Hans Kung, a Catholic theologian of high repute despite being frequently questioned by the Roman Curia, wrote in the 20th century that celibacy in the Catholic church had "led directly to the devaluation of sexuality and indirectly to a devaluation of women." p 160hk - He also taught that the emancipation of women in the Catholic Church was prevented by it's hierarchical structure, hostility to sexuality - and by its devaluation of female education.
This was very different from what I read in the massive white paper-backed theological tones of the 13th Century St. Thomas Aquinas that dominated the theology studies of trainee Catholic priests from the 13th Century. He believed that men were naturally superior to women.
St Thomas Aquinas imagined a supernatural world above the bounds of reason, a world of faith unknown to pagans, and defended the right of the Popes to rule this supernatural world. A positive side of his teaching was that he believed that there were rights and duties based on natural law - and a place for human rights based on reason alone. The negative side of this was that he said women were inferior not just in the supernatural world but also in the natural. When I studied him, he was greatly praised by my seminary teachers for using Aristotle - as if the church had hereby taken on enlightened Greek thinking,
There was much that Aquinas taught about women that was skipped over when I studied him in the Seminary. He stated: "because of the higher water content in women, they are more easily influenced by sexual pleasure" (Summa Theologica lll q42 a 4 and 5). He also stated: "nothing drags the mind of a man down from its elevation so much as the caresses of a woman and the bodily contacts without which a man cannot possess his wife" S Th ll/ll q151 a3 and 2. He explained: because of "the defect in her reasoning ability" which is "also evident in children and mentally ill persons" a woman is not allowed to serve as a witness in testamentary matters" Sum Th ll/ll q70 a3
He also maintained (as had Aristotle) "the father should be loved more than the mother because he is the active principle of generation". ibid. ll/ll q26 a10 He took this further: "the husband has the nobler part in the marital act therefore "it is natural that he needs to blush less." (Sth, suppl. Q64 a 5 ad2. For him "women is intended for procreation... not for perfection of mind. p195
He finally concluded that women were barred from the priesthood because of their inferiority. He stated: "because women are in a state of subordination", they cannot receive holy orders" S Th Suppl. Q39 a1 This was another quotation that was not emphasised when I was a student for the priesthood. A recent Vatican declaration that it was not able to ordain women because of the long tradition of ordaining only men passed over in silence the arguments that were originally used to justify the exclusion of. women.
I was then over optimistic for I expected the whole church to change permanently because of the Second Vatican Council. It now seems however that I was in an institution carefully crafted to preserve a patriarchic view of life despite all changes in the outside world. The Council was later sidelined by the Roman Curia who re-established papal authority - much as happened in the 15th Century when the Curia re-claimed Papal supremacy after the Council of Constance placed the Council above the Papacy. ref1414-18.
When I looked back on the early days of the Church, I found it extraordinary that the men who helped form it in the first centuries, the men who were honoured as the "Fathers of the Church", the men Aquinas quoted as authorities, could write so bitingly and critically of women within 200 years of Jesus' death without being labelled as heretics. Jesus was accompanied by women, worked closely with them and respected them - while the Fathers taught that pious men should avoid the company of women. Surely that should have been seen as heresy? Sadly it was not. The influential Father of the Church, Tertullian (who didn't become a saint since he finally changed his tune), wrote to women: " 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 tunic of skin?" (On Female Dress.1 I)
Even the New Testament suffered at the hands of these chauvinists. The "Fathers" quoted in justification the epistles of St Paul - but they mostly quoted letters now thought by scholars to date from when Paul had been dead for many years. It now seems that "Paul's" letter to Timothy, blaming women for the Fall, was written 50 years after Paul's death, from around the time that the Church of Rome was starting to exclude women. Likewise the Letter to the Ephesians, that told women to keep themselves veiled and quiet in church. is thought to date from some 60 years after Paul's death. A letter that Paul did write instead talked of men and women being equally one in Christ "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female: for you are all one in Christ Jesus". Galatians 3:28.
