WORD AND FLESH

The Bodies and Sexuality of Ascetic Women in

Christian Antiquity
Virginia Burrus

Agnes, Ambrose tells us, was just twelve years old when she died in
witness to her Christian faith. Her young and disturbingly vulnerable body
lies at the focal point of the bishop's rhetorical gaze. "Was there room for a
wound in that little body?" Ambrose asks in the opening pages of his treatise
On virgins.
Yet she, who had no room to receive the sword, had that by which
she conquered the sword. . . . This girl was undaunted by the bloody
hands of executioners, this girl was unmoved by the heavy dragging
of the creaking chains. Now she offered her whole body to the raging
soldier's sword: she had been unaware of death until the present, but
she was ready for it. (de virg. 1.7)1
Erotic images moving just below the text's surface shift our attention from
the girl's martyrdom to her precarious virginity. As we are invited to equate
sword with penis and violent death with sexual intercourse, 2 we find our-

This essay grew out of a talk delivered at the University of Malaga in September 1992 as
part of a lecture series entitled "Las Hijas de Afrodita: Dimensiones de la Sexualidad
Femenina en las Culturas Mediterráneas. " I am grateful to the University of Malaga and
especially to Professor Aurelio Perez Jimenez, director of the annual lectureship program
"Curso de Otoño de Estudios sobre el Mediterraneo Antiquo,"forproviding the occasion
and support for scholarly discussion of the issue of female sexuality in Mediterranean an-
tiquity.
1
Trans. Elizabeth A. Clark, Women in the Early Church (Wilmington, Del : Michael
Glazier, 1983), 108.
2
Lest such a reading seem forced, note that the fourth-century Spanish poet Pru-
dentius, almost certainly familiar with Ambrose's version of the tale, adds several details
which make the sexual undertones of the story still more explicit. In Prudentius telling,
the judge first sentences Agnes to a brothel and only later orders her execution. Pru-
dentius's Agnes responds to the executioner in overtly sexual terms. "When Agnes saw
the savage man standing with his sword unsheathed, with greater joy she spoke these
words: Ί revel more a wild man comes, a cruel and violent man-at arms, than if a softened
28 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

selves momentarily confronted with the image of a prepubescent Roman

bride facing the terror and pain of her wedding night.3 Ambrose goes on to
name the bridal metaphor in language which simultaneously affirms and
denies the fitness of the comparison:
Thus she would not as a bride hasten to the nuptial bed so that as a
virgin with speedy step and joyful approach she might march to the
place of execution, her head not adorned with curls but with Christ.
(de virg. 1.8)
Agnes is emphatically not a bride; yet at the same time, she is like a bride
who eagerly approaches marriage to Christ. Later Ambrose expresses more
directly both the implicit sexuality of Agnes marriage-like relationship to
Christ and the sexual danger represented by the executioner.
What terror the executioner struck to make her afraid, what flatteries
to persuade her! How many longed that she might come to them in
marriage! But she replied, "It would be wrong to my Spouse to
anticipate some man's pleasing me. The One whofirstchose me for
himself shall receive me." (de virg. 1.9)
The sexual images here evoked are echoed in the less delicately told
tale of Pelagia with which the treatise On virgins closes. Having warmed to
his subject, Ambrose new creates not a metaphorical but a literal link be-
tween martyrdom and sexual violation. The persecutors who threaten the
fifteen-year-old Pelagia are presented in the guise of a gang of rapists (de
virg. 3.33), while the bridal imagery attached to the relationship between
the virgin-martyr and Christ is made clumsily concrete in the report that
Pelagia actually adorns her head and robes herself in bridal dress before
plunging a sword into her own breast (de virg. 3.34). Nor is the self-inflicted
death of Pelagia sufficient to satisfy the excessive demands of the astonishing
narrative. Ambrose goes on to relate how the persecutors, frustrated by the

youth cameforth,faintand tender, bathed in scent, to ruin me with chastity's death. This
is my lover, I confess, a man who pleases me at last! I shall rush to meet his steps so I
dont delay his hot desires. I shall greet his blade's full length within my breast; and I
shall draw theforceof sword to bosom's depth. As bride of Christ, I shall leap over the
gloom of sky, the aethers heights'" iperisteph. 14.69-80; trans. Clark, Women in the Early
Church, 112). On the Agnes tradition and Prudentius's place in it, see Anne-Marie
Palmer, Prudentius On the Martyrs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 250-53.
3
The medical literature of the period indicates that Roman girlsfrequentlyexperienced
sexual intercourse before theirfirstmenstrual period: "The anatomical errors made by
the Roman doctors . . . could only be the result of girls being deflowered before pu-
berty. . . . These Roman doctors imagined that the vagina was completely sealed inter-
nally and that this, plus the hymen, made the first act of intercourse very painful.
According to this theory the man had the privilege of opening up the passageforthe
menses." Aline Rousselle, Porneia: On Desire and the Body in Antiquity, trans. F. Pheas-
ant (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 33.
 Burrus: Word and Flesh 29

loss of Pelagia, next seek to rape Pelagia s mother and sisters. These women
too choose to die by their own agency rather than experience sexual viola­
tion, drowning themselves in a self-baptism which is quite literally a death
to the sins of this world (de virg. 3.34-35).
In the stories of Agnes and Pelagia, women, even virginal women—
indeed precisely virginal women—are represented a$ the objects of male
sexual desire: Ambrose's text is replete with the tantalizing imagery of sexual
penetration imagined, deferred, or displaced. But again and again, the threat
of penetration is juxtaposed with the insistence on ultimate impenetrability.
Slowly we become aware that the sexualized bodies of women are carrying
a heavy weight of signification in the writings of this renowned recruiter
and consecrator of virgins, theorist pf virginity, and author of the doctrine
of Marys miraculous hymenal intactness in partu. Women's bodies have
themselves become texts, written by a bishop who struggles to guard his
flock from the all too frequent incursions of worldly or "heretical" influence,
a pastor who strives to keep his churchly bride pure for Christ her bride­
groom.4 The virgins' flesh has become ecclesiological and eschatological sym­
bol; it has been "made word."
The women of antiquity also told stories of ascetics female martyrs, and
these preserve the traces of their resistance to the male textualization of
their flesh. A woman's folktale5 preserved in the late second-century Acts
of Paul and Thecla specifies that a fire blazes around the young virgin Thecla
when she is thrown naked into an arena full of wild beasts, protecting her
body not only from bestial attack but also from the intrusive male gaze.
Subsequently Thecla stands before the governor who has sentenced her and
boldly preaches to him. Are we to imagine that the fire still covers her
nakedness? It does not matter: at this point the story declares the male gaze
impotent. When the governor finally offers Thecla her clothes, she denies
his power either to clothe or to unclothe her, responding defiantly, "The
one who clothed me while I was naked among the beasts shall clothe me

4
Peter Brown's nuanced discussion of Ambrose's treatment of the body and sexuality
highlights the connections between Ambrose's thoughts on female virginity and his preoc­
cupation with the boundaries separating church and world: "In defending the perpetual
virginity of Mary . . . Ambrose . . . found an apposite Te Deum with which to celebrate
twenty years of tense concern for boundaries, for the dangers of admixture, and for the
absolute and perpetual nature of the antidiesis between the Catholic Church and the
formless, disruptive confusion of the saeculum." The Body and Society: Men, Women,
and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press,
1988X355.
5
For arguments in favor of identifying Thecla s story as a woman's folktale, see my
Chastity as Autonomy: Women in the Stories of Apocryphal Acts (Lewiston, Ν. Y. : Edwin
Mellen Press, 1987), esp. 53-57, 67-^80.
30 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

