The Veil and the Ascetic Life

After the death of her parents Genevieve went to live in Paris, and in time received the veil of consecrated virginity from the bishop, keeping the vow made under Germanus’ blessing. The Vita portrays a life of extreme austerity — long fasts broken only twice a week, unbroken vigils and prayer, and charisms of vision and healing — lived not in a cloister but openly in the city as a virgo Dei.

Tradition: Western (pre-Schism, Gallo-Roman Gaul)

The Reception of the Veil

The Vita Genovefae has Genevieve, after the death of her father and mother, move to Paris to live with her godmother, and there, when she came of age, receive the veil of consecration from the bishop — together, in the Vita‘s account, with two other maidens, at the hand of the bishop of Paris (the text names the bishop only loosely, and the identification is uncertain) (Vita Genovefae 8, ed. Krusch, MGH SRM 3, 1896; trans. McNamara, Halborg, and Whatley, Sainted Women of the Dark Ages, 1992, “Genovefa,” §8). The veiling was the formal, public act by which the childhood betrothal to Christ became a canonical state of life: the consecration of virgins (velatio virginum) was by the fifth century an established rite of the Western Church, conferred by the bishop, by which a woman was set apart as a bride of Christ and bound to perpetual chastity (on the rite and the order of consecrated virgins in the late-antique West, see Peter Brown, The Body and Society, Columbia University Press, 1988, on virginity and the ascetic movement; René Metz, La consécration des vierges dans l’église romaine, Presses Universitaires de France, 1954).

Crucially, Genevieve was not, on the Vita‘s account, a monastic in the enclosed sense. She belonged to the order of consecrated virgins who lived in the world — in the city, often in or near the family home or in small companies of women, under the bishop’s oversight rather than under a monastic rule and abbess (McNamara et al., “Genovefa,” introduction, on her status as a consecrated virgin in the city rather than a cloistered nun; Jo Ann McNamara, Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns Through Two Millennia, Harvard University Press, 1996, on the pre-Benedictine varieties of the consecrated female life). This is the form that made her public career possible: her freedom to move about Paris, to lead its people in prayer, to organize its relief, and to travel, is the freedom of a consecrated woman in the world, not of a nun behind a wall. It places her in the same fifth-century Gallic landscape as the male ascetics gathering at Lérins and at Cassian’s Marseilles, but in the distinct and older mode of the urban virgo Dei (on Gallic monasticism of the age, see St. John Cassian).

The Severity of the Regime

The Vita dwells on the sheer austerity of her ascesis, and the details are its most vivid material. Genevieve, it says, ate only twice a week — on Sundays and Thursdays — and then only barley bread and beans, taking no wine and no meat, a regime she is said to have kept from about the age of fifteen until, in old age, the bishops persuaded her to relax it somewhat (Vita Genovefae 9, ed. Krusch; trans. McNamara et al., “Genovefa,” §9). She gave herself to long vigils and to prayer that ran through the night, and the text presents her whole life as an unbroken discipline of self-denial, silence, and intercession (Vita Genovefae 9–10; trans. McNamara et al., “Genovefa,” §§9–10). Such fasting — reception of food only on two fixed days, a diet of bread and pulses, total abstention from wine and flesh — is the recognizable idiom of late-antique heroic asceticism, the same measure the desert tradition prized, transposed into a Gallo-Roman city (on the ascetic ideal of extreme fasting, see The Desert Fathers; Brown, The Body and Society, 1988).

With the austerity the Vita couples charisms. It attributes to Genevieve the gift of prophecy, the discernment of hidden things, visions of heaven and hell, and healings — the raising up of the sick and the paralysed, the restoration of sight, the calming of the possessed — worked through her prayer and the sign of the cross (Vita Genovefae 10–13, and the miracle-catalogue running through the text; trans. McNamara et al., “Genovefa,” §§10–13 and passim). Per the repository methodology (§3.5), these are reported as what the Vita attests of her, pinned to that source and not certified as fact; their value here is as the shape of the holiness the tradition ascribed to her and the faithful received. One recurring motif — a candle carried in her nightly procession to church that the devil extinguished and that was miraculously relit — became, in the later Middle Ages, her signature emblem, the cierge de sainte Geneviève (Sluhovsky, Patroness of Paris, Brill, 1998, on the candle motif and its place in the cult).

Ascesis as the Ground of Authority

It is essential to see that in the Vita’s logic the asceticism is not a private discipline set apart from the public deeds but their very foundation. The woman who could steady a city against Attila, feed it under blockade, and speak to Frankish kings is, in the Vita, precisely the woman whose fasting and vigils had made her a vessel of divine power — the pattern, universal in late-antique hagiography, by which ascetic self-conquest is the credential of civic and charismatic authority (Peter Brown, “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity,” Journal of Roman Studies 61, 1971; Van Dam, Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul, University of California Press, 1985). Her power over the city rests, in the source, on her power over herself.

This is also why the asceticism drew hostility. Extreme fasting, claims to vision, and a woman’s public spiritual leadership were exactly the things that could be read as either sanctity or imposture, and the Vita records that they were read as both (see Opposition and Vindication). The consecrated life, in her case, was not a retreat from conflict but the arena of it. For the Orthodox reader she stands recognizably in the company of the great women ascetics of the undivided Church — the desert ammas, the consecrated virgins of the cities — living the same warfare of prayer and fasting, in the distinctive fifth-century Gallic form of the holy woman who is at once hidden in ascesis and exposed in the life of her city.

See Also

• The Blessing of Saint Germanus — the childhood consecration this veiling fulfils
• Opposition and Vindication — the hostility her ascetic claims provoked, and its overcoming
• Attila and the Deliverance of 451 — the public deed her ascesis is said to have grounded
• The Desert Fathers — the ascetic tradition whose idiom her fasting shares
• Monasticism — the consecrated ascetic life in Orthodox tradition

References

• Vita Genovefae, ed. Krusch, MGH SRM 3 (1896), §§8–13 and passim (the veiling; the fasting regime; the vigils; the charisms).
• McNamara, Jo Ann, John E. Halborg, and E. Gordon Whatley, trans. Sainted Women of the Dark Ages. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992. “Genovefa, Virgin of Paris,” §§8–13 (and introduction on her status as an urban consecrated virgin).
• McNamara, Jo Ann. Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns Through Two Millennia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. (The pre-monastic forms of the consecrated female life.)
• Brown, Peter. The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. (Virginity and the ascetic movement.)
• Brown, Peter. “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity.” Journal of Roman Studies 61 (1971): 80–101. (Ascesis as the credential of authority.)
• Metz, René. La consécration des vierges dans l’église romaine. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954. (The rite of the consecration of virgins.)
• Sluhovsky, Moshe. Patroness of Paris: Rituals of Devotion in Early Modern France. Leiden: Brill, 1998. (The candle emblem and the cult.)