Life of St. Mary of Egypt

This is an extract from:

Holy Women of Byzantium:

Ten Saints' Lives in English Translation

© 1996 Dumbarton Oaks

Trustees for Harvard University

Washington, D.C.

Printed in the United States of America

Published by

Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection

Washington, D.C.

www.doaks.org/etexts.html

edited by Alice-Mary Talbot

No. 1 in the series Byzantine Saints' Lives in Translation

3. LIFE OF ST. MARY OF EGYPT

translated by Maria Kouli

Introduction

Mary of Egypt, the prostitute from Alexandria who achieved sanctity through

repentance and ascetic solitary life, was a holy woman who offered reassurance

to every Christian: if such a licentious woman could find forgiveness,

surely ordinary sinners could hope for salvation. Her vita provides some information

on daily life in Alexandria and Jerusalem, on pilgrimage, on the cult of

the True Cross and the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, and on Palestinian

monasticism. Its primary importance lies, however, in its graphic portrayal of

the theme of the "repentant harlot," a type of female saint that found particular

favor in the milieu of Syro-Palestine and Egypt in the fourth to seventh centuries.

1

The earliest version of Mary's story is a brief account in the vita of Kyriakos

by the sixth-century hagiographer Cyril of Skythopolis.2 Cyril records

the tale told him by a certain monk named John who had encountered Mary

living as a solitary in a cave in the Judean desert. She, in turn, explained that

she had been a singer at the church of the Resurrection in Jerusalem who

withdrew to the desert to avoid leading men into sexual temptation. She had

subsisted for eighteen years on the jar of water and basket of legumes she had

brought with her. When John returned to visit Mary a second time, he found

her dead, and buried her in the cave that had served as her hermitage.

A very similar tale is found a half-century or so later in The Spiritual

Meadow of John Moschos (b. ca. 540/550, d. 619 or 634). Moschos describes

the unnamed woman as a nun from Jerusalem who fled to the desert to avoid

1 See B. Ward, Harlots of the Desert (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1987), for translations of

the vitae of other harlots, Pelagia, Thaı¨s, and Mary, the niece of Abraham.

2 E. Schwartz, Kyrillos von Skythopolis (Leipzig, 1939), 233-34. Eng. trans., R. M.

Price, Lives of the Monks of Palestine (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1991), 256-58.

66 FEMALE SOLITARIES

causing temptation to young men, surviving for seventeen years on a basket

of soaked legumes.3

The much longer and more detailed version presented here has transformed

Mary into a prostitute with an insatiable sexual appetite, thus rendering

even more remarkable her subsequent repentance and conversion into an

ascetic holy woman. This vita is generally attributed in the manuscripts to a

contemporary of Moschos, the theologian and writer Sophronios (ca. 560-

638), who served as patriarch of Jerusalem from 634 to 638. Sophronios' authorship

of the work has been debated in the scholarly literature. Both Zonaras,

a twelfth-century eulogist of Sophronios,4 and H. Delehaye5 viewed the

vita as a genuine work of Sophronios, while F. Delmas cautiously accepted

his authorship;6 other modern scholars, however, among them F. Halkin and

H.-G. Beck, have doubted the attribution.7 In any case, the work was probably

composed in the seventh century, since in the eighth century it was cited by

John of Damascus and translated into Latin.8

The vita is written in a simple but vivid style, making abundant use of

dialogue to advance the story. A substantial section, perhaps one-third of the

whole, is Mary's first-person account to Zosimas of her sinful youth, conversion,

and flight to the desert. It was no doubt this combination of compelling

subject matter, exotic desert locale (complete with wadis and lions), and accessible

language that led to the great popularity of the vita.

Despite the attempts of certain scholars,9 it is impossible to provide a

chronology for the life of Mary, or even to establish her historicity. The vita is

almost totally lacking in fixed chronological reference points, indicating only

Mary's age at various stages in her life. One must treat with skepticism the

3 PG 87:3049; Eng. trans. J. Wortley, The Spiritual Meadow of John Moschos (Kalamazoo,

Mich., 1992), 148-49.

4 A. Papadopoulos-Kerameus, Aj na'lekta IJ erosolumitikh'" Stacuologi'a",