The Sex Lives of Saints

An Erotics of Ancient Hagiography

Virginia Burrus

• Editorial: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Año: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780812200720
• Categoría: Historia
• Categoría: Historia antigua

Has a repressive morality been the primary contribution of Christianity to the history of sexuality? The ascetic concerns that pervade ancient Christian texts would seem to support such a common assumption. Focusing on hagiographical literature, Virginia Burrus pursues a fresh path of interpretation, arguing that the early accounts of the lives of saints are not antierotic but rather convey a sublimely transgressive "countereroticism" that resists the marital, procreative ethic of sexuality found in other strands of Christian tradition.Without reducing the erotics of ancient hagiography to a single formula, The Sex Lives of Saints frames the broad historical, theological, and theoretical issues at stake in such a revisionist interpretation of ascetic eroticism, with particular reference to the work of Michel Foucault and Georges Bataille, David Halperin and Geoffrey Harpham, Leo Bersani and Jean Baudrillard. Burrus subsequently proceeds through close, performative readings of the earliest Lives of Saints, mostly dating to the late fourth and early fifth centuries—Jerome's Lives of Paul, Malchus, Hilarion, and Paula; Gregory of Nyssa's Life of Macrina; Augustine's portrait of Monica; Sulpicius Severus's Life of Martin; and the slightly later Lives of so-called harlot saints. Queer, s/m, and postcolonial theories are among the contemporary discourses that prove intriguingly resonant with an ancient art of "saintly" loving that remains, in Burrus's reading, promisingly mobile, diverse, and open-ended.

Chapter 1

Fancying Hermits:
Sublimation and the Arts of Romance

Sublimation is coextensive with (rather than “beyond”) sexuality.

—Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art

“How often, when I was living in the desert, in the vast solitude which gives to hermits a savage dwelling-place, parched by the flames of the sun, how often did I fancy myself among the pleasures of Rome (putavi me Romanis interesse deliciis)!” (Ep. 22.7). Thus begins Jerome’s account of his own brief career as a hermit, intruded into a letter written to the Roman virgin Eustochium circa 384, some eight years after he had decisively fled the Syrian desert. In this passage, ascetic fantasy quickly overwhelms historical description. Still inventing himself in the present, Jerome’s interest in his own past lies largely with the power of the imagination to shape—and reshape—a human life.¹ His autobiographical confession unfolds in a series of dreamily shifting scenes, as vibrant in emotional tone as they are rich in sensory detail. The remembered landscape conveys the tenor of the former life, even as the terrain of memory itself buckles and folds: in the desert he once fancied Roman allurements; in Rome he now fancies desert delights. Mobile displacements of pleasures thus make space for desire while transforming both topography and chronology.² Defined by mutual lack, desert and Rome, past and present, become (by mutual attraction) almost one topos, a savage habitation that is also the no-place where a sublime eros burns bright.³

