Feminist Interpretations of Augustine

8 De cura feminarum: Augustine the Bishop, North African Women, and the Development of a Theology of Female Nature

8 De cura feminarum: Augustine the Bishop, North African Women, and the Development of a Theology of Female Nature E. Ann Matter Because of his enormous profile in the development of Western Christian thought, Augustine has often been evaluated and judged more by his legacy, that is, how he has been received, than by what he actually said and did.1 Of course, in some ways this is his own fault, since, even in his own lifetime, through vehicles such as the Confessions and the Retractations , he provided an ex post facto filter through which his own works were seen. James J. O’Donnell has recently suggested that one could tell a rather different version of Augustine’s later life, especially his conflicts This essay was first published in Augustinian Studies 36, no. 1 (2005): 87–98. 204 Feminist Interpretations of Augustine with the Donatists and Pelagians, if one were not to automatically begin with the framework of the Confessions. Instead, O’Donnell suggests that we could use the impressive and understudied collection of extant letters, most of which date from after 395, when Augustine was first elected bishop in Hippo, to make a new narrative of what, as O’Donnell puts it, ‘‘Augustine didn’t confess.’’2 This is a tantalizing idea, one that I would like to apply to an area of Augustine’s influence on the Christian tradition in which the Nachleben has surely outshouted the murmurs of the life: Augustine’s theological formulations about the role and nature of women.3 The problem of ‘‘Augustine on women’’ has been one of the more lively debates among contemporary scholars of Christian antiquity, and it is fair to say that there is a variety of opinion on the subject. Even among explicitly feminist women scholars, there are broad differences in opinion, from those who are committed to defending Augustine as a relatively positive voice on women in his context (Børresen, Soennenecken),4 to those who explain his seeming harshness as a consequence of asceticism and sexual renunciation (Clark and Richardson, Truax, Weaver and Laporte, Van Bavel, McGowan),5 to those who (again, in varying degrees) essentially blame him for the heritage of women’s inferiority in Western Christianity (Pagels , Clark, Miles, Ruether, Daly). Elaine Pagels’s widely read critique of Augustine centers on an analysis of the cultural implications of the doctrine of original sin, especially the role of the story of the Fall in Genesis 3. Pagels lays the blame for Christian sexual repression and misogyny squarely on Augustine, positing that Augustine’s pessimistic views of sexuality , politics, and human nature would come to dominate in Western culture, and that ‘‘Adam, Eve, and the serpent—our ancestral story— would continue, often in some version of its Augustinian form, to affect our lives to the present day.’’ In other words, for Pagels, it is not what Augustine intended, but what he left as a legacy that really counts.6 From these scholarly voices, it is an easy step to the more popular feminist historiography that simply assumes that Augustine is the source of misogyny in Western culture as a whole.7 As David Hunter has amply shown, a far harder position on women’s ontological inferiority was struck by Ambrosiaster, an aristocratic Roman cleric writing in the 380s, who is explicit in claiming that Genesis 3 shows exactly that women are not in the image of God.8 Ambrosiaster’s influence was particularly strong in the tradition of canon law, and so had a tangible impact on the ecclesiastical regulation of Christian women. De cura feminarum 205 Augustine, in contrast, in the tradition of Clement of Alexandria, equates the ‘‘image of God’’ with the human mind, a move that makes it harder to deny women a part, except perhaps with respect to their embodiment. In spite of the fact that he was comparatively positive about women’s ontological equality in his own time, most scholars of women in Christian history have tended to agree with Pagels, blaming Augustine for women’s inferior role in the tradition. In all this polemic, it is often the case that the analysis (psycho or other) begins with the youthful Augustine as autobiographically portrayed in the Confessions. But I would like to try something else in this essay. Rather than approaching Augustine’s views of women through his autobiographical accounts of tormented relationships with his mother...