This Female Man of God

Women and Spiritual Power in the Patristic Age, 350-450 AD

Gillian Cloke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134868247
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

This book is a study of the contribution of women to the development of the newly legitimate Christian church in the twilight of the Western Roman Empire. There are many women noted for the example of their life in this period, regarded amongst the luminaries of the day; but while their male mentors, the patristic authors have retained their fame, the women who surrounded and influenced them have all but disappeared from sight. The women themselves are partly to blame for this, for in order to be pious it made sense to disguise one's sex sometimes literally: Dr Cloke gives examples of those whose sex was discovered only after their death - they sought to become androgynous, a third sex before God. This book looks at a multitude of examples in some detail and takes an overview of the role of Christian women at this time. It should appeal not only to historians, classicists and theologians, but also to anyone who takes a general interest in the changing status of women over the the centuries.

1
INTRODUCTION
‘Holy’ women?

About this time… Danus was accused by his wife, who wished merely to frighten him, of some trivial offences. Somehow or other Rufinus…shamelessly seduced this light woman and then cajoled her into a dangerous plot. He persuaded her to accuse her innocent husband of treason by weaving a tissue of lies…

(Ammianus Marcellinus Histories 16.8)

Many women of high birth were convicted of the disgrace of adultery or fornication and put t o d eat h. Among these the m ost notorious were Claritas and Flaviana; for when the latter was being taken to her death, even the clothing that she wore was ripped off her back, nor was she allowed enough to keep even her private parts covered… Esaias, with some others who had been convicted for committing adultery with Rufina, was attempting to have her husband Marcellus tried for treason… in the midst of these horrors and others like them a married woman called Hesychia, who was charged with an attempted crime and kept under guard in the house of an official, was in such terror of torture that she pressed her face into the feather bed on which she was lying and killed herself by suffocation.

(Ammianus Marcellinus Histories 28.1)

Who can sufficiently praise our dear Lea’s mode of living?… becoming the head of a convent, she proved a true mother to the virgins in it: she wore harsh sackcloth instead of soft woven fabric, passed sleepless nights in prayer, instructing her companions more by her own example than by instruction. Her humility was so great that she, once the mistress of many, was now the servant of all… She was heedless of her dress, neglected her hair and only ate the roughest food.

(Jerome Let. 23.2)

Shut up in her narrow cell [Asella] wandered in paradise. Her recreation was fasting and her refreshment was hunger…she took her gold necklace made in the lamprey style…and without the knowledge of her parents, sold it. Then putting on the kind of sombre dress her mother had never wanted her to wear she concluded her pious undertaking by consecrating herself henceforth to the Lord.

(Jerome Let. 24.3)

Marcella…refrained from eating meat, and she knew the scent of wine but not its taste… She rarely appeared in public and took pains to shun the houses of great ladies so that she would not have to see what she had renounced for all time… She gave away her ornaments and other possessions to people already rich, content to throw her money away rather than grieve her mother.

(Jerome Let. 127.4)

This book examines the kind of women Jerome was writing about; and where and why they chose to part company with the lives of the women of whom Ammianus was writing. It explores the abandonment of many of the classical models for womanhood with the increasing appeal of a life of dedication to an ideal of Christianity amongst women in the world of the later Roman Empire. It examines the rise in popularity of (particularly) ascetic Christianity in the later fourth century and early fifth century, from the grass roots of the movement through to its purchase at the top end of the social scale; and looks at the religious adventures and endeavours of clusters of extremely devout Christian women during the period referred to as the patristic age. It is an attempt to give an overall picture of the form, nature and scope of their activities; of the thinking of their peers, both clerical and lay, about them, set in a context of social background and perceptions.
This is a period and a topic rife with inconsistency and ambiguity: such an exploration is made more complicated by being on the knifeedge of the boundary between the classical and the early mediaeval world. Consider the above excerpts. They were taken from two roughly contemporaneous eyewitness accounts of incidents involv ing female activities in urban Roman life towards the end of the fourth century. They could scarcely be more different; indeed, they barely seem to represent the same place. The first set are part of an account by a pagan, a historian of Roman times and moeurs in the traditional mould, of current society causes célèbres: this account is in its form and content entirely the product of classical antiquity. The second set are descriptions by a Christian writer of much venerated colleagues and their ministries, in what was to become a semi-formulaic hagiographical manner: the form and content of this writing is the property of theologians and church historians.

