The Makers of Modern Rome, in Four Books
by Mrs. Oliphant · English · Gutenberg #40135 · 1,158,871 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Makers of Modern Rome, in Four Books
Author: Mrs. Oliphant
Illustrator: Joseph Pennell
Henry Parsons Riviere
Release date: July 3, 2012 [eBook #40135]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024
Language: English
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Transcriber's Note:
Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have
been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
THE MAKERS
OF
MODERN ROME
[Illustration: POPE GREGORY.
_Frontispiece._]
THE MAKERS
OF
MODERN ROME
IN FOUR BOOKS
I. HONOURABLE WOMEN NOT A FEW
II. THE POPES WHO MADE THE PAPACY
III. LO POPOLO: AND THE TRIBUNE OF THE PEOPLE
IV. THE POPES WHO MADE THE CITY
BY
MRS. OLIPHANT
AUTHOR OF "THE MAKERS OF FLORENCE"
_WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY HENRY P. RIVIERE, A.R.W.S.
AND JOSEPH PENNELL_
New York
MACMILLAN AND CO.
AND LONDON
1896
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1895,
BY MACMILLAN AND CO.
Set up and electrotyped November, 1895. Reprinted
January, 1896.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith.
Norwood Mass. U.S.A.
I INSCRIBE THIS BOOK
WITH THE DEAR NAMES OF THOSE OF MINE
WHO LIE UNDER THE WALLS OF ROME:
AND OF HIM, THE LAST OF ALL,
WHO WAS BORN IN THAT SAD CITY:
ALL NOW AWAITING ME, AS I TRUST,
WHERE GOD MAY PLEASE.
F. W. O.
M. W. O.
F. R. O.
PREFACE.
Nobody will expect in this book, or from me, the results of original
research, or a settlement--if any settlement is ever possible--of
vexed questions which have occupied the gravest students. An
individual glance at the aspect of these questions which most clearly
presents itself to a mind a little exercised in the aspects of
humanity, but not trained in the ways of learning, is all I attempt or
desire. This humble endeavour has been conscientious at least. The
work has been much interrupted by sorrow and suffering, on which
account, for any slips of hers, the writer asks the indulgence of her
unknown friends.
CONTENTS.
BOOK I.
HONOURABLE WOMEN NOT A FEW.
CHAPTER I. PAGE
ROME IN THE FOURTH CENTURY 1
CHAPTER II.
THE PALACE ON THE AVENTINE 14
CHAPTER III.
MELANIA 29
CHAPTER IV.
THE SOCIETY OF MARCELLA 43
CHAPTER V.
PAULA 65
CHAPTER VI.
THE MOTHER HOUSE 89
BOOK II.
THE POPES WHO MADE THE PAPACY.
CHAPTER I.
GREGORY THE GREAT 119
CHAPTER II.
THE MONK HILDEBRAND 181
CHAPTER III.
THE POPE GREGORY VII 230
CHAPTER IV.
INNOCENT III 307
BOOK III.
LO POPOLO: AND THE TRIBUNE OF THE PEOPLE.
CHAPTER I.
ROME IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY 381
CHAPTER II.
THE DELIVERER 402
CHAPTER III.
THE BUONO STATO 428
CHAPTER IV.
DECLINE AND FALL 460
CHAPTER V.
THE SOLDIER OF FORTUNE 486
CHAPTER VI.
THE END OF THE TRAGEDY 493
BOOK IV.
THE POPES WHO MADE THE CITY.
CHAPTER I.
MARTIN V.--EUGENIUS IV.--NICOLAS V. 513
CHAPTER II.
CALIXTUS III.--PIUS II.--PAUL II.--SIXTUS IV. 552
CHAPTER III.
JULIUS II.--LEO X. 581
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS.
PAGE
POPE GREGORY _Frontispiece_
COLOSSEUM BY MOONLIGHT, _by H. P. Riviere_ 37
TEMPLE OF VENUS AND RIVER FROM THE COLOSSEUM (1860), _by
H. P. Riviere_ 73
TEMPLE OF VESTA, _by H. P. Riviere_ 111
ARCH OF CONSTANTINE, _by H. P. Riviere_ 153
THE FORUM, _by H. P. Riviere_ 171
ARCH OF TITUS, _by H. P. Riviere_ 209
SANTA MARIA MAGGIORE, _by H. P. Riviere_ 247
ARCH OF DRUSUS (1860), _by H. P. Riviere_ 267
ISLAND ON TIBER, _by H. P. Riviere_ 287
THE CAPITOL, _by J. Pennell_ 317
PORTA MAGGIORE, _by H. P. Riviere_ 327
IN THE CAMPAGNA (1860), _by H. P. Riviere_ 347
ST. PETER'S AND THE CASTLE OF ST. ANGELO, _by H. P. Riviere_ 367
APPROACH TO THE CAPITOL (1860), _by H. P. Riviere_ 387
THEATRE OF MARCELLUS, _by J. Pennell_ 407
AQUA FELICE, _by H. P. Riviere_ 463
THE TARPEIAN ROCK, _by J. Pennell_ 481
ANCIENT, MEDIÆVAL, AND MODERN ROME, _by J. Pennell_ 503
MODERN ROME: SHELLEY'S TOMB, _by J. Pennell_ 519
FOUNTAIN OF TREVI, _by H. P. Riviere_ 527
SANTA MARIA DEL POPOLO, _by H. P. Riviere_ 547
PIAZZA COLONNA, _by J. Pennell_ 565
OLD ST. PETER'S, _from the engraving by Campini_ 585
MODERN ROME: THE GRAVE OF KEATS, _by J. Pennell_ 593
ILLUSTRATIONS IN TEXT.
THE COLOSSEUM, _by J. Pennell_ 1
THE PALATINE, FROM THE AVENTINE, _by J. Pennell_ 13
THE RIPETTA, _by J. Pennell_ 14
ON THE PALATINE, _by J. Pennell_ 27
THE WALLS BY ST. JOHN LATERAN, _by J. Pennell_ 29
THE TEMPLE OF VESTA, _by J. Pennell_ 42
CHURCHES ON THE AVENTINE, _by J. Pennell_ 43
THE STEPS OF THE CAPITOL, _by J. Pennell_ 51
THE LATERAN FROM THE AVENTINE, _by J. Pennell_ 64
PORTICO OF OCTAVIA, _by J. Pennell_ 65
TRINITA DE' MONTI, _by J. Pennell_ 76
FROM THE AVENTINE, _by J. Pennell_ 87
THE CAPITOL FROM THE PALATINE, _by J. Pennell_ 89
SAN BARTOLOMMEO, _by J. Pennell_ 97
ST. PETER'S, FROM THE JANICULUM, _by J. Pennell_ 103
ST. PETER'S, FROM THE PINCIO, _by J. Pennell_ 107
PORTA SAN PAOLA, _by J. Pennell_ 115
THE STEPS OF SAN GREGORIO, _by J. Pennell_ 119
VILLA DE' MEDICI, _by J. Pennell_ 133
SAN GREGORIO MAGNO, AND ST. JOHN AND ST. PAUL, _by J.
Pennell_ 145
THE PIAZZA DEL POPOLO, _by J. Pennell_ 157
MONTE PINCIO, FROM THE PIAZZA DEL POPOLO, _by J. Pennell_ 167
PONTE MOLLE, _by J. Pennell_ 180
THE PALATINE, _by J. Pennell_ 181
PYRAMID OF CAIUS CESTIUS, _by J. Pennell_ 197
TRINITA DE' MONTI, _by J. Pennell_ 207
THE VILLA BORGHESE, _by J. Pennell_ 220
WHERE THE GHETTO STOOD, _by J. Pennell_ 228
FROM SAN GREGORIO MAGNO, _by J. Pennell_ 230
IN THE VILLA BORGHESE, _by J. Pennell_ 306
THE FOUNTAIN OF THE TORTOISE, _by J. Pennell_ 307
ALL THAT IS LEFT OF THE GHETTO, _by J. Pennell_ 377
ON THE TIBER, _by J. Pennell_ 381
ON THE PINCIO, _by J. Pennell_ 402
THE LUNGARA, _by J. Pennell_ 428
PORTA DEL POPOLO (FLAMINIAN GATE), _by J. Pennell_ 459
THEATRE OF MARCELLUS, _by J. Pennell_ 460
THE BORGHESE GARDENS, _by J. Pennell_ 486
TOMB OF CECILIA METELLA, _by J. Pennell_ 493
LETTER WRITER, _by J. Pennell_ 510
PIAZZA DEL POPOLO, _by J. Pennell_ 513
ON THE PINCIO, _by J. Pennell_ 533
IN THE CORSO: CHURCH DOORS, _by J. Pennell_ 542
MODERN DEGRADATION OF A PALACE, _by J. Pennell_ 552
FOUNTAIN OF TREVI, _by J. Pennell_ 581
A BRIC-A-BRAC SHOP, _by J. Pennell_ 600
BOOK I.
HONOURABLE WOMEN NOT A FEW.
[Illustration: THE COLOSSEUM.]
BOOK I.
HONOURABLE WOMEN NOT A FEW.
CHAPTER I.
ROME IN THE FOURTH CENTURY.
There is no place in the world of which it is less necessary to
attempt description (or of which so many descriptions have been
attempted) than the once capital of that world, the supreme and
eternal city, the seat of empire, the home of the conqueror, the
greatest human centre of power and influence which our race has ever
known. Its history is unique and its position. Twice over in
circumstances and by means as different as can be imagined it has
conquered and held subject the world. All that was known to man in
their age gave tribute and acknowledgment to the Cæsars; and an
ever-widening circle, taking in countries and races unknown to the
Cæsars, have looked to the spiritual sovereigns who succeeded them as
to the first and highest of authorities on earth. The reader knows, or
at least is assisted on all hands to have some idea and conception of
the classical city--to be citizens of which was the aim of the whole
world's ambition, and whose institutions and laws, and even its
architecture and domestic customs, were the only rule of
civilisation--with its noble and grandiose edifices, its splendid
streets, the magnificence and largeness of its life; while on the
other hand most people are able to form some idea of what was the Rome
of the Popes, the superb yet squalid mediæval city with its great
palaces and its dens of poverty, and that conjunction of exuberance
and want which does not strike the eye while the bulk of a population
remains in a state of slavery. But there is a period between, which
has not attracted much attention from English writers, and which the
reader passes by as a time in which there is little desirable to dwell
upon, though it is in reality the moment of transition when the old is
about to be replaced by the new, and when already the energy and
enthusiasm of a new influence is making its appearance among the
tragic dregs and abysses of the past. An ancient civilisation dying in
the impotence of luxury and wealth from which all active power or
influence over the world had departed, and a new and profound internal
revolt, breaking up its false calm from within, before the raging
forces of another rising power had yet begun to thunder at its gates
without--form however a spectacle full of interest, especially when
the scene of so many conflicts is traversed and lighted up by the most
lifelike figures, and has left its record, both of good and evil, in
authentic and detailed chronicles, full of individual character and
life, in which the men and women of the age stand before us, occupied
and surrounded by circumstances which are very different from our
own, yet linked to us by that unfailing unity of human life and
feeling which makes the farthest off foreigner a brother, and the most
distant of our primeval predecessors like a neighbour of to-day.
The circumstances of Rome in the middle and end of the fourth century
were singular in every point of view. With all its prestige and all
its memories, it was a city from which power and the dominant forces
of life had faded. The body was there, the great town with its high
places made to give law and judgment to the world, even the officials
and executors of the codes which had dispensed justice throughout the
universe; but the spirit of dominion and empire had passed away. A
great aristocracy, accustomed to the first place everywhere, full of
wealth, full of leisure, remained; but with nothing to do to justify
this greatness, nothing but luxury, the prize and accompaniment of it,
now turned into its sole object and meaning. The patrician class had
grown by use, by the high capability to fill every post and lead every
expedition which they had constantly shown, which was their original
cause and the reason of their existence, into a position of unusual
superiority and splendour. But that reason had died away, the empire
had departed from them, the world had a new centre: and the sons of
the men who had conducted all the immense enterprises of Rome were
left behind with the burden of their great names, and the weight of
their great wealth, and nothing to do but to enjoy and amuse
themselves: no vocations to fulfil, no important public functions to
occupy their time and their powers. Such a position is perhaps the
most dreadful that can come to any class in the history of a nation.
Great and irresponsible wealth, the supremacy of high place, without
those bonds of practical affairs which, in the case of all
rulers--even of estates or of factories--preserve the equilibrium of
humanity, are instruments of degradation rather than of elevation. To
have something to do for it, something to do with it, is the
condition which alone makes boundless wealth wholesome. And this had
altogether failed in the imperial city. Pleasure and display had taken
the place of work and duty. Rome had no longer any imperial affairs in
hand. Her day was over: the absence of a court and all its intrigues
might have been little loss to any community--but that those threads
of universal dominion which had hitherto occupied them had been
transferred to other hands, and that all the struggles, the great
questions, the causes, the pleas, the ordinances of the world were now
decided and given forth at Constantinople, was ruin to the once
masters of the world. It was worse than destruction, a more dreadful
overthrow than anything that the Goths and barbarians could bring--not
death which brings a satisfaction of all necessities in making an end
of them--but that death in life which fills men's blood with cold.
The pictures left us of this condition of affairs do indeed chill the
blood. It is natural that there should be a certain amount of
exaggeration in them. We read daily in our own contemporary annals,
records of society of which we are perfectly competent to judge, that
though true to fact in many points, they give a picture too dark in
all its shadows, too garish in its lights, to afford a just view of
the state of any existing condition of things. Contemporaries know how
much to receive and how much to reject, and are apt to smile at the
possibility of any permanent impression upon the face of history being
made by lights and darks beyond the habit of nature. But yet when
every allowance has been made, the contemporary pictures of Rome at
this unhappy period leave an impression on the mind which is not
contradicted but supported and enforced by the incidents of the time
and the course of history. The populace, which had for ages been fed
and nourished upon the bread of public doles and those entertainments
of ferocious gaiety which deadened every higher sense, had sunk into
complete debasement. Honest work and honest purpose, or any hope of
improving their own position, elevating themselves or training their
children, do not seem to have existed among them. A half-ludicrous
detail, which reminds us that the true Roman had always a trifle of
pedantry in his pride, is noted with disgust and disdain even by
serious writers--which is that the common people bore no longer their
proper names, but were known among each other by nicknames, such as
those of Cabbage-eaters, Sausage-mongers, and other coarse familiar
vulgarisms. This might be pardoned to the crowd which spent its idle
days at the circus or spectacle, and its nights on the benches in the
Colosseum or in the porch of a palace; but it is difficult to
exaggerate the debasement of a populace which lived for amusement
alone, picking up the miserable morsels which kept it alive from any
chance or tainted source, without work to do or hope of amelioration.
They formed the shouting, hoarse accompaniment of every pageant, they
swarmed on the lower seats of every amphitheatre, howling much
criticism as well as boisterous applause, and keeping in fear, and
disgusted yet forced compliance with their coarse exactions, the
players and showmen who supplied their lives with an object. According
to all the representations that have reached us, nothing more degraded
than this populace--encumbering every portico and marble stair,
swarming over the benches of the Colosseum, basking in filth and
idleness in the brilliant sun of Rome, or seeking, among the empty
glories of a triumphal age gone by, a lazy shelter from it--has ever
been known.
The higher classes suffered in their way as profoundly, and with a
deeper consciousness, from the same debasing influences of stagnation.
The descriptions of their useless life of luxury are almost too
extravagant to quote. "A loose silken robe," says the critic and
historian of the time, Ammianus Marcellinus, speaking of a Roman
noble,--"for a toga of the lightest tissue would have been too heavy
for him--linen so transparent that the air blew through it, fans and
parasols to protect him from the light, a troop of eunuchs always
round him." This was the appearance and costume of a son of the great
and famous senators of Rome. "When he was not at the bath, or at the
circus to maintain the cause of some charioteer, or to inspect some
new horses, he lay half asleep upon a luxurious couch in great rooms
paved with marble, panelled with mosaic." The luxurious heat implied,
which makes the freshness of the marble, the thinness of the linen, so
desirable, as in a picture of Mr. Alma Tadema's, bids us at the same
time pause in receiving the whole of this description as
unquestionable; for Rome has its seasons in which vast chambers paved
with marble are no longer agreeable, though the manners and utterances
of the race still tend to a complete ignoring of this other side of
the picture: but yet no doubt its general features are true.
When this Sybarite went out it was upon a lofty chariot, where he
reclined negligently, showing off himself, his curled and perfumed
locks, his robes, with their wonderful embroideries and tissues of
silk and gold, to the admiration of the world; his horses' harness
were covered with ornaments of gold, his coachman armed with a golden
wand instead of a whip, and the whole equipage followed by a
procession of attendants, slaves, freedmen, eunuchs, down to the
knaves of the kitchen, the hewers of wood and drawers of water, to
give importance to the retinue, which pushed along through the streets
with all the brutality which is the reverse side of senseless display,
pushing citizens and passers-by out of the way. The dinner parties of
the evening were equally childish in their extravagance: the tables
covered with strange dishes, monsters of the sea and of the mountains,
fishes and birds of unknown kinds and unequalled size. The latter
seems to have been a special subject of pride, for we are told of the
servants bringing scales to weigh them, and notaries crowding round
with their tablets and styles to record the weight. After the feast
came a "hydraulic organ," and other instruments of corresponding
magnitude, to fill the great hall with resounding music, and
pantomimical plays and dances to enliven the dulness of the luxurious
spectators on their couches--"women with long hair, who might have
married and given subjects to the state," were thus employed, to the
indignation of the critic.
This chronicler of folly and bad manners would not be human if he
omitted the noble woman of Rome from his picture. Her rooms full of
obsequious attendants, slaves, and eunuchs, half of her time was
occupied by the monstrous toilette which annulled all natural charms
to give to the Society beauty a fictitious and artificial display of
red and white, of painted eyelids, tortured hair, and extravagant
dress. An authority still more trenchant than the heathen historian,
Jerome, describes even one of the noble ladies who headed the
Christian society of Rome as spending most of the day before the
mirror. Like the ladies of Venice in a later age, these women, laden
with ornaments, attired in cloth of gold, and with shoes that crackled
under their feet with the stiffness of metallic decorations, were
almost incapacitated from walking, even with the support of their
attendants; and a life so accoutred was naturally spent in the display
of the charms and wealth thus painfully set forth.
The fairer side of the picture, the revolt of the higher nature from
such a life, brings us into the very heart of this society: and
nothing can be more curious than the gradual penetration of a
different and indeed sharply contrary sentiment, the impulse of
asceticism and the rudest personal self-deprivation, amid a community
spoilt by such a training, yet not incapable of disgust and impatience
with the very luxury which had seemed essential to its being. The
picturesqueness and attraction of the picture lies here, as in so many
cases, chiefly on the women's side.
It is necessary to note, however, the curious mixture which existed in
this Roman society, where Christianity as a system was already strong,
and the high officials of the Church were beginning to take gradually
and by slow degrees the places abandoned by the functionaries of the
empire. Though the hierarchy was already established, and the Bishop
of Rome had assumed a special importance in the Church, Paganism still
held in the high places that sway of the old economy giving place to
the new, which is at once so desperate and so nerveless--impotence and
bitterness mingling with the false tolerance of cynicism. The worship
of the gods had dropped into a survival of certain habits of mind and
life, to which some clung with the angry revulsion of terror against a
new revolutionary power at first despised: and some held with the
loose grasp of an imaginative and poetical system, and some with a
sense of the intellectual superiority of art and philosophy over the
arguments and motives that moved the crowd. Life had ebbed away from
these religions of the past. The fictitious attempt of Julian to
re-establish the worship of the gods, and bring new blood into the
exhausted veins of the mythological system, had in reality given the
last proof of its extinction as a power in the world: but still it
remained lingering out its last, holding a place, sometimes dignified
by a gleam of noble manners and the graces of intellectual life--and
often, it must be allowed, justified by the failure of the Church to
embody that purity and elevation which its doctrines, but scarcely its
morals or life, professed. Thus the faith in Christ, often real, but
very faulty--and the faith in Apollo, almost always fictitious, but
sometimes dignified and superior--existed side by side. The father
might hold the latter with a superb indifference to its rites, and a
contemptuous tolerance for its opponents, while the mother held the
first with occasional hot impulses of devotion, and performances of
penance for the pardon of those worldly amusements and dissipations to
which she returned with all the more zest when her vigils and prayers
were over.
