Katie Kleinkopf
kathryn.kleinkopf@louisville.edu
The Life of Pelagia of Antioch has long been read in tandem with other “holy harlot” literature of early Christianity. Within these texts, a protagonist assigned female at birth transforms through conversion from an unrepentant prostitute to an extraordinary ascetic. While debate remains around whether or not the women at the centre of these texts represent historical figures or if they were just a way for men to think through female piety, these lives nevertheless remain central to our understanding of Christian femininity in the late ancient world.[1] Because of these readings, the men within the stories tend to slip into the background, discussed primarily as the instrument for constructing and relaying the life of the holy woman. We quickly forget that these men were ascetics in their own right and that their spiritual edification constitutes the stated purpose of the hagiography itself. While we have become accustomed to recognizing the effect of masculinity and the patriarchy on the bodies and lives of women, what about the physicality of men themselves? The stories of the “holy harlots” are not only debates about female gender representation or holiness; they are tales about male performance and, specifically, men’s struggle to perform properly.
Not all stories with women who participate in sex for pleasure and/or profit, however, are the same. Mary of Egypt, the ascetic whose life is read most often in concert with Pelagia of Antioch, is not enslaved and seeks out sex solely for her own gratification; Thaїs is called a harlot at several points within the text, though her enslavement status remains uncertain; finally, Mary the Niece of Abraham does not begin life as a prostitute, but instead flees to a brothel as self-imposed punishment following her rape.[2] As scholars, we must separate these stories from one another in order to understand their purpose and audience. This article focuses on Pelagia as she alone is enslaved, envied for her work, inspires men to queer their behaviour in imitation of her. Crucially, within the Life of Pelagia, the position of enslavement, not merely the work of sex, feminises the male ascetics and the male audiences. Studying this hagiography on its own enables us to access the gender dynamics of the male protagonists of the story in ways that simply do not exist in the other stories of “holy harlots.”
Thus, in order to grasp the hagiography’s unique purpose, we must resist Pelagia’s undeniable allure to focus instead on the male protagonist and their stated male audience.[3] In so doing, I contend that we are better able to grasp the didactic purpose of these texts: teaching those assigned male at birth how to become more perfect in the eyes of God. If we do not see male bodies with all of the freedoms and restrictions they represent, then we miss their transformation and their conceptualisation of queer holiness and ascetic practice.
Within this article, I employ the word “queer” in two primary ways.[4] First, as a means to display the power relationships inherent within any system of gendering, thus highlighting the inherent fluidity therein.[5] No type of gendering is stable.[6] Masculinity itself was particularly in danger of being “lost” in the late ancient world—it was, as Maud Gleason notes, an “achieved” state, not something a person assigned male at birth naturally, or even necessarily, embodied.[7] In the ancient world, one’s gender fluctuated depending on their relationship (socio-economic, familial, political, etc.) to others within their shared space and sphere of influence.[8] The masculine vir wielded power over other feminised men and those assigned female at birth, as well as on the enslaved, whose own gender within this gendered power hierarchy held little to no relation to their physical anatomy. To hold more social, economic, and/or religious power was to be more masculine, and to hold less, more feminine. At the pinnacle of this hierarchy stood God, to whom all Christians were subjugated and, in the eyes of many, enslaved—thus queering all gender as the power dynamics shifted when people related themselves to God instead of just to their fellow human beings.
For this reason, the second way in which I use “queer” is as a linguistic reminder for us as modern readers that people are not cisgender until proven otherwise.[9] It is an attempt to normalise queerness instead of implying otherness or non-normativity.[10] The tales of the “holy harlots,” as demonstrated by their wild popularity, were normative. Just as much as any other ascetic treatise, they established the ideals of what asceticism was and how it should be practiced.[11] No lamentations of “strangeness” about such practices grace this vita, nor does the author indicate that Pelagia’s or Nonnos’s practice in any way disrupts presumed gender categories. We, therefore, must not understand queer asceticism as necessarily minoritised or transgressive. While it may be thrilling to read holy harlots in their tantalizing alterity, I contend that these practices actually became quotidian. The act of beautification was not exotic—it was ordinary and even conventional for the vocations in question.
Within this gendered practice of power, however, we must also not overlook the deep inability of ancient men to somatically comprehend the violence wrought upon bodies not their own: for those women they seek to imitate are not sex workers, as we might think of them in the modern sense, who (in some cases), choose to engage in sexual acts as a legitimate job.[12] Pelagia was a slave, and she remained so throughout the text. Ultimately, I contend that as James the Deacon, the narrator of Pelagia’s tale, and Nonnos the Bishop, who represents the primary protagonist, participate in the romanticised imitation of sexual enslavement to God, they actively queer holiness. Focusing on the bodies of James and Nonnos complicates the narrative of asceticism as the ultimate masculinised ideal and forces modern scholars to confront the spiritual idealisation of queer asceticism and the historical reality of the sexual abuse and forced feminisation of the enslaved.
