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c h a p t e r 1 A Match Made in Heaven The Bride in the Early Church The association between women and consecrated virginity is an ancient one. Moreover, the evidence suggests that women were already drawn to the condition of lifelong virginity, perhaps in part for some of the practical advantages it conferred, without the kind of patriarchal prodding we will witness in the fourth century. But there is little in scripture to foster the exaltation of the virginal state. Paul, who is usually singled out as the original advocate for celibacy, presents the unmarried as better positioned for serving God (1 Cor. 7.32). His reasons are practical: the time was short and people should be preparing for the heavenly kingdom, not raising families. From this perspective, Paul’s counsel on chastity, his tendency to associate marriage with cares for the wife and “tribulation of the flesh” (1 Cor. 7.28), should be considered a branch of what is commonly referred to as the molestiae nuptiarum—a discourse disparaging marriage and women alike. This was standard fare in the philosophical tradition and hence intended for a male audience.1 By the same token, Paul’s comments commending chastity were addressed to the male heads of households. But the men in his audience were not only concerned with their own spiritual integrity: they also held the matrimonial destinies of female dependents in their hands, and some of Paul’s provirginal remarks addressed men in the capacity of guardians of female virgins. In 1 Corinthians 7 it is unclear whether he is addressing a father who has not yet arranged a marriage for his daughter or a newly made husband who has yet to celebrate his nuptials—the occasion for the consummation of a marriage. In either case, he commends the man for preserving the woman’s virginity (1 Cor. 7.36–38). The chill promise of the later pastoral epistles that women “shall be saved through childbearing” (1Tim. 2.15), however, does suggest that there were at least some 10 chapter 1 parties who either consciously or unconsciously excluded women from the privileges of chastity altogether.2 In the mid-first century when Justin Martyr was called upon to defend Christianity against pagan accusations of immorality, he pointed to the many Christians who had voluntarily embraced chastity to counter these charges. But he did this without intonating any particular bias favoring one sex.3 And yet by the time of the apocryphal Acts of Paul and Thecla, which was already in circulation by the end of the second century, a presumed female proclivity for the virgin state is apparent. Paul is portrayed as the consummate apostle for chastity, and his target audience is represented as almost exclusively female. Paul’s dramatic entry into the city of Iconium is staged around his delivery of a set of beatitudes on the peculiar blessedness of virginity.4 Watching from her window, the virgin Thecla is portrayed as being mesmerized, imprisoned by a vagabond—at least according to her hostile mother’s report to Thecla’s fiancé.5 By the end of the century, the North African virgins with whom Tertullian contends are female. There are no female-authored writings to tell us what these women sought in a life of virginity, only the testimony of the church fathers. Fortunately, these men were not coy about the presumed motives of their female audience : in their view, the female vocation to virginity was inseparable from a pronounced aversion to marriage, and patristic authors made the most of this projection. Thus patristic treatises on virginity set a precedent in patterning a version of the molestiae nuptiarum that was specifically tailored to women, dwelling on the wife’s mandatory subjection to her husband and the very real dangers of childbirth.6 These strategies are represented as so effective that many women suddenly seemed to see the matrimonial goblet as half empty and did, in fact, seek to avoid what had hitherto been the manifest destiny of every freeborn woman in the ancient world. These women, like Thecla, were of marriageable age and probably anticipated a battle similar to the one Thecla was forced to wage against her relatives and their matrimonial ambitions. But as irresistible as virginity’s allure may have been, we only have contemporary patristic speculation about decisions that were individualistic and deeply personal. The very fact that so much of the earliest literature on virginity is rooted in contestation over gender...

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