Chapter Three: Virgins and Wombs
In her work Purity and Danger, the anthropologist Mary Douglas explains that concerns for the physical body - its intactness, purity, and integrity - reflect concerns held by the body politic.
Douglas sees purity and pollution rituals relating to the body as symbols for society and social boundaries. The Israelites’ halakhic (legal) preoccupation with bodily issues and orifices, for example, ultimately reveals their political and cultural apprehension about unity and security as a minority group.
In effect, legalistic obsessions with menstruation and ejaculation might tell the historian more about how Jews distinguished themselves from their Gentile neighbors than about how they viewed women’s and men’s bodies.
Gender historians of early Christianity have recently expanded Douglas’s approach to reevaluate the early church fathers’ admonitions against the female form. From this perspective, patristic texts and hagiography offer more than misogynistic ranting against the female body and instead identify a late antique body metaphor concerned for the social and political boundaries of a newly converted Roman Empire.
These writings rely particularly on the idealized virgin - disciplined through asceticism, sustained in chastity, and purified by God - to signify the orthodox, undefiled, and intact Christian church.
A similar body metaphor emphasizing purity instead of integrity evolved in Shi`ite Islam regarding Muhammad’s prophetic status and the Imams’ religious authority.
Some traditions explain that Allah formed the Prophet as pure light before he created time. This light is referred to as the nur Muhammad, which is the essence of the Prophet’s being. With the light (nur) Allah engraved Muhammad’s name on his throne.
The nur symbolizes Muhammad’s favored status among the other prophets and his commission to transform a dark and corrupt world with Islam’s radiance. After the creation of the heavens, earth, and humanity, Allah removed the light from his throne and translated it through the Prophet’s ordained ancestry until it finally reached Muhammad’s mother, Amina. During this conveyance, Allah carefully preserved the nur through a special covenant requiring all males to place the light only within the wombs of pure females. This provision was necessary because a woman’s body might provide either an immaculate vessel for the light’s containment and gestation or a ritual contagion if unclean, tainted, or impure.
As Adam prepared to transmit the nur Muhammad to Eve, for example, he required her to perform ritual ablutions before sexual intercourse. When Eve finally conceived Seth, the light moved safely from Adam’s loins to Eve’s womb without contagion.
Adam later explained the responsibilities of the unique covenant to his son:
Allah has ordered me to impose on you a covenant and a compact for the sake of the light on your face, to the effect that you shall deposit it only within the purest woman of all mankind. Let it be known to you that Allah has put upon me a rigid covenant concerning it.
Allah commanded Muhammad’s male ancestors to protect the divine light from the female body’s potential threat.
Shi`ite sources employ the body metaphor to emphasize the transmission not only of the nur Muhammad but also of the preexistent Imams.
According to classical hadith esteemed by Twelvers, Allah created Muhammad, Fatima, and the twelve Imams as divine light and engraved all their names on his throne. Each light assumed corporal form only after miraculous conception, gestation, and birth free from ritual pollutants such as blood.
Fatima, as the only female sharing in the holy family’s divine light, transcends mundane limitations ascribed to the female form: she neither menstruated nor experienced blood loss during childbirth. Fatima was born and continued to exist without impurities or pollution and, unlike Eve, presented the ever-immaculate vessel for the Imamate. Fatima’s body, like Christianity’s idealized virgin, presents a metaphor imbued with symbolic formulations of theological, political, and communal purity. While the virgin symbolized the church - immaculate, pure, and intact - Fatima signifies pristine Islam and the Shi`ite Imams’ sublime status.
Although male authors translated Mary’s and Fatima’s virginal bodies into metaphors for communal identity and purity, these metaphors did not remain static. Hagiographers instead merged conflicting descriptions of purity and integrity with fecundity and creativity. The virgin’s physical chastity ultimately led to spiritual fertility. Hagiographers revealed such dynamism by describing the virginal body and womb as a container, at once sealed from worldly contamination while prolific in spiritual works.
The womb itself is a multivalent symbol in sacred literature: it is the source of pollution and purity, chaos and order, darkness and light.
As the innermost female space, the womb pollutes through menstrual contamination,
yet can mediate sacrality as the inner sanctum of a cultic shrine (as in Christianity) or a domestic sphere (as in Islam). Because female reproductive space is occupied in sex and pregnancy, it is both honored and feared: it can contain new life, but, as an empty place, it might also be filled by malevolent forces.
Ethnographers of traditional Islamic societies have also noted the symbolic relationship between the home and the womb. In traditional households women’s quarters are at the back of the complex and masculine space is near the front courtyard. The female space, or secluded interior, can be called the batn, “inside, womb.” Entry into this space proceeds through the khashm, or door, which also designates bodily orifices such as the mouth and nose.
The womb symbolizes a sacred space, a sacred interior separated from the profane exterior. As an empty space, the womb invites penetration or occupation. In the ancient Greek context, for example, divinities bestowed the gift of prophecy on women by possessing their innermost spaces.
The female interior signified the potential for divine inspiration and presence within the community. Since unwelcome divinities, or daemons, associated with darkness and obscurity might dwell within the womb, female possession also conveyed potential threat.
Women (and their communities) might then benefit from divine favor or suffer from the potential chaos that lies within the female interior. Mary and Fatima provided such enigmatic figures for their own communities: virginal containers free from contamination, yet fecund with holiness.
Blessed Virgin Mary
Christian hagiographers fashioned their idealized virgin by transmuting Mary’s mundane form into an extraordinary body. Mary’s virginal flesh defied common laws of physicality and sexuality: Mary remained a virgin even after childbirth. Christian authors constructed this Marian icon as part of a complex ascetic theology that promoted the virgin’s body as one symbolically transformed into the image of the resurrected Christ. Such a body trained through asceticism gains a glimpse of the spiritual form modeled by Christ and promised by the apostle Paul (1 Cor. 15.47-51).
