If there is a chronological timeline between martyrdom and asceticism, there exists a lateral line between virginity and martyrdom. Both virgins and martyrs made dramatic, visible use of their bodies in an unconventional manner, to demonstrate their religious fervour; their subversive behaviours were ‘obvious symbols of radicalism and discontinuity’ within the Christian community.1 They made decisions about the use of their bodies which surprised and disconcerted those who expected them to adopt the conventional pattern of marriage and settled family life. The high status accorded to virginity (both male and female) is copiously attested in the Patristic and desert literature;2 as a concept it had considerable social-political significance as well as its religious import.3 Athanasius presents virginity as an image of angelic holiness.4 Primary sources include both discourses on the condition of virginity and many letters addressed to virgins, this being an accepted mode of communication which not only edified the recipient but maintained the status quo of women within the home. There are a plethora of possibilities to choose from and this chapter focuses on a discussion of two aspects of female asceticism within the late antique period; the topos of the transvestite saint, and the praise of ‘manly’ virtue. These two manifestations of female spiritual identity illustrate the contemporary unease with women as sexual and spiritual beings; they suggest that only by transcending their flawed gender could women enjoy the unified soul that both genders had before the Fall.5 This is how their (predominantly male) contemporaries present it, patronising their sisters and widowed mothers with praise for being so holy as to be effectively surrogate men. Modern commentators (often female) ask whether in fact the matter is not transcending simply gender, but human nature in its entirety.6 The Cappadocian standpoint is clear; the simplicity of the soul is God-like;7 it has a single beginning with the body8 and does not change ‘from female bodies to the life of the male’.9
We saw in Chapter 4 that the human urge for sexual congress was vilified by desert Fathers and pagan sages alike as being animalistic, damaging to the soul and potentially fracturing the human person into good and evil tendencies. The wider church, whilst retaining much of this distaste, rationalised and systematised it as being evidence of the fallenness of humankind. The ideal would be to replace erotic appetites with other forms of desire, and because men and women could not be together without giving in to lust meant it was safer to keep the genders separate.10 Validating those who made a conscious decision to renounce sex encouraged the refocusing of desire. Since women from Eve onwards were seen as inherently libidinous, for them to renounce sex was seem as remarkable and, by God’s grace, against their nature. As with martyrs, the choice for a life which controlled or sacrificed the body conferred power.11
Women presented other challenges to late antique society aside from their participation in the sexual act. At the same time that virginity was being encouraged as a lifestyle, the Ecumenical Councils were debating the motherhood of Christ, placing the position of female ascetics within a ‘discourse of control and denial’.12 Women rejected alongside sexual activity their key social roles as breeders and domestic managers, and their ‘proper’ place as within the privacy of the home.13 The introduction of Eve/Mary typology allows for a female version of redemption to sit alongside that of the first and second Adam, and subsequent development of Marian doctrine allowed a circumscribed model of femininity within the church. The biblical sources provide a very mixed view of women. Genesis portrays Eve as giving in to temptation herself, and then tempting Adam (though in casting Eve as temptress, ancient commentators do not seem to be aware that the temptation she offered Adam was, on the face of it, knowledge, not sex). Revelation shows a polarised view of women much followed by the earliest generation of Christians: they were either harlots, or saints; whores or virgins.
So, during late antiquity women had to act in an extraordinary way, against expectation and convention, in order to be part of redeemed humanity. Martyrdom presented one option; disguising or subjugating their femininity another. Choosing an ascetic life was counter-cultural; this is emphasised by the language used to describe such endeavour. The very words for virtue and virgin are derived from the male noun vir, as pointed out by Jerome in Ep. 49.2, and the assumption that virtue is male can be inferred from the punishment for an Antiochene virgin suspected of being a Christian. She was forced to either sacrifice to pagan gods or enter a brothel, since this would ‘dissolve her masculine virtus into feminine wantonness’.14 The social and gender balance would thus be restored; if to be male is ‘virtuous’, then to be female must normally entail unchastity.
