A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice (14 page)

Born of humble parents in what is now eastern Algeria, Aurelius Augustinius was of a family that typified the pattern already seen with the rise of Christianity: his mother, Monica, was a Christian and his father, Patrick, a pagan who converted before he died. As intellectually and emotionally complex as he
was sexually driven, Augustine began living with a concubine from Carthage at age 17. Monica was deeply upset, and devoutly wished her son would become a Catholic and devote himself to higher things – rather the way, later on, Irish mothers would pray ardently for their sons to become priests. First a student, and then a teacher, of grammar and literature, Augustine moved to Carthage, then to Rome and Milan. He dallied with Manichaeism for years, finally rejecting it because of the incoherence of its cosmology.
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It was in Milan in
AD
386 under the influence of St Ambrose’s sermons, that Augustine converted to Catholicism. But before he found the Lord, he had found Plato.

Augustine is one of the watershed personalities of history. He stands at the great division between the world of Classical Antiquity (which had endured for about 1,000 years) and that of Christian civilization. He is the first person from Antiquity who revealed to us the turmoil of his interior world as recorded in his remarkable work
Confessions.
It is like tuning into a television talk show where the guest is revealing his deepest shame, his greatest love, his worst sin, and his highest goal, one broadcast 1,700 years ago, but still with the immediacy of an Oprah Winfrey interview. At the centre of the turmoil of Augustine’s search for God is the struggle between the desire of the flesh and striving of the will, the profound dualism that Augustine will incorporate into the very heart of Catholicism using Plato’s philosophical apparatus. His cry of anguish echoes that of St Paul, but with a power and complexity the Apostle could not match:

I came to Carthage and all around me hissed a cauldron of illicit loves. I therefore polluted the spring water of friendship with the filth of concupiscence. I muddied the clear stream by the hell of lust, and yet, though foul and immoral in my
excessive vanity, I used to carry on in the manner of an elegant man about town.
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His bodily desires have condemned him to be a prisoner: ‘fettered by the flesh’s morbid impulse and lethal sweetness, I dragged my chain, but was afraid to be free of it.’ He was ‘stuck fast in the glue of pleasure’. Such is his disgust at the physicality of the human condition that he compares us to pigs: ‘We roll in the mud of flesh and blood,’ he proclaims.

In a later work,
The City of God,
he returns to this theme compulsively. Referring to the Fall of Man, he writes:

From this moment, then, the flesh began to lust against the spirit. With this rebellion we are born, just as we are doomed to die and because of the first sin, to bear, in our members and vitiated nature, either the battle with or defeat by the flesh.’
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The Hell of lust has been with us ever since. For Augustine, the struggle could only be resolved on a higher plane. He read the works of the Platonists which had been translated into Latin and found that in all the Platonic books God and his Word keep slipping in. The Idea, the Pure Form, eternal and unchanging, he could equate with God. The Platonic vision of a higher intellectual reality corresponded to a certain extent to Augustine’s desperate endeavours to break the ‘fetters’ of bodily desire. But the intellectual ‘heaven’ of Plato was too abstract and remote; most crucially, it did not promise salvation and everlasting life: that is why today there are so many millions of Christians and so few Platonists. And it was to Christianity that Augustine was converted in
AD
386.

Augustine’s relevance to misogyny can be summed up in the sentence from Book Two of his
Confessions
:

I had no motive for my wickedness except wickedness itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I loved the self-destruction, I loved my fall, not the object for which I had fallen but the fall itself. My depraved soul leaped down from your firmament to ruin. I was seeking not to gain anything by shameful means, but shame for its own sake.

The idea of ‘fall’ had been inherited from the Jewish myth of the expulsion of man from the garden of Eden. To this Fall of Man, Augustine adds another, even more terrible dimension: the Platonic fall. This is a fall from the Pure Form, to Christians, the timeless perfection of union with God, into the mutable world full of life, lust, suffering and death. It comes about through conception. From that moment we are in a state of sin – Original Sin. As Augustine says, quoting the Psalms, we are ‘conceived in iniquity and in sin’ in our mother’s womb. The instrument of this fall from grace is woman: both in the sense that it was Eve’s disobedience that led to our expulsion from paradise, and in the Platonic sense – she represents the wilfulness of the flesh to reproduce itself. We are thus carried away from God into temporal life in which we (thanks to our bodies) are in a state of rebellion against him. We will this fall upon ourselves, and our rebelliousness expresses itself most directly through sexual desire. Because of Original Sin ‘man, that might have been spiritual in body, became carnal in mind’.
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Augustine, like other Christians, believed that the only way to break this cycle of rebellion was to subdue the body. It was his own inability to do so that had delayed for so long his conversion:

