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by Kim E. Power -- Credits
This article appeared in Woman-Church 15 (Spring
1994) pp. 26-33. Published here on the Internet with permission of the author
and the editor of Woman-Church.
‘Women-Church’ can be ordered from Irene Stevens
(irenes@compassnet.com.au).
The problem.
In the magisterial responses of the Catholic church to
the ‘problem of women’ and their role in church ministry, the appeal
has been more and more to “Tradition”,(1) as biblical scholars
disallow naive and uncritical appropriation of Scripture on this issue.(2) In
her study on women in Vatican documents, Nadine Foley discovers an "ontology of
woman" that assumes that
women's nature has a
specificity revealed through a unique set of traits evident in her behavior. .
. . The familial role of woman is essential and normative.(3)
One limitation of this viewpoint is that it treats all
woman as identical without allowing for cultural and individual differences,
thus perpetuating the myth of the ‘universal woman.’ Foley rightly
points out that the "presumed essential function of woman at the heart of the
family is a critical issue for interpretation". In none of the documents is
man's role given treatment separate to that of the generic human being (homo
) nor is his familial role given any extended treatises. It would appear
that his major areas of responsibility are considered to be elsewhere.(4)
This ontology derived from the “Tradition”,
perceives the nature of women as so distinct from that of men, that a common
humanity is not enough for women to represent Christ in his salvific role.(5)
The tradition has not been critically examined on these questions but
appropriated in toto.
The apostolic letter Mulieris dignitatem brought
no changes.(6) In Mulieris dignitatem, woman's vocation is defined as
that of consecrated virgin or mother; dual aspects of Mary's role which
converge in the fact that both are in spousal unions, the former with Christ,
the latter with a husband.(7) Women are defined by their femininity, and warned
that seeking full dignity must never entail "masculinization".(8) Women can
find themselves solely in loving others.(9) Although the Pope affirms the
priesthood of all believers, he denies that women can stand in the person of
Christ at the celebration of eucharist.(10) In archetypal terms, woman,
especially Mary, represents humanity; man represents God.(11)
Two conclusions can be drawn about this Letter. One is
that it is grounded in essentialist models of masculinity and femininity where
stereotypical behaviours are specified for each gender.(12) The second is that
if women are gaining an awareness of their full human dignity, only after two
thousand years of Christianity, questions arise concerning the status of women
within the ecclesia, and the Christian understanding of their nature and role
during that period.
Following the curial subversion of the American Bishops’ pastoral
on women in 1993, the need to subject church history and tradition to a
critical scrutiny is even more imperative.(13) It is my intention to provide
such a scrutiny. By providing examples of the underlying assumptions embedded
in patristic texts interpreting sex and gender, I hope to expose the
foundations upon which the tradition is built. I intend to examine to
demonstrate that underlying the “Tradition” are assumptions about the
sexed body derived from an inaccurate biological model which perceives women as
ontologically inferior, the result of less perfect formation and ordering of
bodily matter in the womb.(14)
Definitive discourses.(15)
In Greco-Roman antiquity the interpretation of sexual difference and
social gender roles can hardly be extricated from the interests of household,
religion, economy and state.(16) For interpreting sexual difference in
antiquity, the definitive science was cosmology, articulated in the discourses
of medicine, philosophy, and religion. These discourses do not necessarily
function independently. For example, biblical exegesis is employed by the
fathers to support their theological application of the ‘natural law’
they find in medicine and philosophy, which are also interdependent
disciplines. To begin with medical discourse: Thomas Laqueur’s research
reveals the importance of the underlying medical model in cultural
interpretations of sex and gender.(17) According to Laqueur a
“one-sex” paradigm emphasising a hierarchy of common humanity that
had served since late antiquity was displaced in the eighteenth century by a
more scientifically based understanding of reproductive processes that
distinguished two opposite sexes.
An understanding of the antique paradigm is essential to interpret
patristic texts, because, as Laqueur describes:
Ancient accounts of reproductive biology, still
persuasive in the early eighteenth century, linked the intimate, experiential
qualities of sexual delight to the social and cosmic order. More generally,
biology and human sexual experience mirrored the metaphysical reality on which
it was thought the social order rested.(18)
The ancient biological paradigm is as much philosophical as medical, and
the dynamic interaction between medicine and philosophy and culture becomes
increasingly clear as I study the texts, and it is remarkable to see it
emerging consistently in texts which span over a millennium. Our own century
has been marked by such rapid scientific and technological progress, and many
changes of intellectual paradigms that the power of such stable belief systems
is difficult to comprehend, until we look as the persistence of perceptions of
woman as subordinate.
