The phenomenon of women choosing celibacy was undoubtedly one of the factors that attracted them to the new faith and so conspired to increase the ratio of Christian women to men. The lists of those who died during the occasional persecutions against Christians bear this out. In Lyons, Gaul, in AD 177, 24 men and 23 women were martyred; at Scilli, in Italy, three years later, it was seven men and five women who died. According to Rodney Stark: ‘The ancient sources and modern historians agree that primary conversion to Christianity was far more prevalent among females than among males.’82 The result was that with a shortage of women in the larger, surrounding pagan culture, pagan men often married Christian women; and a significant number of these men then underwent secondary conversion. In his studies of modern religious movements, Stark has invariably found the same pattern of conversion. Its impact on the rapid growth of Christianity can be seen when the numbers are considered. The best guess is that by AD 40 – seven years after the crucifixion of Jesus – there were approximately 1,000 Christians in an empire with an estimated population of 60,000,000. Surveying the best available evidence, Stark estimates that the most probable growth rate of the new faith was 40 per cent per decade. By the beginning of the second century, there were over 200,000 Christians, and by AD 300, 6,299,832. Just over a decade later, weight of numbers was one of the factors that led the emperor Constantine to recognize Christianity, ending the sporadic persecutions that had been launched against those who practised it. By AD 350 Christians represented over 50 per cent of the empire’s population.
Evidence gathered by Guttentag and Secord on the relationship between the status of women in any society and the proportion of males to females, links high ratios of females to males to higher status for women. Stark believes that in early Christianity, women enjoyed higher status than they did in the pagan world around them.83 St Paul’s references to women as deaconesses are cited to support this contention. According to St Paul, deacons were important in the early Church, assisting in liturgical functions and administering the Church’s charitable activities. And it is clear that Paul regarded it as entirely proper for women to be deaconesses.84
Several later sources also reference the prevalence of women deacons in the early Church. The most compelling evidence of all, of course, of the high regard for women in the early Church, is St Paul’s statement in his epistle to the Galatians :
For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ.
There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus. (3:27–8)
Whatever its other implications, it is the most radical statement of equality – of a kind – between men and women since Plato’s championship of women guardians in his ideal state 400 years before (see Chapter 1). But in fact St Paul is merely making explicit the implications of Jesus’ attitude towards women. He was to Christianity what Lenin was to Marxism – bent on spreading the new faith and preparing Christians to be ready for the coming of the kingdom of heaven where men and women would be united in Christ, and all worldly distinctions would vanish.
But how often did this spiritual equality for women translate into social reality? It is relatively easy to claim that men and women are equal in the eyes of the Lord, but did early Christianity encourage them to see themselves as equals in each other’s eyes? St Paul is cited frequently by both those who argue that it did, and those who hold that it did not. Like Plato, he is hailed by some as a misogynist and by others as a feminist. What remains undeniable is that the moral teachings on adultery, the banning of abortion and infanticide, and the easing of pressure on women to marry would have directly raised the status of women by eradicating some of the practices that were prejudicial to them. But it was not equality as understood in a modern liberal democracy.
There is a further similarity between St Paul and Plato. The equality they offered men and women could only come about through the eradication of the sexual differences between them. Plato’s female guardians must become honorary men, so that their sexuality is obliterated. In the Kingdom of Heaven, according to St Paul, sexual differences disappear. Both thinkers see the sacrifice of a vital aspect of our human nature as the necessary cost of equality between the sexes. In the meantime, however, certain patriarchal traditions must continue. In 1 Corinthians, 11:3–16, the Apostle sets down a series of formulations concerning the relationship between men and women and the Church. He reiterates the Biblical tradition of male dominance for ‘the head of the woman is the man’ and restates the creation myth of the primacy of man: ‘For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man.’ It is also here that he ordains that women must cover their hair when in church. However, he goes on to recognize our mutual interdependence: ‘Nevertheless neither is the man without the woman, neither the woman without the man, in the Lord. For as the woman is of the man, even so is the man also by the woman; but all things of God.’
One could parse this, as does the Jewish feminist Pamela Eisenbaum, as a simple recognition that man depends on woman as much as woman depends on man.85 If one accepts this interpretation, St Paul here rules out that hoary old misogynist fantasy, beloved of the Greeks and of the Old Testament, the myth of autonomous man. That surely is progress. However, while undermining one of misogyny’s pretensions, St Paul went on to supply it with one of its most powerful weapons, one that would change forever how a whole civilization would think about the body.
At first sight, apparently, St Paul was an unimpressive and unattractive little man, with a ‘big bold head’, crooked legs, dark thick eyebrows that grew together and a large nose; hardly, one would think, a man to foment one of the great upheavals in the human psyche.86 But the letters of St Paul represent the beginning of a revolution in human sensibility of seismic proportions. In Romans (7:18–25) he writes about his body:
For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not . . . For I delight in the law of God after the inward man:
But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members.