I begin this article with a discussion of enslavement in the ancient world and why we cannot divorce this identity from the character of Pelagia. In fact, it is her immeasurable dedication to her task as the Devil’s whore from which the male protagonists must learn and through which they themselves are queered, as they take on a similar relationship to their God. Next, I walk the reader through this very act of imitation, analysing how Nonnos himself transforms into a prostitute for God within this very text—for Pelagia is not set before Nonnos to shame him back into his masculinity, but to encourage him to drop that limiting performance. Finally, I examine the structure of this hagiography, revealing that the way the story itself is told walks the audience through how not only the men in the tale, but they themselves, can queer their own practice and become more like Pelagia the Harlot.
Sexual Enslavement
In the world of the ancient Roman Empire, slavery constituted a daily reality. According to some estimates, between eleven and twenty-five percent of the population was enslaved.[13] While enslaved people could hold various jobs, from miner or miller, to prostitute or cook, enslaved people had no authority over their own bodies.[14] Roman enslavers maintained the legal right to engage in sexual activity with those they enslaved whenever they so desired, rendering the question of consent difficult, if not impossible, to access. Despite modern insistence to the contrary, Christianity did not end the practices of sexual abuse or enslavement. In fact, many slaveholding Christians continued to enjoy “casual sexual access to their slaves.”[15] The rape of slaves, though condemned by some Christian moralists, remained a widespread practice throughout late antiquity. Crucially, this sexual abuse continued even if the enslaved person themselves was Christian, as conversion did not result in manumission.[16]
One of the few places where baptism could transform the terms of enslavement in the later Roman Empire was within the system of prostitution. While it is unknown exactly what percent of prostitutes in the ancient world were enslaved, most historians assume that the vast majority were. Under the control of a lupo, or pimp, prostitutes worked in brothels, inns, taverns, bathhouses, and on the stage, turning over their earnings at the end of the day.[17] While Christian leaders began to consider the positions of prostitute and actress sinful and required women to renounce their “profession” before obtaining baptism, such moral positions did not always align with the legal or economic reality.[18] In fact, the conversion of prostitutes caused great concern to lawmakers, as prostitutes’ economic and entertainment value proved indispensable to the maintenance of public order.[19] Given their status as essential workers, and because Christianity forbid its followers from performing on the stage, Valentinian I decreed that actors and prostitutes were only allowed to convert on their deathbeds.[20]
The position of slave, however, carried with it more than a socio-economic status. By reducing a person to their body, to a mere vessel to be used and abused, Romans gendered and sexed all enslaved people female. This means that regardless of their genitalia, a Roman slave could never be classified as male. Not only could a slave legally not experience paternity, but, as Jennifer Glancy recognises, no slave, symbolically, had a phallus.[21] Because a slave was the penetrated party in sexual acts, because they could, as such, have no honour, no status, and no citizenship, they were, regardless of their genitalia, always feminised. Therefore, while modern authors often talk about “male” and “female” slaves in recognition of our own categories of sexed bodies versus gendered practices, no such differentiation existed in the ancient world. When our male authors speak of themselves as slaves of God, we must, then, bear in mind that within this relationship, they do not keep their status as men—they surrender it in their subservience to their heavenly master.
Accordingly, it is within this context that we must read the Life of Pelagia. I suggest that the practice of imitatio meretricis (imitation of a prostitute) constituted a piece of wider doulology (the discourse of slavery), through which some ascetic Christians thought through their relationship to God.[22] While Pelagia appears to serve no earthly master, she is enslaved to the Devil.[23] After her conversion to Christianity, the Devil tries several times to reclaim Pelagia as the property he sees as rightfully his, employing every tactic from fear to bribery. Satan addresses her as the “slave of God,” refers to himself as her master, and centres on the economics of their relationship. His ownership of her, him pimping her out for both himself and other patrons—from which he benefited by means of the corruption of souls and their diversion from God—resulted in him lavishing her in wealth acquired by her actions. By stealing souls, she enriched the Devil and, secondarily, herself: just like a prostitute turned her earnings over to her pimp, getting some amount back in return.
Pelagia’s hagiographer emphasises her position of prostitute throughout her story. He refers to her as “meretrix” (prostitute) at least seven times (including once after her conversion), as well as the chief “mima” (or “actress”) of Antioch.[24] After her conversion, Pelagia’s title switches to “servus” and “ancilliam,” slave and handmaid respectively.[25] While the connotations of these epithets differ, I argue that their consequences for the enslaved individual do not. As Pelagia becomes the handmaid of God, she is not a liberated woman, but a woman whose contract has simply traded hands. Within this description lies the portrait of a “good slave”: obedient and dutiful, doing whatever she must to please her master.[26] In return, she will receive eternal life, exchanging her earthly jewels for spiritual ones. Regardless of the terms, however, the economics of this relationship remain central. They extend beyond Pelagia to Nonnos, who also is referred to as a slave—and by elision, the prostitute—of God: the person to whom God had unlimited sexual access and served God’s wider purposes by seducing others and garnering their immortal souls as payment. Nonnos’s status as God’s slave, then, not only extends far beyond metaphor and surpasses the simple category of servant.[27] As the author of Pelagia’s narrative, as well as his ancient audience, would have been well aware, the social classification of “slave” implies explicit sexual access for the enslaver. Thus, as we continue our reading of the “men” in these tales as God’s slave, we must, in turn, remember that they are also God’s female whore.