Women becoming masculinised through their ascetic lives not only affected themselves but impacted on society: just as it was seen as remarkable for them to behave in a ‘male’ way by giving up sex, so men appearing in any way ‘womanly’ was unusual and unacceptable. Male effeminacy was viewed with as much disapproval as female assertion.15 Ambrose condemns men for having ‘a womanish voice’ and Tertullian derided the ‘enervated bodies’ of men on public show, whose forms were ‘softened to womanish step and effeminate apparel’.16 Clement’s comment on this perhaps reveals as much anxiety about perceptions of maleness as affirmation of female wisdom. Whilst urging women to imitate men in virtue he realises that men lose their innate superiority if they become womanish:
Women must seek wisdom, like men, even if men are superior and have first place in every field, at least if they are not effeminate.17
This raises many issues about the social expectations of men and women in early Christian times which have been explored in detail elsewhere.18 Biblical, late antique pagan and early Christian societies are all largely patriarchal, with clearly defined expectations for both genders; this militates against the development of female asceticism.19 And whilst women had to strive to forge an identity, so also ‘Maleness as an identity had to be constructed’.20
If we accept this appraisal of female spirituality, the instances of successful women ascetics are all the more remarkable. Both the models of alternative femininities explored here (transvestite or cross-dressing women travelling as men and the ‘virtuous’ woman praised by her male peers for her ‘virtue’) entailed social eccentricity or subversion as well as sexual renunciation. In the case of Macrina, her social as well as spiritual role is masculinised but universally seen as laudable by her male commentators. The reception of women ascetics disguised as men is a more complex affair; their fictitiousness raises issues of the audience to their cross-dressing. Ansen argues convincingly that these stories speak of the tension between ‘monastic hostility towards women as the source of their sexual desire … and monks’ suppressed longing for female presence’.21 Male monastic guilt was presumably assuaged by a predilection for casting such transvestites as repentant whores. There is a ‘creative tension in the transvestite saint legends between “manly” piety and female sexual identity’.22
The gendering of virtue as a male quality, and its absence being denoted an effeminate trait, has already been mentioned. It derives from Greek philosophical morality, which was readily absorbed into the Christian tradition. However, virtue/non-virtue whilst being gendered could be accessed by both genders and this is demonstrated by the following examples.23 The process of ‘gendering’ is a social construct applied to perceptions of men and women; what it does not answer is what should happen to the bodies of the women whose souls had been promoted to ‘masculine’ status; was the only option to become a ‘eunuch for God’?
The metaphor of a woman’s ascetic development equating to ‘becoming manly’ is widely used in a range of contexts and is even found in Philo.24 A plethora of examples are available, from which I select just six quotations, ranging in source from the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas to the Cappadocians:
Simon Peter said to them, ‘Let Mary leave us, because women are not worthy of life.’ Jesus said, ‘Look, I shall lead her so that I will make her male in order that she also may become a living spirit, resembling you males. For every woman who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.’25
According to my nature I am a woman, but not according to my thoughts. It is I that am a man and you that are women.26
What a woman she is, if one can call so virile a Christian a woman!27
Euphemia, who once, her soul made masculine, did not, though a virgin, pale before the executioner …28
Who who would be able to recount in a clear and worthy manner the manly deeds of this blessed woman? I mean of course her utter renunciation of worldly things, her ardour for the orthodox faith (an ardour hotter than fire), her unsurpassable beneficence.29
We spoke of a woman, if one may refer to her as that, for I do not know it if it right to use that natural designation for one who went beyond the nature of a woman … having raised herself to the highest peak of human virtue through philosophy, she should not be passed over in silence and her life rendered ineffective.30
The first of these comments closes the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas and has generated an enormous amount of discussion, which relates both to the apocryphal nature of the text, and what we might call the Mary Magdalene industry, which includes the conflation of Marys in the gospels, whether or not Jesus had some sort of intimate relationship with Mary and so on. Despite being non-canonical it is a widely read and cited ‘source’ of teachings about Mary and gendered readings of asceticism. It is implicit that Mary, before Jesus’ intervention, does not have a soul; only through redemption can she ‘become a living spirit’ like her male companions. The second of these is a rare example of a desert Mother, Amma Sarah. She chides the men around her for not maintaining pure thoughts, and in her condemnation of them as ‘women’ expresses exactly the gendering of the spiritual discussed above. The third is Paulinus of Nola describing Melania; even women can appreciate how unusual it is for a woman to be so ‘virile’ (full of virtue). The fourth is Victricius of Rouen’s hagiographic account of how Euphemia faced martyrdom. He suggests that it is when her soul has changed gender even though her body remains that of a pure woman.31 The penultimate quotation is from The Life of Melania the Younger, and stresses not so much her renunciation of marriage (and sex) as of all worldly things, and her charity and correct faith. Her deeds rather than her soul are described as manly. The final quotation is Gregory of Nyssa, talking of his sister Macrina, to which we will return shortly. The complicated family structure in Anessi lent itself to a reversal of normal social roles but in the case of Macrina her renunciation of marriage conferred spiritual status in the eyes of her brothers. It is even possible that Gregory sought to shame other men into macho competition, by offering the model of Macrina’s dual role. She has stepped outside the domestic, private locus of female power into the arena of male, public honour,32 a tacit challenge to the masculinity of her immediate circle.
Within the context of such gendered statements of female virtue we find that a popular topic for hagiographic accounts of women in a range of geographical locations is that they dressed up as men in order to run away from home and pursue a life of virtue and asceticism. The chief reason for such behaviour was because society did not permit them to serve God adequately as women. The social hierarchy was reflected in a spiritual one: ‘Men were worthier than women; monks were holier than nuns. The image summarised the church’s stance on women: grace and sanctity were judged according to maleness.’33 In theological terms the economy of heaven was mirrored in the imperfect copy of the kingdom on earth.