The Greco-Roman world considered that nature and substance of all
created things and beings reflected the basic paradigm of the universe.(19)
Thus Ambrose can describe the body as a microcosm of creation:
First, let us make note of the fact that the body of
man is constructed like the world itself. As the sky is pre-eminent over air,
earth and sea, which serve as members of the world, so we observe that the head
has a position above the other members of our body.(20)
The medical paradigm held by both Aristotle and Galen,(21) postulated
that there was one sex, but two forms -
Both male and female, . . . [Aristotle argued] are not
so in virtue of its essence but in the matter, ie. the body. That is why the
same seed becomes female or male by being acted on in a certain way.(22)
The ancients considered the semen to be the active principle in
conception. Only men produced seed and therefore only men were responsible for
procreation,(23) although male and female genitalia were seen as mirror images
of one another, because they were essentially of the same kind. They taught
that semen was cast into the womb as seed into the earth; indeed there is no
difference between the two processes according to Galen.(24) The process of
embryonic development was activated by the semen and nourished by the blood of
the mother.(25) The banquet of the ten virgins offers a detailed
description of the process, and it is worth noting that this description is
placed in the mouth of a consecrated virgin.
When thirsting for children a man falls into a kind of
trance, softened and subdued by the pleasures of generation as by sleep, so
that again something is drawn from his flesh and from his bones is, ...
fashioned into another man. For the harmony of bodies being disturbed in the
embraces of love, as those tell us who have experienced the marriage state, all
the marrow like and generative part of the blood, like a kind of liquid bone,
coming together from all the members worked into foam and curdled, is projected
through the organs of generation into the living body of the female.(26)
We see here how the heat of passion serves to create the semen, and so
passion, and its concomitant pleasure for both men and women were considered
essential to procreation. Foetuses developed their full potential, maleness, if
they amassed a decisive surplus of “heat” and “vital
spirit” in the early stages in utero. Females were the result of
insufficient heat being absorbed by the foetus. This belief is the medical
basis of Aristotle’s contention that women were “failed males”.
Women’s softer, moister and colder bodies meant they were less formed and
ordered by nature than men. Proof of this is women’s inability to
‘concoct’ semen from blood, as is was thought that men did.
Therefore, any excess nourishment over what was needed for sustenance had to be
secreted from the body so that women would not be ‘water-logged’.(27)
This quotation from Aretaeus the physician demonstrates the interconnections
between heat, semen, maleness and superior formation.
it is in the semen, when possessed of vitality, which
makes us men, hot, well braced in limbs, heavy, well-voiced, spirited, strong
to think and act.(28)
But it is not semen per se that created new life. The semen was the
vehicle for the spiritual principle, the ‘vital heat’ which was the
first and efficient cause of life. Aristotle taught
It is not fire or any such force, but it is the
spiritus included in the semen and the foam-like, and the natural principle of
spiritus, being analogous to the stars.(29)
The proof of the spiritual nature of semen was that it is white, as
opposed to menstrual blood which is red.(30) Sexed bodies become symbolic of
aspects of, and boundaries within, the cosmos:(31) woman’s nature is
analogous to earth, and man’s to the heavens. Hence male superiority was
based on an understanding of men’s optimal formation in the womb, from
which flowed superior personal characteristics, and their power to
procreate.(32) However, the very notion of grades of being, explicit within the
social order, was a constant reminder to men that their bodies and beings were
extremely malleable. Roman men feared sliding into effeminacy if they did not
maintain appropriate heat throughout a lifetime.(33)
Tertullian used the dynamic relationship between spirit, body and
character to argue the simultaneous creation of body and soul:
In a single impact of both parts the whole human frame
is shaken and foams with semen, as the damp humour of the body is joined to the
hot substance of the spirit. and then, (I speak of this at the risk of seeming
improper, but I do not wish to forgo my chance of proving my case) in that last
breaking wave of delight, do we not feel something of our very soul go out from
us?(34)
Clement of Alexandria was just as specific:
Is it not accompanied by weakness following the great
loss of seed? “for a human being is being born of a human being and torn
away from him’ [Democritus frag. 32]. See how much harm is done: a whole
person is torn out with the ejaculation that occurs during intercourse.