The early Christian emphasis on self-abnegation and chastity functioned, at first, to distinguish the new community from its Jewish origins. The Jews celebrated sexuality and procreation as divine blessings from God; indeed, the Abrahamic covenant promised the patriarch offspring as numerous as the stars in the sky (Gen. 15.5). The covenant, as outlined by the Torah, demanded that the Jews worship Yahweh exclusively. In return, they were offered a promised land abounding in spiritual and material blessings. God pledged: “You [Israel] shall be the most blessed of peoples, with neither sterility nor barrenness among you or your livestock” (Deut. 7.14).
The Christian canon diverges from the Judaic acclamation of procreation and family. Jesus (himself understood to be unmarried and celibate) promotes devotion to the “kingdom of heaven” wherein spiritual kinship supersedes physical consanguinity. In Mark 3.33-35, Jesus announces that “[w]hoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother,” not his mundane relatives then summoning him at the door. Jesus even suggests that celibacy surpasses marriage in spiritual perfection: “but those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage” (Luke 20.34-36; also, Luke 20.29).
The Pauline epistles expand this virginal ideal by emphasizing the practicality of celibate life. Virgins, as Paul explains, simply have more time to devote to spiritual endeavors (1 Cor. 7). Paul wishes that “all were as I myself am [i.e., celibate]” (1 Cor. 7.7), although he carefully acknowledges that marriage does not constitute sin. Marriage instead signifies the spiritual relationship between Christ and his church: “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her” (Eph. 5.25). In a further correlation between the Christian household and the ecclesia, Paul commands wives to submit themselves to their husbands just as the church submits to Christ. Women within the marital bond thus represent a gendered image of the Christian community: submissive, domesticated, and redeemed by the salvific acts of the male “householder,” Christ.
The second- and third-century church inherited from the Gospels and Pauline epistles this paradoxical view of virginity and sexuality wherein marriage is censured yet endorsed, criticized yet commended.
The early church promoted an equally complex ascetic theology: wildly popular narratives celebrated pious celibacy while theologians such as Clement of Alexandria (d. 215) called for moderation.
Soon after Paul’s death (c. 150 CE), a number of apocryphal texts exclaiming the benefits of sexual renunciation circulated throughout the Christian world. The Acts of Paul and Thecla, perhaps the most prevalent, recounted the adventures of a young virgin named Thecla who, after hearing the melodious voice of the blessed Paul, renounced her fiancé and devoted herself to perpetual chastity.
For a time, Thecla provided a more popular virginal image than Mary herself. Thecla actuated her new vocation by cutting her hair, dressing as a man, and following after the apostle.
While this lifestyle certainly afforded Thecla more freedom to travel and even preach in the ancient world, the vita nonetheless subordinates the young virgin to the male apostle. Thecla appears as an amorous groupie who obsessively pursues her famous teacher; and after Paul finally commissions her to teach in Iconium, she secludes herself in a cave for seventy-two years sustained only by water and herbs. The vita popularized the notion of pious chastity while still relegating the female virgin to masculine supervision. Church fathers praised Thecla’s astounding asceticism while encouraging other women (especially wealthy matrons) to become “new Theclas” and devote themselves, spiritually and financially, to the church.
Clement of Alexandria, on the other hand, proposed a broader understanding of sexuality and the body. He argued that Paul endorsed both marriage and celibacy equally and that fervent ascetics falsely exaggerated the rewards of virginity. Marriage represented the divinely ordained plan for procreation, although Adam and Eve, like two impatient adolescents, had originally rushed consummation. Because of their sexual enthusiasm, humanity inherited the desire and lust that sullies the sacred intent of the marital bond. Clement writes:
A man who marries for the sake of begetting children must practice continence so that it is not desire he feels for his wife, whom he ought to love, and that he may beget children with a chaste and controlled will. For we have learnt not to “have thought for the flesh to fulfil its desires.” We are to “walk honourably as in the way,” that is in Christ and in the enlightened conduct of the Lord’s way, “not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and lasciviousness, not in strife and envy.”
Married couples, Clement says, might practice sexual intercourse without guilt as long as they hold their desires in check.
Although even the more liberal fathers such as Clement sanction marriage, they share a general distrust of and profound ambivalence toward sexuality and the lustful body. Both Clement and Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 200) equate Adam and Eve’s first sin not only with disobedience but also with the acquisition of carnal knowledge.
After Satan successfully tempted Eve and she shared the forbidden fruit with Adam, “the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fi g leaves together and made loincloths for themselves” (Gen.3.7). Christian theologians easily assimilated sexual astuteness with the shame and disgrace of the Fall. Celibacy, on the other hand, negated the sinful scar manifest in the flesh and returned humanity to prelapsarian existence, untainted by passion and lust.
In the third- and fourth-century ascetic movement, desert anchorites exchanged their physical bodies for a new spiritual existence in an effort to gain such a prelapsarian form. Athanasius advanced this theme (topos) in his Life of Anthony, the sublime prototype for Western hagiography. Athanasius blends Old Testament images of desert asceticism with New Testament accounts of Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection.
Antony at once becomes the new Elijah who found divine solace and preservation in the wilderness (1 Kings 19.4-8) and the image of Christ’s resurrected body. After immuring himself in a tomb and combating his demons, Antony appears to his disciples transformed into a spiritual being.
He served as a visible icon of Paul’s promise: “It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body” (1 Cor. 15.44). Antony and like-minded ascetics of the Egyptian and Syrian desert reclaim their paradisiacal form, released from fleshly bondage, and appear more angelic than human.
Although this desert theology enjoined celibacy and self-abnegation on both males and females, pious women expressed their ascetic heroism in vastly different ways.
The desert corpus advanced, in particular, the harlot-saint figure, holy women (usually former prostitutes) who had languished in their lust and finally redeemed their flesh by immuring themselves in caves and practicing radical penance. These “holy harlots,” such as Mary of Egypt and Pelagia of Antioch, signified God’s redeeming power as they transformed their bodies from corruptible Eves (harlot-temptress) to impenetrable Virgin Marys (cloistered behind cave walls and chaste).
