Content area
Full Text
The Sex Lives of Saints: An Erotics of Ancient Hagiography. By Virginia Burrus. Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religions. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. vi + 216 pp. $42.50 cloth.
Working through The Sex Lives of Saints is, in some ways, like attending a lavish dinner party where the guests, at the outset of the evening, may have little in common besides their acquaintance with the host. By the end of the evening, the diners from diverse walks of life have engaged and have brought their own peculiar perspectives to bear on increasingly complex conversations, resulting in a polyphonous discourse unimagined hours earlier. Some guests are by turns illuminated, confounded, delighted, and challenged by this intercourse, and all are astonished by the degree to which their views have shifted and broadened. Burrus brings together history, theology, critical theory, philosophy, and autobiography in a dazzling series of readings of early Christian hagiographies that will, by turns, delight, confound, illuminate, and challenge diverse historians, theologians, and theorists.
The central goal of this work (described in the introductory chapter) is to elicit, from the ancient Lives of saints, a sublime "countererotics," a theory and practice of desire (eros) that is resistant to more restrictive and heteronormative notions of desire "that likewise emerges (derivatively) in late antiquity and eventually culminates in the production of a modern, western regime of 'sexuality'" (3). Such a countererotics does not sublimate desire (the more common reading of ascetic hagiographies), but rather elevates and expands it beyond (and against) the bounds of modern notions of sexuality. The reader who approaches this book with a narrow understanding of the "erotic" as simply that which crudely points to the human sex act will miss Burrus's much more sweeping argument. Eros and erotics, for Burrus, seek joyously to transcend the self without culmination or release, an infinite desire-beyond-desire that can inform human as well as divine longing, a "love that is letting go of self" (71; more expansively described on 8-9:...