maagdelijkheid {'On Virginity'} feest v/d geest

What we need,
more than anything else,
to survive in a cruel world, is an active spirit and a place to be alive:
without a mind of your own life is very boring and even if you're rich
it doesn't mean
you can be
satisfied!

What we can find
in those first 'Christian/Jewish' ages within the Roman empire
is above all more effective rhetorical moves in which the identification
of the female virgin as male role model
is made explicit.

The folkloristic figure
of the man disguised as woman is explicitly thematized
as an apropriation of the name 'virgin' by a male martyr,
an appropriation that is doubled by the identification of the Fathers with female virgins,
both martyred and not.

In other words,
the male Christian crossdressed as a Roman soldier
and then once again crossdressed as a virgin martyr
produces the same effect of identification with a virgin for a male audience
as that producec through the cross-gendering of the lion/ess
in Ambrose's retelling
of Thecla's story.

The transformation
of the second customer
makes a perfect double of the transformation of the lion.
He also goes in as a hypermale predator ~ a wolf ~ and is transformed into a celibate,
feminized Christian. The point of identification as made even more palpable here, however,
and thus serves as a further interpretative key, guaranteeing our 'comical' and refreshing reading,
for the "female" object, the "virgin" who produces
this second conversion, is, in fact,
this time literally,
a cross-dressed
man
...

So this story goes on
to report that the escaped maiden, however,
returns to the place
of punishments.

The virgin insists
that she must be martyred also,
using the very reasonable argument that it was chastity she sought,
and her chastity is equally in danger now. Moreover, if the soldier is martyred in her place,
then she would be guilty
of his blood.

"A virgin
has a place to bear a wound, even if she had no place te bear an affront ....
I have changed my clothing, not my profession. If you snatch death from me,
you have not saved me
but circumvented me!"

[I have substituted "circumvented"
for "defrauded"!] In the end, of course, both achieve the crown of martyrdom together.
The typological connection, perhaps even the genetic connection, between this story and the story of Rabbi Me'ir's martial disguise is palpable. In both cases, the male rescuer disguises himself
as a Roman soldier, a typical customer of the prostitute's, in order to reveal himself to her
as her rescuer. The stories have very different endings, however.

Rabbi Me'ir's sister-in-law escapes,
and that is the end of her story. The narrative of the virgin of Antioch, however,
reprises the by now familiar Christian plot of the escaped martyr who returns to fullfill his or her destiny
as martyr. We have seen this in the narratives of both Polycarp and Cyprian,
the plot that we have referred to before
as the "Quo vadis?" plot!

The virgin of Antioch is,
indeed, not circumvented by being rescued.
We have here, then, a narrative of female autonomy:
she gets to choose her fate, the double crown of virginity and martyrdom.
However, we also have here a narrative of the most extreme form of social control!
As is elucidated, the function of the narrative of the virgin of Antioch is to "obscur[e] the awkward narrative fact of Thecla's triumphant survival of persecution. It is by juxtaposing Thecla's story
with that of the Antiochene martyr that Ambrose brings Thecla directly ... under control
of the late fourth-century tale of the virgin martyr,
with its necessary fatal
conclusion."

Conversely,
the rescue of the rabbinic virgin
is as necessary in terms of the rabbinic discourse of gender
as the death of the patristic one is for theirs, for were the Jewish virgin to die then,
her calling as woman would have been destroyed,
not preserved.

Whereas for much of the Christian tradition
the perpetual virgin girl is perfection itself, for the Rabbis, she is a chrysalis, not yet fully formed.
As Chrysostom well put it:
"The Jew disdained the beauty of virginity .... The Greek admired and revered the virgin,
but only the Chrurch of G d adored her
with zeal!"

For Chrysostom,
by the fourth century,
rabbinic Judaism, with its anti-ascetic tendency,
simply IS[/ Judaism.

For Ambrose,
the primary issue
in the symbolization of the virgin as ego ideal is precisely her virginity ~
her literal continence, interpreted as a model for male celibates, that is,
as an abiding sign of Christian resistance to the regimes
of heteronormativity and natalism
of the Greco-Roman
world.

[See
also the definition
and enforcement of communal and doctrinal bounderies:
the symbolic functioning of female chastity
in some earlier Jewish texts
such as the Book
of Tobit.]!

Early
Christianity,
it could fairly be argued,
was in large part a powerful resistance movement
to this facet of Roman culture.

In the Ambrose text about Thecla,
her neat martyrdom is caused entirely by her reistance
to her dominant Roman cultural norm
of marriage and
procreation.

There is
virtually nothing in the story
about her belief in Christ, her rejection of pagan gods,
or even her rejection of emperor worship that leads her into the ring with the lions.
To be sure, her commitment to virginity was generated by her conversion to Christianity,
but the content of that conversion is seemingly more about virginity
than about any other religious practice
or belief.

This is typical
of virgin-martyr acts in general!
As characterized as follows this type of text:
"The formulaic character of many of the accounts suggest not an audience expecting novelty,
but one finding a compelling spiritual idiom in the repetitions of the triumph
of virginal virtue over scurrilous and scandalous
male desire!",
including I would add
and amphasize, the scurrilous
and scandalous desire
of "legitimate"
husbands!

One
could have
the impression
reading both the paper
and the responses that the prospective women martyrs
were mainly concerned on the eve of their martyrdom with the question of
whether to accept or to resist the male gave,
rather than with the fact that they were
about to be tortured to death
in the name of their religious
beliefs: i.o.w. thus missing
the point that the resistance to the male gaze
{and even more} was precisely the significant content
of their belief!

To be fair,
this text comes from Ambrose's treatise "On Virginity,"
so it is not entirely surprising that this should be the focus,
but the story as it appears in the apocryphal Acts of Paul & Thecla
is not all that different in content,
although told not nearly
so well
there.