Women of Early Christianity

by Alfred Brittain; Mitchell Carroll

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.