with salvation on the day of judgment."6 In the words of historian Margaret

Miles, "Thecla insists that her body is not ultimately at the disposal of the
governor to cover or strip, but is an aspect of her religious integrity, incorpo-
rated and included in her salvation/'7
The martyr Perpetua rewrites the significance of her own bodily expo-
sure still more dramatically through an intensely physical dream image re-
corded in her diary:
A certain Egyptian came out against me, loathsome in appearance,
along with his assistants, to fight me. Comely young men came to
me, to be my assistants and my promoters. And I was stripped and
I was made a man. My assistants began to rub me down with oil, as
is the custom in the contests. I saw the Egyptian across from me,
rolling in the sand . . . The Egyptian and I came close to each other
and began to send blows. . . . When I saw there was a pause, I joined
my hands so that myfingerslinked and I grabbed his head. And he
fell on his face and I stood on his head The mob began to shout,
and my assistants, to sing Psalms.8
In her dream, Perpetua eludes the male gaze by revising her body in such
a way that it is unavailable for either sexual penetration or textualization.
Her vision of "becoming male" does not primarily express the alienation of
self from body or the rejection of her worth as a woman. Instead, as Patricia
Cox Miller has shown, it reflects a radical rewriting of maleness and female-
ness in the subversive discourse of dream: "When Perpetua embraces the
male, what appears is an image of maleness whose highly valued 'stance' is
a recognition of female identity."9
The two sets of tales here juxtaposed suggest the dual aims of this essay:
first, to examine the strategies by which the bodies of ascetic women were
sexually textualized in the dominant theological tradition of Christian antiq-
uity and, second, to uncover evidence of resistance to such textualization.
In the first section of the paper, entitled "Flesh Made Word," I will focus
on representations of female virginity in the works of fourth-century male

6
Women in the Early Church, 87.
7
Margaret Miles, Carnal Knowing: Female Nakedness and Religious Meaning in the
Christian West (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 58.
8
Women in the Early Church, 101-2. Unlike Agnes, Pelagia, and Thecla, Perpetua is
not a virgin or even generally thought of as an "ascetic." But it seems to me mat the
distinction between virginal and nonvirginal ascetic women is of relatively little use for
understanding women s asceticism from a female point of view. Nor should a strong dis-
tinction be made between nonascetic and ascetic martyrs, since ascetic training can be
shown to be a significant part of the preparation for any martyrdom. On the latter point,
see Maureen A. Tilley, "The Ascetic Body and the (Un) Making of the World of the Martyr,"
Journal of the American Academy of Religion 59 (1991): 467-79.
9
Patricia Cox Miller, "The Devil's Gateway: An Eros of Difference in the Dreams of
Perpetua," Dreaming 2 (1992): 62.
 Bur rus: Word and Flesh 31

writers. While the fourth-century authors can hardly be said to have origi-
nated the sexual textualization of women's bodies,10 it is in this period that
female sexuality first comes to occupy a central and clearly articulated place
in Christian thought. We shall see that the imagined physical enclosure or
intactness of the female virgin s sexual organs functions symbolically in the
rhetoric of the fourth century to reinforce social and ideological bound-
aries.11 Closely linked with the construction of orthodoxy, the figure of the
virgin is frequently contrasted with the figure of the heretical harlot, in
language that seeks to delineate the boundaries of acceptable theological
reflection while also creating a sharp distinction between "insiders" and
"outsiders." At the same time, the constructed opposition of virgin and harlot
functions to limit and control the intellectual, social, and sexual behavior of
Christian women.
The second part of the paper is entitled "Word Made Flesh." Such
language is immediately problematic, for we cannot expect to recover the
"fleshly" experience of ancient women or even to discover more than meager
fragments of the "words" with which they represented their own bodies.
Nevertheless, the metaphor appropriately suggests movement away from the
culturally dominant textualization of women's sexual bodies—the "Word"—
toward the subversive "words" through which some ascetic women chal-
lenged and creatively transformed the androcentric construction of their
bodies. And insofar as these subversive words seem to draw powerfully upon
the bodily knowledge of women, I am willing to suggest that they bring us
closer to the female flesh to which they refer.
Even male authors in the ancient period share the awareness that sexu-
ally ascetic women escape certain forms of physical suffering and social
oppression through the rejection of marriage, and furthermore actively resist
self-textualization through their disciplined refusal to arrange or adorn their
bodies for the benefit of the male viewer.12 But in other areas ascetic women's

10
Indeed, it might be argued that the burden of signification placed on women's bodies
is practically universal in patriarchal cultures. Within the Christian tradition alone, evi-
dence for both the attempt to exploit and control women's bodies and women's resistance
to that attempt surfaces as early as Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians and, still more
dramatically, in the Pastoral Epistles.
11
I emphasize "imagined," because, as observed in note 3, the Roman understanding of
female anatomy was notoriously flawed: "Soranus, thought that only dissection would
convince the Roman doctors that in a virgin the vagina was not normally sealed by a
membrane stretching between the neck of the womb and the hymen" (Rousselle, Por-
neia, 27).
12
See, for example, Ambrose's negative comparison of marriage with virginity in de virg.
1.25-30, 55-56. The theme is common in ancient Christian treatises on virginity. Eliza-
beth Clark considers the social benefits of female asceticism from the point of view of a
modern feminist historian in "Ascetic Renunciation and Feminine Advancement: A Para-
dox of Late Ancient Christianity," Anglican Theohgical Review 63 (1981): 240-57; now
32 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

views are strikingly different from the views of male contemporaries. Female
ascetics express little interest in bodily intactness or cloistered privacy, topics
which loom large in male discussions of female virginity. Nor do women s
interpretations of their sexual asceticism closely parallel ascetic mens domi­
nant preoccupation with resisting their own sexual desire. Instead, it is the
problem of resistance to male control which most concerns ascetic women.
And once they have escaped the social and sexual domination of men and
constructed an alternative ascetic culture, ancient women are free to seek
new expressions of their sexuality. Those who would likely have found little
sexual satisfaction in patriarchal marriage extend their erotic desire for
knowledge of God and enjoy the intimacies of friendship with other ascet­
13
ics. Within the texts of the ancient Christian ascetic movement we can,
then, detect signs of women gaining control over their bodies and sexuality.
We discern the feint traces of the ongoing history of women struggling to
u
free their flesh from imprisonment in the male word and gaze.

Flesh Made Word

We often forget that it took the Christians almost three centuries to
become fascinated with the hymen—and by overlooking the relative lateness

also in Clark, Ascetic Piety and Women's Faith: Essays on Late Ancient Christianity
(Lewiston, Ν.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 1986), 175-208. Focusing on the period of Christian
origins, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza likewise suggests that female asceticism may be
interpreted as a rejection of the social oppression of patriarchal marriage; see In Memory
of Her (New York: Crossroad, 1983), 90, 220-26, 315.
13
In connection with the question of women s sexual satisfaction within Roman marriage,
consider not only the extremely young age of many Roman brides married to older men,
but also the probable implications of the late Roman assent to the Aristotelian tradition
"which held that women conceived without feeling anything"—a tradition which first
competed with and then superceded the earlier Greek understanding that both male and
female partners must achieve orgasm in order to conceive (Rousselle, Porneia, ET, 32).
14
Elizabeth Castelli offers an admirably thorough survey of ancient Christian texts on
female virginity as well as an incisive feminist analysis; her essay should be consulted by
anyone seriously interested in the topic. See "Virginity and Its Meaning for Women's
Sexuality in Early Christianity," Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 2, no. 1 (Spring
1986): 61-88. My own approach diverges most significantlyfromCastelli's in the following
areas. First, I am more interested in the connections between virginity and orthodoxy in
the androcentric construction of ascetic women's sexuality. Second, I am more optimistic
about the possibility not only that ancient women actively resisted the culturally dominant
androcentric interpretation of their own sexuality, but also that we can recover traces of
their resistance. Third, I would like to consider the question of female sexuality from a
broader and more pluralistic point of view than Castelli's claim that women's asceticism
involved a simple "abdication of sexuality" (p. 88) would seem to imply. Peter Brown notes
that "the virgin state was praised as the state of 'true' joining, and so as the source of
'true' and abiding progeny," and warns that "we should be careful not to dismiss such
hyperboles as if they were merely rhetoric or as if they betrayed a somewhat pathetic
 Biirrus: Word and Flesh 33

of the phenomenon, we also overlook its historical and cultural particularity.

