It concerns the relationship between Saint Thaïs, once a courtesan of Alexandria in Roman Egypt, and Paphnutius the Ascetic,[1] the hermit who offered her conversion to Christianity.
[2] Evidently Hrotsvitha employed as a source for her play the Vita Thaisis, a several-centuries-old translation into Latin of the life of Saint Thaïs (the original in Greek).
The playwright, a Benedictine Canoness of Saxony (northwest Germany), drawing on the tradition, apparently created a narrative line and a distinctive character for St. Thaïs appropriate to the medieval Christian worldview.
[6] The saint Paphnutius explains to his disciples that "not only frivolous youth dissipate their families' few possessions on her but even respected men waste their costly treasures by lavishing gifts on her...
Afterwards Paphnutius would describe the event to a brother religious: "I visited her, disguised as a lover, secretly, and won over her lascivious mind first with admonitions and flattery, then I frightened her with harsh threats.
[12] After entering a process of spiritual transformation, Thaïs tells Paphnutius that "All angels sing His praise and His kindness, because He never scorns the humility of a contrite soul.
"[7] "The philosophical ideas of harmony throughout creation" presented early in the play oblige us "to interpret the sinfulness of Thaïs not as the triumph of evil but as an imbalance or discord between parts of her created being.