Woman in the golden ages

by Amelia Gere Mason

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.

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.