O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from this body of death?
I thank God through Jesus Christ Our lord. So then with the mind I myself serve the law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin.
This is a declaration of war on the human body. And when a man declares war on himself, the first casualty is woman. It is a war that is still being fought.
Many thinkers in Classical Antiquity, such as Plato, were dualists, aspiring to greater knowledge of the world by attempting to apprehend what they believed was the perfection of its underlying principles. As a result, they rejected everyday reality, including that of the body and its needs and desires, as woefully inadequate, indeed a hindrance. But they did not reject it as inherently evil as does St Paul. His anguished cry of near despair at his rebellious body had not been heard before. Plato may have regarded the body as an unfortunate inconvenience that a philosopher somehow had to by-pass on his road to the truth. But to St Paul the body represented a rejection of the Divine, an insurrection against the supreme truth for which the Son of God had died on the cross. Inevitably, women would carry the cross as the chief instigators of this rebellion of the flesh.
In the epistle to the Corinthians, written to advise Christians who were debating whether or not to become celibate, St Paul tells them (7:1–9):
It is good for a man not to touch a woman.
Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband . . . I say therefore to the unmarried and the widows, It is good for them if they abide as I.
But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn.
Thus marriage became a ‘defe
nce against desire’.87 Though St Paul did not advocate that all Christians remain celibate, realizing that such a condition would have been incompatible with his ambitions to broaden the new faith’s appeal, his bleak view of human sexuality as a necessary evil provided one justification for the Church’s increasingly misogynistic vision. Sanctity was identified more and more with virginity. The rebellious body had to be put down, and like an enemy citadel, it was laid siege to with fasts, deprivations, and other punishments including, most importantly, abstinence from sex. The Greeks and Romans were taught it was necessary to master passions. But according to the Christian teacher Clement of Alexandria (circa AD 150–215) ‘our ideal is not to experience desire at all.’88 By the end of the second century AD, one of the most powerful and influential figures in the early Church, Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus, better known as Tertullian (AD 160–220), could write: ‘Think of how a man feels in himself when he abstains from a woman. He thinks spiritual thoughts. If he prays to the Lord, he is next door to heaven; if he turns to the Scriptures, he is all of him present to them . . .’89
In theory at least, it is easier for a man to abstain from having thoughts about having sex with a woman if she dresses modestly. According to Tertullian, ‘salvation – and not the salvation of women only, but of men – consists in the exhibition principally of modesty.’90 Women were already expected to wear veils while attending Christian services. It was Tertullian who had women barred from holding ministries in the Church because of their power to distract the pious. In the Christian male’s war with his body, an attractively dressed woman was his rebellious member’s greatest ally. So Tertullian devotes a whole treatise ‘On Female Dress’ to neutralizing this powerful force. In it, he asserts that women originally learned the art of decorating their bodies and wearing make-up from the angels expelled from heaven with whom they coupled. The fallen angels conferred ‘peculiarly upon women that instrumental means of ostentation, the radiance of jewels wherewith necklaces are variegated, and the circlets of gold wherewith the arms are compressed, and the medicaments of orchid with which wools are coloured, and that black powder itself where-with the eyelids and eyelashes are made prominent.’ St Paul had introduced the notion of the body as ‘the temple of the living God’.91 Women’s love of ostentation and make-up pollutes that temple, forcing God to forsake it:
For they who rub their skin with medicaments, stain their cheeks with rouge, make their eyes prominent with antimony, sin against Him. To them, I suppose the plastic skill of God is displeasing. In their persons, I suppose, they convict, they censure, the Artificer of all things! For censure they do when they amend, when they add to, His work; taking these their additions, of course, from the adversary artificer. That adversary artificer is the devil. For who would show the way to change the body, but he who by wickedness transfigured man’s spirit.92
The misogynists of Greece and Rome similarly censured women for beautifying themselves. To a Cato or a Juvenal, however, a woman’s love of decoration was merely a sign of human vanity. Though it was an admittedly powerful distraction for those high-minded men who strove towards the virtues of self-control and discipline, it was also an opportunity to show how foolish women were for aspiring to possess such a transient bauble as beauty. But with Tertullian we are in a different world, one where the border between the natural and the supernatural has been blurred, where God and Satan now struggle for dominance on the battlefield of the human body, and where sexual desire has been deployed on the side of the forces of darkness as one of their most potent weapons. The Divine has intervened on the side of those who strive to suppress human sexuality, which means first and foremost suppressing women’s sexuality. To avoid becoming the devil’s ally, women, writes Tertullian, should ‘go about in humble garb . . . and affect meanness of appearance, walking about as Eve mourning and repentant, in order that by every garb of penitence she might the more fully expiate that which she derives from Eve – the ignominy, I mean, of the first sin, and the odium attaching to her as the cause of human perdition.’
