A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice (15 page)

The debate over Mary’s status was originally a by-product of the rancorous controversies surrounding the status of her son, Jesus. The bishops were trying to settle questions about his nature – should it be defined as human, divine, or some combination of both? The Orthodox Church eventually rejected the two extremes of the argument, that Jesus was either human or divine, in favour of a complex compromise under the term consubstantiation. That is, Jesus as the Son of God was ‘consubstantial’ with his Father, sharing his divine nature, and at the same time was ‘consubstantial with the flesh’, that is partaking fully of human nature. The status of Mary, like that of any mother, rose with that of her son. The gospels had already
described her as a virgin. By the fifth century, the Church decided she was a virgin before, during and after her son’s birth. Once Jesus’ ‘consubstantial’ nature with God was established, it was only fitting that Mary should be declared God’s mother.

After that, her progress up the mythological ladder was unstoppable, at least until the Reformation of the sixteenth century. By that time, the cult of Mary had in all its complex manifestations replaced the Incarnation and the Resurrection as the focus of belief for the vast majority of Catholics. The thousand years between the Christianity of the Church Fathers and the climax of Mary’s cult saw a shift away from the expectancy of the Second Coming and hopes for immediate redemption that had animated the faith’s early followers. Though tremors of millenarianism shook the Middle Ages, especially as they drew to a close, the vast majority of the faithful did not expect redemption in this life and looked to Mary to console them for the arduous and painful passage through it to the next world.

It was deemed unsuitable that the Mother of God should meet the fate of other mortals upon death. From
AD
600 onwards the Church celebrated the Feast of the Assumption on 15 August, when it was believed Mary was assumed bodily into Heaven. She shares the almost unique privilege of defying human fate and existing in bodily form in Paradise with Jesus.
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Once installed among the angels alongside her son, it was not long before Mary was to find herself crowned Queen of Heaven. Later, the question arose as to her own conception. It became unthinkable for some theologians of the Church that the Perpetual Virgin, Mother of God and Queen of Heaven, should have been tainted with Original Sin, sharing our fall from divine grace which is a direct consequence of our sexual lusts. Anxiety about the purity of the Mother of God being blotted by this aspect of the human condition troubled
Duns Scotus back in the fourteenth century. But a firm decision on the matter had to wait another 500 years. In 1854, Pope Pius IX proclaimed the doctrine of Mary’s Immaculate Conception, making her the only human being (aside from Jesus) to have escaped the taint of Original Sin. This meant that Mary was the only human being (again apart from Jesus) to have been conceived in perfection, with no in-built tendency to sin. That is, she lived a life completely free of temptation, thus exceeding the state of perfection Adam and Eve had enjoyed in the Garden of Eden before the Fall.

It was indeed remarkable progress for a Jewish peasant girl from Palestine, especially considering the paucity of references to her in the Bible. The earliest source for our knowledge of Jesus, the Apostle Paul, does not even mention her by name, merely noting that Jesus was ‘made of a woman’ (Galatians, 4:4). Mark refers to her once by name, and once in the context of a rather dismissive exchange between Jesus and ‘his brethren and his mother’. Their pleas for his attention because they are family are swept aside.

‘Who is my mother, or my brethren?’ Jesus replies (3:33). He answers his own question by declaring that all those who followed him are his real family.

John contains two references to Jesus’ mother. She is more present in Matthew and Luke who provide the narrative of Christ’s nativity and infancy upon which Christianity’s rich tradition of Christmas is based. Even here, she is far from being centre stage. But the lack of detail did not prevent Christianity over the centuries, and the Catholic Church in particular, from placing on her shoulders the enormous weight of its most important dogmas. In fact, the very absence of scriptural tradition allowed for the proliferation of myths and legends about Mary that helped turn her into the most venerated woman in human history.