As Jerome rewrites his past, he reinscribes the desert on his body, roughly effacing the soft pallor of Rome: “my skin from long neglect had become like Ethiopian flesh (squalida cutis situm Aethiopicae carnis adduxerat).” The scene bends back on itself, as his savagely “burning mind”—itself a desert product—in turn converts the almost intolerably bleak solitude of sandy wastes into a stage crowded with foregone delights: “I often found myself amidst bevies of girls (choris . . . puellarum),” he reminisces boldly (Ep. 22.7). In this fantastic desert that is also the site of Roman pleasures, Jerome appears virtually indistinguishable from the voluptuous bands of chorus girls, a confusion not repressed but intensified by the text. His skin weathered in the sun-scorched desert, the hermit has become as dark—and perhaps thereby as beautiful—as the sun-scorched bride of the Song of Songs (cf. Song 1.6),⁴ whose naked desire he will, later in this same letter, commend to the girl Eustochium in terms exceeding even the Song’s abundant eroticism (Ep. 22.25).⁵ First, however, he abandons himself fleetingly to a still more exuberant identification with another sensuously, indeed sinfully, female biblical figure: “Helpless, I cast myself at the feet of Jesus, I watered them with my tears, I wiped them with my hair, and then I subdued my rebellious body with weeks of abstinence” (cf. Luke 7.38). Beating his breast and weeping copiously in the queerly feminized and darkly exoticized literary persona of his own construction,⁶ Jerome quickly returns to the opening verses of the Song of Songs, now with an explicit citation, as he sings joyously to his Lord: “because of the scent of thy ointments we will run after thee” (Ep. 22.7; cf. Song 1.3). The words of the Song’s lover and her maidens, directly voiced by Jerome, thus supplement the account of foot washing. The fragrant oils initially elided in his abstinent citation of the Lukan text mingle again with the foot washer’s tears, and the mutely weeping woman is fractured, pluralized, and dispersed in dancing choruses of maidenly celebration—“bevies of girls” fit to accompany the Savior’s bride, none other than Jerome himself, now more than ever one of the girls.⁷ Authorial “fancy” is no longer worldly but rather densely biblical, as Jerome refashions his desire ascetically by rewriting the desert as a voluptuous scriptural text, thereby also reinscribing Scripture as a teeming desert of delights. Fact or fantasy? History or romance? Sexuality or sublimation? In the text of his own recollected life, Jerome dissolves such distinctions.

What of Jerome’s other Lives—the holy biographies of Paul, Malchus, and Hilarion? “Are the Lives romances?” queried E. Coleiro in 1957, wondering aloud “whether Jerome meant the Lives to be considered as history or fiction.” Skittishly, Coleiro concludes that, although Jerome certainly cannot have intended that his saintly biographies be read as novels, they do make for rather bad history while exuding considerable “romantic charm.”⁸ Coleiro stands in a tradition of scholarship that has attempted to discipline Jerome’s disturbingly labile hagiographic compositions by giving them a respectable place within literary history, identifying them as variations on conventional genres of history, biography, or aretalogy and keeping the romance’s troubling fictionality (not to mention its seemingly unmentionable eroticism) at arm’s length wherever possible.⁹ His sensitive reading of the Hieronymian Lives, however, partly subverts his own conclusion. In order to classify Jerome’s Lives as “history”—or, more specifically, “biography”—he must demonstrate the (lamentable?) compatibility of “the more fanciful methods of Jerome” with contemporaneous historiography, which seemingly admitted “the possibility of non-historical additions,” blurring the “line between reality and legend,” introducing details that served a prurient curiosity more than a desire for accuracy, and frequently sacrificing narrative coherence for the vividness of swiftly shifting scenes that remain loosely linked, at best, not only with one another but also with the broader trajectory of “contemporary history.”¹⁰ “It is like the disconnected glimpses of a hidden sky that one would get if a cloud covering the whole length and breadth of it were to break up in parts and let one see a few patches of what is beyond,” muses Coleiro.¹¹ Idealized “heroes” are dramatically depicted and “overstress is conspicuous,” he continues.¹² Indeed, Jerome’s Lives, with “their appeal to the imagination and their romantic associations,” are (he admits) “delightful works of art.” If not quite granting them the status of “romances,” Coleiro is willing to catalogue their distinctly “romantic” aspects: “the use of the weird,” the delight in presenting “the reader continually with unexpected situations,” “the spirit of adventure,” and above all the “taste for description.”¹³ Jerome is especially adept, as Coleiro reads him (reading him well), at using description to convey a particular feeling: “the reader sees the scene under the influence of that sentiment.”¹⁴ Nonetheless, “there is no doubt that [Jerome] intended the Lives to be considered as history.” “Such considerations lead us to reject the opinion that the Lives are romances,” intones Coleiro; “fundamentally, they represent historical truth.”¹⁵

