Alibech, Rustico, and the life of Saint Pelagia

A story in Boccaccio’s Decameron is set in the Egyptian desert of the desert fathers.  The young hermit Rustico dwelling there unexpectedly encountered the beautiful girl Alibech.  Dioneo, the narrator of this story, foretells the story as putting the Devil back into Hell:

I want to tell you how to do it.  Perhaps you’ll even be able to save your souls once you’ve learned it. [1]

Dioneo’s story should be understood in the context of the Life of Saint Pelagia, an early Christian story of ascetic holiness.  Both Dioneo’s story and the Life of Saint Pelagia affirm the natural goodness of human sexuality.  They also recognize the human tendency toward deception and self-centeredness.  At the beginning of the Decameron, Pampinea chartered the brigata with the fullness of good life:

We should go and stay on one of our various country estates, shunning the wicked practices of others like death itself, but having as much fun as possible, feasting and making merry, without ever trespassing the sign of reason in any way. [2]

In Dioneo’s story and the Life of Saint Pelagia, the sign of reason mirrors the sign of selfless self-giving in true love.

He who moves heaven and all of its stars
Made me, for His delight,
Refined and charming, graceful, too, and fair,
To give to lofty spirits here below
A certain sign of that
Beauty abiding ever in His sight.
But mortals imperfect,
Who can’t see what I am,
Find me unpleasing, nay, treat me with scorn. [3]

In the Life of Saint Pelagia, Pelagia’s well-cultivated physical beauty served as inspiration to a higher beauty.  Pelagia was an actress, dancer, and courtesan.  In the company of young men and wearing nothing but jewelry, Pelagia paraded by Bishop Nonnus and other bishops.  Bishop Nonnus intently looked at her.  He delighted in her beauty.  Her beauty inspired him to cultivate beauty of the soul to please God the eternal lover.  His fellow bishops lacked that lofty spirit.  They scorned Pelagia’s obvious physical beauty.  They thus deceived themselves and denied natural male sexuality.[4]

Saint Ursicinus, a hermit saint

The story of Alibech and Rustico plays these keys of asceticism and beauty, self-centeredness and deception.  The story begins with unreason.  Alibech was the fourteen-year-old daughter of a very rich man in the Muslim land of Tunisia.  She was naive and not conscious of her own contradictory motivations:

She was not a Christian, but having heard how greatly the Christian faith and the service of God were praised by the numerous Christians living in the city, one day she asked one of them how God could be served best and with the least difficulty.[5]

Christians praising the Christian faith isn’t reasonably inspiring to non-Christians.  A desire to best serve God isn’t consistent with a desire to serve God with the least difficulty.  In any case, a Christian told Alibech that she could best serve God by becoming a holy recluse in the desert.  Alibech unreasonably sought to do just that:

the following morning, moved not by a reasonable desire, but rather by a childish whim, she set out secretly for the Theban desert all by herself without letting anyone know what she was doing.

Alibech set out into the desert as an unholy fool.

Rustico led himself into temptation with Alibech.  In the desert, Alibech went up to a holy man’s hut and asked him to teach her how to serve God.  The hermit, with appreciation for his natural sexual desire for a beautiful girl, told her that he could not be her teacher.  He advised her to seek someone more capable.  Another hermit similarly advised Alibech.  Then she came to Rustico.  He was willing to put himself to the test.  He took Alibech into his cell and made a bed for her from palm fronds.  His holy resolve soon dissolved.  He designed a scheme to gain consensual carnal knowledge of Alibech.

Rustico told Alibech that the most pleasing service to God is to put the Devil back into Hell.  Rustico told the girl to do whatever he did.  Then he took all his clothes off.  He knelt down and had her kneel down just in front of him:

as they knelt in this way, and Rustico felt his desire growing hotter than ever at the sight of her beauty, the resurrection of the flesh took place.  Staring at it in amazement, she said, “Rustico, what’s that thing I see sticking out in front of you, the thing I don’t have?”

