Virgin: The Untouched History (19 page)

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

Triumph of the Will: Augustine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER 9

Heaven and Earth

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

—Saint Hildegard of Bingen

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

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

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

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

As the Catholic Church matured, its influence spread wherever the Roman Empire's roads preceded it. With the northward and westward migration of Roman Catholicism went its singular philosophy of sexual renunciation, asceticism, and sacrifice. To the farmers, hunters, and craftsmen of early medieval northern Europe, the idea that their sons, daughters, and perhaps even wives might try to secede from the household in the name of God must have seemed radical and unsettling. In the subsistence economies of premodern Europe, a childless woman was a tragic figure, more often mocked and reviled than pitied. Spinsters and bachelors were as rare as hen's teeth. Remaining unmarried was not an option many would, or could, choose. Economic survival meant participation in the economy of the larger household and community, both in terms of labor and of the reproduction of human beings who would labor in turn.

In any case, the majority of people, living as vassals, serfs, villeins, and in other various forms of tenancy on lands owned by feudal aristocrats, did not have the right (or for that matter the financial resources) to remove themselves or their labor contribution from their lord's holdings if they had wanted to. Given these issues, it comes as no surprise that throughout most of the Middle Ages the bulk of those who assumed the profession of consecrated virgin were daughters of the aristocracy.

The Origins of a Vocation

Within Christianity, the elite already had a long tradition of being first in line to step into the rarefied space between earth and heaven. A great deal of the operating capital behind the first several centuries of Christian development had come directly from wealthy women. As Christianity became officially recognized within the Roman Empire, bishops and other churchmen with the ability to pull strings within the secular power structure helped these women and their virgin heiress daughters to remain free agents who were legally able to dispose of their property at will. Thus money and power flowed in mutually beneficial currents between unmarried (or no longer married) women and the Church. Wealthy women in early Christianity not only had the ear of powerful bishops and archbishops, but they could sometimes also wield limited ecclesiastical power themselves. Women deacons called
diaconissae
catechized converts, meditated on religious principles and shared the benefit of their insights, led prayers, taught, and were central in providing aid to the sick and poor.

The first religious vows made available to women represented an effort to formalize these relationships with the Church. In the first century an informal division of three orders of widows became customary, with two groups devoted to meditative prayer and teaching and the third devoted to the care of the needy. The establishment of institutional roles for women took a decisive step forward in the third century with the new role of the
sponsa Chrisd,
the spouse of Christ. There was not yet a distinct category of religious called "nuns" or a system of monastic rule under which they could live. But the
sponsa Chrisd
role gave shape to what would become the iconic role of the virgin within the Christianity. The lives of these "spouses of Christ" revolved around a nucleus made up of devotion, service, the renunciation of sexuality, and the dedication of their worldly goods to their heavenly spouse. It was not exactly like an earthly marriage, but it was recognizably similar.

Standing apart not only from the families they had left behind but also from the hierarchy of a Church headed primarily by married men, the early religious virgins provided a bold contrast indeed. The
sponsa Chrisd's life
was lived at a more stringent level of sanctity than that of most priests. Priestly celibacy, although encouraged from the earliest days of Christianity, did not become doctrine until the Lateran Councils of the early twelfth century. Long before then, however, virgins and virginity were central to the Christian mission. Representing the New Covenant in their bodies by physically symbolizing the superiority of spiritual kinship over worldly family, virgins also provided the Church with critical capital, skill, labor, and, of course, their spiritual and mystical gifts. Perceived as being closer both to God and to God's design for ideal human existence, Christian virgins possessed a unique form of holiness that, like the sacred virginity of their forerunners in the pre-Christian world, was believed to provide a dedicated and uncompromised conduit between heaven and earth.

Daughters of Jerusalem

The spread of European monasticism, and that of female monasteries in particular, was due almost exclusively to the combination of heavenly devotion and earthly wealth. Wealthy women who dedicated their lives to the Church were the vehicles by which the earliest women's monasteries were formed. One of the earliest female monasteries in Europe, Saint-Croix at Poitiers, France, was established by the sixth-century queen Radegund, daughter of Thuringian king Berthaire, who walked out on her husband and used the income from various lands that had been given to her as part of her wedding gifts to found her abbey. Populated almost exclusively by other women of rank and wealth who brought additional endowments to the abbey, Sainte-Croix was notable in that Radegund required that all the sisters be able to read and write. The abbey's scriptorium, just like the ones in the male monasteries, produced many skilled copies of religious books and manuscripts.

