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c h a p t e r 2 The Church Fathers and the Embodied Bride If Tertullian had humbled virgins by marrying them to Christ, the subsequent tradition would attempt to transform sponsa Christi into a title of supreme honor, concealing the defeat at the heart of this persona. Occasionally we catch a glimpse of the process of metamorphosis. The anonymous continuator of Perpetua’s journal describes her entrance into the amphitheatre: “Perpetua followed behind, with a clear gait as a matron of Christ, beloved of God.”1 As Thomas Heffernan points out, this is the first occurrence of Christ as the celestial bridegroom to appear in Christian hagiography.2 Its application to Perpetua is nevertheless tinged with a kind of irony. The woman whose love of Christ transformed her from a matron into a gladiator ended her days in the ring as would a gladiator, but remained a wife after all. On the basis of shared Montanist beliefs, a number of scholars have advanced that Tertullian was the editor of the passion, hence determining its final form.3 Even if this is a mistake, the tone of the anonymous continuator may suggest a wry truth buried in the error. Cyprian: Of Makeup and Adultery Three decades after Tertullian, Cyprian, bishop of Carthage (d. 258), also had occasion to take up his pen against the city’s virgins over the issue of dress. At first glance, his writings suggest that the virginal stock had risen considerably since Tertullian’s time. In any event, Cyprian deviates from the belittling strategies of Tertullian, his main source, in order to emphasize the consecrated virgin ’s distinction. His treatise On the Dress of Virgins is addressed to his female Church Fathers 31 subjects “whose glory, as it is more eminent, excites the greater interest. This is the flower of the ecclesiastical seed, the grace and ornament of spiritual endowment, a joyous disposition, the wholesome and uncorrupted work of praise and honour, God’s image answering to the holiness of the Lord, the more illustrious portion of Christ’s flock.”4 Cyprian is also quick to assign extra merit to virgins in the afterlife, though this privilege was, as we shall see, only definitively secured in the fourth century.5 Virgins alone among women have escaped Eve’s curse of subjection. Only they will be permitted to follow the lamb.6 The singular glory of the virgin state is only surpassed by martyrdom.7 Despite the pronounced debt to Tertullian, however, Cyprian is much more concerned with the possibility of sexual transgressions with men than miscegenation with angels. Thus while the rhetoric of the vita angelica is prominent, even including a fleeting profession of equality with men, this elevated state is stripped of all of the heady freedoms.8 Whether out of genuine deference for the virgin state or for reasons of his own, Cyprian clearly believes that the less said about the prehistoric unions between virgins and angels the better. Thus while concurring with Tertullian’s allegation that the apostate angels were the evil geniuses behind cosmetics, Cyprian evades the question of how the wicked peddlers arrived on earth in the first place, simply relating that “lowered to the contagions of earth, they forsook their heavenly vigour.”9 But whether as husbands or as purveyors of satanic beauty aids, the result of their interference is everywhere apparent in the false colors women apply to change their appearance, destroying God’s image in them. In so doing, women align themselves with the forces backing these suspect products because “everything which comes into being is God’s work, everything which is changed is the devil’s.” It is an unforgivable breach of virginal modesty: “For although you may not be immodest among men, and are not unchaste with your seducing dyes, yet when those things which belong to God are corrupted and violated, you are engaged in a worse adultery.”10 Cyprian is invoking a presumptive celestial marriage through the language of sexual transgression. So while the sordid couplings between angels and antediluvian virgins are expunged, the present-day virgins are nevertheless depicted as uniting themselves with the devil in more subtle ways through cosmetic adulteration. This adultery is clearly damnable in Cyprian’s eyes, who anticipates God’s response as, “‘This is not my work, nor is this our image. You have polluted your skin with a false medicament, you have changed your hair with an adulterous colour, your face is violently taken possession of...

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