Book description
Has a repressive morality been the primary contribution of
Christianity to the history of sexuality? The ascetic concerns that
pervade ancient Christian texts would seem to support such a common
assumption. Focusing on hagiographical literature, Virginia Burrus
pursues a fresh path of interpretation, arguing that the early
accounts of the lives of saints are not antierotic but rather convey a
sublimely transgressive "countereroticism" that resists the
marital, procreative ethic of sexuality found in other strands of
Christian tradition.
Without reducing the erotics of ancient hagiography to a single
formula, The Sex Lives of Saints frames the broad historical,
theological, and theoretical issues at stake in such a revisionist
interpretation of ascetic eroticism, with particular reference to the
work of Michel Foucault and Georges Bataille, David Halperin and
Geoffrey Harpham, Leo Bersani and Jean Baudrillard. Burrus
subsequently proceeds through close, performative readings of the
earliest Lives of Saints, mostly dating to the late fourth and early
fifth centuries-Jerome's Lives of Paul, Malchus, Hilarion, and Paula;
Gregory of Nyssa's Life of Macrina; Augustine's portrait of Monica;
Sulpicius Severus's Life of Martin; and the slightly later Lives of
so-called harlot saints. Queer, s/m, and postcolonial theories are
among the contemporary discourses that prove intriguingly resonant
with an ancient art of "saintly" loving that remains, in
Burrus's reading, promisingly mobile, diverse, and open-ended.
"Burrus's interweaving of ancient and modern voices is as
meditative as it is analytical, but the overall effect is to induce
the reader into an alternative view of what constitutes the allure of
the saintly life. . . . After The Sex Lives of Saints
hagiography will never be the same."-Journal of Early
Christian Studies
Virginia Burrus is Professor of Early Church History at Drew
University and the author of Saving Shame: Martyrs, Saints, and Other
Abject Subjects, also available from the University of Pennsylvania
Press.