There were sexually continent Christians before the fourth century, to be
sure, and it is clear that female ascetics, and perhaps female virgins in
particular, were a source of distinct unease as well as distinct pride to male
ecclesiastics. The early third-century North African Tertullian suggests, with
a horror that is only partly feigned, that the status and independence
claimed by female virgins in his own church implies the creation of "a third
sex, some monstrosity with a head of its own" (virg. vel. 7). A generation
later, fellow North African Cyprian offers fervent praise of female virgins,
designating them "the flower of the ecclesiastical seed" (hab. virg. 3). But
although there are scattered indications that female virgins could evoke
powerful emotional responses, neither virginity per se, nor female virginity,
nor Mary s virginity figured as significantly in the ascetic discourse of the
pre-Constantinian period as it would in a later day.
Methodius of Olympus's late third-century Symposium is the exception
that proves this general rule. In this work, Methodius purports to record a
series of speeches in praise of virginity delivered by ten female virgins in a
rhetorical competition presided over by Arete, the female personification of
Virtue. Despite the dramatic tension initially created by the appearance of
women in the typically male setting of the philosophers' banquet, Methodius
does not go on to give the kind of attention to female virginity which those
of us familiar with fourth-century texts might expect. While virginity is
prized even more than other forms of sexual continence, this is because the
virginal body signifies most powerfully the incorruptibility of flesh which
was ours in Paradise and will be fully restored to us in Christ. Of interest
is a generalized sexual purity, rather than hymenal intactness or enclosure.
Correspondingly, the body of the female virgin is not particularly privileged
in this text. Indeed, the virgin is very frequently thought of as male: it is
Christ, not Mary, who is the "Archvirgm" (symp. 1.4); the choir of virgins
attending Christ can also be imagined as male (symp. 1.5);15 and though the
"bride" of Song of Songs may be identified with the virgins of the church
(symp. 7.1-3), not only are these not necessarily thought of as exclusively
female, but Methodius also insists that it is equally appropriate to think of

sublimation of the procreative urge in so many useless male bodies, so many empty
wombs." T h e Notion of Virginity in the Early Church," Christian Spirituality: Origins
to the Twelfth Century, ed. Bernard McGuinn, John Meyendorff, Jean Leclerq (New
York: Crossroad, 1985), 431-32. Brown makes this point in references to both male and
female virgins but I suspect that it is especially relevant to our understanding of female
virginity and sexuality.
15
This is in the context of the scriptural reference to the hundred andforty-fourthousand
virgins "who were not defiled with women" (Rev. 14.1-5).
34 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

the bride as the whole church (symp. 7.4-7) or as the undefined flesh which
is united with the Lord in the incarnation (symp. 7.8).
As we enter the fourth century, we find ourselves in a very different
world, where the sexual bodies of women, above all the bodies of the true
virgin and her counterpart the heretical harlot, are highly charged with
symbolic meaning. Significantly, the earliest treatments of female virginity
and heretical harlotry are found in the writings of Alexander of Alexandria
and coincide precisely with the onset of the Arian controversy and the acces-
sion of Constantine in the east.16 It is with the writings of Alexander s more
famous and prolific successor Athanasius that we shall begin, moving from
there to survey the slightly later works of Epiphanius and the westerners
Ambrose and Jerome, as we attempt to trace the spread of this intensified
interest in the symbolic expressiveness of female sexuality.
Athanasius's fragmentary Letter to the Virgins is one of the earliest
ascetic works that clearly privileges the virginal female body.17 It does so in
terms which were to endure: namely, the invocation of Mary as the first and
highest model of virginity, and the identification of the female virgin with the
"bride of Christ" whom Patristic exegetes generally agreed to be referred to
in the Song of Songs. In the letter, Athanasius argues that Mary must have
remained eternally virgin; for if she had had other children after Christ,
Christ would surely have entrusted her to these children rather than to John
(ep. virg. 59). Unperturbed by the weakness of his sole scriptural argument,
Athanasius moves to emphasize his main point: Mary remained eternally
virgin in order to serve as model or "type" for the female virgins who would
come after her (ep. virg. 59).18 Athanasius proves surprisingly well-informed
about Mary s life. He notes that Mary is to be imitated in her good works,
her study of scripture, her constant prayer, and her moderate practice of
fasting and vigils. The virgin s calm passions and pure thoughts are likewise

16
I deal briefly with Alexander s feminization of heresy and its probable influence on
Athanasius in "The Heretical Woman as Symbol in Alexander, Athanasius, Epiphanius,
and Jerome," Harvard Theological Review 84.3 (1991): 233-39. In his Letter to the Vir-
gins, Athanasius himself names Alexander as one of the sources for his own construction
of the model of orthodox virginity. Lettre aux vierges, in L.-Th. Lefort, trans, and ed., S.
Athanase: Lettres Festales et Pastorales en Copte, vol. 2 (Louvain: L. Dubercq, 1955)
(hereafter ep. virg.\ 72-76.
17
It should be noted that only a single anonymous and fragmentary Coptic manuscript
survives as a witness to this Letter to the Virgins; nevertheless, scholars feel considerable
confidence in assigning its authorship to Athanasius. The issue is carefully discussed by
David Bernhard Brakke, "St. Athanasius and Ascetic Christians in Egypt" (Ph.d. diss.,
Yale University, 1992), 18-24. I am grateful to Elizabeth Clark for calling my attention to
this fine dissertation and to David Brakke for generously providing me access to his work.
18
So important is Mary s exemplary virginity for Athanasius that he is led to suggest
that Paul must have had Mary in mind when he gave his opinions concerning virginity
in his letter to the Corinthians! (ep. virg. 62)
 Biirrus: Word and Flesh 35

praised, and indeed Athanasius particularly emphasizes her vigilance in

guarding her mind against evil thoughts or even attacks of curiosity. Finally,
Athanasius exalts Mary as a model of daughterly obedience and of maidenly
modesty. Mary made herself more submissive than a slave to her parents,
he assures his readers approvingly, elsewhere adding the significant qualifier
that she would argue with her relatives only if they opposed her ascetic way
of life. As to her modesty, Mary left no part of her body uncovered and, on
those rare occasions when she ventured forth from her home in the company
of her parents to attend worship services, she maintained strict control over
her bodily posture and avoided eye contact with others. Even within her
home, she avoided men to such an extent that she never heard a man speak—
indeed, Athanasius explains, it was the startling sound of Gabriel's masculine
voice that so troubled Mary when she received the angelic visitation (ep.
virg. 60-62).
When Athanasius turns to consider the Song of Songs, more overt sexual
imagery reinforces the previous emphasis on the virgin's vigilant observance
of strict privacy. Athanasius suggests that the virgin must protect her "vine-
yard" from the "foxes" who will seek to ravage it. She must keep her "wed-
ding chamber" pure for the bridegroom. Constant prayer or conversation
with her beloved will excite her love for him and thereby help her to resist
thoughts of any other suitor. Conversely, her pure thoughts will unite the
bridegroom to her so closely that he will defend her against all attackers
and seducers (ep. virg. 69-71). The primary referent of this metaphorical
language is, of course, the need to maintain the sexual purity of the female
virgin by restricting access to her sexual organs—her "vineyard," her "bridal
chamber." But the physical virginity which is to be so carefully guarded is
only the concrete sign of the more important social and theological "virgin-
ity. " That is to say, it is not just narrowly sexual issues that are here at stake,
but also the definition and enforcement of communal and doctrinal bound-
aries.
If Athanasius goes to great pains to stress that the virgin is not to have
dealings with "outsiders" or to expose herself to "strange" opinions, there is
little question as to the identity of the particular "outsiders" who concern
him. His interpretation of the Song of Songs immediately follows upon a
refutation of the ascetic teachings of Hieracas and immediately precedes his
recording of an anti-Arian speech attributed to his predecessor Alexander.
This explicit polemic reminds us of Athanasius's extremely insecure position
in the episcopacy of Alexandria. In exile almost as often as not, his authority
over the diverse and factious Christian population of Alexandria and Egypt
was both fragile and hard won. The support of the ascetics was vital to his
cause but was not easily acquired. In the Letter to the Virgins, then, Athanas-
ius is battling for the loyalty and control of ascetic women, many of whom
36 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

