Video Transcript: Women in the Christian Empire: Ascetics

We've looked at the way Gregory Nazianzen portrays his mother and his sister as virtuous,  wonderfully virtuous women, at a time when you don't really read much from these Christian  theologians about marriage and about the good married women. Augustine has a treatise,  you know, on the good of marriage. And his main argument is that produces more children  who can be ascetic, so can be virgins, you know, so they're hard put at this point to give a  positive theology of marriage. It's just, it's the spirit of the age. And yet, I think that Gregory  really, really succeeds there. So now we're going to look at some other women of the empire  of the Christian empire, who actually did live the ascetic life. And the purpose here was, if you if you read these, and they're all available on the internet, in translation, if you read some of  these lives, you may get a sense, from, from our perspective today, they were really weird,  you know. And, again, you have to understand that these are, they're not reports. They're not  from somebody sitting there watching the person taking notes, these are portrayals of  heroism. There are no longer martyrs, they no longer have martyrdom accounts, they're still  reading those martyrdom accounts from from earlier years. They don't have any new ones  anymore. And so they have to produce new heroes and heroines and so you have something  like Athanasius life of Antony, that from around the same time that portrays Anthony the  hermit, as as heroic. There, there are other there are portrayals of men as well. And they're  almost always the the, the ascetics. So what we're looking at here is a portrayal of some  women who, for whom the portrayal is the same thing to, to show to highlight their, their  heroism. And it's interesting, it's important to look at them because we tend to be aware of  the portrayals of men at this point. Equally, women are portrayed as heroic. And they're elite  women, of course, we just don't have the anything about the women of less elite elite status.  But again, women are not denied this role. It is one in which they can achieve heroic virtue in  the same way that men can. So we're looking here at several women, and I call them elite  copiers of the desert monastics. All of these women who are mentioned here, Paula,  Eustochium and the Melania the elder and Melania the younger are Western women, they're  Romans, and they are from the highest levels of society. They are people who are  extraordinarily wealthy and when we get to talking about Melanias, the younger I'll give you  examples of that, that that show what I mean And in each case, someone took the care to  write up their life after they had died. And again, I emphasize, portraying them in in a heroic  way. And so they have heroic denial, heroic penance. And and it is to portray them as, as  extraordinary people, not people you would want to imitate, I suppose today when we we give portrayals of people we consider holy saints, whatever is in your tradition, we we look for  ways in which they're like us, and precisely in this literary genre. I think the the intention is to  portray them as not like us, as as very different and as people that we can aspire to imitate,  but we're never quite gonna to get there, you know, so it's a very different kind of an  expectation. Let's look first at Paula. Paula was a friend of Jerome, the famous St. Jerome who  did the the biblical translations. Jerome started out as a Presbyter in Rome. And it was just at  the time when some of these elite Roman women were getting this idea of imitating The great ascetics of the desert they were reading things like Athanasios' life of Anthony, and other lives of desert ascetics, and they were, they were getting the idea of how to structure their life  here with fasting, long prayer, recitation of the Psalms, singing of the Psalms, and living in  very simple ways. And they were doing that within their own homes in Rome, these elite  homes, wealthy homes. And Jerome was one of the chaplains, we might say he was he was  one of the the presbyters who was looked to for spiritual guidance because he was  knowledgeable about how these desert ascetics of the East were were living. And Paulo was  one of the women who was attracted to Jerome's circle, and there were a number of them  Eustochium, is, is Paula's daughter, Paula was married. She had had several children, most of  them had died. And Eustochium was one daughter who did survive. Her husband died, she's a widow, what is she got to do with her life, she begins to adopt this ascetic lifestyle. And her  husband was named Toxotius, and they had five children. Yeah. And as I said, quite a few of  them died, I think, I think only two really survive to adulthood. And Jerome is in Rome, and in  the three, early 380s. He is visiting spending time in this ascetic household. And Jerome  decides to move to the Holy Land, and to begin a monastery there and Paula says, I'm coming with you. And so she leaves Rome. She leaves her, her ascetic life there, but among great 