Because the men in this story approached the idealised scenario of being enslaved to God from the position of enslaver, they see only their own pleasure and gratification in this “relationship.” In no biblical account of “good” and “obedient” slaves do we see fear as a motivator for behaviour.[28] And so, no fear existed in this particular kind of relationship with God. Instead, they imagined God the enslaver as they imagined themselves—perfectly entitled to the bodies of the enslaved and looking to gratify themselves with those bodies.[29] While these men knew that slaves must submit, they did not comprehend the violence that this position entails; thus, they willingly, and with romanticised excitement, entered into this submissive relationship. For this reason, when we think with prostitution, enslavement, and pleasure, I do not want us to presume a strict dualism between body and soul, or physical and spiritual. After all, as Virgina Burrus has rightly shown, the tales of “holy harlots” are filled with pleasurable and tantalizing images of seduction.[30] In this doulology, where male enslavers projected their own physical pleasure onto their own enslaved relationship with God, we must once again recall that doulology is a discourse of power.[31] In this particular tale, male enslavers act as God’s enslaved whore—God has power not only over their soul, but over their entire body. To remain sexually open is the ultimate power relationship—the show of the greatest vulnerability. It is that position we will now move to explore.
Imitating Prostitutes
What remains imitable about Pelagia’s life, then, is not solely her asceticism, but her position as a prostitute. In his preface, James encourages his audience to listen carefully in order to deepen their own devotion.[32] The most important aspect of a prostitute’s work, at least in James’ eyes, was her ability to make herself physically irresistible. This alluring quality is the first that James describes, and the first which Nonnos derides himself for not possessing. As Nonnos speaks to his brethren just outside of a church, Pelagia—naked, limbs exposed, bedecked with jewels—rides by, seated upon a donkey. While the other monks avert their gaze, Nonnos stares intently at Pelagia, his eyes lingering even on her departing form. As he slowly turns back to his brothers, he asks “were you not delighted by such a great beauty?”[33] When they do not answer, he bursts into tears, burying his face in his hands before collapsing onto the Bible open upon his lap. He cries out in anguish, lamenting that, while this woman spends hours on her appearance in order to please her lovers, he and his fellow monks, who have the immortal bridegroom waiting for them, do nothing. The monks, he goes on, neglect themselves and the appearance of their souls, and so fail to please, let alone attract, God.
Taking James with him, Nonnos retreats into his chambers, his would-be conjugal room, and cries out to God, “What this prostitute conquered in a single day by adorning herself surpassed everything I have done to adorn myself during all the years of my life. How can I gaze upon you with this kind of face, my God?”[34] Unlike this prostitute, Nonnos does not believe that he is worthy to be looked upon. In fact, he insisted that he is not even worthy to be in the presence of God, so unadorned is his soul. Despite all his years of ascetic devotion, he has succeeded in refining only his body. In his shame, he hides his face from God while simultaneously laying his soul bare. Such an action is made manifest in the Latin text, when Nonnos exclaims “I am naked in heaven just as I am on earth, because I do not fulfil your commandments [to please you.]”[35] Making oneself pleasurable to God, then, constitutes the greatest ascetic undertaking. Like the prostitute, ascetics must labour to render themselves pleasing, exposing themselves in their naked glory. In this state of wanton vulnerability, Nonnos takes the first step to become feminised in his relationship with God. From the conception of the enslaved prostitute, he learns the art of attraction and, like Pelagia, makes himself bare before his client, before God. This act is what draws and holds God’s attention.
Nonnos begins to undertake his own beautification immediately. As soon as Nonnos returned to his bedchamber (the same place where the prostitute beautifies herself for her patrons), he began to weep and bare the inner-most workings of himself to God. Through his tears, Nonnos cleansed himself, wiping away the dirt that had accumulated on his soul, ensuring, like Pelagia, that not a speck remained. He continued in this state for many hours, until, ultimately, he transformed his chamber into a “festival [of tears].”[36] Nonnos had, at last, become the prostitute he had so admired. And for this effort, he was rewarded.
It is crucial, however, that these romanticised sexual performances go well beyond the simple act of seduction. A prostitute does not spend hours beautifying her body, nor the ascetic primping her soul, simply for show. This act of beautification serves two purposes: penetration and subjugation. Just as the prostitute’s job is not complete (nor payment collected) until the sex act is, neither is the job of the ascetic. After he has spent hours cleansing his soul through the constant stream of his tears, God finally notices Nonnos’s gleaming nakedness and visits his chamber.[37] The evidence of this night of pleasure becomes obvious the following morning in Nonnos’s performance. As Nonnos gives his sermon, James describes how the wisdom of God flowed from his mouth because he had been repletus, “filled” (quite literally) with the Holy Spirit.[38] God, as enslaver and pimp, now uses Nonnos’s body to do his own bidding: to spread his Word to his followers and transform them all into his own “willing” subjugated courtesans. They, too, must learn to beautify their souls, rendering themselves open to God, signalling their willingness to be penetrated and filled by him. In return, God grants them eternal life.
