SECOND ARTICLE.
AGES OF THE FATHERS OF THE CHURCH.
When the Christian religion had triumphed over idolatry, the principle of evil took refuge in heresy, and vigorously began a new attack upon the church. As women had once sealed their faith with their blood, so now they came eagerly forward to preach it by their learning. The centuries which produced the fathers of the church produced women also, to whom these great lights of the true faith were mainly indebted for their early education. The same circumstances also created women who, on the throne and in the council-chamber, governed turbulent nations and guided fierce passions, according to the rules of justice, honesty, and religion.
The mother of St. Gregory Nazianzen, Doctor of the Church, was Nonna, and is honored as a saint. Butler, in his Lives of the Saints, says: “She drew down the blessing of heaven upon her family by most bountiful and continual alms-deeds; ... yet, to satisfy the obligation of justice which she owed to her children, she, by her prudent economy, improved at the same time their patrimony.”
Here, therefore, in the fourth century, we find a woman commended for her practical knowledge of business and her skill in managing property. Ventura relates that, as soon as her son Gregory came into the world, she placed the Scriptures in his infant hands, and ever after inculcated in her teaching the greatest love and reverence for sacred learning. Nonna’s other children were both canonized, one of them, Gorgonia, having led the most exemplary life in the holy state of matrimony. (La Donna Cattolica, vol. i. pp. 431, 432.) St. Basil, who counted among his ancestry many martyrs of both sexes, was the son of St. Emelia, and the great-nephew of St. Macrina the Elder, of whom he says himself that he “counts it as one of the greatest benefits of Almighty God, and the truest of honors, to have been brought up by such a woman.” His elder sister, also named Macrina, was greatly instrumental in conducting his education. When after his death his brother, St. Gregory of Nyssa, went to visit their sister, and open his heart to her concerning their common sorrow, he found her dying, it is true, but so vigorous in mind that her discourse on the providence of God and the state of the soul after death was no less striking than comforting. He could hardly believe, says Ventura, that it was not a doctor of the church, a learned theologian, who was speaking to him; and so much did he treasure his sister’s words that he compiled his admirable Treatise of the Soul and The Resurrection chiefly from the matter furnished by her discourse. Macrina’s funeral was an ovation, and the bishop of the diocese held it an honor to be present thereat.
Olympias, the widow of Nembridius, the treasurer of the Emperor Theodosius the Great, flourished about the end of the fourth century, and was the friend and helper of St. John Chrysostom. His letters to her are part of his published works, and Nectarius, his predecessor in the Patriarchal chair of Constantinople, often consulted her on matters of ecclesiastical importance. When Chrysostom was persecuted and banished, she did not escape vexatious notice from heathen and heretical rulers; but through all, her fortitude would have done credit to the bravest man. The great patriarch charged her to continue, during his absence, “to serve the church with the same care and zeal” (Ventura, Donna Cattolica, p. 443), and elsewhere in his works says emphatically that “women, as well as men, can take part in any struggle for the cause of God and of the church.” (Epistle 124, to the Italians.) In a letter to her, he says that her presence was required at Constantinople to encourage the persecuted brethren, and in another he bids her exert all her resources to save the Bishop Maruthas from the abyss (he having given signs of yielding to heresy). Further on, in the same letter, he gives her instructions, almost amounting to a diplomatic and official mission, with regard to the request of the King of the Goths for a bishop and missionary in place of Aubinus the Apostle, who had just died, after converting many thousand of these barbarians. When St. Chrysostom sent a messenger to the Pope St. Innocent, at the beginning of the persecutions at Constantinople, he gave him letters of recommendation to none but a few Roman ladies—Proba, Juliana, and Demetrias.
The influence of Monica, the mother of St. Augustine, upon her wayward son, is so well known that it is almost superfluous to dwell on it; and St. Jerome, eminently a learned saint, was scarcely less connected with holy and well-taught women. He himself tells us that it was especially his friend and spiritual daughter Paula who engaged him in the study of the Old and New Testaments, and who induced him to translate the former from the original Hebrew. Rohrbacher, in his Ecclesiastical History, corroborates this statement; and Capefigue, in his Four First Ages of the Church, says that “the pure society of women had imparted to Jerome a heartfelt exaltation, a deep enthusiasm for all purity and nobility in themselves.” We learn from Butler (Lives of the Saints) that Marcella, one of the many matrons under St. Jerome’s instruction in Rome, made great progress in the critical learning of the Holy Scriptures, and learned in a short time many things which had cost him abundance of labor (vol. ix.). Other women, of whom we shall speak hereafter, were collected under his guidance; almost all are now canonized saints, and were celebrated even in their own day for their skill and erudition. The great Paula was the most illustrious among them, and he tells us of her as also of five or six others that they were as well acquainted with Hebrew as with Latin and Greek. To the daughter-in-law of St. Paula, Jerome wrote a letter full of minute and seemingly trivial details, concerning the education of her little daughter, who afterwards became St. Paula the Younger. It is of such quaint interest, and so calculated to give a high idea of the importance attached by the great doctor of the church to the minutiæ of a little girl’s daily life, that we cannot resist the temptation of quoting a few extracts from it:
