Woman in the golden ages

by Amelia Gere Mason

II

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.