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by Dr. Mary Ann Rossi -- credits
Published in Feminist Theology 4 (1993) , pp.
57-63 (Sheffield Academic Press); here re-published on the Internet with
permission of the author and the publishers (1).
How
could it have come about that a religion rooted in equality and mutuality
should have been transformed into a man-centered cult with the basic tenet of
excluding half of the human race from full personhood? When women are perceived
as less than human, the consequence is violent abuse, such as woman battering,
a crime that was not even acknowledged in our legal codes as recently as two
decades ago, let alone addressed as a significant social problem or as one that
must be addressed from the pulpit. I am convinced that the misshapen society
resulting today from this Christian mindset is adversely affecting the lives of
both women and men who refuse to challenge injustice to all women inherent in
Christianity. This injustice stems from the misogynistic assumptions of the
Christian teachings derived from Augustine, Aquinas, Gratian, and other
founders of Christian precepts grounded in the Aristotelian conviction that
females are defective males. This paper will make the connection between these
Christian teachings and the acceptance of wife abuse as a private matter, and
not open to public debate, and certainly not to acknowledgement from the
pulpit.
The
crime of battering came to my attention nearly twenty years ago. I was
confronted with the problem when Cathy, a ‘good Christian woman’,
knocked on my door and asked me to help her. Thinking that her husband was
drinking too much she went to a tavern to ask him to come home; his response
wás to beat her in the parking lot so severely that she was taken to the
emergency ward, where the doctor, whom she had never met, asked ‘What did
you do to provoke him this time?’. This case and many similar episodes led
to my legislative work in Wisconsin as a member of the Battered Woman Task
Force. It was in this capacity that I began to suspect a strong connection
between Christian upbringing and the acceptance of battering by women and men.
In particular, a strongly worded letter from a rural Wisconsin woman accused me
of sinful ways in trying to urge women to leave a battering situation; as she
put it, it was woman’s God-given duty to submit to her husband and to
suffer in silence as a good Christian woman. I was motivated to discover how
this woman had received such a message from her Christian education: that is,
that for the sake of keeping the family together, a woman had to sacrifice her
own safety and that of her children. Furthermore, the wife who is battered is
made to feel the cause of this abuse, and—like the guilty Eve—shares
the guilt that accrues to all women from the verses of Genesis.
As
legislative chair of the Governor’s Commission on the Status of Women, I
monitored new legislation making the crime of wife battering a felony in
Wisconsin statutes; It had always been a legal prohibition to batter a
stranger. But a man’s home was his castle, and this mindset reflected (and
often still does) the English law of coverture, the basis of our American laws:
that is, in marriage the man and the woman become one, the man. Anyone who has
attended a Christian wedding ceremony recently can testify to the strangle-hold
of this perception in requiring a woman to ‘obey’ her husband, and in
acknowledging and affirming the reading of the passage from Genesis relating to
the fashioning òf the guilty Eve from Adam’s rib, which is the most
pernicious myth perpetrated against women since the ancient Greeks contrived
the myth of the birth of Athena from the head of Zeus. And the continuing
presence of this myth of Eve still exerts a strong influence on woman’s
selfperception today.
Let
us now consider the single most powerful and persistent model of the ‘good
Christian woman’, Monica, the mother of St Augustine (d. 430), the Father
of the church, who was the most influential author of Christian doctrines
regarding the inferiority of women. Although Monica is often the scapegoat of
the psychoanalysts of Augustine’s sexual hangups, she was abused by
Patricius, her pagan husband, and her advice to battered women who came to her
for help was to return to their husbands ànd suffer in silence. It was
Monica’s virtue as a good Christian woman never to speak of what she
endured at the hands of her violent husband. The heritage of Monica’s
lesson is in the countless cases of wife battering, unrecorded, unprosecuted,
unacknowledged by their ministers, priests and fellow parishioners.
