Part 14

Fabiola came once to visit them, and spent two years, entering into all their duties, and brightening the little community with her quick and eager intellect. But she died soon after her return to Rome. They urged Marcella to join them, and sent vivid descriptions of their idyllic life among the hills consecrated by so many sacred memories. “In summer we seek the shade of our trees,” they write; “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 songs among the birds.” To be sure, they had the hospital work, the menial duties, the prayers, and the penances, but they had, too, long and pleasant hours to study the holy books. Then they were free from the “need of seeing and being seen, of greeting and being greeted, of praising and detracting, hearing and talking, of seeing the crowds of the world.” The monastery and the convent were quite separate, but it is likely that St. Jerome passed many moments in the converse of his friends and helpers, though his instructions were largely given by letter. These pastoral pictures, however, with their dark shadings, did not tempt the Roman lady from her chosen work. With her clear and sane intellect she saw her duty to those among whom she was born.

After seventeen years of unselfish labor for the poor and suffering, varied by the study of which we have the fruit, Paula died and was laid away in the grotto at Bethlehem. In her last moments she replied in Greek to a question of St. Jerome, that she felt no pain, and that everything before her was calm and tranquil. All Palestine flocked to her funeral, which was conducted by the Bishop of Jerusalem, and people of every rank and grade looked with tears on her grave and majestic features. “Illustrious by birth,” says St. Jerome, “more illustrious by her piety, first in Rome by the wealth of her house, then more honored by Christian poverty, she scorned pomp and glory, exchanged gilded walls for a cabin, and won the esteem of the entire world.”

Her mantle fell upon Eustochium, an earnest, sincere woman of serious education but less strength and individuality than her mother, who filled her place with dignity and ability for sixteen years. In the first days of his grief St. Jerome was unable to take up his work, but this sympathetic helper turned his thoughts by carrying to him the Book of Ruth to be translated. At her death she was succeeded by her niece, another Paula, who had been long associated with her. The younger Melania, who had followed in the footsteps of her own grandmother, the first woman to leave Rome for an ascetic retreat in the East, was there also, and it was these women who, not long afterward, closed the eyes of St. Jerome, already dimmed with age.

But the close of Marcella’s life came some time before this last light went out in the Syrian monastery, and it was tragical enough. For thirty years she had devoted herself and her large wealth to the unfortunate, and to the interests of the church she loved. During the siege of Alaric and the terrible days that saw the ruin of Rome, she was beaten and tortured to compel her to tell where she had hidden her treasures; but these had all gone for the relief of the suffering, and there was nothing to tell. A soldier with a kinder heart than the rest helped her to reach the old Church of St. Paul without the walls, together with Principia, the only companion left to her, whom she had saved with great difficulty from the fury of her brutal captors. A few days later she died of these tortures, and the maiden was left alone to tell the tale. The Ecclesia Domestica appears no more in history. The little group of devoted women was already scattered. Many were dead. Some had found refuge in the convent at Bethlehem, some in the cells of the Thebaid, and some had gone to carry the seeds of their faith to remote places where we cannot trace them. Strictly speaking, this was never a convent, as there were no vows and women went in and out at pleasure. But it has been called the “Mother of Convents.”

V

The revolution effected in Roman society through these intelligent patrician matrons, whose names had great prestige, and whose wealth seems to have been inexhaustible, was a vital and important one. The women also show us, even in their often intemperate zeal, the magnificent possibilities of the Roman character. But their value to us lies largely in the results of the work they began, which expanded into the vast system of convents that soon overspread the known world. That these have been an unmixed good no one will contend to-day, but that they fulfilled a mission which was, on the whole, a blessing in its time, few, I think, will deny. For centuries they furnished an outlet for the administrative talents as well as the surplus energies and emotions of women. They were also a refuge for multitudes who had no secure place in the world, and for those who did not wish to subject themselves to the slavery of a forced and loveless marriage. If they were not the best things possible, they were the best things available. So far as these women led lives of active charity, and forgot their own comfort in gentle ministrations to the poor and suffering, the results were good for themselves and the world. When they lost their poise in ecstatic visions, spent long hours in useless austerities and morbid introspection, crushing every natural impulse in the effort to attain an impossible holiness that was as airy and unsubstantial as the fabric of a dream, they became abnormal, and the results were distinctly bad; it was in the last analysis the apotheosis of emotionalism. The old extremes of sensuality were followed by equal extremes in another direction. To glorify pain, to neglect the person, to substitute states of exaltation for family ties, was a mark of piety. The movement started with an ideal of virgin purity that depreciated any life but that of a celibate. The immoralities that early began to creep in with the theories of spiritual marriage, even among the cenobites of the desert, to the dismay of the fathers themselves, were doubtless due in part to the repression of tender human affections, and in part to the vow of obedience which placed pure and saintly women at the mercy of the wolves in sheep’s clothing that speedily overran the church and the world.