were evidently attracted to the teachings of his rivals.19 The bishop's primary
rhetorical strategy is to label these rivals heretical and to associate them
with the external forces of evil which attack the virgin s essential "core" of
sexual, social, and doctrinal purity. Athanasius thereby constructs a powerful
link between virginity and orthodoxy.
This link between virginity and orthodoxy and the ecclesiological func-
tion of the virgins as symbols of the true church which is thereby implied
manifests itself not only in rhetoric but also concretely in the parading of
the "symbolic retinue" of female virgins which forms "an integral part of a
bishop's show of power/' in the words of historian Peter Brown.20 As is
frequently the case, virginity receives most attention when it is perceived
to be threatened, and we find many of Athanasius s references to his own
virginal retinue in his account of the violation of the church's virgins which
took place during the public disorder following the accession of the Arian
Gregory to the Alexandrian episcopacy. He writes that
Holy and pure virgins were being stripped naked, and suffering what
is not right or lawful, and if they did not allow it, they placed them-
selves in great danger, (ep. enclycl. 3; cf. apol. sec. 30 and 49)
The image in this text is of Arian Christians raping Nicene virgins, though
that is not necessarily what actually occurred. Elsewhere Athanasius refers
suggestively to the "naked swords" with which the virgins were attacked,
but goes on to describe not sexual assault on the part of Arian Christians
but humiliation at the hands of non-Christians: mock persecution trials,
verbal ridicule, insult, and the like (apol. sec. 15). What actually took place
is less important for our purposes than is Athanasius's interpretation of
events. In Athanasius's view, the Arians were responsible for the public
disorder that led to the dishonoring of the Nicene virgins. And to violate the
virgins constituted a rape of the true church and a defilement of its purity.
The virginal body was not the only female body available for sexual
textualization in the works of the Alexandrian bishop. The orthodox virgin
has her counterpart in the figure of the heretical harlot. If the virgin repre-
sents a community whose boundaries are intact, the heretical harlot ex-
presses the threatening image of a community whose boundaries are
uncontrolled. Just as she allows herself to be sexually penetrated by strange
men, so too she listens indiscriminately and babbles forth new theological
formulations carelessly and without restraint: all the gateways of her body
are unguarded. She furthermore ignores both women's physical restriction
to the private sphere and their corresponding social subordination to the

19
See the far more extended and nuanced discussion of Brakke* "St. Athanasius and
Ascetic Christians in Egypt," 100-173.
20
Brown, Body and Society, 260.
 Burrus: Word and Flesh 37

public sphere of men: the heretical woman is a wanderer, a "gadabout," and

she is notoriously indifferent to the authority of her male superiors.
Such a feminized representation of heresy is first glimpsed in the open-
ing lines of Athanasius s First Discourse Against the Arians. Here Athanasius
plays with the feminine gender of the Greek noun hairesis, describing the
Arian movement as the younger sister of previous heresies and the daughter
of the devil He then evokes Genesis 3 and smoothly suggests the identifica-
tion of this image of "Woman Heresy" with the deceptive and irrational
serpent who "forces her way back into the church's paradise." Finally, Eve
is introduced as the archetype of the foolish one who is deceived by Woman
Heresy (c. Ar. 1.1). The sexual promiscuity associated with this feminized
portrait of heresy is highlighted in Athanasiuss subsequent depiction of
Arius himself. Athanasius introduces Arius as the author of a Thalia, and
here again, he plays with the Greek language, punning on the words thaleta,
or banquet song, and thèleia, femininity. Arius's Thalia is described as a
"light" work, "feminine (thèlukos) in tune and character." Its author is like-
wise effeminate, according to Athanasius, and he compares Arius to a prosti-
tute who sings and dances seductively:
For Arius imitated the broken and feminine character of [Sotades],
writing a Thalia himself; and he rivalled the dance of [ Herodias'
daughter], prancing andfrolickingin evil sayings against the Saviour.
(c. Ar. 1.2)
For what was morefittingfor him to do, when he wanted to dance
against the Saviour, than to put his wretched little words of impiety
to loose and weak tunes? (c. Ar. 1.4)
Arius is not only likened to a dancing prostitute but is also explicitly identi-
fied with the serpent. In a parallel passage (c. Ar. 1.7,8), Athanasius again
alludes to Genesis 3, comparing Arius first with the serpent and then with
Eve. The penetrable harlot Eve is now established as the counterpart to the
impenetrable virgin Mary.21
Writing shortly after Athanasiuss death, the fourth-century heresiolo-
gist Bishop Epiphanius of Cyprus was to pick up these same images of
female sexuality in his presentation of heresy, drawing upon Song of Songs
for female images of promiscuous heresy as well as virginal orthodoxy. Ac-
cording to Epiphanius, the single dove alluded to in Song of Songs 6.8-9 is
the true bride or church, while the eighty concubines mentioned represent
heresies—an identification of sufficient importance to dictate the division of

21
Note that Athanasius draws upon the "little women" of 2 Timothy 3.6-7 as well as the
Eve of Genesis 3 to cement the connection between women or female nature and heresy,
as I point out in a slightly expandedformof this same discussion in "The Heretical Woman
as Symbol, " 235-39.
38 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

Epiphanius's heresiological work into eighty sections. Epiphanius explains

that the concubines are not truly the consorts of Christ but have wrongly
usurped his royal name (Pan. l.pref.l; 35.3).^
Epiphanius also refers to the pre-Christian heresies as the "mothers" of
the Christian heresies (Anaceph. l.pref.), much as Athanasius had referred
to them as "sisters" of one another and "daughters" of the devil. But, as in
Athanasius s text, it is not only the abstraction of heresy which is supplied
with a female body through the personification of heresy as concubine or
mother; the portrait of the heretics themselves is likewise feminized. In his
treatment of the "Ophites," or serpent-followers, Epiphanius follows Atha-
nasius in presenting the serpent of Genesis 3 as the archetypal personifica-
tion of heresy, and Eve as the archetypal heretic. Eve was the first to be
deceived by heresy, but the serpent did not immediately release all its
poison, explains Epiphanius; only later, after Christ's incarnation, did it
"cough up and spit out" the entirety of its venomous malice. Epiphanius
does not, of course, claim that all subsequent heretics were female; nor does
he here follow Athanasius by using common stereotypes of effeminate men
to relate his feminized portrait of heresy to male opponents. Instead, he
takes a more allegorical approach, noting that Adam represents "masculine
reason" and Eve represents "feminine reason"—which, as it turns out, is to
be, equated with "ignorance." When the serpent cannot deceive masculine
reason, it turns to the feminine ignorance and approaches it through the
typically female whims, pleasures, and lusts. Thus all the dupes of heresy,
whether women or men, are characterized by the ascendency of their female
part (Pan. 37.2).
Not surprisingly, Epiphanius frequently highlights the presence of
women among the eighty groups of heretics whom he surveys. His most
striking presentation of women among heretics occurs in a section devoted
to the gnostics. Epiphanius's lengthy account of these heretics is dominated
by their deviant sexual practices: he reports, for example, that the gnostics'
orgiastic "agape" consists of consuming offerings of semen and menstrual
blood; that unwelcome pregnancies are aborted and consumed; and that
the men practice ritual masturbation and pray naked (Pan. 26.4-5). Having
outlined these and similarly shocking practices, Epiphanius then offers the
surprising information that he himself has had dealings with the women of
a certain gnostic group.
I happened on this heresy myself, beloved, and was actually taught
these things in person, out of the mouths of practicing gnostics. Not
only did women under this delusion offer me this line of talk, and

22
Trans. Frank Williams, The Panarkm of Epiphanius of Salamis, Book I, Sections 1-46
(Leiden: Brill, 1987).
 Burrus: Word and Flesh 39

divulge this sort of thing to me. With impudent boldness moreover,

they tried to seduce me themselves . . . because they wanted me in
my youth. (Pan. 26.17)
With God's help, Epiphanius succeeded in resisting the women's sexual
overtures. This was not easy, he tells us, for "the women who taught this
trivial myth were very lovely to look at." Nevertheless, writes Epiphanius,
I lost no time in reporting them to the bishops there, and finding
out which ones were hidden in the church. Thus they were expelled
from the city, about eighty persons, and the city was cleared of their
tarelike, thorny growth. (Pan. 26.17)
In this remarkable passage, in which fact and fantasy seem hopelessly
blurred, Epiphanius suggests that women, like their forerunner Eve, are
easily deceived by heresy; but like the concubines recalled by the "eighty"
gnostics, they are also cast in the role of active deceivers. Significantly,
for Epiphanius, the heretical women's deception takes the form of sexual
enticement. They threaten to draw Epiphanius into a chaotic world in which
neither marriage and procreation nor sexual continence are valued. Seem-
ingly still flustered many years later, Epiphanius repudiates the imagined
sexual practices of the gnostics with a lengthy series of scriptural quotations
which affirm the lifestyles of both marriage and celibacy, in a manner that
seems somewhat haphazard, if not outright contradictory.