This conjunction of two systems so opposite in every impulse,
proceeding from foundations so absolutely contrary to each other,
could not fail to have an extraordinary effect upon the minds of the
generations moved by it, and affords, I think, an explanation of some
events very difficult to explain on ordinary principles, and
particularly the abandonment of what would appear the most
unquestionable duties, by some of the personages, especially the women
whose histories and manners fill this chapter of the great records of
Rome. Some of them deserted their children to bury themselves in the
deserts, to withdraw to the mountains, placing leagues of land and sea
between themselves and their dearest duties--why? the reader asks. At
the bidding of a priest, at the selfish impulse of that desire to save
their own souls, which in our own day at least has come to mean a
degrading motive--is the general answer. It would not be difficult,
however, to paint on the other side a picture of the struggle with the
authorities of her family for the training of a son, for the marriage
of a daughter, from which a woman might shrink with a sense of
impotence, knowing the prestige of the noble guardian against whom she
would have to contend, and all the forces of family pride, of
tradition and use and wont, that would be arrayed against her. Better
perhaps, the mother might think, to abandon that warfare, to leave the
conflict for which she was not strong enough, than to lose the love of
her child as well, and become to him the emblem of an opposing faction
attempting to turn him from those delights of youth which the
hereditary authority of his house encouraged instead of opposing. It
is difficult perhaps for the historians to take such motives into
consideration, but I think the student of human nature may feel them
to be worth a thought, and receive them as some justification, or at
least apology, for the actions of some of the Roman women who fill the
story of the time.
Unfortunately it is not possible to leave out the Church in Rome when
we collect the details of depravity and folly in Society. One cannot
but feel how robust is the faith which goes back to these ages for
guidance and example when one sees the image in St. Jerome's pages of
a period so early in the history of Christianity. "Could ye not watch
with me one hour?" our Lord said to the chosen disciples, His nearest
friends and followers, in the moment of His own exceeding anguish,
with a reproach so sorrowful, yet so conscious of the weakness of
humanity, that it silences every excuse. We may say, for a poor four
hundred years could not the Church keep the impress of His teaching,
the reality of the faith of those who had themselves fallen and
fainted, yet found grace to live and die for their Master? But four
centuries are a long time, and men are but men even with the
inheritance of Christians. They belonged to their race, their age, and
the manifold influences which modify in the crowd everything it
believes or wishes. And they were exposed to many temptations which
were doubly strong in that world to which by birth and training they
belonged. How is an ordinary man to despise wealth in the midst of a
society corrupted by it, and in which it is supreme? how learn to be
indifferent to rank and prestige in a city where without these every
other claim was trampled under foot? "The virtues of the primitive
Church," says Villemain of a still later period, "had been under the
guard of poverty and persecution: they were weak in success and
triumph. Enthusiasm became less pure, the rules of life less severe.
In the always increasing crowd of proselytes were many unworthy
persons, who turned to Christianity for reasons of ambition and
self-interest, to make way at Court, to appear faithful to the
emperor. The Church, enriched at once by the spoil of the temples and
the offerings of the Christian crowd, began to clothe itself in
profane magnificence." Those who attained the higher clerical honours
were sure, according to the evidence of Ammianus, "of being enriched
by the offerings of the Roman ladies, and drove forth like noblemen in
lofty chariots, clothed magnificently, and sat down at tables worthy
of kings." The Church, endowed in an earlier period by converts, who
offered sometimes all their living for the sustenance of the community
which gave them home and refuge, had continued to receive the gifts of
the pious after the rules of ordinary life regained their force; and
now when she had yielded to a great extent to the prevailing
temptations of the age, found a large means of endowment in the gifts
of deathbed repentance and the weakness of dying penitents, of which
she was reputed to take large advantage: wealth grew within her
borders, and luxury with it, according to the example of surrounding
society. It is Jerome himself who reports the saying of one of the
highest of Roman officials to Bishop Damasus. "If you will undertake
to make me Bishop of Rome, I will be a Christian to-morrow." Not even
the highest place in the Government was so valuable and so great. It
is Jerome also who traces for us--the fierce indignation of his
natural temper, mingling with an involuntary perception of the
ludicrous side of the picture--a popular young priest of his time,
whose greatest solicitude was to have perfumed robes, a well fitting
shoe, hair beautifully curled, and fingers glittering with jewels, and
who walked on tip-toe lest he should soil his feet.
"What are these men? To those who see them pass they are
more like bridegrooms than priests. Some among them devote
their life and energies to the single object of knowing the
names, the houses, the habits, the disposition of all the
ladies in Rome. I will sketch for you, dear Eustochium, in
a few lines, the day's work of one of them, great in the
arts of which I speak, that by means of the master you may
the more easily recognise his disciples.
"Our hero rises with the sun: he regulates the order of his
visits, studies the shortest ways, and arrives before he is
wanted, almost before his friends are awake. If he
perceives anything that strikes his fancy, a pretty piece
of furniture or an elegant marble, he gazes at it, praises
it, turns it over in his hands, and grieves that he has not
one like it--thus extorting rather than obtaining the
object of his desires; for what woman would not hesitate to
offend the universal gossip of the town? Temperance,
modesty (_castitas_), and fasting are his sworn enemies. He
smells out a feast and loves savoury meats.
"Wherever one goes one is sure to meet him; he is always
there before you. He knows all the news, proclaims it in an
authoritative tone, and is better informed than any one
else can be. The horses which carry him to the four
quarters of Rome in pursuit of this honest task are the
finest you can see anywhere; you would say he was the
brother of that King of Thrace known in story by the speed
of his coursers.
"This man," adds the implacable satirist in another letter,
"was born in the deepest poverty, brought up under the
thatch of a peasant's cottage, with scarcely enough of
black bread and millet to satisfy the cravings of his
appetite; yet now he is fastidious and hard to please,
disdaining honey and the finest flour. An expert in the
science of the table, he knows every kind of fish by name,
and whence come the best oysters, and what district
produces the birds of finest savour. He cares only for what
is rare and unwholesome. In another kind of vice he is not
less remarkable; his mania is to lie in wait for old men
and women without children. He besieges their beds when
they are ill, serves them in the most disgusting offices,
more humble and servile than any nurse. When the doctor
enters he trembles, asking with a faltering voice how the
patient is, if there is any hope of saving him. If there is
any hope, if the disease is cured, the priest disappears
with regrets for his loss of time, cursing the wretched old
man who insists on living to be as old as Methusalem."
The last accusation, which has been the reproach of the Church in many
different ages, had just been specially condemned by a law of the
Emperor Valentinian I., declaring null and void all legacies made to
priests, a law which called forth Jerome's furious denunciation, not
of itself, but of the abuse which called it forth. This was a graver
matter than the onslaught upon the curled darlings of the priesthood,
more like bridegrooms than priests, who carried the news from boudoir
to boudoir, and laid their entertainers under contribution for the
bibelots and ancient bric-a-brac which their hearts desired. Thus
wherever the eye turned there was nothing but luxury and the love of
luxury, foolish display, extravagance and emulation in all the arts of
prodigality, a life without gravity, without serious occupation, with
nothing in it to justify the existence of those human creatures
standing between earth and heaven, and capable of so many better
things. The revulsion, a revulsion inspired by disgust and not without
extravagance in its new way, was sure to come.
[Illustration: THE PALATINE, FROM THE AVENTINE.]
[Illustration: THE RIPETTA.]
CHAPTER II.
THE PALACE ON THE AVENTINE.
The strong recoil of human nature from those fatal elements which time
after time have threatened the destruction of all society is one of
the noblest things in history, as it is one of the most divine in
life. There are evidences that it exists even in the most wicked
individuals, and it very evidently comes uppermost in every
commonwealth from century to century to save again and again from
utter debasement a community or a nation. When depravity becomes the
rule instead of the exception, and sober principle appears on the
point of yielding altogether to the whirl of folly or the thirst of
self-indulgence, then it may always be expected that some ember of
divine indignation, some thrill of high disgust with the miserable
satisfactions of the world will kindle in one quarter or another and
set light to a thousand smouldering tires over all the face of the
earth. It is one of the highest evidences of that charter of our being
which is our most precious possession, the reflection of that image of
God which amid all degradations still holds its place in human nature,
and will not be destroyed. We may mourn indeed that so short a span of
centuries had so effaced the recollection of the brightest light that
ever shone among men, as to make the extravagance of a human revulsion
and revolution necessary in order to preserve and restore the better
life of Christendom. At the same time it is our salvation as a race
that such revolutions, however imperfect they may be in themselves,
are sure to come.
This revulsion from vice, degradation, and evil of every kind, public
and personal, had already come with the utmost excess of
self-punishment and austerity in the East, where already the deserts
were mined with caverns and holes in the sand, to which hermits and
coenobites, the one class scarcely less exalted in religious passion
and suffering than the other, had escaped from the current of evil
which they did not feel themselves capable of facing, and lived and
starved and agonised for the salvation of their own souls and for a
world lying in wickedness. The fame of the Thebaid and its saints and
martyrs, slowly making itself known through the great distances and
silences, had already breathed over the world, when Athanasius, driven
by persecution from his see and his country, came to Rome, accompanied
by two of the monks whose character was scarcely understood as yet in
the West, and bringing with him his own book, the life of St. Antony
of the desert, a work which had as great an effect in that time as the
most popular of publications, spread over the world in thousands of
copies, could have now. It puzzles the modern reader to think how a
book should thus have moved the world and revolutionised hundreds of
lives, while it existed only in manuscript and every example had to be
carefully and tediously copied before it could touch even those who
were wealthy enough to secure themselves such a luxury. What readings
in common, what earnest circles of auditors, what rapt intense hanging
upon the lips of the reader, there must have been before any work,
even the most sacred, penetrated to the crowd!--but to us no doubt the
process seems more slow and difficult than it really was when scribes
were to be found everywhere, and manuscripts were treated with
reverence and respect. When Athanasius found refuge in Rome, which was
during the pontificate, or rather--for the full papal authority had as
yet been claimed by no one--the primacy--of Liberius, and about the
year 341, he was received by all that was best in Rome with great
hospitality and sympathy. Rome so far as it was Christian was entirely
orthodox, the Arian heresy having gained no part of the Christian
society there--and a man of genius and imposing character, who brought
into that stagnant atmosphere the breath of a larger world, who had
shared the councils of the emperor and lived in the cells of Egypt--an
orator, a traveller, an exile, with every kind of interest attaching
to him, was such a visitor as seldom appeared in the city deserted by
empire. Something like the man who nine centuries later went about the
Italian streets with the signs upon him of one who had been through
heaven and hell, the Eastern bishop must have appeared to the languid
citizens, with the brown of the desert still on his cheeks, yet
something of the air of a courtly prelate, a friend of princes; while
his attendants, one with all the wildness of a hermit from the desert
in his eyes and aspect, in the unfamiliar robe and cowl--and the other
mild and young like the ideal youth, shy and simple as a girl--were
wonderful apparitions in the fatigued and _blasé_ society, which
longed above everything for something new, something real, among all
the mocks and shows of their impotent life.
One of the houses in which Athanasius and his monks were most welcome
was the palace of a noble widow, Albina, who lived the large and
luxurious life of her class in the perfect freedom of a Roman matron,
Christian, yet with no idea in her mind of retirement from the world,
or renunciation of its pleasures. A woman of a more or less
instructive mind and lively intelligence, she received with the
greatest interest and pleasure these strangers who had so much to
tell, the great bishop flying from his enemies, the monks from the
desert. That she and her circle gathered round him with that rapt and
flattering attention which not the most abstracted saint any more than
the sternest general can resist, is evident from the story, and it
throws a gleam of softer light upon the impassioned theologian who
stood fast, "I, Athanasius, against the world" for that mysterious
splendour of the Trinity, against which the heretical East had risen.
In the Roman lady's withdrawingroom, in his dark and flowing Eastern
robes, we find him amid the eager questionings of the women,
describing to them the strange life of the desert which it was such a
wonder to hear of--the evensong that rose as from every crevice of the
earth, while the Egyptian after-glow burned in one great circle of
colour round the vast globe of sky, diffusing an illumination weird
and mystic over the fantastic rocks and dark openings where the
singers lived unseen. What a picture to be set before that soft, eager
circle, half rising from silken couches, clothed with tissues of gold,
blazing with jewels, their delicate cheeks glowing in artificial red
and white, their crisped and curled tresses surmounted by the
fantastic towering headdress which weighed them down!
Among the ladies was the child of the house, the little girl who was
her mother's excuse for retaining the freedom of her widowhood,
Marcella: a thoughtful and pensive child, devouring all these
wonderful tales, listening to everything and laying up a store of
silent resolutions and fancies in her heart. Her elder sister Asella
would seem to have already secluded herself in precocious devotion
from the family, or at least is not referred to. The story which
touched the general mind of the time with so strange and strong an
enthusiasm, fell into the virgin soil of this young spirit like the
seed of a new life. But the little Roman maiden was no ascetic. She
had evidently no impulse, as some young devotees have had, to set out
barefoot in search of suffering. When Athanasius left Rome, he left in
the house which had received him so kindly his life of St. Antony, the
first copy which had been seen in the Western world. This manuscript,
written perhaps by the hand of one of those wonderful monks, the
strangest figures in her luxurious world whom Marcella knew, became
the treasure of her youth. Such a present, at such a time, was enough
to occupy the visionary silence of a girl's life, often so full of
dreams unknown and unsearchable even to her nearest surroundings. She
went through however the usual routine of a young lady's life in Rome.
Madame Albina the mother, though full of interest and curiosity in
respect to all things intellectual and Christian, held still more
dearly a mother's natural desire to see her only remaining child nobly
married and established in the splendour and eminence to which she was
born. We are told that Marcella grew up to be one of the beauties of
Rome, but as this is an inalienable qualification of all these
beautiful souls, it is not necessary to believe that the "insignem
decorem corporis" meant any extraordinary distinction. She carried out
at all events her natural fate and married a rich and noble husband,
of whom however we know no details, except that he died some months
after, leaving her without child or tie to the ordinary life of the
world, in all the freedom of widowhood, at a very early age.
Thus placed in full command of her fate, she never seems to have
hesitated as to what she should do with herself. She was, as a matter
of course, assailed by many new suitors, among whom her historian, who
is no other than St. Jerome himself, makes special mention of the
exceptionally wealthy Cerealis ("whose name is great among the
consuls"), and who was so splendid a suitor that the fact that he was
old scarcely seems to have told against him. Marcella's refusal of
this great match and of all the others offered to her, offended and
alienated her friends and even her mother, and there followed a moment
of pain and perplexity in her life. She is said to have made a
sacrifice of a part of her possessions to relatives to whom, failing
herself, it fell to keep up the continuance of the family name, hoping
thus to secure their tolerance. And she acquired the reputation of an
eccentric, and probably of a _poseuse_, so general in all times when a
young woman forsakes the beaten way, as she had done by giving up the
ridiculous fashions and toilettes of the time, putting aside the rouge
and antimony, the disabling splendour of cloth of gold, and assuming a
simple dress of a dark colour, a thing which shocked her generation
profoundly. The gossip rose and flew from mouth to mouth among the
marble salons where the Roman ladies languished for a new subject, or
in the ante-rooms, where young priests and deacons awaited or
forestalled the awakening of their patronesses. It might be the Hôtel
Rambouillet of which we are reading, and a fine lady taking refuge at
Port Royal who was being discussed and torn to pieces in those antique
palaces. What was the meaning that lay beneath that brown gown? Was it
some unavowed disappointment, or, more exciting still, some secret
intrigue, some low-placed love which she dared not acknowledge?
Withdrawn into a villa had she, into the solitude of a suburban
garden, hid from every eye? and who then was the companion of
Marcella's solitude? The ladies who discussed her had small faith in
austerities, nor in the desire of a young and attractive woman to live
altogether alone.
It is very likely that Marcella herself, as well as her critics, soon
began to feel that the mock desert into which she had made the gardens
of her villa was indeed a fictitious way of living the holy life, and
the calumny was more ready and likely to take hold of this artificial
retirement, than of a course of existence led within sight of the
world. She finally took a wiser and more reasonable way. Her natural
home was a palace upon the Aventine to which she returned,
consecrating a portion of it to pious uses, a chapel for common
worship and much accommodation for the friends of similar views and
purposes who immediately began to gather about her. It is evident that
there were already many of these women in the best society of Rome. A
lively sentiment of feminine society, of the multiplied and endless
talks, consultations, speculations, of a community of women, open to
every pleasant curiosity and quick to every new interest, rises
immediately before us in that first settlement of monasticism--or, as
the ecclesiastical historians call it, the first convent of Rome,
before our eyes. It was not a convent after all so much as a large and
hospitable feminine house, possessing the great luxury of beautiful
rooms and furniture, and the liberal ways of a large and wealthy
family, with everything that was most elegant, most cultured, most
elevated, as well as most devout and pious. The "Souls," to use our
own jargon of the moment, would seem indeed to have been more truly
represented there than the Sisters of our modern understanding, though
we may acknowledge that there are few communities of Sisters in which
this element does not more or less flourish. Christian ladies who were
touched like herself with the desire of a truer and purer life,
gathered about her, as did the French ladies about Port Royal, and
women of the same class everywhere, wherever a woman of influential
character leads the way.
The character and position of these ladies was not perhaps so much
different as we might suppose from those of the court of Louis XIV. or
any other historical period in which great luxuries and much
dissipation had sickened the heart of all that was good and noble. Yet
there were very special characteristics in their lot. Some of them
were the wives of pagan officials of the empire, holding a sometimes
devious and always agitated course through the troubles of a divided
household: and there were many young widows perplexed with projects of
remarriage, of whom some would be tempted by the prospects of a
triumphant re-entry into the full enjoyments of life, although a
larger number were probably resistant and alarmed, anxious to retain
their freedom, or to devote themselves as Marcella had done to a
higher life. Women of fashion not unwilling to add a devotion _à la
mode_ to their other distractions, women of intellectual aspirations,
lovers of the higher education, seekers after a society altogether
brilliant and new, without any special emotions of religious feeling,
no doubt filled up the ranks. "A society," says Thierry, in his _Life
of Jerome_, "of rich and influential women, belonging for the great
part to patrician families, thus organised itself, and the oratory on
the Aventine became a seat of lay influence and power which the clergy
themselves were soon compelled to reckon with."
