The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [80]
It should come as no surprise that the virgin martyrs are both admired and feared for their intelligence, and for their articulate tongues; Catherine of Alexandria, for example, is the patron saint of philosophers because she converted the fifty philosophers who were sent to explain to her the error of her ways. No surprise, either, that they are often tortured by having their tongues torn out; it’s one way to silence a woman. But a theme of many of the stories is the martyr’s miraculous ability to remain lucid, even eloquent, throughout her tortures; to retain even the capacity for worship (expressed best in these memorable words: “plunged into a cauldron of burning pitch, she lived for three days, singing praises”). While this outrages the modern consciousness, it also demonstrates that the silencing of holy women is not easily accomplished.
Accounts of virgin martyrs are so full of what one critic has termed “imaginative chaff” that they’ve typically been dismissed by church historians, labeled “dubious,” “spurious,” “a farrago of impossibilities.” To appreciate the relevance of the virgin martyrs for our own time, we need to ask not whether or not the saint existed but why it might have been necessary to invent her; we need not get hung up on determining to what extent her story has been embellished by hagiographers but rather ask why the stories were so popular in the early church, and also what we have lost in dismissing them. A case in point is Thecla, a virgin and, by some accounts, a martyr of the second century. Her cult was officially suppressed by the Catholic Church in 1969—she is thought never to have existed—and few but scholars are aware of her today. But for many years in the early church she was the most well-known and beloved of female saints.
One can easily see how Thecla’s story would have appealed to women in a church that had begun to consolidate power in its male clergy. Converted to Christianity by the apostle Paul, she becomes an apostle herself. When Paul refuses to baptize her, fearing that because of her youth and beauty she will not remain celibate, Thecla baptizes herself. Paul, having learned his lesson, commissions her to preach. Thecla is one of several miracle-working women mentioned in apocryphal acts of the apostles, and as scholar Gail Paterson Corrington writes in Women in Early Christianity, “the equality of the female convert to the male apostle is frequently demonstrated both by her assumption of his role and functions (teaching, baptizing, preaching) and by the continuity of her apostolic work without his assistance.”
Surely it is significant that the books of “acts” of these young women, which had wide circulation in the early church, were based on the “acts” of the apostles, which in turn were based on the gospel accounts of the ministry of Jesus. All of these stories served to incorporate the hopes of an embattled and vulnerable Christian minority. Their stories often strike me as Christianity of the most radical sort; these seemingly powerless girls were able to do what Jesus did, and change the world around them. Irene, for example, a first-century martyr, raises her father from the dead after his attempt to kill her (by having her dragged by wild horses—a typical grotesquerie) results in his own death. She brings back a child from the dead, and later raises herself from the dead, an event which results in the conversion to Christianity of many thousands.
Popular devotion to the saints has often been a kind of shadow religion, more or less ignored by the official church, by theologians and scholars. In