St Marcella of Rome (325-410)

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 St Marcella of Rome (325-410)

Although Marcella is a saint to the Eastern and Roman Catholic Churches she is not well known and is rarely given the title saint. She was everything that was considered good in holy women of the 4th century: a nun, an abbess, an ascetic, a woman of prayer and the Scriptures, a teacher, an altruist, a mother figure and a martyr.

Marcella’s mother was Albina and her father was of high rank. They had a palatial home in Rome where they hosted some notable house-guests in the 340s including the Egyptian Patriarch, St Athanasius of Alexandria (296-373), who gave Marcella a much-loved copy of his Life of St Anthony (the founder of Egyptian monasticism).

When Marcella’s husband died after seven months of marriage she looked to the life that Anthony exemplified and turned her home into a monastery. She was the first woman of high rank in Rome to embrace monastic life, behaving like a pauper in plain sight and giving away her wealth. As an independent, aristocratic, educated, wealthy woman Marcella could mix in the highest circles. She had worn silk garments but she chose humility and poverty in order to serve the poor: she and her followers donned simple brown robes and were called the Brown Shirt Society. Many Christians, including Jerome for three years, St Paula, her daughters Ss Eustochium and Blaesilla, and St Melania the Elder, came under Marcella’s sway. Those who lived with her also included St Principia who held her as she died and to whom Jerome’s Letter 127 is addressed. Once Jerome was no longer available, having left Rome for the Holy Land, the Pope (Anastasius I) and many others consulted Marcella for sage advice and Scriptural interpretations.

Two years after Marcella’s death her former pupil, St Jerome, write a letter of consolation to Principia. He extolled Marcella’s personal virtues and efforts to save the Church in Rome from the negative effects of the teachings of Origen, who had been martyred in 254, especially his doctrines of the “pre-existence of the soul” and the “restoration of all things” (Universalism). These were seen as minimising or denying the Incarnation and disparaging the body in favour of the spirit (in the Greek manner). Late in the 4th century controversy raged about his divergent beliefs, especially his Universalism.

Origen seems to have been favoured by Rufinus of Aquilia, who, like Jerome, translated Origen’s On First Principles so that each one accused the other of being a worse heretic than himself. Marcella’s contribution to the ‘Origenist controversy’ was to collect witness statements about the damage that these theories had caused to Christians and, according to Jerome, she virtually single-handedly dismantled their errors.

At the age of 85 years St Marcella was brutally treated by the army of Aaric during their invasion of Rome in 410 AD and soon died of her wounds in the arms of her spiritual daughter St Principia.

St Jerome called her “the glory of her native Rome” (Ep. 127.1.) and her relative, Paulinus of Nola said of her, “what a woman she is, if one can call so virile a Christian a woman” (Ep. 29 5-6).

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