The very core belief of Christianity, the Incarnation, rests on the claim that Mary was a virgin when she conceived. Claims of virgin births as a result of some divine intervention were, of course, not unusual in the ancient world as a way of establishing the exceptional nature of the person for whom the claim is made – Alexander the Great is one example, and Plato is another. But thanks to their profound rejection of the body as the Devil’s gateway into the world, the Christians had to protect the Mother of God from any suggestion that the experience leading to the miraculous event was in any way physical, that is, pleasurable. Therefore, sex could not be involved. The Redeemer cannot come into the world as a result of an act of filthy lust. As the seventeenth-century theologian Francisco Suarez put it:

‘The Blessed Virgin in conceiving a son neither lost her virginity nor experienced any venereal pleasure . . . it did not befit the Holy Spirit . . . to produce such an effect, or to excite any unbecoming movement of passion . . . On the contrary, the effect of his overshadowing is to quench the fire of original sin.’
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The most venerated woman in the world could only be venerated on the grounds that she did not share with other women something so fundamental to their nature as the experience of sex. A woman was being exalted yet at the cost of holding in contempt her sexuality. Mary as Mother of God was exempted from the pains, as well as the pleasures, of motherhood, and learned theologians of the early Church debated how she might have produced Jesus without breaking her hymen; the alternative opinion that it did break but was miraculously made whole again was rejected. Thus began a long process that would make Mary increasingly abstract and distant from the experience of the women who looked up to her for some relief from the male-dominated Christian
pantheon. The Word became flesh in the form of her son Jesus, but the flesh of the woman who gave birth to him became an abstraction. In a sense, the abstraction of Mary through her elevation into a sexless, saccharin goddess-like being, far beyond human nature, acted as a counterpoint to the Incarnation. The old dualism of body and spirit, threatened by the belief in the Incarnation, reasserted itself with the cult of the Virgin Mary. The ‘Word became flesh’ signalled the end of dualism but the cult of the Virgin Mary meant that the old contempt for matter was perpetuated.

Even today, stepping into the marble-cool and dimly lit interiors of the great basilicas dedicated to Mary leaves the visitor with the overwhelming sense of the other-worldliness of the Virgin Mother turned Heavenly Queen. In Santa Maria Maggiore, which legend says was founded between 352 and 366 by Pope Liberius I, the Queen of Heaven gorgeously arrayed in cloth of gold and pearls, sits on a luxuriously cushioned couch as, with hands slightly raised and an almost expressionless face, she accepts the crown from Jesus. Across the Tiber, in the even earlier basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere, the Queen of Heaven is portrayed in an icon over six feet high. She sits on imperial cushions, her son Jesus next to her, a protective arm extended around her shoulder. A great diadem crowns her head and a faint nimbus glows around her. Her long, narrow face carries an expression, impassive, remote, and otherworldly, as she stares down from a plane of being far above that of mortal flesh and blood.

The icons send out a complex if not contradictory message. They are, of course, intended to convey messages other than those relating to women. In an age when Rome was asserting its primacy over the other episcopates, the depictions conveyed a very clear signal that its status as capital of the Catholic Church was divinely sanctioned. But if we look at what they
tell us about the status of women we find that while a woman is exulted, like no human being has ever been before, reigning over the very pope, crowned by the king of Heaven, she is not the agent of her own exaltation. And the cause of her elevation to the highest is her very passivity (‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it unto me according to thy word’ Luke, 1:38) and asexuality.

As a role model for women, Mary set contradictory (if not downright impossible) standards for them to meet – representing as she did the apotheosis of passivity, obedience, motherhood and virginity. Indeed, she served as a constant reminder that women were inadequate because of their own, very human, nature. Her sexlessness was a rebuke to their sexuality, her obedience an encouragement to believe that the norms of social relationships had divine sanction, her virgin motherhood a miraculous state beyond the reach of merely human females. That is, she is a specific rebuke to women in a way that Jesus is not to men. Jesus’ suffering and death rebuke all of humankind, and are not aimed specifically at men the way the Church used Mary’s elevation to target the rest of the female sex for denigration. In Catholic imagery to this day, her foot remains firmly planted on the serpent’s head, a call to Catholic girls and women to repress desire in themselves and deny its fulfilment in their men folk.

