Virgin: The Untouched History

by Hanne Blank

  It should be stressed that the generalized misogyny of early Christianity is only coincidentally Christian. From our twenty-first-century vantage point, seeing how the treatises and diatribes of the church Fathers mounted up, we may get the impression of a deeply misogynist Christian conspiracy. This is only partly true. Early Christianity's attitudes toward sex and women were indeed deeply misogynist, but they were neither new nor a conspiracy. What we often perceive as being all of a single monolithic piece, driven by a single overt agenda, was a much more gradual and far less uniform accretion of ideological sediment. While Christian misogyny did develop its own specific tendencies, in its association of the female body and female sexuality with sin and Satan, that kind of thinking in relation to women would have seemed only slightly unusual to any first- or second-century Greek, Roman, Syrian, or Jew.

  One of the thick early layers in the bedrock of Christian virginity was a philosophy known as encratism, from the Greek enkrateia, or continence. Heavily influenced by the Diatessaron, the first version of the Gospels that combined the four canonical Gospels into a single text, encratism explored the question of the appropriate place of sex in the lives of Christians from the perspective of the promised second coming of Jesus. Tatian, the Diatessaron's compiler, and the anonymous author (s) of the apocryphal Acts of Judas Thomas felt that there was no place for sin among the people of God as they waited for the end of life as they knew it.

  Christians wanted fervently to live out their principles as the second coming drew nigh. For several reasons, renouncing sexuality was part of that. It was considered advantageous not to have a human relationship that might interfere with the relationship between the individual and the Divine. Additionally, the Christian had the challenge of making one's human self as close to the angels as possible. It was believed that the vita angelica, the angelic life, was one of apatheia, a Greek Stoic concept meaning passionlessness or desirelessness. The ideal life was the life of the spirit, the life promised to believers by the doctrine of the second coming and the "world to come" in which communion with God was constant. The physical body, on the other hand, served only to anchor humans to the cycle of birth, death, and decay, the daily demands of keeping the body alive and perpetuating the species serving only to further distance them from their destiny with God.

  The most ethical and productive thing to do, as a Christian, was literally to go on strike. The phrase "boycotting the womb" has often been applied to this sit-down strike against human biological imperative, and it is apt. "The works of women," namely birth and its inevitable result, death, were on the short list for elimination, since they had no place in the "world to come." This meant celibacy.

  Ghosts in the Machine: Clement and Origen

  In the era of Clement of Alexandria (late second century and early third) just as in Paul's day, however, celibacy just wasn't that simple. Not everyone could sustain celibacy, and it was a troublesome truth that fervent insistence upon celibacy tended to reduce the numbers of well-off householders likely to participate at high levels in the Church. For a church that had traditionally drawn many of its most effective clergy from the ranks of married male heads of household, this inevitably caused friction. Besides, as Clement pointed out, grumbling that the encratites "set their hopes on their private parts," there was more to being a Christian than just being celibate.

  A moderate man, Clement's notion of the ideal relationship of the Christian to his penis was essentially Greek. The body need not be entirely renounced, he believed, if one could retain a conscious, rational control of it. Orexis, the biological urges that were the unavoidable "ghosts in the machine" of a physical body, were untidy and annoying, but not overpowering. There was a place for sex in Clement's Christianity, but such carefully passionless sex proved even more difficult than encratism.

  We find some echoes of this rationalist, Greek approach to sex much later, in the works of another African, Augustine of Hippo. But in the hundred-odd years between Clement's era and Augustine's lay a figure whose approach to virginity, sexuality, and the body was so dramatic, drastic, and, in its vivid misanthropy, so popular that Clement's moderation didn't stand a chance.

  This celebrity extremist was Origen, son of a martyred Alexandrian Christian. The body, for third-century Origen, was worth nothing unless it was used as a tool for spiritual transformation. It is accepted as being probably true, for example, that Origen had himself castrated in the name of his faith. The body, he believed, was what the spirit had fallen into when it lost its unity with God. The distance between the body and the spirit constituted an unbridgeable and tragic gap that only widened as the body succumbed to the proddings of its logismoi.

