Paula of Rome

Paula of Rome was born in 347 into a senatorial family in the city of Rome. Ancient accounts, above all Jerome’s funeral eulogy, present her father Rogatus as a man of Greek ancestry and her mother Blesilla as a Roman noblewoman whose lineage was associated with the Gracchi and the Scipios. In youth she married the nobleman Toxotius and bore five children: Blaesilla, Paulina, Eustochium, Rufina, and a son also named Toxotius. After her husband’s death, conventionally placed around 379, she adopted the life of a Christian widow of high rank, giving large sums in alms and attaching herself to the circle of aristocratic women who gathered around Marcella on the Aventine Hill to study Scripture and practice ascetic discipline.

Jerome came to Rome in 382 with Epiphanius of Salamis and Paulinus of Antioch for a synod under Pope Damasus I, and Paula became his disciple and a principal financial patron of his work. Her eldest daughter Blaesilla, a young widow, took up an extreme regimen of fasting and died in 384, an event that stirred public hostility toward Jerome and the Aventine circle. After Damasus died in 384, Jerome left the city. In 385 Paula, then in her late thirties, followed him to the East with her daughter Eustochium, leaving her son and other kin in Rome. The two women traveled by way of Cyprus and Antioch, made a pilgrimage through the holy places of Palestine, and visited the monastic settlements of Egypt, including Nitria, before settling at Bethlehem in 386.

At Bethlehem Paula expended what remained of her fortune on a monastery for men, in which Jerome lived and wrote; a convent for women, which she governed; and a hospice for pilgrims. She learned Hebrew in order to read the Old Testament in the original and supported Jerome’s translations and commentaries, including the labor behind the Latin Vulgate. The women’s community lived by a rule of prayer, manual work, fasting, and scriptural study. Contemporary testimony, again chiefly Jerome’s, stresses her personal austerity, which in later years undermined her health and left the Bethlehem houses in straitened circumstances.

Paula died at Bethlehem on 26 January 404, at the age of fifty-six years, and was buried near the grotto of the Nativity. Jerome’s Letter 108, addressed to Eustochium, is the principal narrative source for her life. Eustochium succeeded her as head of the convent. Veneration of Paula as a saint is attested from late antiquity; her feast is kept on 26 January. She stands as one of the best-documented Roman aristocratic women of the fourth-century ascetic movement and as a founder of organized monastic life in the Holy Land.