The Cloister Walk (26 page)

While the names of many of the young women martyrs of the early church are known to us (Agatha, Agnes, Barbara, Catherine, Cecilia, Dorothy, Lucy, Margaret), the political nature of their martyrdom has been obscured by the passage of time and by church teaching that glorifies only their virginity, which we erroneously conceive of as a passive and merely physical condition. For them, virginity was anything but passive; it was a state of being, of powerful potential, a
point vierge
from which they could act in radical resistance to authority.

One can trace the muting of these women by looking at the way the church has chosen to describe them. The early narratives about the virgin martyrs have a remarkable vigor that later theologizing about them lacks. An early account of the sixth-century slave Mahya, for example, has her running through the streets of her south Arabian town of Najran, after her owners and family have been put to death, shouting, “Men and women, Christians, now is the moment to pay back to Christ what you owe him. Come out and die for Christ, just as he died for you. . . . This is the time of battle!” But by the ninth century, Methodius of Sicily, preaching about the third-century martyr Agatha, said, “She wore the glow of a pure conscience and the crimson of the Lamb's blood for her cosmetics.” While this imagery may have impressed Agatha's bravery upon Methodius's original congregation, to us it just seems sick.

We live at the end of a century sickened by violence. Any claim we make to an enlightened modernity must be weighed against the fact that child prostitution is big business on a global scale; that most marriages in the world are arranged, as they were in ancient Rome, for economic and/or social advantage (the most advantageous being the selling of a young daughter to an older, wealthier man); that female infanticide and genital mutilation are still commonly practiced in many cultures; that in more civilized countries, the stalking, rape and/or murder of young women are staples not only of the nightly news but of dramatic entertainment. Maybe it's time to reclaim a
point vierge
and try to hear what the virgin martyrs are saying.

The best-known twentieth-century virgin martyr to be officially sanctified by the church is Maria Goretti, an eleven-year-old who was stabbed to death during an attempted rape in 1902 by a man we would now term a “stalker.” Maria Goretti was an Italian peasant from a town near Anzio, a girl in a vulnerable position, both economically and socially. Her father had died when she was ten, and reading between the lines of the Roman Breviary (“she spent a difficult childhood assisting her mother in domestic duties”), we can assume that both child and mother were at the extreme margins of a marginal culture. For a young man to take advantage of such a situation is not unusual, nor is his resorting to violence when he is rebuffed. We understand these facts all too well from similar events in our own day.

Maria Goretti, canonized in 1950, was the first virgin martyr declared such by the church for defending her chastity rather than her faith, and it's easy to see this development in a cynical light; a perfect expression of a sexually uptight era. Indeed, a popular pamphlet of the time, written by an American priest, dubbed her “the Cinderella Saint.” But our cynicism blinds us to a deeper truth: a martyr is not a model to be imitated, but a witness, one who testifies to a new reality. And our own era's obsession with sexual “liberation” blinds us still further, making it difficult to see the true nature of Maria Goretti's witness, what it might mean for a peasant girl to “prefer death to dishonor.” We may make fun of someone so foolish—a male friend recalls with shame how he and his schoolmates snickered over Maria Goretti in the playground of his parochial school, not long after she was canonized—but such joking is a middle-class luxury.

For Maria Goretti, the issue was not a roll in the hay. The loss of her virginity in a rigidly patriarchal peasant culture could have had economic and social consequences so dire that it might well have seemed a choice between being and nonbeing. And is it foolish for a girl to have such a strong sense of her self that she resists its violation, resists being asked to do, in the private spaces of her body, what she does not want to do? When I was fifteen, and extremely naive, I was attacked by a young man, a college student, who I'm sure remembers the evening as a failed attempt at seduction. What I remember is my anger, the ferocity of my determination to fight him off. I know now that I'm lucky that I was able to simply wear him out; another man might have beat me unconscious and then raped me. It happens more than we like to think, even to middle-class girls like me. But the poor are far more vulnerable; perhaps the scandal of Maria Goretti is the recognition that there can be bodily integrity, honor, and even holiness, among the poorest of the poor, that even a peasant girl of simple faith can claim an inner self, a soul that will make room for Christ but not a rapist. Not even a rapist with a knife.

