Excerpt from “Towards Ground: Modesty and Mutability in the Life of Mary of Egypt & the Life of Pelagia”

José (Jusepe) de Ribera’s Saint Mary of Egypt pictures the fourth century ascetic in prayer (fig. 1). Light ripples across her skin as if to attenuate bones beneath. Shadows mark the clefts of cheeks and cavernous eyes; their orbits resemble those of the head below. A loaf of bread, the Saint’s only sustenance, rests beside the skull [1]. Ribera places his Mary within a telluric setting: only a small segment of yellow sky pierces the canvas. The painter reflects Mary’s description of her body within the desert landscape. In Sophronius’s Life of Our Holy Mother Mary of Egypt, we read: “‘And those who have stripped off the rags of sin have no refuge, hiding themselves in the clefts of the rocks’” [2]. Her garment reflects the terrain; it enfolds her in stone. Where Pygmalion transmuted from soil to skin, Mary’s body returns to ground. Her left hand slips beneath brown fabric (or is this, too, stone?) to occlude itself in igneous terrain. 

I begin with Ribera’s 1641 painting to consider the relation between the ascetic body and its landscape in two early Christian lives: the Life of Our Holy Mother Mary of Egypt and the Life of Pelagia. Each describes a transformation of states: from corruption to purity, from public to private. Each Life, in turn, is rendered as an image of extreme modesty. In Wilkinson’s terms, modesty could offer a “creative and performative mode of being for late Roman Christian ascetic women” [3]. Both hagiographies, then, convey the sanctity of their protagonists as performing modesty in their proximity to ground. 

Upon seeing Zosimas, Mary describes her nudity as a source of shame and a site of sanctity. “‘For I am a woman,’” she explains, “‘and naked as you see with the uncovered shame of my body’” [4]. Mirroring Zosimas, her body lies in prostration. This prostration is one amongst many similar moments. Mary’s body appears in continuous dialogue with the desert terrain. As Mary recounts her temptations, she iterates her proximity to the ground: “Throwing myself on the ground, I worshipped that holy earth and kissed it with trembling;” “I flung myself on the earth and watered it with my tears;” and “I did not rise from the ground” [5]. Throughout this process, her body is transformed: “the skin dark as if burned up by the heat of the sun” [6].

Pelagia’s body undergoes similar transformations, as the Life suggests a similar conjunction of body and ground [7]. Pelagia’s skin changes by her own doing: “The whole complexion of her body was coarse and dark like sackcloth as the result of her strenuous penance” [8]. Her initial prostration, before the feet of Nonnos, marks a dramatic turn from prostitution. She covers herself with the dirt from his feet and throws dust from the ground upon her head. She images herself as literally dirty, and therefore “corrupt” and “corrupting” [9]. Remarkably, it is in this moment that she demands to be baptized. She threatens Nonnos in an agential claim for the possibility of her own redemption [10].

Pelagia alters her integument, removing fabric and dirtying flesh. She transforms from Marganito, with the name’s connotations of pearlescent white, to Pelagios. Like Mary’s emaciated body and burnt skin, such a transformation necessitates a continual “performance.” Neither change is permanent. The body’s alteration is not fixed. This conception of change subtends both Lives. It is an understanding of human will, of agency, within the broader Pelagian debate. The body that can be transformed remains mutable in its transformation. Thus appears the Pelagian corollary as Wilkinson defines it: a need for “ongoing divine grace to sustain righteousness” [11].

Thus, the relationship to ground—one of prostration, of extreme modesty—coextends with the duration of each Life. The ground comes to stand metonymically for Mary. After Mary’s initial disappearance into the desert’s depths, Zosmias falls, “bowing down to the ground on which she had stood” [12]. Mary “speaks” her name through the very sand upon which she lies. Her instruction, to “‘bury on this spot the body of humble Mary,’” is “traced on the ground by her head” [13]. Pelagia’s body would similarly “speak” before going to ground. Upon the internment of the “righteous man,” the bishop and abbots saw “she [now, Pelagia] was a woman” [14]. Their understanding is the result of their inspection. Yet the communication by Pelagia’s body exceeds the clergy’s wishes: “they [bishops and abbots] wanted to hide this astonishing fact from the people but were unable to do so” [15]. In turning to ground both bodies display modesty as performative, as a form altered and altering through time. A body of the earth, a body without pretense to the divine, is made—like ground—capable of transformation and of transcendence.

[1] When Mary is asked by Zosimas what food she finds, she replies: “I had two and a half loaves when I crossed the Jordan. Soon they dried up and became hard as rock. Eating a little I gradually finished them after a few years,” 14. The loaf becomes Mary’s iconographic symbol. See The Life of our Holy Mother Mary of Egypt in The Great Canon, the Work of Saint Andrew of Crete, Holy Trinity Monastery, Jordanville, NY (accessed via Fordham’s Medieval Sourcebook.) All references to The Life of our Holy Mother Mary of Egypt are henceforth abbreviated as Life of Mary.

[2] Life of Mary, 16. 

[3] Kate Wilkinson, Women and Modesty in Late Antiquity, Cambridge University Press (2015), 1–2. 

[4] Life of Mary, 5. 

[5] See Life of Mary, 12, 15, 15, respectively. 

[6] Life of Mary, 5. 

[7] I use “Pelagia” throughout and oscillate between she/hers and he/his pronouns in my writing. However, I want to maintain the name’s ability to signify across gender and to challenge gender binarization altogether, as Pelagia/os appears as a trans body. 

[8] Life of Pelagia, in Sebastian Brock and Susan Harvey, Holy Women of the Syrian Orient, University of California Press (1998), 60. All citations henceforth refer to Life of Pelagia. 

[9] Life of Pelagia, 50. 

[10] Wilkinson, 3. 

[11] Wilkinson, 3. The alternative to this is Augustine’s conception of human nature as essentially fixed. 

[12] Life of Mary, 18. 

[13] Life of Mary, 19–20. 

[14] Life of Pelagia, 61

[15] Life of Pelagia, 61.