Tertullian mostly base his diatribes on his interpretation of an Adam and Eve story. He preached that women almost immediately after being created had deserted their sacred role of helping men. Eve had formed an alliance with the Serpent against men. Tertullian took little notice of the other creation account in Genesis where the Deity creates mankind "in his own image", both "male and female" - and in which Eve had an almost divine role. He also rejected the other creation myths then current in which Eve was seen as enlightening Adam and giving him a soul. If you have not heard of these other woman friendly accounts, this is no surprise. In the Fourth Century, shortly after the Catholic Church became officially recognised, they were ordered burnt and expunged from records. (More about this later.)
Tertullian was part of a Rome centred school of Christians that organised themselves on authoritarian imperial Roman administrative lines. Clement, one of the first to accept the title of Bishop of Rome only some 70 years after Jesus' death, in one of the first Papel edicts claimed that God had delegated divine authority to him - and also to all his appointed officers, his bishops, priests and deacons, and he charitably added that anyone who disobeyed any of these clergy would "receive the death sentence." (Gos 34) Bishop Ignatius of Antioch a generation later would warned the laity to obey any bishop "as if he were God."
The anti-woman views of these Fathers influenced even the Protestant Reformation. In the 16th Century a Protestant Reformer, John Knox, quoted from Aristotle, Augustine and Tertullian as well as the Bible, claiming that for women to rule men was not only utterly unnatural but an insult to God. He was so indignant that a woman, Queen Mary, was in power in England that he wrote a long treatise entitled "The First Blast of the Trumpet against The Monstrous Regiment of Women."(Geneva, 1558)
But in recent years we have rediscovered the writings of many other early Christians who were vastly less authoritarian. They taught that we should not look to bishops but within ourselves to find wisdom, trusting in the inner voice of the Holy Spirit. For this "heresy" they were fiercely attacked by the Fathers of the Catholics. These other Christians became known as the Gnostic Christians - "gnosis" being the Greek for inner knowledge or wisdom.
A modern leading Catholic theologian, Hangs Kung, saw gnosticism as: 140+ "characterised by striving for Knowledge, seen as widespread and not limited to Christians" They were indeed also looking for wisdom in non-Christian writings. They did not demonise the many pagans among whom they lived - but would invite pagans to join them in prayer and ritual, looking for wisdom not just in Christ's teaching but also from their people's inherited wisdom. Tertullian attacked these Christians bitterly for being "without authority" and "without discipline" for "they listen equally, they pray equally - even pagans, if any happen to come... they share the kiss of peace with all that come." 42 g gos
The status women had among them so outraged the patriarchal faction of Christianity that the Fathers and Bishops of Rome issued edicts against women's rights that shaped Europe for the next two millennia. Tertullian declared of Gnostic Christian women: "These heretical women - how audacious they are! They have no modesty; they are bold enough to teach, to engage in argument, to enact exorcisms, to undertake cures, and, it may be, even to baptise!" He added: "it is not permitted .for a woman ... to offer [the Eucharist] nor to claim a share in any masculine function - not to mention any priestly office." (631 m.)
They did not impose uniformity on their groups as for them wisdom was multifaceted like a jewel reflecting infinity. (Thus they are attacked in The Catholic Encylopedia as having a "wild confusion of gnostic systems".) Some were very ascetic, teaching that the body was a prison, while others taught that the body was a sacred temple. They often wrote about the primal fertile chaos from which life emerged, seeing this as female and dark. Later churchmen thought of this as evil even thou' the gnostics had said it sparkled with divine life. They saw God in all creatures and this became attacked by Catholics as pagan "pantheism" (ref C.Encyl). They had no laity for they believed all members were part of a sacred priesthood. Thus Tertullian protested; "Even on the laity they impose the functions of priesthood." They might cast lots to see who would act be the priest or priestess for the day. They were non-hierarchical. They were as convinced that they were following Jesus as were apparently the anti-women Fathers.