  Like Clement's orexis', Origen's logismoi were the various appetites of the flesh; unlike Clement's version, they were not essentially benign. Coupled with an ardent belief that Adam did not "know" Eve in the Garden of Eden, and thus human origins could confidently be said not to include sex of any kind, Origen felt quite sanguine about presenting virginity as the fitting ornament of a disciplined, earnest, and above all successful Christianity. Adunado in action, virginity was simultaneously a sign of moving toward oneness with God and a principled resistance to the temptations of the flesh. When Origen beckoned "I beseech you, therefore, be transformed. Resolve to know that in you there is a capacity to be transformed," it was a literal and fundamental transformation of human instinct and social reality that he had in mind, and nothing short of entirely abolishing the libido would do.

  Never Satisfied: Jerome

  Despite his immense learning, erudite and prolific writings, and immaculate intellectual and spiritual heritage—he was fluent in several languages including Greek, had traveled widely, spent two years living the hermit life in the desert at Chalcis, studied at the knee of Gregory Nazianzen, and, among other things, produced the first Latin version of the Bible—Jerome never did learn to play by the unwritten rules of what was fast becoming the old boys' club of the Church. A man of spectacularly irritable temper and infinitesimally small tolerance for deviation from what he perceived as being the right way to do things, Jerome's enormous influence on the Church was achieved partly in spite of himself. He was a harsh and constant critic of what he saw as inappropriate actions on the part of the Church and its clergy, and was literally run out of town (in this case Rome) after his protector, Pope Damasus I, died in 384. Despite the efforts of some of his friends to save Jerome from his own caustic extremism, Jerome managed in the space of a scant three years to alienate the Roman clergy to the point that he was compelled to live out the rest of his life in exile in Bethlehem.

  Unwelcome among his fellow clerics, whom Jerome frequently castigated in classic do-what-I-say-not-what-I-do fashion for practices including the maintenance of intimate spiritual friendships with monied Christian matrons, Jerome himself spent the bulk of his adult life supported and surrounded by rich Roman women. Marcella, his patron in Rome, was a chaste widow of many decades' standing. Paula, who became his patron and established him in his own Bethlehem monastery after his exile (she herself maintained a parallel convent of sorts for expatriate Christian women), was a thirty-something widow recently devastated by the loss of her husband and raising a daughter, Eustochium, who had been consecrated as a Christian virgin. Jerome would have been horrified to think of himself as a family man, but it would not be entirely incorrect to say that, in some respects at least, he was. A part of Paula's extended household until his death, and a friend and confidant to Paula herself, he was also in a way a paternal figure to the young Eustochium.

  Deeply influenced by Origen, Jerome felt the heavy weight of the flesh as a very real and evidently terrible insult. Writing of his experiences of the solitary renunciate's life in the desert, he described the horrifying discovery that no matter how he fasted and deprived himself, he still felt the bonfire of lust within. The metaphor served him well: if lust could survive the snuffing-out of other material yearnings (represented by the emaciated, nearly de
ad flesh of the desert hermit), then sexuality truly represented the most intractable aspect of the human animal.

  This disgust of the body, and particularly to any feminine or erotic aspects of it, appears throughout Jerome's writing, but nowhere quite so vividly as in his letters to Eustochium. He encouraged her to fast and to shun the lushness of her own nubile body, saying "the one who mortifies her bodily members . . . is not afraid to say, 'I have become like a wineskin in the frost, whatever moisture there was in me has been dried up." He advised that Eustochium's "hot little body" should be secluded from the world and from all manner of potential excesses, including wine and heavy foods, clothes that were either too stylish or too deliberately slovenly, and affected speech. It was all part and parcel of preventing the onslaught of desire, whether Eustochium's own or that of those with whom she might come into contact. For, as Jerome warned her, "if those whose bodies are eroded can still be assailed by such thoughts, what must a girl endure, who is exposed to the thrills of easy living?"