Let
us turn now to the attitude of the church towards sexuality. Those of us raised
in the Roman Catholic faith cannot discuss the defilement of the body by sexual
intercourse without tracing the root of this ‘mindset’ in the
teachings of the Fathers of the church, of whom the most notable is Augustine.
The early Christians as they chose their canonical texts excluded all writings
that conceived of God as both male and female. The orthodox
(‘straight-thinking’) God is exclusively male. Eve is created from
Adam’s side for his fulfillment. This is translated in society into the
domination of men over women as the proper God-given order for the human race
and for the Christian church.
In
Augustine maleness is assimilated into monism; femaleness becomes the image of
the lower corporeal nature, or carnality and sexuality. Male/female dualism is
assimilated into soul/ body dualism. Woman is seen ethically as dangerous to
the male. Let me illustrate the persistence of this male suspicion of all
women. In 1962 at the first ecumenical council convened by Pope John XXIII in
Rome, an Anglican journalist and dear friend of mine, Ann Cheetham, having been
invited to attend, was confronted by a cardinal who screamed: ‘Leave this
place immediately! Do not sully this conference with the presence of a
woman.’ Deeply humiliated, Ann Cheetham, a lifelong worker for the cause
of women’s equality in the church, left Rome in tears, women’s only
resort in the face of a hierarchy deaf to the voices of women.’
At a
meeting of older religious women in April, a letter was sent by the group to
the Archbishop to protest the exclusion of women from a Synod on religious
life. The exclusion of women from decision making in regard to their own lives
continues in the church to this day and punctuates the failure of the hierarchy
to acknowledge the full humanity and personhood of women, often recognized in
society, but not in the Catholic Church, in this last decade of the twentieth
century.
As a
counterpart to the debasing of women as an embodiment of the lower, or
corporeal, nature, we must look to the exclusion of women in the perception of
deity. To regard God in anthropomorphic terms as an elderly white male is
detrimental not only to other races, but to all women. The works of outstanding
theologians like Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Rosemary Radford Ruether
and Elaine Pagels have succeeded in recovering the female images and metaphors
of God. The transforming of the female apostle Junia (Rom. 16.15) into the male
name Junias in the sixth century illustrates one way the testimony of women
leaders was purposely erased from church history.(2) This cover-up of women
leaders in the early church fortified the male hierarchy in their consolidation
of power; the exclusion of women from priesthood and the imposition of mandated
celibacy by the canons of the fifth and sixth centuries were the capstones to
this encapsulation of women’s basic inferiority to men. Battered women
today still suffer the effects of this androcentric perception of human nature.
Augustine locates the source of original sin in the male erection and women are
the cause of it. The depersonalization of women into whore, wife or mother may
be traced to his writings. Most damaging is his reiteration of the precept that
the wife must submit completely to her husband, even to the point of physical
abuse and death. Augustine formulated the idea that women were good only for
reproduction and unqualified for anything connected with mind or intelligence.
Thus Augustine was the inventor of what the Germans call the three K’s,
Kinder, Küche, Kirche: that is children, kitchen and church, an idea that
still has life in it. In fact, as the German theologian Ute Ranke-Heinemann
notes, it continues to be the Catholic hierarchy’s primary theological
position on women.(3)
In
conjunction with this debasing of women in the conception of humanness, we must
acknowledge the purposeful if often subliminal cover-up or omission of female
images in Scripture or commentaries on Scripture. For example, a French Jesuit
translator of the Bible replaces the Greek verb for parturition—I am the
God who gave you birth—with the phrase ‘I am the God who fathered
you’(4).
Augustine describes the Catholic Church as the ‘true Mother of all
Christians’, as if it might be the mother of all humanity and the
guarantor of all existing social bonds: ‘It is you who make wives subject
to their husbands...by chaste and faithful obedience; you set husbands over
their wives’.(5) Peter Brown sums up Augustine’s influence:
‘Augustine created a darkened humanism that linked the pre-Christian past
to the Christian present in a common distrust of sexual pleasure’.(6)
If we
believe, as Clifford Geertz states, that religion is the shaper of society, we
must acknowledge the potential for healing and reform that resides in the
decision-making bodies of the church. How can we effect change that will bring
women into the deliberations that will affect their lives and their future?
