Kate Wilkinson - Gender Roles and Mental Reproduction Among Virgins

      A number of early Christian ascetic writers, including Methodius of Olympus, Athanasius, Ambrose, Augustine, and Jerome use the language of sexual play, conception, and the birth of spiritual offspring to describe the intimate contact between virgin and Word in prayer, psalmody, and meditation on Scripture.  Many of these passages rely on an analogy between mouth and vagina and heart/mind and womb.  The continuity in female sexual and procreative roles, despite the anatomical displacements, might suggest a program of ‘domestication’ wherein clerical writers attempted to align the life of the virgin with the life of the matron (Brakke 1995).  I argue, however, that the procreative imagery in treatises addressed to virgins is not unambiguously ‘feminine.’  

     The generation of rational offspring was a longstanding metaphor in Greek and Latin tradition for philosophical and literary composition.  Both philosophy and literature were largely, if not exclusively, masculine realms of activity.  Plato’s ‘Symposium’ provides the earliest and most famous example.  Socrates’ putative instructor in love, Diotima, describes in some detail the generation of mental offspring in the context of homoerotic, philosophical conversation.  The offspring of the pregnant mind—virtues, poetry, political writing—are superior to the merely mortal progeny of the man who procreates physically, that is, with a woman.  Quotation and imitation of this passage recurs regularly in Greek and Roman literature (Leitao 1997).  The Greek and Roman tradition maintains the equivalence of literary activity, especially, with sexual and procreative activity (Hallett 1988, Vanderspoel 2001,Walsh 1988). Ovid, for example, compares himself with Zeus who brings forth Athena from his head.

     Early Christian authors frequently assimilate the virginal life with the philosophical life for both men and women.  The recitation of Scripture and outpouring of spontaneous, scripturally inspired prayer in the inner room were literary activities.  When Christian virgins take up philosophy and literature, two intensely masculine endeavours from the ancient Greek and Roman point of view, and metaphorically conceive as a result, this is not so much a matter of continuity with their feminine reproductive destiny as continuity with a masculine adoption of procreative language.  Counterintuitive as it may seem, attributing mental reproduction to virgins is at least as masculinising as it is feminizing.