As a hagiographer, Jerome is, then, a master of romance but a lousy historian. All the same, we must read him for his history and resist the lure of his romance, eschewing “entertainment” in favor of “information,” insists Coleiro. A dauntingly ascetic interpretive practice is here recommended. And perhaps we would do well to take the advice, even to take it to excess. Reading “romance” as “history” and writing “history” as “romance” may indeed be the genre-bending technique by which Jerome not merely blurs but effectively dissolves the distinction between “reality and legend” (or fantasy)—thereby rendering the concept of an extratextual “historical truth” virtually irrelevant. Ascetic “(in)formation,” grounded in refusing the tempting reduction of “imagination and feeling” to a merely “entertaining” superficiality, may be exactly what Jerome intends for his readers.¹⁶

But what clues does Jerome himself offer us concerning his hagiographic intentions? As it happens, the three canonical Hieronymian Lives are all mentioned in the self-entry with which Jerome immodestly concludes his catalogue of Christian writers, entitled On Famous Men. Why not, then, begin there in re-posing the question of the hagiographer’s generic purposes? Jerome’s interest in this innovative literary-historical composition does not lie in correlating Christian writings with “Gentile” genres but rather in delineating the emerging corpus of distinctly Christian literature (On Famous Men, preface) and the rise of a new class of Christian men of letters—best represented by Jerome himself.¹⁷ This overt authorial agenda, however, is not necessarily a problem. It may even offer valuable clues for students of Jerome’s hagiography, inciting fresh interpretations of what is perhaps after all best read as a “new” kind of writing—created not ex nihilo but through inventive recyclings of materials borrowed from already overlapped traditions of historical, biographical, aretalogical, martyrological, and novelistic literature. Jerome’s list of his own written works—presumably chronological—begins with the Life of Paul the Hermit and concludes (apart from a final, looser reference to his Bible translations, countless unpublished letters to Paula and Eustochium, and work-in-progress) with the works On the Captive Monk and The Life of the Blessed Hilarion (On Famous Men 135). Two of his conventionally identified hagiographies are, then, also designated by their author as Lives. Taking the form of a rhetorical inclusio, they neatly bracket the list of Jerome’s polemical treatises, published letters, and historical, exegetical, and homiletic writings. If the Lives seem thus to claim a certain prominence in his own oeuvre, it is striking that Jerome credits only one among his Christian literary predecessors, namely, Athanasius of Alexandria, with authorship of a Life—the Life of Antony the Hermit (On Famous Men 87).¹⁸ Does Jerome understand the ascetic Life as a distinctive Christian literary “genre,” and, if so, where does this “genre” originate, what does it include, and how does he intend it to be read?

The hints supplied by On Famous Men draw us into the hagiographic texts themselves. In introducing the earliest of his Lives, the Life of Paul (written circa 374), Jerome acknowledges that it is “partly true” that Antony was the “originator” or “head” (caput) of eremitic asceticism. “Partly I say,” he clarifies, “for the fact is not so much that Antony preceded the rest as that they all derived from him the necessary stimulus (ab eo omnium incitata sunt studia).” Jerome goes on to make it abundantly clear that Paul of Thebes, the hero of his own Life, did, in his view, precede Antony as the “leader” or “first” (princeps) in the eremitic venture (Life of Paul 1). In what sense, then, can Antony be understood as the “originator” or the “stimulus” for the ascetic endeavors of “all”? Jerome, I would suggest, has here deliberately confused the “Life” with the “life”: his subtly displaced, but easily recognizable, claim is that it is the textual Life of Antony (transmitted by “both Greek and Roman writers,” as he goes on to note),¹⁹ rather than the hermit Antony’s living example, that provides the “stimulus” or “incitement” not to asceticism per se but, more importantly, to hagiography. We should not miss the payoff of this rhetorical sleight of hand. In the Life of Paul, Jerome implicitly inscribes the Life of Antony as a “source” (a reading that will prove extraordinarily influential)²⁰ only so that he—thus incited—may make himself the “first” author of holy Lives.²¹ His seeming compliment to Athanasius, who remains unnamed here and elsewhere in Jerome’s Lives (if not in his catalogue of Christian writers), is thus written with the left hand. If hagiography is a genre, from Jerome’s perspective it is a genre of his own imaginative invention. Athanasius’s work is merely the provocation—the pretext, one might say.²²