Until recently we only knew of the Gnostic Christians through the caustic and distorting words of their enemies, the Catholic Fathers, because Emperor Constantine I, in making the Christian church a recognised state religion, only chose to endorse the anti-female authoritarian section of Christianity. Perhaps their views appealed because of his own views about authority and about women? A year after summoning and presiding over the openning session of the Nicene Church Council in 325, the Emperor Constantine had his wife Fausta boiled alive - and killed his eldest son Crispus.
The influence of Constantine on shaping the Christian Church has long been underestimated. Not only did he help to forge the Catholic faction into a strong empire wide organisation by summoning its Councils, funding it, and endorsing its acts, he had commissioned in 322 the first official text of the New Testament from Eusebuis, an anti-Gnostic Catholic writer whom in his History of Christianity praised Constantine as "the mightiest victor, adorned with every virtue of piety [who], together with his son Crispus, a most God-Beloved prince ... formed one united Roman Empire as of old." Eusebius' reaction to the murder of Crispus by Constantine is not recorded.
Around the time of these murders there were protests in Rome because Constantine had refused to take part in a pagan procession. He had then left Rome never to return, living instead in Constantinoble. In 331 C.E. Constantine sacked many pagan temples to enrich his treasury. He gave the Catholic bishops juridical status and wrote that disobedience to them was caused by the devil. The Imperial authorities ordered that the sacred gospels of gnostic Christians were to be burnt and made the meetings of gnostic Christians illegal. Possession of gnostic texts came a criminal offence.
Our ignorance about these gnostic Christians continued for over one and a half thousand years. But then, in 1945, a peasant farmer called Muhammad 'Alí al-Sammán unearthed with his brothers a very large earthenware jar buried in the desert near the town of Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt. The brothers were at first scared to open it, fearing that a spirit, a jinn, might be hidden within. Then the idea came to them that it might contain gold. They gathered their courage and broke it open.
Much to their disappointment they found it was full of ancient documents written on papyrus with thirteen of them books bound in leather. The farmer returned to his home in al-Qasr, dumping these manuscripts on the straw piled next to the oven. Muhammad's mother, 'Umm-Ahmad, later confessed she burned some in the oven along with the straw she used to kindle the fire. Fortunately 54 books were retrieved. These are now known as the Nag Hammadi texts ( an English transliteration of the town's name).
These documents, hidden to save them from destruction, have revolutionised our ideas about the early Christians. Several were written around the same time as the official New Testament's gospels - and by Christians that had as close a knowledge of the life of Christ as had the evangelists. One, the "Gospel according to Thomas", may well be older than any of the official Synoptic Gospels of the New Testament. It's oldest parts date back to around the year 60AD while the oldest parts of the others go pack to about 65AD. (Ref. Prof. H.Koester, Harvard). Some of the other recovered books spoke of the female aspect of the Deity. Since this aspect is not mentioned in the "official" New Testament, it suggests that a criteria for rejection from the official list of books of the New Testament was a reference to the deity as female. This official list of books was approved of at the Council of Niceae - called by Emperor Constantine in the 4th Century. It was this council that finally rejected the gnostic sacred books and gospels. Yet these excluded books were not from a non Christian or non Jewish tradition - several of them were from the heart of the mystical tradition of both religions.
One of these suppressed accounts was surprisingly blunt and feminist in its comments on the version of the Adam and Eve story that we have today. A book entitled "On the Origin of the World" said that the demi-god who inspired this Adam and Eve story was attempting to justify the subjection of women. It imagined the words said by the demi-God: "And let us instruct him in his sleep to the effect that she came from his rib, in order that his wife may obey, and he may be lord over her." But this failed to deceive a powerful Eve. "Then Eve, being a force, laughed at their decision."
