Identity - Lesson 12

Dr. James Houston

Identity

th731-12

Influential Women in Late Antiquity

Lesson Transcript

Let us now look at some of the examples of extraordinary women that influenced profoundly this period, especially in the Eastern part of the old Roman Empire.

We mentioned how Origen was able to start his valuable collection of scrolls because Juliana was his patroness and when it was discreet to hide in a period of persecution, he hid in her house for two years, acting as if he was her sister. So she had a profound influence upon him in every way. On the other hand, Montanus, who lived in Phrygia, he created a community of women prophetesses, whose prophecies became his teachings. And so, on the other hand, he was waylaid and seduced to a very wacky kind of theology as a result of their influence, so it works both ways.

Again, in contrast, we find in south east Cappadocia that [Basil the Elder 00:01:27], who died in 341–45, owned vast estates and his eldest son, Gregory of Nyssa, and his oldest daughter, Macrina, who remained celibate unlike the younger siblings, created a remarkable prototype of ascetic community, like the monasteries that became later. He taught them, and modelled, withdrawal and askesis, signifying the great road which should be given to the meditation of scripture. It was one of the precepts, he said, of right conduct, for right conduct means primarily a life of prayer that begins at sunrise, heightened by the recitation of the Psalms and by reading appropriate scriptures about appropriate personages or figura as models to which a celibate could aspire and to imitate. It also sought right conduct, which was the silence that was needed to discern the right word to address in the presence of the Lord. And thirdly, one was closed physically to protect one’s body from the climactic elements, but otherwise one’s spiritual clothing was self-abasement, humility, with a strict diet of bread, water and vegetables. In other words, what he was seeking, with his oldest son and his daughter as his models, was the right conquest of all emotions by having stillness of heart: all fears, all passions, all aggravations, all freed. But even so in that culture even though she was his match—Macrina—Basil, as the father, gives 400 questions for people like his son to answer in the community and rather scornfully dismisses the number that women need to answer, which is 13.

After her husband’s death, his wife, Emmelia, decided to recreate their home on their vast estate into a much more studied, monastic community. And it’s there where his older brother and his younger brother, Gregory of Nyssa, lived together. And where a third brother Naucratius chose to become a hermit in a remote mountain cave. In the midst of such a family, Macrina was perhaps the most intelligent and certainly a profoundly godly woman, but she’s never mentioned in Basil’s voluminous writings. It’s only Gregory, his younger brother, closer perhaps to Macrina, who did write a life of Macrina, which actually is the life of his mother as well as of his sister. For the great and wealthy widow radically had changed her life about 356/357. She disposed of the whole family inheritance to all of her nine children. She abolished all status between herself and her children and even her slaves. She removed all the luxurious furniture and turned the home into a family monastery. In other words, Emmelia had become a virgin of Christ.

[00:06:29]

Now Macrina took on the role of abbess, teaching her mother as a nun might be taught by the mother superior—a reversal of roles as head of the household. Very soon a number of women joined the community, like [Vetiana 00:06:52], of noble birth, but consorting with others who were just simple, humble peasants. People like Vetiana might have come to avoid a second marriage as a widow, which was a constant threat for wealthy women. And, I think, sometimes later, spirited women often found more refuge in the convent than with the arranged marriage that might have been made for them. Later, like Aelred of Rievaulx in the 12th century, this Basilian community had a core of close, compatible friends as well as the broader loving community as all one in Christ.

Later, in the time of John Chrysostom at the end of the 5th century, there were also now urban communities, as in [Siseria 00:07:54], where, adapted to urban life, they could still live in a monastic way. It’s this that Charles de Foucauld was to recreate in the 12th century, not simply in the Sahara Desert, but in the cities of Johannesburg, where I visited the little sisters and the little brothers that were occupying a large condo, but living simply together like they might have done in the Basilian Order of this earlier period of time. What all these movements so profoundly help us to see is they consistently are indicating that the more intelligence we are gifted to cultivates as Christians, the deeper our insights and way of life should become in understanding and actualising humility. That’s the greatest thing we learn from this particular address.

