Veiled Desire: Augustine on Women

National Catholic Reporter, Dec 13, 1996 by Regina Coll

St. Augustine of Hippo, esteemed as one of the most influential theologians of Western Christianity, had a major impact on both Catholic and Protestant thought. Some consider his work to be the foundation on which the Western Christian tradition is based.

But that foundation has been identified by feminists of all stripes as antiwoman and as legitimization for the subordination and abuse of women. He has been credited -- or blamed -- as the source of that patriarchal anthropology that identifies women as derivative and complementary to men.

Perhaps his most frequently quoted statement in this context is "when [a woman] is referred to separately in her quality of helpmate, which regards the woman alone, then she is not in the image of God, but, as regards the man alone he is the image of God as fully and completely as when the woman is joined with him in one."

Considering this negative view, it is surprising that so little attention has been paid to the influence of women on his life and thought. Australian Kim Power's Veiled Desire: Augustine on Women does just that.

The author searches for the roots of that misogyny in the culture that nourished him and in his life experiences. She investigates his relationship to the women in his life for clues to the origins of his theology. His mother Monica, his unnamed concubine and Mary the Virgin Mother are presented as lenses through which we may gain alternative insights into his theology. Power asks two questions: How much was this most eminent of theologians influenced by his experience and culture, and where was he able to transcend this in the development of his anthropology?

As a psychologist/theologian, Power is able to probe Augustine's use of gendered symbols and sexual meanings in the development of his thought, although I found myself wishing that she played the role of psychologist more in probing that thought.

For instance, she might have provided some insight into the fact that Augustine seems to have a problem with naming people. He does not mention his brother or his sister by name. He does not mention the name of the friend whose early death devastated him. He does not even mention the name of his concubine, the mother of his son, Adeodatus. Monica, his idealized mother, is mentioned by name only once. Surely, this pattern could provide interesting ground for speculation on his character and therefore on his theology.

Power, the psychologist, does sometimes provide some delightful and surprising tidbits. While Augustine presents his mother as if her world revolved around him, he also speaks of her "manipulative maternal blackmail." Augustine claims that Monica on her deathbed said he never spoke a harsh or disrespectful word to her. But Power speculates that Monica might have a different memory of how Augustine deceived her when he sneaked off to Italy.

Power suggests Augustine's early experience of Monica's mothering helped shape his image of a mothering God. She also implies that the Father-God presented by Augustine resembles the qualities of the paterfamilias that Augustine missed in his own father. The discipline of a paterfamilias, Augustine thought, might have been able to save him from himself. But this paterfamilias image also gave rise to the concept of a God who would condemn infants to everlasting hell if they died without baptism and who would withhold grace from some while lavishing it on others.

This gendering of his theology is also evident as he presents both Monica and Mary as models of the church. The church, like Monica, provides milk from her breast that loosens the tongue to speak the name of Jesus. Like Monica, the church cares, feeds and nourishes the faithful. Monica also images the church as the mother who longs to embrace her wayward children but who accepts even torture if it brings about the conversion of the sinning child.

Shifting the maternal image from God to the church serves to eliminate feminine imagery for the divine and assign it to the temporal sphere. The association of church and mother does not raise up women, however. Power maintains that "all the positive aspects of mothering are ascribed to the spiritual mother who becomes the only true mother, while human mothers are debased. They can only bear children to misery and death."

Power suggests that Augustine's loss of any significant relationship with a woman after his ordination may have led him to idealize both Monica and Mary to the point that they become exceptions to what is said about women. The culture in which he lived was one that idealized masculine intellectual friendship, from which women were excluded. Mary is honored, not only as model of the church but also as model of the virgin and as model of the married woman. Mary the Virgin provides the model for Christian virgins who, although they cannot conceive Jesus in the flesh, conceive him in their hearts.

Mary's virginity protected her from sin and therefore provided an appropriate incubator for the honor due to God. Married women may reflect Mary's "virginity of faith" but they must not assume that married women and continent women were equal. Mary is presented as obedient to her husband, an obedience that guarded her chastity and protected her from the sin of pride.