First of all, we must recognize and acknowledge an evil before we can confront
it and extirpate it whether from our consciousness or from the mores of our
society.
There
are three ways of accomplishing this goal:
(1)
Recognize the omission of women from the texts of early Christian history.
Thanks to feminist theologians such as Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza,
Rosemary Radford Ruether, Elaine Pagels and others, we have seen a
proliferation of research on the presence of women in the early church, from
Junia the Apostle to priests like Leta, recovered by Otranto of Italy.(7) To
such an extent have women been erased from androcentric texts that we must
resort to archaeological clues, such as the catacomb painting of women
celebrating the eucharist (with a modern reproduction transforming the women
into men), and locating a bishop Theodora in the Church of St Prassede in Rome
(with the last part of her name scratched out).(8)
(2)
Recognize the seeds of the biological construction of woman’s inferiority
in two of the most influential Greek thinkers of all time: Plato and Aristotle.
In the Laws , Plato concludes that a woman has less potentiality for
virtue than a man; he says further that it is women’s weakness and
timidity that make them sly and devious (781 b 2-4). Again Plato shows his
contempt for women: ‘Human nature being twofold, the better sort was that
which should thereafter be called man’ (Timaeus 42 e). And twice he
says: ‘Evil and cowardly men are reborn as women, that being the first
step downward to rebirth as animals’ (42 b3c4; 90 e 6-91 a 4). Aristotle
sees woman as a misbegotten male (De Generationel IV 6; Metaphysics X 9)
perhaps caused by some adverse circumstance, such as a southeast wind that
is moist. This Aristotelian conception is adopted with approbation by Augustine
and Aquinas, and we might observe the effects of such a mindset in the pages of
medical textbooks in the USA up to a few years ago; the anatomy of the male is
treated as normal throughout, and the differing features of the female anatomy
as anomaly or abnormality.(9) The Aristotelian conception of procreation as
male begetting and woman conceiving (or receiving the seed) is so imbedded in
our thinking that we retain these terms, even though the female ovum was
discovered by Van Baer in 1827, the first time that the woman’s equal role
in conception was realized. Such is the influence of language on the shaping of
our thoughts.
(3)
We must reconstruct our historical perception of women’s equal role in the
ancient Christian church in order to conceive of a liberating praxis in our
present crisis. Such a praxis, wherever it is being learned and disseminated,
will inspire its adherents to three actions: first, to work for the solidarity
of women within or outside of their Christian congregations in order to voice
their consensus; secondly, to refuse to accept interpretations of the Bible or
any canonical doctrine that demeans or diminishes the worth of women as human
beings; and thirdly, to urge governments to enact legislation recognizing that
violence motivated by gender is a violation of civil rights.(10)
We
are more and more aware that the greatest and most profound shaper of our
thoughts and our society is religion. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza has
pointed the way to the recovery of women’ s Christian past by a method she
calls feminist critical hermeneutics.(11) Her works have inspired and directed
my research into the formation of the female mindset in Western society,
especially in woman’ s compliance with battery and subservience according
to the dictates of her Christian faith.
Women
and men working on the problem of battering conclude: the legal system alone
cannot eliminate this problem, for it is rooted in the pernicious and misguided
fallacies of Christian teachings.(12)
Women
and men working on the problem of battering conclude: the legal system
alone cannot eliminate this problem, for it is rooted in the pernicious and
misguided fallacies of Christian teachings. The theory set forth in the works
of feminist theologians urge us to approach androcentric texts with a
hermeneutics of suspicion, and they pose an advocacy stance. That is, if
biblical texts say it is natural and permissible to abuse women, they cannot be
accorded scriptural authority.