“This is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh” Scripture
says.[Gen.2;23] By spilling his seed a man loses as much substance as one sees
in a body, for what has been expelled is the beginning of a birth. Moreover,
the shaking of the body’s material substance disturbs and upsets the
harmony of the whole body.(35)
These texts offer significant insights into the antique mind-set:
Firstly, the overlapping categories of heaven, spirit, heat, and maleness
construct women as ontologically less spiritual than men. Men are symbolically
heavenly, spiritual, rational and fertile as opposed to women who are earthly,
bodily, irrational and infertile. The biological basis of the anthropology
makes these symbolic identifications appear inherently natural, grounded in the
nature of the sexed body. Secondly, it is men who procreate through the body of
a woman, and men who suffer loss.
These descriptions of male orgasm depict it as both fulfillment and
loss, which the fathers further tied to the potent myth of Eve’s creation,
where Eve’s birth is through Adam’s loss.(36) Augustine queried why
God would use a rib rather than flesh, which would have been more appropriate
"for the formation of the woman who belongs to the weaker sex";(37) this use of
the rib made Woman strong, because she was strengthened by Man's bone, "but he
was made weak for her sake because in place of his rib it was flesh, not
another rib that was substituted".(38) Referring to conception Methodius
invokes this allusion in a way that strengthens the sense of male loss and
emphasises woman’s birth from man, whilst underlining that it is the
father who procreates and that his goal is the image of the father in the son:
. . . and probably it is for this reason that a man
is said to leave his father and mother, since he is suddenly unmindful of all
things when united to his wife in the embraces of love, he is overcome by the
desire for generation, offering his side to the divine creator to take away
from it, so that the father may appear in the son.(39)
One danger of intercourse was that men might lose some of their precious
heat and become effeminate, or even die.(40) Certainly, much gynecological
study was undertaken so that men might procreate without too much loss of the
spiritual essence that connected them to the divine.(41) This loss of spiritual
essence was also at the basis of Roman and Judeo-Christian attitudes to ritual
purity, whereby the priest must abstain from intercourse before sacrifice, so
avoid pollution and vitiation of spirit. It is arguable that these ancient
assumptions, embedded in theological doctrine and law, underlie canons such as
Canon 277 which states that
Celibacy is a special gift of God by which sacred
ministers can more easily remain close to Christ with an undivided heart, and
can dedicate themselves more freely to the service of God and their
neighbour.(42)
However, the gap between the cultural paradigms and Christian experience
of womens’ fortitude, courage, faith and leadership qualities,
particularly during persecution, caused major problems in the fourth century.
These women had publicly displayed all the characteristics previously
attributed to men, in numbers large enough to challenge the cultural
assumptions about women. Furthermore, the Acts of the martyrs had immortalised
certain of these women as symbolising the salvific role of “the One who
was crucified for them.”(43)
The post-Constantinian church needed to account for the manner of this
transformation from weakness to power.(44) The solution was grounded in the
cultural assumption that men and women shared the same human essence. In the
essence was identical, then matter could be reformed into a fuller human being.
So, as the difference of women was that of matter, not of kind, women could
remoulded by spiritual “heat”. Therefore, the efficacious heat of
divine Logos, called the “immaculatum semen” by Ambrose(45)
and “the blessed seed” by Methodius, reformed women.
An example from the De institutione virginis illustrates this
position.(46)
Before she received the Word of God, she was winter,
unsightly, and without fruit. When she received the Word of God, and the world
was crucified to her, summer was created. At last, infused with the heat of the
holy Spirit, she began to flower and to breathe forth the perfume of faith, the
fragrance of chastity, the sweetness of grace.(47)
Thus, the Word of God could reform women into virile or manly creatures.
However, she who is not a believer, remains merely woman.(48)
In the same way as the spermatikos Logos infuses a new image into the
soul, it infuses life into the church. Christ/Logos as Bridegroom fertilizes
the womb of the virgin church, his spouse/body daughter.(49) The texts of
Methodius present a most complex web of symbolism where the creation of Eve
through Adam’s loss is the paradigm for all human birth and the creation
of the church from Christ’s side. In each case a daughter-spouse is born
of the bridegroom's body: in the former case a sleeping body, in the latter
case a dead body. Methodius argues that Eucharist recreates the sleep of Adam
in the“trance” of Christ’s passion; his death enables the church
to conceive believers, spiritually born in the baptismal waters.
