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In the letters of Paul, we find that some women among the first generations of Christians renounced sexuality, marriage, and motherhood to consecrate themselves to the service of God and the Christian community.

Their commitment represented a social revolution.

In the ancient world, women were not recognized as having any identity outside the family context. Even the handful of virgins who served the goddess Vesta at Rome were entered by their fathers and generally married when they retired from service. Yet the Christian virgin (or widow, as the case might be), made for herself a recognized and respected place within the fledgling church.

During the centuries when the church suffered intermittent persecution by secular authority, these consecrated women played a vital role in Christianity’s preservation and spread. They turned their homes into shelters for wandering preachers, presided over religious meetings of an indeterminate nature, and performed charitable works—distributing alms, nursing the sick, and visiting prisoners. When martyrdom became inescapable, women were in the front lines of the soldiers of Christ. The second and third-century apocryphal gospels indicate that a common cause of Christian women’s execution was their refusal to obey the Roman law of obligatory marriage.

This “virginity” movement was not an ascetic movement. Some Christian Fathers of the third century criticized consecrated women for their worldly dress and social activities. Tertullian, in particular, rebuked their claim that renunciating sex entitled them to preach and act publicly as freely as men. He maintained that consecrated women had not escaped the boundaries limiting the public activity of women. Rather, by making themselves brides of Christ, they had subjected themselves to the most demanding and powerful of all husbands. Later, medieval clergy claimed the right to supervise nuns, the spiritual brides of the Lord, since they acted as his vicars.

In the third century, men took the initiative in asceticism, the practice of physical self-mortification that included sexual renunciation, severe fasting, sleeplessness, and other practices. Consecrated women, however, soon emulated this new fashion. The first monastic community was organized in the Egyptian desert (c. 320) by Pachomius and his sister, who took charge of a segregated female group on the opposite side of the river from the monks. Thereafter, women are consistently referred to as partners in monastic ventures. Antony, Ambrose, Augustine, Basil, John Cassian, and Benedict of Nursia (to note only a few of the giants associated with the growth of monasticism) all had sisters who practiced the consecrated life. Many more women of the late Roman nobility experimented with the new lifestyle. When Jerome came to Rome in the middle of the fourth century, he found a wide circle of wealthy women, led by Paula and Marcella, who had consecrated their widowhood or virginity to religion.

During the dangerous centuries that followed, the consecrated life became identified more exclusively with monasticism. Nuns and monks clustered in large houses organized according to a variety of rules that emphasized discipline and routine. The day was divided into segments for sleeping, eating together, performing manual labor, and always, chanting the office in a perennial outpouring of praise to God. Women responded in great numbers to the attraction of this life. They planted new communities on the frontiers of the Christian world, contributing to the process of converting barbarian tribes.

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