  The text of Jerome's controversial Adversus Jovinianum (Against Jovinian) makes Jerome's black-and-white views on virginity even clearer. Virginity, he stated, should be a priority not only for the individual but for the whole of the Church. For Jerome, marriage was barely acceptable (he told Eustochium that he could only praise it because it produced virgins), despite the fact that the Church officially embraced it. Second marriages for widows or widowers, in their transparent pursuit of the carnal, were to Jerome scarcely distinguishable from whoredom. Further, Jerome felt the clergy should be made up solely of virgins. Married clergy, who at that time were in the vast majority, were to be regarded as only temporary substitutes until such time as the requisite number of virgin clergy, their Christianity tempered in the forge of sexual asceticism, could come forward to take over the Church.

  With attitudes like these, it is no wonder that Jerome did not last long in the resolutely worldly milieu of Rome. As the age of the great Latin fathers drew to a close, the man who would leave the most striking stamp on Christian virginity turned out to be a rather more politically suave and philosophically moderate man, one with whom Jerome, at the end of his life, would dismissively refuse to engage. This last and greatest synthesist of the Patristic era was none other than Augustine of Hippo, whose own early ambivalence toward sex was summed up in his notorious cry, "Lord, give me chastity . . . but not yet!"

  Triumph of the Will: Augustine

  A man of the world and a man of his time—the late fourth and early fifth centuries—Augustine was no virgin. Although he forswore sexuality when he became a Christian at the age of thirty-two, Augustine's younger manhood, which included a thirteen-year relationship with a concubine and the birth of a son (who died shortly thereafter), was unapologetically carnal. Extensively educated, he was the pride and joy of his mother, Monica, a devout Christian. Prior to becoming a Christian himself, Augustine spent considerable time studying the principles of the ascetic Manichaean movement, but never became part of its rigorously celibate elect.

  It was only after his career as a rhetorician took him from his home in Africa to the Imperial residence in Milan that things began to change for Augustine. Ambitious, he planned a marriage to the much younger daughter of a prominent local family. When he did so, the concubine who had been his romantic and sexual partner for over a decade went back to Africa as custom dictated. Without a concubine, and with his wife-to-be not yet old enough to marry, Augustine took a mistress, a move which revealed to him the crassness of his sexual needs. Shattered and bereft, mired in what we might think of as a sort of post-divorce crisis, Augustine looked inward, to his own soul, and outward, to the rich intellectual and religious world of Christian Milan.

  The experience changed his life. The nourishing intensity of the spiritual joy Augustine found in Christianity made connubial bliss pale by comparison. His connection to his new religion was immediate, his conversion swift, and his rise to prominence breathtaking. Baptized at the hands of his teacher Ambrose, a scant five years later he was back in Africa in Hippo (in what is today Algeria) founding a monastery. In 400, he became the city's bishop.

  Looking across the Mediterranean toward Rome and across the gulf of his own conversion at his former life, Augustine was able to bring a distinctive and sympathetic synthesis to the questions of sexuality, continence, chastity, and virginity that had for so long been central problems to Christianity. Reordering a time-honored hierarchy that put virgins first, widows second, and married people last in line for the favors of heaven, Augustine put martyrs first and foremost and virgins second, a move which would have appealed to Origen. Jerome, though his admiration would no doubt have been grudging, would have agreed with Augustine's judgment that sexual desire was no mere physical stirring of color genitalis, genital heat, that could be dried up by fasting and mortifications of the flesh, but rather the manifestation of an inborn and lifelong psychological phenomenon he called concupiscenda carnis, carnal concupiscence, that knew no master but the will.

  Sin, argued Augustine, was what happened when the will was disobedient to God. In the wet dreams that plagued him and reminded him of his sexually active past Augustine felt the distance between his will, which desired only God, and his fleshly self, which had other things in mind. That this dark, prideful, disobedient heart could be so powerful as to overwhelm the will was a source of deep sadness for Augustine. Developing the will and schooling it in Christian virtue became the key to successful management of this indwelling foe. "The virtue which governs a good life controls from the seat of the soul every member of the body, and the body is rendered holy by the act of a holy will," he wrote in the first book of De civitate Dei.

