Askesis and the Appearance of Holiness

A telling feature of many of the recent titles and subtitles in fields related to late ancient studies is the appeal of the word “making”: the making of orthodoxy, the making of a heretic, the making of a saint, the making of asceticism, making sex, making men, and so on.¹ The use of the word “making” is so appropriate because it communicates an understanding of the “constructed” or historically contingent quality of the phenomenon, personality, or idea examined. This seems particularly crucial for those interested in the social aspects of religious behavior and ideology.

This paper is indebted to several of the studies just mentioned, and is shaped by Peter Brown’s observation that much of late ancient literature functioned to make persons into classics,² as well as to the idea that texts sometimes participate in the process of “making up people,”³ that is, they create and confer new identities and the classifications by which behavior and conformity can be measured.⁴ Specifically, I will examine the image of the Christian virgin as delineated in the male-authored texts on virginity from the fourth and early fifth century, in order to show how the rhetoric of appearance and lifestyle might be integrated into a social analysis of the “making” of the early Christian ascetic ideal. My analysis will thus have a fairly wide focus on a group of late ancient texts, of similar genre, which share much common material and argumentation even if they are distinguished significantly by their particular contexts and audiences as well as by important differences in the type of living arrangements or organizations reflected in each text. While close to two dozen sources from the early fourth to the early fifth century could be fruitfully examined,⁵ I will rely primarily on works of Jerome, Athanasius, John Chrysostom, Basil of Ancyra, Ambrose of Milan, and Eusebius of Emesa. I am interested in the ways in which the rhetoric and ideology of virginity found in the standard treatments of virginity confer identity through classifying lifestyle models, and how this process relates to male authority and to the construction of heretical deviance. If we understand the de virginitate to be at least in part a means by which ascetic aspirations of individual women are channeled into an acceptable pattern of behavior that confirms the authority and virtue of male leaders and bishops, then the fixation on decorum, the fear of deception by false appearance, and the warnings against heretics and flatterers—all standard features of the genre—become essential to ascetic discourse.⁶

As Kate Cooper has recently observed, asceticism permitted a new system of “social ranking” for women at a time when social rank and prestige seemed locked into the traditional categories of wealth, family, and marriage.⁷ I will argue that in the numerous works devoted to the praise of virginity and the regulation of the virginal life, we find both a firming up of the institutional contours of the virgin’s lifestyle as well as a negotiation of her own new social identity in terms of officially defined choices which are “naturalized,” or perhaps we should say “supernaturalized,” by being grounded in the theology of the angelic life and espousal to Christ.⁸ In other words, the virgin’s status is taken out of the realm of the merely personal or bodily by means of the ideology of virginity, which locates virginity in the realm of the angels and paradise and betrothes the virgin to Christ himself. All of the virgin’s behaviors and the appearance of her body itself become, in this context, emblem-atic of her social status and her allegiances, rather than the simple results of individual whim or undisciplined self-styling.

The works praising virginity typically include detailed instructions for proper conduct and activities by which the virgin is distinguished from “the world” and from “worldly” persons. Indeed, such directives are so common, both in the genre and in ancient moral discourse, that it is easy to miss their profound role in the delineation of virginal identity. Allow me briefly to review...