There are numerous examples of transvestite saints in the desert, the prototype perhaps being Mary of Egypt.34 The late fifth to seventh centuries saw a burgeoning of such ‘doubling’, where the woman takes a man’s name as well as his identity; at least eleven vitae of such women are recorded.35 Alice-Mary Talbot’s Holy Women of Byzantium contains the lives of ten saints divided into nuns disguised as monks, female solitaries and others, showing the diverse background from which such women came, and the ingenious ways in which they entered into society in disguise. The popularity of this motif must be seen as based largely on legend, which provides sources of ‘the creative tension … between “manly” piety and female sexual identity’.36 A common pattern occurs in these stories – the woman disguises herself as a man, sometimes accompanying her father (as in the case of Mary/Marinos).37 Sometimes the saint, while disguised as a man, is accused of fathering a child or other sexual misdemeanour; alternatively her escape from the household of her family may be interpreted by her male relatives as harlotry.38
As noted above, from the practice of attributing blame to the figure of Eve onwards female gender identity was seen in terms of sexual appetite and supposed misconduct. The words for ‘desire’ in both Greek (epithymia) and Latin (cupido) are feminine nouns, encouraging the personification of sexual desire as feminine.39 By renouncing marriage and motherhood, and furthermore casting aside the signs of femininity such as long hair and fine clothes, women simultaneously rejected most of the negative qualities associated with, even defining of, their gender (their lustfulness, and role as temptresses).40 In Chapter 4 we observed that choosing to remain a virgin, or rejecting marriage once widowed, effectively de-gendered a woman. In so far as this returned her to a pre-fallen state of gender-neutral perfection, this choice conferred not only spiritual but social power and authority. However, dressing as a man in order to escape from domestic pressure to become a conventional woman carries the process of renunciation a stage further. Pelagia and Castissima acquire freedom from gender identification altogether. Pelagia runs off in the clothes of Bishop Nonnyus because she wants to be seen as a man, and when her high-pitched voice and perpetually smooth chin seem to suggest she is a eunuch, she has arrived, spiritually. Even more than renouncing her femininity, her perceived asexuality means she has transcended gender altogether, becoming ‘an asexual eunuch for Christ’.41 Pelagia’s name also suggests purity (the Pearl motif is widely found in Eastern and Western Christian literature, well into the Western Middle Ages). Castissima, too, takes on the name of a precious stone, ‘Emerald’ meaning faith and purity. In seeking to become a monk she needs to be tonsured; the cutting of her hair, the classic rejection of womanhood, symbolised her becoming a eunuch for Christ.42
Perpetua is another key example of a woman who showed her ‘manly courage’ at the point of death. In divesting herself of female attire in preparation for a martyr’s death she also ‘strips off the cultural attribution of the female body’.43 The strength of her soul is combined with conformity to (male) expectations of social behaviour, resulting in her defeminisation.44 As Perpetua places the gladiator’s sword on her throat (because the male gladiator shrinks from taking such a step), her ‘manly’ courage prompts her to acknowledge ‘I became a man’.45 Ironically, it is as her physical femininity is revealed to the (male) observer that her manly spirit is disclosed.46
An extremely popular character in this panoply of de-gendered women is Thecla, the putative companion of St Paul, who features in both a Vita and a collection of miracle stories. (Her popularity is confirmed by the fact that she wins the crown in Methodius’ putative dialogue between women, a panegyric on virginity entitled Symposium.47) The texts are compiled from the apocryphal Acts of Paul and Thecla. The editor of the authoritative modern edition believes them to be by the same pen.48 Her life features within a hierarchy of female sanctity, with virgins at the top and those who live as married but with shame close to the bottom, with those who have sex or remarry classed as harlots.49 This vita gives colourful detail of her journeys and how she escapes sexual predators, having refused her fiancé, Thamyris.50 Such is her virtue that nature conspires to maintain her modesty; cast into the flames, they shroud her from her audience so that they do not see her nakedness.51 The language is striking for the extent to which it mingles imagery of the body as both a corporeal and personal construct.52
The historicity of Thecla has been much debated from earliest times. Connor thinks there is a ‘grain of truth’ about the existence of ‘a real person named Thekla’;53 however the factual basis of the story is not its main point; the genre is akin to popular romance, but also acts as exemplum, and when taken in conjunction with the Acts of Thecla, a record of thaumaturgy. Hagiographic accounts of women dressed as men carry multiple functions; improving story, hagiography, a martyrology featuring the first woman martyr,54 doctrinal teaching and sheer entertainment. Copious references to the Trinity anachronistically give Thecla a doctrinal voice.55 Similarly, the ‘Life of St Matrona of Perge’ acts as a vehicle for promoting orthodox readings of the human body in reaction against heresy; we are told ‘she did not consider the body to be the most evil of foes, after the manner of the hateful and loathsome Manicheaens’.56
Thecla’s actions from the outset demonstrate an overt renunciation of the semiotics of femininity; her giving away of bracelets in Chapter 18 symbolises divesting herself of femininity, likewise her request to Paul that she be allowed to cut her hair, which as we have seen is almost the most important symbol of rejecting womanhood and decency.57 Cutting off, or uncovering hair, denoted not only a loss of femininity but a loss of respectability since prostitutes had uncovered hair.58 It is, however, striking that her desire to relinquish her femininity in this way, in order to be baptised, is mediated and refused by the male partner in the story; immediately her determination to circumvent this causes the first of her miracles. Forced to self-baptise in a ditch (or a basin full of seals), a cloud of fire appears to cloak her nudity.59 The ‘Life of St Mary of Egypt’ recorded in Talbot’s anthology gives extensive detail of her previous life as a notorious prostitute; almost pornographic detail is given of how she lures sailors into taking her on voyages, suggesting the readership for such texts were in search of salacious narratives as much as uplifting spiritual examples.60