[00:09:15]

Now we come to the last aspect of this theme of virgins for Christ. What about the adoration of the Virgin Mary? What is the role of Mariology? During the first four centuries, there was little or no basis for a Mary cult. The New Testament is, of course, very sparing about reference to her. Mark, as the earliest of the Gospels, has only one reference to her, in Mark 6:3. Again, Luke only mentions her once in the Acts of the Apostles, Acts 1:14, although he fully narrates the nativity story in his Gospel. And of course, the Early Church followed in the same procedure. So the evidence is historically that only popular devotion to Mary began in the latter part of the 5th century and the Council of Ephesus in 431 briefly proclaims Mary as the Theotokos, the God-bearer.

It was undoubtedly the intensification of devotion to her that came in the late 5th century through the 6th and into the 7th centuries. The earliest Marian shrine was built in Constantinople, where it was reportedly called the Veil of the Virgin, that was venerated from the middle of the 6th century. And in the West, the earliest feast of the Virgin was the Purification, that was introduced in the late 7th century, and quickly followed by the other feasts commemorating the Assumption, the Enunciation and the Nativity of Mary.

For an interesting study on the history of Mariology, I would recommend you to read Michael Carroll, The Cult of the Virgin Mary. There were many Classical cults of mother goddesses around the Mediterranean, but unique is the simultaneous conjunction of virgin and woman in the Virgin Mary. Later heresies, such as we saw with Montanists, adopted shamanistic cults that are traceable to Siberia and Central Asia, moving globally through the late Palaeolithic, but even secular scholars today have to accept that the adoration of the Virgin Mary is uniquely different.

[00:12:57]

When Cardinal Newman was moving into Rome, he narrates that there were two doctrines that were still blocking him. There was the Eucharistic doctrine of transubstantiation and there was the cult of the Virgin Mary. And significantly since post-Vatican II, they’ve quietly melted away from the contemporary Christian identity of what was once that social identity of being a Catholic. Being a Catholic was to receive both of these doctrines. It’s what Francis, the new Pope, has so remarkably [dissolved 00:13:47] that Catholics that Catholics are not to have a social identity calling themselves Catholics, but to have a personal identity calling themselves Christians.

The other thing, of course, that still troubles many of us is why then in the midst of all the idolatry of Mariology, why were there these extraordinary apparitions of the Virgin Mary so strong in the 19th and 20th century, at Lourdes, at Fatima, in Mexico and Guatemala, in many different places? Why have they become such strong shrines? Well, they’re quietly melting away and the healing cures that we used to hear about are melting away too. So that’s a mystery that I can’t explore with you, but it’s certainly been an interesting phenomenon that has often stumbled Christians as Protestants from having an association with their Christian brothers and sisters in the Catholic faith.

[00:15:16]

As I close, we can ask then what does it mean to be a woman in Christ today with the fluidity of gender change? I had the privilege of introducing Malcolm Muggeridge to give a first public announcement that he had become a Christian in our chapel at Oxford at Hertford College and such was the crowd of those who saw him as a Judas to the cause of secularism that we had to ban anyone who was not a member of the college from being in the chapel. So we had an after meeting in the dining hall and there I warned him and now all the ridicule and scorn that you’ve given to the Christian faith is all going to be thrown back in your face, Malcolm, tonight. So he was ready. And when we got in, he was like a gnome-like figure, wiggling his legs off the end of the platform of the high table and was ready as a gnome to face the crowd. A tall, young man with a black cloak and long hair stood up with a sneer with the first question: Mr Muggeridge, why was Jesus a man and not a woman? Muggeridge looked at him up and down: which sex are you? So that’s the kind of humour that sometimes we need when we’re talking about this whole issue of femininity and the role of the feminine in the life of the Church.

[00:17:30]

We need to realise that a new attitude is needed among us as Christians towards women. We need to recover some of the teaching of Pope John Paul II when he speaks about the need for us to have a new feminism. He’s contradicting that Catholicism is a male, priestly religion. So for him, feminism is God-centred. It’s God expressing that Eve was intended to be the help-mate of the man. And so constantly Pope John Paul II is rejecting the unisex idea as homosexuality has paraded its protest, or indeed the priestly abuse of children has horrified the Church that there has to be a radical new appreciation.

