Your post makes me at least a little bit more interested in the story of St. Agnes than I was. In general, it’s hard for me to see what value we’re supposed to take from the thorough admixture of fact and legend (when not outright fiction) that constitutes this legacy of “saints”. (A term that, predictably, I don’t like all that much, either.)

The theology behind her rejection seems strange—if Agnes is a saint because she refused marriage, should all women refuse marriage on the same grounds? (That they’re already “married to Jesus”?) If she was tremendously brave, it’s hard for me to see that her cause was worth being brave for. It seems instead to reflect a kind of refusal to engage in life, to be so compromised as to be part of the horrible, fleshly world in which she had been thrust.

I’m more sympathetic to this perspective than almost any Christian I know, and find this view of Agnes-the-stoic rather attractive. But for those of you who would condemn such a merely anti-flesh attitude, isn’t the story of St. Agnes rather void of worth?

Nice linkage, by the way. Also, you’ve managed to comment on church in a way that strikes me as very appropriate; I may try to emulate your example in the future.

I suspect that the lessons we might learn from particular holy men and women of old should not be taken out of context from the whole of faith. Each one might model for us something unique and true, but not something which, by itself, should be taken to constitute the whole picture.

Human marriage is a real thing, a genuine arena in which to work out our salvation with fear and trembling, and generally speaking it has been affirmed by most orthodox (small-o) Christians through the years. But it is also an image of another, mystical union, and there have typically been those who have already taken their places - in the here and now - at the “Marriage Feast of the Lamb” and their sacrifices might help others to remember that Heaven and Earth shall indeed pass away. Actually, to my mind, the ideal situation is one where virgins and monastics respect the sacrament of marriage, and where the married - those “engaged in life,” as Nate phrases it - also have a healthy respect for those who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom. There is something impoverished about a Christianity with no respect for consecrated celibacy, just as a mean-spirited virginity that condemned the lives of the married would seem somewhat sterile.

One nice thing about the communion of the saints - not as a theological concept but as a living set of people containing both some who we would call “alive” and some we might call “dead” - and some about whom we have precious little in the way of non-fantastical biographical info (though there’s more to be said on that, surely) - is precisely that it is diverse. Frankly, we don’t all identify with the same types of people, and the communion of saints gives us wanna-be stoics someone who walked this road before to identify with, while at the same time teaching us that there are other acceptable ways to be, other modes of life that also deserve our respect. None of their stories is “void of worth” but the lessons of each are not the same.

This is how I think about it, at any rate.

Ah, gentlemen. Your trouble over what to do about St. Agnes has much to do with being precisely that: gentlemen. Mr. Esterheld puts it well, when he points out that Saints all together form a whole picture, while individual saints might look simply crazy to those humans who do not feel the pull of a particular saint’s individual relation to the divine.

Agnes belongs to a group of women that are easy to overlook to those satisfied with the routes the city provides for eros and community; those women that, often from their early adolescence onward, say to themselves, that they do not wish to be married to any man. (It should be noted that this is a different species from the ones who wish to date many people instead.) Mythologically, the first person to do this was Artemis, when ten days after her birth, she sat on Zeus’s lap and begged that she might never have a husband. Agnes was only the latest of her kind, though her story has a few twists. Where does this desire come from, and how can we catch at its manner and likeness?

As far as I can tell, the desire includes love of solitude, often involving being solitary in the forest, a kind of wild shyness, an innocent love of purity (innocent because it’s not purity in response to wickedness). Girls before adolescence experience a kind of divine freedom from gender and from the city, and when they feel the oncoming of adolescence and the seeming limitations it will impose, they, like a wild animal or Huck Finn, want to lit out for the forest as soon as possible. Many, even most grow out of it, once they get a better look at Eros, but some legitimately (as opposed to pathologically) wish to hold on to that freedom, and sometimes, they deserve to be honored for it, even to sainthood.

Literary examples abound, though sadly many may be obscure to the non novel-crazed. Thomas Hardy does a good job with Bathsheba Everdene in Far From The Madding Crowd; Henry James has a slightly more pathological picture of Isabel Archer in Portrait of a Lady. It is worth thinking about for the contrast it makes, that Dorothea Brooke and Antigone are not of this class. Both of them are rather more robust than otherwise; both want very directly to participate in the wide public world of justice and charity, not run off to the forest to be alone. Perhaps the best way to see the divinity of Artemis is to consider the skill at which she exceeds even her brother Apollo: hunting. The sort of single-mindedness and clarity of perception that hunting requires—not to mention the control and focus of Eros—is paradigmatically present in the goddess.

It’s this last part, the presence of sublimated Eros in Artemis’s at-working-ness, that helps us understand Agnes’s own particularities. She didn’t want to be married to any man, but she sure wanted to be married to Christ, and HB was right to point out that a lot of her language is pretty erotic. Now, Artemis is a goddess, and she can get away with—for the most part—never dealing with Eros in its more ordinary forms, but for us mortals, this choice is a hell of a lot harder to keep from spiralling into a tragic situation. Aphrodite, as Homer says, is a goddess too. Perhaps Agnes was merely lucky that she never got old enough for her put-aside Eros to assert itself in some scandalous or heart-breaking or merely happy way. But the stories about her, as well as the fact that she became a Saint, suggest to me that she might have been one of those divine mortals that truly managed to love the goddess simply, and without some kind of twisting of soul. Just as Actaeon was struck blind when he looked on Artemis naked, so was the Roman man when he saw Agnes. (How ff-ing significant is that?) Perhaps she was truly lucky in the divinity of her soul and of her choices, that she could harmonize her Eros into an eros for the divinity of Christ, the Bridegroom of us all.

Agnes is the patron saint of girls: may she protect all who desire to forgo erotics just a little longer, as long as they truly wish.

Mary, what an utterly delightful exegesis. Should I ever be in the position of having to deliver a St. Agnes-based homily, I may ask you for permission to repeat much of this.

I’d really like to hear more from both you and Mike on the subject of the saints, but I can’t possibly justify taking more time from work to formulate the proper questions. But note my interest for future occasions.

Also, Mike: I searched exhaustively through my photographs last weekend and cannot find the photographs I took that weekend we spent with Mary and hb in DC. (For that’s the weekend with the one photograph I’ve mentioned.) I have two hard copies, so I know they exist… I’ve probably backed them up somewhere. At any rate, do let me know if you need any of those Flickr photos in higher resolution in the meantime.

This phenomenon is also shared in by my namesake.

You’re quite right, Fafner. Thanks, Nate.

All of the beautiful defenses above aside, I still agree with HB’s original point #4: I’ve always felt a bit defensive about not having any calling what-so-ever to the religious life. None, zero, nada, despite having a mother who constantly told me to be a nun. I still seem to recognize its superiority to my own state, in a way that has nothing to do with eros but instead with what one is dedicated to (how can dedication to my sacred little family really compare to the constant dedication to God?). I guess that’s why I prefer saints like St. Gianna Molla or my all-time favorite (and probably not an Episcopal saint?) St. Thomas More, who was clever, just, pious, explicitly rejected monastic life after giving it much thought, *and* tried his best to wheedle out of martyrdom and continue his normal little life. But still, it’s one of those topics that I can’t think about too long before feeling squirmy and uncomfortable.

This was in no way meant to be inflamatory about Anglicanism, so please don’t flame me. He’s just always been my favorite saint…