The characterisation of female ascetics as male imitators, and as repentant whores, must be placed within the context of their stories being literary constructs. The fictitious nature of vitae such as those of Pelagia and Thecla is corroborated by their social and rhetorical context.61 Averil Cameron explains that Thecla is ‘a wholly fictional character’;62 whose characterisation consists of ‘almost entirely rhetorical constructions composed of clichés of the gender discourses which is a central phenomenon in late antiquity’.63 Whilst it may be so that the real identity of an ascetic woman at this time is ‘pretty elusive’ and ‘even more “constructed” than the men’64 it is clear that female ascetics’ presentation as defeminised and therefore potentially successful spiritual beings was a significant feature within late antique society, and its huge popularity as a construct suggests that such stories were read eagerly. The presence of female ascetics benefitted men in society; the real examples of such women allowed men such as Jerome to benefit from female company without being contaminated by sex; they permitted high class women at least to have an alternative role to that of wife and mother. In adopting male disguise or taking on socially masculine roles, women such as Pelagia and Macrina restored themselves to a pre-sexual status. By relinquishing sexual activity their souls became unified and in imitation of the unsullied spiritual status of the first Adam.
The second version of female asceticism to be examined is the much explored Macrina, the Cappadocian sister/mother. In common with the texts on Thecla, the De Vita Macrinae falls into several different categories. In the Dialogue on the Soul, Macrina is cast in the role of Diotima to Gregory’s Socrates,65 and her wise insights are revealed here though she is not given a voice directly. Alternatively, a close reading of the Vita places Macrina in the company of Odysseus as a type of hero;66 certainly to her brothers, bereft of a father from youth onwards, the energy and initiative of their ‘courageous’ sister supplied many of the deficiencies of absent male role models and even modelled a more appropriate way of being an adult mother (their mother was so stricken with grief at family bereavements that it fell to Macrina to support the family emotionally as well as socially and spiritually.) Another role readily attributed to such as Macrina was that of bride of Christ. Whilst not explicitly referring to doctrines about the Incarnation and redemption, her very life is taken as expressive of union with Christ.67 Because of the ideology (and idolising) of virginity, the associations made between virgins and angels means that anyone dedicating themselves to perpetual celibacy as Macrina did can be read as becoming a bride of Christ.68 This is a double-edged sword, though, as the metaphor of marriage to Christ can be used, especially by male writers, as ‘a rhetorical tool’ which is used to ‘control and confine female religious behaviour’.69
Since Eve was blamed for releasing sin into the world, and since her disobedience condemned womankind to sin by sharing her gender, then the first and most obvious step towards achieving spiritual growth was to eradicate that aspect of their nature, whether by a ‘virtual’ return to virginity through repentance or by renouncing sexual activity altogether.70 Macrina’s self-dedication to virginity reflects this common topos,71 but is remarkable because of the extremely positive interpretation by her brother, who is the author of her – no doubt highly edited – Life.72 Macrina’s life is linked to that of Thecla even before her birth; her mother Emmelia went into a trance during labour with Macrina and had a vision of Thecla, which she bestowed on her daughter as a ‘secret name’.73 We see her predominantly through Gregory’s eyes, and one question this raises is whether he is presenting her as an ideal Christian or ideal woman:74 has she transcended not only her gender but human nature itself? Macrina’s ‘de-gendering’ may indeed ‘prepare the reader for the elevated philosophical value Gregory places on his sister’,75 but the evidence Gregory presents of her life shows her firmly rooted in the minutiae of daily chores and responsibilities, far from a disembodied saint. Macrina’s ‘manliness’ is social as well as ascetic: at the death of Naucritius, she demonstrates ‘manly’ courage in supporting the family;76 she became ‘a bulwark of her mother’s weakness, she lifted her out of the abyss of grief, and, by her own firmness and unyielding spirit, she trained her mother’s soul to be courageous’.77 Basil describes how ‘the illustrious Macrina’ was effectively one of those who could be claimed ‘as our fathers’ for her contribution to his spiritual formation: ‘she guarded, and she formed and molded me, still a child, to the doctrines of piety’.78 Macrina’s ‘manly’ courage and stalwart intellectual and emotional qualities are compounded by ‘an even more conflicted designation as ‘he didaskalos –female article with male noun’.79 As a gynē andreia she adopts the role of educator, spiritual guide and even possibly inspiration or co-author of Gregory of Nyssa’s own ascetical works. In particular, she undertook the supervision of Peter, leading him towards ‘all the higher education, exercising him from babyhood in sacred learning … She became all things to the boy; father, teacher, attendant, mother, the counsellor of every good … so that … he was raised to the high goal of philosophy.’80
The household at Anessi saw a transcending of not only gender stereotypes but social class distinctions too, adding weight to the argument that once having relinquished their wealth, the ascetic life ‘meant an erasure of sexual difference between males and females’ as well as of social difference.81 Macrina is presented by Gregory as having polyvalent social and familial roles, some of which would have conventionally be taken on by the men of the family.82 So her ‘manliness’ is apparent partly by contrast to the ‘unmanliness’ of her brothers, who appear to shirk their conventionally gendered familial roles. Each of these stages takes her further into the new hybrid of the gynē andreia which acts as ‘an exemplum for a complete human being’.83 Within this perfect ‘woman’, male and female virtues and behaviours are blended and united; her unifying of genders in a de-gendered personhood stands as a model for the integrity of human characteristics (body, soul, mind) which combined together create an effective ascetic.
