Ordained Women in the Early Church: A Documentary History

Chapter Four. WOMEN DEACONS IN THE EAST: Canons and Comments on Church Practice

After having seen some of the real data about the lives and activities of female deacons, we turn to some of the prescriptive texts to compare images of their functions in the church. The Didascalia Apostolorum is the earliest church order text to describe the office of female deacons. The Council of Nicaea is the earliest church council to legislate about them, and its Canon 19 concerns only a particular problem, not deaconesses in general. The Apostolic Constitutions of the fourth century include the most complete description of deaconesses ’ activities before Justinian. Following that, Justinian’s Novellae give us more enticing information at least about how deaconesses functioned in the Great Church, Hagia Sophia, of Constantinople, and that arrangement, while undoubtedly on a larger scale than anywhere else, was presumably the liturgical model to which other churches looked in the middle of the sixth century. The Theodosian decree, Canon 15 of Chalcedon, the “Arabic Canons” of Nicaea, and Justinian’s Novellae 6.6 all deal with the minimum age for diaconal ordination of women. Their disagreement indicates doubt and variable practice. Olympias and Maria of Moab (see chapter 3) are known exceptions to even the lowest minimum age of forty. Here, as in all legislation of the era, the reader should not presume that what is legislated is what was always done. DIDASCALIA APOSTOLORUM AND APOSTOLIC CONSTITUTIONS DA 9 = AC 2.26.3, 5–81 The Didascalia Apostolorum is one of the more developed church order texts from the early church, written in Greek in Syria during the first half of the third century. Only a complete Syriac and a partial Latin translation survive. The Apostolic Constitutions , which survives in its original Greek, is a compilation and rough editing of several church orders including the DA, and dates from the late fourth century. Both texts Chapter Four WOMEN DEACONS IN THE EAST Canons and Comments on Church Practice  reflect churches already strongly centered on episcopal authority and with a diversity of ministerial roles including widows and female deacons. The AC adds virgins as an identifiable group. The DA is incorporated into books 1–6 of the AC. In texts that follow , italicized words are not contained in the DA but are added to its edited version in the AC. 3. For these [bishops] are your high priests and the presbyters are your priests, and your levites are the deacons and lectors and cantors and porters, your female deacons, your widows and virgins and orphans, but the high priest is above all these . . . 5. But let the deacon stand next to him [the bishop] as Christ to the Father . . . 6. Also let the female deacon be honored by you as the type of the Holy Spirit, doing or saying nothing apart from the deacon, just as the Paraclete does or says nothing of himself but glorifying Christ, remains according to his will. And just as no one can believe in Christ without the teaching of the Spirit, so let no woman approach the male deacon or the bishop without the female deacon. 7. And let the presbyters be deemed by you as a type of our apostles . . . 8. And let the widows and orphans be reckoned to you as a type of sacrificial offering. The first sentence of this section of the AC reflects the early Church’s conscious claims to replace the religious structures of Israel. Thus each group of ministers is assigned a correspondence with some aspect of Israelite Temple service. In the second part of the selection trinitarian theology comes to the fore: just as Christ is at the right hand of God, so the male deacon stands beside the bishop at the liturgy. The female deacon represents the Holy Spirit who, according to the theology presented here, acts in harmony with Christ. That the presbyters, the bishop’s council, correspond to the apostles while the deacon represents Christ shows the primarily typological intent of the passage and perhaps also the growing importance of deacons as personal agents of the bishop. The typology of deacons and presbyters (without female deacons) was first used by Ignatius in Magnesians 6, and expanded here. In this church, women deacons are present along with widows and consecrated virgins . That only the women deacons are singled out as participants in the trinitarian typology, while widows are relegated to the offering, indicates an official role for the deacons of both sexes. In both references to them the male...