Unless Christ, . . . as I said, through the
recapitulation of his passion, , should die again, coming down from heaven, and
being “joined to his wife”, the church, should provide for a certain
power being taken from his side, so that all who are built up in him should
grow up, . . . receiving of his bones and his flesh, that is, of his holiness
and glory.(50)
In another passage Ambrose links his understanding of the divine Logos
as heat, to a symbolic representation of menstrual blood as sin:
You, too, my daughter, touch the hem of his garment.
The flow of worldly passion will be dried up in the abundant heat of the
saving Word. But you must approach with faith, with deep devotion grasp the
hem of the divine Word.(51)
In the context of this passage, the analogy for the virgin woman is the
woman with the flow of blood healed by touching Jesus’ garment. Passion is
symbolised by the woman’s blood; such potential sinfulness, indicated by
the definition, worldly, implicitly reinforces the cultural construction of
woman’s body/nature as inherently less virtuous and gives it religious
legitimation. As the bleeding woman was healed of bodily illness so the
spiritual infirmity of women will be healed by Christ. The remedies for sin had
physical as well as spiritual repercussions. If women fasted strenuously, then
as their bodies lost body fat, they would cease to menstruate. There in the
body was physical ‘proof’ of the reformative power of the Word. It is
less surprising then that patristic writers spoke of virile women, whose faith
had raised them in the hierarchy of being.
In this formative period, the chaste ideal incarnated by the virgin was
the lodestar of perfect faith. The acetic program she modelled integrated all
behavior into a cohesive system for achieving perfection. Abstinence from food
cooled the body so that the faithful could remain chaste, and indeed we have
seen a physiological relationship between food and sexual function. If
sexuality is subdued, then there is no need for fine clothing to attract or
impress others; clothings’ function as an indicator of status is replaced
by humble garb as the vestment of holiness. Prayer and study were prescribed to
replace any more public role for women, although evidence of women’s
pilgrimages and their roles as public benefactors indicates that they may not
have been as isolated as their male mentors would prefer. The whole of daily
life was mapped and structured, with strict criteria for progress.
Thus it is clear that the assumptions of late antique biology
promulgated by philosopher’s and medical texts were embedded in the
foundational doctrinal texts of Christianity. What was perceived as the natural
order of creation in philosophic texts gained the force of divine law in the
Christian exegesis of Genesis, where the ‘natural order’ expresses
God’s will and right order as manifested in ‘form’. As he was
more formed, ie harder in body and more rational in mind, the one being a
reflection of the other, the human male was the paradigmatic expression of
creation and a microcosm of creation.(52) It becomes clear that the chain of
binary oppositions usually attributed to philosophic dualism - male/female;
spirit/body; mind/body; reason/emotion; subsumed in order vs disorder, were
logically grounded within the medical model, and were the extremes of a
hierarchical chain of being rather than intrinsically opposed opposites.(53) It
was a paradigm where an active, heavenly masculine, spiritual principle orders
the passive, earthly feminine sense material to produce ideally, the imago
patris in a son.(54) This paradigm symbolically represents the ascendancy
of mind over senses, order over disorder, legitimacy over illegitimacy, and of
course, man over woman.(55)
The agenda behind so much of this philosophical and medical reflection
was not, and is not today, objective exploration of the boundaries of sex and
gender but cultural constructions of power, legitimacy and fatherhood.(56) In
antiquity, these constructions legitimated asymmetrical power relationships,
the division of labour, dress codes, access to resources, and the restriction
of women from public life.(57) Pater, patrius, patria - from father to
fatherland, the language constructed the Roman identity in terms of
relationships to a social and sexual role, fatherhood, which in turn, reflects
the true home of the soul, the celestial Fatherland.(58) A model taken directly
into Christianity by Ambrose and Augustine who speak of God as a
paterfamilias, and heaven as our true patria.(59)
Such is the “tradition” churches appealed to by the
Magisterium, and the theologians of “male headship”.(60). But the
“Tradition” is built on sand. The sand of fear, and false
assumptions, and error: Built on the fear of women’s power to destroy
men’s “defining characteristic”, Reason, through desire, and
fear of the loss of male potency in intercourse: built on false assumptions
about the essentialist nature of gender, and most particularly, false
assumptions about women’s ontological inferiority, because they are
grounded in patristic doctrines based on biological error. It is neither good
theology, nor just praxis to appeal uncritically to such traditions to define
woman’s nature, her means of fulfillment and her capacity for ministry,
especially ordained ministry.