The holy harlots’ cave existence provided a symbolic replica of Mary’s impenetrable womb. The Virgin Mary provided a didactic icon, exhorting women to reverse their fallen nature inherited from the temptress Eve.
As the ascetic impulse spread to the western regions of the empire (including Italy and Gaul) during the fourth and fifth centuries, Western theologians adapted the harlot-saint ideal to its new audience. Church fathers assimilated respectable Roman matrons to the desert icons and promoted Mary as a sublime model for female imitation. Mary presented a virginal ideal that advanced an ascetic theology: her pure, incorruptible body signified the redeemed flesh available (through asceticism) to the daughters of Eve. In constructing this Marian exempla, church fathers relied on already existing literary and theological traditions.
Popular extracanonical Christian works had displayed the fascination with Mary’s virginity since the early second century. What details the Gospel accounts neglected, popular imagination soon supplied. In the Odes of Solomon (an early hymn book written in verse), the author embellished the Gospels’ account of Jesus’ miraculous conception and delivery. First, the Holy Spirit opened Mary’s breast, combined her milk with God the Father’s, and delivered the mixture to Mary:
The womb of the Virgin took [the milk],
And she received conception and gave birth.
So, the Virgin became a mother with great mercies.
And she labored and bore the Son but without pain,
Because it did not occur without purpose.
And she did not require a midwife,
Because He caused her to give life.
In this text the image of the virgin merges provocatively with the maternal nature of a lactating God and Mother. The virgin is neither barren nor desolate; she is “mixed” with God, produces milk, and delivers a son. Mary also escapes the indictment of Genesis 3.16: “I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing: in pain you shall bring forth children.” The Odes of Solomon provides Mary with prelapsarian flesh, freeing her from Eve’s punishment for paradisiacal sin. Hagiographers thus confirmed that virginal asceticism leads to physical and spiritual transformation.
The Protevangelium of James, another second-century apocryphal text, goes even further. Although controversial and even banned for a time in the Latin West, the Protevangelium effectively laid the foundation of late antique and medieval Marian theology. It emphasized Mary’s Immaculate Conception, perpetual virginity, and childhood miracles. It also established a gendered metaphor of the virginal body by confining and containing Mary within temple walls and, later, Joseph’s home (domestic space).
The Protevangelium depicted Mary as the ultimate sacred space. In imitation of Hannah’s plea for a son (1 Sam. 1.9-11), the Protevangelium describes Anna and Joachim’s desperation for a child (even a girl child). After Mary’s birth the couple preserves the infant’s room as a sanctuary and prevents any impurities from entering. When Mary was three years old, Anna and Joachim fulfill their pledge and consecrate her at the temple where she was “nurtured like a dove” and “received food from the hand of an angel.”
After Mary reaches the age of menstruation and becomes a potential pollutant to the temple space, Joseph, a local widower, accepts her into his care. The childhood room, the temple space, and finally the private sphere of Joseph’s guardianship maintains Mary’s sacrality. She, like the space she occupies, remains impenetrable (except to the consecrated priest), protected, and contained.
In rendering Mary’s body as sacred space, early hagiographers symbolically correlated her with the Hebrew temple constructed on the tabernacle prototype. Beginning in Exodus 25, God commanded Moses to construct this tabernacle (or dwelling place) for him in the midst of the Israelite camp. The tabernacle, consecrated to God, included an outer courtyard complete with an altar accessible to the Israelites, an outer sanctum accessible only to the priests, and an innermost Holy of Holies accessible only to the high priest. A fine curtain woven from blue, purple, and crimson yarns and fine twisted linens separated the outer sanctuary from the inner sanctum. In the Holy of Holies resided the ark of the covenant, and in the empty space between the cherubim mounted on the ark resided God himself.
Late antique hagiographers subtly transformed Mary’s body into a tabernacle. Mary moves from her parents’ public space to the temple’s sacred space and finally to her restricted existence under Joseph’s guardianship. Like the tabernacle’s Holy of Holies, Mary soon holds God’s presence within her innermost womb/chamber. The tabernacle’s Holy of Holies can even be interpreted as a nuptial bedchamber; in that sacred space God united with Israel, his Bride.
In similar fashion Mary’s womb becomes the locus of God’s presence and union of humanity and divinity.
According to the Protevangelium, when Mary resided with Joseph the temple priests gathered “pure virgins of the tribe of David” to weave a new veil for the temple. The priests then cast lots to decide which virgin should weave what color: “And to Mary fell the lot of the ‘pure purple’ and ‘scarlet.’”
When Gabriel later visited Mary and announced her pregnancy, Mary trembled and “took the purple and sat down on her seat and drew out [the thread].”
As she encounters the angelic messenger, Mary weaves the purple and red symbolic of divinity and martyrdom just as her womb would soon “weave” the flesh of the God-Man.
At the end of the Protevangelium, the midwife Salome questions Mary’s sacrality and receives prompt retribution. Like the apostle Thomas in John 20.25, Salome doubts the physical integrity of the person before her: “As the Lord my God lives, unless I put [forward] my finger and test her condition, I will not believe that a virgin has brought forth.”
After she inserted her hand, testing Mary’s perpetual virginity, it withered (or caught aflame), restored only by the touch of the infant Jesus. Mary’s flesh, as Jesus with the doubting disciple, proved incorruptible.
The church fathers included these Marian traditions in a larger rhetorical framework of feminine compliance and regulation. Ambrose (d. 397), bishop of Milan, for example, championed Mary as the “discipline of life,” or the sublime model for Roman virgins to emulate.
He and other like-minded theologians confined females to private space just as Mary resided within imposed masculine boundaries throughout her own lifetime. Ambrose wrote:
[Mary] was unaccustomed to go from home, except for divine service, and this with parents or kinsfolk. Busy in private at home, accompanied by others abroad, yet with no better guardian than herself, as she, inspiring respect by her gait and address, progressed not so much by the motion of her feet as by step upon step of virtue. . [As the Evangelists have shown,] she, when the angel entered, was found at home in privacy, without a companion, that no one might interrupt her attention or disturb her; and she did not desire any women as companions, who had the companionship of good thoughts.