To think of these two accounts as to the same degree historical, and the events they relate as happening almost side by side requires a pause, and a reframing of perceptions. Happening at the same time, they yet demand a completely different set of mental furniture. The one is experienced as classical history and the other as church history—and it is difficult to fit the two into the same frame of reference because these two sorts of history are viewed on such different levels. (From having trained simultaneously with both classical historians and mediaevalists, it is a divide over which I am perhaps particularly sensitive.) It is salutary to think that the same framework of events and personalities were known to both the two men, both writing of the Rome they had lived and worked in at much the same time. It is still more salutary to consider for a moment that the women they are writing about could be the same women—except for their fates. They were out of the same social bracket, the senatorial top-drawer élite: however, those written of by Ammianus are the proper and fitting heirs to their classical foremothers such that it could be Dio Chrysostom or Suetonius writing, and the tone is resolutely reminiscent of the golden age of imperial Rome. Jerome’s women are already the precursors of Radegund and Hildegard in the twilight world of early mediaeval devotion and they have become most definitely the representatives of the church and church historians; it is the kind of rhetoric which will set the tone for Gregory of Tours, Helgaud and Bede.

This sets a context for the topic I have chosen to write on: just where did the change come about? And, particularly, who were these ‘holy’ women, and where do they come into it? We know rather a lot about the holy men at this time: of pious males there was something of an embarrassment of riches at this period. These were the men who moulded Christianity as we know it and have been dogging it ever since; just as an example, note how many quotations from Augustine, Ambrose, Jerome and Chrysostom have surfaced in the recent debate on the ordination of women. But: what women? I have found when people have enquired into my topic—even those knowing more than a little about the era—that the almost automatic question has been, ‘Were there any holy women?’—closely followed by, ‘you can’t have found many…(subtext: or we surely would have heard about them)’. Yes; many. There were large numbers of extremely active women of high-profile piety at this time, some of them enormously wealthy, powerful and influential, the stars of their contemporary Christian stage no less than the men. It is more lately that they have come to be overlooked so completely.

The period covered in this book is fairly limited in scope, the boundaries being the last half of the fourth century and the first half of the fifth; limited of necessity because of the enormous amount happening in it. This is the period of settlement and reconsideration following the success of the battle of the Christian movement for legitimacy; of the church coming to terms with the consequences of moving from martyrdom to mainstream in one generation: a seachange that left church writers floundering as much as secular sources. Take, for instance, the two turning-points highlighted in Peter Brown’s influential 1961 study of the effect of Roman women in the process of christianisation in this period: the deaths of Vettius Praetextatus Agorius and Rufius Antonius Agrypnius Volusianus. Between the deaths of these two— similarly high-profile, selfconsciously state-oriented pagans with a generation between them the known world changed in an upsurge of barbarian, Christian and, as I hope to show, female activity. Praetextatus died in 384: two years after Gratian’s official disestablishment of pagan cults in Rome, and in the same year as the impassioned debate between pagan and Christian influences on the Emperor over the removal of the Altar of Victory from the senate house, and as the arrival in Rome of Augustine, and probably Ammianus. Volusianus died in 437—and his not-quite-forcible deathbed conversion, smiling through clenched teeth at the interference of his niece Melania the Younger, was indicative of the writing on the wall. In between the deaths of these two aristocratic old recidivists, Roma aeterna was sacked, as were many of the temples representing much that had been most civilised about classical antiquity; Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, Chrysostom, Basil and their kind were industriously pouring out the stuff that was to change the face of the world; and the larger part of their aristocratic contemporaries adopted Christianity.

Some of these contemporaries, aristocratic and otherwise, are to be found amongst the ‘holy’ women I have studied—but only some. Many women of the later Roman period found assimilating Christianity did not alter their experience or perceptions of life by much; as with today, levels of observance varied with belief. For many men and women, the same diurnal round of life went on as it had; going to church rather than to the temples was simply assimilated as part of life and did not necessarily impinge much on their view of the world around them or their response to it. Amongst such men, attending church became a public relations necessity in the same way that sacrificing to the Gods had been (Ammianus Marcellinus Histories 21.2), and assassination was as likely to happen to a general returning from church as from a pagan ritual (ibid. 15.5); women would make visits to churches and martyria the occasions of assignations in the same way their forebears had used temple-going (Jerome Let. 107.9, 147), or were even seduced in church, by church functionaries (Sozomen EH 7.16). Many women still lived under the spell of the wealthy, dissipated social world over which Roman writers had moralised for centuries. The women Ammianus wrote of in the scandalous adultery trials did not evidently notice that they were living in a period identifiable specifically by its Christianity; in a time, moreover, when it behoved each soul to behave as if they were to be carried off to heaven on the next cloud.