What we resist seeing in late-twentieth-century America—where we are conditioned, relentlessly, by images of girls' and women's bodies as
available
—is the depth of that soul, and how fierce a young girl's sense of bodily and spiritual integrity can be. Prepubescent and adolescent girls often express, as Robert Bolt says of St. Thomas More in
A Man for All Seasons,
“an adamantine sense of self.” This is not necessarily a sure sense of who they are—in girls, this is still developing—but rather a solid respect for their physical boundaries. In the early Christian martyrs, this expressed itself as an unshakable faith in Jesus Christ, which enabled them to defy worldly authority. And, as Andrea Dworkin states in a chapter on virginity in her book
Intercourse,
each of the virgin martyrs “viewed the integrity of her physical body as synonymous with the purity of her faith, her purpose, her self-determination, her honor.”

The virgin martyrs make me wonder if the very idea of girls
having
honor is a scandal, and if this is a key to the power that their stories still have to shock us, and even more important, to subvert authority, which now, as in the ancient world, rests largely in the hands of males. The genocidal excesses of our century have not dulled our capacity to be appalled by the brutality of the tortures inflicted on these young women. If anything, our era has made us more fully aware of the psychological dynamic of sexual violence against women that these stories express so unconsciously, in raw form.

The story of the fourth-century martyr St. Lucy of Syracuse is typical of the genre. At the age of fourteen (the median age for marriage in a culture that expected women to bear five children on average and die young, often in childbirth), Lucy was betrothed to a young pagan nobleman. Inspired by an earlier virgin martyr, St. Agatha, Lucy refused him and gave her goods to the poor. Both acts marked her as a Christian, and as Agnes Dunbar's
A Dictionary of Saintly Women
recounts: “The young man to whom she was betrothed denounced her as a Christian before the governor, Pascasius, who spoke insultingly to her. As she openly defied him, he ordered her to be dragged away [to a brothel, that she might be raped there], but it was found that neither strong men with ropes nor magicians with their spells could move her an inch; so Pascasius had a fire lighted to burn her where she stood; but as the flames had no power against her, one of the servants killed her by plunging a dagger into her throat.”

Other versions of Lucy's story, like so many of these tales, provide detailed accounts of the verbal give-and-take between the martyr and the governing authorities, who are both enraged and frightened by the claim of the martyrs to an inviolable, divinely grounded sense of self. Saints Barbara, Catherine, Irene, and Margaret, among others, give speeches so replete with scriptural allusions that they amount to a form of preaching. Here is Mahya again, as Sebastian Brock and Susan Ashbrook Harvey describe her in
Holy Women of the Syrian Orient,
“castigating her torturers with a mighty freedom in the Spirit . . . Publically stripped naked at the orders of the king, Mahya yet holds to her dignity, boldly stating, ‘It is to your shame . . . that you have done this; I am not ashamed myself . . . for I am a woman—such as created by God.' Had she finished her scriptural allusion,” the authors note, “Mahya would have added, ‘created by God in his own image,' ” male and female. Typically, such speech angers male rulers; an account of the Syrian martyr Euphemia states that “Priscus the proconsul was troubled in his mind that he was overcome by a woman.” And typically, the more the martyrs talk back, the more they mock those in power by their allegiance to Christ and his invincible power, the more frenzied is the male response, and the more the violence escalates. It's not pleasant reading, but it is good psychology.

It should come as no surprise that the virgin martyrs are both admired and feared for their intelligence, and for their articulate tongues; Catherine of Alexandria, for example, is the patron saint of philosophers because she converted the fifty philosophers who were sent to explain to her the error of her ways. No surprise, either, that they are often tortured by having their tongues torn out; it's one way to silence a woman. But a theme of many of the stories is the martyr's miraculous ability to remain lucid, even eloquent, throughout her tortures; to retain even the capacity for worship (expressed best in these memorable words: “plunged into a cauldron of burning pitch, she lived for three days, singing praises”). While this outrages the modern consciousness, it also demonstrates that the silencing of holy women is not easily accomplished.

