‘Torture your senses, for without torture there is no martyrdom,’ advised an old monk to a neophyte.104 The spell of the bed was transfigured into a nightmare of self-loathing, as misogynistic tendencies intensified to psychopathic levels, creating scenes like those from a grade-B horror movie. One ascetic monk, driven crazy with lust, dug up the rotting corpse of a woman, dipped his cloak in her putrefying flesh, smelled it and then buried his face in it. He hoped – undoubtedly with some justification – that this would turn him off women for life.105
In the West, meanwhile, Christianity was undergoing other profound transformations that would affect the history of misogyny. As a religion and a cultural force, Christianity had become so powerful that the authorities were compelled to recognize it. In AD 313 the emperor Constantine (306–337) issued the Edict of Milan, proclaiming religious tolerance. In the form of Catholicism, the universal Church, dominated by the bishop of Rome, Christianity began to assume the mantle of the established religion, run by a clerical class determined more than ever to restrict the role of women. A few years earlier, the Church Council of Elvira had passed a series of rulings that imposed strict controls on women both sexually and socially. Clerics could remain married but were forbidden to have sex with their wives. Christians were forbidden to have sex with Jews. Of the eighty-one rulings enacted, thirty-four were codes applying greater restrictions on marriage and women’s behaviour, especially in relation to their role in the Church. It is as if the Council clerics forbade themselves sex and then took out their anger on women.106
Seven years after the Edict of Milan, Constantine, as the first Christian emperor, revealed the stern hand of the new, increasingly absolutist morality. He passed a law that meted out the death sentence to any virgin and her suitor for the crime of eloping together. The penalty for any female slave held to have collaborated in the enterprise (and they were always suspected of such collaboration) was death by having molten lead poured down her throat. The young woman’s consent to the elopement was ruled irrelevant ‘by reason of the invalidity associated with the flightiness and inconsequentiality of the female sex’.107 We find here echoes of the old misogyny of Solon and Cato, but enforced with a horrifying brutality.
The increasing intolerance manifested itself in other ways. During the reign of the pious Catholic emperor Theodosius 1 (AD 379–395), Christian mobs ran amok, knocking the heads off the statues of Vestal Virgins in the Roman Forum (where the results of their vandalism can be seen to this day), attacking pagan temples, and burning down a synagogue.108 The revolution against the body brought the Olympic games to an end in AD 393, because the athletes competed naked. As a subject for art, the body disappears from view in the West for about 1,000 years. Another hint of what lay in the future as the Church strengthened its grip on sexual behaviour came in AD 390 when raids were conducted on homosexual brothels (which had thrived in Rome for centuries). Prostitutes found there were publicly burned alive. They had been condemned for playing the woman’s role in sexual acts, a crime against the new orthodoxy which ruled that the differences between the sexes were irrevocably ordained by God and thus everlasting. Earlier Christianity had tolerated a more fluid notion of male and female. But fluidity, or flexibility, in thought and behaviour was coming to an end. Catholic orthodoxy began defining all the fixed spheres – social, moral, religious, intellectual and sexual – in which men and women were destined to be set forever as fixed as the spheres of the starry heavens above.
However, if Christianity’s profound dualities between soul and body, man and God, man and woman, the world of the spirit and the world of the senses were to be given a philosophical dimension, there was intellectual work still to be completed.
Early Christianity was as innocent of philosophy as modern American Protestantism. Its evangelism bypassed rational thought in favour of faith-based revelation. Tertullian dismissed with contempt any suggestion that ‘the Greeks’ (as he called philosophers) could be of any use to Christians. The one important exception was the fourth gospel of St John, with its pronounced strain of Platonic thought: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’ (1:1). The Word is identified with Plato’s Perfect Form, existing in a state of timeless perfection beyond the realm of the senses, the Absolute Reality that the Christians equated with the one true God: ‘And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father) full of grace and truth’ (1:14).
