Virgin: The Untouched History (17 page)

The vestals were dedicated channels, state-sponsored consecrated bodies whose carefully protected virginity was the conduit between the human and the divine, dedicated quite literally to direct intercession between a people and its gods. Their virginity was not meant as a sacrifice to the gods, nor was it making them more moral or exalted. Instead, human virginity functioned in relation to the gods in much the same way as it functioned in relationship to marriage, as a guarantee of an uncontaminated channel. The vestals were virgins so that their loyalties remained undivided.

Celibates in the Desert

If this classical version of virginity seems simultaneously familiar and yet incomplete, there are good reasons why. The ideology of virginity has accumulated for millennia in much the same way as coral forms a reef. Certainly some aspects of ancient ideologies of virginity, for example that a virgin provides an uncompromised vessel, are still with us. But at the same time ancient-world virginity did not include several elements that later became critical to the way the West grew to think about the subject. The addition of these elements—the spiritualization, personalization, and egalitarianizing of virginity—utterly transformed the way the Western world would think, feel, and behave in regard to virginity.

This shift only seems to have happened suddenly because we look back on it from such a distance. In reality, it happened slowly, and it certainly did not happen without resistance. It represented a sea change in the way the body was understood to function in society as well as a profound rearrangement of the way people thought about their roles in the world and their relationships to the divine. These changes were what made virginity, and all that it symbolized and implied, into a foundational tenet of a new religion that went on to govern much of the world for the better part of two thousand years.

Ironically, the topic of virginity itself was one on which Jesus of Nazareth, the nominal founder of that new religion, spoke scarcely at all. Jesus had literally nothing to say (that we know of) about virginity. Christians, on the other hand, had a great deal to say about it, derived from the philosophies of Jesus's teachings as they understood them but just as influenced by other emerging ideologies and philosophies of the time. A specifically Christian approach to virginity began to coalesce about half a century after Jesus's death, but required most of the next five centuries to mature. None of it, however, would have been possible without the presence of philosophical and religious precursors that laid the groundwork for Christianity's radical new take on sexuality, the body, and virginity.

Around a century before the birth of Jesus, on the shore of Lake Mareotis, south of Alexandria, Egypt, just far enough outside the city walls to feel quite isolated, a community lived at the edge of civilization. This was the largest community of the religious movement known as the Theraputae, literally "the healers," celibate men and women who lived together in simplicity and deep religious contemplation. Many of them were nominally Jews, or at least Judaeans (the two were at that time synonymous), but regardless of their origins or the faith traditions from which they had come, they were all Gnostics, people who believed that the individual soul was capable of
gnosis,
the literal personal experience of God.

The path to
gnosis
was not for everybody. It represented the choice to live a life that was truly set apart from family, home, and everything in which one had learned to take comfort. Joining a sect such as the Theraputae would have meant the assumption of an entirely new social existence. As is true of Buddhism, renunciatipn of the material world formed an important component of the struggle to know God. This appears to have been, at least at its core, a practical asceticism. Renouncing things like family, personal wealth, or sexual activity did not automatically generate holiness but did reduce the number of distractions one had in the world of the flesh.

Not all of the Gnostic sects in the pre-Christian world admitted women. In fact, the Theraputae are the only ones we know of that did. It is primarily thanks to the writings of Philo of Alexandria, a Jew who flourished from roughly 20 B.C.E. to 50 C.E., that we have so much information about the Theraputae. In their quiet and simple celibacy, female and male renunciates living side by side and referring to one another as "brother" and "sister," the Theraputae certainly prefigure the celibate Christian households, compounds, and monasteries that came later.

Celibacy for the sake of God, however, was not a practice limited to the Gnostics. There were also groups of Jews—like those living at Wadi Qumran, the writers of the Dead Sea Scrolls—who donned spiritual armor in the form of celibacy as a way to prepare for holy war. For these men, celibacy appears to have been a way for them to realize the words of the prophet Ezekiel (Ez. 36:6), in removing something that was an obstacle to opening themselves completely to God. They did this at the expense of extant Jewish law that called, as Jewish law still does today, for the maintenance of household, marriage, and family in a sanctified and religiously regulated fashion, but to them, it was justified.

