Feminist Interpretations of Augustine: Re-Reading the Canon (review)

This present volume is the twenty-ninth in the Re-Reading the Canon series, the title of each of which volumes begins Feminist Interpretations of . . . . Surprisingly, the volume on Augustine has appeared relatively late in the series. The editor has collected eleven essays plus a poem on feminist interpretations of the bishop of Hippo, who has certainly exerted a powerful influence on the view of women in the Western Christian churches of all major denominations. Besides the essays, Stark has provided a substantial introduction to the volume in which she touches upon the principal events of Augustine's life and briefly sketches the main points of each essay.

The feminist interpretations of Augustine included in the volume represent a broad spectrum running from quite radical to fairly moderate or even tame approaches. In "Augustine, Sexuality, Gender, and Women," Rosemary Radford Ruether presents a call to critique the views of Augustine from which women and men have suffered for over 1500 years in Western Christianity. Anne-Marie Bowery argues in "Monica: The Feminine Face of Christ" that Augustine's portrait of Monica allows us to "reframe the masculine image of the divinity" (70) that is basic to Western Christianity. In her essay, Felecia McDuffie examines Augustine's rhetoric of the feminine in a literary and historic analysis of the Confessions and concludes that, since Augustine does include some aspects of the feminine, his postmodern daughters may enter into dialogue with him on this subject. "Confessing Monica," the joint work of Virginia Burrus and Catherine Keller, presents the Confessions as a meditation on Monica from a literary and historical and from a theological and exegetical perspective. In "O Mother, Where Art Thou? In Search of Saint Monnica," Rebecca Moore struggles to discover what we can really know about Monnica and comes up with a quite limited view of the facts we can known about Augustine's mother. The other unnamed, but not nameless woman in the Confessions is the topic of Margaret R. Miles's essay, subtitled "The Woman Torn from Augustine's Side." In "Augustine's Letters to Women," Joanne McWilliam surveys Augustine's letters written to women, which fall into the following groups: letters of condolence, letters of advice, letters on religious matters, and finally letters of theological content. She notes that the letters are not condescending or patronizing and even in some cases reveal considerable respect for the talents of the addressee. E. Ann Matter's essay, "De cura feminarum: Augustine the Bishop, North African Women, and the Development of a Theology of Female Nature," a brief essay with so long a title, finds that Augustine's letters to women show kindness and consideration for them and suggests that the women involved in the Pelagian controversy may have contributed to his later more negative views. Stark's essay, "Augustine on Women: In God's Image, but Less So," reviews the texts and current literature on Augustine's view of women as made in God's image in their rational souls, but inferior in terms of their bodies. In "To Remember Self, to Remember God: Augustine on Sexuality, Relationality, and the Trinity," Julie B. Miller attempts to explain his teaching on God and the Self as well as to offer "a feminist psychological critique of Augustine's early relationship with his mother," in an alternate view to that of "traditional non-Freudian analyses" (245). The final essay, "The Evanescence of Masculinity: Deferral in Saint Augustine's Confessions and Some Thoughts on Its Bearing on the Sex/Gender Debate," by Penelope Deutscher, explores "a by-product of the sex/gender debate, namely, attempts by some authors to maintain a terminological distinction between the terms 'man' and 'masculine' and between 'woman' and 'feminine' (282). She argues that one can understand the opposition of such terms as theologically grounded in a particular sense. The closing poem, "To Aurelius Augustine from the Mother of His Son," by Ann Conrad Lammers...