“Let her be brought up as Samuel was in the temple, and the Baptist in the desert, in utter ignorance of vanity and vice; ... let her never hear bad words nor learn profane songs; ... let her have an alphabet of little letters made of box or ivory, the names of all which she must know, that she may play with them, and that learning may be made a diversion. When a little older, let her form each letter in wax with her finger, guided by another’s hand; then let her be invited, by prizes and presents suited to her age, to join syllables together.... Let her have companions to learn with her, that she may be spurred on by emulation.... She is not to be scolded or browbeaten if slower, but to be encouraged that she may rejoice to surpass, and be sorry to see herself outstripped and behind others, not envying their progress, but rejoicing at it while she reproaches herself with her own backwardness. Great care is to be taken that she conceive no aversion to studies, lest their bitterness remain in after-years. A master must be found for her, a man both of virtue and learning: nor will a great scholar think it beneath him to teach her the first elements of letters.... That is not to be contemned without which nothing great can be acquired. The very sounds of letters and the first rudiments are very different in a learned and in an unskilful mouth. Care must be taken that she be not accustomed by fond nurses to pronounce half-words, as it would prejudice her speech. Great care is necessary that she never learn what she will have afterwards to unlearn. The eloquence of the Gracchi derived its perfection from the mother’s elegance (of speech). No paint must ever touch her face or hair.” He is no less sensible and moderate in physical instructions than strict in things of the spiritual order. He says: “She should eat so as always to be hungry, and to be able to read or sing psalms immediately after meals. The immoderate long fasts of many displease me. I have learned by experience that the ass, much fatigued on the road, seeks rest at any cost. In a long journey, strength must be supported, lest, by running the first stage too fast, we should fall in the middle. In Lent, full scope is to be given to severe fasting.” He advises the young girl, when old enough, to read the works of St. Cyprian, the epistles of St. Athanasius, and the writings of St. Hilary. These are grave and abstruse studies, requiring much time and application, and as fully up to the standard of a modern male education as any woman could desire. St. Jerome himself was living at Bethlehem when he wrote this letter, and while recommending her mother to send little Paula to St. Paula the Elder for her later education, he himself promises to instruct her, adding that “he should be more honored by teaching the spouse of Christ than the philosopher [Aristotle] was in being preceptor to the Macedonian King.” It was the elder Paula who built St. Jerome the monastery of Bethlehem, in which he spent a great part of his life. She governed a monastery of women not far from it. St. Jerome, in his panegyric of her life, addressed to her daughter Eustochium, expresses himself in the following unequivocal language: “Were all the members of my body to be changed into tongues, and each fibre to utter articulate and human sounds, even then I could not worthily celebrate the virtues of the holy and venerable Paula.” As soon as her husband’s death left her the free use of a magnificent fortune, she liberated all the numerous retinue of slaves that formed not only her household but her possessions. Hundreds of Christian masters and mistresses did the same, and treated their freed retainers as brethren and sisters in the faith, long before the philanthropy of modern times had begun to envelop in a halo of unusual heroism the sacrifice of slave property. From a noble Roman matron, placed by her birth in an assured position of great prominence, she became a voluntary exile and wanderer for the sake of planting the faith more firmly in the East. St. Jerome describes, in words full of sympathetic admiration, her pious visits to the Holy Places of Judea. She also made a pilgrimage to the home of monasticism, the Thebaïd and the Lybian desert. Humble as she was, fame followed and surrounded her. Pilgrims to Jerusalem counted her as one of the most consoling and admirable of the objects that claimed their devotion. Macarius, Arsenius, Serapion, famous lights of the church and patriarchs of the eremitical life, came from long distances and inaccessible solitudes to confer with her. At Jerusalem, she founded places of shelter and entertainment for the many pilgrims who flocked there; both at Rome and in the East, she was the mother and the idol of the poor, whose wants she relieved untiringly, and for whose sake she was often not only penniless, but in debt. Her last illness was like a royal levee, and bishops and patriarchs hastened to her bedside; her funeral, says Ventura, was almost a canonization. Bishops carried her body to its tomb, and for seven days sacred hymns and psalms echoed ceaselessly in the church of the Holy Grotto at Bethlehem, where the funeral service was performed in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Capefigue calls her the “most remarkably erudite woman of her age,” and her instincts of faith and learning alike made her intuitively aware of the artifices of the heretic Palladius, whose well-concealed Origenism she unmasked and denounced in presence of St. Jerome, when the wolf would have put on sheep’s clothing and deceived her simple nuns. Paula’s daughters—Blesilla, the learned and accomplished widow; Eustochium, the celebrated virgin to whom many of St. Jerome’s works are addressed or dedicated; Paulina, the model wife to whose influence over her saintly husband the first hospitals in the West are due—and their sister-in-law, Læta, the happy mother of the younger St. Paula, are all canonized saints of the church, and each of them the just pride of their sex in the respective walks of life to which they were destined. Fabiola, another of St. Jerome’s scholars, was the foundress of the first hospital absolutely established in Rome.
The church has never been chary of tendering graceful homage to the influence and ability of woman, and perhaps no more singular or flattering proof of this can be found than the pictorial honor which, Ventura assures us (Donna Cattolica, vol. i. p. 466), was offered by St. Gregory the Great to St. Sylvia, his mother. She was represented as sitting by his side, robed in white, and crowned with the mitre worn by doctors of theology, while the left hand held an open Psalter, and the right was raised with two fingers extended, in the attitude of benediction.