With such renunciate communities as a backdrop, it makes perfect sense that, as Peter Brown writes, "the fact that Jesus himself had not married by the age of thirty occasioned no comment." There was no shortage of radical young spiritual seekers who had added celibacy, even lifelong celibacy, to their spiritual practice. A long tradition within Judaism held that prophets were often unmarried and sexually abstinent: Moses himself was held to have found his sexual appetites permanently removed from him following the forty days he spent in the presence of God. Pliny the Elder, a slightly younger contemporary of Jesus's, commented on the paradoxical vigor of the celibate Essene community at Engeddi, noting that it managed to stay vibrant and well populated despite having made an end run around the usual cycle of marriage, sex, and birth. It should thus come as no surprise that, in the Bible, more is not made of Jesus' apparent virginity. In the sort of religious circles in which a man like him would have traveled, it would have been quite ordinary.

Eunuchs for the Sake of the Kingdom of Heaven: Jesus

These ordinary celibates were the men of whom Jesus likely spoke when he so famously said "there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let anyone accept this who can" (Matt. 19:12). Sexual renunciation was seen as an essential aspect of an aggressively individual relationship with God, and it is little wonder that Jesus promoted it. It seems likely, given both the Jewish abhorrence for bodily modification and the widespread association, in the ancient world, between castration and pagan priests (such as the
galli
of the cult of Cybele), that the word "eunuch" was intended to be taken metaphorically, not literally.

Rather, this metaphorical self-castration was a physical gesture of separation, placing one's self entirely outside of the normal life cycle and refusing to participate in the sexual acts that the ancient world considered not only an intrinsic part of human nature but also a necessary aspect of the functioning of the human organism. In refusing to take part in the socially critical processes of marriage and fathering children, one dealt a slap to near-universal social priorities. For a radical preacher and prophet, these rejections were simultaneously heartfelt and strategic. The effort to create a new society where belief, not heredity or wealth, formed the basis for inclusion, glory, and salvation required no small amount of tearing down extant societal structures.

The rebellious preacher from Nazareth set a good example in this department, peripatetic, celibate, neither owning nor working land, wifeless (as far as we know from the canonical Gospels) and childless. Like the Essenes waiting for God's angelic armies out in the desert, he surrounded himself with like-minded men who shared his willingness to reject everything they had ever known in favor of existing for a while in close rapport with the Divine, sure that a new and better world was close at hand. Like the Theraputae, he helped and healed the sick and the lame. Most of all he preached, spreading a liberation theology of radical autonomy and rejection of worldly privilege that could not have been better calculated to anger the Roman forces that occupied and subjugated his homeland.

What is odd about this is not that Jesus would have exhorted his immediate followers to celibacy. That was psychologically and politically strategic, as well as au courant. What is odd is that this exhortation to a very small group of people living in a very specific and embattled moment in time was taken up with such fervor, expanded upon so enormously, and implemented with such unhesitating enthusiasm. In Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, he admits that he has no specific instructions from Jesus in regard to virgins (i Cor. 7:25), and yet not only he, but generations of writers after him (only a few of whom are discussed here), elaborated the concept and requirements of Christian virginity to an extent that would scarcely be believable if they hadn't gone to such pains to write it all down. Virginity's metamorphosis within monotheism, from a matter of tactical guerrilla celibacy to the highest of moral virtues (and not coincidentally the subject of dozens of deeply misogynist and erotophobic treatises), is not something we owe to Jesus. It is his followers who deserve all the credit—and all the blame.