Refuse younger widows. . . . Let them marry, bear children, guide

the house (1 Timothy 5.11,14),
he recites, immediately following this citation with another:
They who shall be accounted worthy of the kingdom of heaven nei-
ther marry nor are given in marriage. (Luke 20.35-36) (Pan. 26.15-
16)23
As we leave Epiphanius and turn westward, we find further parallels to
Athanasius's sexualized textualization of women's bodies. Indeed, here we
can safely speak of direct Athanasian influence, for Ambrose, bishop of Mi-
lan, made extensive use of Athanasius's Letter to the Virgins as he shaped
his earliest and most careful composition on the theme of virginity—the
treatise On Virgins which I have already mentioned. 24 For Ambrose as for
Athanasius, the bridal imagery drawn from the Song of Songs and the invoca-
tion of Mary as a model for ascetic women are central to the construction

23
This discussion of women and heresy in Epiphanius also appears in 'The Heretical
Woman as Symbol, " 239^3.
24
Charles Neumann considers in some detail Ambrose's dependence on Athanasius's
depiction of Mary. The Virgin Mary in the WorL· of St. Ambrose (Fribourg: The Univer-
sity Press, 1962), 39-17.
40 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

of Christian virginity. And like Athanasius, Ambrose faced formidable com-

petition in his own episcopal see as he composed his treatise. With the
embattled outlook of one whose election has taken place in the context of a
struggle between Nicene and Arian parties, Ambrose is particularly drawn
to those sexual images in the Song of Songs which highlight enclosure,
protection, or the fortification of boundaries. Citing the passage, "A garden
enclosed is my sister, my spouse, a garden enclosed, afountainsealed" (Song
of Songs 4.12), he elaborates:
. . . Modesty, surrounded by the wall of the Spirit, is enclosed so
that it not be exposed to plunder. And so [it is] a garden inaccessible
to thieves . . . (de virg. 1.45)
Ambrose is also more explicit than Athanasius about the ecclesiological sig-
nificance of the virginal body.25 In a passage with clear references to Mary as
well as to the Solomonic bride of Christ, he describes the church as follows:
So the holy Church, unstained by sexual union but fertile in bearing,
is a virgin in respect to chastity, a mother in respect to offspring.
And thus she labors to give us birth as a virgin, impregnated not by
a man but by the Spirit. The virgin bears us not with physical pain,
but with the rejoicings of the angels. . . . For what bride has more
children than die holy Church. . . ? She has no husband, but she
has a bridegroom, inasmuch as she . . . weds the Word of Cod as
her eternal Spouse . . . (de virg. 1.31, emphasis added)
While Ambrose's primary eulogy of Mary in his work On virgins does not
deviate significantly from Athanasius's presentation of Marys life (de virg.
2.6-18), in the passage just cited Ambrose clearly anticipates his later, more
innovative claim that Mary retained her hymenal integrity even in the act
of giving birth. In a work written roughly a decade later, following a period
of open strife between Arian and Nicene Christians in Milan, Ambrose again
merges Mariological and ecclesiological imagery while emphasizing the vir-
gin's hymenal intactness in partu: "A virgin has conceived us by the Spirit,
a virgin has given birth to us without groaning" (exp. in Luc. 2.7), he writes,
and subsequently refers to "the novelty of the immaculate birth" in which
Jesus "opened the hidden womb of the holy virgin church, which possesses
immaculate fertility, in order to generate the people of God" (exp. in Luc.
2.56, 57). The female body now not only conceives without sexual inter-
course but also bears children without physical pain or groaning. Rewritten

25
David Hunter places both Ambrose's novel use of Mary as a type of the church and
the "virginal" ecclesiology of his interpretation of the Song of Songs within the context of
the ecclesiological debate between Ambrose and Jovinian. "Helvidius, Jovinian, and the
Virginity of Mary in Late Fourth-Century Rome/' Journal of Early Christian Studies 1
(1993): 47-71.
 Burrus: Word and Flesh 41

almost beyond recognition, it strains to give textual expression to the fourth-

century bishop's preoccupation with the reinforcement of communal bound­
aries.
Alongside these developed treatments of female virginity, we also find
in Ambrose's works the representation of heresy as a woman, and particu­
larly as a sexually promiscuous woman. "She is a virgin who is wed to God,
a harlot who makes gods," he proclaims in the treatise On virgins (de virg.
1.52). In another early work in which he apparently defends himself against
charges of heresy brought by Arians, Ambrose draws upon the Greek mytho­
logical tradition to find an image of the monstrous female with which to
identify his opponents (de fide 1.46-47). α Ambrose subsequently confines
himself to biblical examples as he viciously attacks the pro-Arian empress
Justina for her support of the Arians* occupation of a basilica in Milan. Noting
that "those temptations are worse which arise through women," he compares
his Arian opposition to Eve (ep. 20.17), Jezebel, and Herodias (ep. 20.18),
and states in conclusion that his attackers' church is "an adulteress who is
not joined to Christ in legitimate marriage" (ep. 20.19).
Ambrose's slightly younger contemporary Jerome produces a more de­
veloped portrait of the heretical harlot for the West, as well as a still more
influential letter concerning female virginity. Jerome's remarkable twenty-
second epistle is ostensibly intended for the instruction of the young female
virgin Eustochium, but it also represents a defense of both his ascetic agenda
and his controversial social position as a freelance teacher and spiritual direc­
tor to the ascetic Christian women of Rome. Among his complex rhetorical
purposes is to demonstrate the sexual propriety of his own ascetic program
and, significantly, Jerome wants to narrow the focus of the by now "tradi­
tional" treatise on virginity. Leaving the praise of virginity to writers like
Ambrose, he will deal only with the defense of the virginal body, the fortifi­
cation of its well-defined boundaries. "There is no flattery in this work," he
warns Eustochium. "There will be no rhetorical flourishes setting you
among the angels. . . . I want you to derive not pride but fear from your
vow" (ep. 22.2-3). Later he notes briefly, "Our purpose is not to praise
virginity but to preserve it" (ep. 22.23). Jerome's focused interest in pro­
tecting female virginity reveals itself to be a near-obsession. Still more explic­
itly than his predecessors, he depicts the female body balanced precariously
on the edge of sexual destruction; the line between virginity and harlotry is
thin indeed. "I will say it boldly: though God can do all things, he cannot

