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St. Marcella
00:18:39
Dr. Elizabeth Klein and Taylor Kemp sit down to discuss St. Marcella, the early Church martyr of Rome, who's feast day is celebrated on January 31st. St. Marcella was born in 325 AD and died in 410 AD, around the time of the sack of Rome. During this tumultuous time in Church history (between the Council of Nicaea and the sack of Rome) St. Marcella befriended St. Jerome who wrote several letters to and about St. Marcella. Through these letters, we learn of a woman of the Church who modeled virtue and walked the path of Christ to the end. Eventually, St. Marcella died of wounds she received during the sack of Rome. Watch Catholic Saints on FORMED. Sign Up for FORMED. Support this podcast and the Augustine Institute on the Mission Circle.
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Podcast Host
You're listening to a podcast on Catholic saints. This podcast is produced by the Augustine Institute, an apostolate helping Catholics understand, live, and share their faith.
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Taylor Kemp
Hi, and welcome to Form Now, I'm Taylor Kemp, and with me is Dr. Elizabeth Klein, a professor here at the Graduate School of Theology. Would you like to introduce what you teach, Dr. Klein?
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
I teach theology.
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Taylor Kemp
You teach all kinds of things.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Actually, I wrote my dissertation on St. Augustine, so I guess that's my area of expertise. Early Christianity. That what we're going to be talking about today? Yes, and right now I teach the class on the creed, which is the first pillar of the catechism.
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Taylor Kemp
Very nice. So today, as you alluded to, we are talking about someone from the early church, St. Marcella. Would you like to share a personal anecdote about Saint Marcella?
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
So Saint Marcela of Rome is an early Christian saint, and I named my daughter after Saint Marcel. Taylor asked me if there were any saints in January that I wanted to talk about. So I thought, you know, maybe we would talk about Saint Marcella. And she's not. She's not as well known, so it's fun to share.
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Taylor Kemp
And it was a tremendous blessing for me because I did not know very much about Saint Marcella. But, Dr. Klein, you had this great book, Lives of Roman Christian Women, produced by Penguin Classics. And in it is a length, somewhat lengthy letter from St. Jerome about St. Marcella. So I had the great privilege of learning about her. And she's really amazing.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Yeah. So St. Jerome had a number of, like, women correspondents, even got driven out of Rome because of rumors about how many women correspondents he had. So Jerome, you know, crotchety Jerome. So a number of Jerome's letters are also written to Marcela. And then in this lengthy letter, he writes about Marcela to a kind of pupil or fellow monastic named Principia about her praising her life after she died.
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Taylor Kemp
And it's really moving. I mean, you could tell St. Jerome really loved St. Marcella. So just a little background on her. She was born in 325, which was the Council, the Council of Nicaea, and then died soon after the sack of Roman in 410. She was widowed after just seven months of marriage and never remarried. And commit was committed to a very different type of life, which we will talk about. Those are the basic details.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Yeah. So the fact that she was widowed after seven months, this is a common thing that happens in a lot of these lives of early Christian women, is that they're widowed at a young age. Maybe they're married to a wealthy Roman man, they inherit the property. And this is something you see a little bit in the New Testament as well. So often these wealthy women who are widowed then will turn their estate over basically into a monastic community or turn it over to the church. And this is kind of a new thing still in the Western church, like the idea of having a monastic community. When people like St. Marcel and St. Augustine are founding monastic communities in the fourth, early fifth centuries, this is still seen as a little bit of a weird thing to do. Interesting. Yeah. And Jerome mentions it a little bit in the letter. And interestingly, Saint Marcello says of Saint Marcello that she's inspired to found a monastic community by the exact same person who also inspired St. Augustine to live the monastic life. And that is the famous life of St. Anthony. St. Anthony of the desert. In the case of Marcela, it's actually even a cooler story because her family, Jerome tells us, sheltered Athanasius, who was a famous bishop of Alexandria, who wrote the life of St. Anthony. So, you know, Athanasius is in Alexandria. He's embroiled in the controversies following the Council of Nicaea about the divinity of Christ, the Arian controversy, for those of you who know a little bit about early Christian history. So he's embroiled in this theological controversy. He gets exiled something like seven times from his own diocese. And apparently one of those times, he's sheltered in Rome by Marcellus family. And while he's there, he tells the story of Anthony of the desert. Marcel is a little girl, and she apparently hears this story and is very inspired by it. But, yeah, Roman women often were widowed young because they married young, and they often married much older men. So the average age of marriage of a woman in this period be something like between 12 and 16. But often they'd be bearing men who were in their 30s or 40s. And that actually happens again. So Marcel's widowed after seven months, and then an older Cerealis. Yeah, cerealis. Roman centurion man tries to get him to marry her.
