I Appendix
APPENDIX I taught by one whose reputation for sanctity and learning stood so high.
The letters written from his hermitage had been circulated in the West as well as in the East, and like the treatises of Ambrose of Milan and of Pope Damasus 1 had formed part of the reading of Marcella's circle.
Many years later Jerome tells us 2 how Fabiola knew by heart and recited to him the letter in praise of the ascetic life which he had written to his friend Heliodorus in 374.
He could not refuse to teach such eager disciples, and in response to Marcella's earnest request he gave a series of lectures and readings to her and her friends and finally became their director and spiritual guide. 3
He found his pupils intelligent and sympathetic and intensely interested in all questions of scriptural interpretation and theological controversy.
Probably they all knew Greek and Paula and her daughters studied Hebrew as well,4 so as to be able to help him in his great work of translating the Bible into the vulgar tongue.
Long letters to Marcella, Paula and others 5 explain passages of scripture or points of doctrine and some essays on Jewish observances originated in the eager questions of Fabiola. 6
Not only many of Jerome's letters but some of his most important treatises were inspired by Marcella and her friends.
During his stay in Rome a certain Helvidius, a lay-
Cf. p. 102 and note 3.
2 Letter LXXVII. 9, written 399.
Cf. esp. Letter XXX.
(to Paula), saluta reliquum ^astitatis chorum et domesticam tuam ecclesiam.
Letters XXXIX. and CVIII.
E.g. Letters XXXIII. and XXXIV., also LXIV.
Letters LXIV. and LXXVIII., and p. 329, note.
APPENDIX J man, wrote an attack on the celibate life, extolled by Jerome as the highest, placing the estate of marriage above it. 1
Such an attack struck at the root of the life of celibacy which Marcella and her friends were leading and trying to induce others to lead, and it was probably in response to their entreaties that he wrote in 383 his treatise against Helvidius.
It was certainly at Marcella's request that ten years later Jerome, from his monastery at Bethlehem, denounced the similar teaching of the renegade monk Jovinian, who again made an attempt to discredit the celibate life which Jerome had done so much to encourage, and with such success that by that time, as he exultantly writes, Italy was full of nunneries and the number of monks in Rome was past counting. 2
But interesting as these general treatises and letters are, it is in the more personal letters on life and conduct that the influence of Jerome's ardent and magnetic personality on his disciples is best seen.
That influence was especially strong on Paula and her family.
He confirmed the young Eustochium, Paula's third daughter, in her desire to take the veil,3 and his famous letter to her in praise of virginity, much of which reads strangely when we remember that it was addressed to a child of fourteen or fifteen, was really intended for a larger public and was a defence of the celibate life and an attack on its opponents.
The marriage of Paulina, Paula's second daughter, to his friend the senator
Cf. esp. Letter XXIV.
2 Letter CXXVII. 8.
Cf. also Palladius de Opiano.
3 Letter XXII., written in 384.
49°
APPENDIX I Pammachius, a man of more than twice her age, was approved by him, but it was on the life of Paula herself and her eldest daughter Blesilla that his influence was strongest.
Ever since the visit of Epiphanius to her house in 382,1 Paula had longed to abandon her life in Rome and to visit the Holy Land and the famous solitaries of Egypt and the East, and there to adopt a conventual life.
Such a desire, involving, as it did, the abandonment of her children, two of whom were still quite young, and the loss to them of much of their inheritance, naturally aroused strong opposition among Paula's family and friends, part of which was directed against Jerome, to whose influence it was ascribed ; and just at this time Pope Damasus, his friend and patron, died.
Siricius, his successor, was jealous of his predecessor's friend, and perhaps frightened by the unpopularity which his uncompromising principles had aroused—his advocacy of asceticism, his exaltation of monastic as opposed to family life, and the violence of his attacks on those who disagreed with him.
This unpopularity was brought to a head by the death of Blesilla towards the end of the year 384, shortly after that of the Pope.
For nearly two years Paula and Jerome, her spiritual director, had striven to turn the gay young widow to a more serious way of life, but it was only after a dangerous illness in the summer of 384 that Blesilla was converted and threw herself into a life of self-denial and study with the same ardour with which she had previously pursued a life of pleasure.
Her health was delicate and a few 1 Letter CVIII. 6.
APPENDIX I months later she died.
