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Virgins on the cutting-room floor
Excerpt from Chapter Eight: In A Certain Way Unbodily
The generations immediately following Paul were an era of tumult and violence on the one hand, with the Roman overthrow and destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 CE and the ever-expanding campaigns of authoritarian persecution against the rapidly-growing cult of Jesus, and concerted efforts at monotheist solidification on the other, as evinced by processes like the gathering of the canonical Gospels and the generation of the rabbinical writings we call the Talmud. In the shadow of a vast pagan empire ("pagan" in this sense meaning nothing more or less than non-monotheist), Judaism and Christianity alike struggled to maintain a sense of continuity, to assert their own sacred law in the face of the imposed secular law of Rome, and to encourage the belief and development of the faithful.
Part of the Christian response to all the tumult was to continue the Pauline project of teaching Christians how to be more distinctively Christian. Now that Jesus had proclaimed obsolete the old laws of Jewish practice, there was a very real need for material means of demonstrating one's principles and one's adherence to the tenets of Christian virtue. People of all backgrounds—the Greek sophrosyne and the manly Roman virtue of severitas were differently metaphysical in their implications than the observance of Jewish halakah, but not necessarily less so—were accustomed to behaving in ways that provided outward manifestations of their inner faith. All of these were ways for believers to participate socially in their beliefs, to generate community and empathy through making common, even communal lived experience out of ideology and doctrine. In the Christian milieu, where flesh had become equal to corruption and marriage was clearly the less desirable fallback position for those who could not withstand the rigors of a more stringent discipline, sexual continence, including lifelong virginity, rapidly emerged as a primary Christian practice.
As a point of distinction, the refusal of sex fit the Christian model perfectly. It was egalitarian, for one thing. It didn't matter if you were male or female, penniless or rolling in money, a king or a slave. Everyone had a body, and anyone who was willing to try could at least sometimes succeed in denying their appetites even if they couldn't eliminate them altogether. It also perfectly fit the idea that the spirit was inherently more important than the flesh. To refuse the "common slur of the marriage bed" also allowed the Christian believer to pull back publicly from the priorities of the "present age," hinting that rather than putting his or her stock in her family and children, the believer was holding out for the second coming of Jesus instead.
Universally available, yet difficult enough that attaining it brought significant merit, celibacy, and specifically the lifelong virginity that became the ultimate expression of this renunciation, was a nearly ideal solution to the problem of distinctive religious behavior. It was also a nearly ideal solution to the ever-present problem of how one might deal with the troublesome constants of sexuality and gender difference. Jesus preached that in the kingdom of God there would be no male and no female, implying a transcendence of the gendered body and of biological sexuality. Virginity and celibacy allowed believers the illusion of genderlessness and asexuality on earth.
This gender egalitarianism, however, was strictly limited. On the one hand, Christianity was far more inclusive of women than the other religions that existed at the time. Unlike in pagan or Jewish tradition—Rabbinical wisdom of the era held that women were so unsuited to religious learning that teaching a woman Torah was tantamount to teaching her tiflut, stupidity—Jesus himself, by including both Mary Magdalene and his own mother, had set the example that Christian women were to be allowed to learn, pray, discuss, and teach. In the Christian communities of the first and early second centuries, women did participate in the religious community in those arenas, as well as in contributing their wealth and traditionally female domestic skills.
Many women of the early Church must have greeted the opportunity with glee. Many of them would have assumed Christian celibacy with equal alacrity. Celibacy, assumed at whatever period in life (many women became celibate when they became widows), granted a reprieve from wifely duties and any further pregnancies, as well as giving women the time and latitude to participate in Christian learning. Virginity went celibacy one better, and additionally allowed women to forego the guilt of perpetuating the cycle of birth and death from which Christianity wished to separate itself.
Unsurprisingly, as this female freedom to learn, to study, to teach, to be a part of the development of Christian communities revealed that women could be equally as fervent and just as well suited to the religious and intellectual life as men, men became uncomfortable. The firmly patriarchal products of a firmly patriarchal culture, the leaders of the early Church felt it incumbent upon themselves to curb, or at least to control, this female freedom.
Eliminating women from the Church was not a viable option, particularly as an increasing number of wealthy widows brought their fortunes with them when they allied themselves to the nascent Church. But neither was it a viable option to allow them to acquire too much privilege, lest they make too many executive decisions about their own standing and participation, or define the terms of their own religious and social existence in a way that would jeopardize the comfortable normalcy of male control.
Part of putting women back in their place required addressing the mechanism by which they were increasingly leaving it, namely, virginity. Putting restrictions and conditions on virginity, yoking it directly and solely to femaleness and femaleness directly to sin, and reinterpreting Jesus' egalitarian vision of genderlessness so that it could not truly be applied in the present world became part of the work of the many theologians who wrote on virginity. As a result of its multiple functions, the literature of Christian virginity is a mixture of many things. On one level an explication of Christian theology and doctrine, it also constitutes an appeal to a radically different vision of what it might mean to be holy. At the same time, it is an elaborate apologetics for the institutional control of women by hierarchies made up of men.
An excellent case in point is De virginibus velandis (On the Veiling of Virgins) by Tertullian (circa 160-220 CE), the first of the Latin-speaking church Fathers. As with Paul's letter to the Corinthians, De virginibus velandis was written to address a real-world problem. The problem, in this case, was the refusal of certain Christian virgins in Carthage to wear veils on their heads while in church. Veiling the head, neck, and to some degree the shoulders of adult women was considered part of feminine modesty in Carthage, as it was throughout much of the Mediterranean at the time.