To the suggestion of allowing an unveiled girl into church, Tertullian responds with an example of how moralists can enjoy masturbatory fantasies in the guise of condemning them: ‘There she is patted all over by the roving eyes of total strangers, is tickled by the fingers of those who point her out, and the darling of us all, she warms to it amid assiduous hugs and kisses.’93
In a passage that has become notorious since Simone de Beauvoir’s citation of it in The Second Sex, Tertullian proclaims the link between women and the devil.
The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity live too. You are the devil’s gateway: you are the unsealer of that forbidden tree: you are the first deserter of the divine law: you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God’s image, man. On account of your desert – that is, death – even the Son of God had to die. And do you think about adorning yourself over and above your tunics of skins?94
Tertullian thunders at women in the manner of the God of the Old Testament who once threatened to make their hair fall out. But his tone and his words are altogether more menacing. Not only are women held responsible for the Fall of Man, but it is they – not the Jews, not the Roman authorities – who are blamed for the suffering and death of Jesus, man’s Redeemer. It is through their flesh that the devil comes into the world. Indeed, apparently oblivious to Jesus’ own attitudes to women, Clement of Alexandria asserted that Jesus’ mission had been specifically ‘to undo the works of women’, by which he meant sexual desire, birth and death. His words echoed those of Ecclesiastes (3:19): ‘And marriage followed the woman, and reproduction followed marriage, and death followed reproduction.’
With Christianity there was a new concept in the world – the concept of salvation. Increasingly, as their faith struggled to define itself, Christians believed that salvation could only be achieved by rejecting sex. This feeling intensified to unheard of levels during the third century. It was accompanied by a radical misogyny of a ferocity never before seen.
The background to these developments was a crisis that struck about 200 years after the death of Jesus, when Western civilization was almost extinguished. Its impact on the way people thought and felt about themselves and the world was even more unsettling than the impact the Peloponnesian War had on the Athenians of the fifth century (see Chapter 1). A series of wars of succession weakened Rome internally: twenty emperors took power between AD 235 and 28495 and uncontrolled inflation threatened the empire with economic collapse. Barbarian hordes burst across the borders and thrust deep inside the empire’s hitherto tranquil provinces. For the first time in 700 years, Rome had to be ringed with massive walls.96 A Roman emperor bowed the knee to a Persian king.97 Two major epidemics of what is now thought to have been the first outbreaks of smallpox and measles struck the major cities and their rural hinterlands, carrying off between a quarter and a third of the people and deepening an already profound population crisis.98 Rarely had the world seemed more mutable and transient. And it was during these decades of disaster and despair that Christianity enjoyed the period of its most rapid growth; by the end of it there were over 6,000,000 members of the faith, making it a force to be reckoned with.”99
Since St Paul, there always had been a powerful feeling of ambivalence about sexuality within Christianity. But the early Christians experienced the joy of believing that the return of Jesus was imminent, when all such problems would be resolved. The mood changed as time passed. Origen (AD 185–254), the first real philosopher of the early Church, decided not to wait for the Kingdom of Heaven and resolved the conflict between body and soul by having himself castrated.100 During the third and fourth centuries, the desire to avoid the temptations of the flesh became radicalized into an outright rejection of the body. Edward Gibbon observed in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that Christians felt a ‘contempt for their present existen
ce’, which they believed was a merely passing phase that had to be endured. Some declared ‘a boycott of the womb’. A young wife turned Christian rejects her husband when he comes to her bed with these words: ‘There is no place for thee beside me because my Lord Jesus with whom I am united is better than thee.’101 Another young woman signals her rebellion against marriage and reproduction by informing her parents she is refusing to wash. St Jerome (AD 342–420) would later sing the praises of Paula ‘squalid with dirt’ as the ideal of Christian womanhood.102 According to Brown: ‘To break the spell of the bed was to break the spell of the world’.103 The effect of this and similar sentiments was to make early Christianity – with its hostility to sex, disparagement of the married state and obsession with virginity – one of the most profoundly anti-family movements ever to come into existence.
In the eastern half of the empire this anti-family sentiment expressed itself most radically in the rise of militant asceticism. It is not surprising that the eastern Mediterranean, which was the original cradle of misogyny, also gave birth to its most profound and disturbing manifestation. John the Baptist had set a Biblical precedent by living in the desert, surviving on locusts and wild honey. Jesus himself had spent forty days and forty nights in the wilderness. During the third and fourth centuries, thousands of monks known collectively as ‘the desert fathers’ took refuge from the world in the deserts of Syria and Egypt, living in caves or primitive huts, even on top of pillars, sometimes alone, sometimes in small communities. Running from society was a lot easier than running from the body – it has a habit of coming along with you with its bundle of desires and needs, especially those related to women.
A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice Page 9