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Taylor Kemp
And Marcela's mom wants her to marry him because of the benefits of, well, you'll get this inheritance. And she says something along the lines of, mom, if I was to remarry, it would be for a husband, not for an inheritance.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Right.
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Taylor Kemp
Which it made me think of. I don't know. I mean, you hear sometimes of the question of, like, should you marry for love or for money? And Saint Marcel is like, well, definitely love, but I'm still not going to do that either.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Right. And this Is you say, you know, her mother wants her to get married. And in Roman society, the idea of being an unmarried woman who's living this alternate life is very strange.
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Taylor Kemp
That is really something in a sense, not safe. Almost like, how do you make your way?
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Right. And that's often why these kind of early monasteries of women are in urban communities. So they live in like urban cities where they still have like family and connections. They don't necessarily live sort of in their own cloistered place outside the city. That's not really how it works. And really, in the period just prior to Marcela, often women would kind of have spiritual marriages because it was so weird to not be married that two people would agree to live together, you know, as brother and sister in Christ in a kind of monastic relationship. Because there wasn't yet this idea of, you know, for, especially for women, there wasn't this idea of like, no, I'm actually just going to be married to Christ. And so she's kind of one of these early pioneers of that, especially in the West.
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Taylor Kemp
So she is married for seven months, widowed, refuses the consul or centurion, and then she's inspired by St. Anthony and she commits herself to this very ascetic and kind of austere life. And then so what else does she do? Because she lives a rather long life. So what is she doing?
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Yeah, so she commits herself, you know, to prayer and fasting. But Jerome really praises her moderation. And one thing and another thing he praises about her is her ability to live this ascetic life as a witness in the city of Rome. So if you think about how many saints have like, of Rome, Saint Marcella of Rome. Rome doesn't necessarily produce a whole bunch of saints.
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Taylor Kemp
Yeah. I'm trying to think if there's like an equivalent. I mean, I don't know if you'd say like maybe New York City, but yeah, as a place where it's very difficult to live a faith filled life.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Right. And you know, because it's just so much crowding or even just to live a kind of life at peace with the world, it's very difficult. And Jerome praises Marcella because he says that no one in Rome had a bad word to say about her, which, you know, for somebody who got driven out of Rome because of rumors, it's like a big. That's a major point of praise to say that she was able to live this ascetic life, but with such moderation and grace and generosity that she didn't make the kind of enemies that St. Jerome made.
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Taylor Kemp
He's right about her. He's like, she's got something that I. Whatever she's doing. So could you talk a little bit about Jerome and her friendship? How did they interact? What did they talk about? What kind of filled out their friendship.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Right. So it seems like one of the things that really drove their friendship was that Marcellus sought Jerome out as a scriptural mentor so that she had a deep desire to understand the Scriptures. And so Jerome tells us that whenever he was in town visiting Rome, that she would seek him out and press him with questions, and she wouldn't be happy with the first answer, but. But that she would kind of quarrel with him. And he said not in order to sort of be, you know, quarrelsome, but in order that she would have the best answers. Any opposition that anyone could raise about the passage, she wanted to raise it and then have a ready answer for it. And he says that her manner of doing this was very humble, that the way that she asked didn't offend the people that she was asking, and that when people would ask her in turn for scriptural questions, that all kinds of people would come to her then that she would always present the opinions as that of Jerome or of someone else. And, you know, part of that is the structural society of, you know, what a woman is kind of allowed to say or do, you know, especially if he's a. Maybe.
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Taylor Kemp
She's definitely treading how to manage that kind of a thing.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Yeah, yeah. But at the same time, I think there is a kind of. There is a kind of lesson there, because I know, as someone who's a theologian that it's easy to, you know, take pride or pleasure in your own knowledge and to love your own knowledge of Scripture more than Scripture or something like that. Right. It's a slippery slope. It's always that temptation to pride there. And the fact that both in her seeking after that knowledge and then her presentation of that knowledge was so pure and so humble is something that Jerome recognized. And, yeah, I don't know if Jerome was the kind of person who was necessarily always so modest about his own.
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Taylor Kemp
Scriptural abilities, but, you know, I like it, too. I'm thinking of the encyclical where Pope Francis called for the Sunday of the Word of God, which is. I think it's the third Sunday of ordinary time after Advent. But one of the things that he does in there that is echoing De Verbum, the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation from Vatican ii is talks about the importance of listening to the Word of God like that we're not supposed to stand over the Word of God and conform it to our preferences of life, but rather to see it as the measure of everything and to then allow ourselves to be conformed through this very active listening and dialogue with the Lord through his Word. And I feel like you can see that in Saint Marcela, where she's really seeking to understand it on God's terms in a way, like she's, she's asking every possible question and she's not trying to find the answer that fits her life. And you can see her courageous response through the inspiration of St. Anthony and this committing to this difficult life and austere life, but she's allowing herself to hear the Word of God and be changed rather than like, I just want to prove this or that or I want to.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
And I think a commitment to the sort of ascetical life was seen by many as a sort of commitment to a life of scripture and really infused with scripture, you know, you know, saying the psalms sort of morning to night is a feature that's commented upon often as like an aspect of early Christian monasticism that, you know, they're kind of living, breathing everything in the Psalms. And you see that of course, now also in the monastic life we have a lot of different diversity, but you know, that, of course that charism is still there in many different religious orders. And when St. Augustine wanted to retire to the monastic life, you know, he lives in a similar time and place to Marcella. He. He thought about it as a life of leisure to read the word of God. Yeah, like that is, you know, he didn't end up getting to that to be a bishop, but that's what he conceived of. That was like his sort of dream.
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Taylor Kemp
I mean, it sounds awesome.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Yeah, life of total leisure.
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Taylor Kemp
It sounds really great. So did you want to add anything else?
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Well, why don't we talk a little bit? So one thing that's interesting about her living in this time is that she lives through a very interesting historical period, as you mentioned, living between the first Ecumenical Council of Nicaea and the sack of Rome in 410. So the sack of Rome is an enormous event in the 5th century because the walls of Rome hadn't been breached for a thousand years. And so it's a very. Gosh, that's crazy. So in our modern psych, it's something like, we all know that no empire lasts forever. We all know that. And yet at the same time, we don't actually expect the end of the empire that we know of or the End of the world powers that we know of to come in. And so for that, psychologically, is a huge event. And that event actually precipitates Augustine's writing of the City of God against the idea that Christians caused the fall of Rome. And so it's a cool historical fact that that's when she dies. But also it's kind of a beautiful peek into what happened in Rome at that time. Right. Because, you know, the barbarians are coming in and they're looking for all of this treasure, and they kind of bash down the door of St. Marcela's estate, which is, you know, then a monastery, and they're looking for all of the treasure. And, you know, the line that's given is that she has nothing because she stored all her wealth in the bellies of the poor, which I don't think the barbarians take very well. And so she gets kind of beat up and then. But she finds sanctuary in the church and dies of her injuries. And so some people in the early Roman martyrologies considered her a martyr because she died of the. Died of her injuries associated with that. But there's a cool connection there with the sanctuary offered her. And Augustine talks about even the barbarians, who are Arian Christians, allow the sanctuary of the churches and have a certain kind of respect for the churches. And so I just thought I would talk about that because it's a kind of cool fact about the end of her life. And that line about her storing her riches in the valley of the poor, that's like one of my favorite lines of story.