26
Ambrose here compares his opponents to "some dread and monstrous Scylla" whose
cavern "is laid thick with hidden lairs" (de fide 1.46-47). Later in the same work he
expresses awareness that some might be offended by his use of pagan examples and
defends himself on the grounds that Isaiah too spoke of "sirens and daughters of ostriches,"
while Jeremiah warned against the "daughters of sirens" (defide3.4).
42 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

raise a virgin after her fell," he warns the young Eustochium (ep. 22.5).
Even a thought can compromise the true virgin, who must remain spiritually
as well as physically pure. "But if those who are virgins are not saved by
their physical virginity when they have other failings, what shall become of
those who have prostituted the members of Christ?" he demands. "Do not
let the faithful city Zion become a harlot" (ep. 22.6). Protesting that he is
"ashamed to speak of the many virgins who fall daily" (ep. 22.13), Jerome
nevertheless devotes a large portion of his lengthy letter to precisely that
topic, vividly depicting the disturbing spectacle of sexually and socially pro-
miscuous women, while at the same time also satirizing their male seducers,
from whom he is at pains to separate himself.
Jerome's intense preoccupation with protecting the fragile virginal body
from corruption clearly goes beyond his immediate need to defend himself
from charges of improper relations with female ascetics. Yet at the same
time the ecclesiological significance of the female virgin is more ambiguous
for this man who is most at home in the small-group setting of the informal
meetings of largely female ascetic scholars. The boundaries Jerome defends
do not always coincide with those of the episcopally led congregation, and
he is correspondingly hesitant in his use of explicit ecclesiological language
in relation to the virginal body. Nevertheless, for Jerome, as for Athanasius
and Ambrose, the female virgin has an important social referent. Just as the
spread of asceticism creates elite subgroups within the church, so too the
virginal body functions, albeit ambiguously, to define the sacred integrity of
the ascetic community.
Accompanying Jerome's preoccupation with the sexual vulnerability of
the virgin is an extraordinary textual eroticism whose focus is not so much
the disturbingly open bodies of most women (the "fallen") as the tantalizingly
closed body of the virgin.27 He counsels Eustochium,
Always let the privacy of your chamber guard you; always let the
Bridegroom sport with you within. You pray: you speak to the Bride-
groom. You read: He speaks to you. And when sleep overtakes you
He will come behind and put His hand through the opening, and
He shall touch your inner parts; and you will be aroused and rise up
and say: "I have been wounded by love." And you will hear Him
respond: "A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a garden en-
closed, a fountain sealed." (ep. 22.25)

27
Patricia Cox Miller first alerted me to the depth and complexity of this textual eroti-
cism ('The Blazing Body: Ascetic Desire in Jerome's Letter to Eustochium," Journal of
Early Christian Studies, 1 [1993]: 21-45). In an article tracing the widespread popularity
of the Cyprianic notion that prayer and Scripture-reading constitute "speech" with God,
Neil Adkin notes that "Jerome is alone in placing the idea in a prurient context: only he
goes beyond conversation to physical caress." "'Oras: loqueris ad sponsum; legis: ille tibi
loquitur (Jerome, Epist. 22.25,1)," Vigiliae Christianae 46 (1992): 145.
 Burrus: Word and Flesh 43

Here more clearly than ever we see the powerful attraction of the unattain-
able female body for the male viewer. Jerome, of course, does not interpret
his own preoccupation with the virginal female body in quite these terms,
but uses the example of Mary to explain and justify his privileging of the
female in ascetic discourse: "Death came through Eve, life through Mary.
And thus the gift of virginity has been bestowed more richly upon women,"
he writes, "since it began from a woman" (ep. 22.21).
In the letter to Eustochium Jerome emphasizes that all ascetic practices
are only of use when they are carried out "within the church." Indeed, by
now we are not surprised to find that he goes still further in his claims:
"Virgins such as are said to be among the various heresies and among the
followers of the vile Mani must be considered not virgins but prostitutes" (ep.
22.38). This link between false virginity, or harlotry, and heresy is further
developed in a much later letter written from Jerome's Bethlehem monas-
tery and addressed to one Ctesiphon, a supporter of Pelagius. In this letter
Jerome claims to demonstrate historically that women have been involved
in the founding and promulgation of all heretical movements, including
those associated with the figures of Simon Magus, Nicolaus, Marcion, Apel-
les, Montanus, Arius, Donatus, Elpidius, and Priscillian. "Now also the
mystery of iniquity is at work. Both sexes trip each other up," he concludes
darkly, in veiled allusion to the circle around his rival Pelagius (ep. 133.4).
Innuendoes of sexual immorality lurk just below the surface of Jerome's
rhetoric, and elsewhere he does not stop short with innuendoes. In this
same letter, he accuses the followers of the heretic Priscillian of shutting
themselves up alone with "little women" and singing words of Virgil to them
"between intercourse and embraces" (ep. 133.3) and he remarks that some
of Pelagius's followers "cling to women and think that they cannot sin" (ep.
133.11). In his unfinished Commentary on Jeremiah, Jerome generalizes
about the relation between heresy and sexual promiscuity, citing 2 Timo-
thy 3.6-7:

No heresy is constructed except on account of gluttony and greed,

in order to "seduce little women burdened with sins, always learning
and never reaching knowledge of truth." (comm. in Jer. 6.1.57)
By using the specter of the sexually promiscuous heretical woman not only
to discredit a male rival but also to define and enforce the boundaries of
acceptable female behavior and belief, Jerome lays claim to a powerful means
of controlling women.28
This rapid survey of the works of Athanasius, Epiphanius, Ambrose, and
Jerome has familiarized us with the rhetorical and theological themes which

See also Burrus, "The Heretical Woman as Symbol," 243-46.

44 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

clustered around the textualized sexual bodies of both virginal and sexually
active women. What are we to make of all this? How are we to locate this
fourth-century Christian fascination with the sexual bodies of women within
its particular historical and cultural context, as I suggested at the outset we
must do? In closing this portion of the discussion, let me venture a few
generalized claims.
I have hinted at the chaotic conditions which reigned in the strife-ridden
Christian communities of Alexandria and Milan and likewise referred briefly
to the dispute in Rome about the proper role of asceticism in Christian life.
Such local conflicts point to a broader crisis, namely the dramatic reconfigu-
ration of Christianity following the early fourth-century conversion of Con-
stantino The church's new access to imperial power resulted first of all in the
evolution of an innovative, more explicitly political model for the Christian
community itself and, second, in the intensification of intra-Christian dis-
putes. It appeared for the first time possible to enforce unity and uniformity
within the imperially supported church; but in reality the goal of unity
remained more elusive than ever, as the high stakes of imperial rewards and
punishments intensified rivalry and bitterness. These political changes were
accompanied by shifts in ideological perspective and emphasis: fourth-cen-
tury Christians became increasingly concerned with the issue of Christian
self-identity, as they confronted the rapid and sometimes very incomplete
conversion of former pagans, as well as the internal differences which were
made more visible and problematic by the new political process. This con-
cern with Christian self-identity intensified interest in defining a single
catholic orthodoxy and, correspondingly, heresy was problematized through
the construction of negative boundary markers for orthodoxy. Finally, on a
social plane, the fourth century witnessed the emergence of numerous alien-
ated Christian movements which resisted the creation of an imperially sup-
ported catholic orthodoxy. These protest movements were frequently
ascetic, and the authority of the ascetic lifestyle was such that catholic ortho-
doxy was forced either to discredit it or to assimilate it.
In considering this broader context, several factors seem crucial to un-
derstanding the fourth-century sexualized textualization of female bodies:
first, the introduction of a decisively male-dominated political model for
Christian community; second, the anxious concern to establish a unified and
well-defined catholic orthodoxy; and, third, the need to come to terms with
the disturbing influence of various ascetic movements in which traditional
social institutions and the gender roles undergirding them were profoundly
challenged. The men who struggled to construct an imperial, catholic ortho-
doxy were drawn again and again to the problems of boundaries and social
order—above all the order of the relations between men and women. Within
this context the well-bounded and constrained virginal body came to carry
 Burrus: Word and Flesh 45

much of the weight of ecclesiology, and female sexuality became almost

unbearably heavy with symbolic meaning.
This privileging of the text of the virginal female body had significant
social as well as doctrinal consequences. First, it encouraged a progressive
hierarchalization of the Christian community, as the lifestyle of married
women and men was devalued in relation to the emergent ascetic elite. At
the same time, the textualized virginal body served to control and subordi-
nate female ascetics in particular and women in general, and it finally made
particularly available the label of "heretic" (and later of "witch") to enforce
the compliance of women.

