On Saint Agnes and the Secret of Girlhood
Hi friends,
Happy new year! I’m feeling hopeful about this one, hopeful that it will be better than the last. And I’m looking forward to writing about more saints for you in this little newsletter! Book writing is going well, but it also feels very serious, and so it’s nice to have this email to balance things out. I look forward to writing it every month because it feels so relaxed to me, low stakes and loose form. And I’m glad you enjoy it enough to be here with me.
On January 21st, the Catholic Church celebrates the feast of Saint Agnes. Very little is known about her, and much of her story is myth. We know that she lived in Rome in the last half of the 3rd century, during the reign of Emperor Diocletian. We know that she was very young, 12 or 13 years old, when she was martyred. We know that she refused to be married and was killed because of it. Legend fills in the blanks. It tells us that Agnes was a stunningly beautiful girl from a wealthy Roman family. She had many suitors and refused them all, declaring herself a bride of Christ. The suitors formally accused her of being a Christian, a dangerous thing to do under the rule of an emperor who reveled in violently persecuting Christians. The accounts of how she died are varied and gruesome; I won’t go into them here. What matters is that she defended her personhood unto death.
Among the Catholic saints, there are a number of virgin martyrs: Agnes, Cecilia, Lucy, Agatha. I’ve spent time lately looking up and reading reflections on their lives from various Catholic sources. Much of the hagiography surrounding them is terrible, written by men who simply cannot understand what it feels like to be a young girl, an understanding of which is necessary to truly understand Agnes’ story. The lives of the virgin martyrs are often flattened, reduced to a bland morality tale about physical purity, essentially teaching young girls that it is better to be a dead virgin than a living survivor of assault. Their stories become passive lessons in proper behavior, more about what happened to them than about what they did or why. They are often told in such a way that it is easy to get the message that a girl’s value is in the physical fact of her virginity, and that once her physical virginity is no more, she has less value. This is certainly what I was taught. The virgin martyrs were never about the spiritual virtue of chastity, or about courage, or about the intense self-possession of a young girl. Their stories, as they were told to me, were about defending a physical state of being which has nothing to do with a person’s inherent value. Their stories were used to instill fear.
Agnes’ life is about much more than this, obviously, and the historical context of her life is important. Agnes lived in the third century, during the days of the Early Roman Empire. During this time, Roman law forbade a woman to remain unmarried. She was, always, the property of a male, either her father or her husband. A woman simply had to marry, because she was property, and the law recognized her as nothing more than a legal appendage of a man. Into this Roman world, Christianity introduced radical ideas about a woman’s dignity and right to personhood. From the very beginning, Christianity insisted on a woman’s right to remain unmarried. The Church created space for women to be wholly unto themselves, apart from any man. It recognized that women could belong to God as much as a man could. Girls like Agnes refused to accept that they were second-class citizens, only fit to be a man’s property, and they died defending their right to self-possession, their right to be brides of Christ rather than brides of men. Agnes was a bride of Christ. Agnes believed, truly, that she was a person whole unto herself. She believed that she could be defined outside of her relationships to men, that she deserved to remain untouched by men, that she deserved to exist outside of their authority and outside of their interest.
There is a phenomenon among women I’ve chatted with about girlhood and womanhood, leaving one and entering the other. A girl is invisible, and then suddenly she is not. A girl can be secret, and then suddenly men want to know the secret. It becomes harder to remain apart. It becomes harder to remain a virgin in the old sense of the word, woman-unto-herself. I think that this experience is familiar to most girls, the time when the body starts to become a thing which no longer belongs to oneself and is suddenly subject to scrutiny by others, when one suddenly starts hearing talk about how one can become defiled through no fault of one’s own, when the secret self-possession of girlhood starts to slip from one’s grasp. Agnes was 12 or 13 when she died. I imagine her being noticed by men, and feeling uncomfortable being perceived in that way, and wanting a way out. I imagine Agnes as wanting to keep her self to herself, and finding a way to do that in Christianity, in becoming a bride of Christ. Men could not hold the secret, but God could.
There is so much writing about the virgin martyrs by white male priests who seem to not understand the discomfort and fear of being perceived in a predatory way and so they necessarily miss the point. For me, the stories about the virgin martyrs are not about physical virginity. They are about the secret self, and wanting to keep it secret. Thomas Merton wrote about a thing he called le point vierge, how there is “at the center of our being a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God. . .which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will.” I think that Agnes was deeply in touch with this “virgin point,” and I think that this is what was what she was so fiercely protective of. I think that Agnes’ story is about self-possession, and I think that so many men don’t understand the depth of a young girl’s self-possession, of how well young girls know themselves, of how deep their spiritual integrity can run, of the lengths they will go to protect it. The virginity of the virgin martyrs was not a passive thing. It was fierce protection of le point vierge, of the hiddenness of girlhood.
As a teenager, I felt a deep kinship with Agnes and her desire to be a bride of Christ. It may have something to do with the way I entered the Catholic Church, participating in the usual rituals at a later age. It is the tradition in the Catholic Church for children to receive their first communion at 7 years old. The girls dress up in white dresses, the boys dress up in little suits, there are often gifts and a party. I was a bit older when my family joined the Catholic Church, and so I was a bit older when I went through the motions of the first communion tradition. I was not 7 but 14 on the day of my first communion. I participated in this bridal ritual not in the thick of girlhood but just as I was leaving it. Dressing up as a bride and being led into church feels less metaphorical when you’re on the cusp of puberty, less like a ritual and more like a marriage, and I think that there is no way for a girl to perform a thing of that nature and it not bury itself deep in her psyche. It certainly did for me. When I write it all out like this, it seems like such a strange thing, but I’m oddly grateful for it. Grateful for the ritual itself. Grateful for the time in which it happened. The pseudo-marital ritual of first communion reminded me that I belonged to God at a time when I needed that reminder. It gave me permission to remain unto-myself, for God. I saw that same desire in Agnes, the desire to remain secret and hidden, to keep oneself whole. It made me feel less strange and alone in that feeling, in the desire to hold onto one’s self. I feel like Agnes showed me how to keep a part of myself to myself, how to hold tightly to it, how it is worth holding tightly. Not virginity, but le point vierge, the secret self that is for God alone.