Making the Two into One: The Genderless Ideal of Egyptian Monks and Nuns

Did early Christian monks and nuns transcend gender through asceticism?

In a letter to his friend and benefactor Melania the Elder, the eminent Christian monk and author Evagrius Ponticus exhorts her to “strive therefore, O Temperate One, to give good example not only to women but also to men, being as it were an archetype of patience; since it is proper for a disciple of Christ to struggle unto blood, showing everyone that Our Lord arms women, too, with manliness against the demons.”

Indeed, early Christian monks and nuns often seemed to view gender as fluid, something that could be changed through ascetic behaviors, and therefore not entirely essential to the human being. Seventh-century monk Maximus the Confessor would thus write “[Christ] unified man, mystically abolishing by the Spirit the difference between male and female and, in place of the two with their peculiar passions, constituting one free with respect to nature.” The Roman world had strictly circumscribed gender roles which required the performance of particular gendered behaviors. Monks and nuns in Roman Egypt would in this sense reject their assigned genders in favor of the holiness of an ungendered ideal, a notion which can be traced back to early church father and theologian Origen of Alexandria. 

For example, the desert fathers of Egypt exhibited societally prescribed feminine virtues such as solitude, silence, passivity, and an emotional remorse for their sins, including copious weeping. The desert mothers, by contrast, took on masculine characteristics by cutting their hair short, wearing male attire, and allowing extreme fasting and other austerities to diminish or obscure their sexual anatomy. We'll explore how many among the desert fathers and mothers negated their assigned genders through asceticism in an effort to come ever closer to an ungendered ideal of holiness already well-established in some forms of Christianity.

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