And I had the privilege when I was in Tokyo in the spring with my daughter to speak about this wonderful equality of men and women. It was very amusing because when we came to the end of our sessions, and the Japanese women are very modest and never rebellious in any way, and so I said your pastors are getting nervous about what kind of sabotage I’m doing in the Church. And so for the last session, hands up those who want your pastors, who are very curious as to what I’ve been teaching, and your husbands, who are even more nervous about what I’ve been teaching, do you want them to come? Hands up those who want them to come? There wasn’t a hand up. There was a great applause: we’re free. Japanese Christian women are free. Well, you know, we need the same freedom everywhere. We need to realise that we all distort our Christian identity in so many ways. We’ve distorted our identity as male and female. We’ve certainly distorted our identity by having a functional identity so that we ask the stranger what do you do, as if to say tell me who you are by what you do. Nonsense.

And so one of the remarkable women who you should read, as ladies in the congregation especially, but for all of us, is the brilliant student of Heidegger at the beginning of the 20th century Edith Stein, who strongly reacted as a Christian to his own Gnostic philosophy of being as the abstraction of being human. She anticipated the personalist movement of the early 1930s as anti-phenomenological. Just as body, soul and spirit are not creations of the philosopher, so too Heidegger’s being is not being a human person and it was his pro-Nazi sympathy that created a philosophy for the death camps of the Holocaust. The Jews were not beings. So what we find that is so significant about Edith Stein was that she stood up to the role of what it is to be a woman in Christ. And she entered the gas chambers as a result. She was a nun. She was Jewish. And although she was his most favourite pupil, most distinguished pupil, Heidegger never lifted a finger to save her life. That is one of the most devastating things that we can speak of, that there are people in their abstraction of thinking who are no longer human in their philosophy.

[00:23:05]

What we need to recover then, as we will look at one or two women in the rest of the course, is to see that women have an ability, I think, much more than a man, for utter selflessness. After all, they bear in their own body the impregnation of the seed of life. They wait nine months in anticipation of the birth of their child. And there’s something about the women mystics that, likewise, is so utterly selfless. Can you ever imagine someone like Julian of Norwich shutting yourself in a prison cell with no access to the outside world? She’s entombed there. She’s buried there. And she’s ministering to others through the cell window. Can you imagine, as we’re going to talk about, Teresa of Avila, and all the amazing insights that she has of having intimacy with Christ?

There are mystics that perhaps some of us don’t know well enough about, like Anna Maria van Schurman, who lived between 1607 and the [1670s 00:25:04], or again, Madame Guyon, who died in 1717, who were so utterly selfless. So selfless that in the court of Louis XIV, where Madame Guyon was in the court, she was viewed as just a mad woman. She was mad in her selflessness and in a court of such hubris and pride as ‘état, c’est moi’, this was viewed as totally like a lunatic that was part of the court life. I would recommend, those of you who want to be inspired by women’s selflessness, a recent book by one of our alumni, Bo Karen Lee, who is a professor in Princeton University. And her book is called Sacrifice and Delight in the Mystical Theologies of Anna Maria van Schurman and Madame Jeanne Guyon. I have to say that, like Lewis, if you can imagine what immortal, glorious beings we shall be all in the presence of the heavenly, we would stand in awe of each other. I have to say to you, especially to you ladies, I have to stand in awe of you because God created you to be a woman.

[00:27:05]

Well, as we reflect on these things then, let me just see if I’ve got some questions I want to ask you for your discussion groups. The first question is a question, of course, that’s ongoing for the whole of this series and that is from your own family background, what handicaps do you now recognise have challenged your growth to be more fully human, more fully in Christ?

The second question is if you’re called upon to teach on what I’m now calling child theology or family theology, how do the virgin martyrs inspire your life to teach? Thirdly, how does this address help you to live in tension between having a professional identity or an identity in Christ? And you can think about how, obviously, Augustine has helped you already and now you find the virgins helping you as well.

The fourth question is apposite from one of my friends, one of our alumni, who’s a highly intelligent scholar in much demand to teach in seminaries, but she much prefers to live contentedly at the home and not go out to teach at all. Would the parable of the talents suggest that’s a wasted life?