The heads of the community bore the noblest names in Rome, which
however at that period of universal deterioration was not always a
guarantee of noble birth, since the greatest names were sometimes
assumed with the slenderest of claims to their honours. Marcella's
sister, Asella, older than the rest, and a sort of mother among them,
had for a long time before "lived the life" in obscurity and
humbleness, and several others not remarkable in the record, were
prominent associates. The actual members of the community, however,
are not so much remarked or dwelt upon as the visitors who came and
went, not all of them of consistent religious character, ladies of the
great world. One of these, Fabiola, affords an amusing episode in the
graver tale, the contrast of a butterfly of society, a _grande dame_
of fascinating manners, airs, and graces, unfortunate in her husbands,
of whom she had two, one of them divorced--and not quite unwilling to
divorce the second and try her luck again. Another, one of the most
important of all in family and pretensions, and by far the most
important in history of these constant visitors, was Paula, a
descendant (collateral, the link being of the lightest and easiest
kind, as was characteristic of the time) of the great Æmilius Paulus,
the daughter of a distinguished Greek who claimed to be descended from
Agamemnon, and widow of another who claimed Æneas as his ancestor.
These large claims apart, she was certainly a great lady in every
sense of the word, delicate, luxurious, following all the fashions of
the time. She too was a widow, with a family of young daughters, in
that enviable state of freedom which the Roman ladies give every sign
of having used and enjoyed to the utmost, the only condition in which
they were quite at liberty to regulate their own fate. Paula is the
most interesting of the community, as she is the one of whom we know
the most. No fine lady more exquisite, more fastidious, more splendid
than she. Not even her Christianity had beguiled her from the
superlative finery of her Roman habits. She was one of the fine ladies
who could not walk abroad without the support of her servants, nor
scarcely cross the marble floor from one silken couch to another
without tottering, as well she might, under the weight of the heavy
tissues interwoven with gold, of which her robes were made. A widow at
thirty-five, she was still in full possession of the charms of
womanhood, and the sunshine of life (though we are told that her grief
for her husband was profound and sincere)--with her young daughters
growing up round her, more like her sisters than her children, and
sharing every thought. Blæsilla, the eldest, a widow at twenty, was,
like her mother, a Roman exquisite, loving everything that was
beautiful and soft and luxurious. In the affectionate gibes of the
family she is described as spending entire days before her mirror,
giving herself up to all the extravagances of dress and personal
decoration, the tower of curls upon her head, the touch of rouge on
her cheeks. A second daughter, Paulina, was on the eve of marriage
with a young patrician, as noble, as rich, and, as was afterwards
proved, as devoutly Christian as the family into which he married. The
third member of the family, Eustochium, a girl of sixteen, of a
character contrasting strongly with those of her beautiful mother and
sister, a saint from her birth, was the favourite, and almost the
child, of Marcella, instructed by her from her earliest years, and had
already fixed her choice upon a monastic life, and would seem to have
been a resident in the Aventine palace to which the others were such
frequent visitors. Of all this delightful and brilliant party she is
the one born recluse, severe in youthful virtue, untouched by any of
the fascinations of the world. The following very pretty and graphic
story is told of her, in which we have a curious glimpse into the
strangely mixed society of the time.
The family of Paula though Christian, and full of religious fervour,
or at least imbued with the new spirit of revolt against the
corruption of the time, was closely connected with the still existing
pagan society of Rome. Her sister-in-law, sister of her husband and
aunt of her children, was a certain lady named Prætextata, the wife of
Hymettius, a high official under the Emperor Julian the Apostate, both
of them belonging, with something of the fictitious enthusiasm of
their master, to the faith of the old gods. No doubt one of the
severest critics of that society on the Aventine, Prætextata saw with
impatience and wrath, what no doubt she considered the artificial
gravity, inspired by her surroundings, of the young niece who had
already announced her intention never to marry, and to withdraw
altogether from the world. Such resolutions on the part of girls who
know nothing of the world they abandon have exasperated the most
devout of parents, and it was not wonderful if this pagan lady thought
it preposterous. The little plot which she formed against the serious
girl was, however, of the most good-natured and innocent kind. Finding
that words had no effect upon her, the elder lady invited Eustochium
to her house on a visit. The young vestal came all unsuspicious in her
little brown gown, the costume of humility, but had scarcely entered
her aunt's house when she was seized by the caressing and flattering
hands of the attendants, interested in the plot as the favourite maids
of such an establishment would be, who unloosed her long hair and
twisted it into curls and plaits, took away her humble dress, clothed
her in silk and cloth of gold, covered her with ornaments and led her
before the mirror which reflected all these charms, to dazzle her eyes
with the apparition of herself, so different from the schoolroom
figure with which she was acquainted. The little plot was clever as
well as innocent, and might, no doubt, have made a heart of sixteen
beat high. But Eustochium with her Greek name, and her virgin heart,
was the grave girl we all know, the one here and there among the
garden of girls, born to a natural seriousness which is beyond such
temptations. She let them turn her round and round, received sweetly
in her gentle calm the applauses of the collected household, looked at
her image in the mirror as at a picture--and went home again in her
little brown gown with her story to tell, which, no doubt, was an
endless amusement and triumph to the ladies on the Aventine, repeated
to every new-comer with many a laugh at the foolishness of the clever
aunt who had hoped by such means to seduce Eustochium--Eustochium, the
most serious of them all!
Such was the first religious community in Rome. It was the natural
home of Marcella to which her friends gathered, without in most cases
deserting their own palaces, or forsaking their own place in the
world--a centre and home of the heart, where they met constantly, the
residents ever ready to receive, not only their closer associates, but
all the society of Roman ladies, who might be attracted by the higher
aspirations of intellect and piety. Not a stone exists of that noble
mansion now, but it is supposed to have stood close to the existing
church of Sta. Sabina, an unrivalled mount of vision. From that mount
now covered with so many ruins the ladies looked out upon the yet
unbroken splendour of the city, Tiber far below sweeping round under
the walls. Palatinus, with the "white roofs" of that home to which
Horatius looked before he plunged into the yellow river, still stood
intact at their right hand: and, older far, and longer surviving, the
wealth of nature, the glory of the Roman sky and air, the
white-blossomed daphne and the starry myrtle, and those roses which
are as ancient inhabitants of the world as any we know flinging their
glories about the marble balustrades and making the terraces sweet.
There would they walk and talk, the recluses at ease and simple in
their brown gowns, the great ladies uneasy under the weight of their
toilettes, but all eager to hear, to tell, to read the last letter
from the East, from the desert or the cloister, to exchange their
experiences and plan their charities. There is nothing ascetic in the
picture, which is a very different one from that of those austere
solitudes of the desert, which had suggested and inspired it--the lady
Paula tottering in, with a servant on either side to conduct her to
the nearest couch, and young Blæsilla making a brilliant irruption in
all her bravery, with her jewels sparkling and her transparent veil
floating, and her golden heels tapping upon the marble floor. This is
not how we understand the atmosphere of a convent; yet, if fact were
taken into due consideration, the greatest convents have been very
like it, in all ages--the finest ladies having always loved that
intercourse and contrast, half envious of the peace of their
cloistered sisters, half pleased to dazzle them with a splendour which
never could be theirs.
"No fixed rule," says Thierry, in his _Life of St. Jerome_,
"existed in this assembly, where there was so much
individuality, and where monastic life was not even
attempted. They read the Holy Scriptures together, sang
psalms, organised good works, discussed the condition of
the Church, the progress of spiritual life in Italy and in
the provinces, and kept up a correspondence with the
brothers and sisters outside of a more strictly monastic
character. Those of the associates who carried on the
ordinary life of the world came from time to time to
refresh their spirits in these holy meetings, then returned
to their families. Those who were free gave themselves up
to devotional exercises, according to their taste and
inclination, and Marcella retired into her desert. In a
short time these exercises were varied by the pursuit of
knowledge. All Roman ladies of rank knew a little Greek, if
only to be able to say to their favourites, according to
the _mot_ of Juvenal, repeated by a father of the Church,
[Greek: Zôê kai psuchê], my life and my soul: the Christian
ladies studied it better and with a higher motive. Several
later versions of the Old and New Testament were in general
circulation in Italy, differing considerably from each
other, and this very difference interested anxious minds in
referring to the original Greek for the Gospels, and for
the Hebrew books to the Greek of the Septuagint, the
favourite guide of Western translators. The Christian
ladies accordingly set themselves to perfect their
knowledge of Greek, and many, among whom were Marcella and
Paula, added the Hebrew language, in order that they might
sing the psalms in the very words of the prophet-king.
Marcella even became, by intelligent comparison of the
texts, so strong in exegetical knowledge that she was often
consulted by the priests themselves."
It was about the year 380 that this establishment was formed. "The
desert of Marcella" above referred to was, as the reader will
remember, a great garden in a suburb of Rome, which she had pleased
herself by allowing to run wild, and where occasionally this great
Roman lady played at a hermit's life in solitude and abstinence.
Paula's desert, perhaps not so easy a one, was in her own house,
where, besides the three daughters already mentioned, she had a
younger girl Rufina, not yet of an age to show any marked tendencies,
and a small boy Toxotius, her only son, who was jealously looked after
by his pagan relatives, to keep him from being swept away by this tide
of Christianity.
[Illustration: ON THE PALATINE.]
Such was the condition of the circle on the Aventine, when a great
event happened in Rome. Following many struggles and disasters in the
East, chiefly the continually recurring misfortune of a breach of
unity, a diocese here and there exhibiting its freedom by choosing two
bishops representing different parties at the same time, and thus
calling for the exercise of some central authority--Pope Damasus had
called a council in Rome. He was so well qualified to be a judge in
such cases that he had himself won his see at the point of the sword,
after a stoutly contested fight in which much blood was shed, and the
church of S. Lorenzo, the scene of the struggle, was besieged and
taken like a castle. If he had hoped by this means to establish the
universal authority of his see, a pretension as yet undeveloped, it
was immediately forestalled by the Bishop of Constantinople, who at
once called together a rival council in that place. The Council of
Rome, however, is of so much more importance to us that it called into
full light in the Western world the great and remarkable figure of
Jerome: and still more to our record of the Roman ladies of the
Aventine, since it suddenly introduced to them the man whose name is
for ever connected with theirs, who is supposed erroneously, as the
reader will see, to have been the founder of their community, but who
henceforward became its most trusted leader and guide in the spiritual
life.
[Illustration: THE WALLS BY ST. JOHN LATERAN.]
CHAPTER III.
MELANIA.
It may be well, however, before continuing this narrative to tell the
story of another Roman lady, not of their band, nor in any harmony
with them, which had already echoed through the Christian world, a
wild romance of enthusiasm and adventure in which the breach of all
the decorums of life was no less remarkable than the abandonment of
its duties. Some ten years before the formation of Marcella's
religious household (the dates are of the last uncertainty) a young
lady of Rome, of Spanish origin, rich and noble and of the highest
existing rank, found herself suddenly left in the beginning of a
splendid and happy life, in desolation and bereavement. Her husband,
whose name is unrecorded, died early leaving her with three little
children, and shortly after, while yet unrecovered from this crushing
blow, another came upon her in the death of her two eldest children,
one following the other. The young woman, only twenty-three, thus
terribly stricken, seems to have been roused into a fever of
excitement and passion by a series of disasters enough to crush any
spirit. It is recorded of her that she neither wept nor tore her hair,
but advancing towards the crucifix with her arms extended, her head
high, her eyes tearless, and something like a smile upon her lips,
thanked God who had now delivered her from all ties and left her free
to serve Himself. Whether she had previously entertained this desire,
or whether it was only the despair of the distracted mother which
expressed itself in such words, we are not told. In the haste and
restlessness of her anguish she arranged everything for a great
funeral, and placing the three corpses on one bier followed them to
Rome to the family mausoleum alone, holding her infant son, the only
thing left to her, in her arms. The populace of Rome, eager for any
public show, had crowded upon the course of many a triumph, and
watched many a high-placed Cæsar return in victory to the applauding
city, but never had seen such a triumphal procession as this, Death
the Conqueror leading his captives. We are not told whether it was
attended by the overflowing charities, extravagant doles and offerings
to the poor with which other mourners attempted to assuage their
grief, or whether Melania's splendour and solitude of mourning was
unsoftened by any ministrations of charity; but the latter is more in
accordance with the extraordinary fury and passion of grief, as of a
woman injured and outraged by heaven to which she thus called the
attention of the spheres.
The impression made by that funeral splendour and by the sight of the
young woman following tearless and despairing with her one remaining
infant in her arms, had not faded from the minds of the spectators
when it was rumoured through Rome that Melania had abandoned her one
remaining tie to life and gone forth into the outside world no one
knew where, leaving her child so entirely without any arrangement for
its welfare that the official charged with the care of orphans had to
select a guardian for this son of senators and consuls as if he had
been a nameless foundling. What bitterness of soul lay underneath such
an incomprehensible desertion, who could say? It might be a sense of
doom such as overwhelms some sensitive minds, as if everything
belonging to them were fated and nothing left them but the tragic
expedient of Hagar in the desert, "Let me not see the child die."
Perhaps the courage of the heartbroken young woman sank before the
struggle with pagan relations, who would leave no stone unturned to
bring up this last scion of the family in the faith or no-faith of his
ancestors; perhaps she was in reality devoid of those maternal
instincts which make the child set upon the knee the best comforter of
the woman to whom they have brought home her warrior dead. This was
the explanation given by the world which tore the unhappy Melania to
pieces and held her up to universal indignation. Not even the
Christians already touched with the enthusiasm and passion of the
pilgrim and ascetic could justify the sudden and mysterious
disappearance of a woman who still had so strong a natural bond to
keep her in her home. But whatever the character of Melania might be,
whether destitute of tenderness, or only distracted by grief and
bereavement, and hastening to take her fatal shadow away from the
cradle of her child, she was at least invulnerable to any argument or
persuasion. "God will take care of him better than I can," she said as
she left the infant to his fate. It was probably a better one than had
he been the charge of this apparently friendless young woman, with her
pagan relations, her uncompromising enthusiasm and self-will, and with
all the risks surrounding her feet which made the path of a young
widow in Rome so full of danger; but it is fortunate for the world
that few mothers are capable of counting those risks or of turning
their backs upon a duty which is usually their best consolation.
There is, however, an interest in the character and proceedings of
such an exceptional woman which has always excited the world, and
which the thoughtful spectator will scarcely dismiss with the common
imputation of simple heartlessness and want of feeling. Melania was a
proud patrician notwithstanding that she flung from her every trace of
earthly rank or wealth, and a high-spirited, high-tempered individual
notwithstanding her subsequent plunge into the most self-abasing
ministrations of charity. And these features of character were not
altered by her sudden renunciation of all things. She went forth a
masterful personage determined, though no doubt unconsciously, to sway
all circumstances to her will, though in the utmost self-denial and
with all the appearances and surroundings of humility. This is a
paradox which meets us on every side, in the records of such
world-abandonment as are familiar in every history of the beginnings
of the monastic system, in which continually both men and women give
up all things while giving up nothing, and carry their individual will
and way through circumstances which seem to preclude the exercise of
either.
The disappearance of Melania made a great sensation in Rome, and no
doubt discouraged Christian zeal and woke doubts in many minds even
while proving to others the height of sacrifice which could be made
for the faith. On the other hand the adversary had boundless occasion
to blaspheme and denounce the doctrines which, as he had some warrant
for saying, thus struck at the very basis of society and weakened
every bond of nature. What more dreadful influence could be than one
which made a woman forsake her child, the infant whom she had carried
in her arms to the great funeral, in the sight of all Rome, the son
of her sorrow? Nobody except a hot-headed enthusiast could take her
part even among her fellow-Christians, nor does it appear that she
sought any support or made any apology for herself. Jerome, then a
young student and scholar from the East, was in Rome, in obscurity,
still a catechumen preparing for his baptism, at the time of Melania's
flight; and though there is no proof that he was even known to her,
and no probability that so unknown a person could have anything to do
with her resolution, or could have influenced her mind, it was
suggested in later times when he was well known, that probably he had
much to do--who can tell if not the most powerful and guilty of
motives?--in determining her flight. Such a vulgar explanation is
always adapted to the humour of the crowd, and gives an easy solution
of the problems which are otherwise so difficult to solve. As a matter
of fact these two personages, not unlike each other in force and
spirit, had much to do with each other, though mostly in a hostile
sense, in the after part of their life.
We find Melania again in Egypt, to which presumably she at once
directed her flight as the headquarters of austere devotion and
self-sacrifice, on leaving Rome--alone so far as appears. This was in
the year 372 (nothing can be more delightful than to encounter from
time to time a date, like an angel, in the vague wilderness of letters
and narratives), when Athanasius the great Bishop was near his end.
The young fugitive, whose arrival in Alexandria would not be attended
by such mystery as shrouded her departure from Rome, was received
kindly by the dying saint, to whom she had probably been known in her
better days, and who in his enthusiasm for the life of monastic
privation and sacrifice probably considered her flight and her
resolution alike inspired by heaven. He gave her, let us hope, his
blessing, and much good counsel--in addition to the sacred sheepskin
which had formed the sole garment of the holy Macarius in his cell in
the desert, which she carried away with her as her most valued
possession. The great Roman lady then pursued her way into the
wilderness, which was indeed a wilderness rather in name than in fact,
being peopled on every side by communities both of men and women,
while in every rocky fissure and cavern were hermits jealously shut
each in his hole, the more inaccessible the better. Nothing can be
more contradictory than the terms used. This desert of solitaries gave
forth the evening hymn over all its extent as if the very sands and
rocks sang, so many were the unseen worshippers. And the traveller
went into the wilderness alone so to speak, in the utmost
self-abnegation and humility, yet attended by an endless retinue of
servants whose attendance was indispensable, if only to convey and
protect the store of provisions and presents which she carried with
her.
The conception of a lonely figure on the edge of a trackless sandy
waste facing all perils, and encountering perhaps after toilsome days
of solitude a still more lonely anchorite in his cell, to give her the
hospitality of a handful of peas, and a shrine of prayer, which is the
natural picture which rises before us--changes greatly when the
details are examined. Melania evidently travelled with a great
caravanserai, with camels laden with grain and every kind of provision
that was necessary to sustain life in those regions. The times were
more troublous even than usual. The death of Athanasius was the signal
for one of those outbursts of persecution which rent the Christian
world in its very earliest ages, and which alas! the Church herself
has never been slow to learn the use of. The underground or overground
population of the Egyptian desert was orthodox; the powers that were,
were Arian; and hermits and coenobites alike were hunted out of
their refuges and dragged before tribunals, where their case was
decided before it was heard and every ferocity used against them. In a
country so rent by the most violent of agitations Melania passed like
an angel of charity. She became the providence of the hunted and
suffering monks. She is said for a short period to have provided for
five thousand in Nitria, which proves that however secret her
disappearance from Rome had been, her address as we should say must
have been well known to her bankers, or their equivalent. Thus it is
evident that a robe of sackcloth need not necessarily imply poverty,
much less humility, and that a woman may ride about on the most sorry
horse (chosen it would seem because it was a more abject thing than
the well-conditioned ass of the East) and yet demean herself like a
princess.
There is one story told of this primitive Lady Bountiful by Palladius
which if it did not recall the action of St. Paul in somewhat similar
circumstances would be highly picturesque. The proconsul in Palestine,
not at all aware who was the pestilent woman who persisted in
supplying and defending the population of the religious which it was
his mission to get rid of--even going so far as to visit and nourish
them in his prisons--had her arrested to answer for her interference.
There is nothing more likely than that Melania remembered the method
adopted by St. Paul to bring his judges to his feet. She sent the
consul a message in which a certain compassionate scorn mingles with
pride. "You esteem me by my present dress," she said, "which it is
quite in my power to change when I will. Take care lest you bring
yourself into trouble by what you do in your ignorance." This incident
happened at Cæsarea, the great city on the Mediterranean shore which
Herod had built, and where the prodigious ruins still lie in sombre
grandeur capable of restoration to the uses of life. The governor of
the Syrian city trembled in his gilded chair. The names which Melania
quoted were enough to unseat him half a dozen times over, though,
truth to tell, they are not very clearly revealed to the distant
student. He hastened to set free the sunburnt pilgrim in her brown
gown, and leave her to her own devices. "One must answer a fool
according to his folly," she said disdainfully, as she accepted her
freedom. This lady's progress through the haunted deserts, her
entrance into town after town, with the shield of rank ready for use
in any emergency, attended by continual supplies from the stewards of
her estates, and the power of shedding abundance round her wherever
she went, could hardly be said to merit the rewards of privation and
austerity even if her delicate feet were encased in rude sandals and
the cloth of gold replaced by a tunic of rough wool.
