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The University of Southern Mississippi The Aquila Digital Community Master's Theses Summer 8-2015 A Garden Locked, A Fountain Sealed: Female Virginity as a Model for Holiness in the Fourth Century Lindsay Anne Williams University of Southern Mississippi Follow this and additional works at: https://aquila.usm.edu/masters_theses Part of the Ancient History, Greek and Roman through Late Antiquity Commons, Catholic Studies Commons, History of Christianity Commons, and the Women's History Commons Recommended Citation Williams, Lindsay Anne, "A Garden Locked, A Fountain Sealed: Female Virginity as a Model for Holiness in the Fourth Century" (2015). Master's Theses. 133. https://aquila.usm.edu/masters_theses/133 This Masters Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by The Aquila Digital Community. It has been accepted for inclusion in Master's Theses by an authorized administrator of The Aquila Digital Community. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The University of Southern Mississippi A GARDEN LOCKED, A FOUNTAIN SEALED: FEMALE VIRGINITY AS A MODEL FOR HOLINESS IN THE FOURTH CENTURY by Lindsay Anne Williams A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate School of The University of Southern Mississippi in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Approved: _____________________________________ Dr. Courtney Luckhardt, Committee Chair Assistant Professor, History _____________________________________ Dr. Westley Follett, Committee Member Associate Professor, History _____________________________________ Dr. Kenneth Swope, Committee Member Professor, History _____________________________________ Dr. Karen S. Coats Dean of the Graduate School August 2015 ABSTRACT A GARDEN LOCKED, A FOUNTATIN SEALED: FEMALE VIRGINITY AS A MODEL FOR HOLINESS IN THE FOURTH CENTURY by Lindsay Anne Williams August 2015 Despite centuries of Christian theologians and lay Christians alike assigning and/or accepting an entrenched misogyny in the writings of Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine, close examination of their work on its own terms and in its own time reveals that, in fact, they did not hold women in lesser esteem than men. Rather, time and again, in the writings of these Latin Doctors of the Church, women were promoted as exemplars of holiness and sanctity often in excess of their male counterparts and commonly as didactic tools used to lead their fellow Christians down a more righteous path. The following thesis serves as both examination and exculpation of these deeply influential figures in the history of Christianity, in an attempt to understand better the place of women in Christian society, teaching, and theology. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................................ ii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ............................................................................................ iv LIST OF EDITIONS............................................................................................................v CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................1 Life Stories: Profiles of the Latin Church Fathers The Latin Church Fathers: The State of Scholarship The Latin Church Fathers: the Road Behind, the Road Ahead II. EDUCATING VIRGINS: FEMALE GUIDES AND THE PATH TO HOLINESS ................................................................................................31 III. FEMALE MODELS OF HOLINESS: VIRGINITY, MARRIAGE, AND THE FOURTH-CENTURY AUDIENCE .................................................58 IV. THE “MOTHER” OF AUGUSTINE: WOMEN IN THE CONFESSIONS 87 V. CONCLUSION ........................................................................................109 REFERENCES ................................................................................................................112 iii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS CCSL Corpus Christianorum Series Latina. Turnhout: Brepols, 1953- CSEL Corpus Scriptorium Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum. Vienna, 1866- CT Theodosian Code Ep(p) . Epistula(e) MGH Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Berlin: Weidmann, 1819- PL Patrologia Latina. Paris: J.P. Migne, 1841-1865. For the convenience of general readers, Latin works are referred to by English titles throughout this text unless better known by their Latin names (e.g. On Virginity , or Epitoma Chronicon ). Unless otherwise noted, all dates referred to herein are from the Common Era. iv LIST OF EDITIONS Augustine. Ep. CXLII : The Works of St. Augustine: A New Translation for the 21 st Century, Part 2, Volume 3, Letters 156-210. Translated by Roland J. Teske. Edited by Boniface Ramsey. Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2004. ———. Ep. CCLII-CCLV : Saint Augustine: Letters, Volume V (204-270), The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation, Volume 32. Translated by Sister Wilfrid Parsons. Baltimore, MD: Catholic University of America Press, 1956. Jerome. Ep. XXXIX: Jerome Letters and Select Works. Translated by W.H. Fremantle. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1956. ———. Ep. XLIX (XLVIII); Ep. LIV; Ep. CVII; Ep. CXXVIII : Select Letters of Saint Jerome. Translated by F.A. Wright. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1933. C. Pharr. The Theodosian Code and Novels and Simondian Constitutions. A Translation with Commentary, Glossary, and Bibliography . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1952. All Latin text is from the CSEL , unless otherwise noted. Aside from the specific works and translations mentioned above or in the text, most translations are from the Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers Series I and II. Edited by Philip Schaff. (Grand Rapids, MI: W.M. Eerdmans, 1886-1895). The translations found in these editions are often the only translations available in English of certain compositions of Ambrose, Jerome and Augustine. This series is so well regarded that it was reprinted beginning in the 1950s through the end of the 1990s. All biblical passages in English are from the New Revised Standard Edition. v 1 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION “Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet. ..” -Augustine, Confessions , VIII.vii.17 “But I was unhappy, incapable of following a woman’s example …” -Augustine, Confessions , VI.xvi.25 “I only wish that men would follow the example that women have publicly given them…” -Jerome, Epistula LIV.ii Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine have left an indelible mark on the history of western Christendom. Their works became the foundations of orthodox Roman Catholicism. The subjugation of women perpetuated by the Church from the time of the early Middle Ages was often traced to a supposed biblical and patristic precedent in the compositions of Paul of Tarsus, Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine. But upon more thorough examination, the compositions of Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine presented women as capable of greater religious purity than men; the epitome of Christian righteousness. Their position as Fathers of the Church, and the extensive translating and transmission of their compositions led to bad interpretations and the misappropriation of their ideas, just as the works of Paul were also victims of interpolation and misunderstanding. It is common to write Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine off as merely being mouthpieces for their misogynist times, parroting back the mores of the overly patriarchal society in which they lived. This simply is not good enough. Within the letters, sermons, and books of Ambrose, Jerome and Augustine, one finds their 2 Christianity to be largely inclusive, emphasizing the equality in terms of religious potential and purity of human beings, not just elite men. More than that, however, they were addressing issues of heresy and paganism in a time when orthodox Christianity was still evolving. In their works to perpetuate orthodoxy, Ambrose, Jerome and Augustine portrayed the important role women played in life and in theory as role models and paradigms of proper Christian religious expression. Although without question Greco- Roman polytheism played a large role in the Mediterranean late antique world, these church fathers do not address the role of Christian women in comparison with their pagan counterparts, but instead seem to be forging a model of feminine holiness within a uniquely Christian context. It is important to look closely at the works of Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine and how they perceived women, to better understand women’s positions as exempla for humanity, literally and rhetorically, in Christian society in the late fourth century. The issue of women’s role in history is a field that has recently arisen in late antique studies. While the research undertaken has spanned many subjects, no one has investigated the specific role the Latin Church Fathers of the fourth century played in determining, or at least enunciating, the relatively important role of women as exempla in Christian society. While studies have been undertaken that note the progressive views of one or another of the Latin Fathers, or that discuss the power of aristocratic women in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, the two have yet to be put together in a comprehensive study. My thesis will address the important role of women in the late antique Western Roman Empire and the Church. 3 In the late fourth century, Ambrose, Jerome and Augustine, to borrow and slightly modify a phrase of Peter Brown’s, used women to teach with, presenting them as ideal exempla of Christian behavior and asceticism. 1 The writings of Ambrose, Jerome,

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