never wholly broke away from their influence. “What has Horace

to do with the Psalter, or Vergil with the gospels, or Cicero with the

apostles?” he said to Eustochium. No pursuit of secular knowledge was

ever countenanced in the large bodies of women swayed by a spiritual

director who would have burned Sappho and Euripides if he could,

and dominated by a visionary emotionalism turned out of its natural

channels and centered on a single idea. Great ability asserted itself,

not in learning, but in organization, leadership, and an ever-narrowing

discipline.

The representative pagan woman had her shortcomings and her

disabilities. She had also her virtues. If she had less of the spirit

of religion, she had equally the spirit of patriotism, of culture, of

honor, and of duty. There was a finer sensibility among the Christian

women, and a stronger instinct of self-sacrifice. None of us will

depreciate the beauty of those traits, but without the firmness of

fiber that is fostered by trained intelligence, they have their

dangers. When they mark the permanent attitude of one class toward

another which in no wise recognizes any corresponding duty, they

inevitably result in the servility of the one and the tyranny of the

other. Such was the relative position of men and women in the dark

ages. Even chivalry which paid a tribute to weakness was largely a

theory, or a fashion that offered a new path to glory, and does not

bear too close a scrutiny, though it tempered the condition of women

and modified the character of men, upon whom it reflected great honor.

Its ideals were fine, but the gulf between the ideal and its attainment

in daily life was often a very wide one. There were conspicuous

examples of feminine courage and heroism as well as talent, but the

lives of women in these ages were not, as a rule, pleasant ones, in

spite of a certain halo of romance that was thrown about them. No doubt

it was their suffering and helplessness that sent so many of them into

convents where they frequently found a state of morals little better

than the one from which they fled. It was not until the Renaissance

brought back the old spirit of learning and a vigorous intellectual

life among women that they combined the sweetness of Christian virtues

with the dignity and strength born of knowledge and a measure of

freedom, took the rightful position that belongs to the mothers of the

race, and once more played a distinctly civilizing and beneficent rôle

on the world’s stage.