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The Sex Lives of Saints

DIVINATIONS: REREADING LATE ANCIENT RELIGION

Series Editors

Daniel Boyarin
Virginia Burrus
Charlotte Fonrobert
Robert Gregg

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

An Erotics of Ancient Hagiography

Virginia Burrus

Copyright 2004 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

First paperback edition 2008

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4011

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Burrus, Virginia.

The sex lives of saints : an erotics of ancient hagiography / Virginia Burrus.

p. cm. (Divinations : Rereading Late Ancient Religion)

ISBN-978-0-8122-2020-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

1. SexReligious aspectsChristianityHistory of doctrines. 2. Christian hagiographyHistory. I. Title. II. Series

BT708 .B885 2004

Erotic experience is possibly close to sanctity.

Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality

The Sex Lives of Saints? What could such words possibly signify? Surely everyone knows that the repression of erotic desire is the hallmark of Christian sanctity: a sex life is precisely what a proper saint lacks. At most, ascetic erosencoded as yearning for Godmay be seen as the residue of an imperfectly sublimated sexuality. Better yet: it is a merely metaphorical expression for a purely desexualized love. Worse still: it reflects pleasure derived from practices of self-denial rooted in a pathological hatred of the body.

It is difficult simply to contradict such widespread and thus all too easily anticipated doubts. Nonetheless, I find myself moved to pursue a different path of interpretation. The wager is at once intellectual and spiritual: might it be possible to take common knowledge by surprise, to disarm its resigned certainties, to disturb it with the stirrings of a most uncommon love, and thereby to enable a different knowing of both sex and sanctity? My title, though lightly ironic, is not intended to be oxymoronic: ancient Lives of Saints, I suggest, are the site of an exuberant eroticism. Resistance to the pervasive anti-erotic interpretation of hagiography (and of asceticism more generally) is crucial to the excitementor, more conventionally phrased, the significanceof this argument. That sanctity can be restyled as an erotic art, that the holy Life carries us to the extremities of human desire, that (conversely) erotic experience is possibly close to sanctitythese are admittedly queer notions, seductive insinuations, even downright perverse proposals, in relation to traditional readings of the Lives, whether popular or scholarly, literary-historical or doctrinal. I take the risk of transgressing more than a few cherished orthodoxies in the hope of thereby uncovering a theory and practice of eroticism that is responsively attuned to the hallowed texts of the Christian past while also remaining unapologetically attentive to an urgent need of the present momentnamely, 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 (indeed, may at points entail disciplined refusal of) the demands of either biological reproduction or institutionalized marriage; that furthermore resists the reductions of the modern cult of the orgasm. In the stories of saints who steadfastly reject both the comforts and the confinements of conventional roles and relationships (swapping and discarding identities like so many threadbare cloaks), we may discover not only evidence of the historic transformation of desire but also testimony to the transformative power of eros.

If the interests that impel this work are thus revealed to be broadly theoretical and theological, at once undeniably political and inescapably personal, the approach is first and foremost historical, betraying my own disciplinary orientation. The suggestion that hagiography conveys a sublime art of eroticism rather than a repressive morality of sexuality implicitly raises questions and disrupts assumptions about the position of Christianity in the history of sexualitythe by-now conventional label for a wide-reaching scholarly conversation flourishing in the wake of the publication of the first three volumes of Michel Foucaults ambitious (and unfinished) History of Sexuality. Although the subsequent chapters will not cleave closely to an explicitly Foucaultian analysis, here at the outset I want to map the larger historical trajectory of my argument by offering a fresh reading of Foucaults own emplotment of Christianity in the history of desire. If Foucaults thought provides a promising point of departure, it will also draw me into a broader web of contemporary discourses of eroticism, within which I will subsequently situate readings of the hagiographical texts of late antiquity.

The so-called Christian morality is nothing more than a piece of pagan ethics inserted into Christianity. Shall we say then that Christianity did not change the state of things? It is also the question on which this present work turns. In respect to sexuality, how did Christianity change the state of things? What revisions and interruptions in ancient Mediterranean conceptions of erotic pleasure and sexual ethics were introduced with the rise of the church?

The so-called Christian morality to which Foucault refers crystallizes in a sacralized monogamy in which sexuality is a means legitimated by its reproductive end, while pleasure (a necessary evil at best) is shadowed by One of the aims of this book is to make that paradox once again palpable, to explore its tensions, and thereby to begin to free a transformative theology of eros from the stifling grip of a repressive morality of sexuality.

I say that I am perhaps departing from Foucaults script, because Foucault himself is, I think, intriguingly ambivalent. For Foucault, ancient Christian asceticism constitutes both the matrix of modern sexualityand thus the end of a still more ancient ars eroticaand, at the same time, an emergent strategy for escaping sexualitys disciplinary power. Christianityas an ensemble of techniques that historically produces the desiring subjectis, in other words, at once the problem and the promise. The problem is perhaps easier to spot. Foucault locates the distinctiveness of Christianity in the rise of a hermeneutics of the self resting on practices of self-examination and confession in which the problem is to discover

Having relentlessly exposed the circulation of knowledge, power, and pleasure that inheres in such a confessional sexuality, indeed having virtually equated (modern) sexuality with power/knowledge, Foucault may appearas Jean Baudrillard chargesto have rendered himself and his readers captive to a totalizing power of his own discursive fabrication.

Retracing the path of his own, already ancient thought, Foucault thus encounters himself from new angles. In his