Footnotes
(1) Congregation for the doctrine of the faith. "Declaration on the
question of the admission of women to the ministerial priesthood." (Inter
Insignores) in The Furrow. 28, no. 3, March, 1977, pp. 174-175;
179.
(2) Biblical commission report, 1976. "Can women be
priests?" Appendix 1, Sexism and church law: equal rights and affirmative
action. Ed. James Coriden. New York: Paulist Press, 1977, p. 172. Since
1977 a great deal of work has been done which illuminates women's roles in the
Gospel and the early Christian communities. The report's assertion that women
never held leadership roles in the early church is now untenable.
(3) Nadine Foley, "Woman in Vatican documents 1960 to the
present" in Sexism and church law: p. 98. Foley's interpretation is
supported by Francine Cardman, "The church would look foolish without them:
women and the laity since Vatican II" in Vatican II: open questions and new
horizons. ed. G. Fagin. Wilmington: Michael Glazier, 1984, pp. 105-133,
especially pp. 119-124.
(4) Foley, "Woman in Vat. doc." p. 100.
(5) Inter Insignores, pp. 179-183.
(6) One issue worthy of comment is that although women
are included in the addressees of the letter, the English translation uses
exclusive language when speaking of both men and women.# 9. p. 4.
(7) Mulieris dignitatem, #7, 21, pp. 4,
10.
(8) Mulieris dignitatem, #10, p. 5. Femininity is
largely undefined but appears to entail a responsive love and nurturing
qualities. Masculinization is totally undefined. The document assumes that
woman/feminine and man/masculine are co-terminus. If women allow their nature
to be defined thus by male perception and experience, such generic terms can
provoke great anxiety as women try to live by non-specific norms.
(9) Mulieris dignitatem, #24; 30-31, pp. 11; 13.
Cf #14, p. 7.
(10) Mulieris dignitatem, #26, pp. 11-12. Pope
John Paul II concentrates exclusively on Bride/Bridegroom imagery for the
relationship between Christ and the church as the basis of his
argument.
(11) Mulieris dignitatem, #4. p. 2.
(12) None of the sources quoted in the footnotes of this
Apostolic Letter on the nature and experience of women are by women, or derived
directly from women's experience, not even for the description of women's
experience of motherhood and their capacity to love.
(13) Cardman, "One treasure," p. 123, argued in 1984 that
the Christian theological anthropology of the Council and Vatican documents
worked to hold back change in personal and structural relationships between men
and women.
(14) A more detailed and academic study of this
biological model as it applies particularly to Ambrose of Milan will be
published as “Philosophy, medicine and gender in the ascetic texts of
Ambrose of Milan” Proceedings of Ancient history in a modern
university: In honour of Edwin A. Judge, (forthcoming).
(15) My argument here takes its cue from T. Laqueur,
Making sex: body and gender from the Greeks to Freud, Cambridge Mass.
1990. See also P. Willem Van der Horst, “Sarah’s seminal emission:
Hebrews 11:11 in the light of ancient embryology,” in Greeks, Romans
and Christians: Essays in honor of Abraham Malherbe, Eds David L. Balch et
al. Minneapolis 1990, pp.287-302; J. Aubert, “Threatened wombs: aspects of
ancient uterine magic,” GRBS 30, 3, 1989, pp. 421-449. For the
influence of the model on Ambrose in particular see Power,
“Philosophy.”
(16) Aristotle, Politics, 1-5, 13, Great books
of the western world, vol. 9, ed. in chief Robert Maynard Hutchins, Trans.
Marcus Dods, Chicago: William Benton, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952, pp.
445-447, 454-455. Hereafter referred to as GB plus volume number. On the
intersection of culture and nature in sexual concerns see Eric Fuchs, Sexual
desire and love: origins and history of the Christian ethic of sexuality and
marriage. Trans Marsha Daigle. Cambridge: James Clark & Co, 1983,
p. 9
(17) Thomas Laqueur, Making sex: Body and gender from
the Greeks to Freud, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990 and
Peter Brown, The Body and Society, London: Faber & Faber, 1990, p. 1
on the plasticity of the body as derived from what Laqueur calls a “one
sex” medical model of sexual difference.