In this way, John declares that the perfection of the everlasting divine presence entered the stage of history in the person of Jesus. Plato’s Perfect Form had become human, the ideal merged with the real, declaring an end to dualism. So it is one of the profound ironies of Christianity that when it began to systematically absorb Platonism (to become Catholicism), it was as a philosophical justification for the set of dualities on which Christian thinking about the world rested.
There are two reasons why Catholicism took so readily to Platonism. Plato’s appeal was made on both intellectual and social grounds. His Theory of Forms fitted in very well with a religion that stressed the importance of the next world and expressed contempt for this one. His theory of society, as recounted in The Republic, appealed directly to a Church developing an increasingly elaborate hierarchical structure, with a ruling cast of clerics who, like Plato’s guardians, have comprehended the Absolute Truth and are there to interpret it for the faithful and protect it from heretics. According to Bertrand Russell, Origen was the first to begin the synthesis of Platonic thought and the Jewish scriptures. But it was left to St Augustine (AD 354–430), the greatest thinker since Plato, to establish the philosophical edifice that intellectually propped up the Christian view of the world, including its misogynistic vision.
Born of humble parents in what is now eastern Algeria, Aurelius Augustinius was of a family that typified the pattern already seen with the rise of Christianity: his mother, Monica, was a Christian and his father, Patrick, a pagan who converted before he died. As intellectually and emotionally complex as he was sexually driven, Augustine began living with a concubine from Carthage at age 17. Monica was deeply upset, and devoutly wished her son would become a Catholic and devote himself to higher things – rather the way, later on, Irish mothers would pray ardently for their sons to become priests. First a student, and then a teacher, of grammar and literature, Augustine moved to Carthage, then to Rome and Milan. He dallied with Manichaeism for years, finally rejecting it because of the incoherence of its cosmology.109 It was in Milan in AD 386 under the influence of St Ambrose’s sermons, that Augustine converted to Catholicism. But before he found the Lord, he had found Plato.
Augustine is one of the watershed personalities of history. He stands at the great division between the world of Classical Antiquity (which had endured for about 1,000 years) and that of Christian civilization. He is the first person from Antiquity who revealed to us the turmoil of his interior world as recorded in his remarkable work Confessions. It is like tuning into a television talk show where the guest is revealing his deepest shame, his greatest love, his worst sin, and his highest goal, one broadcast 1,700 years ago, but still with the immediacy of an Oprah Winfrey interview. At the centre of the turmoil of Augustine’s search for God is the struggle between the desire of the flesh and striving of the will, the profound dualism that Augustine will incorporate into the very heart of Catholicism using Plato’s philosophical apparatus. His cry of anguish echoes that of St Paul, but with a power and complexity the Apostle could not match:
I came to Carthage and all around me hissed a cauldron of illicit loves. I therefore polluted the spring water of friendship with the filth of concupiscence. I muddied the clear stream by the hell of lust, and yet, though foul and immoral in my excessive vanity, I used to carry on in the manner of an elegant man about town.110
His bodily desires have condemned him to be a prisoner: ‘fettered by the flesh’s morbid impulse and lethal sweetness, I dr
agged my chain, but was afraid to be free of it.’ He was ‘stuck fast in the glue of pleasure’. Such is his disgust at the physicality of the human condition that he compares us to pigs: ‘We roll in the mud of flesh and blood,’ he proclaims.
In a later work, The City of God, he returns to this theme compulsively. Referring to the Fall of Man, he writes:
From this moment, then, the flesh began to lust against the spirit. With this rebellion we are born, just as we are doomed to die and because of the first sin, to bear, in our members and vitiated nature, either the battle with or defeat by the flesh.’111
The Hell of lust has been with us ever since. For Augustine, the struggle could only be resolved on a higher plane. He read the works of the Platonists which had been translated into Latin and found that in all the Platonic books God and his Word keep slipping in. The Idea, the Pure Form, eternal and unchanging, he could equate with God. The Platonic vision of a higher intellectual reality corresponded to a certain extent to Augustine’s desperate endeavours to break the ‘fetters’ of bodily desire. But the intellectual ‘heaven’ of Plato was too abstract and remote; most crucially, it did not promise salvation and everlasting life: that is why today there are so many millions of Christians and so few Platonists. And it was to Christianity that Augustine was converted in AD 386.
