The Sex Lives of Saints? What could such words possibly signify? Surely everyone knows that the repression of erotic desire is the hallmark of Christian sanctity: a “sex life” is precisely what a proper saint lacks. At most, ascetic eros—encoded as yearning for God—may be seen as the residue of an imperfectly sublimated sexuality. Better yet: it is a merely metaphorical expression for a purely desexualized love. Worse still: it reflects pleasure derived from practices of self-denial rooted in a pathological hatred of the body.

It is difficult simply to contradict such widespread and thus all too easily...

“How often, when I was living in the desert, in the vast solitude which gives to hermits a savage dwelling-place, parched by the flames of the sun, how often did I fancy myself among the pleasures of Rome (putavi me Romanis interesse deliciis)!” (Ep. 22.7). Thus begins Jerome’s account of his own brief career as a hermit, intruded into a letter written to the Roman virgin Eustochium circa 384, some eight years after he had decisively fled the Syrian desert. In this passage, ascetic fantasy quickly overwhelms historical description. Still inventing himself in the present, Jerome’s interest in his own...

Loosing her tongue, Ambrose’s Agnes gives shameless witness to her desire for the executioner’s sword: by such violent proxy is she made Christ’s bride (Ambrose, On Virgins 2).¹ In contrast, Jerome’s unnamed youth (subjected to a still stranger persecution) bites his tongue, thereby excising his shameful desire for the torturess who has him bound and mounted: thus he becomes a hermit (Life of Paul 3). The virgin martyr surges toward an erotic consummation, joyfully impaling herself on the steely blade that may be exchanged for a heavenly husband. (She is something of a literalist as well as a sensualist.) The...

Martin of Tours, a Pannonian ex-soldier credited with the militant conversion of Gaul to Christianity, is best known to us from the Life penned by the Aquitanian ascetic Sulpicius Severus. Much admired for its delicate engagement with classical traditions of historiography and biography, Sulpicius’s Life of Martin also forcefully overwrites prior hagiographical texts. Like Jerome, Sulpicius takes up the task of refuting the singular claims of the Life of Antony, thereby also issuing a challenge to Jerome’s own Lives of Paul and Hilarion—competitors in his competition with the Athanasian Life. The Life of Martin is thus written aggressively, but...

The peculiarly promiscuous Lives of loose women are not easy to tie down to a particular time, place, or even textual version, in large part because their immense popularity led quickly to multiple translations and uncertain attributions of authorship. Thus, although the Syriac tale of Mary, part of a longer Life of Abraham also transmitted in Greek and Latin versions, was traditionally assigned to the fourth-century poet-theologian Ephrem, it is almost certainly a fifth-century text, and its author must remain anonymous.¹ The Life of Pelagia claims to be authored by one Jacob, the deacon of the bishop Nonnos, yet neither...

Countereroticism will not tolerate conclusion. There can be no end to love in the lives of saints, no end to the reading and rewriting of holy Lives. Nonetheless, readers, writers, and lovers alike honor the power of the interval, the necessity—even the intense desirability—of the pause. Let us pause, then, in the midst, in between. Let us catch our breath.

Inspire: write and be read! Expire: let go of the self! In the midst, in between such daunting imperatives, our lives transpire. Heavy breathing, shallow breaths, suspenseful breathlessness: so we might measure the soulful, sensual embodiment of what...