[Illustration: COLOSSEUM BY MOONLIGHT.
_To face page 36._]
Melania had been, presumably for some time before this incident,
accompanied by a priest named Rufinus, a fellow-countryman,
schoolfellow and dear friend of Jerome, the future Father of the
Church, at this period a young religious adventurer if we may use the
word:--which indeed seems the only description applicable to the bands
of young, devout enthusiasts, who roamed about the world, not bound to
any special duties, supporting themselves one knows not how, aiming at
one knows not what, except some devotion of mystical religious life,
or indefinite Christian service to the world. The object of saving
their souls was perhaps for most the prevailing object, and the
greater part of them had at least passed a year or two in those
Eastern deserts where renunciation of the world had been pushed to its
furthest possibilities. But they were also hungry for learning, for
knowledge, for disciples, and full of that activity of youth which is
bound to go everywhere and see everything whether with possible means
and motives or not. Whatever they were, they were not so far as can be
made out missionaries in any sense of the word. They were received
wherever they went, in devout households here and there, in any of the
early essays at monasteries which existed by bounty and Christian
charity, among the abounding dependents of great houses, or by the
bishop or other ecclesiastical functionary. They were this man's
secretary, that man's tutor--seldom so far as we can see were they
employed as chaplains. Rufinus indeed was a priest, but few of the
others were so, Jerome himself only having consented to be ordained
from courtesy, and in no way fulfilling the duties of the priesthood.
There were, however, many offices no doubt appropriate to them in the
household of a bishop, who was often the distributor of great
charities and the administrator of great possessions. But it is
evident that there were always a number of these scholar-student monks
available to join any travelling party, to serve their patron with
their knowledge of the desert and their general experience of the ways
of the world. "To lead about a sister":--St. Paul perhaps had already
in his time some knowledge of the usefulness of such a functionary,
and of the perfectly legitimate character of his office. Rufinus
joined Melania in this way, to all appearance as the other head of the
expedition, on perfectly equal terms, though it was her purse which
supplied everything necessary. Jerome himself (with a train of
brethren behind him) travelled in the same way with Paula--Oceanus
with Fabiola. Nothing could be more completely in accordance with the
fashion of the time. Perhaps the young men provided for their own
expenses as we say, but the caravan was the lady's and all the immense
and indiscriminate charity which flowed from it.
It is not necessary for us to follow the career of Rufinus any more
than we intend to follow that of Jerome, into the violent controversy
which is the chief link which connects their names, or indeed in any
way except that of their association with the women of our tale.
Rufinus was a Dalmatian from the shores of the Adriatic, learned
enough according to the fashion of his time, though not such a scholar
as Jerome, and apt to despise those elegances of literature which he
was incapable of appreciating. He too, no doubt, like Jerome, had
some following of other men like himself, ready for any adventure, and
glad to make themselves the almoners of Melania and form a portion of
her train. It is a strange conjunction according to our modern ideas,
and no doubt there were vague and flying slanders, such as exist in
all ages, accounting for anything that is unusual or mysterious by the
worse reasons. But it must be remembered that such partnerships were
habitual in those days, permitted by the usage of a time of which
absolute purity was the craze and monomania, if we may so speak, as
well as the ideal: and also that the solitude of those pilgrims was at
all times that of a crowd--the supposed fugitive flying forth alone
being in reality, as has been explained already, accompanied on every
stage of the way by attendants enough to fill her ship and form her
caravan wherever she went.
From Cæsarea, where Melania discomfited the government by her high
rank and connections, it is but a little way to Jerusalem, where the
steps of the party were directed after their prolonged journey through
the desert. It had already become the end of many pilgrimages, the one
place in the world which most attracted the hearts and imaginations of
the devout throughout all the world; and we can well realise the
sensation of the wanderers when they came in sight of that green hill,
dominating the scene of so many tragedies, the still half-ruined but
immortal city of which the very dust was dear to the primitive
Christians. Who that has come suddenly upon that scene in quiet,
without offensive guidance or ciceroneship, has not named to himself
the Mount of Olives with such a thrill of identification as would move
him in scarcely any other landscape in the world? It was still
comparatively virgin soil in the end of the fourth century. The
Empress Helena had been there, making, as we all feel now, but too
easy and too exact discoveries: but the country was unexplored by any
vain searchings of curiosity, and the calm of solitude, as perfect
and far sweeter than amid the sands of the deserts, was still to be
found there. The pilgrims went no further. They chose each their site
upon the soft slope of that hill of divine memories. Rufinus took up
his abode in a rocky cell, Melania probably in some house in the city,
while their monasteries were being built. The great Roman lady with
her faithful stewards, always sending those ever valuable supplies, no
doubt provided for the expenses of both: and soon two communities
arose near each other preserving the fellowship of their founders,
where after some years of travel and movement Melania, with strength
and courage restored, took up her permanent abode.
It is difficult to decide what is meant by sacrifice and
self-abnegation in this world of human subterfuge and self-deception.
It is very likely that Melania, like Paula after her, gave herself to
the most humble menial offices, and did not scorn, great lady as she
was, to bow the haughty head which had made the proconsul of Palestine
tremble, to the modest necessities of primitive life. Perhaps she
cooked the spare food, swept the bare cells with her own hands:
undoubtedly she would superintend the flocks and herds and meagre
fields which kept her community supplied. We know that she rode the
sorriest horse, and wore the roughest gown. These things rank high in
the catalogue of privations, as privations are calculated in the
histories of the saints. And yet it is doubtful how far she is to be
credited, if it were a merit, with any self-sacrifice. She had
attained the full gratification of her own will and way, which is an
advantage not easily or often computed. She had settled herself in the
most interesting spot in the world, in the midst of a landscape which,
notwithstanding all natural aridity and the depressing effects of ruin
everywhere, is yet full of beauty as well as interest. Most of all
perhaps she was in the way of the very best of company, receiving
pilgrims of the highest eminence, bishops, scholars, princes,
sometimes ladies of rank like herself, who were continually coming and
going, bringing the great news of the world from every quarter to the
recluses who thus commanded everything that wealth could supply. One
may be sure that, as Jerome and Paula afterwards spent many a serene
evening in Bethlehem under their trees, Melania and Rufinus would
often sit under those hoary olives doubly grey with age, talking of
all things in heaven and earth, looking across the little valley to
the wall, all the more picturesque that it was broken, and lay here
and there in heaps of ruin, of Jerusalem, and hearing, in the pauses
of their conversation, the tinkling of that little brook which has
seen so many sacred scenes and over which our Lord and His favourite
disciples crossed to Gethsemane, on such a night as that on which His
servants sat and talked of Him. It is true that the accursed Arians,
and grave news of the fight going on between them and the Catholics,
or perhaps the question of Origen's orthodoxy, or how the struggle was
going between Paulinus and Meletius at Antioch, might occupy them more
than those sacred memories. But it is much to be doubted whether any
grandeur of Roman living would have been so much to Melania's mind as
the convent on the Mount of Olives, the stream of distinguished
pilgrims, and the society of her ever devoted companion and friend.
[Illustration: THE TEMPLE OF VESTA.]
[Illustration: CHURCHES ON THE AVENTINE.]
CHAPTER IV.
THE SOCIETY OF MARCELLA.
The council which was held in Rome in 382 with the intention of
deciding the cases of various contending bishops in distant sees,
especially in Antioch where two had been elected for the same seat--a
council scarcely acknowledged even by those on whose behalf it was
held, and not at all by those opposed to them--was chiefly remarkable,
as we have said, from the appearance for the first time, as a marked
and notable personage, of one of the most important, picturesque, and
influential figures of his time--Jerome: a scholar insatiable in
intellectual zeal, who had sought everywhere the best schools of the
time and was learned in all their science: and at the same time a monk
and ascetic fresh from the austerities of the desert and one of those
struggles with the flesh and the imagination which formed the epic of
the solitary. It was not unnatural that the régime of extreme
abstinence combined with utter want of occupation, and the
concentration of all thought upon one's self and one's moods and
conditions of mind, should have awakened all the subtleties of the
imagination, and filled the brooding spirit with dreams of every wild
and extravagant kind; but it would not occur to us now to represent
the stormy passage into a life dedicated to religion as filled with
dancing nymphs and visions of the grossest sensual enjoyment--above
all in the case of such a man as Jerome, whose chief temptations one
would have felt to be of quite another kind. This however was the
fashion of the time, and belonged more or less to the monkish ideal,
which exaggerated the force of all these lower fleshly impulses by way
of enhancing the virtue of him who successfully overcame them. The
early fathers all scourged themselves till they were in danger of
their lives, rolled themselves in the snow, lay on the cold earth, and
lived on a handful of dried grain, perhaps on the grass and wild herbs
to be found in the crevices of the rocks, in order to get the body
into subjection: which might have been more easily done, we should
have supposed, by putting other more wholesome subjects in the place
of these visionary temptations, or filling the vacancy of the hours
with hard work. But the dulness of an English clown or athlete, in
whom muscular exercise extinguishes all visions, would not have been
at all to the mind of a monkish neophyte, to whom the sharpest stings
of penitence and agonies of self-humiliation were necessary, whether
he had done anything to call them forth or not.
Jerome had gone through all these necessary sufferings without sparing
himself a pang. His face pale with fasting, and his body so worn with
penance and privation that it was almost dead, he had yet felt the
fire of earthly passions burning in his soul after the truest orthodox
model. "The sack with which I was covered," he says, "deformed my
members; my skin and flesh were like those of an Ethiop. But in that
vast solitude, burnt up by the blazing sun, all the delights of Rome
appeared before my eyes. Scorpions and wild beasts were my companions,
yet I seemed to hear the choruses of dancing girls."
Finding no succour anywhere, I flung myself at the feet of
Jesus, bathing them with tears, drying them with the hair
of my head. I passed day and night beating my breast, I
banished myself even from my cell, as if it were conscious
of all my evil thoughts; and, rigid against myself,
wandered further into the desert, seeking some deeper cave,
some wilder mountain, some riven rock which I could make
the prison of this miserable flesh, the place of my
prayers.
Sometimes he endeavoured to find refuge in his books, the precious
parchments which he carried with him even in those unlikely regions:
but here another temptation came in. "Unhappy that I am," he cries, "I
fasted yet read Cicero. After spending nights of wakefulness and tears
I found Plautus in my hands." To lay aside dramatist, orator, and
poet, so well known and familiar, and plunge into the imperfectly
known character of the Hebrew which he was learning, the
uncomprehended mysteries and rude style of the prophets, was almost as
terrible as to fling himself fasting on the cold earth and hear the
bones rattle in the skin which barely held them together. Yet
sometimes there were moments of deliverance: sometimes, when all the
tears were shed, gazing up with dry exhausted eyes to the sky blazing
with stars, "I felt myself transported to the midst of the angels, and
full of confidence and joy, lifted up my voice and sang, 'Because of
the savour of thy ointments we will run after thee.'" Thus both were
reconciled, his imagination freed from temptation, and the poetry of
the crabbed books, which were so different from Cicero, made suddenly
clear to his troubled eyes.
This was however but a small part of the training of Jerome. From his
desert, as his spirit calmed, he carried on a great correspondence,
and many of his letters became at once a portion of the literature of
his time. One in particular, an eloquent and oratorical appeal to one
of his friends, the Epistle to Heliodorus, with its elaborate
description of the evils of the world and impassioned call to the
peace of the desert, went through the religious circles of the time
with that wonderful speed and facility of circulation which it is so
difficult to understand, and was read in Marcella's palace on the
Aventine and learnt by heart by some fervent listeners, so precious
were its elaborate sentences held to be. This letter boldly proclaimed
as the highest principle of life the extraordinary step which Melania,
as well as so many other self-devoted persons, had taken--and called
every Christian to the desert, whatever duties or enjoyments might
stand in the way. Perhaps such exhortations are less dangerous than
they seem to be, for the noble ladies who read and admired and learned
by heart these moving appeals do not seem to have been otherwise
affected by them. Like the song of the Ancient Mariner, they have to
be addressed to the predestined, who alone have ears to hear.
Heliodorus, upon whom all that eloquence was poured at first hand,
turned a deaf ear, and lived and died in peace among his own people,
among the lagoons where Venice as yet was not, notwithstanding all his
friend could say.
"What make you in your father's house, oh sluggish soldier?" cried
that eager voice; "where are your ramparts and trenches, under what
tent of skins have you passed the bitter winter? The trumpet of heaven
sounds, and the great Leader comes upon the clouds to overcome the
world. Let the little ones hang upon other necks; let your mother rend
her hair and her garments; let your father stretch himself on the
threshold to prevent you from passing: but arise, come thou! Are you
not pledged to the sacrifice even of father and mother? If you believe
in Christ, fight with me for His name and let the dead bury their
dead." There were many who would dwell upon these entreaties as upon
a noble song rousing the heart and charming the ear, but the balance
of human nature is but rarely disturbed by any such appeal. Even in
that early age we may in the greater number of cases permit it to move
all hearers without any great fears for the issue.
Jerome, however, did not himself remain very long in his desert; he
was invaded in his very cell by the echoes of polemical warfare
drifting in from the world he had left: and was called upon to
pronounce himself for one side or the other, while yet, according to
his own account, unaware what it was all about. He left his retirement
unwillingly after some three years, quoting Virgil as to the barbarity
of the race which refused him the hospitality of a little sand, and
plunged into the fight at Antioch between contending bishops and
parties, the heresy of Apollinaris, and all the rage of religious
polemics. It was probably his intimate acquaintance with all the
questions so strongly contested in the East, and his power of giving
information on points which the Western Council could only know at
second hand, which led him to Rome on the eve of the Council already
referred to, called by Pope Damasus, in 382. The primary object of
this Council was to settle matters of ecclesiastical polity, and
especially the actual question as to which of the competitors was
lawful bishop of Antioch, besides other questions concerning other
important sees. It was no small assumption on the part of the bishops
of the West, an assumption supported in those days by no dogma as to
the supremacy of the Bishop of Rome, to interfere in the affairs of
the East to this extent. And it was at once crushed by the action of
the Church in the East, which immediately held a council of its own at
Constantinople, and authoritatively decided every practical question.
Jerome was the friend of all those bishops whose causes would have
been pleaded at Rome, had not their own section of the Church thus
made short work with them: and this no doubt commended him to the
special attention of Damasus, even after these practical questions
were set aside, and the heresy of Apollinaris, which had been intended
to be treated in the second place, was turned into the only subject
before the house. Jerome was deeply learned on the subject of
Apollinaris too. It was on account of this new heresy that his place
in Egypt had become untenable. His knowledge could not but be of the
utmost importance to the Western bishops, who were not as a rule
scholars, nor given to the subtle reasoning of the East. He was very
welcome therefore in Rome, especially after the illness of the great
Ambrose had denuded that Council, shorn of so much of its prestige, of
almost the only imposing name left to it. This was the opportunity of
such a man as Jerome, in himself, as we have said, still not much
different from the many young religious adventurers who scoured the
world. He was already, however, a distinguished man of letters: he was
known to Damasus, who had baptized him: he had learning enough to
supplement the deficiencies of an entire Council, and for once these
abilities were fully appreciated and found their right place. He had
scarcely arrived in Rome when he was named Secretary of the Council--a
temporary office which was afterwards prolonged and extended to that
of Secretary to the Pope himself: thus the stranger became at once a
functionary of the utmost importance in the proceedings of the See of
Rome and in its development as a supreme power and authority in the
Church.
There is something strangely familiar and quaint in the appearance, so
perfectly known to ourselves, of the gathering of a religious
congress, convocation, or general assembly, when every considerable
house and hospitable family is moved to receive some distinguished
clerical visitor--which thus took place in Rome in the end of the
fourth century, while still all was classic in the aspect of the
Eternal City, and the altars of the gods were still standing. The
bishops and their trains arrived, making a little stir, sometimes even
at the marble porticoes of great mansions where the master or mistress
still professed a languid devotion to Jove or Mercury. Jerome, burnt
brown by Egyptian suns, meagre and sinewy in his worn robe, with a
humble brother or two in his train, accepted, after a little modest
difficulty, the invitation or the allotment which led him to the
Aventine, to the palace of Marcella, where he was already well known,
and where, though his eyes were downcast with a becoming reserve at
the sight of all the ladies, he yet felt it right to follow the
example of the Apostle and industriously overcome his own bashfulness.
It was not perhaps a quality very strong in his nature, and very soon
his new and splendid habitation became to the ascetic a home more dear
than any he had yet known.
It is curious to find how completely the principle of the association
and friendship of a man and woman, failing closer ties, was adopted
and recognised among these mystics and ascetics, without apparent fear
of the comments of the world, or any of the self-consciousness which
so often spoils such a relationship in ordinary society. Perhaps the
gossips smiled even then upon the close alliance of Jerome with Paula,
or Rufinus with Melania. There were calumnies abroad of the coarsest
sort, as was inevitable; but neither monk nor lady seem to have been
affected by them. It has constantly been so in the history of the
Church, and it is interesting to collect such repeated testimony from
the most unlikely quarter, to the advantage of this natural
association. Women have had hard measure from Catholic doctors and
saints. Their conventional position, so to speak, is that of the
Seductress, always studying how to draw the thoughts of men away from
higher things. The East and the West, though so much apart on other
points, are at one in this. From the anguish of the fathers in the
desert to the supposed difficulties of the humblest ordinary priest of
modern times, the disturbing influence is always supposed to be that
of the woman. Gruesome figure as he was for any such temptation,
Antony of Egypt himself was driven to extremity by the mere thought of
her: and it is she who figures as danger or as victim in every
ultra-Protestant plaint over the condition of the priest (except in
Ireland, wonderful island of contradictions! where priests and all men
are more moved to fighting than to love). Yet notwithstanding there
has been no founder of ecclesiastical institutions, no reformer,
scarcely any saint, who has not been accompanied by the special
friendship and affection of some woman. Jerome, who was so much the
reverse, if we may venture to use these words, of a drawing-room hero,
a man more used to vituperation than to gentleness of speech, often
harsh as the desert from which he had come, was a notable example of
this rule. From the time of his arrival on the Aventine to that of his
death, his name was never dissociated from that of Paula, the pious
lady _par excellence_ of the group, the exquisite and delicate
patrician who could scarcely plant her golden shoe firmly on the
floor, but came tottering into Marcella's great house with a slave on
either side to support her, in all the languid grace which was the
highest fashion of the time. That such an example of conventional
delicacy and luxury should have become the humble friend and secretary
of Jerome, and that he, the pious solitary, acrid with opposition and
controversy, should have found in this fine flower of society his
life-long companion, both in labour and life, is more astonishing than
words can say.
[Illustration: THE STEPS OF THE CAPITOL.]