The Christian ideals are essentially feminine ones. They exalt love, not force, and glorify the finest and most distinctive traits of womanhood. “Heavens, what wives these Christians have!” said a pagan ruler, struck with their spirit of supreme self-sacrifice. “Kill me,” said Eve to Adam, as they were being driven from the Garden of Eden; “then perhaps God will put you back into paradise.” So wrote a man centuries later who was trying to illustrate the unselfishness of woman at the crucial point of her history. But the obedience which was so beautiful to the husband was quite another matter when demanded by a spiritual director, and family life began to suffer. Perhaps this state of affairs is partly responsible for the bitter denunciations of women in the writings of the fathers, though by no means confined to them. “You are the devil’s gateway,” says Tertullian, “the unsealer of the forbidden tree, the deserter from the divine law. You persuaded him whom the devil was not brave enough to attack. You destroyed God’s image, man.” “Eve was the principle of death,” wrote St. Jerome; but remembering, perhaps, how far the work of his life had been aided by women, he adds that “Mary is the source of life.” His attacks elsewhere are frequent and merciless. “Woman has the poison of an asp and the malice of a dragon,” is the kindly tribute of Gregory the Great. “Of all wild beasts the most dangerous is woman,” says St. Chrysostom, who owed so much to his own mother and loved her so devotedly. “It brings great shame to reflect of what nature woman is,” writes Clement of Alexandria. One might fill a book with similar quotations. “A woman is an evil.” “A woman is a whited sepulcher.” This is the burden of priestly complaint from St. Augustine to the Protestant Calvin and John Knox, who sang variations on the same theme in a different key. Not even the classic Greeks were more abusive. All this is specially surprising, since we find no such spirit in the words of Christ, who was invariably gentle toward women and tender even to their faults. St. Paul was disposed to keep them in a very humble place, but, after all, he was never incurably bitter.

In spite of these persistent attacks, however, the church has availed itself, throughout its history, of the talents of great women, from the first St. Catherine to her namesake of Siena, from Marcella to the gifted St. Theresa and Mère Angélique, the thoughtful saint of Port-Royal. Women were associated with all the humane movements of the primitive church. They held honorable and prominent positions as deaconesses, were intrusted with grave responsibilities, and venerated to an extent unheard of before. Salvina officially protected the Eastern churches, and supplications for favors were addressed to her on account of her ability and her influence at the court of the emperor. St. Chrysostom always spoke of Olympias, the ablest of his deaconesses, as his “dear and trusted friend.” A rich woman, noble, and a widow, she had given up her life to the service of religion, and managed the affairs of the great archbishop, who depended upon her as St. Ambrose depended upon his sister Marcellina. When he was driven into exile, and the flames were bursting from St. Sophia, it was to her, not to the bishops, that he gave instructions for the government of his church in his absence, which was destined to be final.

It is worth while, perhaps, to quote a few lines from a letter written by this celebrated man to a Roman lady whose influence he asked in the interest of a general council. After a few generalities about the sphere of her sex, he continues: “But in the work which has the service of God for its object, in the church militant, these distinctions are effaced, and it often happens that the woman excels the man in the courage with which she supports her opinions and in her holy zeal.... Do not consider as unbecoming to your sex that earnest work which in any way promotes the welfare of the faithful.... I beg you to undertake this with the utmost diligence; the more frightful the tempest, the more precious the recompense for your share in calming it.”

There were a great many other able women, and some wicked ones, connected with the earlier movements of Christianity, especially in the Eastern Church, but they do not fall within the scope of this paper. I mention these few simply to show that it was by no means the emotional enthusiasm of women which gave them so much influence in a field for which they were peculiarly fitted, though this may account for much of their subsequent power over the masses, and many of their errors. Most of the leaders had great force of intellect and a special talent for organization.

The ultimate effect of conventual life on the minds of women is open to serious question. The founders of the movement were matrons of pagan education. The little circle on the Aventine, as we have seen, was versed in the knowledge of the time. But learning was already in its decline. About the time that Marcella was a victim to the barbarians who destroyed the glory of Rome, the last great feminine representative of the genius and culture of the classic world, the beautiful and gifted Hypatia, was dead in Alexandria, a sacrifice to the mad passions of a fanatical mob that marched under the banner of One who came into the world with a message of peace and good will to men. Even the semi-mythical St. Catherine, the patron saint of science, philosophy, education, and eloquence, who lived not long before,--if at all,--was brought up on Plato and taught by pagan masters. So clear was the intellect of this prodigy of wisdom and knowledge that she was called upon to dispute with fifty of the most learned pagans, and, if the legends are to be trusted, vanquished them all on their own ground. The philosopher and the saint were trained in the same schools, and they were alike martyrs to their own learning and talents, though one was a partizan of the old order of things, the other of the new.