Holy hermits aspired to put their flesh to death symbolically with ascetic practices.  The resurrection of the flesh — Rustico’s genital erection — was a reversal of monastic asceticism.[6]  Echoing the disparagement of men’s genitals in medieval European literature, Rustico described his penis as the Devil.  He described Alibech’s vagina as Hell.  With Alibech’s enthusiatic consent, Rustico put the Devil back into Hell.  They went on to put the Devil back into Hell seven times, a virtuous number, before they rested for awhile.  Alibech came to enjoy immensely putting the Devil back into Hell.  At her insistence, they had sex even when Rustico didn’t want to.  According to the United Nations’ judgment of criminality, Alibech raped Rustico repeatedly.  Rustico became thin and exhausted. In a symbolic transfer of Alibech’s fiery lust, her father’s house burned down, killing him and all the family except for Alibech.

The story of Alibech and Rustico represents self-centeredness and deception.  Personal whim propelled Alibech out into the desert to seek to serve the Christian understanding of God.  After she experienced sex, she insistently demanded sex with no respect for Rustico’s exhaustion.  Beneath Alibech’s expressed desire to serve God was her own self-centeredness.  Rustico, on the other hand, betrayed his ascetic commitment as a monk and intentionally deceived Alibech with his story of putting the Devil back into Hell.

Beyond Alibech’s and Rustico’s problems of sexual desire are more important problems of self-centeredness and deception.  True love, which can encompass sexual love, is impossible with deception and self-centeredness.  That’s the higher meaning of Boccaccio’s story of Alibech and Rustico.[7]

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Notes:

[1] Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron, Day 3, story 10, from Italian trans. Rebhorn (2013) p. 290.  Id. Notes, n. 1, p. 889 states, “There are only the vaguest antecedents for this story.”  Several early saints were named Rustico (Rusticus): Saint Rusticus of Verona (died c. 290),  Saint Rusticus of Narbonne (died c. 461), and Saint Rusticus of Lyon (died 501).  While two of these saints were bishops, Rustico also suggests “rustic” or uncultured.

Perhaps a more relevant referent for Rustico is Boccaccio’s imagination of the monk Rusticus of Toulouse. Jerome’s surviving collection of letters include a letter to Rusticus (letter 125) in 412. Jerome warned Rusticus of a woman’s ability to seduce a monk.

Alibech sounds Arabic and is thus appropriate for a girl from Tunisia.  An early fifteenth-century text from North Africa tells the story of men who were sexual heroes and who would have been Alibech’s equals.

[2] Id. Day 1, Intro., trans. Rebhorn (2013) p. 16.  I’ve replaced “overstepping the bounds of reason” with “trespassing the sign of reason” based on Kirkham (1993), Introduction.

[3] Decameron, Day 3, Conclusion, Lauretta’s song, trans. Rebhorn (2013) p. 298.  The first line quoted above parallels the end of Dante’s Commedia in Paradiso, 33.145, “The love that moves the sun and the other stars.” Id. Notes, p. 890, n. 3.  Id n. 4 observes of Lauretta’s song:

Critics have attempted to link it to Boccaccio’s own life and to allegorize it in various ways, but with little success.

The relevant allegory seems to me to be the speaker of the song having been the bride of Christ, also understood as the Church.  In addition to the stanza quoted above, a key line:

Although I’d come to earth
For all men’s good, of one I’m now the slave.

That line makes little sense realistically and personally. It makes sense allegorically as representing the political position of the Church in Florence at a specific time.

[4] The Life of Saint Pelagia was a hagiography that probably originated in a mid-fifth-century Syro-Palestinian milieu.  It was well-known in medieval Italy; a Latin translation survives in a late-twelfth-century or early thirteenth-century Italian manuscript.  Here’s discussion of the Life of Pelagia, with citations to source texts.  Storey (1982), pp. 164-7, discusses the tale of Alibech and Rustico in relation to the literary tradition of Vite Patrum, but doesn’t mention the Life of Saint Pelagia.

[5] Decameron, Day 3, story 10, from Italian trans. Rebhorn (2013) p. 290.  All subsequent quotes are from id. pp. 291-2.

[6] Illustrating perennial social repression of strong, independent male sexuality, the story of Alibech and Rustico was multilated and repressed in editions of the Decameron from the sixteenth century to the twentieth century:  “this story — when printed at all — was sometimes so radically abridged or altered as to be rendered virtually unrecognizable if not downright nonsensical.”  Kirkham (1981) pp. 79-80.  In English translations, sometimes the key passage wasn’t translated.

