John and Women: Implications of a Vision

In John's stories of these women, we can see not only the perspective of his presentation and its circumstances, but also its consequent meanings. The contrasts between his treatment of women and those in other works of this same genre of hagiographical collections are marked.^[112]

Palladius would apparently urge women to lead separate lives for the good of all rather than by reason of devotion to God. Separated into groups, as convent communities, his female ascetics quarrel constantly and require male supervision; but they are prone to vainglory whether alone or in a cenobitic practice.^[113] Those women in Palladius who seem most successful in their ascetic pursuits lived anchoretic, enclosed lives.^[114] Palladius is willing to praise an active role only among women of high social standing and wealth, advantages of serious import at a time when asceticism was just becoming established within the sociopolitical structure of the empire.^[115] His praise for the dignity of Amma Talis and for the convent she governed appears in his collection as if it were a concession to an unstereotyped reality. It is the exception to his rule.^[116] Palladius keeps his readers ever-mindful that women, ascetic or otherwise, are a continuous source of sin.^[117]

Theodoret's women ascetics are unobtrusive to the degree that they barely figure in his work, except in affirmation of a passive presence.^[118] Enclosed, they intrude neither into the temporal world nor into the workings of the church within the world. Their devotional presence is their only acknowledged role. Theodoret does tell us that holy women deserve higher praise than holy men, since theirs is the feebler gender;^[119] yet the brief glimpses he provides reveal that in fact these women underwent grave feats of endurance, both physical and spiritual. One finds here a "chosen type" of holy woman, well tailored to suit the interests of an authoritarian ecclesiastical structure.

The treatment by John Moschus is the most stereotyped of these authors. His women characters, whether ascetics or not, are presented al-

most invariably in relation to the sin of fornication. Sometimes they bring it about through their own intrigues;^[120] most of the time, however, they are inadvertent, unwilling objects of lust, who seek to prevent or escape the foul crime.^[121] Although Moschus plants the guilt firmly on womankind, it is in fact his male characters who weaken in the face of temptation, or who find themselves tormented beyond endurance by their sinful thoughts. Female victims frequently labor to save the souls of their would-be rapists. At the same time, Moschus laces his tales with adoration for the Virgin Mary, whose place in popular religion is presented as both crucial and mandatory.^[122] But this is Mary as champion of orthodoxy and champion of chastity; her ascendency is violently belligerent. As such, she bears little if any resemblance to her female devotees. This powerful image of Mary is portrayed apparently at the cost of possibilities for ordinary women. These Moschus has reduced to a one-dimensional existence.

The contrasts of these cases to those of John of Ephesus are at once apparent. Even while following established ascetic patterns—as pilgrim, charity worker, recluse, or nun—his women are not stereotypes. Their ascetic modes encapsulate the variety of practices he surveys in his more detailed and numerous reports of holy men.

The dependence of John's pragmatism on the needs created by crisis is at its most obvious in these accounts. The irony in his traditional use of language about women, so contrary to what he tells us his holy women do, serves to highlight the opposition between society's values and institutions, on the one hand, and human capacity, on the other. In accord with the earliest churches, grateful for the witness women offered as missionaries and martyrs, the Monophysites in the sixth century needed women's contributions more than they needed the institutional advantages of excluding women from their structural ranks and of restricting them to a passive presence such as that which Theodoret glorifies. John's treatment of his female subjects clarifies his views on the Monophysite situation more sharply than his treatment of men, if only because the roles and activities of his male subjects are not extraordinary to their place in society or in the church.

Far from writing a simple devotional collection, John presents the ambiguous impact of people during a pivotal era. His own missionary works in Asia Minor (with compromisingly Chalcedonian sponsorship); the ex officio ordinations performed by the "Fathers" of the Jacobite church, John of Tella, John of Hephaestopolis, and Jacob Burd'aya; the authoritative activities of his women; all of these had an impact of a kind. Motivated by faith, performed for the sake of the Christian body,

their actions were all subversive to the institutions of the state church as it existed, despite being dedicated to it. In the case of the ordinations, the results were as drastic as the step itself: a "new" church was born. The case of the Monophysite missions in Asia Minor proved ultimately ambivalent, since it was a politically successful endeavor for both sides: for the Monophysites, because of the glory and renown it cast on their leaders and traditions, as shown especially in the accounts of these missions in the later chronicles; and for the Chalcedonians, since the converted areas of Asia Minor apparently functioned as Chalcedonian. The case of women, however, laid bare the contradictions of the Monophysite cause. For, just as the early church had done in its time, the Monophysites drew profitably on the strengths of those such as Euphemia or Susan but did not finally incorporate such strengths into the structural format of their own church. Although John called for extreme steps in response to the events of his time, no call is made to give women major institutionalized positions in the church.

Like John himself, the women he writes about are empowered by their personal inspiration, but they are propelled by their times into an arena greater than they had foreseen or chosen. They fit into John's scheme because they respond to the situations at hand through their relation to God and not from their relation to the ascetic "institution" or church structure. They take the crisis upon themselves as their own. John does not change the values he is advancing for these women; rather, they bring his message to fullness. It is both practical and propagandistic for John to celebrate women for deeds such as those in the Lives . However, John's own prejudices—evident in his use of language, and in the vivid manipulation of Satan appearing in the Virgin Mary's image—set limits on his zeal and foreshadow the results. Rules change; but the immediacy of crisis does not necessarily call for change in existing structures.

The Lives of the Eastern Saints are the product of John of Ephesus' admiration for his comrades. In them, he reasserts the unique potency of asceticism as a power to be channeled into the world, and thus he affirms the ascetics' place as participants in society. At the same time, sixth-century asceticism existed in relation to a society born of specific factors: the mature self-confidence of the ascetic movement and a consequent responsive fluidity of structure. John's treatment of women ascetics points to just how flexible institutions could be. The institutional partnership of asceticism and ecclesiastical organization was strong enough and stable enough to absorb even such threatening flexibility as the sanctioning of authoritative leadership for women. The sanctioning

was itself a response to crisis. But the situation allowing women certain roles of impact was possible only in a period of grave unrest. It was not to become a permanent pattern. Even during the period of crisis, women's roles, although expanded, were still at the periphery of church activities. They might head communities or dispense charity, but they did not become institutionalized leaders or gain any positions in the church hierarchy.