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