Accounts of virgin martyrs are so full of what one critic has termed “imaginative chaff” that they've typically been dismissed by church historians, labeled “dubious,” “spurious,” “a farrago of impossibilities.” To appreciate the relevance of the virgin martyrs for our own time, we need to ask not whether or not the saint existed but why it might have been necessary to invent her; we need not get hung up on determining to what extent her story has been embellished by hagiographers but rather ask why the stories were so popular in the early church, and also what we have lost in dismissing them. A case in point is Thecla, a virgin and, by some accounts, a martyr of the second century. Her cult was officially suppressed by the Catholic Church in 1969—she is thought never to have existed—and few but scholars are aware of her today. But for many years in the early church she was the most well-known and beloved of female saints.

One can easily see how Thecla's story would have appealed to women in a church that had begun to consolidate power in its male clergy. Converted to Christianity by the apostle Paul, she becomes an apostle herself. When Paul refuses to baptize her, fearing that because of her youth and beauty she will not remain celibate, Thecla baptizes herself. Paul, having learned his lesson, commissions her to preach. Thecla is one of several miracle-working women mentioned in apocryphal acts of the apostles, and as scholar Gail Paterson Corrington writes in
Women in Early Christianity,
“the equality of the female convert to the male apostle is frequently demonstrated both by her assumption of his role and functions (teaching, baptizing, preaching) and by the continuity of her apostolic work without his assistance.”

Surely it is significant that the books of “acts” of these young women, which had wide circulation in the early church, were based on the “acts” of the apostles, which in turn were based on the gospel accounts of the ministry of Jesus. All of these stories served to incorporate the hopes of an embattled and vulnerable Christian minority. Their stories often strike me as Christianity of the most radical sort; these seemingly powerless girls were able to do what Jesus did, and change the world around them. Irene, for example, a first-century martyr, raises her father from the dead after his attempt to kill her (by having her dragged by wild horses—a typical grotesquerie) results in his own death. She brings back a child from the dead, and later raises
herself
from the dead, an event which results in the conversion to Christianity of many thousands.

Popular devotion to the saints has often been a kind of shadow religion, more or less ignored by the official church, by theologians and scholars. In studying the relevance of the virgin martyrs for our own time, we might note that belief in their power shows up in this “folk religion” in surprising ways. As a Benedictine historian wrote to me, “I have always been struck by the inverse ratio of historical knowledge about a saint and the oral tradition. We know nothing about Agatha other than the tradition of her death during Decius's persecution in the east coast of Sicily.” The monk continues, “But when I ran across a statue of Agatha in a Chicago fire station and a year later saw people in Catania, Sicily, invoking Agatha's intercession to keep Mt. Etna's lava at bay, I had to admit to an incredibly deep and broad current of tradition at work.”

What may be most valuable for modern people in the accounts of virgin martyrs is the depth of psychological truth that they contain. An account of the second-century virgin martyr Saint Barbara states that her father, a wealthy man, built “a strong, two-windowed tower in which he did keep and close her so that no man should see her great beauty.” When Barbara escapes his control—surreptitiously baptized a Christian, she convinces the workmen to add a third window, so that she may meditate on the Trinity—her father's rage is without bounds. It is he who betrays her to government authorities for refusing to worship pagan gods. When their tortures, including a scourging and burning, do not work, but only seem to strengthen Barbara's resolve to pray, the men beat her with hammers and lop off her breasts. Finally, it is her father who drags her up a mountain by her hair and beheads her. He is then struck dead by lightning. A dysfunctional relationship, to say the least. In our day, Barbara and her dad might end up on the front pages, fodder for the “true crime” market.