Writing Demetrias: Ascetic Logic in Ancient Christianity

Abstract

In his influential discussion of early Christian ascetic renunciation, Peter Brown announced that “Christian men used women ‘to think with’ in order to verbalize their own nagging concern with the stance that the Church should take with the world.” Brown's statement encapsulates the particular difficulties facing students of the history of women in the early Christian period. The most basic difficulty is that we possess very few texts by women from this period until well into the Middle Ages. We can point to the diary of the third-century martyr Perpetua, the complex and recondite Vergilian and Homeric centos (“stitch-verses”) of the aristocrat Proba and the empress Eudocia, and perhaps one or two other arguable examples. With a dearth of women's own voices, can historians be expected to reconstruct women's lives? This paucity of “first-person” texts is coupled with a more serious theoretical difficulty facing historians of all periods whose main “evidence” consists of literary and rhetorically informed texts. Scholars are much less confident today in our ability to peel back layers of male rhetoric and find the “real” woman concealed underneath. Brown's comment underscores this rhetorical skepticism by asking whether these texts are even “about” women at all. Others following Brown's lead have understood texts that are ostensibly to or about women as concerned primarily with issues of male authority and identity. In Brown's words, women were good “to think with,” but the subject of that “thought” was inevitably male. Despite these technical and theoretical difficulties, however, I do not think we are witnessing the final and absolute erasure of women from ancient Christian history.

Real Women or Objects of Discourse? The Search for Early Christian Women

“…Similarly, Andrew Jacobs acknowledges the difficulties of reconstructing women's history – which entail both a lack of sources by women and our inability to ‘peel back layers of male rhetoric and find the “real” woman concealed underneath’– yet, like Matthews, he asserts that we are not necessarily ‘witnessing the final and absolute erasure of women from ancient Christian history’ (2000, p. 720). Both Jacobs and Matthews remind us that texts mirror as well as create social realities, a fact that tends to be disregarded when we read Brown's suggestion of Christian men ‘thinking with’ women as solely an ‘intellectual process, confined to the remote recesses of the ancient male mind’ (Jacobs 2000, p. 722). Jacobs, then, takes seriously the social context of ancient texts and, utilizing the work of historian Gabrielle Spiegel, reminds us that male‐authored texts were not the products of a female‐free world.…”

“…Jacobs, then, takes seriously the social context of ancient texts and, utilizing the work of historian Gabrielle Spiegel, reminds us that male‐authored texts were not the products of a female‐free world. This recognition allows us to write women's history from a more theoretically sophisticated vantage point: ‘By attending to the particularity of a cultural product, its “social logic,” we can perhaps bridge the gap between “text” and “context” and produce social history from within the murky depths of poststructuralist discourse’ (Jacobs 2000, p. 722). Thus while Jacobs does not propose to recover specific, real women, he puts forward the possibility of ‘delineating the space in which women could “logically” operate in the early Christian world’ (Jacobs 2000, p. 722).…”

“…In taking up the case of Demetrias, an aristocratic Roman and a consecrated virgin, Jacobs attends to the ‘social logic’ of the letters to Demetrias penned by Jerome, Augustine, and Pelagius between ca. 414–417 ce .…”

“…Although Jerome attempted to erase her nobilitas by warning her against public displays of wealth – encouraging her to focus her attention on the poor and homeless instead – Demetrias nonetheless endowed a church in Rome. In the letter De vera humilitate Jacobs finds another possible example of Demetrias ‘thinking back’, this time against Augustine's advice. The author of this letter – writing at Demetrias's request – affirms the connection between Demetrias as aristocrat and ascetic.…”