  This philosophy gave rise not only to Augustine's veneration of Mary, who in her submissive obedience during Jesus's conception replicated the utterly libido-free sexuality of Eden, but to his notion that virginity resided not so much in the body as in the mind. In the wake of the horrifying Gothic invasion of Rome in 410, this allowed Augustine to provide some small comfort, personal and doctrinal, for the consecrated virgins raped by the invading Goths as an act of war. "No matter what anyone else does with the body or in the body that a person has no power to avoid without sin on his own part, no blame attaches to the one who suffers it," he wrote. (A double-edged sword to be sure; the phrase "the power to avoid" can damn as well as reprieve.) But Augustine also wrote that the holiness of the body did not lie in the integrity of its parts, "enim eo corpus sanctum est, quodeius membra sunt integral A raped virgin was not necessarily ruined in the eyes of either the Church or God: it was ultimately the integrity of her soul that mattered.

  The relocation of virginity from the body to the soul was an imperfect solution to the problems of either rape or virginity, but it was a brilliant stroke of philosophy. After Augustine, both libido and virginity were matters of the conscious self at least as much as they were matters of the body. How one dealt with them spoke volumes about one's morality, one's Christianity. Making sexuality and its control a matter of individual motivation took away the easy excuse of being overpowered by the body's appetites. Virginity was no longer just a marker of a pure and empty vessel. It was more than just the boycott of the womb or the distrust of the motives of the pleasure-seeking flesh. It was all those things and more: a test that measured moral commitment, spiritual purity, and personal strength. Augustine's ingenious and adept synthesis created an ideology of virginity that has remained central to Western thought for millennia. In it, virginity is a triumph over more than just the imperatives of the body. It is, in every way, a triumph of the will.

  CHAPTER 9

  Heaven and Earth

  Valde durum est contradiciere quod habet gustus pomi. It is so hard to deny things that taste of the apple.

  —Saint Hildegard of Bingen

  THE VIKING FORCES that landed on the North Sea coast of Scotland in 870 swept south with a vengeance, leaving utter devastation in their wake. The only thing that traveled faster
than the Vikings was the news that they were on the way.

  When word of the approaching berserks reached Ebba the Younger, abbess of Coldingham Abbey, a convent located just north of the present-day border between England and Scotland, she gathered the sisters together, knowing that they had no greater strength than the community they shared. Warning her community of virgins of the probability that they would all be raped by the invaders when the convent was sacked, Ebba took a razor and sliced off her own nose and upper lip, making a bloody, mutilated spectacle of her face that she hoped would repel the invaders. One after the other, the nuns followed suit, fearlessly carving into their own flesh with cold steel in the hopes that it might forestall their having to endure a violation of their bodies that these consecrated virgins perceived as far worse than the ones to their faces.

  According to the legend, it worked. The Vikings took one look at the ruined faces of the nuns who appeared at the convent gate, and burned the place to the ground. Trapped inside the inferno of their cloister, Ebba and all her nuns died a horrifying death. But in death they found victory: the women of Coldingham died virgin martyrs, guaranteed a place in Heaven.

  Gruesome, coldly practical, and yet oddly transcendent, the story of the nuns of Coldingham Abbey provides a useful snapshot of the often extreme nature of the medieval world. In this era a retreat into the monastery did not reprieve one from having to face the realities of invasion or war, nor did it in any way protect women from the threat of rape. Although this was the heyday of the great scholar-theologians, the golden age of monasticism, and the period during which the Roman Catholic Church achieved an unprecedented hold over virtually all of western Europe, it was also an era dominated by seemingly perpetual war, budding class struggle, devastating epidemics, internecine politics, Crusades and Inquisitions, a slowly but surely metamorphosing economy, and, at different times and places, the very real problem of armed invasion. A great deal of medieval culture was necessarily preoccupied with the difficult task of negotiating and maintaining the perpetually uneasy balance between the mandates of heaven and those of earth. Virginity was central to that struggle because of its own critical role in the dominant institution of the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church.