His arrival in Marcella's hospitable house, with its crowds of
feminine visitors, was in every way a great event. It brought the
ladies into the midst of all the ecclesiastical questions of the time:
and one can imagine how they crowded round him when he returned from
the sittings of the Council--perhaps in the stillness of the evening
after the dangerous hour of sunset, when all Rome comes forth to
breathe again--assembling upon the marble terrace, from which that
magical scene was visible at their feet: the long withdrawing distance
beyond the river, out of which some gleam might be apparent of the
great church which already covered the tombs of the Apostles, and the
white crest of the Capitol close at hand, and the lights of the town
scattered dimly like glowworms among the wide openings and level lines
of classical building which made the Rome of the time. The subjects
discussed were not precisely those which the lighter conventional
fancy, Boccaccio or Watteau, has associated with such groups, any more
than the dark monk resembled the troubadour. But they were subjects
which up to the present day have never lost their interest. The
debates of the Council were chiefly taken up with an extremely
abstruse heresy, concerning the humanity of our Lord, how far the
nature of man existed in him in connection with the nature of God, and
whether the Redeemer of mankind had taken upon himself a mere ethereal
appearance of flesh, or an actual human body, tempted as we are and
subject to all the influences which affect man. It is a question which
has arisen again and again at various periods and in various manners,
and the subtleties of such a controversy have proved of the
profoundest interest to many minds. Jerome was not alone to report to
those eager listeners the course of the debates, and to demolish over
again the intricate arguments by which that assembly of divines
wrought itself to fever heat. The great Bishop Epiphanius, the great
heresy-hunter of his day--who had fathomed all the fallacious
reasonings of all the schismatics, and could detect a theological
error at the distance of a continent, in whatever garb it might shield
itself--was the guest of Paula, and no doubt, along with his hostess,
would often join these gatherings. The two doctors thus brought
together would vie with each other in making the course of the
controversy clear to the women, who hung upon their lips with keen
apprehension of every phrase and the enthusiastic partisanship which
inspires debate. There could be no better audience for the fine-drawn
arguments which such a controversy demands. How strange to think that
these hot discussions were going on, and the flower of the artificial
society of Rome keenly occupied by such a question, while still the
shadow of Jove lingered on the Capitol, and the Rome of the heathen
emperors, the Rome of the great Republic, stood white and splendid, a
shadow, yet a mighty one, upon the seven hills!
Before his arrival in Rome, Jerome had been but little known to the
general world. His name had been heard in connection with some
eloquent letters which had flown about from hand to hand among the
finest circles; but his true force and character were better known in
the East than in the West, and it was in part this Council which gave
him his due place in the ranks of the Church. He was no priest to be
promoted to bishoprics or established in high places. He had indeed
been consecrated against his will by an enthusiastic prelate, eager to
secure his great services to the Church; but, monk and ascetic as he
was, he had no inclination towards the sacerdotal character, and had
said but one mass, immediately after his ordination, and no more. It
was not therefore as spiritual director in the ordinary sense of the
words that he found his place in Marcella's house, but at first at
least as a visitor merely and probably for the time of the Council
alone. But the man of the desert would seem to have been charmed out
of himself by the unaccustomed sweetness of that gentle life. He would
indeed have been hard to please if he had not felt the attraction of
such a retreat, not out of, but on the edge of, the great world, with
its excitements and warfare within reach, the distant murmur of the
crowd, the prospect of the great city with its lights and rumours, yet
sacred quiet and delightful sympathy within. The little community had
given up the luxuries of the age, but they could not have given up the
refinements of gentle breeding, the high-born manners and grace, the
charm of educated voices and cultivated minds. And there was even more
than these attractions to gratify the scholar. Not an allusion could
be made to the studies of which he was most proud, the rugged Hebrew
which he had painfully mastered, or ornate Greek, but some quick
intelligence there would take it up; and the poets and sages of their
native tongue, the Cicero and Virgil from whom he could not wean
himself even in the desert, were their own literature, their valued
inheritance. And not in the most devoted community of monks could the
great orator have found such undivided attention and interest in his
work as among the ladies of the Aventine, or secretaries so eager and
ready to help, so proud to be associated with it. He was at the same
time within reach of Bishop Damasus, a man of many experiences, who
seems to have loved him as a son, and who not only made him his
secretary, but his private counsellor in many difficulties and
dangers: and Jerome soon became the centre also of a little band of
chosen friends, distinguished personages in Roman society connected in
faith and in blood with the sisterhood, whom he speaks of as Daniel,
Ananias, Azarias, and Misael, some of whom were his own old companions
and schoolfellows, all deeply attached to him and proud of his
friendship. No more delightful position could have been imagined for
the repose and strengthening of a man who had endured many hardships,
and who had yet before him much more to bear.
Jerome remained nearly three years in this happy retreat, and it was
here that he executed the first portion of his great work, that first
authoritative translation of the entire Canon of Scripture which still
retains its place in the Church of Rome--the Vulgate, so named when
the Latin of Jerome, which is by no means that of Cicero, was the
language of the crowd. In every generation what is called the higher
education of women is treated as a new and surprising thing by the
age, as if it were the greatest novelty; but we doubt whether Girton
itself could produce graduates as capable as Paula and Marcella of
helping in this work, discussing the turning of a phrase or the
meaning of an abstruse Hebrew word, and often holding their own
opinion against that of the learned writer whose scribes they were so
willing to be. This undertaking gave a double charm to the life, which
went on with much variety and animation, with news from all quarters,
with the constant excitement of a new charity established, a new
community founded: and never without amusement either, much knowledge
of the sayings and doings of society outside, visits from the finest
persons, and a daily entertainment in the flutterings of young
Blæsilla between the world and the convent, and her pretty ways, so
true a woman of the world, yet all the same a predestined saint: and
the doings of Fabiola, one day wholly absorbed in the foundation of
her great hospital, the first in Rome, the next not so sure in her
mind that love, even by means of a second divorce, might not win the
day over devotion. Even Paula in these days was but half decided, and
came, a dazzling vision in her jewels and her crown, to visit her
friends, in all the pomp of autumnal beauty, among her daughters, of
whom that serious little maiden Eustochium was the only one quite
detached from the world. For was there not also going on under their
eyes the gentle wooing of Pammachius and Paulina to make it apparent
to the world that the ladies on the Aventine did not wholly discredit
the ordinary ties of life, although they considered with St. Paul that
the other was the better way? The lovers were as devout and as much
given up to good works as any of them, yet, as even Jerome might
pardon once in a way, preferred to the cloister the common happiness
of life. These good works were the most wonderful part of all, for
every member of the community was rich. Their fortunes were like the
widow's cruse. One hears of great foundations like that of Fabiola's
hospital and Melania's provision for the monks in Africa, for which
everything was sacrificed; yet, next day, next year, renewed
beneficences were forthcoming, and always a faithful intendant, a good
steward, to continue the bountiful supplies. So wonderful indeed are
these liberalities, and so extraordinary the details, that it is
surprising to find that no learned German, or other savant, has, as
yet, attempted to prove that the fierce and vivid Jerome never
existed, that his letters were the work of half a dozen hands, and the
subjects of his brilliant narrative altogether fictitious--Melania and
Paula being but mythical repetitions of the same incident, wrapt in
the colours of fable. This hypothesis might be made to seem very
possible if it were not, perhaps, a little too late in the centuries
for the operations of that high-handed criticism, and Jerome himself a
very hard fact to encounter.
But the great wealth of these ladies remains one of the most singular
circumstances in the story. When they sell and sacrifice everything it
is clear it must only be their floating possessions, leaving untouched
the capital, as we should say, or the estates, perhaps, more justly,
the wealthy source from which the continued stream flowed. This gave a
splendour and a largeness of living to the home on the Aventine. There
was no need to send any petitioner away empty, charity being the rule
of life, and no thought having as yet entered the most elevated mind
that to give to the poor was inexpedient for them, and apt to
establish a pauper class, dependent and willing to be so. These ladies
filled with an even and open hand every wallet and every mouth. They
received orphans, they provided for widows, they filled the poor
quarters below the hill--where all the working people about the
Marmorata clustered near the river bank, in the garrets and courtyards
of the old houses--with asylums and places of refuge. The miserable
and idle populace of which the historian speaks so contemptuously, the
fellows who hung about the circuses, and had no name but the nicknames
of coarsest slang, the Cabbage-feeders, the Sausage-eaters, &c., the
Porringers and Gluttons, were, no doubt, left all the more free to
follow their own foul devices; but the poor women, who though perhaps
far from blameless suffer most in the debasement of the population,
and the unhappy little swarms of children, profited by this universal
balm of charity, and let us hope grew up to something a little better
than their sires. For however paganism might linger among the higher
class, the multitudes were all nominally Christian. It was to the
tombs of the Apostles that they made their pilgrimages, rather than to
the four hundred temples of the gods. "For all its gilding the Capitol
looks dingy," says Jerome himself in one of his letters; "every temple
in Rome is covered with soot and cobwebs, and the people pour past
those half-ruined shrines to visit the tombs of the apostles."
The house of Marcella was in the condition we have attempted to
describe when Jerome became its guest. It was in no way more rigid in
its laws than at the beginning. The little _ecclesia domestica_, as he
happily called it, seems to have been entirely without rule or
conventual order. They sang psalms together (sometimes we are led to
believe, in the original Hebrew learned for the purpose--but it must
have been few who attained to this height), they read together, they
held their little conferences on points of doctrine, with much
consultation of learned texts; but there is no mention even of any
regular religious service, much less of matins, and vespers, and nones
and compline, and the other ritualistic divisions of a monastic day;
for indeed no rule had been as yet invented for any coenobites of
the West. We do not hear even of a daily mass. Often there were
desertions from the ranks, sometimes a young maiden withdrawing from
the social enclosure, sometimes a young widow drawn back into the
vortex of the fashionable world. But on the whole the record of the
little domestic church, with its bodyguard of faithful friends and
servitors outside, and Jerome, its pride and crown of glory, within,
is one of serene and happy life, dignified by everything that was best
in the antique world.
It was after the arrival of Jerome that the little tragedy of
Blæsilla, the eldest daughter of Paula, occurred, rending their gentle
hearts. "Our dear widow," as Jerome called her, had no idea of second
marriage in her mind. The first, it would appear, had not been happy;
and Blæsilla, fair and rich and young, had every mind to enjoy her
freedom, her fine dresses, and all the pleasures of her youth. Safely
lodged under her mother's wing, with those irreproachable friends 011
the Aventine about her, no gossip touched her gentle name. The
community amused itself with her light-hearted ways. "Our widow loves
to adorn herself. She is the whole day before her mirror," says
Jerome, and there is no harsh tone in his voice. But in the midst of
her gay and innocent life she fell ill of a fever, no unusual thing.
It lingered, however, more than a month and took a dangerous form, so
that the doctors began to despair. When things were at this point
Blæsilla had a dream or vision, in her fever, in which the Saviour
appeared to her and bade her arise as He had done to Lazarus. It was
the crisis of the disease, and she immediately began to recover, with
the deepest faith that she had been cured by a miracle. The butterfly
was touched beyond measure by this divine interposition, as she
believed, in her favour, and as soon as she was well, made up her mind
to devote herself to God. "An extraordinary thing has happened," cries
Jerome. "Blæsilla has put on a brown gown! What a scandal is this!" He
launches forth thereupon into a diatribe upon the fashionable ladies,
with faces of gypsum like idols, who dare not shed a tear lest they
should spoil their painted cheeks, and who are the true scandal to
Christianity: then narrates with growing tenderness the change that
has taken place in the habits of the young penitent. She, whose
innocent head was tortured with curls and plaits and crowned with the
fashionable _mitella_, now finds a veil enough for her. She lies on
the ground who found the softest cushions hard, and is up the first in
the morning to sing Alleluia in her silvery voice.
The conversion rang through Rome all the more that Blæsilla was known
to have had no inclination toward austerity of life. Her relations,
half pagan and altogether worldly, were hot against the fanatic monk,
who according to the usual belief tyrannised over the whole house in
which he had been so kindly received, and the weak-minded mother who
had lent herself to his machinations. The question fired Rome, and
became a matter of discussion under every portico and wherever men or
women assembled. Was it lawful, had it any warrant in law or history,
this new folly of opposing marriage and representing celibacy as a
happier and holier state? It was against every tradition of the race;
it tore families in pieces, abstracted from society its most brilliant
members, alienated the patrimony of families, interfered with
succession and every natural law. In the turmoil raised by this event,
a noisy public controversy arose. Two assailants presented themselves,
one a priest, who had been for a time a monk, and one a layman, to
maintain the popular canon, the superiority of marriage and the
natural life of the world. These arguments had a great effect upon the
public mind, naturally prone to take fright at any interference with
its natural laws. They had very serious results at a later period both
in the life of Paula and that of Jerome, and they seem to have
threatened for a time serious injury to the newly established convents
which Marcella's community had planted everywhere, and from which
half-hearted sisters took this opportunity of separating themselves.
It is amusing to find that, by a curious and furious twist of the
usual argument, Jerome in his indignant and not always temperate
defence describes these deserters as old and ugly, and unable to find
husbands notwithstanding the most desperate efforts. It has been very
common to allege this as a reason for the self-dedication of nuns: and
it is always a handy missile to throw.
Jerome was not the man to let any such fine opening for a controversy
pass. He burst forth upon his opponents, thundering from the heights
of the Aventine, reducing the feeble writers who opposed him to
powder. Helvidius, the layman above mentioned, had taken up the
question--a question always offensive and injurious to natural
sentiment and prejudice, exclusive even of religious feeling, and
which, whatever opinions may prevail, it must always be profane to
touch--of the Virgin Mary herself, and the existence of persons called
brothers and sisters of our Lord. To him Jerome replied by a flood of
angry eloquence, as well as some cogent argument--though argument,
however strong, is insupportable on such a subject. And he launched
forth upon the other, Jovinian, the false monk, that famous letter on
Virginity, nominally addressed to Eustochium, in which one of the most
trenchant pictures ever made of society, both lay and clerical--the
habits, the ideas, the follies of debased and fallen Rome--is of far
more force and importance than the argument, and furnishes us with
such a spectacle as very few writers at any time or in any place are
capable of placing before the eyes of the world. I have already quoted
from this wonderful composition the portrait of the popular priest.
The foolish virgin who puts on an appearance of indifference to
worldly things, and "under the ensign of a holy profession draws
towards her the regard of men," is treated with equal severity.
We cast out and banish from our sight those virgins who
only wish to seem to be so. Their robes have but a narrow
stripe of purple, they let their hair hang about their
shoulders, their sleeves are short and narrow, and they
have cheap shoes upon their feet. This is all their
sanctity. They make by these pretences a higher price for
their innocence. Avoid, dear Eustochium, the secret
thought that having ceased to court attention in cloth of
gold you may begin to do so in mean attire. When you come
into an assembly of the brothers and sisters do not, like
some, choose the lowest seat or plead that you are unworthy
of a footstool. Do not speak with a faltering voice as if
worn out with fasting, or lean upon the shoulders of your
neighbours as if fainting. There are some who thus
disfigure their faces that they may appear to men to fast.
As soon as they are seen, they begin to groan, they look
down, they cover their faces, all but one eye. Their dress
is sombre, their girdles are of sackcloth. Others assume
the mien of men, blushing that they have been born women,
who cut their hair short, and walk abroad with effrontery,
confronting the world with the impudent faces of
eunuchs.... I have seen, but will not name, one among the
noblest of Rome who in the very basilica of the blessed
Peter gave alms with her own hands at the head of her
retinue of servants, but struck in the face a poor woman
who had twice held out her hand. Flee also the men who wear
an iron chain, who have long hair like women against the
rule of the Apostle, a miserable black robe, who go
barefooted in the cold, and have in appearance at least an
air of sadness and anxiety.
The following sketch of the married woman who thinks of the things of
the world, how she may please her husband, while the unmarried are
free to please God, has an interest long outliving the controversy, in
the light it throws upon contemporary Roman life.
Do you think there is no difference between one who spends
her time in fastings, and humbles herself night and day in
prayer--and her who must prepare her face for the coming of
her husband, ornament herself, and put on airs of
fascination? The first veils her beauty and the graces
which she despises; the other paints herself before a
mirror, to make herself more fair than God has made her.
Then come the children, crying, rioting, hanging about her
neck, waiting for her kiss. Expenses follow without end,
her time is spent in making up her accounts, her purse
always open in her hand. Here there is a troop of cooks,
their garments girded like soldiers for the battle, hashing
and steaming. Then the women spinning and babbling. Anon
comes the husband, followed by his friends. The wife flies
about like a swallow from one end of the house to the
other, to see that all is right, the beds made, the marble
floors shining, flowers in the vases, the dinner prepared.
Is there in all that, I ask, a thought of God? Are these
happy homes? No, the fear of God is absent there, where the
drum is sounded, the lyre struck, where the flute breathes
out and the cymbals clash. Then the parasite abandons shame
and glories in it, if he amuses the host who has invited
him. The victims of debauch have their place at these
feasts; they appear half naked in transparent garments
which unclean eyes see through. What part is there for the
wife in these orgies? She must learn to take pleasure in
such scenes, or else to bring discord into her house.
He paints for us, in another letter, a companion picture of the widow
remarried.
Your contract of marriage will scarcely be written when you
will be compelled to make your will. Your new husband
pretends to be very ill, and makes a will in your favour,
desiring you to do the same. But he lives, and it is you
who die. And if it happens that you have sons by your
second marriage, war blazes forth in your house, a domestic
contest without term or conclusion. Those who owe life to
you, you are not permitted to love equally, fully. The
second envies the caress which you give to the son of the
first. If, on the contrary, it is he who has children by
another wife, although you may be the most loving of
mothers, you are condemned as a stepmother by all the
rhetoric of the comedies, the pantomimes, and orators. If
your stepson has a headache you have poisoned him. If he
eats nothing you starve him, if you serve him his food it
is worse still. What compensation is there in a second
marriage to make up for so many woes?
This tremendous outburst and others of a similar kind raised up, as
was natural, a strong feeling against Jerome. It was not likely that
the originals of these trenchant sketches would forgive easily the man
who put them up in effigy on the very walls of Rome. That the pictures
were identified was clear from another letter, in which he asks
whether he is never to speak of any vice or folly lest he should
offend a certain Onasus, who took everything to himself. Little cared
he whom he offended, or what galled jade might wince. But at last the
remonstrances of his friends subdued his rage. "When you read this you
will bend your brows and check my freedom, putting a finger on my
mouth to stop me from speaking," he wrote to Marcella. It was full
time that the prudent mistress of the house which contained such a
champion should interfere.
While still the conflict raged which had been roused by the retirement
of Blæsilla from the world, and which had thus widened into the
general question, far more important than any individual case, between
the reforming party in the Church, the Puritans of the time--then
specially represented by the new development of monasticism--and the
world which it called all elevated souls to abandon: incidents were
happening which plunged the cheerful home on the Aventine into sorrow
and made another noble house in Rome desolate. The young convert in
the bloom of her youthful devotion, who had been raised up
miraculously as they all thought from her sick bed in order that she
might devote her life to Christ, was again struck down by sickness,
and this time without any intervention of a miracle. Blæsilla died in
the fulness of her youth, scarcely twenty-two, praying only that she
might be forgiven for not having been able to do what she had wished
to do in the service of her Lord. She was a great lady, though she had
put her natural splendour away from her, and it was with all the pomp
of a patrician funeral that she was carried to her rest. It is again
Jerome who makes visible to us the sad scene of this funeral, and the
feeling of the multitude towards the austere reformers who had by
their cruel exactions cut off this flower of Roman society before her
time. Paula, the bereaved mother, followed, as was the custom, the
bier of her daughter through the crowded streets of Rome, scarcely
able in the depths of her grief to support herself, and at last fell
fainting into the arms of the attendants and had to be carried home
insensible. At this sight, which might have touched their hearts, the
multitude with one voice cried out against the distracted mother. "She
weeps, the daughter whom she has killed with fastings," they cried.