The only way that women could hope to emulate her was by foreswearing their sexuality.

In the early years of Christianity, thousands of women did so by taking up the ascetic life, usually by converting a private house or villa into a retreat. By
AD
800, some 400 years after the proclamation that Mary was the mother of God the movement had become institutionalized, and convents, monasteries and priories were a common feature throughout
Europe. Women’s energy and commitment that had contributed so much to the rise of Christianity were not rewarded through the granting of any role in the power structures of the Church. Instead, they were now channelled into the great monastic institutions, which, for the first time in history, offered large numbers of women an alternative to marriage and childbearing – albeit at the price of accepting life-long chastity and other restrictions, part of an often harsh way of life. But it was a price many thousands of women were prepared to pay. By the eleventh century, convents had become a major educational resource for women where they learned to read and write, and where they could become acquainted with learning and the classics. As of 1250 in Germany alone there were some 500 nunneries, holding between 25,000 and 30,000 women.
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They spent their time praying, meditating and working in wool and linen. It was the nuns of Normandy who sewed the beautiful Bayeux tapestry, commemorating the Norman victory over the Anglo-Saxon King Harold at the battle of Hastings in England in 1066. They also embroidered the garments for the priests and bishops (a task many nuns still perform). During this period, women were also able to oversee the institutions as abbesses, and a few rose to powerful positions. Abbesses could find themselves ruling over men in joint communities such as that founded by St Fara in Brie in northern France. She and others even heard confessions. Nuns in the abbey of Las Huelgas in Spain appointed their own confessors.
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However, by the beginning of the thirteenth century such freedom and independence were in decline. Many of the abbeys lost their lands, and control became increasingly centralized. Pope Innocent III (1198–1216), who launched the crusade against the Cathars in Languedoc, imposed prohibitions on women’s role in the Church. Joint communities were
abolished, a move welcomed in misogynistic fashion by one abbot who wrote:

We and our whole community of canons, recognizing that the wickedness of women is greater than all the other wickedness of the world, and that there is no anger like that of women, and that the poison of asps and dragons is more curable and less dangerous to men than the familiarity of women, have unanimously decreed for the safety of our souls, no less than that of our bodies and goods, that we will on no account receive any more sisters to the increase of our perdition, but will avoid them like poisonous animals.
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Although women were never ordained priests, the priesthood was not officially closed to them until the thirteenth century. St Thomas Aquinas issued his opinion that women cannot be in authority over men and that ‘the superior male essence’ was necessary to become a priest for ‘Adam was beguiled by Eve, not she by him’. It was necessary for the priest therefore to be male ‘so that he did not fall a second time through her female levity’.
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In future, only priests could hear confessions, and since only men could be priests women would be forced to confess any sexual transgressions to often lascivious and frustrated males who frequently exploited their power.

By the beginning of the following century, the world of the great abbesses was a thing of the past. But the early Middle Ages allowed other outlets for women of energy, talent and status. Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122–1204), wife of Louis VII of France and later Henry II (Plantagenet), the future king of England, was ‘the richest heiress of western Christendom’ and ‘the presiding genius . . . of courtly culture’.
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The women of southwestern France enjoyed some of the benefits of Roman
law, which persisted in what had been the Roman province of Aquitania, including the right to inherit property. Eleanor’s inheritance, comprising of most of southern France, stretched south from the Loire Valley to the Mediterranean Sea and west to the Atlantic coast of Bordeaux. It was there, during her reign, that the culture of courtly love, celebrated in the work of the troubadour poets, reached its peak. Between 1150 and 1250, some two hundred troubadour poets whom we know by name flourished, twenty of them women. They were poets from noble families, who introduced to their aristocratic patrons the refinements of wit and elegant verse; most importantly, they celebrated a new code of chivalrous conduct in the relationship between high-ranking men and women.