But those who followed them do not seem to have equaled the early women who were the product of pagan schools. Polite letters were discouraged, if not forbidden. St. Jerome himself mourns over the lost hours spent over Cicero and the poets, though, fortunately for his fame, he never wholly broke away from their influence. “What has Horace to do with the Psalter, or Vergil with the gospels, or Cicero with the apostles?” he said to Eustochium. No pursuit of secular knowledge was ever countenanced in the large bodies of women swayed by a spiritual director who would have burned Sappho and Euripides if he could, and dominated by a visionary emotionalism turned out of its natural channels and centered on a single idea. Great ability asserted itself, not in learning, but in organization, leadership, and an ever-narrowing discipline.

The representative pagan woman had her shortcomings and her disabilities. She had also her virtues. If she had less of the spirit of religion, she had equally the spirit of patriotism, of culture, of honor, and of duty. There was a finer sensibility among the Christian women, and a stronger instinct of self-sacrifice. None of us will depreciate the beauty of those traits, but without the firmness of fiber that is fostered by trained intelligence, they have their dangers. When they mark the permanent attitude of one class toward another which in no wise recognizes any corresponding duty, they inevitably result in the servility of the one and the tyranny of the other. Such was the relative position of men and women in the dark ages. Even chivalry which paid a tribute to weakness was largely a theory, or a fashion that offered a new path to glory, and does not bear too close a scrutiny, though it tempered the condition of women and modified the character of men, upon whom it reflected great honor. Its ideals were fine, but the gulf between the ideal and its attainment in daily life was often a very wide one. There were conspicuous examples of feminine courage and heroism as well as talent, but the lives of women in these ages were not, as a rule, pleasant ones, in spite of a certain halo of romance that was thrown about them. No doubt it was their suffering and helplessness that sent so many of them into convents where they frequently found a state of morals little better than the one from which they fled. It was not until the Renaissance brought back the old spirit of learning and a vigorous intellectual life among women that they combined the sweetness of Christian virtues with the dignity and strength born of knowledge and a measure of freedom, took the rightful position that belongs to the mothers of the race, and once more played a distinctly civilizing and beneficent rôle on the world’s stage.

THE LEARNED WOMEN OF THE RENAISSANCE

· Glorification of Women in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries · · Their New Cult of Knowledge · · Bitisia Gozzadina · · Ideals of the Early Poets · · Dante · Petrarch · Boccaccio · Medieval Saints · · Catherine of Siena · Women in Universities · · Precocious Girls · Olympia Morata · · Women Poets · Veronica Gambara · · Vittoria Colonna · · High Moral Tone of Literary Women · · An Exception · Tullia d’Aragona ·

I

There was a curious book written early in the sixteenth century by a savant of Cologne, on “The Superiority of Women over Men.” It was one out of many that were devoted to the glorification of the long-secluded sex, but its title serves to indicate the nature of the epidemic of eulogies that raged more or less for nearly two hundred years after Boccaccio set the fashion. This he did by singing the praises of the great heroines he brought out from the shadows of the past to adorn the pages of his “Illustrious Women.” It seemed as if men had been struck with a sudden remorse for the unkind things they had been saying about women since the dawn of the world, and were trying to make amends by putting them, theoretically at least, on a pinnacle of glory. Some celebrated their beauty, others their virtues, and still others their talents, while a few did not stop short of awarding them all the graces and perfections. Paul de Ribera published “The Immortal Triumphs and Heroic Enterprises of Eight Hundred and Forty-five Women,” which was comprehensive if not convincing. Hilarion of Coste devoted two large volumes to eulogies of women of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, finding nearly two hundred to put into his Temple of Fame. What their special claims to glory may have been I do not know beyond the fact that they were pious and devout Catholics. One man who had contended for the equality of the sexes tried afterward to refute himself; but his recantation was half-hearted, as he confessed his private conviction that logic was against him.