Gregory of Nyssa’s portrayal of his sister as such a powerful blend of womanly and manly was shared by the other Cappadocian Fathers. Basil allows that women as well as men have a role to play in the ‘fight for Christ’ because of the ‘manliness of their souls’.84 Such ‘courage [andreia]’ was accepted in the noetic battle and was not rejected ‘because of the weakness of their bodies’.85 ‘Manliness’ such as Macrina’s, therefore, transcends not only the constraints of her gender but even ‘the limitations of human nature as such’, so that she ‘live[d] a life which is angelic in its detachment from earthly and bodily concerns’.86 The distinction seems to be not between male and female but between human and angelic. It is not clear from this whether Basil sees this as particularly remarkable for a woman, or whether such ‘angelic’ life is open to any ascetic. But it is significant that he places comments about the angelic life in the context of Macrina’s gender. In turn Gregory of Nazianzus records that his sister, Gorgonia, transcended her bodily gender, too, as her soul was manly,87 more manly than that of weakwilled men:
she seemed stronger not only than women but also than the most devoted of men … O nature of woman, overcoming that of man in the common struggle for salvation, and proving that the distinction between male and female is one of body, not of soul!88
Elsewhere in the writings of the Cappadocians, we find some clues though not full answers to the issue of whether becoming a manly woman transcended just bodily gender or human nature itself. Gregory’s De Opificio Homini insists on human creation as ‘logically prior to the division of humanity into two sexes’.89 Since humanity was made in God’s image, and God is without gender, separation into male and female is antithetical to being made in the image. Gender division according to this reading of Genesis is the consequence of the Fall. So Macrina’s transcending gender in fact meant a return to the most pure state of creation, before gender existed, as an angelic pre-lapsarian form. Earlier we noted the extract from the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, with its suggestion that Mary could be made male in order that she might enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Put into Platonic terms, such a transformation would be a return to the perfect unity of the ideal form, to a state in which there is no division between male and female, and when body and soul are united, too.90 The designation of the soul as ‘essentially without gender, acquiring sexual differentiation only because of God’s pre-vision of the Fall’91 is not restricted to the Cappadocians, and not only applicable to Macrina. But through Gregory’s depiction of her, we see more than the complementary juxtaposition of male and female. We see her as the archetypal embodied mind, working as human nature at its most integrated.
1 Philip Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea (Berkeley, 1994), p. 4. He is writing here on St Macrina.
2 For example, Ambrose On Virginity and On Widowhood; in Athanasius is one of the earliest articulations of the relative merits of virginity and marriage, expressed as 100-fold, 60-fold and 30-fold. See First Letter to Virgins, 1 (23), in David Brakke, Athanasius and the Politics of Asceticism (Oxford, 1995), pp. 281–2.
3 See Brakke, Athanasius, ch. 1. Averil Cameron’s reading of Jerome’s Against Jovinian likewise places the issue of virginity within a socio-political context. See her Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire (Berkeley, 1991), pp. 174–5.
4 Apol. Const. 33.1–12.5, cited in Brakke, Athanasius, p. 17.
5 The intrinsically inferior nature of women is commonly seen as requiring a transformative transcending in order to ‘attain spiritual virility and manliness’. ‘Life of St Mary/Marinos’, trans. Nicholas Constas, in Alice-Mary Talbot (ed.), Holy Women of Byzantium: Ten Saints’ Lives in Translation (Washington, 1996), p. 3.
6 Graham Gould takes issue with Constas’ approach; he sees Macrina’s spiritual elevation as due to a quasi-angelic status rather than a de-gendered life. ‘Women in the Writings of the Fathers: Language, Belief, and Reality’, in W.J. Sheils and Diana Wood (eds), Women in the Church (Oxford, 1990), pp. 1–13, at pp. 6–7.
7 Gregory of Nyssa On The Soul and Resurrection, in Virginia Woods Callahan (trans.), Saint Gregory of Nyssa: Ascetical Works (Washington, 1967), p. 239.