(18) Laqueur, Making sex, p. 11.
(19) Marcus Aurelius, c. 121-180.,Meditations,
7.23, 24, Trans. George Long, GB 12, p. 281 a. Cf. Plotinus, 204-270 CE,
Second ennead, 1,1, Third ennead, 5, 1-4, GB 17, pp. 35;
100-103.
(20) Ambrose, Hexameron, 9.55; FC p. 268. Cf.
Plotinus, Second Ennead, 1,3, GB 17, p. 36.
(21) This covers a period of over 500 years from
Aristotle’s death in 322 B.C. to Galen- 130-200 C.E. See Galen On the
natural faculties, 2. 3, GB 10, trans. Arthur John Brock, p. 185 b.
(22) Aristotle, Metaphysics, 9, 1058 b, GB 8,
trans. W. D. Ross, p. 586.
(23) Lucretius, On the nature of things, 4. 1037,
trans. H. A. J. Munro, GB 12, p. 57 B.
(24) Galen, On natural faculties, 1, 6. GB 10,
p.169; cf. 2, 3, pp.185-186.
(25) See the Wisdom of Solomon, 7:1: “I also am
mortal, like all men a descendant of the first-formed child of earth; and in
the womb of the mother I was moulded into flesh, within the the period of ten
months, compacted with blood, from the seed of man and the pleasure of
marriage”. Dated by the RSV as belonging to the intertestamental period,
p. viii.
(26) Methodius, The banquet of the ten virgins, 2.
2, trans. William R. Clark, The writings of Methodius, ANCL, 14,
Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1969 p. 13; cf. Lucretius, On the nature of
things, 4. 1037, GB 12, p. 57.
(27) Aristotle, On the generation of animals, 4.
1. 765 b [5-20] cf. 1. 19-20, translated Arthur Platt, GB 9, p. 306
B; 266B-269 B.
(28) Aretaeus, Causes and Symptoms of chronic diseases
2.5 in F. Adams trans. The extant works of Aretaeus the Cappadocian,
London: The Sydenham Society, 1856, cited in Peter Brown, B&S, p.
10. See also Galen, On natural faculties, 2, 3-4, cf 2, 8, GB 10, pp.
186-187, 193 .on the relationship between heat, blood and action.
(29) Aristotle, GA, 2. 3. 735a [30-35] - 4. 737
a [1-10, 34] GB 9, pp. 276 A-278 A277 B.
(30) Aristotle, GA, 2. 2 735 b[30] -736
a[20], GB 9, p. 276 AB.
(31) Laqueur, Making sex, p. 55. According to
Laqueur, Aristotle used the same words to describe the superior rational power
of the male citizen and the strength of the sperm, whilst lack of political
authority and women’s biological incapacity are described by the same
adjective.
(32) See Epictetus, Discourses, 2. 10, GB 12, pp.
148-150.
(33) Brown, B&S, pp. 10-11. Both Epstein and
Straub, “Introduction”,pp. 19-21, and Elizabth Castelli, “I will
make Mary male” pp. 29-49, in Bodyguards: The cultural politics of
gender ambiguity, eds., Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub, New York
& London: Routledge, 1991, explore the plasticity of sex/gender in
antiquity and the ambiguities it raised.
(34) Tertullian, De anima 27.5. In J. H. Waszink,
ed. CC 2: 823.
(35) Clement of Alexandria, Paed. 2. 94, trans.
David Hunter, Marriage in the early church, Minneapolis: Fortress Press,
1992, p. 44.
(36) Lucretius, On the nature of things, 4.
1037-1287, GB 12, pp. 57-61; in this section of his treatise Lucretius uses the
same imagery of chains that Augustine uses in the Confessiones; Virgil,
Ecologues, 6; Georgics, 3. 244-283; trans. James Roade, GB 13,
pp. 19-21; 73-74; For the literary and philosophical sources which kept placing
the model before educated Romans see John O’Meara, “Virgil and saint
Augustine: The Roman background to Christian sexuality” Augustinus,
13, 1968, pp. 307-326.
(37) Augustine, De gen. ad litt. 9. 13.
23,.PL. 34. 402, ACW 42, p. 86
(38) Augustine, De gen. ad litt. 9.18. 34.
PL. 34. 407, ACW 42, p. 94.