A surprising insight into relations between the Apostle Peter and women is contained in two of these documents. The Gospel according to Mary, perhaps linked to Mary Magdelen, reported: "(Peter) questioned them about the Saviour. "Did he really speak privately with a woman (and) not openly with us? Are we to turn about and all listen to her? Did he prefer her to us?' Then Mary wept and said to Peter, "My brother Peter, what do you think? Do you think I made this up in my heart or that I am lying about the Saviour? "Levi (Mathew) answered and said to Peter, "you have always been hot tempered. Now I see you contending against the women like the adversaries. But if the Saviour made her worthy, who are you indeed to reject her? Surely the Saviour knows her very well. That is why he loved her more than us.' N 59 634 After this Mary was recognised as a divinely appointed teacher. In another document, Pistis Sophia, Mary admits to Jesus that she scarcely dared talk freely to him in front of Peter for "Peter makes me hesitate. I am afraid of him because he hates the female race." Gos65 The Gnostic Gospel according to Thomas was however not so woman-friendly. It had Christ say that women have to become men in order to become perfect! It could have been a reference to the need we all have to embrace both sides of our nature, anima and animus, but as I said, the gnostics did not enforce a uniform line.
We also find in these books the creation myths that were rejected by the Fathers and destroyed, perhaps because they did not blame women for the Fall. The book entitled "On the Origin of the World" depicted Eve as the daughter and messenger of the Goddess Sophia. Eve was given the mystical name of Zoe, meaning life. Sophia sent her daughter Zoe or Eve, as an instructor to raise up Adam and give him a soul so that his children might also become vessels of light. When Eve saw Adam in his cast down condition she pitied him, and exclaimed: "Adam, live! Rise up upon the earth!"
The Gnostic Christians agreed with the Fathers and with Plato that there was ultimately one ineffable deity. They went on to say with Plato that from this supreme Deity emanated the divine Father and the Mother called Sophia. She was widely honoured among the mystically inclined gnostic Christians and Jews, and sung of in the Old Testament's Song of Songs. It had been no easy matter for the advocates of a patriarchy to purge Judaism of a Goddess. The Bible recorded earlier attempts. When the prophet Jeremiah led the charge, he met with resistance.
"A great crowd.. answered Jeremiah as follows; "We have no intention of listening to the word you have just spoken to us in Yahweh's name, but intend to go on doing all we have vowed to do; offering incense to the Queen of Heaven and pouring libations in her honour, as we used to do, we and our ancestors, our kings and our chief men, in the towns of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem, we had food a plenty then, we lived well, we suffered no disasters. But since we gave up offering incense to the Queen of Heaven and pouring libations in her honour, we have been destitute and have perished either by sword or by famine. Besides ... [the women said] do you think we make cakes for her with her features on them, and pour libations to her, without our husbands' knowledge?' Jeremiah 44/16
But 100 years after Jesus' birth, the Jewish philosopher Philo provided an intellectual escape route for those among the Jews and Christians who were uncomfortable honouring a female deity. He queried whether Sophia was really female: "Is it because while Wisdom's name is feminine, her nature is manly? ... for pre-eminence always pertains to the masculine and the feminine always comes short of and is lesser than it. Let us then pay no heed to the gender of the words and say that the daughter of God, even Wisdom, is not only masculine but father.". p 614 b 3 This was a major change - and it helped in the development of a Christianity that was without a Goddess - and thus entirely unlike many earlier religions. Sophia, the Mother, the Spirit of Love and of Wisdom, was to become faded, near invisible, a sexless ghost, our Holy Ghost.
St. Augustine was a convert from a pagan religion called Manichaeanism. They taught that the human soul was imprisoned in a world of tainted flesh - and he effectively carried the same idea with him into Christianity, adapting it by saying that human nature was not intrinsically tainted (otherwise he could not explain how Jesus could be human and untainted) but that had become tainted through Adam and Eve's sins, a tainting from which Jesus had been exempted. It was Augustine, not Jesus, that thus originated the doctrine of Original Sin that would shape the guilt complexes of the Christian world for near two millennia. (footnote. Hans Kung maintained that in rejecting the Gnostic Christians, Christianity remained non-syncratic. But here we have a clear example of a pagan belief being successfully introduced into Christianity.)