[7] Emphasizing the story’s context in Day 3, in the Decameron, and in all of Boccoccio’s works, Kirkham (1981) reads the story of Alibech and Rustico to instruct, “Illicit love leads to perdition.”  Id. p. 93.  Alibech is forced to return to town and marry.  Rustico, after burdensome sexual demands, is restored to his betrayed monastic solitude.  Those outcomes are less than Alibech’s and Rustico’s ill-formed desires, but not necessarily equal to perdition.  Moreover, “illicit love leads to perdition” is rather vague instruction for students.  Is sex outside of the legal institution of marriage necessarily illicit?  Boccaccio, one might reasonably suppose, pondered that question.

[image] Saint Ursicinus, a hermit living about 600 in present-day Switzerland. Thanks to Yesuitus2001 and Wikipedia.

References:

Kirkham, Victoria. 1981. “Love’s labors rewarded and paradise lost (Decameron, III, 10).” Romanic Review, vol. LXXII, no. 1, pp. 79-83.  Reprinted as Ch. 6 in Kirkham (1993).

Kirkham, Victoria. 1993. The sign of reason in Boccaccio’s fiction. Firenze: L.S. Olschki.

Rebhorn, Wayne A., trans. 2013. Giovanni Boccaccio. The Decameron. New York : W.W. Norton & Company.

Storey, Harry Wayne. 1982. “Parodic Structure in ‘Alibech and Rustico’: Antecedents and Traditions.” Canadian Journal of Italian Studies 5 (3), pp. 163-176.

gods and physicians in ancient Greek inscriptions and epigrams

In Greco-Roman antiquity, infirm or sick persons seeking cures went to temples dedicated to the Asclepius, the god of medicine.  These temples, called Asclepeia, displayed inscriptions describing cures.  The inscriptions typically described the name of the person, the nature of the infirmity or illness, and the way in which the person was cured.  Cures often involved sleeping in the Asclepeion and having a dream that provided instructions for a cure (incubation).  Here’s a roughly 2400-year-old inscription from the Asclepeion at Epidaurus:

Ambrosia from Athens, blind in one eye.  She came as a suppliant to the god.  Walking about the sanctuary, she ridiculed some of the cures as being unlikely and impossible, the lame and the blind becoming well from only seeing a dream.  Sleeping here, she saw a vision.  It seemed to her the god came to her and said he would make her well, but she would have to pay a fee by dedicating a silver pig in the sanctuary as a memorial of her ignorance.  When he had said these things, he cut her sick eye and poured a medicine over it.  When day came she left well. [1]

This inscription describes a cure of blindness and skepticism.  It also indicates the god, or temple operatives, looking out for their material interests.  Diogenes the Cynic sought to cure entreaties to Aesclepius:

One day he saw a woman prostrating herself before the gods in an indecent position, and wishing to free her of superstition, according to Zolus of Perga, he came forward and said, “Are you not afraid, my good woman, that a god may be standing behind you?  — for all things are full of his presence — and you may be put to shame?”  He consecrated to Asclepius a fierce ruffian who, whenever people prostrated themselves, would run up to them and beat them up. [2]

The account suggests Diogenes viewing the woman from behind and assimilating the god to himself.  Diogenes made praying for blessing into an invocation for a beating.  In the ancient Greco-Roman world of pervasive gods, humans both sought miracles from gods and ridiculed petitions to them.

sculpture of the god Jupiter de Smyrne, a Roman version of Zeus

Physician similarly generated hope, doubt, question, and ridicule.  Physicians presented themselves as inheritors of the healing powers of Asclepius.  An epigram  from the Milan Posidippus celebrates the healing skill of the physician Medeios, son of Lampon:

Like this bronze which, drawing shallow breath up over
its bones, scarcely gathers life into its eyes,
such were the ones he used to save from disease, that man who discovered
how to treat the dreadful bite of the Libyan asp,
Medeios, son of Lampon, from Olynthos, to whom his father
gave all the panacea of Asclepius’ sons.
To you, O Pythian Apollo, in token of his craft
he dedicated this shriveled frame, the remnant of a man. [3]