The Menacing Flesh: Paul

Paul of Tarsus was, in some ways, the very model of a cosmopolitan Diaspora Jew. A well-traveled polyglot who wrote excellent Greek and was apparently at one point made a Roman citizen, he spent years at a time in the greatest cities of the Aegean, including Phillippi, Ephesus, Thessalonica, and Corinth. Less typically Jewish, he was an evangelist and a missionary. Prior to being put to death in Rome around the year 64, he had spent the lion's share of his life pursuing the missionary work of establishing Christian communities throughout the Greek-speaking world and attempting to provide long-distance guidance for those communities after leaving for his next port of call.

This is the exact context in which the first letter to the Corinthians was written. As the man who helped to found their community, Paul was the spiritual father to whom they turned in times of trouble. And trouble there was. We do not have the letter or letters to which Paul's epistle is a response, but we do not need them. Between the lines of Paul's reply, written around the year 54, we can figure out exactly what kinds of trouble the Corinthians were having among their ranks: strife and jealousy, people patronizing prostitutes, gluttony, Christians partaking of the meat of animals that had been offered as pagan sacrifices, uppity women wanting a voice and a presence in church, and what seems a generalized lack of focus.

By turns patronizing and avuncular, severe and accommodating, Paul's letter begins with a striking reminder of one of the things Paul, and Christianity, offered the Corinthians to begin with. This was a profound personalizing and egalitarianizing of the experience of the Divine, the notion that each individual body was a temple of God, that all people had the potential to experience God within themselves (1 Cor. 3:16).

This was a complete departure from the classical model of human contact with the Divine, which was generally accomplished through at least two layers of intercessors. One of these layers was the human layer, the priests and/or priestesses whose job it was to be in direct contact with the Divine. The other layer was the layer of material sacrifice. Sacrifices, then a primary mode of worship, demanded goods that could be sacrificed. A spotless kid or lamb or even a dove for the altar of the great temple in Jerusalem, or even a loaf of ritual bread for one's local altar to Artemis or Apollo, represented a not insignificant expenditure. The wealthier one was, it almost goes without saying, the greater one's ability to curry favor with the gods.

By locating God within the individual, even within the individual body, Christianity upset this applecart. It completely transformed the socioeconomics of religion as it then existed, as well as essentially eradicating the need for the hierarchies of priestly professionals on which pre-Christian worship depended. In a single sweeping move, the nature of the human-divine relationship went from being predominantly external to being decidedly interior. Objects of sacrifice were no longer inanimate objects or dumb animals but actual human bodies, offered up in the hopes that individuals would not only become instruments of the Divine, but also literally be adopted as dwelling places for God.

The way in which believers constructed and organized their ideologies of ritual purity began to migrate inward. Formerly, ritual purity might have consisted partially of hereditary caste—the vestals were daughters of the elite, for example, and the
kohanim,
or priestly class, of the temple at Jerusalem were all descended from a specific lineage. Ritual purity had also consisted of the observance of numerous vows and taboos concerning, for example, ejaculation or contact with dead bodies.

Now, with the integrity and purity of the individual self at such a premium, having sex likewise raised a number of problems. As the occasion during which the physical and psychological boundaries of the self seemed most permeable, sexual activity seemed fraught with peril. Paul wrote that when one had sex with a whore, one became "one flesh" with her (i Cor. 6:16), that the boundaries of one's body and one's self were compromised. The result of such compromise could only be impurity.

For Paul, and for Christians generally, sexuality was also symbolic of the struggle between desire and will, the flesh and the spirit. In what it was hoped would be a brief interval between the miraculous resurrection of Jesus and the time when he would return to Earth to take his followers with him "into the air," the concern of his most ardent followers was to become undivided in their hearts, able to open themselves unstintingly to God in anticipation of that ultimate and permanent
gnosis.
Everywhere a Christian turned, though, his flesh threw up obstacles to this complete and selfless dedication. Reading between the lines of i Corinthians produces a laundry list of the problems that resulted. Paul's task, at his writing desk in Ephesus, was to help his parishioners in Corinth to resist their ids and egos, erect penises and salivating mouths not only with greater individual force of will but in ways that would contribute to the success and cohesion of the group.