The Sex Lives of Saints: An Erotics of Ancient Hagiography (review)

As the author herself notes, the startling title of this book is "lightly ironic" but not oxymoronic (1); when understood in conjunction with the subtitle, it alerts the reader to one of the book's major premises, namely, that narrow definitions of "sex" cannot account for the "exuberant eroticism" (1) that pervades ancient Christian asceticism, particularly in hagiographical writing. Rather than construing "sex" as genitally organized activity and thus interpreting ancient lives of saints as anti-erotic, Burrus argues that sanctity and eros form a pair. By showing how hagiography positions the saint as a subject of desire and as a desiring subject, Burrus challenges the stark distinctions that are often drawn between theology and sexuality, as well as between the holy and the erotic (and also between male and female). Self-consciously reading "otherwise" by comparison with traditional readings of saints' lives, she has positioned the book as a response both to ancient texts and to the continuing "repressive morality of sexuality" so forcefully analyzed by Foucault in his History of Sexuality. "Transgressing more than a few cherished orthodoxies," Burrus aims "to affirm the holiness of a love that is simultaneously embodied and transcendent, sensual and spiritual, painful and joyous; that may encompass but can by no means be limited to . . . the demands of either biological reproduction or institutionalized marriage; that furthermore resists the reductions of the modern cult of the orgasm" (1–2).

This is a heady agenda, and Burrus's insistent exposure of the excessive and transgressive desire that she detects in hagiography will be unsettling for those who prefer a more positivist practice of historiography. But interpretive discomfort is, I think, part of the power of the book, whose concern is not with anchoring "the facts" but rather with teaching the reader how to see hagiographical texts with new eyes. The book is teacherly, but it is a demanding pedagogy. Those familiar with Burrus's previous work will know that she is expertly informed in feminist theory and theories of gender; here she has expanded her purview to include a wide range of contemporary philosophical writings on desire (Leo Bersani, Georges Bataille, and Jean Baudrillard, to name the most prominent of them). Burrus's interweaving of ancient and modern voices is as meditative as it is analytical, but the overall effect is to induce the reader into an alternative view of what constitutes the allure of the saintly life.

The book builds on the large corpus of scholarly work done in the last twenty years on late ancient sexuality and the body, but it adds its own distinctive contribution by viewing hagiographical literature as a sign of an important moment in the history of the desiring subject. The introduction offers a complex assessment of Foucault's (unfinished) analysis of Christian asceticism, and this clears the way for the author's extension and revision of his position on early Christian morality, namely, that "the eruption of a powerful crosscurrent of asceticized eroticism" (3) in early Christianity was more powerful and more central than Foucault had allowed. In the four chapters that follow, a wide range of hagiographical writing is subjected to minute analysis which exposes these texts as "queer," a term derived from contemporary "queer theory" that designates, on the one hand, a mode of interpretation that investigates the undecidability or shifting of gender categories and identifications, and, on the other, "erotic practices that actively resist and/or put into question the very categories of the 'normal,' the 'conventional,' or the 'natural'" (168, n. 66). "Queer" is not, then, a term of derision or critique. Instead, it points to the unstable and shifting identities (including especially gendered identities) of saints, from Jerome's Paul, Hilarion, and Malchus to the so-called harlot saints Pelagia and Mary of Egypt. It also points to the extremes of saintly human longing as in Jerome's presentation of his friend Paula (in Ep. 108), whose...