This ascetic Mary, cloistered within her domus (domestic space), no longer resembles the Hebrew girl of the New Testament Gospels who traveled to visit Elizabeth and participated in temple feasts. She instead reflects an immuring theology for females proscribed by episcopal authority. Female ascetics, as the Virgin Mary, resemble the Song of Solomon’s “garden enclosed”:
“You are a garden locked up, my sister, my bride; you are a spring enclosed, a sealed fountain” (4.12-13).
The female virginal body is transformed into sacred space, contained and secured. Ambrose even likens virgins to altars on which Christ “is daily offered for the redemption of the body.”
Yet male agents ultimately mediate between that sacred space and the mundane world as altar servants. Ambrose continues: “Blessed virgins, who emit a fragrance through divine grace as gardens do through flowers, temples through religion, altars through the priest.”
Theology concerned for Mary’s virginity reveals not only a model for female imitation but also a rhetoric endorsing masculine agency and authority within the burgeoning church. The divine blessings of the female “altars” proceed only through the intercession of a masculine clergy.
Late antique theologians delineated Mary’s sacred status through the use of container metaphors; Mary was a feminine vessel, a perpetually pure vessel, “possessed” by the divine God-Man. Such imagery confirmed her status as virgin (the purified inner sanctum) and mother (pregnant with the Divine Son). Theologians such as Ambrose and Jerome again invoked Old Testament descriptions of the Hebrew tabernacle, transforming Mary into an archetypal sacred container holding the Divine within her body.
Just as the Holy of Holies and the ark of the covenant marked the dwelling place of Yahweh in the midst of the Israelites, Mary’s womb provided the empty space wherein the God-Man dwelled. The door or passageway remained sealed except for the divine High Priest. Ambrose, in De Institutione Virginis, asserts the Mary-tabernacle parallel explicitly while discussing the Book of Ezekiel. Ambrose identifies Mary as an exemplary model and transmutes her into the prophet Ezekiel’s visionary New Temple:
And later the prophet [Ezekiel] related that he had seen on a very high mountain the structure of a city whose many gates were revealed; one, however, was described as shut, concerning which he said: Then He (the Lord) brought me back to the outer gate of the sanctuary, which faces east; and it was shut. The Lord said to me: This gate shall remain shut; it shall not be opened, and no one shall enter by it; for the Lord, the God of Israel, has entered by it; therefore it shall remain shut (Ezek. 44.1-2) [Ambrose added]: Who is this gate except Mary, “shut” as a virgin? Therefore, Mary is the gate, through whom Christ entered into this world[,] . a gate which was shut, and is not opened. Christ passed through her, but did not “open” her.
Ambrose explains that the porta is the womb’s gate (venter), inviolate for any ordinary man, yet miraculously penetrated by the God of Israel. Mary’s womb corresponds to the Temple’s east door, accessible only by the Divine and sealed thereafter.
Jerome, too, relates Mary’s body to the Hebrew temple. In his polemic Against Pelagius, Jerome defines Mary’s womb as the temple’s east door available only to the High Priest. The divine God-Man alone miraculously entered the womb, and it remained permanently closed after Jesus was born.
Jerome’s text reveals that Marian theology was still evolving in the West; for in an earlier treatise Jerome had explained that Christ, as the “first-born,” had indeed opened Mary’s womb.
This had compromised Mary’s in partu virginity, or the notion that Mary’s womb remained miraculously sealed and she remained (corporally) a virgin before, during, and after childbirth. Yet when Jerome wrote Against Pelagius in 415, he concluded along with Ambrose that Mary’s womb remained perpetually closed like the tabernacle’s east gate. Jerome and Ambrose successfully translated Mary’s womb into a metaphor for permanent enclosure (like the tabernacle’s inner sanctum). Not only did this argument boost the uniqueness of Christ’s birth (i.e., a Christological point), but it also supplied a powerful prototype for the growing number of female ascetics to imitate: one of seclusion, purity, and impenetrability.
Marian texts extolling this immuring lifestyle, using the womb as a metaphor, ultimately served to curb the public and independent careers of imperial women recently converted to Christianity.
Late antique hagiographers advertised the vitae of wealthy patrician women who dedicated their money to the church, their lives to charity, and their bodies to a new spiritual Bridegroom while leaving the public rule of the church to male clergy. Hagiographers modified desert spirituality to a new form of elite asceticism wherein matrons and young virgins abandoned their fineries and delicacies in favor of a more austere lifestyle devoted to pious reflection, usually under the tutelage of male mentors.
Jerome’s personal fondness and spiritual counsel for Roman matrons consecrated to the ascetic life is a significant example of this new elite asceticism. He paints a vivid picture of ascetic expectation in his Epistle 22 to the young virgin Eustochium.
A good virgin, Jerome explained, exercised self-control regarding food and drink; she never evoked lust from a man’s heart; and she never crossed the boundaries of her domus.
At the same time, however, Jerome encouraged holy women to imitate Paula’s excessive (and public) acts of charity. In his Vita Paulae (Ep. 108), Jerome said:
Her liberality alone knew no bounds. Indeed, so anxious was she to turn no needy person away that she borrowed money at interest and often contracted new loans to pay off old ones. . “God is my witness,” she said, “that what I do I do for His sake. My prayer is that I may die a beggar not leaving a penny to my daughter and indebted to strangers for my winding sheet.”
Paula, a noble woman descended from the Gracchi and Scipios according to hagiographic convention, subverts traditional Roman values by abandoning her family and relinquishing her patrimony to wed her new heavenly Bridegroom.
She becomes a new Mary, submissive, silent, and receptive to God’s will, which is now mediated by a masculine hierarchy (i.e., Jerome).