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Taylor Kemp
I mean, it's awesome. And because she came from a wealthy family, it makes you think of Jesus discourse with the rich young man. He says, take all you have, sell everything that you have, give it to the poor, and then come follow me. But that great challenge, and you look at Saint Marcel, and she was. She was very wealthy. She had a lot, and she sold it all, gave it everything she had to the poor and followed Christ and she attained the eternal crown. So it's just a really beautiful lived example.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Yeah. And that verse, of course, is the same verse that inspired St. Anthony, right. When he walks into the church, and St. Francis and many others. And one thing I think that's cool about Marcella, with respect to that verse in the vow of poverty, and this is also true of some other early Christian women, is that there. I don't know if this is necessarily like a feminine dimension of monasticism or something like that, but it really is. Like, instead of going out and giving everything away and going into the desert. What Marcella does is invite people in such that her wealth is divested of her. So it's like a.
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Taylor Kemp
And what a service to Rome like.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
This, right, to have this. And then on the Aventine hill, right, One of these, the hills of Rome. And so I just think that's a. That's a very beautiful image for those of us who aren't going to give away everything to the poor, but divesting ourselves by inviting others in to share what we have, such that we become equal and a partner and a share in all those around us, that the good things that we have become the property of everyone else. You know, even though we're not, you know, personally actually going to only have a tunic like Saint Marcel or whatever. But the way that a number of these monastic women, their estates become kind of just a community center. Right. Like when you talk about, oh, like in Jerome stopped by to teach us scripture, you know, it's like the whole society is being invited into this life of Christ by the transformation of this home estate in a city. I think that really. I think that really does say something about what we can do now. Many of us live in cities. You know, we don't live these lives that are separated from the world as some monastic. And so thinking of our home as a domestic church, you know, what is it like to be a domestic monastery or whatever? I think maybe some of these women give us something to think about.
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Taylor Kemp
Yeah, it's really. Yeah, I like that a lot. And I don't know, just this recognizing. They recognize that everything that they had was given from God and then they allowed that to be used for a purpose that was beyond just whatever accumulation or comfort for themselves, which is great.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
And then. Yeah. And at the end, it's almost like even the barbarians are sort of welcomed in to their poverty, but they don't appreciate it.
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Taylor Kemp
But yeah, they could have come. Is there anything else from Saint Marcela that you think we could learn from today?
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
I do think another thing Marcella embodies is sort of this idea that there's no conflict between living a very pious holy life and living a life of the mind that's very, very active in seeking after God. And it really seems like Jerome emphasizes that this life that Marcella chose to live kind of really whet her appetite for the scriptures. And it made her want to know more, want to know more, want to know the Lord more deeply and want to be able to share him with others by understanding the Bible. I think sometimes, for whatever reason, the sort of intellectual and spiritual life get divided. Yeah. And maybe that has something to do with the university leaving the heart of the church and through modernity. I don't know. There's all kinds of theories that you could have about that. But really, throughout the tradition, the life of the mind and the life of the heart go together. And I think she really embodies that.
- [17:05]
Taylor Kemp
Yeah, it's great. And that is something that we are passionate. Here at the Augustine Institute. We have a wonderful graduate School where Dr. Klein is a professor that brings these two together really wonderfully. You can check it out by just googling the Augustine Institute Graduate School of Theology. And then on Formed, we have tons of stuff that can help us do this. We have Dr. Tim Gray's Daily reflections that walk through the daily Mass readings, which is scripture. And then we have the Amen app that has free daily readings that you can listen to. But we hope that all of these conversations help all of us do that. To look at the beautiful history of the church and her saints, look at sacred scripture, look at the spiritual life and make sure that that is all brought together in a integrated whole that is actually being lived out. Because that's really the only way the Christian life truly exists. So thank you so much for joining us. We pray that all of these conversations bless you and that Saint Marcel can become a friend to many of us. Thank you so much and God bless.
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Podcast Host
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