Thus, the author of Pelagia’s narrative insists that prostitutes not only beautify themselves in order to be penetrated by their master, but to prove their ardent, and willing, subjugation to him. This ultimate act of servitude comes in the form of the author’s perception of imitating the “good slave.” First and foremost, this slave must be dedicated to their work. Despite serving the wrong master, Pelagia has this quality in spades. Not only does she not complain about her work as a prostitute—she revels in it. She takes it on as though with absolute devotion and (imagined) free will. All Christians, the author insists, must learn from this fealty, as they, too, are slaves of God. And in good Christian fashion, they must learn to devote themselves obediently and zealously to their master. While this type of behaviour is clearly a romanticised trope, invented by people who had no experience of the brutal reality of actual enslavement, hagiographies like the Life of Pelagia encouraged their audience to visualise themselves in such imagined relationships. In lived reality of physical privilege, spiritual prostitution was able to be imagined and experienced in a pleasurable way, for their place as God’s whore held no physical consequences to their earthly body. Within this realm of fantasised slavery, fear and pleasure form a heady mixture, as vulnerability (physically, economically, eternally) proved both terrifying and deeply rewarding.
Above all else, then, Pelagia’s hagiographer insists that “good” slaves should live in fear of their masters. Even though Nonnos has spent the majority of his life as God’s slave, he has failed, until now, to consummate their relationship. Without this action of penetration, he is doomed and his soul will perish. Both Pelagia’s and Nonnos’s dread reveals itself through their excessive tears, as they rend their garments and lament that they have not yet done enough to save themselves. While this display of emotion can also be read as pious devotion and an act of cleansing, we cannot lose sight of enslavement within our analysis. If Christians did not make themselves worthy to be penetrated by God, this hagiography argues that they will suffer the eternal consequences. This fear, and the flipside of the heavenly reward, is part of what the author envisions renders Christians as such “good” slaves to their heavenly master.
Shame and Masculinity
Often, when extremely strong and powerful ascetic women appear in vitae or other sayings, they exist primarily to shame the men into performing in a more masculine fashion. Because Romans generally saw women as weak and inferior, no greater call to action, call to masculinisation, existed than showing how a person assigned female at birth had greater endurance and hardship than a vir.[39] Yet, what is remarkable about Pelagia is that James does not employ her to shame the men either in the story or the audience into becoming more male. Perhaps ironically, it is this privileged position that these men must momentarily surrender as they engage in the fantasy of enslaved prostitute because, in this instance, their masculinity gets in the way.
Within Roman society, men maintained a special, privileged position. Viri were not simply adult males nor even those with a phallus; they were freeborn male citizens, and therefore at the pinnacle of their social and political hierarchy. As such, their bodies were safe from violation. This immunity took many forms, including freedom from sexual, physical, and ocular assault. Within the public realm, men were supposed to draw attention to themselves. Yet unlike women, whose bodies could be easily penetrated should a man gaze upon them, viri suffered no such attacks. Once a man had proved both his honour and masculinity through his willingness (and thus bravery) to display himself in public, he relied upon others to not penetrate him with their eyes.[40] Within the upper classes, this action was considered sacred. As Carlin Barton contends, “The gaze without compunction signalled the loss of trust, the end of the collusion between the seer and the seen, the breakdown of a common bond and the security and camaraderie created by the mutual inhibition of the eyes.”[41] The elite were supposed to subject only the “others” of society to this kind of gaze: lower class men, women, children and slaves. Penetrating those of the lower class signified an elite male’s prerogative, something he practiced freely.[42] In so doing, he both reaffirmed his manliness and shamefully gendered his inferior female, no matter their anatomy.
While this type of gaze functioned well and still proved crucial for society in general, it prohibited the subjugated relationship that ascetics sought with God: for, as Nonnos’s distress implies, they actually desired a relationship far closer to that of an enslaved prostitute and her master. Masculinity required a careful demonstration of both control and restraint, and because incorporeality marked the pinnacle of masculine achievement, it also demanded that the man free himself from the body which served as locus for all manner of pleasure and pain.[43] As David Frederick recognises, this “vulnerable self is the true locus of penetrability, not the bare employment of one’s anus, vagina, or mouth in copulation. In general, the closer one is to the body in the form of overwhelming sensation, the more penetrable one is.”[44] The body and its vulnerabilities, typically a detriment to honour and holiness, now become vital to ascetic performance. These men yearn to be completely overwhelmed with the physical sensation of God—and the closest they can get to imagining what that union might be like, what that complete sublimation to sensation might entail—is to put themselves in the position of an enslaved prostitute. These men’s vulnerability is thus twofold. One, as I have discussed, is in the relinquishment of their body to God. But true vulnerability comes before that—it comes in the exposure of their soul, of opening themselves up to “overwhelming sensation.” To be overcome is to be feminine. To be overcome means dropping their masculinity, means queering their relationship to God. Nonnos and his fellow ascetics must become not only feminised but fully female in their physical, sexual, and spiritual submission. They must become prostitutes for God.