Living, speaking sculptures are standard figures in ancient Greek epigrams.  In this epigram, the bronze sculpture figures a shriveled man near to death, but not beyond the reach of Medeios’s healing art.  A Greek epigram from the first century presents a sharply contrasting view of a physician:

The physician Marcus laid his hand yesterday on the stone Zeus, and though he is of stone and Zeus, he is to be buried today. [4]

The living sculpture here is Zeus, the King of the gods and the father of Apollo.  The touch of the physician Marcus kills the stone sculpture of Zeus and causes it to be buried.  That could be interpreted as the reverse of dedicating a sculpture.  An insightful reading of the Medeios epigram suggests that it’s implicitly critical of Medeios’s immoderate claim to skill.[5] A physician treating Zeus, in the form of a stone sculpture not rigidly distinct from the god, is highly immoderate.  The Marcus epigram is consistent with criticism of physicians’ presumption.

Both gods and physicians healed.  Both gods and physicians acted within circumstances of swirling beliefs and doubts.

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Notes:

[1] From the shrine of Asclepius at Epidaurus, inscription A4, from Greek trans. LiDonnici (1995) p. 89.  On healing shrines in fifth and fourth-century BGC Greece, Nutton (2013) Ch. 7.

[2] Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Bk. VI.37-38, from Greek trans. adapted from Robert Drew Hicks (1925) and Bing (2009) p. 239.

[3] Posidippus, Epigrams (Pap Mil. Vogl. VIII 309), AB 95, from Greek trans. Peter Bing.  Bing (2009), pp. 217-233, discusses the collection of seven healing epigrams (iamatika) in the Milan Posidippus Papyrus.  He observes that they draw upon the conventions of healing inscriptions (iamata) in Asclepeia.

[4] GA 11.113.  The epigram is attributed to Nicarchus.  Many satirical Greek epigrams directed against physicians exist in the Greek Anthology.  See, e.g. GA 11.112-126, 11.257.  Here’s GA 11.125:

The physician Crateas and the graveyard manager Damon made a joint conspiracy.  Damon sent the wrappings he stole from the grave-clothes to his dear Crateas to use as bandages and Crateas in return sent him all his patients to bury.

The first-century Latin writer Martial also composed epigrams against physicians, as did Ausonius (see his epigrams 4, 80, and 81 in Evelyn-White LCL numbering). Pliny described physicians as greedy, unscrupulous, and deadly to their patients. Those were common themes in ancient satire of physicians. A physician killing a statue of a god is rather more unusual.

Satire on physicians continued in medieval literature. A fragment from Constantine Manasses’s twelfth-century Byzantine novel Aristandros and Kallithea states:

There is nothing more stupid in life than schoolteachers,
did not the sons of doctors run around on earth.

Frag. 25, from Greek trans. Jeffreys (2012) p. 290. “Sons of doctors” means persons with the patronymic Asklepiades (son of Asklepios), i.e. doctors. Id. n. 46. Essentially the same witticism occurs in Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 666a (Bk 15).

[5] Wickkiser (2013).  Zeus punished Asclepius for bringing a dead man back to life.  Restoring the dead was a sign of the perfect physician. The Libyan asp’s bite was regarded to be incurably fatal.  Claiming to cure its bite was extraordinary.

[image] Jupiter (Zeus) of Smyrna. Third-century marble statue of a male deity, restored as Zeus in 1686. Preserved as accession # Ma 13, MR 255 in the Louvre Museum (Paris). Image thanks to Marie-Lan Nguyen and Wikimedia Commons.

References:

Bing, Peter. 2009. The scroll and the marble: studies in reading and reception in Hellenistic poetry. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

GA: Paton, W.R. 1920. The Greek Anthology with an English Translation. London: William Heinemann (vol. I, bks. 1-6; vol. II, bks. 7-8; vol. III, bk. 9; vol IV, bks. 10-12; vol. V, bks. 13-16). (epigrams indicated GA {bk}.{epigram # within bk})

Jeffreys, Elizabeth, trans. and notes. 2012. Four Byzantine novels: Theodore Prodromos, Rhodanthe and Dosikles; Eumathios Makrembolites, Hysmine and Hysminias;  Constantine Manasses, Aristandros and Kallithea; Niketas Eugenianos, Drosilla and Charikles. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

LiDonnici, Lynn R. 1995. The Epidaurian miracle inscriptions. Atlanta, Ga: Scholars Press.