Word Made Flesh

The previous discussion suggests that ancient Christian women's bodies
and sexuality are hidden from our view by the very process which at first
appears to lay them painfully bare. In the fourth-century church fathers
treatises on female virginity, layers of word obscure the flesh, as women's
bodies are rewritten by male authors whose own sexual, theological, and
political agenda so distort and obscure their vision of female bodies and
sexuality that women's capacity to know, to relate, to create, and even to
procreate is severed from their physical experiences of desire, pleasure, and
pain. I now leave this male textualization of female bodies and consider
instead ascetic women's representations of their own bodies and sexuality.
In seeking to uncover women's perspectives, I will focus attention on two
woman-centered, or gynocentric, texts: first, the second-century story of
Thecla and, second, an anonymous fourth-century Spanish letter addressed
to a certain Marcella.29

29
I use the term gynocentric, or woman-centered, not only because it parallels the term
androcentric, but also to sidestep lengthy debates about male and female authorship.
The story of Thecla probably originated as a folktale told by and to women, as both
Dennis MacDonald and I have argued MacDonald, The Legend and the Apostle: The
Battle for Paul in Story and Canon (Philadelphia: Westminster: 1983), 34-53; Burrus,
Chastity as Autonomy, 53-57, 67-80. But the feet remains that we do not know who first
told the story or even who eventually wrote it down. Similarly, the Spanish letter was
probably written not only to but also by a woman, although we cannot be sure of this.
The letter bears the title "to the holy widow Marcella," but its content suggests that its
addressee is a married woman whose husband is still living at the time the letter is
written. D. G. Morin, the text's editor, suggests persuasively that the author is likewise
a woman, on the basis of her playful self-designation "she-ass"; see "Pages inédites de
deux Pseudo-Jérômes des environs de Tan 400," Revue Bénédictine 40 (1928): 291. I find
it curious that scholars nevertheless typically refer to this text as a letter of Bachiarius,
ostensibly following Morin, who in fact suggests tentatively not that Bachiarius authored
the document but that he may have edited it, perhaps serving as secretary to its female
author (Morin, "Pages inédites/' 307). On the basis of Bachiarian echoes as well as the
reference to a practice of Advent retreat also mentioned in the Spanish Acts of the Council
46 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

The story of Thecla is worth recounting in some detail. We are told that
the young Thecla sits in her window for three days and nights listening to
the itinerant apostle Paul preach about the ascetic life. Her fiance Thamyris,
filled with jealous rage, persuades the civic leaders to imprison Paul on
the grounds that he is corrupting the women of the city. When Thecla is
subsequently discovered to have joined Paul in his prison cell, the citizens
are outraged. Paul is scourged, and Thecla is condemned to be burned.
Thecla is miraculously rescued from the fire, and afterwards she again seeks
Paul. When she finds him, she declares that she wants to cut her hair and
follow him. He hesitates. "The times are unfavorable, and you are beautiful,"
he replies. "May no other temptation come upon you, worse than the first,
and you not endure but act cowardly!" Thecla persists, asking him to
strengthen her with baptism, but Paul still refuses.
Paul and Thecla then journey to a neighboring town. Immediately, Alex-
ander, a leading citizen, sees Thecla and desires her. He tries to buy Thecla
from Paul, but Paul again proves peculiarly unhelpful, claiming that he does
not know Thecla. Perceiving Thecla to be unattached and therefore avail-
able, Alexander attempts to embrace her, but Thecla resists forcefully. In
his anger and shame, Alexander brings her before the governor, who con-
demns her to the wild beasts. During the fight in the arena, Thecla is
miraculously saved four times, and in each case females are somehow respon-
sible for her rescue: even a female lion defends her from the other animals.
At one point Thecla, denied baptism by Paul, baptizes herself in a pool
filled with dangerous beasts. Once freed, Thecla stays for some time with a
wealthy female supporter and teaches the women of her household. But
again she yearns for Paul, so she dresses as a man and goes off in search of
him. Paul still cannot fully accept her role; instead, he wonders whether
"some other temptation had come to her." She explains all that has happened
and announces that she is returning to her hometown. Finally, Paul commis-
sions her: "Go and teach the word of God!" Thecla continues to do just that,
"and when she had enlightened many people with the word of God, she
slept with a good sleep."30
This remarkable narrative is preserved in the late second-century Acts
of Paul. Tertullian may not be far off the mark when he reports that a naive
and misguided devotion to the apostle Paul led a certain Asian presbyter to
record Thecla's exploits (de bapt. 17). Surely the Acts author intended for
the interpretation of the story of Thecla to be controlled by the framing
narrative of the Acts of Paul, in which context Paul is to be read as the hero.

of Saragossa (380), Morin suggests that the letter originates in Spain around the year 400
("Pages inédites," 302-7).
30
The Acts of Thecla are translated in Clark, Women in the Early Church, 78-88.
 Burrus: Word and Flesh 47

But the presbyter seems to have preserved more than he realized. In the
story of Thecla, we see that Thecla, not Paul, stands at the center of the
narrative. And though Paul initially appears in the positive if ancillary role
of a supernatural helper or "donor figure/' by his repeated failure to satisfy
our expectations for that role he comes precariously close to alliance with
Thecla's villainous opponents. We begin to suspect that he is not in fact
Thecla's helper but is, like the other males in the story, part of her problem.
Indeed, the story of Thecla insists that it is men—whether would-be
lovers or fellow-ascetics—who impede women's struggle to live ascetically.
Viewing women only through the narrow and distorting lens of their own
desire, they vie with one another for the control of women's sexuality. At
the same time, they jealously project their own desire onto women, so that
Thecla's fiance Thamyris suspects her of unchaste relations with Paul, and
Paul can only interpret her rejection of matronly attire as a sign of the
"temptation" to sexual promiscuity. In this context, the central problem of
female sexual asceticism becomes resistance to male control. Consequently,
the story calls attention to the potentially radical social consequences of
women's choice to be sexually continent. Thecla cuts her hair and dons male
clothing in the most blatant enactment of her rejection of traditional female
social roles. Equally significant is the manner in which she shatters the
spatial boundaries which define women's social roles. In the course of the
narrative Thecla moves first to gaze out the window, then to leave the house
alone at night, then to leave her town in the company of a strange man, and
finally to travel independently and speak publicly as a man would.
If it rejects the androcentric sexualization of the female body, the story
of Thecla is nevertheless attentive to female eroticism, as it subtly traces
the transfer of her desire—a process crucial to Thecla's escape from male
domination. Extracting herself from her relationship with her fiance Tha-
myris, Thecla attaches herself instead to Paul, whom she idealizes as her
guide and liberator. However, Paul almost immediately betrays her. When
she is about to be burned at the stake, Thecla looks around for his supporting
presence, but he is already gone. Christ then appears in the form of Paul
to encourage her. The facade of her idealizing construction begins to crum-
ble as we perceive the growing disjunction between the real Paul and
Thecla's vision of Paul, but Thecla is still irresistibly attracted to and depen-
dent on the form she has created, and she must pursue Paul until she can
force him to acknowledge her as a fellow ascetic and apostle. Only then is
she able to free herself from this attraction and move another step in her
social and sexual liberation. Upon receiving Paul's recognition, she discovers
that by extending her desire toward Paul, she has extended herself and has
in fact become the idealized apostle; she no longer needs the form of Paul
interposed between herself and Christ. Now Thecla returns to the spot
where she first heard Paul speak and praises Christ as her true helper. If
48 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