Cardinal Pompeo Colonna takes it upon himself to demolish the old creed that a woman is an inferior creature, convenient in the house, but unfit for any large responsibility. He proves her capacity for public life by many examples, treats lightly the plea of the moral dangers that would beset her, and shows what men become when left to their own devices. After giving exalted praise to the masterful, accomplished women of his time, he cites his beautiful cousin, the “divine Vittoria,” as a living model of talent and strength, as well as of virtue, magnanimity, and devotion. More pointed and concise, though less definite, was Monti, a famous Roman prelate, who said: “If men complain of seeing themselves equaled or surpassed by women, so much the worse for them. It is because they are not worthy of their wives.” The climax of praise was reached in a work written to prove that women are “nobler, braver, more tactful, more learned, more virtuous, and more economical than men.” Such a pitch of adulation could hardly be maintained without a protest, and there were a few men ungallant enough to say that the best proof of their own sovereignty was the effort needed to combat it.

It is pleasant to record that the most ardent champions of feminine ability were men of more than ordinary caliber. As men rarely exaggerate the talents of women, though they sometimes make goddesses of them, we may safely conclude that their pictures were not overdrawn on that side. Truth, however, compels me to say that some of the eulogists were accomplished courtiers with special appreciation of queens and princesses who might make or mar their fortunes; also that this complaisance was by no means universal. Whether the satirists, novelists, and minor poets found the wicked more effective, from a dramatic point of view, than the good, as many of their successors do to-day, or the sensual age was more interested in pretty sinners than in saints, it is certain that these writers paid scant honor to women, and delighted to put them in the worst light, though satire was in the main directed against the ignorant and the frivolous, not against the intelligent or the strong. Even Montaigne refused to look upon a woman otherwise than as a useful but inferior animal, though he inconsistently chose one of these “inferior animals” as his confidante and literary executor, because she was the “only person he knew in whose literary judgment he could confide.” The scholarly Erasmus said she was “a foolish, silly creature, no doubt, but amusing and agreeable.” He was happy in the belief that “the great end of her existence is to please men”; but he pays his own sex a poorer compliment than we should like to when he adds that “she could not do this without folly.”

So much for the man’s point of view. But the women were not silent, and a few glorified themselves as naïvely as some of their modern sisters have done. If we ever had any doubts as to our own modesty they ought to convince us of it. Lucrezia Marinelli, a clever Venetian and a poet, defined herself quite clearly in a work entitled “The Nobleness and Excellence of Women and the Faults and Imperfections of Men.” As a comparison this seems rather unfair, but considering the fact that men had for ages given themselves all the noble qualities and women all the weak ones, they could not take serious exception to it. Indeed, they evidently found it refreshing. It furnished them with a new sensation, and was quite harmless on the practical side, as they still held the reins of power. Marguerite of France, the brilliant and lettered wife of Henry IV, tried to prove that women are very superior to men, but, unfortunately, in her category of superiorities morals had no place. Mlle. de Gournay was more generous, as well as more just, and declared herself content with simple equality, though one cannot help wondering how she settled that matter with her friend Montaigne. But Mlle. Schurmann of Cologne thought that even this was going too far. It seems as if she might fairly have claimed to be the peer of the average man, since she spoke nine languages and was more or less noted as painter, musician, sculptor, engraver, philosopher, mathematician, and theologian. Just how much solid learning was implied in this formidable list of accomplishments we cannot judge, but it is clear that there has been a time before to-day when women aimed to know everything, though there was a safeguard against shattered nerves in the fact that there were not so many books to read nor so many brain-splitting problems to solve. It is fair, however, to suppose that this learned lady did not waste much time on clothes or five-o’clock teas. Louise Labé, the poet and savante of Lyons, takes a more modern tone. In claiming intellectual equality for women, she begs them not to permit themselves to be despoiled of the “honest liberty so painfully won--the liberty of knowing, thinking, working, shining.” In spite of her courageous words, however, this paragon of so many talents and virtues, the glory of her sex and the pride of her city, asserts herself in a half-deprecating way, as if she were asking pardon for presuming to publish her little verses, and shelters herself behind the admiring friends who are willing to “take half the shame.” But she was a Frenchwoman, and her day was not yet. Women had so long hidden their light, if they had any, that it blinked perceptibly when exposed to the winds of heaven or the more chilly breezes of masculine criticism.

It is needless to extend the list of writers on this subject, but it is a long and remarkable one. The books would make rather interesting reading to-day, whatever we might think of their quality, as problems familiar to us were pretty thoroughly if not always ably discussed, and apparently with great good nature. A distinguished Frenchman, well known in the salons of the eighteenth century, unearthed a great many curious facts and opinions hidden away in these books, which are now mostly buried too deep in the dust of old libraries for resurrection, and his own wise and quite modern conclusions entitled him to more consideration than he received from the women of his time. But this rapid glimpse will suffice, perhaps, to show the spirit in which latter-day questions were treated four or five centuries ago; also to throw a strong light on the position of women during the period, without very precise limits, known as the Renaissance--a period of special interest to us, as it marks the dawn of a new era of feminine intelligence.

II