Augustine’s relevance to misogyny can be summed up in the sentence from Book Two of his Confessions:
I had no motive for my wickedness except wickedness itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I loved the self-destruction, I loved my fall, not the object for which I had fallen but the fall itself. My depraved soul leaped down from your firmament to ruin. I was seeking not to gain anything by shameful means, but shame for its own sake.
The idea of ‘fall’ had been inherited from the Jewish myth of the expulsion of man from the garden of Eden. To this Fall of Man, Augustine adds another, even more terrible dimension: the Platonic fall. This is a fall from the Pure Form, to Christians, the timeless perfection of union with God, into the mutable world full of life, lust, suffering and death. It comes about through conception. From that moment we are in a state of sin – Original Sin. As Augustine says, quoting the Psalms, we are ‘conceived in iniquity and in sin’ in our mother’s womb. The instrument of this fall from grace is woman: both in the sense that it was Eve’s disobedience that led to our expulsion from paradise, and in the Platonic sense – she represents the wilfulness of the flesh to reproduce itself. We are thus carried away from God into temporal life in which we (thanks to our bodies) are in a state of rebellion against him. We will this fall upon ourselves, and our rebelliousness expresses itself most directly through sexual desire. Because of Original Sin ‘man, that might have been spiritual in body, became carnal in mind’.112
Augustine, like other Christians, believed that the only way to break this cycle of rebellion was to subdue the body. It was his own inability to do so that had delayed for so long his conversion:
Vain trifles and the triviality of the empty-headed, my old loves, held me back. They tugged at the garment of my flesh and whispered: ‘Are you getting rid of us?’ And ‘from this moment we shall never be with you again, not for ever and ever.’ And ‘from this moment this and that are forbidden to you for ever and ever.’113
In spite of the misogynistic interpretation of his doctrine, which became enshrined in the Doctrine of Original Sin, St Augustine’s attitudes to women were more complex. He did not see women as inherently evil. In The City of God he stresses that ‘the sex of woman is not a vice but nature.’ But the terrible anguish of his struggle with desire, which he records with such power, reveals clearly that it is man’s battle with himself that is at the root of misogyny. However, for St Augustine, ultimately it is our will that is the source of evil. Ego, not libido, is the problem that made us defy God in the first place. As a punishment, God gave us sexual desire, something over which our will has no control. Just as we defied God, so our desires defy us. Sex became the battleground, both as a pleasure and a punishment, in a way unheard of before in Western culture. Woman was bound to suffer because of our nasty habit of blaming that which we desire for making us desire it.
In a frightening glimpse of what lay ahead for women in the coming centuries of Christian domination, consider the terrible fate of the last pagan woman philosopher: Hypatia of Alexandria. There are but a few women philosophers from ancient times who are known by name.114 Hypatia is the most renowned, thanks to Christian fanaticism and intolerance.
She was born in Alexandria towards the end of the fourth century, the daughter of the mathematician Theon, who commentators say she excelled in ability and intelligence to ‘far surpass all the philosophers of her own time’.115 She wrote commentaries on the geometry of Apollonius and Diophantus, played music, taught Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy at Athens and Alexandria, where she opened an academy, and published a work on astronomy. Hypatia was something of an ascetic, and though described as ‘beautiful and shapely’ remained chaste and virginal. From one source we learn that when one of her students fell so madly in love with her that he exposed himself to her, in order to cure him of his infatuation she handed him her undergarments stained with menstrual blood.116 It is a novel way of discouraging a suitor and proves that it was not only Christians who were affected by the revolt against the body that characterizes this epoch. But Hypatia’s virtues (however Christian-like) did not mollify the local Christians’ hostility towards her.