The womb also provided theologians such as Ambrose and Jerome with a multivalent symbol. Blurring gender boundaries, the theologians used the womb not only as a metaphor for female purity and enclosure but also as an image of fecundity and birth. The soul, much like the womb, received the divine seed (or Jesus) and became pregnant. This divine (and intellectual) pregnancy transformed both men and women into spiritual beings; human gender proved irrelevant as God impregnated the souls of both sexes.
Origen proclaims that the soul represents the heavenly Bridegroom’s beloved who “conceives from Christ, it produces children. . Truly happy, therefore, is the fecundity of the soul.”
The soul, like the womb, bears “spiritual” fruit in works and deeds.
Mary, after all, had welcomed God’s impregnation in an ultimate act of selfless obedience and, by this holy work (sanctus labor), gave birth to humanity’s redeemer.
Every soul, then, should submit to the Divine Will, receive God’s seed, and become fecund: in effect, believers should become “like Marys.”
Early medieval authors inherited this metaphor of the womb’s spiritual fecundity and continued to promote Mary as an exemplar for both men and women to imitate. For female virgins in particular, Marian imagery articulated a clear message of feminine compliance and accommodation to the church hierarchy. Medieval authors, much like the church fathers, encouraged religious women to confine themselves to the growing number of cloisters and bear spiritual children instead of corporal progeny. Unlike their predecessors, however, early medieval authors advised holy women to envision themselves as numinous mothers and concentrate on their maternal responsibilities toward their family and communities.
As Christianity expanded and stabilized in the post-Constantinian era, wealthy female patrons offered the method and means of constructing new monastic foundations, educational facilities, and charitable endowments. Virginal rhetoric again offered a social critique and theological response to female affluence and charisma. The exemplary virgin, displayed so eloquently by the Mother of God, extended a powerful rejoinder to the pious female’s complex (and perilously public) status in addition to promoting an ascetic ideal.
Bishop Avitus of Vienne (d. 518) composed a poem addressed to his sister, Fuscina, in praise of chastity and the celibate life. He assures Fuscina that Christ has released her from the bonds of physical lust and transformed her into his heavenly bride: “You are enrolled as a consort, are wedded to a mighty king, and Christ wants to join Himself to your beautiful form which He has selected.”
Fuscina’s physical sexuality is eradicated by her spiritual (although strangely erotic) union with her divine Groom. As the Bride of Christ, she is now released from the perils of mundane marriage, childbirth, and (hopefully) her own sexual nature.
Avitus then advises Fuscina that she must bear good works in her soul / womb as evidence of her divine marriage. He persuades her to imitate Mary’s conception of Christ through her own spiritual pregnancy:
You may follow Mary who was permitted under Heaven’s dispensation to rejoice in the twin crown, that of both virgin and mother, when she conceived God in the flesh, and the Creator of heaven, revealing the mystery of His being, entered her inviolate womb. . But you, my sister, will not be without the glory of a deed that great if, as you conceive Christ in your faithful heart, you produce for heaven the holy blossoms of good works.
Avitus carefully acknowledges that such conception is required of both men and women: “mind and not gender carried off the palm of victory.”
But, for Avitus, spiritual pregnancy implies separate risks and responsibilities for the two sexes.
The pious bishop warns his sister against relapsing into her earthly vanities and lusts in a subtle castigation of what he views as woman’s nature. He offers spiritual remedies to guard against her sensual proclivities; first and foremost he requires her to occupy both body and mind with good works. Avitus extols study (a sanctus labor) above all others but commands his sister to read “manfully” to avoid distraction and frivolous fantasies.
He also offers the life of Eugenia as one worthy of contemplation and emulation.
Eugenia was a Roman martyr who enjoyed intellectual debate and studying the Scriptures. As a young virgin, she dressed as a man in order to live in a monastery where her piety and devotion distinguished her among her colleagues. At the abbot’s death, her brothers nominated her as his replacement; she declined, however, because custom prevented a woman from ruling over a man.
Eugenia’s true identity was finally revealed publicly after she was falsely accused of rape.
Avitus thus reminds his sister that she may study as a man does and learn as a man does, but, in the end, she may not become a man. She should instead remain cloistered and protected, obedient to the church hierarchy, and fecund in spiritual deeds.
Bishop Fortunatus of Poitiers, a near-contemporary of Avitus, details the spiritual fertility of Radegund, founder of the Holy Cross convent at Poitiers. Radegund adopted Caesarius of Arles’s monastic rule, which demanded complete claustration.
Fortunatus explained that Radegund devoted her immured existence to serving her spiritual family and the Frankish community with amazing displays of domestic piety. When Radegund died, her nuns could only watch from atop the convent walls as she was carried away, for, according to the rule, no consecrated nun should ever leave the convent’s protection.
Fortunatus’s hagiography chronicles Radegund’s radical acts of selfabnegation, displays of charity, and maternal care for her convent.
His poems also betray a close friendship with both Radegund and Agnes, abbess of Holy Cross. In one of his poems addressed to Agnes, he characterizes Radegund as the mother who had “given birth to both of us in a single delivery from her chaste womb, as though the dear breasts of the blessed mother had nurtured the two of us with a single stream of milk.”
Fortunatus herein viewed his own spiritual life and friendship with Agnes as products of Radegund’s spiritual fecundity. She, like Mary, gave birth to the church’s saints.
The life of Galswinth, also by Fortunatus, presents another Merovingian queen distinguished by her domestic miracles and maternal deeds.
Gal swinth’s spiritual fecundity benefited her entire adopted Frankish community. Unlike Radegund, she lived outside the cloister and continually interceded between the poor and vanquished and her husband, King Chilperic (d. 584).
According to Fortunatus, Galswinth was a Visigothic princess far from home and family. Yet in perfect maternal fashion, she adopted her new community and served it willingly: “The maiden . earned the great love and respect of the people. Charming some by gifts, others by her words, she thus makes even strangers her own. . [T]he stranger, by her generosity to the poor was a mother to them.”
Galswinth’s deeds (performed as one newly converted to Catholic Christianity) might be compared to the soul’s fecundity, the spiritual womb giving birth to Christian charity.