Indeed, if Hieronymian hagiography is a genre, it is a genre always being invented. The Lives of Paul and Hilarion are intertextually linked through their common (if also strategically differentiated) construal of the Life of Antony as their literary point of departure—a linkage further strengthened by the explicit reference to the Life of Paul in the Life of Hilarion. The same is not true of On the Captive Monk. Yet this not-quite-Life of Malchus sidles up cozily enough to the Life of Hilarion in Jerome’s On Famous Men, and indeed the oriental setting and overt historicism of On the Captive Monk (described by Jerome as a warm-up exercise for a future church-historical narrative) may be seen to anticipate the Life of Hilarion’s ambition to convey a broad history of eastern monasticism in which Syria-Palestine takes its rightful place. At the same time, On the Captive Monk is arguably the least metahistorical and most explicitly romantic of Jerome’s three saintly biographies, reproducing the plot line and rhetorical style of the ancient novel with parodic near-exactitude. In these respects, it draws closer to the Life of Paul, while also sharply distancing itself from the latter’s mythical flights of fancy, as well as from the focus on the miraculous characteristic of the Life of Hilarion. The point is that Jerome’s hagiographic writings exceed and contradict even his own lightly insinuated generic definitions and refuse, collectively, to stabilize into a single literary form. Previous scholarly studies strongly suggest (not least where failing to achieve consensus) that the Lives are each generic hybrids, emerging in the interplay of already distinctly hybridized literary genres. Beyond that, I am suggesting, these ambiguously overlapped texts are also remarkably dissimilar to one another, to put it simply. Nor can their differences be easily smoothed away by plotting a linear development toward a single, culminating “end.”²³ The reader of Jerome’s three hagiographic compositions is, rather, left with the impression of an ongoing, even restless experimentation at work in these texts.

Hieronymian hagiography is, thus, a remarkably plastic genre. Possibly it is even a genre defined by its irreducible plasticity, which (by effectively refusing the contrast with “real life”) exposes and exploits the promising fictiveness and malleability of any “life,” remaining stubbornly resistant even to literary devices of normalization. Fact or fantasy? History or romance? What is a true story, who is a holy man? These are questions that Jerome’s saintly Lives continue to incite, while successfully deferring conclusive answers. At this point, a “deferential” (which is also to say, a “differential”) reading of Hieronymian hagiography may be just what is required, for would-be saints and other shifty subjects of phantasmatic desire. There is, there can be, no end to the incitement to write and read holiness, to discover new “queerings” of romance,²⁴ further intensifications of erotic longing within the operations of sublimation. From Jerome’s perspective (as I here imagine it), there are always more Lives to be found and lost—multiplied, fractured, and destroyed—in the savage (dis)habitation, the prolific specula(riza)tions, of hagiography’s fluid literary imaginary.

The Queer Life of Paul the Hermit

Both art and criticism compensate for the surrender of physical sexuality by providing imaginative gratifications that have their own attractiveness. Freud argued that beauty . . . represented a sublimation of sexuality, a rerouting of transgressive energies along socially acceptable lines; and while this seems a decidedly modern view of the matter, I would argue that we can in fact locate the germ of sublimation, the beginnings of a modern understanding, in ascetic art and its cultural interpretation. As one among countless examples, I want to focus on a picture by Sasetta (c.1400–1450) . . . depicting . . . the meeting between Antony and Paul the Hermit. . . . The compensation I am hunting for does not withhold itself, for the meeting between the two saints represents a momentary relief from the intense solitude suffered by each; their holy embrace provides, in fact, not only an affirmation of the worthiness of the ascetic life, but an astonishing interval of sensation, an unrepeatable break amid the unrelieved decades of self, or rather t...