In ‘The Literal Meaning of Genesis’ Augustine of Hippo (354 AD – 430 AD) comments on the creation accounts of Genesis 1 and 2 to form judgements on the nature of biblical manhood and womanhood and to develop ideas about the body and human sexuality, focusing particularly on the distinction between the carnality of the flesh as existing in opposition to the ‘rationality’ of the mind and the soul. Augustine’s suggestions about manhood and womanhood as a result of his reading of the creation accounts can in some ways be seen to support the subordination of women, especially in light of his idealisation of male headship. However, it is significant that much of Augustine’s assertions about the roles of man and woman are not based exclusively on Genesis itself but are predominantly informed by the writings of the Apostle Paul, New Testament ideology, and Augustine’s own eisegesis. It is through this amalgamation of the Genesis creation accounts with New Testament concepts and personal convictions that Augustine’s stance is born, complicating the extent to which it can truly be argued that he uses the creation accounts of Genesis to support the subordination of women.
Augustine introduces the idea of the distinction between the body and the spirit, arguing that Genesis 1 demonstrates that the spirit preceded the body in creation. He argues that God made man’s spirit in his image, with “man” referring to both man and woman because of the “intimate bond uniting them”, and that the following “he created them male and female” of Genesis 1.27 is speaking of the physical body, which was not made in the image of God.1 Augustine therefore separates the body from the spirit and upholds both man and woman’s spirit as exhibiting the holiness of God, and their bodies — the woman’s in particular — as the troubling element. Because of his affirmation of the theory that the physical differences between man and woman symbolise the duality of man’s mind, with the masculine representing the organisational part of the mind, and the feminine representing the obedient, Augustine’s negative focus on the physicality of women and his distinguishment of it as somehow less than that of men through the suggestion that woman’s sexual characteristics would logically seem to preclude her from God’s grace of renewal could suggest an attempt to justify the subordination of women through the positioning of their bodies as inferior to men’s.2
In ‘Augustine: Sexuality, Gender and Women’, Rosemary Radford Ruether rightly points out that “despite Augustine’s theoretical position that both Adam and Eve have intellects, when referred to as a couple, men and women are continually treated as representing hierarchically graded “parts” of the self” which leads her to take the position that Augustine’s proposed stance on male-female relations is that of “master to slave, dominus to ancilla”.3 However, despite Augustine’s suspicion towards the female body, demonstrated by the repeated mentions of woman’s “physical qualities”, “physical side” and “external differences”, he nevertheless asserts that it is in “that part which is devoted to the contemplation of immutable truth” that the image of God is found, and that woman is not excluded from this.4 Thus, Augustine here is not attempting to use the creation account of Genesis 1 to remove women from the claim to godliness in spirit that men have and therefore justify the subordination of women and Ruether is perhaps too radical in her reading of the text to suggest that Augustine endorses a type of male domination akin to bondage over women in marriage.
The assertion that the first woman’s sole purpose was to be a childbearer, the transparency of which he argues is evident in God’s declaration in Genesis 1.28 that man and woman should “Increase and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it”, is one of the prime ways in which Augustine can be seen to be using the creation accounts to support the subordination of women.5 Augustine reaches this conclusion about woman’s God-given purpose through this rationalisation:
Now, if the woman was not made for the man to be his helper in begetting children, in what was she to help him? She was not to till the earth with him, for there was not yet any toil to make help necessary. If there were any such need, a male helper would be better, and the same could be said of the comfort of another’s presence if Adam were perhaps weary of solitude. How much more agreeably could two male friends, rather than a man and woman, enjoy companionship and conversation in a life shared together… Consequently, I do not see in what sense the woman was made as a helper for the man if not for the sake of bearing children.
(Augustine, Literal Meaning of Genesis, p. 150.)
Characterising man as woman’s superior in company, and alluding to him as woman’s superior in physical strength, Augustine concludes that the only possible nature of the help alluded to in Genesis 2.18 was procreative. But to come to this conclusion, he posits ideas about man and woman’s physical capabilities and the inferiority of heterosociality to homosociality that are not substantiated by either of the Genesis accounts. As male and female strengths and weaknesses — physical and otherwise — are absent from both accounts of the creation, Augustine’s claims, which he uses to support the further claim that woman was created to be man’s childbearer only, are dubious in origin, evidenced by the speculative tone of his commentary (“If there was any such need”, “How much more”). This addition of features not made explicit in the biblical text seems to point to a desire to thwart female exploration of activity outside childbearing that could indicate support of female subjugation, reinforced by his discomfort with the female form.
