A feminist critique of Christian theology is likely to begin with the Creation narrative of Genesis 2 and 3. In the biblical Creation myth, the existence of evil and suffering in the world is attributed to the disobedience of Adam and Eve: succumbing to temptation, they eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The story has been subjected to continuous reinterpretation across every era of Church history, from Augustine’s theodicy, to Milton’s emphasis of Adam and Eve’s humanity in ‘Paradise Lost’, to scepticism arising from Darwin’s theory of evolution. Central to much of this exegesis is the role of Eve. That she was the first to disobey has often been used as a evidence of the inferiority of women, and read as a warning about the dangers of female sexuality: the fall of humanity is attributed to the weakness of women, and their tendency to seduce men away from virtue. This narrative of femininity as a corrupting influence contributed to the development of patriarchal hierarchy in the early Church, finding expression in the works of second century polemicists. However, ancient Christianity was certainly not a homogenous religion, and the gender dynamics of Genesis were not universally accepted. The literature of Gnostic sects decried as heretical by ‘orthodox’ bishops reveal a more nuanced picture, shedding light on consciously subversive attitudes towards the culpability of women.
The biblical text itself does not explicitly present Eve bearing greater responsibility than Adam for Original Sin. It is she who gives in to temptation - who first eats of the fruit, and gives it to her husband - but both are cast out of Eden, and it is the serpent who is depicted as deceitful and corrupting. However, there is misogynistic subtext in God’s pronouncement of punishment. Whilst both Adam and Eve are made mortal, and subjected to pains and toil, Eve’s sentence entails desire for her husband, who is to rule over her (Genesis 3: 16). This passage lends divine authority to the subservience of women as a just punishment for leading man into temptation. God’s rebuke of Adam reinforces this idea: ‘Because you have listened to the voice of your wife… cursed is the ground because of you’ (Genesis 3:17). Adam is punished not only for his disobedience, but for allowing a woman to influence him.
There is a sexual dimension to the eating of the forbidden fruit. Upon learning of good and evil, Adam and Eve experience shame, becoming aware of their nakedness for the first time. The theologian Augustine of Hippo (354-430AD) interpreted the Fall as evidence that sexual intercourse was always corrupt, even in wedlock. For Augustine, the stain sin was passed from one generation to the next in seminal fluid. All human beings were born of lust, and the phenomenon of arousal was proof that no sexual activity, and therefore no product of sex, could be without sin. Augustine did not assign blame to Eve in particular, but to human disobedience. However, his emphasis on the sexual connotations of Genesis endured, and gave rise to explicitly misogynistic treatments of Eve.
During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Latin Christendom was characterised by an obsession with purity, and a terror of spiritual pollution. The notion that sin could be sexually transmitted shaped attitudes towards marginalised demographics: leprosy was believed to be an outward expression of lust, and in Canon Law, sexual intercourse between Jews and Christians was considered tantamount to bestiality. In this climate, depictions of the Fall tended to emphasise the culpability of Eve, and more broadly, female sexuality. For instance, bestiaries included the story of ‘fire stones’ as an allegory for Original Sin: the mythical rocks are anthropomorphised and gendered, and when the female comes into contact with the male, both burst into flame. The stories are generally accompanied by a warning to men to avoid the dangers of female sexuality. This is not to say that biblical Creation myths were directly responsible for the development of misogynistic ideas; rather, such narratives shaped the way in which those ideas were expressed, and lent them authority.
In the early Church, the inferiority of women was not universally assumed. Women and men dined together, and there is written evidence that women preached and taught alongside their male counterparts. As ecclesiastical hierarchy began to develop from the second century onwards, the Church became increasingly patriarchal. Prominent theologians advocated the need for a single bishop for each congregation. Boundaries between the laity and the clergy were crystalised, and as such, women were excluded from holding institutional authority. Theologians often quoted an extract from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians forbidding women from speaking in Church. Against a female teacher in North Africa, Tertullian (155-240AD) argued for the ‘precepts of ecclesiastical discipline concerning women’, excluding women from ‘any masculine function’ such as priestly office. In his work on female attire, he draws an explicit association between the inferiority of women, and the culpability of Eve in the Creation story:
And do you not know that you are each an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity live too. You are the devil’s gateway: you are the unsealer of that forbidden tree: you are the first deserter of the divine law: you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God’s image, man… And do you think about adorning yourself over and above your tunics of skins?
Here, Eve is unequivocally responsible for the Fall of Man; the devil, in the form of the serpent, may have planted the seed of temptation, but Tertullian makes it clear that the woman’s susceptibility to him was the fault of her femininity, and that she alone is to blame for leading Adam astray. A less vitriolic expression of feminine culpability is found in the salvation theology of Irenaeus of Lyons (130-202). According to Irenaeus, Christ was the second Adam, who recapitulated the errors of history by assuming humanity and making it perfect. He understands the virgin birth as part of this process: just as humanity’s fall from grace was brought about by a woman, so must the means of its redemption be born of one.
The form of Christianity that would later prevail as orthodoxy was thus shaped by a narrative of feminine guilt. However, to suggest that these attitudes were universally accepted without question would be to ignore the diversity of early Christianity and its mythology. Irenaeus and Tertullian’s polemics against heresy are testament to the pluralism that characterised the second century Church. They accuse contemporaries of denying the humanity of Jesus, rejecting the Creator God as an evil demi-urge, and claiming to possess secret knowledge about the divine. Their theology was characterised by a dualist cosmology, according to which the material world was evil, and humanity contained a divine spark that would be the means of its salvation. In 1945, a collection of Coptic texts was discovered at Nag Hammadi, and its contents substantiated the accounts of ‘orthodox’ polemicists. The library revealed a rich mythological tradition that subverted Biblical narratives and stood in contrast to mainstream Christian teaching. The sects responsible for producing the Nag Hammadi texts are often described as ‘Gnostics’. They were initiatory movements, purporting to offer hidden knowledge, or ‘gnosis’, only available to the enlightened. Although there is considerable diversity within ‘heretical’ literature from this period, the group of movements categorised as ‘Gnostic’ shared a common Creation myth, that drew on Christian cosmology whilst consciously subverting it.
The gendered dimension of Gnostic mythology diverged significantly from that of Genesis. Central to Gnostic theology was the belief that the Creator god was not the omnipotent, omniscient, monotheistic being of mainstream Christianity. Rather, he was an evil demiurge who foolishly believed himself to be almighty. In The Secret Book of John, Christ appears to the apostle John and reveals hidden knowledge to him. He weaves a complex cosmology, comprised of numerous aeons, angels, and deities. The true God is called ‘The One’, or ‘The Invisible Spirit’ and cannot be comprehended by human beings. His thoughts take the form of lesser deities, beginning with Barbelo, described as the image of the ‘perfect and invisible virgin spirit’ through which all things are conceived. The divine thus contains both male and female elements, and the figure of the virgin mother becomes a powerful creative force rather than the means of redeeming fallen womanhood. The creator god worshipped by Christians was believed to be the son of a female deity called ‘Sophia’, or ‘Wisdom’. Female culpability is present here: Sophia disobeys the male Invisible Spirit by bringing forth an independent thought without his consent. Her child, Ialdabaoth, is misshapen and ignorant. However, there is no suggestion that femininity is inherently rebellious or susceptible to temptation. The true villain of the piece, Ialdabaoth, is a male entity who creates the rulers of the earth by ‘mating with himself’. The Gnostics understood the behaviour of the Old Testament god as the actions of this ignorant demi-urge. The passage ‘I am a jealous god and there is no other god beside me’ was considered evidence that another deity must have existed. The evils of the world were, therefore, not the result of human sin, but of a petulant creator who designed earth as a distorted image of the divine order.
The Biblical story of the first human beings is re-imagined in Gnostic scripture, giving rise to a very different gender dynamic. Seeking to retrieve the power that the demi-urge took from Sophia, God persuades Ialdabaoth to breathe his spirit into Adam, creating an enlightened human being. Thus, in a reversal of the biblical narrative, humanity is the means of the world’s salvation rather than the cause of its ruin. Ialdabaoth is jealous of Adam’s intelligence, and retaliates by casting him into ‘the lowest part of the whole material realm’. The gendered dimension of the Creation myth is similarly subverted. The story of Eve’s origin is complex, but put simply, she is depicted as the anthropomorphised figure of ‘Enlightened Insight’, sent to restore Adam’s knowledge to him. Ialdabaoth separates her from Adam, creating the first woman in the image of divine insight. In an attempt to take her power of enlightenment, he rapes her, impregnating her with two sons. It is through this act that sex enters the world. In this way, Gnostic mythology treats sexuality with as much, if not more, contempt than mainstream Christianity. However, it is not the product of female disobedience, but of violent masculine desire. As a final attempt to assert his supremacy, Ialdabaoth forces humanity to drink the ‘water of forgetfulness’, rendering them ignorant of their origins. Similar narratives are found in other Gnostic texts. In The Hypostasis of the Archons, it is the female spiritual principle who possesses the serpent and orders Adam to open his eyes to good and evil, in a striking subversion of the biblical Creation myth. The curse upon women is not presented as a just punishment, but as the retaliation of ‘the arrogant Ruler’. Gnostic mythology does not deny the biblical claim that woman was responsible for the disobedience of the first human beings; rather, it depicts this act of disobedience as justified rebellion against an oppressive, delusional ruler. The desire for divine knowledge becomes a feminine virtue that redeems man rather than ruining him. The fallen state of humanity is the result of a male deity raping an enlightened woman, precisely because he resents her enlightenment. Whilst the biblical figure of Eve has given rise to misogynistic tropes about female weakness, Ialdabaoth’s violence, obsession with power, and hatred of female intelligence is reminiscent of the 21st century notion of toxic masculinity.
Polemics against Gnostic heresy suggest that their mythology both reflected and shaped their attitudes towards women. Whilst ‘orthodox’ Christianity began to codify the authority of the bishop, Gnostic sects followed the principle of equality. They believed that religious authority was derived from enlightenment and revelation. Given that everyone who had been initiated was considered enlightened, no one had a greater claim to lead than anyone else. Irenaeus reports that Gnostics and other so-called heretics drew lots at each meeting to decide who would act as ‘priest’, ‘bishop’, and ‘prophet’. All initiates participated, including women, meaning that there was no gendered hierarchy. The eligibility of women as spiritual teachers is a recurring theme in Gnostic gospels. In ‘The Gospel of Mary’, Mary Magdalen teaches the disciples ‘hidden’ knowledge that Jesus revealed to her before his death. The author demonstrates an awareness that this was a controversial claim through the protestations of Peter and Andrew, who struggle to believe that Jesus would have spoken to a woman in private. Levi defends her on the grounds that Jesus ‘made her worthy’, declaring, ‘That is why he loved her more than us’. Evidently, the use of Biblical creation mythology to support the authority of men over women in the early Church did not go unchallenged.
It would be an over-simplification to depict Gnosticism as a proto-feminist alternative the misogynistic orthodoxy. As discussed, there was considerable diversity in early Christian communities, and there was no uniform orthodox theology. Clement of Alexandria identified himself as orthodox, and described men and women as ‘equal in perfection’, insisting that both genders receive religious instruction. Conversely, much of the literature classed as ‘Gnostic’ showed contempt for femininity. For instance, in the Paraphrase of Shem, Nature casts the power of fire from ‘her dark vagina’, and in the Dialogue of the Saviour, Jesus orders his disciples to ‘destroy the works of femaleness’. However, Gnostic literature is proof that Biblical mythology was not treated as immutable by every faction of early Christianity. The gendered dimensions of its cosmology were consciously subverted in the form of alternative myths. Where mainstream Christianity increasingly focused on the Fall as the result of female disobedience and seduction, prominent strands of Gnostic mythology depicted femininity as wise, enlightened, and redemptive.
