Demons And the Making of the Monk

Monastic literature did not equate the demonic and the feminine; rather, gendered imagery, especially visual, provided a variety of perspectives from which to view the monk and his diabolical enemies... Many early Christian writings portrayed virtuous women as being "made male" or becoming "men." Such works shared antiquity's general equation of virtue with manliness, and some authors believed that the female body was merely a lesser version of the male and that an individual's body could move up or down a sliding scale of masculinity that also measured virtue. The opposite of virtuous "manliness" (andreia) was female "weakness" (astheneia). Thus, the metaphor (if it can be called that) of the masculine woman did not require the metaphor of combat: in the Gospel of Thomas, when Peter asserts that "Mary [Magdalene] should leave us, for females are not worthy of life," Jesus replies, "I am going to attract her to make her male so that she too might become a living spirit that resembles you males. For every female that makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heavens." As we have seen, monastic authors inherited the combat metaphor from the literature of martyrdom, which understood the captive Christian's struggle with beasts or gladiators in the arena to be combat with Satan. A female martyr such as Perpetua displayed masculine courage in her triumphant defiance of the demonic forces: "I became a man," she says. The monastic life succeeded martyrdom as the arena in which a woman could prove herself to be a "female man of God." Book jacket.