8 Ibid., p. 255.
9 Ibid., p. 250.
10 This is the main argument put forward by Elizabeth Clark, ‘Women and Asceticism in Late Antiquity: The Refusal of Status and Gender’, in Asceticism, pp. 33–48, at, p. 39. She argues that transformation of the body together with the soul might bring about freedom from the thrall of sexual desire.
11 Joyce Salisbury, Church Fathers, Independent Virgins (New York, 1991), p. 29.
12 Averil Cameron, ‘Virginity as Metaphor’, in A. Cameron (ed.), History as Text (London, 1989): pp. 181–205, at p. 200.
13 Clark, ‘Women’, p. 38.
14 Ambrose, De Virg. 2.4.27 and 28, cited in Mathew Kuefler, The Manly Eunuch: Masculinity, Gender Ambiguity, and Christian Ideology in Late Antiquity (Chicago, 2001), pp. 242–3.
15 See on this Margaret Y. Macdonald, Early Christian Women and Pagan Opinion: The Power of the Hysterical Woman (Cambridge, 1996), esp. pp. 29 and 144. The quandary was heightened for Romans such as Cicero, who would see ‘womanly’ courage as a challenge to male identity. Brent D. Shaw, ‘Body/Power/Identity: Passions of the Martyrs’, JECS, vol. 4, no. 3 (1996): pp. 269–312, at p. 291.
16 Kuefler’s analyses these examples of gender ambiguity, linking the ‘degendered’ ideal promoted by some areas of early asceticism to Gnostic influence in its rejection of the material. Kuefler, Manly, esp. ch. 7, pp. 209–11. See also Virginia Burrus: Chastity as Autonomy: Women in the Stories of the Apocryphal Acts (Lewiston, 1987). Tertullian’s classically misogynistic comment about women being the devil’s gateway is to be found in the De Cultu Feminarum, 1.1. Salisbury points out that ‘door’, or here gateway, was a euphemism for the vagina. This suggests a semiotics of enclosure/openness, the ‘hortus inclusus’ representing female chastity. Gillian Cloke explains Roman misconceptions about female reproductive function and anatomy which may underlie such attitudes in ‘This Female Man of God’: Women and Spiritual Power, AD 350–450 (London, 1995), p. 44. Chrysostom’s anxiety about gendered behaviour is elegantly explored in Aideen Hartney’s ‘Manly Woman and Womanly Men: The subintroductae and John Chrysostom’, in Liz James (ed.), Desire and Denial in Byzantium (Aldershot, 1999): pp. 41–8. Gould notes that ‘Men treated “womanishness” – irrational and uncontrolled behaviour – as a defect to be avoided in their dealings both with their friends and with inferiors like slaves’. ‘Women’, p. 2; it was a compliment to Macrina that she was not seen as ‘womanish’. Cloke, ‘Female’, p. 68.
17 Misc. PG 8, 1275, cited by Cloke, ‘Female’, p. 32. Clement also complains about women having the temerity to appear in public because this was the male domain; clearly he felt under threat! De Virginibus Elandis, 9, cited Kuefler, Manly, p. 238.
18 See, for example, Gillian Cloke, who explores male unease with female spirituality. She reports the desire to confine the authority of pious females to the domestic arena as the locus of female pious authority since ‘female spirituality as a concept had no currency in the eyes of the patristic writers of their period’. ‘Female’, p. 6.
19 Carolyn L. Connor, Women of Byzantium (New Haven, 2004), p. 1. This view is also expressed by Clark, ‘The Ascetic Impulse in Religious Life’, in Asceticism, pp. 505–12, at p. 506, where she reminds us that ‘Feminists might note that women’s rise to prominence through asceticism challenges male hegemony in particular, not just societal hegemony’.
20 Burrus, Begotten, p. 18.
21 John Anson, ‘The Female Transvestite in Early Monasticism: The Origin and Development of a Motif’, Viator, vol. 5 (1974): pp. 1–32, at p. 7.
22 Stephen J. Davis, ‘Crossed Texts, Crossed Sex: Intertextuality and Gender in Early Christian Legends of Holy Women Disguised as Men’, JECS, vol. 10 (2002): pp. 1–36, at p. 31.
23 John Behr, Asceticism and Anthropology in Irenaeus and Clement (Oxford, 2000), p. 180.
24 Giulia Sfameni Gasparro, ‘Asceticism and Anthropology: Enkrateia and “Double Creation” in Early Christianity’, in Asceticism, pp. 127–46, at p. 140. Philo’s allegories depict the intellect as allegorically male and the senses as allegorically female. Harrison, ‘Allegorization’, p. 520.
25 Logion 114, Gospel of Thomas, in J. Keith Elliott (ed.), The Apocryphal New Testament: A Collection of Apocryphal Christian Literature in English Translation (Oxford, 1993), p. 147.
26 Amma Sarah, 9, in Benedicta Ward (trans.), Alphabetical Sayings of the Apophthegmata (Fairacres, 1985), p. 65. Ward comments: ‘Sarah was accepted but it is clear that to achieve this she had in effect to become a man.’
