agapetae

1. pluralplural of agapet

   The men adopted agapetae (from the word agape), spiritual sisters or wives with whom they slept but did not have intercourse.

   2008, Richard Smoley, Conscious Love: Insights from Mystical Christianity, →ISBN, page 46

   3 more examples

   Saint Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, finally wrote a letter in 249 A.D. attempting to "blow the whistle" on the cohabitation of the agapetae with men of the cloth.

   1980, Fred Schroeder, 5000 years of popular culture: popular culture before printing, →ISBN, page 129

   In the late fourth century C.E. Jerome, in a letter to Eustochium, one of his closest friends among the noble women of Rome, asked how the "plague" of the agapetae came to exist within the Church. He calls these agapetae "unwedded wives," "novel concubines, and harlots."

   1983, Rosemary Rader, Breaking Boundaries: Male-Female Friendship in Early Christian Communities, page 62

   These agapetae, as the above quote shows, were widely criticized; for, in an attitude which most of you reading this can doubtless relate to, there was much suspicion that such close relationships were little more than fronts for sexual promiscuity.

   2004, Wylark Day, The Conclusion of the Sexual Revolution, →ISBN

alternative agapetae · alternative Agapetæ

1. historicalpluralplural onlyWomen of the early Christian church who cohabited in a state of "spiritual love" with clergy or laymen who had vowed chastity.

   It describes the Agapetae as virgins who consecrated themselves to God with a vow of chastity and associated with laymen who like themselves had taken a vow of chastity.

   2007, Alvin Boyd Kuhn, Who Is This King of Glory?:, →ISBN, page 175

   1 more example

   The novel itself suggests that Huxley knew about this attempt to go beyond gender, that the earliest Christian priests had Agapetae, or female ritual lovers, and that both the early Christian Gnostics and the later Catholic moralists permitted a form of coitus reservatus, the latter "claiming that it was known to Adam in the Garden and therefore a part of Paradise."

   2008, Jacob A. v Belzen, Jacob Adrianus Belzen, & Antoon Geels, Autobiography and the Psychological Study of Religious Lives, →ISBN

2. historicalpluralplural onlyMonks or clergy who cohabited with virgins and widows of the church.
3. historicalpluralplural onlyA 4th century Spanish sect founded by Agape and her husband Elpidius that rejected the institution of marriage and was deemed heretical for its perceived hedonism. Considered also to be a forerunner of Priscillianism.

   1 more example

   He was instructed and assisted by Agape, an honourable woman, in carrying on the secret mysteries ; and she was the mother of the Agapetae, or love-feasters ; whose rites became by degrees so very scandalous, that St. Jerome tells Oceanus "you are exposed to the teeth of detractors, unless you dismiss the assemblies of the Agapetae."

   1820, Polwhele, The enthusiasm of Methodists and Papists considered by .Bishop Lavington, page 298

   Synonyms: Dilectae, subintroductae