John's Lives: Sixth-Century Patterns

John's treatment of women in the Lives of the Eastern Saints was typical of his day. He devotes only a few of his chapters to female rather than male ascetics; and although he mentions numerous cases of deeply religious laywomen, he brushes over these without detailing them. Elsewhere in his Lives, womankind appears in her more familiar guise: weak, feeble minded, and sister to Eve.

Women in general fall outside the scope of John's collection. But he does provide us with occasional glimpses of women's experiences, and these are not without insight: the grief of the barren women who seek help from his holy men and the equally desperate joy when a child is born to them.^[51] John veers in these instances between the specific and the universal: motherhood in marriage was the only socially acceptable occupation by which a woman could justify her existence, apart from asceticism. But the social stigma of barrenness was a paradoxical one. In the ascetically minded view of John's day, the blessing of children was a dubious gift, if not futile. Celibacy was the higher achievement. Motherhood might be necessary, but it brought women only grudging praise. The connection John misses is that between these childless women with their frightened prayers and the extraordinary number of possessed women who turn to his holy men for exorcism. Instead, he simply takes

for granted, without seeking a cause, that women and girls are the ones most susceptible to demonic madness.^[52] Childbearing and insanity are the two main reasons John presents for women's recourse to holy intercession; these are the contexts in which they are seen.

John does not portray women as intrinsically evil, corruptive, or destructive. But as if to echo Tertullian's sentiments, John presents women as passive, even unwitting, instruments of Satan's wiles: they are literally the devil's gateway, the path by which evil can most effectively cause the downfall of holy men. The blessed Tribunus was sorely endangered when a landlady attacked him "with all the lasciviousness and violence of impurity and adultery." His victory in the situation gave proof of his spiritual fortitude.^[53] Not without reason did the stylite Maro forbid women to enter the enclosure of his column, demanding instead that they shout to him from beyond the enclosure wall if they desired counsel.^[54]

John highlights the ambiguity found in the views of the wider church. He is quick to honor women of virtue, but these are presented as particular individuals for him; women in general are ready tools for the Adversary. He sets the two views side by side and yet misses the irony of doing so. Thus he dedicates an entire chapter of his Lives to the "believing queen" Theodora.^[55] Here and in other chapters, John praises Theodora for her aid to the Constantinopolitan refugees,^[56] her perseverance in seeking counsel from holy men, and her piety. Laywoman and empress, with a Chalcedonian husband and the obvious disadvantages of her past, Theodora is yet presented by John as a model Christian. And when later, after her death, the Chalcedonians tried to desecrate her good works, it is no coincidence that they chose to do so by polluting the palace of Hormisdas, sending into it "some women with their husbands, and others who were not chaste, and filled the place where the blessed men lived, where the sacrament and service of God used to be performed."^[57] A sudden fire turned the tables, "purifying" the holy place and killing some of the women. John does not hesitate to call this divine justice.

Such incidents in John's Lives are relatively few when compared, for example, with John Moschus' Pratum spirituale . Nonetheless, in his most bizarre account of temptation by the devil, John plainly states that seeing the image of the Blessed Virgin in any woman is folly. John's story of two monks who encounter Satan in the guise of Mary's image is an unusual one,^[58] and not least because he so rarely discusses fallen monks or nuns.

Jacob and his spiritual brother, the same two monks who had been forced to establish a sanctuary for exorcism, roused the jealousy of the Evil One, who then contrived an ingenious downfall for them.^[59] One

night from among the crowds of possessed persons who slept in the sanctuary awaiting a cure, Satan chose a young woman "of worldly appearance."

