The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [13]
Jerome is a saint feminists love to hate, and to quote: “Now that a virgin has conceived in the womb and borne to us a child . . . now the chain of the curse is broken. Death came through Eve, but life has come through Mary. And thus the gift of virginity has been bestowed most richly upon women, seeing that it has had its beginning from a woman.”
This is typical of the way in which the Christian biblical interpreters of the late fourth century—Jerome and then Augustine, not long after—made a connection between Eve and Mary. We’ve lost the wonder that these words must have had for those who first heard them; now we sigh, discouraged, hearing only the seeds of our well-worn, ludicrous sexual double standard which dictates that women must be either virgins or whores, either blessed or cursed, while men are simply sexual athletes, slaves of lust. (And, don’t forget, Christian boys and girls, everyone is a temple of the Holy Spirit.)
As with most of these writings from a time so distant from our own, it is difficult to read without reading into it our modern frustrations, difficult to discern the complexities that resist our simplistic interpretations. To me, this passage reflects a fear of women that is thoroughly comprehensible: if Eve is the mother of the living, she is also mother of the dead. One of the most astonishing and precious things about motherhood is the brave way in which women consent to give birth to creatures who will one day die. That they do this is an awesome thing, as is their virginity, their existence in and of themselves, apart from that potential for bearing life and death. That we all begin inside a woman and must emerge from her body is something that the male theologians of the world’s religions have yet to forgive us for.
The truth about Jerome is that he was an equal-opportunity curmudgeon. He despised both men and women, but women fascinated him more. Maybe because he genuinely believed that in them, as in Mary, lay the beginnings of salvation. Jerome’s friendships with women—Paula, her daughter Eustochium, Marcella—certainly saved him from much hardship. These learned, powerful women had taken their considerable wealth out of the Roman Empire’s reach in order to found monasteries and scholarly enterprises such as Jerome’s. Without their friendship and financial support, his translation of the Bible would not have been possible.
It is clear from Jerome’s correspondence that his friendships with these women were abiding and deep. I like to think that they inspired him to give the women of the New Testament a theological import that is radical, even now. Whenever I hear of conservative seminarians (Roman Catholic or Protestant) who bristle at the mention of Mary Magdalene as a model for the apostles, I think of Jerome’s typically tart comment on the subject: “The unbelieving reader may perhaps laugh at me for dwelling so long on the praises of mere women; yet if he will but remember how holy women followed our Lord and Saviour and ministered to Him out of their substance, and how the three Marys stood before the cross and especially how Mary Magdalene—called the tower from the earnestness and glow of her faith—was privileged to see the rising Christ first of all before the very apostles, he will convict himself of pride sooner than me of folly. For we judge people’s virtue not by their sex but by their character . . .”
Jerome’s own character was notoriously difficult. As Peter Brown has dryly noted, he was a man “of pronounced ascetical views,” not at all shy about advising his lady friends on the virtues of going without baths, of aspiring to “holy knees hardened like a camel’s from the frequency