Pelagia’s ability to welcome penetration from everywhere forces Nonnos to think about the points in his life and those of his followers where they should behave similarly: as they prepare themselves for their God, their immortal bridegroom, and their ultimate bridal chamber where the union will take place. Like the prostitute who has taken such care to adorn herself, a true Christian ascetic must work equally hard to adorn his soul. It is in these instances of in-text pedagogy where the act of shaming would typically occur. This even happens in the other tales of the “holy harlots,” where the women hide their bodies in disgrace or are reprimanded for their past actions. In contrast, in the story of Pelagia, Nonnos praises the performance of the prostitute and reproaches himself and his fellow monks for their actions (or lack thereof). After commending Pelagia’s dedication to her beauty routine, Nonnos laments, “I know I am a sinner and unworthy, for today the ornaments of a harlot have shone more brightly than the ornaments of my soul.” He goes on, “She promises to please men; I have promised to please you [God]; and my filthiness makes me a liar.”[45] Their failure to provide pleasure; their inability to bedeck their souls; in other words, their deep inability to become women has caused these men to fail in their duty as Christians and God’s loyal slaves.
It is therefore from this ardent desire, this unending zeal to please, to beautify, to attract, that that Nonnos, Zosimos, and their entire male audience must learn. These stories are about their quest for perfection, after all. What is perhaps most surprising at the end of these tales is not the irony that they sought a man and ended up finding a woman, but that they, in many ways, had to become like women themselves. Only then, through the loss of their masculinity, could they achieve physical union with their beloved.
Structure
The structure of this vita is organised to mirror the tasks of a prostitute and to show, through the narrator, protagonist, and call to the male audience, that the queering of their asceticism through imitation of this enslaved woman is not only possible, but desirable. This goal is demonstrated not through Pelagia at the centre of the tale, but through the men who bookend it and serve as the driving forces of change throughout the story.
Instead of a steady climbing action with a denouement and neat conclusion, this hagiography unfurls as a series of repeating circles that roll on through time, through each character of the story, and eventually through the audience themselves. Step one: the prostitute spends hours beautifying herself, ensuring, as Nonnos says, that no speck of dirt remains on her immaculate visage.[46] Step two: the prostitute sets out to attract her suitors, displaying her beautiful body in a place where she is most likely to seduce a suitable clientele. Step three: the enslaved whore opens herself up to penetration (both ocular and physical) to consummate the relationship with her client. And repeat. What drives this particular story forward is that, upon the repetition of step two, men both inside and outside the tale realise that they are not adorning themselves properly, and so strive to emulate the act of holy prostitution in their own ascetic lives.
This cycle occurs several times throughout the narrative, beginning with Pelagia as a harlot serving the Devil. Nonnos then sees Pelagia and realises that he has not properly adorned himself for his own master, God, and so endeavours to follow the prostitute’s example until he is cleansed and filled with the Holy Spirit. Then Pelagia takes centre stage once more, as she sees Nonnos prostituting himself for the Lord, and realises that she has been serving the wrong master all along. Taking her considerable skills from her past life, she simply re-deploys them to serve her new patron as a courtesan for Christ. Throwing herself at Nonnos’s feet she begs him, “Stand up, my lord, and strip off from me the dirty clothing of prostitution; clothe me with pure garments, the beautiful dress for the novel banquet to which I have come.”[47] Crucially, as Burrus notes, Pelagia’s very words reveal that she does not lose her seductive nature upon her conversion.[48] Instead, she begs to be stripped down and, following her baptism, clothes herself in vestments which will draw the eye of her new master through her physical devotion: a “man’s” hairshirt and woollen mantle.[49] Pelagia subsequently flees the church and begins to live her new life as the monk, Pelagius.
In the final act of the story, James also wishes to achieve ascetic perfection and union with God. Nonnos, his Bishop, knows that James cannot learn from him alone, so sends James to seek out Pelagius, who has enclosed himself within a small cell within a larger male monastery. Following a brief meeting with Pelagius, during which James gained great wisdom pertaining to the purification of his soul, James realises that Pelagius has died. After other monastics break into Pelagius’ cell, they carry “his sacred little body” back to the monastery. When they prepared the body for death, they realised that it was that of a woman. According to James, the fathers wanted to keep “such a wonder hidden,” but crowds of people pushed their way through and began to proclaim glory to the Lord. It is on this scene that a great deal of scholarship focuses on the gender “reveal” and potential attempted “cover-up” by the monastics themselves.[50]
Pelagius’s has typically been read in one of three ways in relation to the male audience: first, that the discovery of Pelagia’s sex organs shames men into competition and imitation through the realisation that they are the “real” sinners; second, that it reveals that even the most egregious sinner can be saved through Christ; or third, that Pelagia herself transgresses gendered boundaries and perplexes the audience.[51] While all of these explanations offer distinct possibilities for reading this vita, it is crucial that we once again look back at the structure of the tale to ask: in imitation of what? Within Pelagia’s life story, the author describes her ascetic undertaking only briefly. The audience is informed of her clothing, her solitude, and her emaciation. In fact, Pelagius’ ascetic undertakings do not appear to differ from any of the other monks around them. What Nonnos sends James (and subsequently the audience) to learn from, then, is not Pelagius’ current asceticism, but their past as a prostitute. They must learn to imitate the meretrix, ensuring only that their enslavement and devotion remain to God.
