Virginity Sexualized

Abstract

We have determined that the ideal of virginity, conceived of as ontological asexuality, lies at the center of monastic life, giving life and logic to other themes conventionally associated with the cloister. The medieval monastic ethos, which sprang from Christian gnosis and drew upon that tradition periodically at times of reform, often found itself at odds with an Augustinian theological tradition whose presuppositions it did not share. Had Christian gnosis not been institutionalized in monasticism, it probably would have gone the way of the heterodox gnostic creeds. And it was, it did not manage to survive intact and “incorrupted” its embodiment in the structure of the western Church. Medieval history shows the cloister growing increasingly more receptive to western interpretation of its fundamental beliefs, to the detriment of its own uniqueness as a spiritual culture. It is only at periods of reform that the institution reawakened to the meaning of its gnostic heritage; such a period was the twelfth century. The time was an exciting one for the number of intellectual currents that met there in conflux. One of the most forcible of these, and no small component of the whole intellectual history of the period, was the attempt by monasticism, largely in the persons of Bernard of Clairvaux and the Victorine school of commentators, to expose the original nucleus of meaning implicit in its practice of celibacy.