Saint Pelagia of Antioch

The Catholic Encyclopedia calls her "undoubtedly an historical person", and draws its account from a homily of Saint John Chrysostom. ¹ She was a Christian virgin, fifteen years old. ¹ Soldiers came for her, evidently during the persecution of Diocletian, to make her offer a pagan sacrifice in public. ¹

She was alone in the house, with no one to help her. ¹ She went out to the soldiers, and when she learned what they had been ordered to do, she asked leave to go back inside to change her clothes, and they allowed it. ¹ The encyclopedia says that she probably knew what awaited her and would not expose herself to the danger of being dishonored. ¹ She went up to the roof of the house and, in the encyclopedia's words, "threw herself into the sea". ¹

So she died, the encyclopedia goes on, "as St. Chrysostom says, as virgin and martyr", and the Church of Antioch honored her as such. ¹ The current Roman Martyrology still describes her as the virgin and martyr whom Chrysostom, in its Italian, "esaltò con grandi lodi", exalted with great praise. ⁴

Saint Ambrose tells her story in the third book of Concerning Virgins, written for his sister Marcellina. ¹² She had asked him what should be thought of women who threw themselves from a height or drowned themselves in a river rather than fall into the hands of persecutors, since Scripture forbids a Christian to lay hands on himself. ² For virgins forced to defend their purity, he answered, "we have a plain answer, seeing that there exists an instance of martyrdom", and he gave Pelagia as that instance. ²

In his telling she lived at Antioch, about fifteen years old, "a sister of virgins, and a virgin herself". ² At the first sound of persecution she shut herself up at home, her mother and sisters away, with no defense. ² Ambrose gives her a long speech of resolve, in which she says, "I both wish and fear to die", and reasons that "God is not offended by a remedy against evil". ² She is said, he writes, to have adorned her head and put on a bridal dress, "so that one would say that she was going to a bridegroom, not to death". ² He does not describe how she died.

He goes on to her mother and sisters. When the persecutors lost Pelagia they went after the others, who were caught between the soldiers and a fast river. ² In Ambrose's account the women joined hands as if to lead a dance and walked out to where the current ran strongest and the water was deepest, the mother holding her daughters tight. ² When they were found, he says, the mother had not loosened her grip, and the river had not carried the bodies apart. ²

The question Marcellina put to her brother did not go away. Saint Augustine took it up in the City of God, without naming Pelagia, writing of holy women who in time of persecution had drowned themselves to escape outrage and "are venerated in the Catholic Church as martyrs". ³ "Of such persons I do not presume to speak rashly," he wrote. ³ He allowed that the Church may have had some divine authority for honoring them, and that they may have been moved by God rather than by their own judgment. ³

But he did not make it a rule. In the same chapter he insists that "no man ought to inflict on himself voluntary death", not to escape suffering, not to escape another's sin, and not to reach heaven sooner, and that one who believes himself commanded by God must "be very sure that the divine command has been signified". ³ The Church honors Pelagia's death as a martyrdom, and the chapter's heading states Augustine's point plainly: "in certain peculiar cases the examples of the saints are not to be followed". ¹³

Her name has gathered other stories. The Catholic Encyclopedia describes a later legend of a Pelagia who lived as a prostitute at Antioch, was converted by a bishop named Nonnus, and went to Jerusalem, where she lived disguised as a man under the name of Pelagius, in penance, in a cave on the Mount of Olives. ¹ Its author, who calls himself the Deacon Jacob, took the core of the story from Chrysostom's forty-eighth homily on Matthew, which tells of the conversion of a famous actress of Antioch without naming her. ¹ Since no early authority mentions a Pelagia in Jerusalem, the encyclopedia concludes that the penitent is "a purely legendary recasting of the historical Pelagia". ¹

The Greek Church, the encyclopedia adds, also keeps on October 8 a virgin martyr Pelagia of Tarsus, whom the Roman Martyrology placed on May 4. ¹ The 1897 Martyrology says of her that she was shut up in a red-hot brazen ox. ⁵ The encyclopedia thinks she should probably be identified with the martyr of Antioch, whose feast was also kept in nearby Tarsus and who afterward became a martyr of Tarsus. ¹ A fourth Pelagia, a martyr of Nicopolis in Armenia with a companion named Januarius, is in the Martyrologium Hieronymianum on July 11, and is plainly a different person; the 1897 Martyrology says the two were racked for four days. ¹⁵

One scholar, Usener, argued that all these saints were a Christian reworking of the goddess Aphrodite. ¹ The encyclopedia answers that his opinion has been completely disproved by Delehaye. ¹

None of the sources consulted for this page names a patronage for Saint Pelagia of Antioch, so none is given here. ¹²⁴⁵

The feast of Saint Pelagia of Antioch is October 8. ⁴ The current Roman Martyrology enters her at Antioch in Syria on that day, and the Catholic Encyclopedia says that the old Syrian martyrology already gave her feast under that date. ¹⁴

The date has moved in the Roman books. The Martyrology of 1897 kept the virgin martyr of Antioch on June 9, "whose praises have been proclaimed by St. Ambrose and St. John Chrysostom", and gave October 8 to "St. Pelagia, surnamed the Penitent", at Jerusalem. ⁵ The Catholic Encyclopedia describes the same arrangement as that of the Roman Martyrology of its day, and says the East kept the penitent on October 8. ¹ Today the virgin martyr has October 8. ⁴

She was fifteen, alone in the house, and the soldiers were at the door. ¹ Everything known about her comes down to one choice, made in the time it took to ask leave to change her clothes. ¹

Her story raised a hard question from the beginning, and it is honest to say so. ²³ Ambrose told her story because his sister asked him a hard question. ² Augustine, writing of women like her, would not condemn them and would not let anyone take them as a pattern. ³ The Church honors her as a martyr; Augustine, for his part, held that no one may take their own life on their own authority. ³⁴

Ambrose's account of her family ends with a mother who would not let go of her daughters even in the river. ² It is not a comforting image, and he does not offer it as one.

What the Church keeps of her is her refusal to sacrifice to the gods, and the praise of two of its greatest preachers. ¹²⁴ Her name is remembered, and so is the fear of a girl who had no one with her.