Virgin: The Untouched History (21 page)

Cultivating the Christian cult of holy virginity meant cultivating holy Virgin role models. The virgin martyr saints of the Catholic tradition filled that niche in many ways during the medieval period, both as top-down propaganda promoted by the Church and as beloved grassroots icons. As privileged friends of God who had been granted a special place in heaven, their physical remains were believed to partake of their holiness. They were (and still are) also believed to have the ability to transmit requests directly from the devout to the Divine. In terms of the history of virginity, though, the most important aspect of the cult of the saints wasn't what remained after they died or how those remains were venerated, it is their hagiographies, or life stories.

Like Jesus, although at a bit of a theological remove, saints are both human and holy. They look like us, they have mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers like us, they have aspirations to greatness like we do. Very much like we do, they face temptation, cope with obstacles, and get into trouble. We empathize with these people, and we look up to them. As we do with rock stars and movie divas, comic book heroes, or legendary martial artists, we look to saints as role models.

The retelling of saints' stories began in the early years of Christianity, when often-persecuted believers drew courage from the success stories of their belief community. That "success" was defined in somewhat unusual terms—death in the service of the religion—was part and parcel of the Christian message. A true Christian, looking forward to eternal life, would hardly fear losing his or her earthly one.

The classic stories of Saint Agatha and her spiritual descendant Saint Lucy are good cases in point. Both Sicilian saints, a generation or so apart in age, they are described as having been beautiful girls who became Christian when young and dedicated themselves body and soul to God.

Both reject male authority and are sent to brothels as a punishment. Lucy is brought to the attention of the authorities when she rejects the man who wants to marry her. Agatha, on the other hand, has no man to whom she is betrothed. Instead, the governor learns of her Christianity and decides to try to turn her away from her spiritual perversion before it can cause problems. In both stories, these women are sent to brothels in an attempt to break their wills, making it abundantly clear that their primary crime is not the spiritual disobedience of professing Christianity but instead the very secular disobedience of refusing to consent to marriage and sex. The message is clear: if these women will not voluntarily submit to sexual relations like normal women, then they are to be forced.

Neither woman, however, can be forced into sex, even in a brothel. In the thirteenth-century versions of their legends found in the English source known as the Katherine Group, both women are loudly unwilling to change their ways. After Agatha is sent to the brothel of Aphrodisia, the whores urge her to submit by describing a life of pleasure, but she responds by saying, "Shut up, bitches! You won't get anywhere with me. I've given my heart to the highest prince of all!" Lucy, for her part, responds to the judge who sentences her to the brothel by paraphrasing St. Augustine: "No woman can be deprived of her virginity, no matter what is done to her body, unless her heart consents. If you defile my body against my will, my virginity is all the purer and my reward all the greater." When the judge's henchmen try to take Lucy to the brothel, they discover that she has become miraculously immovable, and cannot be dragged off even with a team of oxen.

The consequences of persisting in holy virginity and not submitting to sexual intercourse are torture and death. The tortures are often specifically sexual. Agatha's iconic torture is having her breasts torn off with pincers, which is why paintings of Agatha often depict her proffering her mutilated breasts on a tray. Lucy, on the other hand, is stripped naked and has boiling pitch poured over her body in front of the assembled onlookers. Despite the torture, neither woman recants or repents. Instead, they display an extraordinary indifference to pain, which they credit to God.

Virgin martyrs continually and vocally reaffirm their commitment to Christ. No torment is sufficiently severe, and no torturer sufficiently sadistic, to stop them from preaching. Lucy is one of many virgin martyrs (another is the legendary Saint Reparata) whose throat is slit by her torturers simply because she refuses to shut up. Lucy is unstoppable. Eyeballs plucked out and throat slit, she goes right on preaching while she holds her bloody eyeballs in her hand.

When virgin martyrs do finally die, they die on their own terms. Agatha and Lucy both choose the moment of their deaths. Agatha prays to God to let her die and promptly does so. Lucy's legend variously has her welcoming the thrust of a dagger into her neck, or, in other versions, calling for her supporters and being given last rites, whereupon she permits herself to expire in time with the final "amen." Even the anomalous Welsh saint Winifred, the only virgin martyr to survive her own beheading (a miraculous resurrection that leaves her with a white scar around her neck for the rest of her life), chooses her own demise, telling the nobleman who is also her would-be seducer that she would rather he cut off her head than take her virginity.

The basic traits of virgin martyrs are remarkably consistent. They are known for their beauty and attractiveness, and, as in the case of Saint Wilgefortis (also known as Uncumber), whose prayer to be delivered from an unwanted marriage was answered with the miraculous appearance of a beard and mustache, for their pious vowed virginity. Their refusal to submit to sex and to sexual gender norms forms the basis for the persecution. Finally, the fervor of their belief induces God to grant them miraculous immunity to public humiliation, sexual violation, and physical torment. Throughout, they speak. Holy virginity gives them powers of speech that normal women do not have, letting them alone among women baptize, preach, exorcise demons, and banish Satan.

As spiritual superheroines, virgin martyrs have been phenomenally attractive role models. Particularly prior to the tenth and eleventh centuries they rivaled the Virgin Mary in popularity, their shrines, relics, and stories making up a vital realm not just of medieval theology but also of education and popular culture. Over time, however, as the culture changed and expectations of women's roles changed along with it, the ways virgin martyr stories were told changed, too. The disruptive, mouthy, dangerous, even deadly virgin rebels of the early Church are harnessed and brought to heel as quiet, self-effacing lambs. The rebellious thirteenth-century version of Agatha cited earlier, with its fiery invective, became, over the centuries, the story of a rather undeveloped personality discreetly described as having been taken to a brothel where she "refused to accept customers." Lucy no longer preaches throughout torture and has her throat slit as a result, but instead is described mildly as having "prophesied against her attackers" before dutifully baring her throat for the dagger.

