The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [81]
What may be most valuable for modern people in the accounts of virgin martyrs is the depth of psychological truth that they contain. An account of the second-century virgin martyr Saint Barbara states that her father, a wealthy man, built “a strong, two-windowed tower in which he did keep and close her so that no man should see her great beauty.” When Barbara escapes his control—surreptitiously baptized a Christian, she convinces the workmen to add a third window, so that she may meditate on the Trinity—her father’s rage is without bounds. It is he who betrays her to government authorities for refusing to worship pagan gods. When their tortures, including a scourging and burning, do not work, but only seem to strengthen Barbara’s resolve to pray, the men beat her with hammers and lop off her breasts. Finally, it is her father who drags her up a mountain by her hair and beheads her. He is then struck dead by lightning. A dysfunctional relationship, to say the least. In our day, Barbara and her dad might end up on the front pages, fodder for the “true crime” market.
And where is Barbara’s power in all this? The oddly satisfying logic of hagiographical construction makes her the patron saint not only of stonemasons, architects, and prisoners but of electricians and artillery gunners—anyone, in fact, in danger of sudden death. Here the depth of Barbara’s radical subversion is made clear. While she is most commonly depicted holding her tower, she is also one of the very few women saints who is sometimes pictured holding the eucharistic elements, a chalice and host. A person in danger of dying without receiving the last rites from a priest may pray for Barbara’s intercession, and it’s taken care of; she substitutes for the priest and the sacrament itself.
One would think that Barbara’s priestly attributes, or those of Petronilla, a first-century martyr whose “usual emblem,” according to the Oxford Dictionary of Saints, is “a set of keys, presumably borrowed from St. Peter,” would make them favorites of Catholic feminists; instead, like the other virgin martyrs, they are largely forgotten, considered an embarrassment by women still smarting from the prayers of the old Roman Missal, which managed to be both sappy and insulting in giving thanks that God “didst bestow the victory of martyrdom on the weaker sex.” But to forget a martyr is to put her through another martyrdom. Eric Partridge’s Origins gives as the origins of our English word “martyr” both the Latin memor (mindfulness) and the Greek martys (witness); which suggests that when we are no longer mindful of a martyr, we lose her witness, we render her suffering meaningless.
I believe that the relevance of the virgin martyrs for today may rest in what one scholar of the early church, Francine Cardman, terms their “defiance of the conventions of female behavior,” a defiance that their belief in Christ made possible. Knowing that they were loved by Christ gave them the strength to risk a way of life that was punishable by death (under Roman law, both a soldier’s refusal to fight, and a woman’s refusal to marry and breed for the Empire, were treasonous offenses). That the virgin martyrs have been in a sense betrayed by the very church that sanctified them may be clearly seen in the fact that, although they were executed for rejecting marriage, by the time of the Victorian Age,