At stake in the Carthaginian virgins' refusal to veil was not merely the rejection of a regional norm but something much greater. By refusing to veil, these women were essentially refusing to be identified as women. They had forsworn being submitted to men in marriage, had given up the bearing of children, and not coincidentally had never entered into the shameful state of active sexuality that went along with either one. They had (or so we surmise from reading between the lines of Tertullian's angry condemnation) had the temerity to believe themselves absolved of the conditions which they understood to underlie the second-class citizenhood that made it necessary for them to veil their heads.
Tertullian was having none of it. Virgins were females and therefore women, he insisted, just as boys were males and therefore men. The "natural" order of things, in which the male is the head of the female, had to be preserved as part of the self-same divine law that had produced first Adam, then Eve. The idea that virgins might constitute "a third class, a monstrosity with a head of its own" was absolutely out of the question.
Because virgins were women, Tertullian reasoned, they were therefore subject to the same transitional states of social and bodily identity as any other woman. Through terminological analysis, Tertullian comes to the conclusion that since marriage was what commonly made the difference between whether someone was called a girl or a woman, then logically marriageability and not actual marriage was the critical fact that determined womanhood. In the culture of Tertullian's time, marriageability meant physical maturity, the bloom of young womanhood with its fulsome curves and menstrual proof of reproductive readiness. For Tertullian, these were precisely the characteristics that made a girl a woman, imbuing her irrevocably with the stain of woman-ness, of mulieritas. A qua potuerunt filiae hominum concupiscientiam sui adducere, "when daughters of men can induce concupiscience," he writes, "and are capable of being married (...et nuptias pati), they are no longer girls but women.
As women, they are at once both dangerous and endangered. Their beauty is enough to seduce the angels into falling, Tertullian relates, implying that if angels cannot resist the sight of unveiled feminine pulchritude, men can certainly be expected do no better. This is not mere metaphor. In passages whose import becomes critical to the future of the Christian understanding of virginity, Tertullian claims that sight alone, the mere act of a woman being seen in a sexual way and knowing that she is being thus observed constitutes a sort of sexual immorality (literally stuprum, often glossed as "fornication") and is quite sufficient to compromise her virginity. Ex illo enim virgo desinit, ex quo potest non esse, he writes, "a virgin ceases to be a virgin from the time that it is possible for her not to be one."
Virginity had always been perceived as a damageable commodity, something that a family had to guard the way it would guard a flock of sheep from the wolves, but this assertion represented an altogether different order of paranoia. Now virginity was a Schroedinger's cat, a quantum creature that even the act of observation could kill. Shielding virginity from examination by putting on the veil was part of preserving it as well as part of protecting men and angels alike from its temptations. Accepting one's womanhood as an automatic source of sexual culpability was made an inextricable part of virginity.
Further, Tertullian made it plain that it was incumbent upon women, even women who had no intention of ever being actively sexual, to act in deference to their mulieritas, their sexually attractive "woman-ness," taking responsibility for keeping the temptations of their bodies suitably under wraps. Even having done so, she was to defer always to the possibility that she might create an obstacle to someone who was, by virtue of sex, her automatic superior. Chastened, veiled, and thus visibly female, virgins could not continue to act as if they lived in a world in which the words of Galatians 3:28, "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus," might literally come true.
This seems to have been an issue of some importance to Tertullian. Under the guise of gender equality, he repeatedly reinscribes gender difference. Women are explicitly inferior to men as a bedrock condition of their existence (God is the head of man, man is the head of woman), but nonetheless it would be unfair for women virgins to be permitted any outward mark of honor for their virginity since male virgins, those continent self-made "eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of Heaven" do not get to do the same. Tertullian does his best to make the very question ridiculous, saying that if virgin women got to go around with their heads unveiled, then no doubt men would want to wear something special on their heads too, and perhaps would take to such excesses as wearing their hair in curls like the Germans, or tattooing themselves like the Britons. Since no man would do anything of the kind to draw attention to his superior male virginity (or so Tertullian insists), why on earth would a woman think herself entitled to draw attention to her inferior version?
What becomes clear during this discussion is a conceptual difference that becomes all the more critical as the church develops: for Tertullian male virginity and female virginity are not the same thing. Virginity only appears to be a gender-neutral attribute. In reality, the sexual continence of the spadones voluntarii, the "voluntary eunuchs," was simply not considered to possess the same volitional or spiritual character as the virginity of women. Implied in Tertullian's descriptions of them both is the sense that male virginity is a matter of strong action, a manly and willful prerogative exercised with considerable effort by creatures whose natural desire was indisputably stronger than women's. Female virginity, on the other hand, was not so much a matter of action as inaction, an inherent but fragile quality which women carried within them from birth as a matter of natural course and would retain by default unless it were ended by a man.
It didn’t seem to matter to Tertullian that this effortless, childlike, and furthermore imaginary absence of female libido or sexual feeling stood somewhat at odds with the accepted medical wisdom of the day, to say nothing of the intrinsically sexual womanly self-awareness that Tertullian claimed came along with female reproductive maturity. Tertullian wanted very much for women to be inherently unobtrusive creatures, and as he goes to some pains to prove, virgins are women. But at the same time, Tertullian felt it was impossible for women to be that way: mulieritas meant that a woman became an agent of chaos merely by allowing herself to be seen. A woman is always suspect, always a source of danger: women's bodies "cast stumbling blocks as far as heaven" according to De virginibus velandis. To Tertullian, who in another work characterized all daughters of Eve as "the Devil's gateway," any woman's body was a symbol for all the looming perils of the constantly-desiring flesh, no matter how virginal or how veiled the individual woman's flesh might be.
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