"Why are not these detestable monks driven from the city? why are they
not stoned or thrown into the river? It is they who have seduced this
miserable woman to be herself a monk against her will--this is why she
weeps for her child as no woman has ever wept before." Paula, let us
hope, did not hear these cries of popular rage. The streets rung with
them, the populace always ready for tumult, and the disgusted and
angry nobles encouraging every impulse towards revolt. No doubt many
of the higher classes had looked on with anxiety and alarm at the new
movement which dissipated among the poor so many fine inheritances
and threatened to carry off out of the world, of which they had been
the ornaments, so many of the most distinguished women. Any sudden
rising which might kill or banish the pestilent monk or disperse the
troublesome community would naturally find favour in their eyes.
[Illustration: THE LATERAN FROM THE AVENTINE.]
[Illustration: PORTICO OF OCTAVIA.]
CHAPTER V.
PAULA.
Paula was a woman of very different character from the passionate and
austere Melania who preceded and resembled her in many details of her
career. Full of tender and yet sprightly humour, of love and
gentleness and human kindness, a true mother benign and gracious, yet
with those individualities of lively intelligence, understanding, and
sympathy which quicken that mild ideal and bring in all the elements
of friendship and the social life--she was the most important of those
visitors and associates who made the House on the Aventine the
fashion, and filled it with all that was best in Rome. Though her
pedigree seems a little delusive, her relationship to Æmilius Paulus
resolving itself into a descent from his sister through her own
mother, it is yet apparent that her claims of the highest birth and
position were fully acknowledged, and that no Roman matron held a
higher or more honourable place. She was rich as they all were, highly
allied, the favourite of society, neglecting none of its laws, though
always with a love of intellectual intercourse and a tendency to
devotion. Which of these tendencies drew her first towards Marcella
and her little society we cannot tell: but it is evident that both
found satisfaction there, and were quickened by the strong impulse
given by Jerome when he came out of the schools and out of the wilds,
at once Scholar and Hermit, to this house of friendship, the Ecclesia
Domestica of Rome. That all this rising tide of life, the books, the
literary work, the ever-entertaining companionship, as well as the
higher influence of a life of self-denial and renunciation, as
understood in those days--should have at first added a charm even to
that existence upon its border, the life in which every motive
contradicted the new law, is very apparent. Many a great lady, deeply
plunged in all the business of the world, has felt the same
attraction, the intense pleasure of an escape from those gay
commotions which in the light of the other life seem so insignificant
and wearisome, the sensation of rest and tranquillity and something
higher, purer, in the air--which yet perhaps at first gave a zest to
the return into the world, in itself once more a relief from that
higher tension and those deeper requirements. The process by which the
attraction grew is very comprehensible also. Common pleasures and
inane talk of society grow duller and duller in comparison with the
conversation full of wonders and revelations which would keep every
faculty in exercise, the mutual studies, the awe yet exhilaration of
mutual prayers and psalms, the realisation of spiritual things. And no
doubt the devout child's soul so early fixed, the little daughter who
had thought of nothing from her cradle but the service of God, must
have drawn the ever-tender, ever-sympathetic mother still nearer to
the centre of all. The beautiful mother among her girls, one
betrothed, one self-consecrated, one in all the gay emancipation of
an early widowhood, affords the most charming picture among the graver
women--women all so near to each other in nature,--mutually related,
members of one community, linked by every bond of common association
and tradition.
When Blæsilla on her recovery from her illness threw off her gaieties
and finery, put on the brown gown, and adopted all the rules of the
community, the life of Paula, trembling between two spheres, was
shaken by a stronger impulse than ever before. But how difficult was
any decision in her circumstances! She had her boy and girl at home as
yet undeveloped--her only boy, dragged as much as might be to the
other side, persuaded to think his mother a fanatic and his sisters
fools. Paula did all she could to combine the two lives, indulging
perhaps in an excess of austerities under the cloth of gold and jewels
which, as symbols of her state and rank, she could not yet put off.
The death of Blæsilla was the shock which shattered her life to
pieces. Even the coarse reproaches of the streets show us with what
anguish of mourning this first breach in her family overwhelmed her.
"This is why she weeps for her child as no woman has ever wept
before," the crowd cried, turning her sorrow into an accusation, as if
she had thus acknowledged her own fault in leaving Blæsilla to
privations she was not able to endure. Did the cruel censure perhaps
awake an echo in her heart, ready as all hearts are in that moment of
prostration to blame themselves for something neglected, something
done amiss? At least it would remind Paula that she herself had never
made completely this sacrifice which her child had made with such
fatal effect. She was altogether overcome by her sorrow: her sobs and
cries rent the hearts of her friends. She refused all food, and when
exhausted by the paroxysms of violent grief fell into a lethargy of
despair more alarming still. When every one else had tried their best
to draw her from this excess of affliction, the ladies had recourse
to Jerome in their extremity: for it was clear that Paula must be
roused from this collapse of all courage and hope, or she must die.
Jerome did not refuse to answer the appeal: though helpless as even
the most anxious affection is in face of this anguish of the mother
which will not be comforted, he did what he could; he wrote to her
from the house of their friends who shared yet could not still her
sorrow, a letter full of grief and sympathy, in the forlorn hope of
bringing her back to life. Such letters heaven knows are common
enough. We have all written, and most of us have received them, and
found in their tender arguments, in their assurances of final good and
present fellow feeling, only fresh pangs and additional sickness of
heart. Yet Jerome's letter was not of a common kind. No one could have
touched the shrinking heart with a softer touch than this fierce
controversialist, this fiery and remorseless champion: for he had yet
a more effectual spell to move the mourner, in that he was himself a
mourner, not much less deeply touched than she. "Who am I," he cries,
"to forbid the tears of a mother who myself weep? This letter is
written in tears. He is not the best consoler whom his own groans
master, whose being is un-manned, whose broken words distil into
tears. Yes, Paula, I call to witness Christ Jesus whom our Blæsilla
now follows, and the angels who are now her companions, I, too, her
father in the spirit, her foster-father in affection, could also say
with you--Cursed be the day that I was born. Great waves of doubt
surge over my soul as over yours. I, too, ask myself why so many old
men live on, why the impious, the murderers, the sacrilegious, live
and thrive before our eyes, while blooming youth and childhood without
sin are cut off in their flower." It is not till after he has thus
wept with her that he takes a severer tone. "You deny yourself food,
not from desire of fasting, but of sorrow. If you believed your
daughter to be alive, you would not thus mourn that she has migrated
to a better world. Have you no fear lest the Saviour should say to
you, 'Are you angry, Paula, that your daughter has become my daughter?
Are you vexed at my decree, and do you with rebellious tears grudge me
the possession of Blæsilla?' At the sound of your cries Jesus,
all-clement, asks, 'Why do you weep? the damsel is not dead but
sleepeth.' And when you stretch yourself despairing on the grave of
your child, the angel who is there asks sternly, 'Why seek ye the
living among the dead?'"
In conclusion Jerome adds a wonderful vow: "So long as breath animates
my body, so long as I continue in life, I engage, declare and promise
that Blæsilla's name shall be for ever on my tongue, that my labours
shall be dedicated to her honour, and my talents devoted to her
praise." It was the last word which the enthusiasm of tenderness could
say: and no doubt the fervour and warmth of the promise, better kept
than such promises usually are, gave a little comfort to the sorrowful
soul.
When Paula came back to the charities and devotions of life after this
terrible pause a bond of new friendship was formed between her and
Jerome. They had wept together, they bore the reproach together, if
perhaps their trembling hearts might feel there was any truth in it,
of having possibly exposed the young creature they had lost to
privations more than she could bear. But it is little likely that this
modern refinement of feeling affected these devoted souls; for such
privations were in their eyes the highest privileges of life, and in
fasting man was promoted to eat the food of angels. At all events, the
death of Blæsilla made a new bond between them, the bond of a mutual
and most dear remembrance never to be forgotten.
This natural consequence of a common sorrow inflamed the popular rage
against Jerome to the wildest fury. Paula's relations and connections,
half of them, as in most cases in the higher ranks of society, still
pagan--who now saw before them the almost certain alienation to
charitable and religious purposes of Paula's wealth, pursued him with
calumny and outrage, and did not hesitate to accuse the lady and the
monk of a shameful relationship and every crime. To make things worse,
Damasus, whose friend and secretary, almost his son, Jerome had been,
died a few months after Blæsilla, depriving him at once of that high
place to which the Pope's favour naturally elevated him. He complains
of the difference which his close connection with Paula's family had
made on the general opinion of him. "All, almost without exception,
thought me worthy of the highest sacerdotal position; there was but
one word for me in the world. By the mouth of the blessed Damasus it
was I who spoke. Men called me holy, humble, eloquent." But all this
had changed since the recent events in Paula's house. She on her side,
wounded to the heart by the reproaches poured upon her, and the
shameful slanders of which she was the object, and which had no doubt
stung her into renewed life and energy, resolved upon a step stronger
than that of joining the community, and announced her intention of
leaving Rome, seeking a refuge in the holy city of Jerusalem, and
shaking the dust of her native country, where she had been so
vilified, from her feet. This resolution was put to Jerome's account
as might have been expected, and when his patron's death left him
without protection every enemy he had ever made, and no doubt they
were many, was let loose. He whom courtiers had sought, whose hands
had been kissed and his favour implored by all who sought anything
from the Pope, was now greeted when he appeared in the streets by
fierce cries of "Greek," "Impostor," "Monk," and his presence became a
danger for the peaceful house in which he had found a refuge.
It is scarcely possible to be very sorry for Jerome. He had not minced
his words; he had flung libels and satires about that must have stung
and wounded many, and in such matters reprisals are inevitable. But
Paula had done no harm. Even granting the case that Blæsilla's health
had been ruined by fasting, the mother herself had gone through the
same privations and exulted in them: and her only fault was to have
followed and sympathised in, with enthusiasm, the new teaching and
precepts of the divine life in the form which was most highly esteemed
in her time. No cry from that silent woman comes into the old world,
ringing with so many outcries, where the rude Roman crowd bellowed
forth abuse, and the ladies on their silken couches whispered the
scandal of Paula's liaison to each other, and the men scoffed and
sneered over their banquets at the mere thought of such a friendship
being innocent. Some one of their enemies ventured to speak or write
publicly the vile accusation, and was instantly brought to book by
Jerome, and publicly forswore the scandal he had spread. "But," as
Jerome says, "a lie is hard to kill; the world loves to believe an
evil story: it puts its faith in the lie, but not in the recantation."
And the situation of affairs became such that he too saw no expedient
possible but that of leaving Rome. He would seem to have been, or to
have imagined himself, in danger of his life, and his presence was
unquestionably a danger for his friends. A man of more patient
temperament and quiet mind might have thought that Paula's resolution
to go away was a reason for him to stay, and thus to bear the scandal
and outrage alone, at least until she was safe out of its
reach--giving no possible occasion for the adversary to blaspheme. But
Jerome was evidently not disposed to any such self-abnegation, and
indeed it is very likely that his position had become intolerable and
that his only resource was departure. It was in the summer of 385,
nearly three years after his arrival in Rome--in August, seven months
after the death of Damasus, and not a year after that of Blæsilla,
that he left "Babylon," as he called the tumultuous city, writing his
farewell with tears of grief and wrath to the Lady Asella, now one of
the eldest and most important members of the community, and thanking
God that he was found worthy of the hatred of the world. We are apt to
speak as if travelling were an invention of our time: but as a matter
of fact facilities of travelling then existed little inferior to those
we ourselves possessed thirty or forty years ago, and it was no
strange or unusual journey from Ostia at the mouth of the Tiber, by
the soft Mediterranean shores, past the vexed rocks of the Sirens in
the blazing weather, to Cyprus that island of monasteries, and Antioch
a vexed and heresy-tainted city yet full of friends and succour.
Jerome had a cluster of faithful followers round him, and was escorted
by a weeping crowd to the very point of his embarkation: but yet swept
forth from Rome in a passion of indignation and distress.
[Illustration: TEMPLE OF VENUS AND ROME FROM THE COLOSSEUM (1860).
_To face page 72._]
It was while waiting for the moment of departure in the ship that was
to carry him far from his friends and the life he loved, that Jerome's
letters to Asella were written. They were full of anger and sorrow,
the utterance of a heart sore and wounded, of a man driven almost to
despair. "I am said," he cries, "to be an infamous person, a deceiver
full of guile, an impostor with all the arts of Satan at his fingers'
ends.... These men have kissed my hands in public, and stung me in
secret with a viper's tooth; they compassionate me with their lips and
rejoice in their hearts. But the Lord saw them, and had them in
derision, reserving them to appear with me, his unfortunate servant,
at the last judgment. One of them ridicules my walk, and my laugh:
another makes of my features a subject of accusation: to another the
simplicity of my manners is the evil thing: and I have lived three
years in the company of such men!" He continues his indignant
self-defence as follows:
"I have lived surrounded by virgins, and to some of them I
explained as best I could the divine books. With study came an
increased knowledge of each other, and with that knowledge mutual
confidence. Let them say if they have ever found anything in my
conduct unbecoming a Christian. Have I not refused all presents, great
or small? Gold has never sounded in my palm. Have they heard from my
lips any doubtful word, or seen in my eyes a bold or hazardous look?
Never, and no one dares say so. The only objection to me is that I am
a man: and that objection only appeared when Paula announced her
intention of going to Jerusalem. They believed my accuser when he
lied: why do they not believe him when he retracts? He is the same man
now as then. He imputed false crimes to me, now he declares me
innocent. What a man confesses under torture is more likely to be true
than that which he gives forth in a moment of gaiety: but people are
more prone to believe such a lie than the truth.
"Of all the ladies in Rome Paula only, in her mourning and fasting,
has touched my heart. Her songs were psalms, her conversations were of
the Gospel, her delight was in purity, her life a long fast. But when
I began to revere, respect, and venerate her, as her conspicuous
virtue deserved, all my good qualities forsook me on the spot.
"Had Paula and Melania rushed to the baths, taken advantage of their
wealth and position to join, perfumed and adorned, in one worship God
and their wealth, their freedom and pleasure, they would have been
known as great and saintly ladies; but now it is said they seek to be
admired in sackcloth and ashes, and go down to hell laden with fasting
and mortifications: as if they could not as well have been damned
along with the rest, amid the applauses of the crowd. If it were
Pagans and Jews who condemned them, they would have had the
consolation of being hated by those who hated Christ, but these are
Christians, or men known by that name.
"Lady Asella, I write these lines in haste, while the ship spreads its
sails. I write them with sobs and tears, yet giving thanks to God to
have been found worthy of the hatred of the world. Salute Paula and
Eustochium, mine in Christ whether the world pleases or not, salute
Albina your mother, Marcella your sister, Marcellina, Felicita: say to
them that we shall meet again before the judgment seat of God, where
the secrets of all hearts shall be revealed. Remember me, oh example
of purity! and may thy prayers tranquillise before me the tumults of
the sea!"
[Illustration: TRINITA DE' MONTI.]
The agitation with which the community of ladies must have received
such a letter may easily be imagined. They were better able than any
others to judge of the probity and honour of the writer who had lived
among them so long: and no doubt all these storms raging about, the
injurious and insulting imputations, all the evil tongues of Rome let
loose upon the harmless house, their privacy invaded, their quiet
disturbed, must, during the whole course of the deplorable incident,
have been the cause of pain and trouble unspeakable to the gentle
society on the Aventine. Marcella it is evident had done what she
could to stop the mouth of Jerome when the trouble began; it is
perhaps for this reason that the letter of farewell is addressed to
the older Asella, perhaps a milder judge.
Paula's preparations had begun before Jerome had as yet thought of his
more abrupt departure. They were not so easily made as those of a
solitary already detached from the world. She had all her family
affairs to regulate, and, what was harder still, her children to part
with, the most difficult of all, and the special point in her conduct
with which it is impossible for us to sympathise. But it must be
remembered that Paula, a spotless matron, had been branded with the
most shameful of slanders, that she had been shrieked at by the crowd
as the slayer of her daughter, and accused by society of having
dishonoured her name. She had been the subject of a case of libel, as
we should say, before the public courts, and though the slanderer had
confessed his falsehood (under the influence of torture it would seem,
according to the words of Jerome), the imputation, as in most cases,
remained. Outraged and wounded to the quick, it is very possible that
she may have thought that it was well for her younger children that
she should leave them, that they might not remain under the wing of a
mother whose name had been bandied about in the mouths of men. Her
daughter Paulina was by this time married to the good and faithful
Pammachius, whose protection might be of greater advantage to the
younger girl and boy than her own. And Paula had full knowledge of the
tender mercies of her pagan relations, and of the influence they were
likely to exercise against her, even in her own house. The staid young
Eustochium, grave and calm, clung to her mother's side, her youthful
head already covered by the veil of the dedicated virgin, a serene
and unfaltering figure in the midst of all the agitations of the
parting. All Rome poured forth to accompany them to the port, brothers
and sisters with their wives and husbands, relations less near, a
crowd of friends. All the way along the winding banks of the Tiber
they plied Paula with entreaties and reproaches and tears. She made
them no reply. She was at all times slow to speak, as the tender
chronicle reports. "She raised her eyes to heaven, pious towards her
children but more pious to God." She retained her self-command until
the vessel began to move from the shore, where little Toxotius, the
boy of ten years old, stood stretching out his hands to her in a last
appeal, his sister Rufina silent, with wistful eyes, by his side.
Paula's heart was like to burst. She turned her eyes away unable to
bear that cruel sight, while Eustochium, firm and steadfast, supported
her weaker mother in her arms.
Was it a cruel desertion, a heartless abandonment of duty? Who can
tell? There are desertions, cruelties in this kind, which are the
highest sacrifice, and sometimes the most bitter proof of
self-devotion. Did Paula in her heart believe, most painful thought
that can enter a mother's mind, that her boy would be better without
her, brought up in peace among his uncles and guardians, who, had she
been there, would have made his life a continual struggle between two
sides? Was Rufina more likely to be happy in her gentle sister's
charge, than with her mind disturbed, and perhaps her marriage
spoiled, by her mother's religious vows, and all that was involved in
them? She might be wrong in thinking so, as we are all wrong often in
our best and most painfully pondered plans. But condemnation is very
easy, and gives so little trouble--there is surely a word to be said
on the other side of the question.