But this is part of the fascination of this particular area of study. In large part, the women about whom I am writing as heroines of Christian rhetoric and legend were the same kind of women as the causes célèbres written of by Ammianus; the same upper-class heroines (and villainesses) who would have attracted note in ‘classical’ antiquity, for inspiring or betraying their menfolk, or perhaps for contributing to the well-being of their patria—but in this generation they employed these qualities rather differently. erently. Ammianus was writing about a world that does not, in his account, seem to be much different from that of previous Roman historians—but it was: and it was changing fast, most notably in the persons and activities of its citizens. The women examined in this book were those for whom a belief in Christianity not only impinged on their view of the world but for whom it necessitated an active change; women emanating from an unexceptionable family or social background, who subsequently made a decision to distance themselves from it. Some women at this time thought deeply about the nature of Christianity and the logical conclusions of Christian commandments, and determined to carry them out to the best of their abilities. These women often ‘removed’ themselves—altogether in a literal and physical sense, or just slightly, within their own homes and minds—from the common course of events, in order to pursue a greater level of concentration on the things of holiness. In doing so, they were perceived by their families and peers as being ‘holy’; were thought of as as being ‘soldiers of Christ’, ‘renowned’, ‘known for virtue’; as overtly playing with different goal-posts from others of their circles. Their ‘different’ motivations were evident to those around them and they were accordingly identified and described by their ‘different’ status. I shall examine this phenomenon, how it was believed to happen in women, and how the theologians said it should affect them. However, women following this different motivation were less susceptible of obvious definition than the men following it, who had a clear variety of acceptable, definable paths available to them: reader, deacon, monk, priest, bishop and so on. I shall therefore also examine the routes to a holy lifestyle women did find, both those accepted and those disallowed.

For this has long been the problem with this period and this topic of study: for years, even centuries, the thought, decisions and writings of the churchmen of the patristic age have been influential entirely in self-referential terms; observed and studied rather as if these men, and their ideas, arose out of a vacuum—the ideas in themselves, the pure thought produced, all that need be considered. But no thought arises out of a vacuum. All ideas are the product of an environment: and in this case, the fathers’ thought-processes were the product of a female environment—that is to say an environment set up, maintained by and filled with (pious) females—as I shall show. These great men of their age were bought and sold by women. One common and unifying fact about these patristic church writers —of Augustine, John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, Palladius, Rufinus, and most conspicuous of all, Jeromeis that they were surrounded and supported by women; relays of women. In addition, most of them attest to an early female influence, specifically defined in terms of Christian piety, on their subsequent development.

For this is the crux of what I discovered when I was researching for this study: the absolute ubiquity of these ‘holy’ women—once one starts to look for them. It is not possible—or it should not be possible—to separate them from rom a study of the patristic age, for or they are everywhere: humble women from the lowest levels of the social strata adopting harsh lives as hermits with such frequency that priests and monks tripped over them at every turn; middle class Hausfraus planting ideological trip-wires in the consciences of their children and turning out priests, monks and bishops by the seminary-load; on up to the élite women of the very top-drawer who gave up on secular life and their worldly possessions to such an extent that they precipitated economic crises at the heart of the empire.

This is, of course, partly an attempt to justify what may look like a loose frame of reference for this study: looking only for pious Christian women of the mid-fourth to mid-fifth centuries, there was just so much going on, ranging from the intriguing and enlightening to the simply weird, that I felt there was a great need for a general over-view of how much pious female activity and of what different kinds was taking place; and, particularly, how the different classes of women and styles of activity interwove and cross- fertilised each other. Much ink has been expended in the examination of certain of the upper-class women, mainly by classicists—but not all of them and certainly not all together and as a consideration of the phenomenon they collectively presented. Further examination has been done into some of the aspects of the female side of monasticism, predominantly by church historians; but again, in a variety of fragmented and discrete studies. This is an attempt to demonstrate how much activity was happening, amongst how many females all within a short space of time, and how great was the crossreferencing between them.