While I will not offer a full queer or trans reading of Pelagia here, as the focus of this article remains on the monastics and audience assigned male at birth, I urge us to resist the overarching assumption that, at the end, Pelagia “is” a woman and remains so regardless of her vestments and gendered practice and that her sexed body is what makes her remarkable, imitable, and confounding.[52] In so doing, we must resist essentialising language to embrace fully the queerness, and thus the power dynamics, of the tale. James, Nonnos, and all those who follow in their example, are not becoming women, yet nor do they remain as men. The attraction of God is feminised in the way of a harlot—vulnerability, penetration, ownership, and a lower position in the power, and thus gendered, hierarchy. But their demeanour (including that of Pelagius) is more masculinised in naming and clothing conventions. This relationship, this status as an ascetic who is portrayed as a prostitute for God, thus defies modern concepts of cisness and binarity to demonstrate the normalcy of what we would call “queerness” in the ancient world. The ascetic’s relationship with God marks a position of femininity, though their relationship to other monks on this earth reads as more masculine. I therefore urge us to refuse to place Pelagius, or, indeed, any of the monks within this tale, into any definite sex/gendered category. Their status is relational, changes moment by moment, and is a constant, ongoing practice and negotiation. The stability of “being” is not what is at stake. Instead, the doulology of the enslaved prostitute to God disrupts ontology to embrace an ever-developing queer and gender-fluid practice—a practice which can never be neglected, lest the ascetic fail to attract the attention of their divine lover.
Uncomfortable Conclusions
Thus, we reach the disquieting conclusion of the inextricability of queerness and enslavement in the Life of Pelagia. The field of late antiquity has long been comfortable playing with the concept of gender fluidity and, with the continued attacks on the basic human rights of LGBTQ+ people in the United States and around the world, has fought to find positive representation of queerness in sources that have been deemed indelibly cisgender and heterosexual. In many ways, this scholarship continues to be both a corrective to and respite from current social and political structures. As this article, among a great many others, has demonstrated, Christianity is not and has never been the sole prerogative of those whom we would now identify as cisgender men. It matters that, in the ancient world, those assigned female at birth did not, alone, trouble gender roles and that gender fluidity was encouraged by Christian texts and authors. Yet at the same time, we cannot ignore the institution of slavery and the very real role it played in the construction of Christian sanctity and the gender systems therein. As much as we, as I, may want queerness to be entirely liberatory, such is not always the case.
The imagined role of God’s whore as described in the Life of Pelagia of Antioch, required not only the knowledge and existence of the system of enslavement, but its deep romanticisation by both author and audience. These individuals would never have been subject to the cruel and brutal reality of the enslaved, and so were able to play with the imagined “pleasurable” aspects—submission and feminisation—without facing the dehumanizing ones. This aspect of the vita, however, is not one we can ignore, for enslavement queers everyone within the tale more than any other aspect of their gendered performance. To be enslaved and to be sexually used (or abused) was to be rendered feminine. Pelagia’s hagiographer understood this gendered phenomenon and built his story around it.
For this reason, among others, we cannot continue grouping the holy harlot texts together as a cohesive genre. As Ellen Muehlberger notes, “systems of representing gender in texts are local and particular.”[53] Systems of gender are neither constant nor consistent, and depend inherently upon both time and place as well as the way in which the author deploys them. By studying the Life of Pelagia on its own merits, we can begin to see how all authors do not deploy the trope of holy harlot in the same way. In this hagiography, Pelagia’s asceticism does not constitute the pedagogical thrust of the narrative, nor does her harlotry represent merely an egregious sin of a past life. Instead, the men both inside and outside the tale must learn from her, imitating her ritual of beautification to ensure that they, too, can render themselves wantonly penetrable prostitutes of God: enslaved and queer both—troubling ancient and modern systems of gender, social standing, and Christian practice.
Bibliography
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[1] Patricia Cox Miller suggests that the figures of Mary of Egypt and Pelagia represent “grotesqueries”—a not-quite-coherent construct representing the conundrum of female holiness in late antiquity. “Is There a Harlot in This Text?: Hagiography and the Grotesque,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 33.3 (2003): 419–35, doi:10.1215/10829636-33-3-419; while Lynda Coon reads the holy harlots as superhuman exemplars of Christianity whom male Christians authors used to preach universal repentance. Sacred Fictions: Holy Women and Hagiography in Late Antiquity (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 74–75.
[2] English translations of all these texts can be found within Harlots of the Desert: A Study of Repentance in Early Monastic Sources, ed. and trans. Benedicta Ward (Kalamazoo, KY: Cistercian Publications, 1987).
[3] While people of all genders would have heard these stories, the author, James, explicitly addresses his “holy brothers.” “Vita S. Pelagiae, Meretricis” in Patrologiae Cursus Completus Series Latina,ed. J. P. Migne (Paris, 1855), 198: preface. Unless otherwise noted, I have translated all passages from the Latin.
[4] Even though in modern parlance, “queer” can refer to one’s sexuality as well as one’s gender, I do not use it in such a way here. This article is not concerned with sexual attraction or identity, though such readings of ancient texts are persuasive. For example, see: Christopher Zeichmann, Queer Readings of the Centurion at Capernaum (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2022).
[5] According to Toby Beauchamp and Benjamin D’Harlingue, “the assignment of gender categories to particular bodies organizes social relationships and maintains matrices of power.” Beauchamp and D’Harlingue, “Beyond Additions and Exceptions: The Category of Transgender and New Pedagogical Approaches for Women’s Studies” Feminist Formations 24.2 (2012), 34, doi:10.1353/ff.2012.0020.
[6] Numerous scholars of early Christianity have discussed how asceticism itself transforms gender roles and expectations. For a few foundational texts, see: Elizabeth Clark, “The Celibate Bridegroom and His Virginal Brides: Metaphor and the Marriage of Jesus in Early Christian Ascetic Exegesis,” Church History 77.1 (2008): 1–25, doi:10.1017/S0009640708000036; Gillian Cloke, This Female Man of God: Women and Spiritual Power in the Patristic Age, 350–450 AD (London: Routledge, 1995); Gillian Clark, Body and Gender, Soul and Reason in Late Antiquity (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011).
[7] Maud Gleason, Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 58.
[8] Roland Betancourt, Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020). Though much of Betancourt’s monograph covers a later period than this article, his description of the intersectional aspects of gender, race, and socio-economic status date back to late antiquity.
[9] Rafael Neis, “Undoing the Cisness of Late Ancient (Jewish/Religious) Studies,” QTR: A Journal of Trans and Queer Studies in Religion 2.2 (2025): 134–76, doi:10.1215/29944724-12226603.
[10] Wayne Martino and Kenan Omercajic argue that we must refuse to exceptionalise and other trans and queer people while accepting the normativity of cisness. Martino and Omercajic, “A Trans Pedagogy of Refusal: Interrogating Cisgenderism, the Limits of Antinormativity and Trans Necropolitics.” Pedagogy, Culture & Society 29.5 (2021): 679–94, doi:0.1080/14681366.2021.1912155
[11] For foundational texts on the various ways in which asceticism was interpreted and practiced by early Christians, see: Peter Brown: The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); Elizabeth Clark, Reading Renunciation: Asceticism and Scripture in Early Christianity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).
[12] For more on the role of male fantasy and gender-based violence in early Christian texts, see: Jennifer Barry, “A Bad Romance: Late Ancient Fantasy, Violence, and Christian Hagiography,” Journal of Late Antiquity (2023): 54–73, doi:10.1353/jla.2023.0003.
[13] Noel Lenski, “Slavery in the Roman Empire,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Global Slavery throughout History, eds. Damian A. Pargas and Juliane Schiel (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), 94.
[14] Matthew J. Perry, “Control of Roman Slave Sexuality: Authority, Profit, and Resistance,” in Slavery and Sexuality in Classical Antiquity, eds. Deborah Kamen and C. W. Marshall (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2021), 255.
[15] Jennifer Glancy, “Slavery and the Rise of Christianity,” in The Ancient Mediterranean World, vol. 1 of The Cambridge World History of Slavery eds. Keith Bradley and Paul Cartledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 466.
[16] Jennifer Glancy, “Early Christianity, Slavery, and Women’s Bodies,” in Beyond Slavery: Overcoming Its Religious and Sexual Legacies, ed. Bernadette J. Brooten(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 144.
[17] Rebecca Flemming, “Quae Corpore Quaestum Facit: The Sexual Economy of Female Prostitution in the Roman Empire,” The Journal of Roman Studies 89 (1999), 43, doi:10.2307/300733.
[18] Because most prostitutes were enslaved, the ability of people to leave this “job” is unclear. In 390 CE, Theodosius II did encourage those who were forced into prostitution to contact a bishop or a priest, but there is little evidence to suggest what happened because of these meeting or if they ever occurred at all. Judith Evans Grubbs, “Virgins and Widows, Show-Girls and Whores: Late Roman Legislation on Women and Christianity,” in Law, Society and Authority in Late Antiquity, ed. Ralph Mathisen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 235.
[19] Grubbs, “Virgins and Widows,” 237.
[20] Grubbs, “Virgins and Widows,” 237.
[21] Glancy, “Slavery in Early Christianity,” 25.
[22] Chris de Wet coins the term “doulology” and explores its function and creation within early Christian literature in his book The Unbound God: Slavery and the Formation of Early Christian Thought (London and New York: Routledge, 2018).
[23] “Vita S. Pelagiae,” 668B.
[24] “Vita S. Pelagiae,” 664B.
[25] “Vita S. Pelagiae,” 670A.
[26] Sandra R. Joshel, “Slavery and Roman Literary Culture,” in Bradley and Cartledge, The Ancient Mediterranean World, 223.
[27] De Wet argues that scholars should question their assumption that early Christians employed slavery only as a metaphor within their doulology. The Unbound God, 9–13.
[28] Glancy talks about this at length in “Slavery and the Rise of Christianity,” 470.
[29] For a more historically grounded, and less imagined, description of the horrors of sexualised enslavement, see Perry “Control of Roman Slave Sexuality,” 442–79.
[30] Burrus, The Sex Lives of Saints, 128–59.
[31] De Wet, The Unbound God, 8–9.
[32] “Vita S. Pelagiae,” 663B.
[33] “Vita S. Pelagiae,” 664B.
[34] This passage appears in the Greek, “μετάνοια τῆς ὁσίας Πελαγίας,” in Legenden der heiligen Pelagia, ed. and trans. Hermann Karl Usener (Bonn, 1879), 194. The Latin reads: “today the ornaments of a prostitute have shone more brightly than the ornaments of my soul. How can I turn my face towards you?” “Vita S. Pelagiae,” 665C.
[35] “Vita S. Pelagiae,” 665D.
[36] “Vita S. Pelagiae,”665D.
[37] “Nudus sum tam in caelo quam in terra, non adimplens praecepta mandatorum tuorum.” “I am naked before heaven as before earth, for I do not fulfil the orders of your commands.” “Vita S. Pelagiae,” 665D.
[38] “Vita S. Pelagiae,” 666B.
[39] See, for example, the story of Silvania reproaching Jovinius for washing his hands and feet in cold water after an arduous journey. Palladius, Historia Lausiaca, 55.1–2. For a discussion of women shaming men, see: Coon, Sacred Fictions, 81–83, 87, 93.
[40] Carlin Barton describes the extreme fear that the gaze held for the general populace. This fear of the uninhibited gaze displays itself most terrifyingly in Roman dramas. In many instances, gazing upon another even equated to cannibalism, the most terrible of Roman crimes. See: “Being in the Eyes: Shame and Sight in Ancient Rome” in The Roman Gaze; Vision, Power, and the Body, ed. David Fredrick (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 224–25 for further discussion.
[41] Barton, “Being in the Eyes,” 225. Virginia Burrus suggests that, perhaps more than trust, shame itself prevents further shame. Saving Shame: Martyrs, Saints and Other Abject Subjects (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 3.
[42] Burrus, Saving Shame, 220.
[43] For more on Roman masculinity, see Colleen Conway, Behold the Man: Jesus and Greco-Roman Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 22; David Frederick, “Mapping Penetrability in Late Republican and Early Imperial Rome,” in Fredrick, The Roman Gaze, 25.
[44] Frederick, “Mapping Penetrability,” 238.
[45] “Vita S. Pelagiae,” 665D.
[46] “Vita S. Pelagiae,” 665C.
[47] “Pelagia of Antioch,” in Holy Women of the Syrian Orient ed. and trans. Sebastian P. Brock and Susan Ashbrook Harvey (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), 23. This verse is translated from the Syriac (which had been translated from the Greek) and is the earliest extant version of the text.
[48] Virginia Burrus, The Sex Lives of Saints: An Erotics of Ancient Hagiography (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 142.
[49] Much has been made of Pelagia/us’s choice of ascetic clothing in reference to their gender. For a recent discussion, see: Maria Doerfler, “Coming Apart at the Seams: Cross-Dressing, Masculinity, and the Social Body in Antiquity,” in Dressing Judeans and Christians in Antiquity, eds. Kristi Upson-Saia, Carly Daniel Hughes and Alicia J. Batten (London: Routledge, 2016):37–51.
[50] Patricia Cox Miller describes the following seen as a “botched attempt to conceal feminine holiness.” Miller, “Is There a Harlot in This Text?” 423.
[51] Claudia Rapp, “Figures of Female Sanctity: Byzantine Edifying Manuscripts and Their Audience,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 50 (1996): 313–32, doi:10.2307/1291749; Dorthea French, “Maintaining Boundaries: The Status of Actresses in Early Christian Society,” Vigiliae Christianae 52.3 (1998): 293–318, doi:10.2307/1584505.
[52] Numerous scholars read ascetics assigned female at birth who reside in male monastics, as “cross-dressing” or in “disguise.” For example, see: Stephen Davis, “Crossed Texts, Crossed Sex: Intertextuality and Gender in Early Christian Legends of Holy Women Disguised as Men” Journal of Early Christian Studies 10.1 (2002): 1–36, doi:10.1353/earl.2002.0003. Stavroula Constantinou, Female Corporeal Performances: Reading the Body in Byzantine Passions and Lives of Holy Women (Stockholm: Uppsala, 2005). Recently, scholars have begun to challenge this assumption and read these saints as queer/trans/non-binary. For example, see: M.W. Bychowski, “The Authentic Lives of Transgender Saints: Imagio Dei and imitatio Christi in the Life of St Marinos the Monk,” in Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography, eds. Alicia Spencer-Hall and Blake Gutt (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021) 245–65; Martha G. Newman, “Assigned Female at Death: Joseph of Schonau and the Disruption of Medieval Gender Binaries,” in Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography, eds. Alicia Spencer-Hall and Blake Gutt (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021): 43–63.
[53] Ellen Muehlberger, “Simeon and Other Women in Theodoret’s Religious History: Gender in the Representation of Late Ancient Christian Asceticism,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 23.4 (2015): 605, doi:10.1353/EARL.2015.0050.