Alexandria, one of the greatest cities of Antiquity and famous as a seat of learning, nevertheless also had a reputation for sectarian violence often accompanied by the lynching of political and ideological opponents. (One of the earliest instances of rioting against Jews in the ancient world took place there in AD 38.) In AD 412, Cyril, a Christian fanatic, became bishop of Alexandria. Cyril had punished himself for several years as a desert monk, but as was often the case, the tribulations of the flesh served merely to deepen his fanaticism and fire his intolerance: imagine him as a kind of fundamentalist mullah. Certainly, his desert years had done nothing to dampen the fires of ambition. As bishop, he challenged the rule of the Imperial Prefect Orestes, who ruled Egypt on behalf of Rome. In these, the twilight years of Antiquity, the growing power of the Church was absorbing that of the civil authority, a precursor of the theocracy of the Middle Ages. Cyril was a heretic hunter, and Jew hater. Around Easter AD 415, he roused a Christian mob to attack the local Jews, sacking their homes, and seizing their synagogues to purify them and turn them into churches. He drove this ancient community from the city. When Orestes objected, a Christian mob assaulted him.
Christians began muttering that Hypatia had bewitched the Imperial Prefect and was responsible for the breakdown in understanding between him and the bishop. In a sinister premonition of what was to come, a Christian writer accused her of being ‘devoted at all times to magic, astrolabes and instruments of music, and she beguiled many people through her Satanic wiles.’117 For a woman to be learned and accomplished was not only a novelty but a sign that she was a witch, in league with the Devil. Cyril was happy to use Hypatia as a scapegoat for his troubles with the civil powers. After a fiery sermon, one of Cyril’s followers, Peter (‘a perfect believer in all respects in Jesus Christ,’ according to John, Bishop of Nikiu) led an excited mob to attack her academy.
The mob ‘found her seated on a lofty chair; and having made her descend they dragged her along till they brought her to the great church, named Caesarion.’118 There, she was stripped naked. Holding her down, the Christians used oyster shells to skin her alive.119 Then, ‘her quivering limbs were delivered to the flames,’ in the words of an outraged Gibbon.120
Bribes blocked all attempts to prosecute the murderers of Hypatia. Cyril’s career in the Catholic Church blossomed. He was canonized a saint. Apparently, miracles, not murders, are what count on a saint’s curriculum vitae.
From being martyrs, Christians had quickly become inquisitors. In the coming centuries, the p
erfume of church incense would all too often mingle with the smell of a woman’s burning flesh.
FROM QUEEN OF HEAVEN
TO DEVIL WOMAN
The thousand years or so separating the end of the Classical world and the rise of the modern witnessed the development of two seemingly contradictory processes: the beatification of woman and her demonization. The Middle Ages would begin by elevating women towards heaven and end by consigning many thousands of them to hell. In the latter case, however, the process was more than mystical or metaphorical. The flames were all too real. It marked an extraordinary period when the human imagination soared with the great spires of the Gothic cathedrals of France that seem to scrape the very floors of heaven. It was a period too when the human spirit was convulsed by outbreaks of mass hysteria, pogroms, and witch hunts that plunged it into some of the most hellish regions it has ever visited.
In AD 431 the highest council of the Catholic Church declared that Mary, a Jewish peasant girl from Palestine, was the Mother of God. The girl, about whom, historically speaking, almost nothing was known apart from her name, was not just the mother of a god – and in the Classical world gods were as plentiful as celebrities are in modern times – she was the mother of the only God, the creator of the entire universe. The other gods had been banished or transformed by St Augustine into demons, leaving the Christian God to loom over the cosmos in solitary majesty. Mary was his mother – or Theotokos (the god-bearer). Because of this unique claim, Mary would play not only an unprecedented role in the history of religion, but a vital and determining part in the history of misogyny.
A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice Page 10