When these pilgrims leave Rome they cease to have any part in the
story of the great city with which we have to do. Yet their after-fate
may be stated in a few words. No need to follow the great lady in her
journey over land and sea to the Holy Land with all its associations,
where Jerusalem out of her ruins, decked with a new classic name, was
already rising again into the knowledge and the veneration of the
world. These were not the days of excursion trains and steamers, it is
true; but the number of pilgrims ever coming and going to those more
than classic shores, those holy places, animated with every higher
hope, was perhaps greater in proportion to the smaller size and less
population of the known world than are our many pilgrimages now,
though this seems so strange a thing to say. But is there not a
Murray, a Baedeker, of the fourth century, still existent, the
_Itinéraire de Bordeaux à Jerusalem_, unquestioned and authentic,
containing the most careful account of inns and places of refuge and
modes of travel for the pilgrims? It is possible that the lady Paula
may have had that ancient roll in her satchel, or slung about the
shoulders of her attendant for constant reference. Her ship was
occupied by her own party alone, and conveyed, no doubt, much baggage
and many provisions as an emigration for life would naturally do; and
it was hindered by no storms, as far as we hear, but only by a great
calm which delayed the vessel much and made the voyage tedious,
necessitating the use of the galley's oars, which very likely the
ladies would like best, though it kept them so many more days upon the
sea. They reached Cyprus at last, that holy island now covered with
monasteries, where Epiphanius, once Paula's guest in Rome, awaited and
received her with every honour, and where there were many visits to be
paid to monks and nuns in their new establishments, the favourite
dissipation of the cloister. The ladies afterwards continued their
voyage to Antioch, where they met Jerome; and proceeded on their
journey, having probably had enough of the sea, along the coast by
Tyre and Sidon, by Herod's splendid city of Cæsarea, and Joppa with
its memories of the Apostles--not without a thought of Andromeda and
her monster as they looked over the dark and dangerous reefs which
still scare the traveller: for they loved literature, notwithstanding
their separation from the world. They formed by this time a great
caravanserai, not unlike, to tell the truth, one of those parties
which we are so apt to despise, under charge of guides and attendants
who wear the livery of Cook. But such an expedition was far more
dignified and important in those distant days. Jerome and his monks
made but one family of sisters and brothers with the Roman ladies and
their followers, who endured so bravely all the fatigues and dangers
of the way. Paula the pilgrim was no longer a tottering fine lady, but
the most animated and interested of travellers, with no mere mission
of hermit-hunting like Melania, but the truest human enthusiasm for
all the storied scenes through which she passed. When they reached
Jerusalem she went in a rapture of tears and exaltation from one to
another of the sacred sites, kissing the broken stone which was
supposed to have been that which was rolled against the door of the
Holy Sepulchre, and following with pious awe and joy the steps of
Helena into the cave where the True Cross was found. The legend was
still fresh in those days, and doubts there were none. The enthusiasm
of Paula, the rapture and exaltation, which found vent in torrents of
tears, in ecstasies of sacred emotion, joy and prayer, moved all the
city, thronged with pilgrims, devout and otherwise, to whom the great
Roman lady was a wonder: the crowd followed her about from point to
point, marvelling at her devotion and the warmth of natural feeling
which in all circumstances distinguished her. The reader cannot but
follow still with admiring interest a figure so fresh, so
unconventional, so profoundly touched by all those holy and sacred
associations. Amid so many who are represented as almost more
abstracted among spiritual thoughts than nature permits, her frank
emotion and tender, natural enthusiasm are always a refreshment and a
charm.
We come here upon a break in the hitherto redundant story. Melania and
Rufinus were in possession of their convents, and fully established as
residents on the Mount of Olives, when the other pilgrims arrived; and
there can be but little doubt that every grace of hospitality was
extended by the one Roman lady to the other, as well as by the old
companions of Jerome to her friend. But in the course of the
after-years these dear friends quarrelled bitterly, not on personal
matters, so far as appears, but on points of doctrine, and fell into
such prolonged warfare of angry and stinging words as hurt more than
blows. By means of this very intimacy they knew everything that had
ever been said or whispered of each other, and in the heat of conflict
did not hesitate to use every old insinuation, every suggestion that
could hurt or wound. The struggle ran so high that the after-peace of
both parties was seriously affected by it; and one of its most
significant results was that Jerome, a man great enough and little
enough for anything, either in the way of spitefulness or magnanimity,
cut off from his letters and annals all mention of this early period
of peace, and all reference to Melania, whom he is supposed to have
praised so highly in his first state of mind that it became impossible
in his second to permit these expressions of amity to be connected
with her name. This is a melancholy explanation of the silence which
falls over the first period of Paula's residence in Palestine, but it
is a very natural one: and both sides were equally guilty. The quarrel
happened, however, years after the first visit, which we have every
reason to believe was all friendliness and peace.
After this first pause at Jerusalem, the caravanserai got under way
again and set out on a long journey through all the scenes of the Old
Testament, the storied deserts and ruins of Syria, not much less
ancient to the view and much less articulate than now. This was in
the year 387, two years after their departure from Rome. Even now,
with all our increased facilities for travel--neutralised as they are
by the fact that these wild and desert lands will probably never be
adapted to modern methods--the journey would be a very long and
fatiguing business. Jerome and his party "went everywhere," as we
should say; they were daunted by no difficulties. No modern lady in
deer-stalker's costume could have shrunk less from any dangerous road
than the once fastidious Paula. They stopped everywhere, receiving the
ready hospitality of the convents in every awful pass of the rocks and
stony waste where such homes of penance were planted. Those
wildernesses of ruin, from which our own explorers have picked
carefully out some tradition of Gilgal or of Ziklag, some Philistine
stronghold or Jewish city of refuge--were surveyed by these
adventurers fourteen hundred years ago, when perhaps there was greater
freshness of tradition, but none of the aids of science to decipher
what would seem even more hoary with age to them than it does to us.
How trifling in our pretences at exploration do the luxurious parties
of the nineteenth century seem, abstracted from common life for a few
months at the most, and with all the resources of civilisation to fall
back upon, in comparison with that of these patient wanderers, eating
the Arab bread and clotted milk, and such fare as was to be got at,
finding shelter among the dark-skinned ascetics of the desert
communities, taking refuge in the cave which some saint but a day or
two before had inhabited, wandering everywhere, over primeval ruin and
recent shrine!
When they came back from these savage wildernesses to green Bethlehem
standing up on its hillside over the pleasant fields, the calm and
sweetness of the place went to their hearts. It was in this sacred
spot that they decided to settle themselves, building their two
convents, Jerome's upon the hill near the western gate, Paula's upon
the smiling level below. He is said to have sold all that he had,
some remains of personal property in Dalmatia belonging to himself and
his brother, who was his faithful and constant companion, to provide
for the expenses of the building, on his side; and no doubt the
abundant wealth of Paula supplemented all that was wanting. Gradually
a conventual settlement, such as was the ideal of the time, gathered
in this spot. After her own convent was finished Paula built two
others near it, which were soon filled with dedicated sisters. And she
built a hospice for the reception of travellers, so that, as she said
with tender smiles and tears, "If Joseph and Mary should return to
Bethlehem, they might be sure of finding room for them in the inn."
This soft speech shines like a gleam of tender light upon the little
holy city with all its memories, showing us the great lady of old in
her gracious kindness, full of noble natural kindness, and seeing in
every poor pilgrim who passed that way some semblance of that simple
pair, who carried the Light of the World to David's little town among
the hills.
All these homes of piety and charity are swept away, and no tradition
even of their site is left; but there is one storied chamber that
remains full of the warmest interest of all. It is the rocky room, in
one of the half caves, half excavations close to that of the Nativity,
and communicating with it by rudely hewn stairs and passages, in which
Jerome established himself while his convent was building, which he
called his Paradise, and which is for ever associated with the great
work completed there. All other traditions and memories grow dim in
the presence of the great and sacred interest of the place. Yet it
will be impossible even there for the spectator who knows their story
to stand unmoved in the scene, practically unaltered since their day,
where Jerome laboured at his great translation, and Paula and
Eustochium copied, compared, and criticised his daily labours. A
great part of the Vulgate had been completed in Rome, but since
leaving that city Jerome had much increased his knowledge of Hebrew,
losing no opportunity, during his travels, of studying the language
with every learned Rabbi he encountered, and acquiring much
information in respect to the views and readings of the doctors in the
law. He took the opportunity of his retirement at Bethlehem to revise
what was already done and to finish the work. His two friends had both
learned Hebrew in a greater or less degree before leaving Rome. They
had no doubt shared his studies on the way. They read with him daily a
portion of the Scriptures in the original; and it was at their
entreaty and with their help that he began the translation of the
Psalms, so deeply appropriate to this scene, in which the voice of the
shepherd of Bethlehem could almost be heard, singing as he led his
flock about the little hills. I quote from M. Amédée Thierry a
sympathetic description of the method of this work as it was carried
out in the rocky chamber at Bethlehem, or in the convent close by.
His two friends charged themselves with the task of
collecting all the materials, and this edition, prepared by
their care, is that which remains in the Church under
Jerome's name. We have his own instructions to them for
this work, even to the lines traced for greater exactness,
and the explanation of the signs which he had adopted in
the collation of the different versions with his text,
sometimes a line underscored, sometimes an obelisk or
asterisk. A comma followed by two points indicated the
cutting out of superfluous words coming from some
paraphrase of the Septuagint; a star followed by two points
showed, on the contrary, where passages had to be inserted
from the Hebrew; another mark denoted passages borrowed
from the translation of Theodosius, slightly different from
the Septuagint as to the simplicity of the language. In
reading these various symbols it is pleasant to think of
the two noble Roman ladies seated before the vast desk upon
which were spread the numerous manuscripts, Greek, Hebrew,
and Latin--the Hebrew text of the Bible, the different
editions of the Septuagint, the Hexapla of Origen,
Theodosius, Symmachus, Aquila, and the Italian
Vulgate--whilst they examined and compared, reducing to
order under their hands, with piety and joy, that Psalter
of St. Jerome which we still sing, at least the greater
part of it, in the Latin Church at the present day.
It is indeed a touching association with that portion of Scripture
which next to the Gospel is most dear to the devout, that the
translation still in daily use throughout the churches of Continental
Europe, the sonorous and noble words which amid all the babble of
different tongues still form a large universal language, of which all
have at least a conventional understanding--should have been thus
transcribed and perfected for the use of the generations. Jerome is no
gentle hero, and, truth to tell, has never been much loved in the
Church which yet owes so much to him. Yet there is no other work of
the kind which carries with it so many soft and tender associations.
The cave at Bethlehem is as little adapted as a scene for that
domestic combination as Jerome is naturally adapted to be its centre.
And no doubt there are unkindly critics who will describe this austere
yet beautiful interior as the workshop of two poor female slaves
dragged after him by the tyranny of their grim taskmaster to do his
work for him. No such idea is consistent with the record. The gentle
Paula was a woman of high spirit as well as of much grace and
courtesy, steadfastness and humour, the last the most unusual quality
of all. The imaginative devotion which had induced her to learn Hebrew
in order to sing the Psalmist's songs in the original, among the
little band of Souls, under Marcella's gilded roof, had its natural
evolution in the gentle pressure laid upon Jerome to make of them an
authoritative translation: and where could so fit a place for this
work have been found as in the delightful rest after their travels
were over, in the very scene where these sacred songs were first
begun? It would be almost as impertinent and foolish to suppose that
any modern doubt of their authenticity existed in Paula's mind as to
suggest that these were forced and dreary labours to which she was
driven by a spiritual tyrant. To our mind this mutual labour and study
adds the last charm to their companionship. The sprightly, gentle
woman who shed so much light over that curious self-denying yet
self-indulgent life, and the grave young daughter who never left her
side, whose gentle shadow is one with her, so that while Paula lived
we cannot distinguish them apart--must have found a quiet happiness
above all they had calculated on in this delightful intercourse and
work. Their minds and thoughts occupied by the charm of noble poetry,
by the puzzle of words to be cleared and combined aright, and by
constant employment in a matter which interested them so deeply, which
is perhaps the best of all--must have drawn closer and ever closer,
mother to child, and child to mother, as well as both to the friend
and father whom they delighted to serve, and whose large intellect and
knowledge kept theirs going in constant sympathy--not unmingled with
now and then a little opposition, and the pleasant stir of independent
opinion.
It is right to give Jerome himself, so fierce in quarrel and
controversy, the advantage of this gentle lamp which burns for ever in
his little Paradise. And can any one suppose that Paula, once so
sensitive and exquisite, now strong and vigorous in the simplicity of
that retirement, with her hands full and her mind, plenty to think of,
plenty to do, had not her advantage also? The life would be ideal but
for the thought that must have come over her by times, of the young
ones left in Rome, and what was happening to them. She was indeed
prostrated by grief again and again by the death of her daughters
there, one after another, and mourned with a bitterness which makes us
wonder whether that haunting doubt and self-censure, which perhaps
gave an additional sting to her sorrow in the case of Blæsilla, may
not have overwhelmed her heart again though on a contrary ground--the
doubt whether perhaps the austerities she enjoined and shared had been
fatal to one, the contradictory doubt whether to leave them to the
usual course of life might not have been fatal to the others. Such a
woman has none of the self-confidence which steels so many against
fate--and, finding nothing effectual for the safety of those she
loved, neither a sacred dedication nor that consent to commonplace
happiness which is the ordinary ideal of a mother's duty, might well
sometimes fall into despair--a despair silently shared by many a
trembling heart in all ages, which finds its best-laid plans, though
opposite to each other, fall equally into downfall and dismay.
[Illustration: FROM THE AVENTINE.]
But she had her compensations. She had her little glory, too, in the
books which went forth from that seclusion in Bethlehem, bearing her
name, inscribed to her and her child by the greatest writer of the
time. "You, Paula and Eustochium, who have studied so deeply the books
of the Hebrews, take it, this book of Esther, and test it word by
word; you can tell whether anything is added, anything withdrawn: and
can bear faithful witness whether I have rendered aright in Latin this
Hebrew history." Few women would despise such a tribute, and fewer
still the place of these two women in the Paradise of that laborious
study, and at the doors of that beautiful Hospice on the Jerusalem
road, where Joseph and Mary had they but come again would have run no
risk of finding room!
They died all three, one after another, and were laid to rest in the
pure and wholesome rock near the sacred spot of the Nativity. There is
a touching story told of how Eustochium, after her mother's death,
when Jerome was overwhelmed with grief and unable to return to any of
his former occupations, came to him with the book of Ruth still
untranslated in her hand, at once a promise and an entreaty. "Where
thou goest I will go. Where thou dwellest I will dwell"--and a
continuation at the same time of the blessed work which kept their
souls alive.
[Illustration: THE CAPITOL FROM THE PALATINE.]
CHAPTER VI.
THE MOTHER HOUSE.
Amid all these changes the house on the Aventine--the mother house as
it would be called in modern parlance--went on in busy quiet, no
longer visible in that fierce light which beats upon the path of such
a man as Jerome, doing its quiet work steadily, having a hand in many
things, most of them beneficent, which went on in Rome. Albina the
mother of Marcella, and Asella her elder sister, died in peace: and
younger souls, with more stirring episodes of life, disturbed and
enlivened the peace of the cloister, which yet was no cloister but
open to all the influences of life, maintaining a large correspondence
and much and varied intercourse with the society of the times. In the
first fervour of the settlement in Bethlehem both Paula and Jerome
(she by his hand) wrote to Marcella urging her to join them, to
forsake the world in a manner more complete than she had yet done.
"... You were the first to kindle the fire in us" (the letter is
nominally from Paula and Eustochium): "the first by precept and
example to urge us to adopt our present life. As a hen gathers her
chickens, who fear the hawk and tremble at every shadow of a bird, so
did you take us under your wing. And will you now let us fly about at
random with no mother near us?"
This letter is full not only of affectionate entreaties but of
delightful pictures of their own retired and peaceful life. "How shall
I describe to you," the writer says, "the little cave of Christ, the
hostel of Mary? Silence is more respectful than words, which are
inadequate to speak its praise. There are no lines of noble
colonnades, no walls decorated by the sweat of the poor and the labour
of convicts, no gilded roofs to intercept the sky. Behold in this poor
crevice of the earth, in a fissure of the rock, the builder of the
firmament was born." She goes on with touching eloquence to put forth
every argument to move her friend.
Read the Apocalypse of St. John and see there what he says
of the woman clothed in scarlet, on whose forehead is
written blasphemy, and of her seven hills, and many waters,
and the end of Babylon. "Come out of her, my people," the
Lord says, "that ye be not partakers of her sins." There is
indeed there a holy Church; there are the trophies of
apostles and martyrs, the true confession of Christ, the
faith preached by the apostles, and heathendom trampled
under foot, and the name of Christian every day raising
itself on high. But its ambition, its power, the greatness
of the city, the need of seeing and being seen, of greeting
and being greeted, of praising and detracting, hearing or
talking, of seeing, even against one's will, all the crowds
of the world--these things are alien to the monastic
profession and they have spoiled Rome, they all oppose an
insurmountable obstacle to the quiet of the true monk.
People visit you: if you open your doors, farewell to
silence: if you close them, you are proud and unfriendly.
If you return their politeness, it is through proud
portals, through a host of grumbling insolent lackeys. But
in the cottage of Christ all is simple, all is rustic:
except the Psalms, all is silence: no frivolous talk
disturbs you, the ploughman sings Allelujah as he follows
his plough, the reaper covered with sweat refreshes himself
with chanting a psalm, and it is David who supplies with a
song the vine dresser among his vineyards. These are the
songs of the country, its ditties of love, played upon the
shepherd's flute. Will the time never come when a
breathless courier will bring us the good news, your
Marcella has landed in Palestine? What a cry of joy among
the choirs of the monks, among all the bands of the
virgins! In our excitement we wait for no carriage but go
on foot to meet you, to clasp your hand, to look upon your
face. When will the day come when we shall enter together
the birthplace of Christ: when, leaning over the divine
sepulchre, we weep with a sister, a mother, when our lips
touch together the sacred wood of the Cross: when on the
Mount of Olives our hearts and souls rise together in the
rising of our Lord? Would not you see Lazarus coming out of
his tomb, bound in his shroud? and the waters of Jordan
purified for the washing of the Lord? Then we shall hasten
to the shepherds' folds, and pray at the tomb of David.
Listen, it is the prophet Amos blowing his shepherd's horn
from the height of his rock; we shall see the monuments of
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and the three famous women, and
Samaria and Nazareth, the flower of Galilee, and Shiloh and
Bethel and other holy places, accompanied by Christ, where
churches rise everywhere like standards of the victories of
Christ. And when we return to our cavern we will sing
together always, and sometimes we shall weep; our hearts
wounded with the arrow of the Lord, we will say one to
another, "I have found Him whom my soul loveth; I will hold
Him, and will not let Him go!"
Similar words upon the happiness of rural life and retirement Jerome
had addressed to Marcella before. He had warned her of the danger of
the tumultuous sea of life, and how the frail bark, beaten by the
waves, ought to seek the shelter of the port before the last hurricane
breaks. The image was even more true than he imagined; but it was not
of the perils of Rome in the dreadful time of war and siege which was
approaching that he spoke, but of the usual dangers of common life to
the piety of the recluse. "The port which we offer you, it is the
solitude of the fields," he says:
Brown bread, herbs watered by our own hands, and milk, the
daintiest of the country, supply our rustic feasts. We have
no fear of drowsiness in prayer or heaviness in our
readings, on such fare. In summer we seek the shade of our
trees; in autumn the mild weather and pure air invite us to
rest on a bed of fallen leaves; in spring, when the fields
are painted with flowers, we sing our psalms among the
birds. When winter comes, with its chills and snows, the
wood of the nearest forest supplies our fire. Let Rome keep
her tumults, her cruel arena, her mad circus, her luxurious
theatres; let the senate of matrons pay its daily visits.
It is good for us to cleave to the Lord and to put all our
hope in Him.
But Marcella turned a deaf ear to these entreaties. Perhaps she still
loved the senate of matrons, the meetings of the Souls, the irruption
of gentle visitors, the murmur of all the stories of Rome, and the
delicate difficulties of marriage and re-marriage brought to her for
advice and guidance. The allusions in both these letters point to such
a conclusion, and there is no reason why it should not have been so.
The Superior of a convent has in this fashion in much later days
fulfilled more important uses than the gentle nun of the fields. At
all events this lady remained in her home, her natural place, and
continued to pour forth her bounty upon the poor of her native city:
which many would agree was perhaps the better, though it certainly was
not the safer, way. The death of her mother, which made a change in
her life, and might have justified a still greater breaking up of all
old customs and ties, was perhaps the occasion of these affectionate
arguments; but Marcella would herself be no longer young and in a
position much resembling that of a mother in her own person, the
trusted friend of many in Rome, and their closest tie to a more
spiritual and better life. The light of such a guest as Jerome,
attracting all eyes to the house and bringing it within the records of
literary history, that sole mode of saving the daily life of a
household from oblivion--had indeed died away, leaving life perhaps a
little flat and blank, certainly much less agitated and visible to the
outer world than when he was pouring forth fire and flame upon every
adversary from within the shelter of its peaceful walls. But no other
change had happened in the circumstances under which Marcella opened
her palace to a few consecrated sisters, and made it a general oratory
and place of pious counsel and retreat for the ladies of Rome. The
same devout readings, the same singing of psalms (sometimes in the
original), the same life of mingled piety and intellectualism must
have gone on as before: and other fine ladies perhaps not less
interesting than Paula must have sought with their confessions and
confidences the ear of the experienced woman, who as Paula says in
respect to herself and her daughters, "first carried the sparkle of
light to our hearts, and collected us like chickens under your wing."