Women like Radegund were behind the foundation of most of Europe's convents, and those in the British Isles as well. The great dual monastery of Ely, for example, was founded by Queen Aethelthrith, who left her second husband, the King of Northumbria, in order to found Ely on land left to her by her first husband. In founding or merely joining religious communities, even married aristocratic women were able to choose their own path at a level and with a degree of control to which they otherwise could not aspire. Remarkably, the Church welcomed these wealthy wayward wives with open arms. The entrance of a marriage partner into a monastery was considered legitimate grounds for annulment of the marriage by the Church, even if the partner had not consented to his or her spouse's actions.

This did not mean, however, that husbands and families just stood there waving good-bye when their womenfolk wandered off to found convents. On the contrary, women's efforts to devote themselves to a religious life were often thwarted at every step. But for the women who either had familial support or managed to shame, outwit, or just outrun their opposition, consecration was the one respectable ticket out of the various miseries of a married woman's life. Women who freely entered the monastic life as never-married virgins, like the aristocratic Ethelburga, who, courtesy of her brother (the Bishop of London), went from being a member of the family of the King of Wessex to being foundress of Barking Abbey, knew very well how fortunate and unusual they were.

This is an important concept. To most people today, the life of a nun, with its vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience; regular obligations of the monastic rule; and restrictions on personal liberties, seems shockingly limiting. We often assume that such a lifestyle must represent an enormous personal sacrifice. But limitation is not necessarily synonymous with loss.

For medieval women, the regulations of the monastic life were often very welcome, not only because of the opportunity they offered for real religious devotion but because despite their strictness, they still offered more freedom and opportunity than the married state. Destined to act as the human glue that cemented dynastic relationships between aristocratic clans by producing offspring of august and verifiable paternity, women who did not successfully lobby for the religious life could expect their lives to be quite literally ruled by marriage. Elite marriages might take place as early as a girl's twelfth birthday, and betrothals even earlier.
*
These women's lives were so thoroughly oriented toward expedient marriages that
*
sometimes they were sent away as little girls to be raised in the households of the courts over which they would later preside. A case in point is Matilda, daughter of King Henry I of England, sent at the age of seven to be reared in the court of Holy Roman Emperor Heinrich V so that upon her marriage to the emperor five years later when she was twelve (and he was twenty-eight), she was already conversant with the language, customs, and politics of his court into which she married and able to immediately take up her duties.

Women without religious vocations existed quite literally in the service of men. Used as bargaining chips in the politically and socially vital marriage market by their fathers or guardians, elite women almost inevitably wed. Often they were married off to men who were decades older, and it was more the exception than the rule for a woman to actually know her husband socially when she found herself standing beside him at the altar. Sexual submission to one's husband was both socially and legally mandated, and the difficult, dangerous, and frequently fatal prospect of childbearing was all but inescapable.

All this was absolutely normal and expected, but it was also quite understandably distasteful to many. Choosing to take Christ as a spouse was not merely an emblem of devotion, it was perhaps the only means a woman had of exercising any choice whatsoever in the matter of what would form the core of her adult life. In the texts left to us by some of the great literary nuns of the High Middle Ages, like Hildegard of Bingen and Elisabeth of Schonau, marriage is described in terms nearly identical with slavery. It was partially the daunting physical demands of married life—submitting to men's sexual demands, bearing children, wiping bottoms, running a household—that women found undesirable. Marriage simply used women up. By contrast, in the words of the thirteenth-century
Hali Mei&had,
"Virginity is the blossom which, if it is once completely cut off, will never grow again, but though it may wither sometimes through indecent thoughts it can grow green again nevertheless." Virgins not only got to escape the perils and inconveniences of earthly marital life, but additionally they would always (at least metaphorically) remain in the eternal blossom of youth.

These were not the only benefits awaiting those who chose the monastery. The monastic life also promised the opportunity to devote time to charity (convents often included poorhouses, hospitals, and leprosaria), to live in a community of like-minded people, and to be genuinely useful. Nuns also enjoyed spiritual communion and the joys of being in a position to help others through intercessory prayer: nuns' prayers could, among other things, help to free souls trapped in Purgatory.

Virginity also held the promise of education. Monasteries were renowned as places where women became literate. Years of singing or listening to a relatively limited collection of familiar texts while looking at books like psalters and missals would eventually result in women figuring out how to match what they heard to what they saw. But that was not the way most nuns who became literate this way understood their experience of ."spontaneous" literacy. To them, it was a miracle bestowed upon the deserving, pure-hearted virgin by God: when the gift of literacy bloomed in the mind of Hedwig von Regensburg, the entire choir of sisters saw her heart shine through her body and habit "like the sun through glass."