Augustine has been blamed for many things in the western Christian tradition that seem burdensome and unfair to modern people. He is the man whose doctrine of original sin condemned unbaptized babies to eternal damnation, the gloomy fashioner of a theology of predestination, the one who left a theological legacy of deep pessimism about embodiment and sexuality, and one of the most misogynist of the Fathers. Indeed, some of Augustine's writings, including De civitate Dei, De trinitate, and commentaries on Genesis, were enormously influential in the development of classical medieval theology, and deeply influenced both Protestant and Catholic doctrines of sexual morality, the family, and the role of women. Some prevailing prohibitions against women, especially having to do with women's bodies, have been traced to these works.
It is, therefore, not at all surprising that Augustine has been called to task by feminist scholars, including Mary Daly, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Elaine Pagels, and Margaret Miles, as the foundation of misogyny in western Christianity. All of these authors have shown in different ways the abiding influence of a few choice passages, such as the discussion in De Genesi ad litteram IX of women's natural subordination to men, including the much-quoted statement that women are "helpmates" to men only in the fact that they bear children; and the analysis of just how women are (and are not) in the image of God in De trinitate XII. The tendency among these critics has been to take the offending passages at face value, and to assume a sort of choice in Augustine's positions; Daly even calls him "cynical" in the nuances of his description of women's souls.
Other scholars, such as Kari Elisabeth B¿rresen, Silvia Soennecken, Jean A. Truax, F. Ellen Weaver, Jean Laporte, Gerald Bonner, and Tarcisius Jan van Bavel, have approached the same problematic texts for the purpose of contextualizing and explaining what Augustine really meant, and thereby finding a way to forgive him. In their opinion, Augustine did not really mean harm to women. Rather, in the context of his culture and the Christian theology he had inherited, much of it deeply anti-woman, Augustine had the insight and courage to assert an ultimate spiritual equality of women and men. This equality, it is true, functions only insofar as men and women share a disembodied spirit that is God's image in human beings, and does not apply to any of the characteristics, physical or mental, that are particular to actual human women, but it is an equality all the same.
Kim Power's comprehensive study of this fraught issue is, first of all, a wide-ranging and thorough synopsis of the major elements of the debate. Power has multi-chapter sections on Augustine's cultural and theological world, the story of Augustine's life and his relations with women both before and after his conversion to Catholic Christianity, the theoretical issues of the nature of women in Augustine's theology including the question of the imago Dei, and Augustine on the Virgin Mary. Power does not take passages from Augustine's work out of context, but neither does she use the context to deny his pernicious influence on the role of women in western Christianity. This in itself is a significant accomplishment, one which makes this book the clear starting-point for any investigation of aspects of the problem from now on.
But Power has done far more than bring together two sides of a debate which has generated scholarly activity for several decades; in the role of historian/anthropologist, she has offered a new vantage point from which to examine the issues. One excellent example of this is the description of Augustine's mother Monica in the context of a slave society; "slave wife" is the category Power applies. Augustine's enthusiastic praise in the Confessions for the way his mother fulfilled her role as wife shows that he accepts and assumes a master-slave relationship as one natural part of the role of women. In a discussion of women and public life Power points out an important, unexplored, consequence of the relegation of women to the private sphere, an activity in which Augustine participated particularly in his years as Bishop of Hippo: quoting Robert Markus, Power reminds us that "'privacy,' self-enclosure, was the 'most insidious form of pride' in Augustine's mature thought." (p. 235). With such an insight we can begin to see the subtleties of women's disadvantage in Christian theology and society: forcibly relegated to a state that is in itself inherently sinful.
Power's treatment of Augustine's letter to Ecdicia, in which he chides a married woman for taking on an ascetic life against her husband's will, is equally illuminating. Power notes that the one element of mutuality Augustine posited in marriage, the mutual obligation to marital sexual relations, here becomes an argument against a woman's self-actualization as an ascetic. Ecdicia, Augustine argues, is ultimately responsible for her husband's adultery, since she drove him to take a mistress. "Better a sexually active woman who yields the marriage debt to her husband whilst desiring continence, for continence will be imputed to her by God, than a proud and overly bold continent woman who drives her husband into eternal damnation." (p. 113). Ecdicia is the opposite of a slave-wife, and Augustine does not approve. Among the many levels of this complicated story, Power notes an indirect confirmation of the status and power of women ascetics. The very fact that this story evoked such a reaction from Augustine suggests the tensions ascetic women were creating in fifth-century Christian society.
But it is Power's analysis of Augustine on sexuality and the body that lead to her central conclusions. Like many critics of Augustine, even those who love him, she argues for a causal link between Augustine's own experience of sexuality in his early life and the distaste for the body and sex that marks his later theological writings. This is not new, but Power's real contribution here is the argument that the study of gender is by no means tangential to the development of "mainstream" Christian theology. Anthropologists know that sexual meanings are at the heart of cultural systems. Augustine's sexual meanings are evident at the very core of his anthropology, in his view of himself, in his understanding of the basics of human motivation, in his awareness of God's presence in the created world. But these sexual meanings are neither cynical, nor simple, nor easily explained away; and many problems in Augustine's writings, including his shunning of nuptial and erotic spirituality, are related. As Power concludes: "There is a poignant irony in the fact that it was Augustine, the man who argued so powerfully, and eventually persuasively, that sexuality belonged in Eden, who also made the desire to be loved by the beloved so suspect and so shameful, rendering it so tainted and dangerous that the erotic could never be permitted to symbolize the divine." (p. 239).
Power shows that Augustine's views on women are intimately connected with Augustine's conclusions on many different issues. She does so persuasively, neither patronizing nor defending her subject. Augustine, she argues, is strong enough to take all due blame and all the credit he has coming. It is our task to understand his legacy in its own terms, but with all of the tools we have working for us.