27 Paulinus of Nola on Melania, cited in Kuefler, Manly, p. 237, Melania, widowed at the age of 22 and thereafter dedicated to a life of virginity, was able to become a ‘female man of God’. She is recorded as reading both the Old and New Testaments three to four times a year. See also John Chysostom to his deacon, talking about Olympius: ‘Do not say “woman”: say “what a remarkable human being,” for she is a man despite her outward appearance.’ Palladius, Dialogue on the Life of St. John Chrysostom (PG 47.56), cited by Clark, ‘Women’, p. 43.
28 Clark, ‘Victricius’, p. 383. This resonates with Chrysostom’s comments on the Deaconness Olympius: ‘she covered herself with garments that were all rags, unworthy of her manly courage’. Life of Olympias, Deaconess, 15, cited in Cloke, ‘Female’, p. 96. See also Elizabeth Castelli ‘“I will make Mary Male:” Pieties of the Body and Gender Transformation of Christian Women in Late Antiquity’, in J. Epstein and K. Straub (eds), Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity (New York, 1991), pp. 29–49.
29 Elizabeth A. Clark (trans.), The Life of Melania the Younger (New York, 1984), pp. 25–6.
30 The Life of Saint Macrina, in Callahan (trans.), Saint Gregory of Nyssa, p. 163.
31 A contemporary analogy is my teenage sons’ exhortation to me as sole parent to ‘man up’ and do something I am shirking from. In their case it is devoid of spiritual meaning, but carries the same connotations as here that the superior and courageous approach is masculine.
32 Elizabeth Clark, ‘The Lady Vanishes’, CH, 67 (1998): pp. 1–31, at p. 29.
33 Susan A. Harvey, ‘Women in Early Syrian Spirituality’, in Averil Cameron and A. Kuhrt (eds), Images of Women in Late Antiquity (Detroit, 1982), pp. 288–98, at p. 297.
34 See the account translated by Maria Kouli, in Talbot, Holy, pp. 65–93. Benedicta Ward’s groundbreaking Harlots of the Desert (Kalamazoo, 1987) gives much useful background on the issue, from the perspective of women as exemplars of penitence.
35 See Davis, ‘Crossed’, p. 4, which gives a list which differs slightly from that in Evelyne Patlagean, ‘L’histoire de la femme déguisée en moine et l’évolution de la sainteté feminine à Byzance’, Studi Medievali, 17 (1976): pp. 597–623. Patlagean’s focus is on structural aspects of such legends.
36 The body of the transvestite saint thus becomes ‘contested space … resulting in the intertextual fragmentation and defeminisation of the saint’s body’. Davis, ‘Crossed’, pp. 31 and 28.
37 ‘Life of St Mary/Marinos’, trans. Constas, in Talbot, Holy, pp. 1–12.
38 ‘Life of St Matrona of Perge’, trans. Jeffrey Featherstone, in Talbot, Holy, pp. 13– 64, at p. 20.
39 Clark, Women, p. 124.
40 Salisbury, Church, p. 27.
41 Ibid., p. 103.
42 Ibid., p. 106,
43 Castelli, ‘Mary’, p. 35.
44 Cameron, ‘Virginity’, p. 194.
45 Cited Castelli, ‘Mary’, p. 34.
46 The extent to which femininity was denoted by clothing, and the ritualised significance of ascetic dress for both men and women is discussed in detail by Clark, Women, ch. 4, esp. pp. 113–18.
47 Peter Brown, The Body and Society (New York, 1988), p. 184, and Cameron, Christianity, p. 177.
48 Gilbert Dagron (trans.), Vie et Miracles de Sainte Thècle (Brussels, 1978). For the literary character of the text and its reception, see Scott Fitzgerald Johnson, The Life and Miracles of Thekla, a Literary Study (Harvard, 2006). Johnson dismisses the idea of this as a ‘gendered’ text, believing that Thecla’s status as a woman is of little interest to the author of her Life. Johnson, Life, p. 221.
49 Dagron, Vie, p. 131.
50 Dagron, Vie, 19, pp. 243–7.
51 Dagron, Vie, 12, p. 219.
52 Johnson, Life, p. 25.
53 Connor, Women, p. 2.
54 Johnson, Life, p. 21.
55 Dagron, Vie, 26, p. 270. Johnson describes this as the author ‘actively gathering post-Nicene Trinitarian formulae, which echo some of Gregory of Nazianzus’ sermons’. Life, pp. 34 and 222–3.
56 ‘Life of St. Matrona of Perge’, trans. Jeffrey Featherstone, in Talbot, Holy, p. 20.
57 Connor, Women, p. 5.
58 Ibid., p. 81.
59 Chapter 34, cited Connor, Women, p. 7. Connor notes that St Mary of Egypt was also forced to selfbaptise in a puddle: this is perhaps a topos of humility? Ibid., p. 90.
60 ‘Life of St Mary of Egypt’, trans. Kouli, in Talbot, Holy, p. 81. This version is much more detailed than that recorded by Benedicta Ward in her Harlots of the Desert.