Vain trifles and the triviality of the empty-headed, my old loves, held me back. They tugged at the garment of my flesh and
whispered: ‘Are you getting rid of us?’ And ‘from this moment we shall never be with you again, not for ever and ever.’ And ‘from this moment this and that are forbidden to you for ever and ever.’
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In spite of the misogynistic interpretation of his doctrine, which became enshrined in the Doctrine of Original Sin, St Augustine’s attitudes to women were more complex. He did not see women as inherently evil. In
The City of God
he stresses that ‘the sex of woman is not a vice but nature.’ But the terrible anguish of his struggle with desire, which he records with such power, reveals clearly that it is man’s battle with himself that is at the root of misogyny. However, for St Augustine, ultimately it is our will that is the source of evil. Ego, not libido, is the problem that made us defy God in the first place. As a punishment, God gave us sexual desire, something over which our will has no control. Just as we defied God, so our desires defy us. Sex became the battleground, both as a pleasure and a punishment, in a way unheard of before in Western culture. Woman was bound to suffer because of our nasty habit of blaming that which we desire for making us desire it.

In a frightening glimpse of what lay ahead for women in the coming centuries of Christian domination, consider the terrible fate of the last pagan woman philosopher: Hypatia of Alexandria. There are but a few women philosophers from ancient times who are known by name.
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Hypatia is the most renowned, thanks to Christian fanaticism and intolerance.

She was born in Alexandria towards the end of the fourth century, the daughter of the mathematician Theon, who commentators say she excelled in ability and intelligence to ‘far surpass all the philosophers of her own time’.
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She wrote commentaries on the geometry of Apollonius and Diophantus,
played music, taught Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy at Athens and Alexandria, where she opened an academy, and published a work on astronomy. Hypatia was something of an ascetic, and though described as ‘beautiful and shapely’ remained chaste and virginal. From one source we learn that when one of her students fell so madly in love with her that he exposed himself to her, in order to cure him of his infatuation she handed him her undergarments stained with menstrual blood.
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It is a novel way of discouraging a suitor and proves that it was not only Christians who were affected by the revolt against the body that characterizes this epoch. But Hypatia’s virtues (however Christian-like) did not mollify the local Christians’ hostility towards her.

Alexandria, one of the greatest cities of Antiquity and famous as a seat of learning, nevertheless also had a reputation for sectarian violence often accompanied by the lynching of political and ideological opponents. (One of the earliest instances of rioting against Jews in the ancient world took place there in
AD
38.) In
AD
412, Cyril, a Christian fanatic, became bishop of Alexandria. Cyril had punished himself for several years as a desert monk, but as was often the case, the tribulations of the flesh served merely to deepen his fanaticism and fire his intolerance: imagine him as a kind of fundamentalist mullah. Certainly, his desert years had done nothing to dampen the fires of ambition. As bishop, he challenged the rule of the Imperial Prefect Orestes, who ruled Egypt on behalf of Rome. In these, the twilight years of Antiquity, the growing power of the Church was absorbing that of the civil authority, a precursor of the theocracy of the Middle Ages. Cyril was a heretic hunter, and Jew hater. Around Easter
AD
415, he roused a Christian mob to attack the local Jews, sacking their homes, and seizing their synagogues to purify them and turn them into churches. He drove
this ancient community from the city. When Orestes objected, a Christian mob assaulted him.

Christians began muttering that Hypatia had bewitched the Imperial Prefect and was responsible for the breakdown in understanding between him and the bishop. In a sinister premonition of what was to come, a Christian writer accused her of being ‘devoted at all times to magic, astrolabes and instruments of music, and she beguiled many people through her Satanic wiles.’
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For a woman to be learned and accomplished was not only a novelty but a sign that she was a witch, in league with the Devil. Cyril was happy to use Hypatia as a scapegoat for his troubles with the civil powers. After a fiery sermon, one of Cyril’s followers, Peter (‘a perfect believer in all respects in Jesus Christ,’ according to John, Bishop of Nikiu) led an excited mob to attack her academy.