The speculative nature of much of Augustine’s writing in ‘The Literal Meaning of Genesis’ is also evident in his discussion of the events in the Garden of Eden that draws him to the characterisation of the first woman as devious. He writes that “using perhaps some persuasive words which Scripture does not record but leaves to our intelligence to supply” the first woman tempted Adam.6 These extrabiblical details which Augustine himself acknowledges as such but uses as basis for his arguments anyway, throw into question his motives regarding his understanding of biblical womanhood and more widely his feelings towards women generally. This is furthered by the fact that he is very liberal in his elaborations of what Genesis leaves out pertaining to the first woman’s internal life and notably sparing in doing so for Adam. Because of the very fact that in the instance of childbearing Augustine relies on what is not actually present in Genesis to inform his model of female responsibility, while he could be seen to be advocating for female subordination, it cannot be argued that this is through the use of the Genesis creation accounts.
Augustine also suggests that the first woman’s subjugation to Adam is present from the beginning of creation, stating “we must believe that even before her sin woman had been made to be ruled by her husband and to be submissive and subject to him”.7 However Genesis 3 makes it explicitly clear that only after their eating from the tree of knowledge is the woman subjected to Adam, and that this is her gendered punishment as God says that along with painful childbirth “your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you”.8 Because of the restrictive nature of the conception of the female role as solely pertaining to childbearing, Augustine’s choice to overwrite the biblical distinction between woman’s role before and after sin in favour of a totalising narrative on the female purpose strongly suggests a sentiment in favour of subordinating women. Ruether also concludes that Augustine’s attitude towards the first woman is such that “he is never able to really think about women as persons in their own right, but only in their relation to the male, either as rightly subjugated and submissive to the male or as wrongly tempting the male”.9 This is reinforced by Augustine’s attempt to naturalise female subjection to her husband in the earliest instance.
Despite this, it is clear from Augustine’s language that in his eyes, solely fulfilling the role of childbearing is neither a derogation of women or an expression of inferiority to the man; rather, it is a distinctly positive function, demonstrated by his referral to children as a “blessing” and “granted” by God.10 The positive stance he takes on childbearing thus undermines the idea that Augustine is advocating for female subjugation with the harmful or even abusive undertones that we as modern day readers might be inclined to read it as denoting. Thus, although his insistence on extrabiblical additions does betray questionable attitudes towards women, and the afterlife of his writings could be said to be reflected in arguably misogynistic attitudes in some Christian communities, in ‘The Literal Meaning of Genesis’, his attitude towards the female role is neither disparaging nor necessarily positioning her as the man’s inferior but is instead describing what he views to be neutral differences between the two.
Where Augustine can be seen to be using the accounts of Genesis to support the subordination of women is in his reconstruction of both Adam and Eve’s roles in the Fall which betrays a hostility towards the figure of Eve that could, and arguably did, operate in favour of female subordination. Augustine elaborates on Eve’s role while downplaying Adam’s role to rewrite the events in the Garden of Eden with emphasis on Eve’s frailty and Adam’s husbandly love, characterising the pair as primary sinner and follower respectively. David Hunter in A Companion to Augustine observes that Augustine points to human pride and selfishness without gender distinction as the motive for Adam and Eve’s disobedience of God, leading to both their participation in the eating of the fruit. He writes that “by attempting to take their salvation into their own hands, so to speak, they had rejected the grace of God and turned in upon themselves” and “by opting for autonomy, the first human beings had lost control even over themselves”.11 Indeed, Augustine includes Adam in his condemnation of the vices that precipitate man’s expulsion from the Garden, shown by his frequent use of “their” in his discussion of the couple’s faults. However, he specifically characterises pride as a female vice in his suggestion that there was “already in her [Eve’s] heart a love of her own independence and a proud presumption on [sic] self which through that temptation was destined to be found out and cast down”, a trait he does not explicitly attribute to Adam.12 Instead, he argues that Adam ate the fruit alongside Eve out of fear that she would “waste away without his support”.13
By mentioning Eve’s failure in particular, and especially implying pride to be an inherent feature in the first female human alone, Augustine casts the first woman as the more grievous transgressor, a sentiment concretised by his emphatic statement that “Sin came from the Devil, through the woman, to the man”.14 The syntax of this statement not only places man last in the order of sequence which has the effect of diminishing his role in the events, it also places the woman directly in-between man and the devil, visually showing that it is only through woman that man gains access to evil. This, along with Augustine’s allusion to her “persuasive” abilities implicitly paints the first woman as Adam’s corruptor. Through his conflation of the female body, represented by the figure of Eve, with the corruptive carnality responsible for defiling sex and subjecting humanity (more specifically, men) to the debasement of the mind by the body, Augustine’s imputation of innate disobedience to Eve could be used to support the subordination of women. This is furthered by Augustine’s use of the arbitrariness of the erection as the exemplar of the subjection of man’s mind to the carnality of his body as a consequence of the first woman’s sin, which implicitly links problematic sexual desire with womanhood. Paired with Augustine’s insistence on the supremacy of man in matters of spirituality, rewriting the first woman in this way could support the subordination of women by creating a binary of female weakness to male strength of character that would therefore justify the subjugation of women to male headship.