A particular phenomenon taken to denote the presence of ‘holiness’ in individuals of this age was the decision to adopt a sterner than usual version of the Christian life: the undertaking of an ‘ascetic’ life. After some generations since legitimacy, participation in Christianity, and observing a degree of commitment within it, had normalised and settled down, relatively speaking. The trend that in our period is perceptibly odd and separate and special, and goes some way to filling the gap left by martyrdom as a sign of extra commitment to the faith, is the decision for some kind of ascetic life. And a consideration of the ascetic movement further reinforces the need for looking at aristocratic women of the courts of Rome and Constantinople and peasant women from the deserts of Eygpt, Palestine and Syria in the same volume—and the same breath. The ascetic movement encompassed both and the former learned their asceticism at the instance and example of the latter.

The disparity cannot be overstated between these women who admired and imitated each other. The women who have traditionally tended to attract the attention of both the fathers and classical historians were out of the very top drawer of society. For a suitable comparison of today one would have to imagine women with the material resources and position in public awareness of, say, Princess Diana and the Duchess of Kent, Ivana Trump and Leona Helmsley, and then imagine them all being swept away by the teachings of the Plymouth Brethren or the Reverend Sun Myung Moon; to such a degree of commitment as to make over all their resources to the movement, doff their power-dressing and executive lifestyles in favour of wearing jeans and tee-shirts, living in shabby communes and handing out tracts on street-corners. The change, for some of the objects of my study, between the environment from which they emanated and that which they chose to adopt was really that extreme: it was not just that they ‘got religion’, but that some of them took to one of the most excessive and dramatic versions of it, on the far ar fringe of acceptability. And, further, this was a version that was causing severe angst amongst those in the upper echelons of their own church, who were most acutely aware of the church’s need to acquire gentrification. And these blue-blooded women learned their extremism at the instance of the women of the humiliores. Some aristocrats fled to the environs and the influence of the peasants and vowed great envy of the simplicity and directness of the latter’s route to God—though not infrequently finding the reality rather different from their enthusiasts’ imaginings. They then told tales to their own disadvantage of how they had been wrong-footed and edified by these holy peasants; witness the experiences of Melania the Elder, Melania the Younger and Paula. And Marcella and her ladies ‘created a desert in the city’, trying for the coenobitic life without the wilderness, in their exaggerated admiration for all they could learn of what seemed to be a more direct route to God than the urban and urbane modes of worship they knew already. Then, in their turn becoming spearheads of such tendencies, these ladies became themselves models and mentors to others and attracted many women of all stations around them. Because of the inter-relatedness of these influences it is impossible to examine one without the other; in addition to which the attitudes and problems attendant upon the decision for this life show root similarities which belie the different conditions of the women undertaking them.

But women in particular had to be careful in adopting this kind of extreme tack. From Eve onwards, women were seen by the Christian theorists as the natural first victims of deception, and from the very first condemnation of the very first non-orthodox tendency were regarded peculiarly apt pupils at propagating heresy; ‘Do not pay heed to a woman, O Israel. Lift yourself above the evil designs of woman, for it is woman who hunts for the precious souls of men… Do not believe a vulgar woman: for every heresy is a vulgar woman’ (Epiphanius Medicine Box 79.8), a view reinforced by experience of the ‘petticoat troubles’ of Montanists, Donatists, Pelagians, Circumcellions and so on and so forth. Jerome had a hit-list of such examples:

It was with the help of the whore Helena that Simon Magus founded his sect; troops of women accompanied Nicholas of Antioch, that inventor of pollutions; it was a woman that Marcion sent as his precursor to Rome, to undermine the souls of men in readiness for his traps;… Montanus…used two wealthy noblewomen, Prisca and Maximilla first to bribe and then to subvert many churches;… when Arius was determined to lead the world into darkness, he commenced by deceiving the Emperor’s sister; it was the resources of Lucilla that helped Do...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE
• ABBREVIATIONS
• 1: INTRODUCTION: ‘HOLY’ WOMEN?
• 2: PATRISTIC PERCEPTIONS: THE SOURCES AND THE PROBLEMS
• 3: MODELS FOR PIETY IN A SOCIAL CONTEXT
• 4: ‘EUNUCHS FOR THE LOVE OF HEAVEN’: AVOWED VIRGINITY
• 5: ‘THE CONTINENCE WHICH IS AWARE OF ITS OWN RIGHT’: THE ORDER OF WIDOWS
• 6: MARRIED SANCTITY I: ‘THE BED UNDEFILED’: Christian wifehood
• 7: MARRIED SANCTITY II: CHRISTIAN MOTHERHOOD
• 8: ‘NOT BY OFFICE BUT BY GIFTS OF THE SPIRIT’: THE MINISTRIES OF WOMEN
• 9: CONCLUSION: Holy ‘women’: THE IMAGO DEI REVISITED
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY