Letter
XXIV. To Marcella.
Concerning the virgin Asella. Dedicated to God before
her birth, Marcella’s sister had been made a church-virgin at the
age of ten. From that time she had lived a life of the severest
asceticism, first as a member and then as the head of Marcella’s
community upon the Aventine. Jerome, who subsequently wrote her a
letter (XLV) on his departure from Rome, now holds her up as a model to
be admired and imitated. Written at Rome a.d.
384.
1. Let no one blame my letters for the eulogies and
censures which are contained in them. To arraign sinners is to admonish
those in like case, and to praise the virtuous is to quicken the zeal
of those who wish to do right. The day before yesterday I spoke to you
concerning Lea of blessed memory,697
| 697 Vide the
preceding Letter. |
and I had
hardly done so, when I was pricked in my conscience. It would be wrong
for me, I thought, to ignore a virgin after speaking of one who, as a
widow, held a lower place. Accordingly, in my present letter, I mean to
give you a brief sketch of the life of our dear Asella. Please do not
read it to her; for she is sure to be displeased with eulogies of which
she is herself the object. Show it rather to the young girls of your
acquaintance, that they may guide themselves by her example, and may
take her behavior as the pattern of a perfect life.
2. I pass over the facts that, before her birth, she was
blessed while still in her mother’s womb, and that, virgin-like,
she was delivered to her father in a dream in a bowl of shining glass
brighter than a mirror. And I say nothing of her consecration to the
blessed life of virginity, a ceremony which took place when she was
hardly more than ten years old, a mere babe still wrapped in swaddling
clothes. For all that comes before works should be counted of grace;698
although, doubtless, God foreknew the
future when He sanctified Jeremiah
as yet unborn,699
when He made John to leap in his
mother’s womb,700
and when, before the
foundation of the world, He set apart Paul to preach the gospel of His
son.701
3. I come now to the life which after her twelfth year
she, by her own exertion, chose, laid hold of, held fast to, entered
upon, and fulfilled. Shut up in her narrow cell she roamed through
paradise. Fasting was her recreation and hunger her refreshment. If she
took food it was not from love of eating, but because of bodily
exhaustion; and the bread and salt and cold water to which she
restricted herself sharpened her appetite more than they appeased
it.
But I have almost forgotten to mention that of which I
should have spoken first. When her resolution was still fresh she took
her gold necklace made in the lamprey pattern (so called because bars
of metal are linked together so as to form a flexible chain), and sold
it without her parents’ knowledge. Then putting on a dark dress
such as her mother had never been willing that she should wear, she
concluded her pious enterprise by consecrating herself forthwith to the
Lord. She thus showed her relatives that they need hope to wring no
farther concessions from one who, by her very dress, had condemned the
world.
4. To go on with my story, her ways were quiet and she
lived in great privacy. In fact, she rarely went abroad or spoke to a
man. More wonderful still, much as she loved her virgin sister,702
| 702 Probably Marcella
before she was married. |
she did not care to see her. She worked
with her own hands, for she knew that it was written: “If any
will not work neither shall he eat.”703
To
the Bridegroom she spoke constantly in prayer and psalmody. She hurried
to the martyrs’ shrines unnoticed. Such visits gave her pleasure,
and the more so because she was never recognized. All the year round
she observed a continual fast, remaining without food for two or three
days at a time; but when Lent came she hoisted—if I may so
speak—every stitch of canvas and fasted well-nigh from
week’s end to week’s end with “a cheerful
countenance.”704
What would perhaps
be incredible, were it not that “with God all things are
possible,”705
is that she lived
this life until her fiftieth year without weakening her digestion or
bringing on herself the pain of colic. Lying on the dry ground did not
affect her limbs, and the rough sackcloth that she wore failed to make
her skin either foul or rough. With a sound body and a still sounder
soul706
| 706 Cf. Juvenal, Sat. x.
356. |
she sought all her delight in solitude, and
found for herself a monkish hermitage in the centre of busy Rome.
5. You are better acquainted with all this than I am,
and the few details that I have given I have learned from you. So
intimate are you with Asella that you have seen, with your own eyes,
her holy knees hardened like those of a camel from the frequency of her
prayers. I merely set forth what I can glean from you. She is alike
pleasant in her serious moods and serious in her pleasant ones: her
manner, while winning, is always grave, and while grave is always
winning. Her pale face indicates continence but does not betoken
ostentation. Her speech is silent and her silence is speech. Her pace
is neither too fast nor too slow. Her demeanor is always the same. She
disregards refinement and is careless about her dress. When she does
attend to it it is without attending. So entirely consistent has her
life been that here in Rome, the centre of vain shows, wanton license,
and idle pleasure, where to be humble is to be held spiritless, the
good praise her conduct and the bad do not venture to impugn it. Let
widows and virgins imitate her, let wedded wives make much of her, let
sinful women fear her, and let bishops707
look up to her.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