She was the same, "our gentle, our sweet Marcella, sweeter than
honey," open to every charity and kindness: not refusing, it would
seem, to visit as well as to be visited, and willing to "live the
life" without forsaking any ordinary bonds or traditions of existence.
There is less to tell of her for this reason, but not perhaps less to
praise.
Marcella had her share no doubt in forming the minds of the two
younger spirits, vowed from their cradle to the perfect life of
virginhood, the second Paula, daughter of Toxotius and his Christian
wife; and the younger Melania, daughter also of the son whom his
mother had abandoned as an infant. It is a curious answer to the stern
virtue which reproaches these two Roman ladies with the cruel
desertion of their children, to find that both those children, grown
men, permitted or encouraged the vocation of their daughters, and were
proud of the saintly renown of the mothers who had left them to their
fate. The consecrated daughters however leave only a faint trace as of
two spotless catechumens in the story. Incidents of a more exciting
character broke now and then the calm of life in the palace on the
Aventine. M. Thierry in his life of Jerome gives us perhaps a sketch
too entertaining of Fabiola, one of the ladies more or less associated
with the house of Marcella, a constant visitor, a penitent by times,
an enthusiast in charity, a woman bent on making, or so it seemed, the
best of both worlds. She had made early what for want of a better
expression we may call a love match, in which she had been bitterly
disappointed. That a divorce should follow was both natural and lawful
in the opinion of the time, and Fabiola had already formed a new
attachment and made haste to marry again. But the second marriage was
a disappointment even greater than the first, and this repeated
failure seems to have confused and excited her mind to issues by no
means clear at first, probably even to herself. She made in the
distraction of her life a sudden and unannounced visit to Paula's
convent at Bethlehem, where she was a welcome and delightful visitor,
carrying with her all the personal news that cannot be put into
writing, and the gracious ways of an accomplished woman of the world.
She is supposed to have had a private object of her own under this
visit of friendship, but the atmosphere and occupations of the place
must have overawed Fabiola, and though her object was hidden in an
artful web of fiction she was not bold enough to reveal it, either to
the stern Jerome or the mild Paula. What she did was to make herself
delightful to both in the little society upon which we have so many
side-lights, and which doubtless, though so laborious and full of
privations, was a very delightful society, none better, with such a
man as Jerome, full of intellectual power, and human experience, at
its head, and ladies of the highest breeding like Paula and her
daughter to regulate its simple habits. We are told of one pretty
scene where--amid the talk which no doubt ran upon the happiness of
that peaceful life amid the pleasant fields where the favoured
shepherds heard the angels' song--there suddenly rose the voice of the
new-comer reciting with the most enchanting flattery a certain famous
letter which Jerome long before had written to his friend Heliodorus
and which had been read in all the convents and passed from hand to
hand as a _chef d'oeuvre_ of literary beauty and sacred enthusiasm.
Fabiola, quick and adroit and emotional, had learned it by heart, and
Jerome would have been more than man had he not felt the charm of such
flattery.
For a moment the susceptible Roman seems to have felt that she had
attained the haven of peace after her disturbed and agitated life.
Her hand was full and her heart generous: she spread her charities far
and wide among poor pilgrims and poor residents with that undoubting
liberality which considered almsgiving as one of the first of
Christian duties. But whether the little busy society palled after a
time, or whether it was the great scare of the rumour that the Huns
were coming that frightened Fabiola, we cannot tell, nor precisely how
long her stay was. Her coming and going were at least within the space
of two years. She was not made to settle down to the revision of
manuscripts like her friends, though she had dipped like them into
Hebrew and had a pretty show of knowledge. She would seem to have
evidenced this however more by curious and somewhat frivolous
questions than by any assistance given in the work which was going on.
Nothing could be more kind, more paternal, than Jerome to the little
band of women round him. He complains, it is true, that Fabiola
sometimes propounded problems and did not wait for an answer, and that
occasionally he had to reply that he did not know, when she puzzled
him with this rapid stream of inquiry. But it is evident also that he
did his best sincerely to satisfy her curiosity as if it had been the
sincerest thing in the world. For instance, she was seized with a
desire to know the symbolical meaning of the costume of the high
priest among the Jews: and to gratify this desire Jerome occupied a
whole night in dictating to one of his scribes a little treatise on
the subject, which probably the fine lady scarcely took time to read.
Nothing can be more characteristic than the indications of this bright
and charming visitor, throwing out reflections of all that was going
on round her, so brilliant that they seemed better than the reality,
fluttering upon the surface of their lives, bringing all under her
spell.
There seems but little ground however for the supposition of M.
Thierry that it was in the interest of Fabiola that Amandus, a priest
in Rome, wrote a letter laying before Jerome a case of conscience,
that of a woman who had divorced her husband and married again, and
who now was troubled in her mind as to her duty; whether the second
husband was wholly unlawful, and whether she could remain in full
communion with the Church, having made this marriage? If she was the
person referred to no one has been able to divulge what the question
meant--whether she had a third marriage in her mind, or if a wholly
unnecessary fit of compunction had seized her; for as a matter of fact
she had never been subjected by the Church to any pains or penalties
in consequence of her second marriage. Jerome however, as might have
been expected of him, gave forth no uncertain sound in his reply.
According to the Church, he said, there could be but one husband, the
first. Whatever had been his unworthiness, to replace him by another
was to live in sin. Whether it was this answer which decided her
action, or whether she had been moved by the powerful fellowship of
Bethlehem to renounce the more agitating course of worldly life, at
least it is certain that Fabiola's career was changed from this time.
Perhaps it was her desire to shake off the second husband which moved
her. At all events on her return to Rome she announced to the bishop
that she felt herself guilty of a great sin, and that she desired to
make public penance for the same.
[Illustration: SAN BARTOLOMMEO.]
Accordingly on the eve of Easter, when the penitents assembled under
the porch of the great Church of St. John Lateran, amid all the wild
and haggard figures appearing there, murderers and criminals of all
kinds, the delicate Fabiola, with her hair hanging about her
shoulders, ashes on her head and on the dark robe that covered her,
her face pale with fasting and tears, stood among them, a sight for
the world. Under many aspects had all Rome seen this daughter of the
great Fabian race, in the splendour of her worldly espousals, and at
all the great spectacles and entertainments of a city given up to
display and amusement. Her jewels, her splendid dresses, her fine
equipages, were well known. With what curiosity would all her old
admirers, her rivals in splendour, those who had envied her luxury and
high place, gather to see her now in her voluntary humiliation,
descending to the level of the very lowest as she had hitherto been on
the very highest apex of society! All Rome we are told was there,
gazing, wondering, tracing her movements under the portico, among
these unaccustomed companions. Perhaps there might be a supreme
fantastic satisfaction to the penitent--with that craving for
sensation which the exhaustion of all kinds of triumphs and pleasures
brings--in thus stepping from one extreme to the other, a
gratification in the thought that Rome which had worshipped her beauty
and splendour was now gazing aghast at her bare feet and dishevelled
hair. One can have no doubt of the sensation experienced by the _Tota
urbe spectante Romana_. It was worth while frequenting religious
ceremonies when such a sight was possible! Fabiola,--once with mincing
steps, and gorgeous liveried servants on either hand, descending
languidly the great marble steps from her palace to the gilded
carriage in which she sank fatigued when that brief course was over,
the mitella blazing with gold upon her head, her robe woven with all
the tints of the rainbow into metallic splendour of gold and silver
threads. And now to see her amid that crowd of ruffians from the
Campagna, and unhappy women from the purlieus of the city, her
splendid head uncovered, her thin hands crossed in the rough sleeves
of the penitent's gown! It might be to some perhaps a salutary
sight--moving other great ladies with heavier sins on their heads than
Fabiola's to feel the prickings of remorse; though no doubt it is
equally possible that they might think they saw through her, and the
new form of self-exhibition which attracted all the world to gaze. We
are not told whether Fabiola found refuge in the house on the Aventine
with Marcella, who had lit the fire of Christian faith in her heart as
well as in that of Paula: or whether she remained, like Marcella, in
her own house, making it another centre of good works. But at all
events her life from this moment was entirely given up to charity and
spiritual things. Her kinsfolk and noble neighbours still more or less
Pagan, were filled with fury and indignation and that sharp disgust at
the loss of so much good money to the world, which had so much to do
in embittering opposition: but the Christians were deeply impressed,
the homage of such a great lady to the faith, and her recantation of
her errors affecting many as a true martyrdom.
If it was really compunction for the sin of the second marriage which
so moved her, her position would much resemble that of the _fine
fleur_ of French society as at present constituted, in its tremendous
opposition to the law of divorce, now lawful in France of the
nineteenth century as it was in Rome of the fourth--but resisted with
a splendid bigotry of feeling, altogether independent of morality or
even of reason, by all that is noblest in the country. Fabiola's
divorce had been perfectly lawful and according to all the teaching
and traditions of her time. The Church had as yet uplifted no voice
against it. She had not been shut out from the society even of the
most pious, or condemned to any penance or deprivation. Not even
Jerome (till forced to give a categorical answer), nor that purest
circle of devout women at Bethlehem, had refused her any privilege.
Her action was unique and unprecedented as a protest against the
existing law of the land, as well as universal custom and tradition.
We are not informed whether it had any lasting effect, or formed a
precedent for other women. No doubt it encouraged the formation of the
laws against divorce which originated in the Church itself but have
held through the intervening ages a doubtful sway, broken on every
side by Papal dispensations, until now that they have settled down
into a bond of iron on the consciences of the devout--chiefly the
women, more specially still the gentlewomen--of Catholic Europe, where
as in Fabiola's time they are once more against the law of the land.
The unworthy second husband we are informed had died even before
Fabiola's public act of penitence; but no further movements towards
the world, or the commoner ways of life reveal themselves in her
future career. If she returned to life with the veiled head and bare
feet of her penitence, or if she resumed, like Marcella, much of the
ordinary traffic of society, we have no information. But she was the
founder of the first public hospital in Rome, besides the usual
monasteries, and built in concert with Pammachius a hospice at Ostia
at the mouth of the Tiber, where strangers and travellers from all
parts of the world were received, probably on the model of that
hospice for pilgrims which Paula had established. And she was herself
the foremost nurse in her own hospital, shrinking from no office of
charity. The Church has always and in all circumstances encouraged
such practical acts of self-devotion.
The ladies of the Aventine and all the friends of Jerome had been
disturbed a little before by the arrival of a stranger in Rome, also a
pretended friend of Jerome, and at first very willing to shelter
himself under that title, Rufinus, who brought with him--after a
moment of delusive amiability during which he had almost deceived the
very elect themselves--a blast of those wild gales of polemical
warfare which had been echoing for some time with sacrilegious force
and inappropriateness from the Mount of Olives itself. The excitement
which he raised in Rome in respect to the doctrines of Origen caused
much commotion in the community, which lived as much by news of the
Church and reports of all that was going on in theology as by the
daily bread of their charities and kindness. It was to Marcella that
Jerome wrote, when, reports having been made to him of all that had
happened, he exploded, with the flaming bomb of his furious rhetoric,
the fictitious statements of Rufinus, by which he was made to appear a
supporter of Origen. Into that hot and fierce controversy we have no
need to enter. No one can study the life of Jerome without becoming
acquainted with this episode and finding out how much the wrath of a
Father of the Church is like the rage of other men, if not more
violent; but happily as Rome was not the birthplace of this fierce
quarrel it is quite immaterial to our subject or story. It filled the
house of Marcella with trouble and doubt for a time, with indignation
afterwards when the facts of the controversy were better known; but
interesting as it must have been to the eager theologians there,
filling their halls with endless discussions and alarms, lest this
new agitation should interfere with the repose of their friend, it is
no longer interesting except to the student now. Rufinus was finally
unmasked, and condemned by the Bishop of Rome, chiefly by the
exertions of Marcella, whom Oceanus, coming hot from the scene of the
controversy, and Paulinian the brother of Jerome, had instructed in
his true character. Events were many at this moment in that little
Christian society. The tumult of controversy thus excited and all the
heat and passion it brought with it had scarcely blown aside, when the
ears of the Roman world were made to tingle with the wonderful story
of Fabiola, and the crowd flew to behold in the portico of the Lateran
her strange appearance as a penitent; and the commotion of that event
had scarcely subsided when another wonderful incident appears in the
contemporary history filling the house with lamentation and woe.
The young Paulina, dear on all accounts to the ladies of the Aventine
as her mother's daughter, and as her husband's wife (for Pammachius,
the friend and schoolfellow of Jerome, was one of the fast friends and
counsellors of the community), as well as for her own virtues, died in
the flower of life and happiness, a rich and noble young matron
exhibiting in her own home and amid the common duties of existence,
all the noblest principles of the Christian faith. She had not chosen
what these consecrated women considered as the better way: but in her
own method, and amid a world lying in wickedness, had unfolded that
white flower of a blameless life which even monks and nuns were
thankful to acknowledge as capable of existing here and there in the
midst of worldly splendours and occupations. She left no children
behind her, so that her husband Pammachius was free of the anxieties
and troubles, as well as of the joy and pride, of a family to regulate
and provide for. His young wife left to him all her property on
condition that it should be distributed among the poor, and when he
had fulfilled this bequest the sorrowful husband himself retired from
life, and entered a convent, in obedience to the strong impulse which
swayed so many. Before this occurred however "all Rome" was roused by
another great spectacle. The entire city was invited to the funeral of
Paulina as if it had been to her marriage, though those who came were
not the same wondering circles who crowded round the Lateran gate to
see Fabiola in her humiliation. It was the poor of Rome who were
called by sound of trumpet in every street, to assemble around the
great Church of St. Peter, where were those tombs of the Apostles
which every Christian visited as the most sacred of shrines, and where
Paulina was laid forth upon her bier, the mistress of the feast. The
custom was an old one, and chambers for these funeral repasts were
attached to the great catacombs and all places of burial. The funeral
feast of Paulina however meant more than ordinary celebrations of the
kind, as the place in which it was held was more impressive and
imposing than an ordinary sepulchre however splendid. She must have
been carried through the streets in solemn procession, from the
heights on which stood the palaces of her ancient race, across the
bridge, and by the tomb of Hadrian to that great basilica where the
Apostles lay, her husband and his friends following the bier: and in
all likelihood Marcella and her train were also there, replacing the
distant mother. St. Peter's it is unnecessary to say was not the St.
Peter's we know; but it was even then a great basilica, with wide
extending porticoes and squares, and lofty roof, though the building
was scarcely quite detached from the rock out of which the back part
of the cathedral had been hewn.
[Illustration: ST. PETER'S, FROM THE JANICULUM.]
Many strange sights have been seen in that spot which once was the
centre of the civilised world, and this which seems to us one of the
strangest was in no way unusual or against the traditions of the age
in which it occurred. The church itself, and all its surroundings,
nave and aisles and porticoes, and the square beyond, were filled with
tables, and to these from all the four quarters of Rome, from the
circus and the benches of the Colosseum, where the wretched slept and
lurked, from the sunny pavements, and all the dens and haunts of the
poor by the side of the Tiber, the crowds poured, in those
unconceivable yet picturesque rags which clothe the wretchedness of
the South. They were ushered solemnly to their seats, the awe of the
place, let us hope, quieting the voices of a profane and degraded
populace, and overpowering the whispering, rustling, many-coloured
multitude. Outside the later comers would be more unrestrained, and
the roar, even though subdued, of thronging humanity must have come in
strangely to the silence of the great church, and of the mourners,
bent upon doing Paulina honour in this curious way. Did she lie there
uplifted on her high bier to receive her guests? Or was the
heart-broken Pammachius the host, standing pale upon the steps, over
the grave of the Apostles? When they were "saturated" with food and
wine, the first assembly left their places and were succeeded by
another, each as he went away receiving from the hands of Pammachius
himself a sum of money and a new garment. "Happy giver, unwearied
distributor!" says the record. The livelong day this process went on;
a winter day in Rome, not always warm, not always genial, very cold
outside in the square under the evening breeze, and no doubt growing
more and more noisy as one band continued to succeed another, and the
first fed lingered about comparing their gifts, and hoping perhaps for
some remnants to be collected at the end from the abundant and
oft-renewed meal. There were no doubts in anybody's mind, as we have
said, about encouraging pauperism or demoralising the recipients of
these gifts; perhaps it would have been difficult to demoralise
further that mendicant crowd. But one cannot help wondering how the
peace was kept, whether there were soldiers or some manner of
classical police about to keep order, or if the disgusted Senators
would have to bestir themselves to prevent this wild Christian
carnival of sorrow and charity from becoming a danger to the public
peace.
We are told that it was the sale of Paulina's jewels, and her splendid
toilettes which provided the cost of this extraordinary funeral feast.
"The beautiful dresses woven with threads of gold were turned into
warm robes of wool to cover the naked; the gems that adorned her neck
and her hair filled the hungry with good things." Poor Paulina! She
had worn her finery very modestly according to all reports; it had
served no purposes of coquetry. The reader feels that something more
congenial than that coarse and noisy crowd filling the church with its
deformities and loathsomeness might have celebrated her burial. But
not so was the feeling of the time; that they were more miserable than
words could say, vile, noisome, and unclean, formed their claim of
right to all these gifts--a claim from which their noisy and rude
profanity, their hoarse blasphemy and ingratitude took nothing away.
Charity was more robust in the early centuries than in our fastidious
days. "If such had been all the feasts spread for thee by thy
Senators," cried Bishop Paulinus, the historian of this episode, "oh
Rome thou might'st have escaped the evils denounced against thee in
the Apocalypse." We must remember that whatever might have been the
opinion later, there was no doubt in any Christian mind in the fourth
century that Rome was the Scarlet Woman of the Revelation of St. John,
and that a dreadful fate was to overwhelm her luxury and pride.
Pammachius, when he had fulfilled the wishes of his wife in this way,
thrilling the hearts of the mourning mother and sister in Bethlehem
with sad gratification, and edifying the anxious spectators on the
Aventine, carried out her will to its final end by becoming a monk,
but with the curious mixture of devotion and independence common at
the time, retired to no cloister, but lived in his own house,
fulfilling his duties, and appearing even in the Senate in the gown
and cowl so unlike the splendid garb of the day. He was no doubt one
of the members for the poor in that august but scarcely active
assembly, and occupied henceforward all his leisure in works of
charity and religious organisations, in building religious houses, and
protecting Christians in every necessity of life.
We have said that Rome in these days was as freely identified with the
Scarlet Woman of the Apocalypse as ever was done by any Reformer or
Puritan in later times. To Jerome she was as much Babylon, and as
damnable and guilty in every way as if he had been an Orangeman or
Covenanter. Mildness was not general either in speech or thought: it
has seldom been so perhaps in religious controversy. It is curious
indeed to mark how, so near the fount of Christianity, the Church had
already come to rend itself with questions of doctrine, and expend on
discussions of philosophical subtlety the force that was wanted for
the moral advantage of the world. But that no doubt was one of the
defects of the great principle of self-devotion which aimed at
emptying the mind of everything worldly and practical, and fixing it
entirely upon spiritual subjects, thus substituting them for the ruder
obsta
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