Woman in the golden ages

by Amelia Gere Mason

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.

III

These brief outlines indicate the character and position of a few of the best-known women who gathered about Marcella. Some of them lived with her; others came from time to time, or were constant attendants at the Bible readings and prayers. Saintly women, and worldly ones who were doubtless eager to flock to the little chapel in a palace that represented to them a great name, if not a living faith, had been going in and out for some years before St. Jerome came from the East at the summons of Pope Damasus, and was invited by Marcella to stay at her house, after the manner of famous divines of all ages. It is to this most interesting and learned of the early fathers that we are indebted for the blaze of light that was thrown upon the Church of the Household. It was also to this group of consecrated women that St. Jerome owed the inspiration and the intelligent criticism that led him to give the world some of the works on which his greatest fame rests. The circle that listened to his persuasive eloquence, born of a keen intellect, an ardent imagination, a passionate temperament, and an exalted faith, was not an ignorant one. Most of these ladies spoke Greek and were familiar with Greek letters. Some had learned Hebrew, which was not included among the fashionable accomplishments of the day. A few were women of brilliant ability and distinct individuality, who could not live in the world without leaving some trace of themselves. The discriminating mind of Marcella exercised itself on every new problem. “During the whole of my residence at Rome she never saw me without asking some question about history or dogma,” said St. Jerome. “She was not satisfied with any answer I might give; she never yielded to my authority only, but discussed the matter so thoroughly that often I ceased to be the master and became the humble pupil.” It would have been better for him if he had given more heed to her gentle voice when she tried to temper his bitterness and restrain his unruly tongue. We have another proof of the solid fiber of her intellect in the fact that she was consulted on Biblical matters by Roman ecclesiastics, even by the Pope himself; indeed, it was her counsel that led Pope Anastasius to condemn the heresies of Origen in the synod.

It may easily be imagined that the pale, slender, ascetic monk of thirty-four, with the light of genius in his eye, the fire of sublimated passion in his soul, and the vein of poetry running through his nature, had a strange power over these women who lived on moral heights quite above the heavy worldly atmosphere about them. This spiritual exaltation has swayed women of ardent imagination ever since the days of the apostles, and doubtless swayed them before. It was the secret of Savonarola’s influence. Under the inspiration of the persuasive Nicole, the earnest Arnauld, and the austere Pascal, the great ladies of France put off their silks and jewels with their mundane vanities, and knelt in the bare cells at Port-Royal, with the haircloth and the iron girdle pressing the delicate flesh as they prayed. Fénelon found his most ardent disciple in the mystic Mme. Guyon. The pure soul of Mme. Swetchine responded to the earnest words of Lacordaire as the Æolian harp vibrates to the lightest breath of wind. “I cannot attach to your name the glory of the Roman women whom St. Jerome has immortalized,” he says, “and yet you were of their race.... The light of your soul illumined the land that received you, and for forty years you were for us the sweetest echo of the gospel and the surest road to honor.” It is needless to recall the power of many spiritual men of our own race and day in leading the serious and gay alike into paths of a rational self-renunciation. Perhaps the little coterie in which St. Jerome found himself was more permanently severe in its self-discipline than most of the later ones have been. Doubtless there was a little blending of the church and the world, of literature and prayers, of gilded trappings with the nun’s robe and the monk’s cowl. But when these Roman women came into the devoted household on the Aventine, they usually renounced the world very literally, though it is not unlikely that they had a following of those who mingled a pale and decorous piety with their worldly pleasures, as did many of the priests whom St. Jerome attacks with such biting sarcasm.

Then this monk of many dreams and visions, with his halo of saintship, was fresh from the hermits and cenobites of the Thebaid. The even-song that went up from countless caves and cabins under the clear Egyptian sky still lingered in his ear as he expatiated on the paradise of solitude. Forgetting in his zeal the violent moral struggles he had passed through himself, he appealed to them in impassioned words to immolate every natural affection on the altar of a faith that invited them to a life of prayer and meditation far from the tempting delights of a sinful world. It was under this teaching that the ascetic spirit grew so strong as to call out the indignation of the pagan society of Rome. People of the fourth century were as fond of gossip as are the men and women of to-day, and no more charitable. Malicious tongues were whispering evil things of the gifted and famous monk who exercised so pernicious an influence over the wives and daughters of illustrious Roman citizens, inciting them to fling away their fortunes for a dream and seclude themselves from the world to which they belonged. He had spent three years in an atmosphere that must have been grateful to his restless and stormy spirit. But now he found that he was bringing reproach upon those he most revered and loved, so in the summer of 385, when Pope Damasus died, and his occupation was gone, he bade farewell to his friends, and went back to the East, leaving a letter to Asella in which he bitterly denounces those who had dared to malign him. Of Paula he says that “her songs were psalms, her conversations were of the gospel, her delight was in purity, her life a long fast.” Yet his enemies had presumed to attack his attitude toward the saintly woman whose “mourning and penance had touched his heart with sympathy and veneration.”

But his pleadings for a life of penitence and sacrifice had not been in vain. A few months later Paula carried out a plan which had been for some time maturing, and followed him, with her daughter Eustochium and a train of consecrated virgins and attendants. The power of religious enthusiasm was never shown more clearly than in this able and learned matron, who had all the strength of the Roman character together with the mystical exaltation of a Christian sibyl. That she was a woman of ardent emotions is evident from the violence of her grief at the death of her daughter and her husband. But in spite of her family affections she was firm in her purpose to leave home and friends for a life of hardship in the far East. The tears of her youngest daughter, Rufina, who begged her to stay for her wedding day,—which, alas! she never lived to see,—were of no avail. Her little son entreated her in vain. The words of St. Jerome were ringing in her ears. “Though thy father should lie on the threshold, trample over his body with dry eyes, and fly to the standard of the cross,” he had said. “In this matter, to be cruel is the only true filial affection.”

Several years before, Melania, a widow of twenty-three, had sailed away to the Thebaid, on a similar mission. She too had passed through great sorrows. With strange calmness and without a tear, she had buried her husband and two sons in quick succession, thanking God that she had no longer any ties to stand between her and her pious duties. And for this hardness St. Jerome had applauded her, holding her up as an example to her sex! She too had turned away dry-eyed and inflexible from the tears of the little son she left to the tender mercies of the pretor. Did Mme. de Chantal recall these women, centuries after, when she walked serenely over the prostrate body of her son, who had thrown himself across the threshold to bar her departure from her home to a life of spiritual consecration and conventual discipline under the direction of St. François de Sales?