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.