What’s past is prologue.
The Tempest
Ifear that, despite my best efforts, I have subjected my readers to an awful lot of know-it-alls, men (almost always men) who know what is best for everyone, prescribers and proscribers who can articulate exactly what we all must think, believe, do, and avoid. Though the period of Reformation and Counter-Reformation is especially rife with such types, there are others whose welcome heads peek through the soil of history as if they were the first buds of spring. To them we will now turn, if briefly.
There is an aspiration that runs through religious history, no matter which religion is being studied, that we might call the desire to limit membership—and limit it severely. I recall attending a religious publishing convention many years ago during which I was asked several times by people I was just being introduced to—and with all the unsmiling seriousness of a CIA inquiry—“Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?” To these questioners there was no point in further discussion of anything if I could not answer this question affirmatively. Such people are excluders, who want their circle—the circle of the saved—to be exclusive, as small and as (uncomfortably) intimate as possible. (Luckily for me, the convention was held in late-twentieth-century America, so I had no fear of being burned at the stake if I fumbled my answer. Still, I fancied I could see the licking flames in the eyes of my interlocutors.)
But there also runs through each religious tradition an opposite aspiration: to include as many as possible, to open the windows to fresh air and the doors to all comers. Of course, to do this one must lower one’s standards—at least, in the eyes of the excluders. But from another perspective—the perspective of the includers—one is merely opening one’s arms to everything and everyone; one is acting as Jesus advises in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–7) and as Mohandas Gandhi advised in his repeated meditations on that sermon: “How can we, little crawling creatures, so utterly helpless as He has made us, how could we possibly measure His greatness, His boundless love, His infinite compassion, such that He allows man insolently to deny Him, wrangle about Him, and cut the throat of his fellow-man? How can we measure the greatness of God who is so forgiving, so divine? Thus, though we may utter the same words [as Jesus did] they have not the same meaning for us all.”
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there were many who yearned to cut the throats of “heretics,” and not a few who succeeded in doing so. There was also a growing procession of those who longed to include and embrace as many human beings as possible.
Their weapons weren’t actually guns; and, at least to start with, they weren’t even nuns. They were a group of well-born Lombardian ladies, led by Angela Merici, who came together to educate poor girls in the northern Italian city of Brescia. So far as I can ascertain, no one had ever thought to do this before them. In the same period, Anabaptist communities in Germany, Switzerland, and Holland were beginning to encourage universal “biblical literacy,” but this, often enough, referred to memorization of biblical texts rather than to actual literacy—and, in any case, the Anabaptist program was not especially directed toward poor girls. As we saw in the story of Thomas More, the education of girls, even those of educated households, was not a value in European society. The education of poor girls was an unthinkable innovation. What society had against the education of females was, of course, that it would put the weapons of knowledge into their hands: it would make them too much like males, able to hold real power over others.
One recalls the remarkable result of the second communications revolution (this page), in which, because of the simplicity of the alphabet, it became possible for anyone, even a slave, to learn to read. So even slaves learned to read in the time of Moses and after,but another three thousand years would pass before the daughters of the poor would have the treasures of literacy opened to them. Their champion was a most unlikely warrior: a tiny, though pretty and charming, spinster.
Angela Merici wished to form an elective association of women like herself, whose life experiences gave them sympathy for others, especially for other females of scant means. Angela, orphaned at ten, had lost her last remaining protector, her beloved elder sister, when she was thirteen. These losses, which might have turned a psychologically weaker girl into a broken woman, strengthened Angela: she sought solace in prayer and in dedication to others in need. She became a visionary in the strict sense: one who saw in advance the work that God had assigned her, as well as others, to accomplish. Her meeting with Pope Clement VII in 1525 resulted in his inviting her to lead a congregation of nursing nuns. Angela turned him down, something a lady, well born or not, was hardly in a position to do; but she knew the pope’s proposal wasn’t what God had in mind for her.
Angela’s association in Brescia took as its spiritual patron Saint Ursula, a wholly legendary figure who served nonetheless as the medieval patron of universities. It was this connection of a female figure to university education that attracted the women, who came to be called Ursulines. Angela died in 1540, and in subsequent centuries, under subsequent popes, the Ursulines would be hemmed in by many papal rules about the conduct of their lives. Eventually, they were forced to assume the strict identity of nuns, which had not been their original intent. But their connection to the education of girls and women would never falter. Throughout Europe and at many of the sites of the new worldwide Catholic missions, the Ursulines built and staffed schools and universities for women, never entirely abandoning their original focus on the education of poor girls.