(39) Methodius, Banquet, 2. 2; Cf. 2. 1, pp.
12-13.
(40) Aristotle, On life and death, 478 B, trans.
G. R. T. Ross, GB 8, p. 725. Cf. Meteorology, 4.11.8-15, trans. E. W.
Webster, GB 8, p. 493; Death was caused by loss of heat.
(41) See Aline Rouselle, Porneia on desire and the
body in antiquity. Trans Felicia Pheasant. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988,
p. 59.
(42) Cited in John McAreavey’s conservative defense
of celibacy in “Priestly celibacy”, Irish Theological
Quarterly, ns. 59, 1, 1993, p. 37.
(43) Eusebius The history of the church 5. 1.
33-V. 1. 47, Trans. A. Louth, London, [1965] rev. 1989, pp. 144-145; cf.
Perpetua, The martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas, trans. R. Rader in
A lost tradition, women writers of the early Christian church, ed. P.
Wilson-Kastner, Lanham 1981, pp. 19-32; Ambrose, De virginibus. 2. 35.
PL 16. 228 C.
(44) Ramsay Macmullen, Christianising the Roman
Empire, (AD 100-400), New Haven/London: 1984, p. 86, estimates that in the
century after Constantine’s conversion the number of Christians grew from
approximately 5 million to 30 million.
(45) Ambrose, Exp. evang. sec. Lucam, 2.56, CC 14,
p.55; cf. Ps-Jerome, Ep. 6, Ad amicum aegrotum 6-7, PL 30. 82 C - 86 B.
(46) For females’ natural inferiority see also
Ambrose, De viduis, 7. 37; 8. 44. PL 16. 259 A; 261 A. NPNF 2. 10. pp.
397; 398-99.
(47) De institutione virginis
1. 3. PL 16. 320 A.
(48) Ambrose, De virginitate 4. 20. PL 16. 285 B,
trans. D. Callam, On virginity, Toronto 1991, p. 15. Expos. in ev.
sec. Luc. 10. 161. CC 14, p. 392. See also Ep. 69. 2 to Irenaeus, PL
16. 1285. FC. 26, Ep. 78, pp. 435-437, where he defines some of the
differences between men and women, assuming men’s innate
superiority.
(49) Ambrose, De mysteriis 1. 56-57, PL 16 425. FC
44, pp. 26-27.
(50) Methodius, Banquet, 3. 8, ANCL 14, p.
28.
(51) Ambrose, De virginitate, 16. 100. trans
Daniel Callam, Toronto: Peregrina Press, 1991 [1990], p. 40;
(52) I discuss this in detail in papers on aspects of the
body in Ambrose’s Hexameron given at the North American Patristic
Society in May, 1994, and the forthcoming ANZATS/AASR conference in Adelaide in
July.
(53) Ps. Clement of Rome,Two epistles concerning
virginity, 2.14, trans. B. L. Pratten, The writings of Methodius,
ANCL 14, p. 393. On women and their identification with disorder, cf.
Power, Augustine’s theology, ch. 7; O’Meara, “Virgil
”, p. 323; and Carole Pateman, “‘The disorder of women’:
women, love and the sense of justice”, Ethics, 91, 1, 1980, pp.
20-34.
(54) On the meaning “son” see Epictetus,
Discourses 2. 10, GB 12, 149 A.
(55) Laqueur, Making sex, p. 59.
(56) Laqueur, Making sex, p. 57.
(57) Aristotle, Politics, 2. 1852 b, GB 9, 446.
(58) Aristotle, Politics, I. 13, x-xv, GB 9, 455;
Plotinus, First Ennead, 6. 8; Fifth Ennead, 1. 1. GB 17, 25;
208.
(59) Ambrose, Ep. 45. 1.16, PL. 16. 1194 connects
God as father with earth as patria.; Hexameron, 1.9.33, cf.
6.8.52, FC 42, p. 38; Augustine, Civ. Dei. 19. 16. PL. 41. 644, G. B.
18, 522 a.
(60) Apart from the Vatican documents cited above, other
Christian writers arguing from an essentialist position are Werner Neuer,
Man and woman in Christian perspective, London: Hodder and Stoughton,
1990; Stephen B. Clark, Man and woman in Christ: an examination of the roles
of men and women in the light of Scripture and the social sciences, Ann
Arbor, Michigan: Servant Books, 1980.
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