The mob ‘found her seated on a lofty chair; and having made her descend they dragged her along till they brought her to the great church, named Caesarion.’
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There, she was stripped naked. Holding her down, the Christians used oyster shells to skin her alive.
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Then, ‘her quivering limbs were delivered to the flames,’ in the words of an outraged Gibbon.
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Bribes blocked all attempts to prosecute the murderers of Hypatia. Cyril’s career in the Catholic Church blossomed. He was canonized a saint. Apparently, miracles, not murders, are what count on a saint’s curriculum vitae.

From being martyrs, Christians had quickly become inquisitors. In the coming centuries, the perfume of church incense would all too often mingle with the smell of a woman’s burning flesh.

The thousand years or so separating the end of the Classical world and the rise of the modern witnessed the development of two seemingly contradictory processes: the beatification of woman and her demonization. The Middle Ages would begin by elevating women towards heaven and end by consigning many thousands of them to hell. In the latter case, however, the process was more than mystical or metaphorical. The flames were all too real. It marked an extraordinary period when the human imagination soared with the great spires of the Gothic cathedrals of France that seem to scrape the very floors of heaven. It was a period too when the human spirit was convulsed by outbreaks of mass hysteria, pogroms, and witch hunts that plunged it into some of the most hellish regions it has ever visited.

In
AD
431 the highest council of the Catholic Church
declared that Mary, a Jewish peasant girl from Palestine, was the Mother of God. The girl, about whom, historically speaking, almost nothing was known apart from her name, was not just the mother of a god – and in the Classical world gods were as plentiful as celebrities are in modern times – she was the mother of the only God, the creator of the entire universe. The other gods had been banished or transformed by St Augustine into demons, leaving the Christian God to loom over the cosmos in solitary majesty. Mary was his mother – or Theotokos (the god-bearer). Because of this unique claim, Mary would play not only an unprecedented role in the history of religion, but a vital and determining part in the history of misogyny.

The proclamation by the gathering of bishops came after a heated debate, in which crowds (pro-and-anti Mary’s elevation to Theotokos) demonstrated on the streets of Ephesus where the council met – the ancient city on the eastern coast of what is now Turkey. It was renowned for being the centre of the worship of the virgin goddess Diana whose temple there had been one of the seven wonders of the ancient world before an army of Goths destroyed it in the upheavals of the third century. One of those most actively involved in the controversy was St Cyril of Alexandria, something of an expert at exciting mobs – his fiery sermon sixteen years earlier had provoked a Christian mob to skin alive the woman pagan philosopher Hypatia. This time, however, St Cyril was ardently in favour of promoting woman, in the form of Mary, to the highest elevation imaginable, and excommunicated Nestorius, the bishop of Constantinople who had pointed out that since God had existed forever, it was impossible for Mary or any woman, however virtuous and miraculous, to have been his mother. Nestorius was concerned that declaring Mary Theotokos elevated her to the status of a goddess and smacked of
paganism: perhaps on his way to the council meetings, held in the church of the Virgin Mary, he had glanced up at the remains of Diana’s temple, and worried that the Catholic Church was in danger of replacing one virgin goddess with another. Some fifty years before, another learned mustering of ecclesiastics had already declared Mary a perpetual virgin. In any case, Cyril’s victory was popular with the masses, who held a candlelit procession through the ancient streets to celebrate Mary, the Mother of God. The persistence of their devotion to Mary has proven to be one of the most remarkable and enduring features of Catholicism. In 1950, 1,431 years after the Council of Ephesus, enormous crowds of the faithful, said to be a million strong, would gather in St Peter’s Square in Rome, to greet Pope Pius XII’s proclamation of the dogma of Mary’s Assumption into Heaven with outbursts of hymn singing, tears, and joyous prayers. In the meantime, the Jewish peasant girl from Palestine, would find her name on twenty-eight churches in Rome and many thousands more elsewhere, as well as being the inspiration of some of the greatest works of architecture and art (including poetry and song) the world has produced.