Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.32728/tab.22.2025.11
Purity – the heroic virtue of biblical women
Ružica Pšihistal
orcid.org/0000-0002-7018-6328
; Filozofski fakultet u Osijeku, Hrvatska
Abstract
The research question of the study is whether purity can still be thought of as a virtue – even as a heroic virtue – in biblical women and early Christian saints. The first section examines the status of purity as a virtue, which, despite contemporary attempts to revive aretaic ethics, is burdened by notions of tyranny over the body and Christian asceticism as an ideological construct. The second section provides a conceptual outline of the Christian relationship to the body in the field of ascetic practices, establishes a distinction between the Roman civic virtue of chastity and Christian purity, traces the transformation of sexual ethics in late antiquity, and the elaborated morphology of the virtue of purity in Christian ethics. The third section explores the concepts of hero and courage – from the typological characteristics of the epic hero to the Aristotelian and Thomistic categories of heroic virtue – and shows how martyrdom and psychomachia changed the concept of heroism. In the fourth section, Judith is approached as a hermeneutical key and emblematic figure of „heroic purity”, by exploring the emphasis on her courage and purity in an article of Thomas Aquinas' Summa and in the patristic reception (especially in Jerome›s epistles). In conclusion, the parallels with Marulić’s Judith and the descending modern reception trajectory confirm the inseparability of the categories of purity and the heroic character of the biblical heroine. Based on the intellectual history of the body and sexuality in late antiquity, the paper conducts a conceptual analysis of particular concepts (pudicitia, castitas, virtus heroica) by drawing from biblical-literary, theological and philosophical sources.
Keywords
chastity (castitas); heroic virtue; body; sexuality; Christian asceticism; aretaic ethics; biblical women; Judith; St. Jerome; psychomachia
Hrčak ID:
341904
URI
Publication date:
19.12.2025.
Visits: 342 *