there is still an inescapable element of male domination in this final transfer

of desire to Christ, the patriarchy of Christ nevertheless functions to subvert
other, more concrete patriarchies and models a relationship in which the
woman is not "sex object" but respected partner.
The gynocentric perspective of the story of Thecla is highlighted in
contrast with Ambrose's strikingly different retelling of the story from the
point of view of the male voyeur. As he considers how Thecla's naked virgin-
ity is exposed to male onlookers when she fights with the beasts in the
arena, Ambrose plays with the tantalizing image of the body which is both
revealed and concealed, open and closed, vulnerable and protected Once
again, we find female flesh impossibly distorted as we are confronted with
a bizarre spectacle: Thecla, Ambrose tells us, arranges her body in such a
way as to avoid the gaze of male onlookers while simultaneously revealing
her virginal genitals to an attacking lion (de virg. 2.19)! In addition, in
Ambrose's retelling of the story, the defending lioness has become a lion
who honors Thecla because of her purity. Female solidarity against univer-
sally hostile males has thus been replaced by chivalrous male protection of
blushing virgins. "Virginity has so much that is admirable that even lions
wonder at it," Ambrose enthuses.
They gave a lesson in chastity when they did nothing but kiss the
virgin s feet with their eyes turned to the ground, as though bashful,
lest any male, even a beast, should see the virgin naked, (de virg.
2.20)
But Ambrose's voice was not the only voice of his time. We can well
imagine that some of the ascetic women he addressed were telling versions
of Thecla's story which remained disturbingly close to the second-century
"original."31 And in a letter which was probably written in Spain near the
end of the fourth century, we find continued contrast with, and now perhaps
also active resistance to, the fourth-century androcentric construction of
ascetic women's bodies and sexuality. For the letter's author, as for Ambrose,
it is not Thecla but Mary who is the central model for female asceticism.
But—strikingly—whereas Ambrose insists that Mary gave birth to Christ
in a miraculous manner without pain or groaning, the Spanish letter finds
precisely in Mary's painful physical labor a potent metaphor for the process
of spiritual growth. The author urges her female correspondent to "imitate
the groans of holy Mary who labors, so that just as within the dark matrix
of the womb, so within the secret cell of the monastery something will take

31
My hunch is that the Constantinian shift had a far less direct and profound effect on
ascetic women's experience and interpretation of their own sexuality than it did on men s
view of female sexuality. When we shift the perspectivefromwhich history is written,
the old schema of periodization may no longer be helpful.
 Burrus: Word and Flesh 49

form in us which will contribute to our salvation."32 To imagine that Mary

gave birth without physical pain is as impossible as to imagine that those
who follow her can produce spiritual fruits without similar struggle: "For if
that incorrupt and holy Mary did not pour forth the hope of her salvation
without groans and sighs, how do you think that we, whom the counsels
of the serpent deceive, must labor so that we are able to imitate some
such thing?"33
Hymenal intactness, whether Mary's or any other woman's, is of little
interest to the letters author. The objections of the married addressee Mar-
cella are anticipated: "But perhaps you will say, '. . . Only virgins may serve
Christ/" Emphatically denying the superior status of the female virgin who
has experienced neither sexual intercourse nor birthpangs, the author re-
sponds, "Indeed I refuse for you to close the grace of God within the nar-
rowness of a single person."34 The practice of sexual continence is, however,
of central importance, and Mary remains a model for a life of female asceti-
cism which includes at least periodic abstinence from sexual relations. In-
deed, it is the purpose of the letter to persuade Marcella that she should,
with Mary, spend the end of the year—that is, the final three weeks of her
metaphorical pregnancy—in the solitude of a monastery.35 Thus, whereas
the story of Thecla propels the ascetic woman out of the domestic sphere
into the public arena, in a move which is opposite yet complementary the
Spanish letter urges that the ascetic woman abandon the domestic sphere
for the more radical privacy of retreat to a metaphorical "desert."36 And
here too some resistance from the husband seems to be anticipated. The
writer counters the husband's imagined objections by pointing out that even
Joseph surely did not remain by Mary's side "during the groans of the
laboring woman."37 Later the writer repeats that "no other male is to be
found in the refuge of the monastery alongside the laboring one" since "even
Joseph" should not find it difficult to be temporarily separated from his
wife.38 Nor should the ascetic woman be frightened by the prospect of soli-
tude, for her "inner person" holds its "spouse"—that is, Wisdom—close.39
The privacy of the spiritual retreat represents an escape from the distraction
of human interactions and conversations and allows the woman to undergo
a process of self-examination and discipline through which she, like Mary,

32
Morin, "Pages inédites," 297 (L 31-34).
33
Morin, "Pages inédites," 297 (L 35)-298 (L 3).
34
Morin, "Pages inédites," 298 (L 4-6).
35
Morin, "Pages inédites," 297 (L 16)-302 (L 9).
36
Morin, "Pages inédites," 298 (L 15-19).
37
Morin, "Pages inédites," 298 (L 10-12).
38
Morin, "Pages inédites," 301 (L 26-33).
39
Morin, "Pages inédites," 299 (L 2-4).
50 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

makes herself a dwelling place for Christ.40 Some will attack this innovative
Advent practice but, the author insists, the novelty of Christ abrogates all
old laws and institutions.41
Thus, in the fourth-century Spanish letter as in the story of Thecla,
women are concerned with resistance to their husbands' or lovers' desire,
not with subduing their own desire. And even in the later period when
writers like Ambrose focus so intensely on the virginal body, the ascetic
women we hear of are by no means exclusively virgins; nor do they seem
particularly interested in their own physical intactness. The central problem
of women's sexual asceticism is neither the preservation of virginity and
sexual purity nor the suppression of female sexual desire but rather the
resistance to male attempts to exert sexual and social control over women.
If sexual asceticism entails successful resistance to male control, this in
turn liberates the women's sexual energies, albeit in "sublimated" forms; for
the women are now free to direct their eros toward the pursuit of knowledge
and spiritual growth as well as the formation of new relationships. While the
correspondence of men like Jerome and John Chrysostom gives us one side
of the remarkably intense and egalitarian friendships between ascetic men
and women,42 the story of Thecla and the Spanish letter seem to give us a
glimpse into relationships between women who support one another in
their ambitious undertaking of self-formation. The extent to which women
appropriated or even shaped the "bride of Christ" imagery remains difficult
to trace, but the story of Thecla and the Spanish letter suggest that the
experiences not only of labor and birth but also of sexual desire may have
functioned as powerful metaphors for women who sought to articulate the
spiritual and intellectual fertility of their encounter with Christ.
In the Spanish letter as in the story of Thecla, we have pushed beyond
the "word" of the dominant androcentric construction of ascetic women's
sexuality. What we have encountered is, of course, not actual "flesh" but
rather more words—words which are, however, more revealing of the elusive
flesh, representing the utterance of that flesh.

Conclusions
As we have considered the sexuality of ancient Christian ascetic women,
it has become clear that the perspectives which I have labelled androcentric

40
Morin, "Pages inédites," 299 (1. 16-32).
41
Morin, "Pages inédites," 301 (1. 33)-302 (1. 9).
42
See the studies of Elizabeth Clark, Jerome, Chrysostom, and Friends (New York:
Edwin Mellen 1979), and Rosemary Rader, Breaking Boundaries: Male/Female Friend-
ship in Early Christian Communities (New York: Paulist Press 1983). See also Clark,
"Theory and Practice in Late Ancient Asceticism: Jerome, Chrysostom, and Augustine,"
Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 5, no. 2 (1989): 25-46.
 Biirrus: Word and Flesh 51

and gynocentric not only diverge dramatically, but to a great extent develop
in active opposition to one another. The culturally dominant androcentric
construction of virginal sexuality, which crystallizes out of the distinctive
needs of the post-Constantinian church, functions to create and defend new
communal boundaries and to reassert and strengthen the gender hierarchy;
in the process, it rewrites women's bodies with an almost violent disregard
for the physical knowledge and experience of women. But at least some
ascetic women of antiquity either ignore or resist this interpretation. For
them, sexual asceticism represents liberation from precisely such male at-
tempts to control women's sexuality, social relationships, and intellectual
strivings; and their articulation of their own sexuality remains attentive to
the knowledge and experience of their own bodies.
Both as historians and as the cultural heirs of the church fathers and
mothers, we must work to reconstruct both sides—or, rather, all sides—of
the ancient Christian debate over the meaning of female sexuality, not least
because one may offer a key to the interpretation of the other. Ambrose uses
the metaphor of the virgin s own enclosed body to confine and control her.
His Spanish contemporary, on the other hand, insists that the very notion
of enclosing God's grace in a single human body is misguided. The Mary of
Ambrose's construction not only conceives without sexual desire but is also
miraculously delivered of her child without pain or physical disruption. But
the Spanish author exhorts Marcella to join with the laboring Mary as she
sighs and groans in her struggle to give birth to her own salvation. Word or
flesh? Or, rather, whose word names her flesh?
 ^ s
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