Western scholars used to only know of Manichaeanism through the accounts of its enemies but in the twentieth century Manichaean scriptures were discovered in Asia and a living Manichaean based religion, Mandaean, was found surviving in Iraq. This religion turned out not to be as miserable as once portrayed by Augustine and others but not very flattering to men.
Their creation myth taught that from the ultimate Deity had emanated lesser male and female deities who created this world. When they made Adam "he was like a man, but moved about on all fours, had a face like an ape, and made noises like a sheep". They were puzzled so went to ask the supreme Deity that lived in the House of Life why they had failed. The House of Life sent a Son to ask a Soul to go to the man. When the Soul saw Adam she was horrified, and said, 'What! must I dwell in this flesh and blood, this house of uncleanness?' And she refused at first - but then finally agreed "on one condition only, and that is that everything that is in the world of light shall be in this world-flowers, trees, light, ajar (pure air), running water (yardna), baptisms." And so it was. Later the lesser female deity that had created Adam mated with him and thus the human race was started.
The Sleeping Beauty myth encapsulated some of the Gnostic teaching. The soul is the sleeping beauty who is awoken and transformed by the kiss of the Divine Lover. They taught that a divine spark exists in nature and is in every one of us and only needs awakening.
But St. Augustine did not put his faith in any such spark but in a City of God that he claimed existed outside nature. He developed this theory after being shocked by the sacking in 410AD of the Eternal City, Rome, by Alaric, the King of the West Goths. (p306kung), In his last great work, "The City of God" Augustine wrote of history as a battle fought between the earthly state seen as the Devil's kingdom of Babylon, -and the City of God seen as the supernatural world of the Predestined Elite.
Catholic Christians at that time saw little point in looking after nature, whether it was tainted or not, for many thought the world was about to end. Tertullian even suggested that procreation be left to Pagans as, with such little time to go, Christians had no need to engage in such a dangerous activity! They saw history as linear, beginning with an act of Creation, bearing fruit with Christ, and ending with the Apocalypse. (Ref. p 111) This was a dramatic change from the normal pagan spiral or circular view of history that had developed from the experience of a continuous cycle of life and death and of the seasons.
But it should be remembered that much of what we know as Christianity developed out of the Pagan belief systems of that time. Christianity was not a complete system that suddenly appeared. It was formed by developing and adding Christ centred elements to pre-existing Pagan and Judaic philosophical and religious systems. Those who self-identified as Christian retained many pagan beliefs - and what they retained helped shape Christianity.
Augustine's book was enormously influential. Charlamagne was said to read some of it every day while extending "the City of God" by armed force and by forcing everyone he conquered to become Christian - in one case by having a bishop bless a river while his soldiers forced the local inhabitants though it at sword point downstream. His partner in this work of conquest was the Roman Pope who anointed him as King of the Holy Roman Empire. This again was a very different concept of kingship from that of earlier pagan kingdoms where the King was seen as coming from the land and being responsible to the land.
Augustine's work undermined the prestige of women and of mothers by associating them with the Fall and with original sin. Before his time women still held some sacred roles in churches and in temples - but his work helped to destroy this. He was still more vehement against the priests and priestesses of the Goddess Cybele in Rome - and particularly against those in her priesthood that were sexually "different", the gays and the transgendered.
. Cybelle was served by priestesses known as Gallae - including some who were gender-role reassigned in the temple by means of a sacred operation. (Note. Some historians who refused to recognise them as women used the male term "galli" for them - for example "Blossom of Bone" ref.) Augustine fumed against these priestesses saying they were "foully unmanned and corrupted" and that Cybele herself was a "demon " 121 and that she as "the Great Mother surpassed all the Gods ... not for reason of her divine power but in the enormity of her wickedness." His attacks on these priestesses and priests were instrumental in causing their torture and deaths under the first Christian emperors.
