Theophanes and Pansemne

Antioch, the marriage, and the widowhood

The notice begins with Theophanes in the Antioch of the middle of the fourth century — the great Syrian metropolis, only partly Christian, in the generation of the boy-emperors and of Julian's short restoration, and the city whose ascetic hinterland was even then filling with hermits. His parents were pagans, and he was married young, in the ordinary way, according to their religion. Three years into the marriage his wife died.

The bereavement is presented as the hinge of his life. He came to the faith of Christ, was baptised, and — the notice is emphatic — gave away his possessions, left the city, and took up a life of ἄσκησις in a cell outside the walls, where he prayed, fasted, and taught the commandments of God to those who came to him. He is not said to have joined a monastery. His is the Antiochene form of the solitary life, close enough to the city to be reached by those who wanted counsel.

Pansemne

There was in Antioch a woman named Pansemne — the name means "all-modest," and the tradition preserves the irony of it — who was a public prostitute and, in the language of the notice, "caught in the snares of the devil"; many, it says, were undone through her.

Theophanes' response is what makes this notice unlike any other in the June synaxarion. He did not preach at her, and he did not denounce her. He judged that she would not be approached by a man in a hermit's habit, and so he laid the habit aside: he put on expensive clothes, took with him a great deal of gold, and went to her house as a rich man goes. There he made her an offer of marriage, with two conditions: that she receive baptism, and that she leave her way of life entirely.

She accepted. The notice does not pretend that she accepted out of conviction: the offer as made was worth accepting on any terms, and Theophanes had calculated exactly that. But having accepted, she was catechised and baptised — and it is at this point that the account says that she was "by the grace of God wholly made a new person." What had begun as a bargain became a conversion. She distributed the money she had gained by her sin, and instead of a household she built a cell beside his, and there took up the ascetic life.

Twenty-two months, and one day

The notices are careful about how long she lived in it: twenty-two months. It is a short ascetic career, and its shortness is part of the point — the tradition holds up Pansemne not as a great ascetic but as a great repentance, and twenty-two months of it were counted enough. Both of them reposed in the year 369, and, the notice says, on one and the same day; and it is on that account that they are commemorated together, as a pair, and never separately.

The pattern of the story

The episode belongs to a small and much-loved family of Eastern hagiographical narratives in which an ascetic goes into a brothel to save the woman in it — the best known being the accounts of Abraham of Kidunaia and his niece Mary, and of Vitalis of Gaza at Alexandria, both of whom entered the houses of prostitutes in disguise and both of whom bore the resulting scandal in silence. Theophanes' version is the gentlest of them: he neither feigns sin nor courts scandal, but makes an honest offer that he intends to keep, and the deception is only in the clothes. That the Church commemorates the woman as well — with the ascetic title, and with her own name in the heading — is the measure of how the tradition understood the outcome.