The populace ascribed her illness to the fasting and asceticism advocated by Jerome, and clamoured for the expulsion of the monk 1 whose austere teaching was held responsible for her death. 2
Darker accusations still were brought against him, and it was openly declared that the friendship between him and the dead girl's mother was only the cloak for a more guilty relation. 3
Jerome exposed the lie and the slanderer confessed his falsehood, but no doubt an atmosphere of suspicion remained, and as he now no longer had the Pope's friendship and protection, Jerome decided to leave Rome.
He embarked at Ostia with his brother Paulinus and his friend the priest Vincentius in August 385, and wrote thence a letter of farewell to his women friends and disciples, which he addressed, not to Paula or Marcella, but to the virgin Asella,4 perhaps because she, absorbed in a life of prayer and contemplation, was unaffected by the atmosphere of slander and suspicion which was surrounding him.
A few months after Jerome's departure, Paula finally made up her mind to start on her long-wishedfor journey to the East.
The storm of anger and disapproval which the death of Blesilla and her friendship with Jerome had brought upon her, added to her natural grief at the loss of her child, had
Cf. Letter XXXIX. 6.
2 Letters XXXVIII. and XXXIX.
Cf.
Letter XLV.
where Jerome alludes somewhat obscurely to this incident.
Who the accuser was is unknown.
Apparently legal proceedings were taken against him for the slander, and the mention of torture suggests that he was a slave.
4 Letter XLV.
APPENDIX I reduced her to a condition of deep depression and despair from which Jerome had tried in vain to rouse her , 1 and he himself seems to have been sincerely fond of his young disciple, whose memory, he promised, should be kept alive wherever his works were read . 2
Paula and Eustochium and the band of widows and virgins who went with them were escorted to the port of embarkation by a crowd of friends and relations, hoping, we may think, even to the last to dissuade them from the journey . 3
Jerome movingly describes how the young Toxotius stood on the shore stretching out his arms to his mother as he implored her to return, and how her youngest daughter vainly begged her to stop till she should be settled in marriage.
But no family ties could now keep her back from her pilgrimage.
Such journeys were not without precedent about thirteen years before, Melania, a wealthy widow of Spanish origin, had left Rome, abandoning her home there and her only child, to travel in the East and establish a convent on the Mount of Olives
; associated with her on her travels and in her life at Jerusalem was Rufinus, the friend of Jerome's youth, and later his bitter enemy.
Jerome was perhaps at Rome when Melania thus exiled herself, though there is no certain evidence 4 that he knew her or had influenced her conduct, but he no doubt
1 Letter XXXIX., written to Paula on the death of Blesilla.
2 Op. cit. section 7.
3 Letter CVIII.
4 The fact that Melania's freedman Hylas was one of the band of ascetics with Jerome at Aquileia, and accompanied him to Syria, suggests that he knew Melania when in Rome as a student.
APPENDIX I had used this precedent to confirm Paula in her purpose, for in his eyes, as his letters prove , 1 no home ties or duties should prevail once the vocation for the religious life had been felt.
There still exists a guide written for the assistance of such pilgrims as Paula and Melania which gave a list of inns and hospices and the best route to follow ,
and perhaps aided by some such itinerary, Paula and her companions made their way through the Aegaean islands to Salamis in Cyprus, where they stayed with the venerable Bishop Epiphanius, and thence to Antioch, where they met Jerome and his monks, who accompanied them to Egypt, where the monk Isidore entertained them, and afterwards to Jerusalem.
Here they probably stayed at the monasteries on the Mount of Olives with Jerome's old friend Rufinus and Melania, whose experiences had been so like Paula's own life . 3
But this is not expressly told us ; when J erome wrote the history of these travels ,4 the bitterness of theological con-
Cf. esp. Letter XIV.
2 Itinerarium a Borcligala Hierusalem usque , written 333 a.d.
(ed. Tobler and Molinier, Geneva, 1879 and by P. Geyer in Itinera Hierosolymitana, Vienna, 1898).
It was the death of her husband and two of her children which had led Melania to leave her home in Rome and her only remaining child and to go on a pilgrimage to the East, where she lived for nearly a quarter of a century.
Jerome couples the names of the two women together in a letter written in 385 (Letter XLV. 4 and 5), but the most striking parallels in their lives were then still in the future—Paula's journey to the East, her convent at Bethlehem beside Jerome's monastery, like Melania's at Jerusalem beside the monastery of Rufinus.
Melania, however, revisited Rome in 397 and lived there with her son Publicola and his family for eleven years, ultimately persuading her grand-daughter the younger
Melania and her husband Pinianus to return with her to the East.
4 Letter CVIII., circ. 404.