Her Share of the Blessings: Women's Religions Among Pagans, Jews, and Christians in the Greco-Roman World. - book reviews

National Review, March 1, 1993 by Paula Fredriksen

Her Share of the Blessings: Women's Religions among Pagans, Jews, and Christians in the GrecoRoman World, by Ross Shepard Kraemer (Oxford, 275 pp., $24.95)

GOD THE FATHER, the Lord Jesus Christ--these masculine images for the divine have dominated traditional Western religions as men (rabbis, priests, bishops, preachers) have controlled their hierarchies. Does correlation imply cause? Would women's religious experience be different if God were "feminized"? Was it different, when ancient societies worshipped female as well as male gods?

In Her Share of the Blessings, Ross Kraemer grapples with these questions as an historian of religions. Concentrating on Mediterranean societies from the late classical period to the end of the Roman Empire in the West (roughly 400 B.C. to 400 A.D.), she sets herself two tasks: accurate description and explanatory analysis. The descriptive project is well realized. Professor Kraemer surveys the ancient evidence--literary, epigraphical, archaeological--and wrings from it some lively reconstructions of cultic activity, progressing chronologically from Greek festivals, to Roman urban observances, through Jewish practices (within Israel and without), to, finally, the varieties of Christian ones. (My favorite was the Eleusian haloa, a mid-winter female festival behind closed doors involving dirty jokes, raucous laughter, shouted obscenities, and genitalia-shaped pastries. The men sat outside, getting some of the pastries and none, one assumes, of the jokes.)

Professor Kraemer's speculations on what women might have felt or experienced while enacting these rites are models of historical caution. She frequently, and rightly, asserts that we just cannot know. She asks whether the religious experience of men can be securely known to be qualitatively different from that of women; alert to the perils of anachronism, she cautions against pressing ancient data into the service of modern political agenda. The data scarcely oblige even the relatively modest, and logically prior, efforts at description: again and again, Professor Kraemer points out where the evidence lets us down.

Women in pagan cults served as priestess and patron as well as devotee. Jewish women of the Hellenistic and Roman period likewise filled various roles. They could not be priests in the Temple at Jerusalem--but then, neither could most Jewish men: the job was hereditary within particular priestly families, and candidates had to meet physical qualifications as well. And while all Jews might be and doubtless were ritually impure much of the time (a condition caused, for example, by contact with a corpse, seminal emission, or childbirth), women had in addition the regular impurity imparted by menstruation. Temple service was thus out of the question. Synagogues, however, were not subject to the purity strictures of the Temple. Women evidently served as patrons and perhaps even officers of these institutions. And in the Therapeutic community outside Alexandria, Jewish virgins of philosophical disposition could participate on a level with the men of the community in a curiously monastic, extremely intellectual society.

Women both Jewish and Gentile were drawn into the new Christian communities. Jesus-as-feminist does not survive Professor Kraemer's historical scrutiny; and the triumphant orthodox Church was finally much more misogynist than either of its cultural forebears. But until the victory of orthodoxy--that is, until Constantine's patronage forever changed the political climate of faith the new religion had some three centuries of gloriously confusing variety. Christian women in "heterodox" communities may or may not have been apostles, priests, and bishops: the evidence, again, teases us here. Heroic virgins, charismatic martyrs, and energetic women preachers people this period. Professor Kraemer asks, of course, why.

This brings us to her second task: explanatory analysis. She draws on the work of anthropologist Mary Douglas, particularly the latter's analysis of social organization in terms of group and grid. Group, the horizontal axis of Professor Douglas's scheme, indicates social incorporation (strong group: the military; weak group: hermits); grid, the vertical axis, indicates degree of individual autonomy (high grid: low autonomy; low grid: high autonomy). Various types of societies are then plotted on these axes. Professor Kraemer lays out this scheme in her introduction, and endorses it as "extraordinarily useful for explaining the correlations between individual social experience and beliefs individuals hold about all sorts of things." This model, in other words, is what permits her both to speculate on the beliefs of the ancient women she studies and to account for their social behavior: if she can plausibly plot her subjects' grid/ group, the method can fill in where the data runs out.

This grid/group analysis runs like a bass clef throughout Professor Kraemer's book. She concludes each chapter by restating her historical descriptions in Douglasian social-anthropologese. The jargon obtrudes, but the goal--explanation--is laudable. To the question, Why did later Christianity not remain true to its egalitarian origins? she answers, "Such egalitarianism was fundamentally antithetical to the social structure and cosmology of any high grid society [e.g., late Roman society], and that, it seems to me, is as sufficient and persuasive as any answer."