61 The story of Saint Pelagia is recorded by John Climacus in Step 15.58 of The Ladder. See John Chryssavgis, John Climacus: From the Egyptian Desert to the Sinaite Mountain (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 54 and 58.
62 In James Howard-Johnston and P.A. Hayward (eds), The Cults of Saints in late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, (Oxford, 1999), p. 41; see also Anson, ‘Female’, p. 7. This echoes Clark, ‘Lady’, pp. 16 and 17, and Macdonald, Early, p. 176, where she asserts ‘Paul and Thecla are almost certainly a fabrication’.
63 Averil Cameron, ‘On Defining the Holy Man’, in Howard-Johnston and Hayward, Cults, pp. 27–43.
64 Ibid., p. 41.
65 J. Warren Smith, ‘A Just and Reasonable Grief: the Death and Function of a Holy Woman in Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Macrina’, JECS, vol. 12, no. 1 (2004): pp. 57–84, at p. 62.
66 Georgia Frank, ‘Macrina’s Scar: Homeric Allusion and Heroic Identity in Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Macrina’, JECS 8 (Winter 2000): pp. 511–30.
67 Abstract for Smith, ‘A Just and Reasonable Grief’ suggests that Macrina is ‘one whose asceticism and virginity allow her to experience proleptically the eschatological communion with Christ’. See p. 57.
68 Teresa M. Shaw, ‘Askesis and the Appearance of Holiness’, JECS, vol. 6, no. 3 (Fall 1998): pp. 485–99, at p. 487.
69 Teresa M. Shaw, The Burden of the Flesh: Fasting and Sexuality in Early Christianity (Minneapolis, 1998), pp. 248–9.
70 Cloke, ‘Female’, p. 33.
71 Vita, trans. Callahan, in Gregory, p. 164.
72 Elizabeth Clark reads this as an example of how men used women to ‘think with’, here allowing Gregory of Nyssa to revise Originist theology. ‘Lady’, p. 27.
73 Vita, 2.21–34 and 27–38. Connor, Women, p. 21.
74 Morwenna Ludlow, Gregory of Nyssa, Ancient and (Post)modern (Oxford, 2007), p. 207. Ludlow is perhaps responding to Susanne Elm’s suggestion that the Vita is constructed to show Macrina as ‘our first image of the perfect Christian woman’. Elm, ‘Virgins of God’: The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 1994), p. 39.
75 Connor, Women, p. 21.
76 Susanna Elm points out that the word translated as ‘courageous’ in English is literally ‘manly’. Virgins, p. 83.
77 Vita, Callaghan, Gregory, p. 170. Philip Rousseau notes that the long list of eulogistic titles for Macrina recorded by her brother are all masculine nouns. ‘The Pious Household and the Virgin Chorus: Reflections on Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Macrina, JECS, vol. 13, no. 2 (2005): pp. 165–86, at p. 176.
78 Epistle 204 To the Neo-Caesareans, trans. Sister Agnes Clare Way, Saint Basil: Letters (Washington, 1951), p. 76. In Epistle 223 Against Eustathius of Sebaste, Basil also acknowledges the didactic input of his mother and grandmother, Ibid., p. 130.
79 Ibid., p. 244.
80 Vita, Callaghan, Gregory, p. 172.
81 Elizabeth A. Clark ‘Theory and Practice in Late Antique Asceticism: Jerome, Chrysostom and Augustine’, JFSR, vol. 5, no. 2 (Fall 1989): pp. 25–46, at p. 25 suggests higher-class women involved in this practice; whether such women usually came from aristocratic backgrounds or not is contested. Gillian Cloke thinks it was open to women of all classes. ‘Female’, p. 6.
82 With regard to this, Philip Rousseau has analysed the vocabulary used in the Vita to conclude that the ascetic community over which she presided was ‘more domestic than institutional’. ‘Pious’, p. 177. Given what we know of the Cappadocian brothers’ insecurities about their siblings, it would be surprising if Gregory set Macrina up as too much of a rival to Basil.
83 Elm, Virgins, p. 102.
84 Outline of the Ascetic Life, PG 31, 624C–5A, cited Gould, ‘Women’, p. 3.
85 Outline of the Ascetical Life, PG 31, 624C–5A, cited Gould ‘Women’, p. 3.
86 Gould, ‘Women’, pp. 6–7.
87 Oration 8 (13–14), PG 35, 804C, cited by Gould, ‘Women’, p. 2.
88 Oration 8 (13, 14). PG 35, 804C, 805B, cited Gould, ‘Women’, p. 2.
89 Gould, ‘Women’, passim.
90 Castelli, ‘Mary’, p. 31. See also ibid., p. 33: ‘The female can and should strive to become male – to overcome gender distinction, since the male embodied the generic “human” and therefore the potential for human existence to transcend difference and return to the same.’
91 Rowan Williams, ‘Macrina’s Deathbed Revisited; Gregory of Nyssa on Mind and Passion’, in Christian Faith and Greek Philosophy in Late Antiquity, Supplement to VC, 19 (Leiden, 1993), p. 243.