The
Christian fabric of modern society contains the imbedded and false text of
woman’s innate inferiority to man, the root of woman-hating and
woman-battering today. The restoration of the women leaders and priests of the
early church has transformed our understanding of this formative period as
‘what shall be remembered’, and we can never again accept as
authority a text that demeans and debases half of the human race.
Footnotes
1. This article is a longer version of a paper presented at an
International Conference of Law and Society in Amsterdam, 1991, and at the
University of Bremen at a feminist conference on ‘Equality and
Difference’.
2.
Cf. E. Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological
Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York, 1989).
3. U.
Ranke-Heinemann. Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven (New York. 1990).
4.
Deut. 32.14.
5. P.
Brown, The Body and Society (London: André Deutsch, 1988), p. 426.
6.
Brown, The Body and Society, p. 426.
7.
‘Priesthood, Precedent, and Prejudice: On Recovering the Women Priests of
Early Christianity’ (English trans. G. Otranto’s ‘Notes on the
Female Priesthood’), Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 7.1
(1991) pp. 73-94.
8. D.
Irvin ‘The Ministry of Women in the Early Church: The Archaeological
Évidence’, in Duke Divinity School Review 45.2 (Spring,
1980), pp. 76-86.
9.
For these and other citations, cf. M. Horowitz, ‘Aristotle and
Woman’, Joumal of the History of Biology IX (1976), pp.
183-213.
10.
E.F. Defeis, ‘An International Human Right: Gender Equality’,
Journal of Women’s History 3.1 (1991), pp. 90-107.
11.
E. Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her.
12.
S. Brooks Thistlethwaite,’Every Two Minutes: Battered Women and Feminist
Interpretation’, in L. Russell (ed.), Feminist Interpretation of the
Bible, pp. 96-107.
Further Reading
Alsdurf, l., and P. Alsdurf, Baltered into Submission (Intervarsity
Press, 1989).
Bleier, R.,’Science and Belief: A Polemic on Sex Differences’, in C.
Farnham (ed.), The Impact of Feminist Research’ in Academy
(Bloomington, 1987), pp. Ilt-30.
Bohn,
C.R.,’Dominion to Rule: The Roots and Consequences of a Theology of
Ownership’, in Christianity, Patriarchy, and Abuse: A Feminist Critique
(NY, 1989).
Brown, 1.C., and l.R. Bohn (eds.), Christianity, Patriarchy, and Abuse: A
Feminist Critique (New York, 1989).
Douglas, M., Natural Symbols (London, 1970; New York, 1982).
Ettlinger, G.H.,’Church Fathers and Desert Mothers: Male and Female in the
Early Church’, America 164.20 (May 1991), pp. 558-65.
Gillespie, C.K., Justifiable Homicide: Battered Women, Self-Defense, and the
Law (Columbus, 1989).
King,
K., Images of the Feminine in Gnosticism (Philadelphia, 1988).
Kraemer, R., Maenads, Martyrs, Matrons, Monastics: A Sourcebook on
Women’s Religions in the Greco-Roman World (Philadelphia, 1988).
Milne, P.J Eve and Adam: Is a Feminist Reading Possible?’, Bible Review
5.3 June 1988), pp. 12-31, 39.
Pagels, E.,’What Became of God the Mother? Conflicting Images of God in
Early Christianity’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
2.2, (1976)
—The Gnostic Gospels (New York, 1979).
—Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (New York, 1988).
Rossi, M.A., ‘The Passion of Perpetua, Everywoman of Late Antiquity’,
in Lounibos and Smith (eds.), Pagan and Christian Anxiety: A Response to
E.R. Dodds (Philadelphia, 1985).
Ruether, R.R.,’Misogynism and Virginal Feminism in the Fathers of the
Church’, Religion and Sexim (New York, 1974).
—Sexim and God-talk: Toward a Feminist Theology (Boston, 1983).
and
E. Mclaughlin (eds.), Women of Spirit: Female Leadership in the
Jewish and Christian Traditions (New York, 1979).
—Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 8.3, (1983).
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