Yet many aspects of the cult of Cybele made their way into Christianity. She had her main temple in Rome on the site where now stands the Vatican. The Sacred Marriage was celebrated among her mysteries. Roman coins had on them an inscription calling her "Mater Dei", the very title soon to be given to Mary. Her priestesses wore mitres and stoles as do today's Christian Bishops and were said to "vaticanate" when they divinated. Her symbols were tablets with a fish and a chalice carved onto them - this too would become a Christian symbol. Fish were a food sacred to her. Her special day of the week was Friday - and to this day some Christians eat fish on this day not knowing that the origin of this custom is pagan.
Statues of Cybele have been found in Ukraine, the Crimea, Romania and Bulgaria . She was said by the Greeks to be honoured by the Amazons. She was represented in her temple by a black meteorite brought to Rome from her original shrine in Anatolia. Similar goddess symbols were the cube shaped black stone at Poetra and the another meteorite stone of the Ka'aba at Mecca which was also honoured as an image of the creating goddess until the rise of Islam. The priests who tended the shrine, even after the rise of Islam, were known as "the sons of the Old Woman'.
Once Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire in the 4th Century, the temple of Cybelle, the Mother Goddess of Rome, was razed and the Vatican was built upon it's ruins. Images of Mary, Christ's mother, now appeared decked in the same symbols as were previously reserved to pagan goddesses - perhaps because this was the only legal way for the people to retain an image that also could symbolise for them the Goddess and the old ways. A sculpture of the boat of Isis became the boat of Mary before a church in Rome. She was depicted with 12 stars around her head after the Book of Revelations. "And there appeared a great wonder in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars" Rv 12/1 But the Apocalypse took this from a millennia old image of Innana, a very much loved Middle Eastern Goddess who had for centuries been depicted with 12 constellations around her head.
It was not forgotten by those who suppressed women that the male body was part of nature and thus also an enemy to be subdued. The Catholic ascetics and Fathers believed that the path to perfection entailed forcing the body into line by starvation, by penance and hardship. This may have been partially inherited from the Iron Age society's warrior ethos. They believed the effort a person put into the conquering of pain showed how seriously they were taking their faith. Ascetic schools of monks and nuns set up settlements on remote islands, on headlands and in barren places around Europe. The ideas of these monks had helped shape the very institution in which I lived, the Claretian Order.
It took centuries for these puritanical ideas to prevail in Europe. The 8th Century missionary to the British, St Boniface, wrote in disgust that the British "totally despise matrimony" and had sexual relations outside marriage "after the manner of neighing horses and braying asses.": A century later the monk Alcuin wrote that England "has been absolutely submerged under a flood of fornication, adultery, incest, so that the very semblance of modesty is entirely absent." Quoted on 034 of the Gospel ac..
In Ireland the clash between the Christian ascetic world and older values is reflected in stories about Bridget, also known as Bride. She was the Goddess most celebrated in Ireland at the time when St Patrick arrived. One of these stories had St Patrick given to spending his nights in icy pools of water as a penance. When Bridget went to do the same, the pools promptly dried up. The lesson taken was that she was not to engage in the body punishing spirituality of Patrick. p103/n44 When she had trouble with Coemgen of Glendalough, who punished himself by holding his palms up for seven years, she predicted that he would soon be driven indoors by a snowstorm. She evidently thought little of such asceticism.
But there was not much room for sex in the new Christian world. In the early Middle Ages sex was officially banned on Thursdays in honour of Christ's arrest, on Fridays because of his death, on Saturdays because it was Our Lady's day, on Sundays because of the Resurrection and on Mondays in commemoration of the dead. P 36 Gospel No doubt couples stayed home on Tuesday and Wednesday nights!