Her accordingly the demons took, and they clothed her in awe-striking forms of phantasmal rays; and they led her up and seated her on the bishops' throne. . . . Then they filled the whole martyr's chapel again with phantasmal forms, as if forsooth they were angels of God.^[60]

Meanwhile, some of the demons entered where the holy men were sleeping. "Emitting rays with the appearance of light," they roused the two monks and exhorted them to make haste for the chapel, explaining, "the holy Mary the God-bearer has been sent to you, with a great host of angels." Seizing some incense they flew to the chapel, where they found demons in the likeness of "angels of brilliant light," and the woman enthroned with "a semblance of light flashing from her." Fear and awe stole their wits, and commanded by the demons the monks prostrated themselves in obeisance before the unholy sight. Worse sacrilege, however, was yet to come. The young woman proclaimed her identity as Mary the Mother of God, claiming that Christ had sent her to ordain them presbyters. The two monks thought this vision had come to them as an act of special grace, and they knelt before her as she performed the ordinations.^[61]

At once, the demons filled the air with laughter; and the phantasmal vision faded, revealing not the Blessed Virgin but a simple Greek girl seated on the bishops' throne. Jacob and his brother were mortified. They fled to John of Tella, who heard their confession (with suitable astonishment) and laid three years penance on them. Thenceforth the two monks "led even more severe lives than before, with sorrow and tears," until at last they were absolved of their guilt in the strange affair.^[62]

John has no blame for the woman herself. She is already possessed by demons before the episode takes place; she is "unaware even herself" of what is happening; and she is not responsible for what is said, since "the fiend spoke in her."^[63] She is a mute puppet, instrument for but not party to the wiles of Satan. The arresting point, however, is that these monks do not fall into sexual sin, as so often happens in hagiography; they sin theologically, an altogether different theme of women as the source of evil. That the Virgin Mary should command her own worship, as if she were not exalted but divine; that she should further dare to consecrate men to the priesthood, an authority granted to no woman, not even herself (as Epiphanius of Salamis and others enjoyed recalling): such ideas could only be the work of the devil.

John's account of the feigned image of Mary is his most lurid state-

ment regarding the potential dangers of women. Fittingly, it pinpoints the church's paradoxical attitude towards women. For the guilty woman here is very much a sister to the crowds of women John leaves undifferentiated elsewhere. She is nameless; she comes to the holy men because she is possessed; she is a source of evil to these monks through no fault of her own, no will of her own, and no knowledge of her own.

In his portrayal of women as instruments of Satan, John did occasionally, as in the case of Tribunus' would-be landlady, evoke woman in the image of Eve. Yet, what John tells us of women's actual involvement in the Christian community more often directly contradicts this portrayal. Thus we learn from John's Lives , apart from the chapters about holy women, that women in all ranks of society were involved in the religious affairs of the community. In the cases of Peter^[64] and the traders Elijah and Theodore,^[65] pious sisters living private religious lives brought them to their conversions. From "young girls" to "old women," John's cities and towns did not lack in good works by Christian women. Indeed, as if not seeing his own contradictions, John writes about pious wives who are crucial for the holy work of their husbands. At times, it is women specifically in their roles as wives and mothers who surpass all others in the quality of their religious practices.^[66] One such woman was Maria, wife of Thomas the Armenian.^[67] John tells us little about her other than to mention her work setting up a convent in tandem with Thomas' monastery, to which she brought her daughter and the other women of the household as companions in the monastic life.

Maria is named by John; otherwise the women in these brief citations are not. He mentions them in passing in the course of his accounts of their brothers or their husbands or their sons. Their individual identities are not important to him, although he clearly affirms their importance to the life of the church community. Further, unlike the few he presents in the image of Eve, John tells us that these devout women act by their own choice. They know their vocations and they carry them out.

John's account, then, of Satan at work through the image of Mary is not so outlandish as it might appear. In a work such as the Lives of the Eastern Saints, a work whose basis lies in experience rather than in stereotype or didacticism, the use of Mary's image rather than Eve's for admonitory purposes is surprisingly appropriate. John's encounters would suggest that if women represented a threat to the Christian community of his times, they did so under Mary's aegis, by their capacity for worthiness, and not through the inheritance of Eve. By their competence and fortitude, women themselves belied the church's stance against them.