One of Galswinth’s postmortem miracles also attested to her revered position among her community. As her body was deposited in her burial chamber, a hanging lamp crashed to the stone ground yet remained intact and with its flame still burning.
The lamp symbolizes Galswinth’s beloved status as it parallels the parable of the ten virgins in Matthew 25.1-13. According to this parable, ten bridesmaids went to meet their Heavenly Bridegroom, but only five had sufficient oil for their lamps. When the Bridegroom arrived, he accepted the five virgins and escorted them to the wedding banquet. Like the alert and prepared virgins, Galswinth, with her lamp continually burning, too attained the Groom’s rewards.
The lamp may also suggest Galswinth’s maternal function by further assimilating her to the Marian archetype. Not only does the miracle echo the parable of the ten virgins but it also recounts God’s command in Leviticus 24.2. According to this Old Testament edict, God required the priests to maintain lamps within the tabernacle symbolizing his perpetual presence. These lamps burned only the purest oil and sat in stands of pure gold. Galswinth, as a new tabernacle, held God’s light within her own vessel-body even after it crashed to the ground. Fortunatus transforms Galswinth’s body into a container for the Divine presence.
Fatima al-Batul (the Virgin)
While over the centuries Christianity popularized the virginal return to a prelapsarian state by circulating holy women’s vitae, classical Islam never articulated a cosmogonic link between sin and sexuality. Asceticism flourished in Suficircles and among pious mystics, but the Qur’an and hadith literature extolled the body and sexuality as divine gifts. As Christian virgins hoped to reclaim prelapsarian existence free from lust, medieval Muslims disavowed virginal piety in exchange for marital bliss.
The Muslim descriptions of paradise offer a sufficient glimpse into the exaltation of sexuality and sensual pleasures. In the next life Allah will reward the righteous with plentiful gardens, cool waters, luxurious mansions, and pure spouses.
The medieval exegetes Abd al-Rahman b. Ahmad al-Qadhi and Shaykh Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti further detail the heavenly vision by including the eight gates at its entrance, all constructed in precious stones, atop a ground composed of musk-clay, grass of saffron, and dust of amber.
In these sublime surroundings also reside heavenly houris (huriyat), or beautiful female creatures - seventy for each righteous male - who are flawless in their sensuality and femininity. Their bodies are composed of saffron, musk, and amber, and their cascading hair resembles raw silk. Allah assigns each houri to her Muslim husband and engraves his name on her chest. She then anxiously awaits her husband’s arrival and weeps over his absence. Once there the Muslim man encounters perfect love, sensuality, and sexuality: the houris miraculously retain their virginal bodies at the same time that their sexual stamina increases.
Muslim men also enjoy perfect sexual pleasure with their earthly spouses. They regain youth, vigor, and beauty while their pious Muslim women derive complete satisfaction from the eternal marriages. In accordance with Islamic law, even in paradise women may have only one husband whereas men collect many partners.
Although hadith maintain that both the male and the female achieve perfect sensual satisfaction through their respective experiences,
the obvious incongruity is difficult to ignore. This view of paradise exemplifies Islam’s approach to female sexuality in general.
In paradisiacal descriptions, female sexuality is both marginalized and strictly contained while men languish in various sexual delights with wives, houris, and (in some poetry) young boys.
Islamic law ignores female sexuality as well; legal texts go to great lengths to outline legal expressions of male sexuality but are largely silent on women. Shi`ite Islam even permits a much-debated form of temporary marriage called mut’a to accommodate the male sex drive. Temporary marriage is a contract forged between a man and a woman, without legal documentation and often in private, that binds husband and wife for an established amount of time, from a number of hours to ninety-nine years. Supporters of temporary marriage argue that it gives men a religiously sanctioned method of sexual contact with the implicit supposition that they seek sexual pleasure more ardently than do women.
From a Western perspective, this version of male sexuality expressed even in paradise might seem materialistic and oddly sensual. Late antique and early Christian theologians (who shaped medieval and even some modern expectations of the afterlife) viewed paradise very differently. Many of these authors, such as Irenaeus and Tertullian, agreed that the flesh itself will be resurrected; that is, human identity does not simply reside in the spirit or soul but also in the body’s material continuity. Yet the resurrected flesh will be very different from the earthly body: according to 1 Corinthians 15.21-54, the resurrected body will be imperishable and incorruptible; in Matthew 22.23-32 the body will not marry but be like the angels; and in 2 Corinthians 5.4 the earthly body is but a burdensome tent / tabernacle compared with the immortal, heavenly dwelling. The resurrected heavenly bodies will not require food, sex, or sensual joys but will take pleasure in continually praising God.
According to Jerome and Augustine, sex organs will remain in heaven (unused) as part of a sublime gender hierarchy only because this hierarchy was so important in defining virtuous rank on earth.
In Islamic religious consciousness, however, paradise is a logical continuation of the celebration of the body’s senses: it celebrates even more fully the ways Muslims encounter Allah and enjoy his creation through the body. The flesh and sexual pleasures, far from being associated with primeval sin or obligatory redemption, number among Allah’s creation and, therefore, his wondrous gifts. The Qur’an encourages sexual intimacy (within legal marital bonds) and even promotes marriage as a metaphor for Allah’s unity.
Although Islam releases humanity from the scar of original sin and the shame of sexuality, Muslims nonetheless struggle to maintain a state of purity required to commune with Allah. In this sense Islam resembles the halakhic traditions of Judaism, carefully outlining conditions of ritual purity and impurity. Pollution is not viewed as an ethical issue or sin problematic. Pollution or impurity works instead within legal traditions, separating the sacred from the mundane. Islam asserts a constant contention between sacrality and pollution on a daily, even hourly basis.
Islamic law regulates and routinizes the body’s constant lapse from and return to purity. Throughout the day legal pollution occurs through biological functions of elimination, excretion, or emissions. After ritualized cleansing (either wudu´, lesser ablutions, or ghusl, complete lustration), the body returns to its pure state, again able to commune with God.