wealth, with her daughter, Eustochium, they move to the Holy Land, and they settled in  Bethlehem. So Jerome and Paula had a double monastery in Bethlehem, in which he was in  charge of the man, he was a leader, the women and she was the leader of the store, he was  the leader of the men, and she was the leader of the women in Bethlehem. If any of you have  been to Bethlehem, you know that, under the the Church of the Nativity, there is a whole cave complex. And from the Church of the Nativity, you go down into an area that is venerated as  the place of the birth of Jesus. But that cave connects with another whole piece of the  complex that's under the adjoining Church of St. Catherine, where there are burial areas. And  it's where Jerome says that when Paula died, he buried her. And then the daughter,  Eustochium died, he buried her there as well. And then ultimately, he was buried there. So  their monastery was somewhere else in Bethlehem, we don't know where. But they had  access to that church, which was the Church of Constantine at the, at the time. And, and to  that, that burial area in the caves. Now, Paula, he says, in his Life of Paula, he begins, he  begins the treatise by saying, I dictated this and in an entire night, he spent the whole night  dictating to a scribe, his his Life of Paula. And it's a highly literary construction. And he, he  emphasizes how highly placed she was in Roman society. I mean, she was from the absolutely best family, and how educated she was. He says that she could sing the Psalms in Hebrew,  without a Latin accent, which he was never able to do. And it was when he was in the Holy  Land in Bethlehem that he was doing most of his translation work. And it really is his thought  that she helped him a great deal with that biblical work. And of course, she didn't get the  credit for it. He does in church history, nothing new there. But she was highly educated  woman, and highly venerated by Jerome and by many others. She was extremely wealthy.  And she distributed her wealth she kept giving her wealth away so much so that by the time  she'd died her monastery was in debt. She had spent her entire fortune on charity. So her her  daughter Eustochium was left with debt. Jerome says that in, in his Life of Paula, she  continued for a few more years. And she died in 420. And Jerome, died a few years later. So  this is one case of a family relationship, a mother and daughter who were involved in the  ascetic life. And then there are the Melanias. Melania, the elder and Melania, the younger.  Melania, the elder lived until, 410, she was married at the age of 14. So you remember I said  that that very elite, women were often married much earlier than then the lower class people  were. So she was married, she had three sons. And then she was widowed, as well. And  remember the pattern of younger bride with older groom, which meant that most likely,  you're going to have more widows than you are widowers, because the husbands are going to die sooner. And that's indeed what happened with her. Now, there was another person  besides Jerome, there was another presbyter who was very influential in Rome with these  people his name was Rufinus. And Rufinus was someone who was very devoted to the  theology of Origen. Now Origen was a very creative and controversial theologian who had  been dead at this point for over 100 years. But he is his theology was still studied, and  venerated. And Rufinus, was a very definite disciple of Origen. Jerome did not like Origen's  theology, and there was a dispute a kind of conflict between Jerome and Rufinus. Over this, so as it continued, in Jerome, entered how much you know about St. Jerome and he, he was not  an easy person to get along with, and, and I could understand that people would, he would  rub people the wrong way, but Paulaand Eustochium were devoted to him. But what this  meant was that, even though they were in the Holy Land, at the same time, they had very  little to do with each other, unfortunately, and, and the Melanias were disciples of Rufinus.  And so did the Melanias and Paula ever meet? They probably did. And they probably had  some kind of association in around Jerusalem that they would meet once in a while, but it isn't talked about. And so this is kind of a separate stream here. So Melania the elder had a  monastery on the Mount of Olives she had moved to Jerusalem. And remember the Jerome  and Paula are in Bethlehem. The Melania is on the Mount of Olives. That whole in the Mount of Olives, at one point must have been occupied with monasteries around this period. And  there's almost nothing left of that today. Today, most of the Mount of Olives is is Jewish  cemetery. But if you've been there, and you've been to this little church called Dominus Flevit, which is a little bit more than halfway down the Mount of Olives, a little Franciscan place that  commemorates Jesus looking over Jerusalem and weeping over it. Just beside the entry to 

that little church, there's a mosaic floor. And that is the only remnant I know of from these  monasteries that were built there. So Melania the elder was in in the Holy Land. She she died  there. Melania the younger, also eventually died there but at a quite different period. She is  the granddaughter of Melania, the elder and her husband's name was Pinianus or Pinian it's  shortened that way. They also were in Rome, they had several children. And they both aspired after the after the ascetic life now 410 was a traumatic year in Rome, because the Goths who  were coming down from the north were invading and in 410, they invaded Rome. And sacked  it for weeks just took everything worth taking. Melania, the younger and Pinian of course  people knew they were coming. They got out and they they went south, and to South Italy,  they sailed across to North Africa. And they settled for a while in Thagaste, which was very  near Hippo was very near Augustine, who was alive then and Thagaste was was a nearby  diocese that was administered by Bishop Alypius, who it was a close friend of Augustine's,  they had been together in Milan. They stayed there for a while they they went to visit  Augustine. They they knew him. And after a while, they also got the Holy Land bug and  decided to move to the Holy Land. So they went across North Africa, moving by land, maybe  short hops on boats to another city, but basically across the top of North Africa, from what is  Algeria, today, to cross over to Egypt and up Sinai. And her biographer says that everywhere  they went, they stayed on their own property. So that gives you some idea of the wealth that  this family had. And another just a chance, comment by the biographer says that at one  point, she freed 8,000 of her slaves. That wasn't all just that was one, one gesture of  Manumission. So it has some sense of the wealth of this woman, it would be like the very  wealthiest people today. And but they're living this very simple, ascetic life. And they settled  in the Holy Land. They lived in Jerusalem, at first Pinian died in 431. And after that, she asked  herself, Melanea the younger, asked herself What to do now. And then she decided to do the  same thing her grandmother had done to found a monastery on the Mount of Olives. And so  after 431, she did that, and she lived for another eight years there. So these are some of the  ascetic women whose lives were written up. And again, not they're not ordained. They are,  some of them had, in fact, deaconesses in their monastery, and we'll talk about one in the  next segment. There is no evidence that these women were deaconesses they could have  been but they, you see, they, they didn't exercise a ministry in a local church. Rather, they  lived in monasteries, they were founders of monasteries and and monastic lifestyle was a bit  separate. So I think that that was probably the reason they didn't but they were people who  were they were women who were patrons that are sure they were patrons, and of many and  exercise their charity and and their, their living an intense Christian lifestyle. as best they  could