Nutton, Vivian. 2013. Ancient medicine. 2′nd ed. London: Routledge.

Wickkiser, Bronwen L. 2013. “The Iamatika of the Milan Posidippus.” The Classical Quarterly. 63 (02): 623-632.

male dominance is socially constructed belief

Highly individualistic, materialistic, and competitive societies favor belief in male dominance. In an influential book written in 1981, a highly regarded anthropologist in a highly individualistic, materialistic, and competitive society noted:

It has long been customary among members of our species to assume that males are dominant over females.[1]

An intellectual response to a mere custom is to ask “Why assume that?”  Here’s the anthropologist’s answer:

in generation after generation, species after species, or in the human case, culture after culture, primate males have been able to dominate females and to translate superior fighting ability into political preeminence over the seemingly {sic} weaker and less competitive sex. … on those occasions when a male and a female covet the same fig or the same safe crotch of a tree to spend the night, it will typically be the male who gets it.[2]

Concern about the distribution of the richest material goods and the choicest social positions defines a concept of dominance likely to be of acute concern to elites fighting for these goods in an individualistic, materialistic society.  More fundamental measures of welfare are length of average lifespan and the share of organisms who produce at least some offspring.  On these measures primate females on average surely rank higher than primate males.  Belief in male dominance shows social vision focused on the best goods and the most privileged individuals.

rabbit doll ponders male dominance

Belief in male dominance isn’t part of reasonable thinking about social reality.  Try thinking about dominance outside of well-entrenched customs of public deliberation and the dominant discourse.  Was your mother’s life less abundant and less full of joy than your father’s life?  Was your grandmother worse off than your grandfather?  Many persons with sensitivity to the fullness of real life would not easily reach a definitive answer to those questions.  Moreover, those questions point to some important objective facts: you may not know your father very well.  Fathers on average are more likely to be displaced from their children’s lives than are mothers.  Fathers also on average die earlier than mothers.  More generally, men tend to predominate among the richest and most powerful persons, and among the poorest and most marginalized persons.  At the level of fundamental reproductive biology, men have paternity legally assigned to them in completely mendacious ways, and men are socially denied practically attainable knowledge of who their offspring actually are.  Belief in male dominance obscures this social reality.

Belief in male dominance is commonly coupled with denial of matriarchy.  The anthropologist who declared the assumption of male dominance also declared, “outside of myth, I know of no evidence that any matriarchal societies ever existed.”[3]  Interpreted literally, matriarchy means rule by mothers.  The rulers of most societies throughout human history have been men, not mothers.  Considerable evidence exists, however, that primate societies are organized around females.  Much evidence also exists of female control over males through sexual power and superior social communication skills.  Matriarchy in an operational sense is best understood as gynocentrism, i.e. society organized around women and predominately concerned about serving women.  Belief in male dominance is socially constructed to obscure the reality of gynocentrism.

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Notes:

[1] Hrdy (1981) p. 11.

[2] Id. pp. 16, 18.  Hrdy’s biography points to important aspects of social dominance apart from physical strength. Hrdy not only lives in the U.S., but is a member of a family that has been highly successful within the U.S.  Hrdy grew up in Texas, where her father was a wealthy member of an oil-rich family.  Hrdy’s mother attended Wellesley College, an elite women’s college.  Hrdy also attended Wellesley College.  For a featured biography of Hrdy, see Dowling, Gage, and Betterton (2003).

[3] Hrdy (1999) p. 252.

References:

Dowling, Claudia Glenn, Jenny Gage, and Tom Betterton. 2003. “The Hardy Sarah Blaffer Hrdy.” Discover 24(3).

Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer. 1981. The woman that never evolved. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press.

Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer. 1999. Mother nature: a history of mothers, infants, and natural selection. New York, Pantheon Books.