The impure body must remain outside sacred boundaries, dissociated from handling the Qur’an, prayer, or fasting. The female body also derives impurity from menstrua, pseudomenstral emissions, or lochia.
In contrast, the paradisiacal body realizes a state of constant purity and functions as a vehicle for divine communion with Allah. Instead of receiving redemption from its sexual sin and shame, the body achieves complete harmony with itself. The righteous, for example, consume food without digestion and excretion and experience sex without pollution (the emission of semen or other fluids), and women cease to menstruate.
From this paradisiacal state, Fatima or al-Batul (the Virgin) originates.
Fatima’s appellation, al-Batul, at first seems enigmatic considering that she bore four children who survived her: two sons, Hasan and Husayn, and two daughters, Zaynab and Umm Kulthum. Unlike the Virgin Mary, al-Batul need not indicate corporal integrity. Fatima as Virgin instead symbolizes paradisiacal purity through exemption from all ritual pollutants.
Certain Shi`ite hadith place Fatima in paradise, preexistent and formed of Allah’s nur, prior to her earthly conception. There Allah stored her essence in a fruit (apple, date, or pomegranate) and commanded Muhammad to consume it during his famous night journey and ascent to paradise at the beginning of his ministry (mi`raj):
The Prophet said: When Gabriel ascended with me to the heavens, he took my hand, he admitted me to paradise, and he offered to me a date from it. And I ate it and it was changed to sperm in my loins. When I descended to the earth and had intercourse with Khadija, she became pregnant with Fatima.
In a scene reminiscent of the Christian Fall, Muhammad eats from the paradisiacal tree as commanded by God via Gabriel. The proffered (not forbidden) fruit contained Fatima’s essence, and eating it led to her creation and birth. In contrast, Christian theologians viewed eating as humanity’s pathway to sin. By consuming the fruit denied them in paradise, Adam and Eve brought death and destruction into the world. This imagery hints again at Islam’s completion of the Judeo-Christian story. God invites Muhammad (unlike the biblical prophets before him) to eat the fruits of heaven, while Khadija, in another type of miraculous conception, receives Fatima’s essence directly from paradise. Fatima, like Mary’s immaculate conception and Jesus’ virgin birth, is conceived free from sin, pollutants, or impurities.
Muhammad continuously recalls his daughter’s paradisiacal nativity by calling her a human houri and reporting that he “smells from her fragrance of paradise.”
Fatima characterizes eschatological perfection: like the houris who remain eternal virgins, Fatima’s body displays the idealized feminine form. She emanates musk and amber, she never menstruates, and she bears her sons without blood loss or other contamination.
Instead of exemplifying corporal integrity, Fatima’s status as virgin connotes paradisiacal perfection free from impurities. She is, by her essence, sacred.
Shi`ite hadith underscore this sacrality through linguistic exegesis of batul (بتول ). According to one transmission, the Prophet designated al-batul simply as one “who has never seen red, that is, has never menstruated.”80 The transmitter further defines virgin by relating the root (verbal form), batala (ب-ت-ل , to cut off or sever), to its synonym, qata`a (قطع) Mary is a virgin, “cut off from man,” devoid of passion for them or they for her. Fatima, however, is “cut off [separated] from women of her time.”
The human houri thus surpasses the virtuous women on earth in both purity and divine favor.
Other hadith rank Fatima as superior to women not only of her own generation but also of all time. She is compared specifically with Maryam bint `Imran (Mary, daughter of Imran) and receives the appellation Maryam al-kubra, or Mary the Greater. This intertextual allusion asserts the supersession of Christianity by Islam. Mary along with other heavenly women attend Fatima’s birth, symbolically conceding the infant’s magnificent status:
[And while Khadija was in labor] four tall, brown-skinned women came to her, as if they were women from Banu Hashim. And she feared them when she saw them. And one of them said: Do not grieve, Khadija, because we are messengers of your Lord to you, and we are sisters. I am Sara, and this is Asiya bint Mazihim [the Pharaoh’s righteous wife]. . [T]his is Maryam bint `Imran, and this is Kulthum, the sister of Musa ibn `Imran, [for] God has sent us to you. . And one sat to [Khadija’s] right, and the other to her left, and the third in front of her, and the fourth to her back. She gave birth to Fatima, the Pure One, without ritual impurity.
The sublime midwives, along with ten houris, then proceed to bathe and wrap the infant in water and linens from paradise.
The presence of the four holy women at Khadija’s side attests to Fatima’s significant station and Islam’s completion of Judaism and Christianity. Sara, Asiya, Mary, and Kulthum all serve Khadija at Fatima’s birth. Fatima, as Mary the Greater, promotes Islam’s transcendence while also providing a feminine ideal of purity and virtue. This ideal does not stand alone, however, as Fatima also represents the sublime mother. Like their Christian counterparts, Islamic hagiographers emphasize fertility and spiritual fecundity alongside Fatima’s ritual purity. Once again, hagiographers liken their holy woman to sacred containers, a metaphor most apt for the mother who held the Imamate within her womb.
Medieval Shi`ite cosmology presents the womb as an equally complex and multivalent symbol as does Christian tradition. The womb symbolizes both the pure inner sanctum where the sublime seed dwells and the locus of fecundity and familial loyalties. Christian exegetes related the sacred womb to spiritual vocation and enclosure, commanding its female religious to be both virgin and mother, chaste and pregnant. Shi`ite authors used the metaphor for different purposes. Instead of outlining the expectations of spiritual pregnancy and the individual soul, Shi`ite exegetes linked their communal identity to maternal kinship with Fatima.
According to Shi`ite cosmology, the pure womb protected Muhammad’s divine nur (as well as that of the Imams) from pollution and contamination. Medieval hadith related that Allah fashioned the ahl al-bayt from his nur before the creation of the heavens and the earth. At the moment of creation, Allah placed Muhammad’s nur and the Imams into Adam’s loins and then required the angels to bow in symbolic submission to their spiritual authority. Allah transmitted the nur through Muhammad’s Arabian ancestors with women serving as immaculate vessels for the light’s “gestation.” This enabled the Prophet to finally boast: “A whore has never given birth to me since I came out of Adam’s loins.”