In the eminence of his writings in the formation of Christian theology, Augustine’s assertions about godly or ‘natural’ womanhood certainly seem to have perpetuated the subordination of women to a great degree in the centuries following his writing, as evidenced for example by texts such as the Malleus Maleficarum in the medieval period which oversaw a rise in associating the female with the occult, influenced by Thomas Aquinas’ work for whom Augustine’s writing was foundational. In spite of this, there is little in ‘The Literal Meaning of Genesis’ itself to support the view that Augustine was using the Genesis accounts expressly in support of the subordination of women. While his insistence on locating the responsibility for man and woman’s separation from God on the first woman’s carnality (as opposed to the exclusively spiritual nature of Adam) and therefore conflating the female body with distorted, postlapsarian sexuality certainly vilifies the first biblical woman and likely contributed to misogynistic attitudes towards women in the early Christian period, his conflictedness in simultaneously highlighting the centrality of woman’s role in a Christian marriage and diminishing her spiritual significance in relation to her husband suggests that he was not attempting to use the creation accounts of Genesis to justify the subordination of women as much as to provide an etiology of humankind’s fallen state.
In addition — and crucially so — because of the fact that his reading relies heavily on his speculation of what is left unsaid in the Genesis accounts, such as the critical exchange between Adam and Eve between her eating from the tree and his doing so, it is only to a limited extent that Augustine uses what is present in Genesis to form any conclusions about the nature of man and woman, which therefore challenges the ability to conclude that he uses the creation accounts to support the subordination of women.
Bibliography
Augustine, ‘The Literal Meaning of Genesis’ in Kvam, Kristen E., Linda S. Schearing and Valarie H. Ziegler, Eve and Adam: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Readings on Genesis and Gender (Indiana University Press, 1999), pp. 147-155
The Bible, New Revised Standard Version
Hunter, David. G, ‘Augustine on the Body’ in Vessey, Mark, A Companion to Augustine, (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), pp. 353-364
Ruether, Rosemary Radford, ‘Augustine: Gender, Sexuality and Women’ in Judith Stark Chelius, Feminist Interpretations of Augustine (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press), pp. 49-67
- Augustine, ‘The Literal Meaning of Genesis’ in Kristen E. Kvam, Linda S. Schearing and Valarie H. Ziegler, Eve and Adam: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Readings on Genesis and Gender (Indiana University Press, 1999), p.149.
↩︎ - Augustine, ‘Literal Meaning of Genesis’, p.149.
↩︎ - Rosemary Radford Ruether, ‘Augustine: Sexuality, Gender and Women’ in Judith Stark Chelius, Feminist Interpretations of Augustine (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press), p. 54, p. 57.
↩︎ - Augustine, ‘Literal Meaning of Genesis’, p. 149.
↩︎ - Augustine, ‘Literal Meaning of Genesis’, p. 150.
↩︎ - Augustine, ‘Literal Meaning of Genesis’, p. 151.
↩︎ - Augustine, ‘Literal Meaning of Genesis’, p. 152.
↩︎ - Genesis 3.16, NRSV.
↩︎ - Ruether, ‘Augustine: Sexuality, Gender and Women’, p. 56.
↩︎ - Augustine, ‘Literal Meaning of Genesis’, p.150.
↩︎ - David G. Hunter, ‘Augustine on the Body’ in Mark Vessey, A Companion to Augustine, (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), pp. 358-59.
↩︎ - Augustine, ‘Literal Meaning of Genesis’, p. 151.
↩︎ - Augustine, ‘Literal Meaning of Genesis’, p. 154.
↩︎ - Augustine, ‘Literal Meaning of Genesis’, p. 151.
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