These women, once so mad, bad, and dangerous to know, become women whose only salient characteristic is their refusal of sex. This is often true of modern-day saints as well. The twelve-year-old Maria Goretti, for example, was sainted after her would-be rapist stabbed her to death in 1902. But she is lauded for having suffered death rather than the loss of her chastity and for granting forgiveness to her attacker on her deathbed, not for having fought back against a vicious armed rapist. Canonized in 1950 with both her mother and her murderer in attendance, she is invoked as an example to young women that they should be prepared to preserve their virginity at any cost.

But even Maria Goretti's example, controversial for its implication that it is better for a woman to die than be sexually penetrated, appears to inspire its fair share of "grrl power." In October 2003 a group of young students at the all-female St. Maria Goretti High School in South Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, fought back against a twenty-five-year-old man who had been stalking several schoolgirls and had repeatedly flashed his bare genitals at them. The girls spotted the man one afternoon and, as a pack, dropped their book bags and chased him through the city streets, finally catching and beating him badly enough that he required hospital treatment. Although modern feminism undoubtedly contributed to these young women's willingness to fight back against a sexual predator, we cannot say the example of their school's patroness might not have had a role to play, too.

Desperately Seeking Mary

Although she is central to Christianity and was beyond question the most important female figure of the Middle Ages, we know virtually nothing about the woman who became immortalized as the Virgin Mary. Of the canonical Gospels that form the core of the New Testament, only Luke mentions her at any length. Mark, the earliest of the Gospels chronologically, mentions her a grand total of twice. John, the Gospel assigned the latest date of composition by historians, not only fails to mention her by name but doesn't mention most of the major Marian episodes that the other Gospels include. Out of the four articles of dogma that the Roman Catholic Church has articulated in regard to its most famous woman (and its second most important human figure after Jesus), only one, her having given birth to Jesus, can be substantiated by scripture. The other three, her virginity, her immaculate conception, and her assumption into heaven, were established by papal decree in the fourth century, 1854, and 1950, respectively. Even so, as of this writing, the Vatican remains undecided whether or not Mary's bodily virginity survived childbirth and beyond, as well as on the question of whether Mary actually experienced death or was translated bodily into heaven.

The historical Mary, whoever she may or may not have been in the literal, physical flesh, is still a work in progress. As for the literal version, we presume she existed, was a Judaean, got pregnant, had a baby boy who grew up to have a career as a radical preacher, and witnessed the political murder of her son at the hands of an imperialist army of occupation. Everything else that is "known" about her stems from sources that are either sufficiently improbable or uncorroborated as to be open to debate at the very least. We do not even know what Mary looked like. Unlike the virginal beauties whose good looks are detailed in so many virgin martyr legends, neither the four authors of the Gospels nor even Paul, who makes the earliest chronological reference to Mary (Gal. 4:4, circa 57 C. E.), describe her. There is virtually no information about her from people who might have ever personally seen her or spoken with her.

We simply cannot pretend to discuss Mary in any factually biographical way. Readers wanting to know if she was "really" a virgin will have to keep waiting. But we can look at how other people have described her and examine the roles she has played in Christianity and in Western culture, and specifically, we can look at the issue of her virginity and its importance to Christianity.

In the earliest canon sources that mention Mary—the four canonical Gospels—it is unclear whether all the authors of the Gospels felt that Mary's virginity was of major importance. Only in Luke and in Matthew, which, like Mark, is believed to have been written over a century after the events in question, do we find unequivocal statements in regard to Mary's virginity. Of Luke and Matthew, Luke's statements about Mary are the more famous. Luke depicts Mary in conversation with the angel Gabriel, responding to Gabriel's announcement that she is to bear a child with the famous words, "But how can this be, seeing as I know not a man?" In Matthew, virginity is established at more of a remove through a statement that Jesus was conceived of the Holy Ghost prior to the time that Mary and Joseph "came together." Otherwise, Mary's sexual status is not made explicit in the New Testament. Paul does not mention it. John, the last of the Gospel authors, writing at the end of the first century, begins his infancy narrative with the simple statement that the word was made flesh and proceeds from there.

We don't really know why some of the New Testament writers chose to mention Mary's virginity and others overlooked it. Perhaps Matthew emphasized the role of the Holy Ghost to forestall skeptics. There were certainly a number of alternate ancestries for Jesus that circulated during the earliest decades of Christianity. We know about them because the church fathers felt compelled to debunk them. One popular story held that Jesus's father was actually a Roman centurion named Pantherus. The sexual abuse and rape of women in occupied territories by the soldiers of occupying armies was no newer a phenomenon in the antique world than it is today, and this eminently believable rumor was quite popular. A more limited rumor, which apparently existed primarily in Alexandria, claimed that Jesus had been the product of an, incestuous union between Mary and her brother.

Perhaps it simply took someone like Luke, who is definitely the most talented writer among the Gospel authors, to imagine the poignant confusion of a young unmarried woman who has never had sex but who is told that she is going to have a baby. Or maybe Luke, canny storyteller that he was, thought that invoking the popular literary device of the
parthenos
who bears a Godfathered
parthenios
would help to substantiate Jesus's claims to greatness. As historian Marina Warner points out, the similarities between the story of Jesus's conception and birth and the Greek pagan tradition of the
parthenios,
the half-human son of a god who goes on to become a great, even miracle-working man, were controversial in the early years of Christianity. Jesus was not, after all, the only historical figure for whom divine ancestry had been claimed. There was a real and pressing need to distinguish Jesus's birth from that of people like Plato or Alexander the Great, both of whom enjoyed similar reputations for being
parthenioi.