Allah continued to secure immaculate vessels for Fatima and the Imams; Muhammad, for example, impregnated Khadija immediately after his visit to paradise (mi`raj). Once in the womb, Fatima conversed with her mother in miraculous displays of maternal comfort. According to one hadith, Qurayshi women had rejected Khadija after she married Muhammad so that when she became pregnant she had no companions. Feeling her mother’s intense loneliness, the preexistent Fatima consoled her by issuing proclamations against the Qurayshi women from the womb in her mother’s defense. After Muhammad heard about these chats between daughter and mother, he revealed to Khadija a message from Gabriel: “He tells me that she is a female, and that she is the blessed, pure progeny and that Allah, Blessed and Exalted, will create my progeny from her . and Allah appoints them [as] His caliphs on His earth.”
While these traditions emphasize Khadija’s miraculous relationship with Fatima, they also illustrate Fatima’s unique status as divine matriarch. Fatima nurtures and comforts her biological mother even before her birth, and she contributes the surrogate womb for Muhammad’s sublime progeny, the Shi`ite Imams.
Fatima, unique among women, participates in the divine light and then later furnishes the vessel (her own body) for the Imamate. Muhammad b. Ya`qub al-Kulayni (d. 940-41) relates Fatima to the famous Qur’anic Light Verse (24.35):
Allah is the Light of the heavens and the earth, the parable of His Light is as if there were a Niche and within it a Lamp, the Lamp enclosed in Glass, the Glass as it were a brilliant star.
According to Kulayni’s exegesis, Fatima serves both as the niche wherein the lamp (i.e., the Imams Hasan and Husayn) resides and the shimmering glass itself.
Fatima, unlike the women of her paternal ancestry, is both vessel and nur.
Shi`ite traditions associate Fatima with other ancient container archetypes as well.
Noah’s ark prefigures the salvific force not only of Fatima but also of the entire holy family as a vessel of salvation. One hadith recounts the Prophet’s words:
The people of my house (ahl bayti) may be compared to Noah’s ark; whoever rides in it is saved and whoever hangs on to it succeeds and whoever fails to reach it is thrust into hell.
The ark imagery resonates with the figure of Fatima. She, also as a vessel, contains the hope of salvation - her progeny, the Imamate. This tradition provides a striking parallel to early Christian exegesis that acclaims Mary as the “new ark.” Late antique authors first promoted Noah’s ark as the Old Testament symbol for the church. Like the ark the ecclesia might be tossed and tried, yet never submerged or defeated. Early medieval authors such as Saint Hildephonsus of Toledo (d. 667) likened Mary to the wooden vessel: just as the ark held the hope of humanity, so Mary’s body enclosed humanity’s redeemer.
Theologians thus transformed both women into sacred vessels for their holy offspring.
According to Shi`ite tradition, Gabriel himself explained to Noah that his ark prefigured the holy family’s salvific force. When Allah commanded Noah to build the vessel, the angel delivered five sparkling nails to aid in its construction (which resonates with the image of Christ’s five wounds). As Noah received the first four, he rejoiced; yet he could only weep as he looked at the fifth.
Gabriel then reported that the nails symbolized the holy family: Muhammad, `Ali, Fatima, Hasan, and Husayn. The fifth nail, imbued with sorrow and pain, prophesied Husayn’s martyrdom at Karbala.
After Noah completed the ark, God flooded the earth and set the vessel afloat. According to tradition, the ark soon experienced rough sailing: it began to toss as the waters and wind raged. Noah offered supplications to Allah and soon learned why the ark trembled so: it was then passing over the plain of Karbala.
Allah revealed the Shi`ite holy family’s prophetic status and suffering; and as Noah recognized and even participated in those sufferings, he was symbolically transformed into a distant relative and brought aboard the ark of salvation. Just as Fatima’s womb contained the light of the Imams, the ark embraced all the adoptive members of the ahl al-bayt.
Virgin Mothers?
Mary and Fatima provide both Christianity and Shi`ite Islam with the ultimate paradox: they are figures of incorruptible purity and virtue pregnant with spiritual deeds and piety. Both women personify ideals of feminine chastity; they transcend the limitations placed on mundane women and attain a paradisiacal form here on earth. Mary, the miraculous virgin, remains intact and uncorrupted while living a life of seclusion and charity in prelapsarian flesh. Fatima, al-batul, provides a pure vessel for the Imams within her undefiled body. Whereas early Christian authors elevated Mary as flesh transformed, Shi`ite transmitters hailed Fatima as flesh perfected.
While advancing these feminine ideals, Mary’s and Fatima’s hagiographers represented them as sacred space. As undefiled containers of sublime progeny, their bodies resembled the tabernacle, lamp, and ark of biblical tradition. The vessel metaphors also served to subtly promote masculine public authority and feminine compliance. Mary’s vita modeled the secluded and privatized life intended for young Christian virgins to imitate; Fatima’s paradisiacal form still deferred to the authority of her husband, `Ali. Taken together, the virgin mother is relegated ultimately to male agency evident both in a masculine clergy (who traverses sacred/profane and public/private space) and a patriarchal ahl al-bayt (Fatima’s father, husband, and sons).
From another perspective, however, these models may reveal more about theology than human gender expectations. The church fathers command both men and women to become “like Mary” and transform their barren souls into fecund wombs through the conversion process. According to ascetic theology, Christ transmutes the sinful flesh of both men and women so they may be the spiritual consorts of the Heavenly Bridegroom and dedicate themselves to good works. Fatima’s womb, like an ark of salvation, contains the Imamate, the sublime descendants of Muhammad created by Allah. Fatima’s purity confirms the Imams’ status while offering security to all those who identify with the Shi`ite holy family. Mary’s and Fatima’s bodies thus effectively advertise the salvific powers of the church and Shi`ite Imams, their holy families, to their respective communities.
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Author: Mary F. Thurlkill
