Mary and Early Christian Women: Hidden Leadership by Ally Kateusz. Palgrave MacMillan (London, 2019). 312 pages. £19.99.
I bought this book out of curiosity having seen a very favourable review that stated, ‘This is one of those books that everyone concerned about the place of women in the West should read’. At its heart it is also something of a mystery: of how women disappeared from the original prominent roles they held in the church.
What I found particularly attractive about the book was not so much the abstract argument as the graphic presentation of historical visual evidence of the roles of women in the early church, evidence that reflects the conservative nature of art in preserving early representations of liturgical roles that were later denied. And the evidence is indisputable. It is wide-ranging, to be found in mosaics, catacomb murals, ritual objects, not to mention written references.
The surviving artistic representations of women, sometimes intentionally defaced or obscured, leave no doubt as to their prominent ministerial roles in Christian communities in the first four centuries. As Kateusz notes, ‘zero iconographic artifacts have survived from the fifth century or earlier that depict a Christian man alone at an altar table in a church, that is, without a woman also there.’ (p.161) In contrast there are numerous clear representations of women in liturgical roles wearing distinctive liturgical and episcopal garb such as the pallium, still the distinguishing mark of a bishop.
It is interesting that in 113 CE when the Roman governor Pliny sought to learn more about the strange new movement that he would call ‘Christian’ it was to women that he turned, calling them ‘ministers’. For several centuries the gender of official titles was ambiguous: canon 14 of the second Council of Tours (567) confusingly instructed that ‘A bishop (male) who has no bishop (female) may have no women in his entourage.’
Which brings us to the enigma at the heart of this book: given the prominence that the early Jesus movement that became the church gave to women as one of its most distinctive characteristics – that there was to be no more division between male and female (Gal 3:28) – then why and how did this change?
From the second century we can see male church leaders such as Irenaeus and Tertullian increasingly decrying women’s liturgical roles as ‘heretical’. There are clear signs that this view did not go uncontested. The discovery in 1988 of a large stone panel (3½ feet by 6½ feet) in Istanbul that clearly showed a dual gendered celebration taking place in the Hagia Sophia was dated to 434 and enables Kateusz to link it to a controversy raging at the time between the patriarch Nestorius and a prominent virgin Pulcheria over the struggle by women to preserve their traditional liturgical rights.
It was a struggle that was replicated in numerous Christian communities across the empire and as late as 829 French bishops (male) were complaining to Louis the Pius about women who continued to distribute the Eucharist despite the fact that, ‘We have attempted in every way possible to prevent women approaching the altar.’ Through the careful comparative analysis of numerous manuscripts Kateusz is able to show how at the hands of monastic scribes women were gradually ‘edited out of texts or ‘anonymised’: the fourth century church history of Eusebius had six times as many named women as similar histories a century later.
The value of such evidence and a book like this is that it reveals how dramatically ‘traditional’ church history has been distorted to substantiate a bogus ‘orthodoxy’ in which women have simply been ‘cancelled’ – something that in the context of contemporary gender controversy we can perhaps better appreciate. Clearly some men disliked sharing leadership roles with women (like the BBC once regarded women unsuitable to be news readers as ‘they lack authority’ – plus ça change?) and it is these men who would in time be recognised as the authoritative ‘fathers’ of church tradition. Thus by the time Christianity had become an imperial religion, a misogynistic momentum of patrological prejudice enabled the practice and testimony of the previous centuries to be all but obliterated.
It is ironic, given the continued resolute opposition of the Catholic Church to women’s ordination, that some of the best evidence of this is in Rome itself, even in St. Peter’s basilica, if you know where to look, as Kateusz obviously does. For example the liturgical scene on an ivory reliquary depicting old St. Peter’s Basilica (from the mid fifth century), shows a man and woman flanking an altar (over the tomb of St Peter!) clearly officiating jointly in a ritual.
Other fascinating depictions show women officiating in liturgical roles, prominent amongst whom is Mary in clearly episcopal garb (as in the Lateran baptistery Chapel of San Venantius – that also shows evidence of later erasure). Not so much the iconic submissive hand-maiden of later popular piety or doting domesticated Madonna of Renaissance art as an authoritative, presidential figure who stands in the midst of the community with arms raised in prayer, a role later reserved exclusively for male celebrants.
This should not surprise us. As Kateusz notes, ‘Almost all the house churches named in the New Testament are identified by the name of the women who apparently oversaw them.’ (p.154) The letter of St Paul to the Romans ends with his commendations to the many women who ministered alongside him (Rm 16) and who in the case of the Roman church, as with so many churches, were instrumental in its foundation and organisation.
In this list we meet Phoebe of whom the Greek word ‘prostatis’ is used, for which the Latin equivalent is ‘presidens’, ‘the one who sits in front’ – the root of ‘preside’ and ‘president’ – that was the key role in the Eucharistic celebrations of the early church. This was long before the word ‘priest’ was used – a word associated with pagan temples. The status of women such as Phoebe is usually diminished to that of a ‘deacon’, or ‘one who serves’.
What is surprising is how all this came to be explained away over the centuries, if necessary by defacing the evidence. Kateusz presents evidence from the church of Santa Prassede, Rome, where a mosaic shows very clearly the title ‘Episcopa’ written above the head of a woman with the name ‘Theodora’ printed along side it. What it also shows is that the mosaic has been altered and the last two letters removed so as to indicate the person was male. This has also been the fate of the apostle named in a letter of Paul as Junia but often translated by the addition of an ‘s’ – as a ‘correction’! – to make it male. Shockingly, attempts to conceal and deface artistic evidence at the hands of church authorities has continued into the twentieth century.
The modern clamour for the inclusion of women in ministerial roles can be depicted as some sort of attack by militant feminists or secularists on the divinely established hierarchical order, and often is by disgruntled ‘traditionalists’. But as this book makes clear it is rather a demand to return to the church what was originally one of its most distinguishing features: the prominent role it gave to women at every level of its organisation. The value of a book like this one is that it helps us to see what is hiding in plain sight and always was. It’s just that, for all sorts of visceral prejudices, some choose to refuse to see it.