did Jesus really think about women? The very question seems to invite anachronism. It seems to assume that Jesus thought about women in an analytical, politicized way. That, of course, is little short of absurd. Earlier ages and other cultures certainly debated the relations between women and men, and reached differing and conflicting conclusions. English readers will remember the extended debate on “sovereignty in marriage” in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and the Wife of Bath’s combative contribution. But something new and determinative happened in the late seventeenth–early eighteenth century which changed the debate forever. The first stage of feminist consciousness, writes Gerda Lerner, is “the awareness of a wrong.”61 Judith Lorber takes the matter further: “the long term goal of feminism must be no less than the eradication of gender as an organizing principle of post-industrial society.”62 This awareness of wrong, and the political analysis which follows from it, has its origins in the Enlightenment project. Writing in 1700, with an acute awareness of the constitutional implications of the Revolution of 1688, the Newcastle bluestocking Mary Astell was probably the first to argue that if absolute rule is illegitimate in the state, it ought also to be so in the family. She is wittily reversing the arguments of Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha, the textbook of Stuart absolutism.
Again, if absolute Sovereignty be not necessary in a State how comes it to be so in a Family? Or if so in a Family why not in a State, since no Reason can be alleged for the one that will not hold more strongly for the other? If Authority of the Husband, so far as it extends, is sacred and inalienable, why not that of the Prince? The Domestic Sovereign is without Dispute elected; and the Stipulations and Contract are mutual; is it not then partial in Men to the last Degree to contend for and practice that Arbitrary Dominion in their Families which they abhor and exclaim against in the State?63
Mary Astell’s sagacity and wit, summoning the revolution in English politics to the aid of her feminist agenda, is remarkable; but that is not the end of the story. We know that Astell had read Hobbes and Locke (the weakness of whose argument for domestic authority she here deftly exposes). Spinoza was to her probably no more than the name of a bogeyman. But the role of Spinoza’s metaphysics in the revolution in European consciousness—even, perhaps especially, among those who were eager to dissociate themselves from him—is undeniable. A contemporary of Astell who knew the work both of Pierre Bayle and Benedict de Spinoza was Bernard Mandeville, whose first prose work in English, The Virgin Unmask’d (1709),64 must have been music to Astell’s ears. Mandeville is fulsome about the utter defenselessness under the law of women trapped by marriage to cruel, selfish, and domineering husbands. He attacked at the same time both the rigidity of the English divorce laws and the doctrine of the indissolubility of marriage. He was convinced of “the parity of the intellectual organs in both sexes, and that woman’s wit is equal to man’s.” Mandeville, a native of Dort, settled in England in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution, bringing with him egalitarian notions learnt in Holland, to unite with the native Hobbesian radicalism.
It was, however, a revolution more fundamental and more radical than that of 1688 that brought the feminism of the early Enlightenment to its apogee. The Declaration of the Rights of Woman was Olympe de Gouges’s response to the exclusion of women from the French National Constituent Assembly’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (August 26, 1789). It earned Olympe, a butcher’s daughter and playwright, her day at the guillotine.
Consequently, the sex that is as superior in beauty as it is in courage during the sufferings of maternity recognizes and declares in the presence and under the auspices of the Supreme Being, the following Rights of Woman and of Female Citizens:
Article I: Woman is born free and lives equal to man in her rights. Social distinct can he based only on the common utility.
Article II: The purpose of any political association is the conservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of woman and man; these rights are liberty, property, security, and especially resistance to oppression.
Article III: The principle of all sovereignty rests essentially with the nation, which a nothing but the union of woman and man; no body and no individual can exercise any authority which does not come expressly from it (the nation).
Article IV: Liberty and justice consist of restoring all that belongs to others, thus, the only limits on the exercise of the natural rights of woman are perpetual male tyranny, these limits are to be reformed by the laws of nature and reason.
Article V: Laws of nature and reason proscribe all acts harmful to society; everything which is not prohibited by these wise and divine laws cannot be prevented, and no one can be constrained to do what they do not command.
Article VI: The law must be the expression of the general will; all female and male citizens must contribute either personally or through their representatives to its formation, it must be the same for all: male and female citizens, being equal in the eyes of the law, must be equally admitted to all honours, positions and public employment according to their capacity, and without other distinctions besides those of their virtues and talents.65
And so on, through another sixteen articles. What is clear, in article after article, is de Gouge’s almost casual identification of divine with natural law—Deus sive natura. Hers is a largely unconscious association of democratic politics, a priori egalitarianism, an abhorrence of hierarchies, and the new metaphysics of the radical Enlightenment. It is a heady combination, which, as one might expect, Daphne Hampson, in our own day, eagerly embraces.
One may believe of God that God is equally available to people in all times and places. Such is my position. That is to say I deny that there could be a particular revelation of God in any one age which henceforth becomes normative for all others . . . I am not a Christian because I do not credit, as I earlier put it, that nature and history could be other than closed causal nexuses or believe that there can be events which are in some way qualitatively different from other events.66
She goes on to point out that this a priori position has a compelling ethical dimension.
The question of the truth of the Christian picture of the world has increasingly come to be raised during the last two hundred years. In our age this has become an urgent question for many people and many others have left Christianity behind. The further question which feminism raises—to an extent which, I would contend, this has not been raised before—is that of whether it is moral . . . [or] . . . false to one’s belief in human equality.67
Anyone following the trajectory of feminism from Mary Astell to Daphne Hampson will be acutely aware that it begins a thousand miles from the world view of first century Jewry and moves inexorably away from it. Upon no presently agreed historical principle could Jesus be thought to have any place on that trajectory or even any inkling of the principles which governed it.
So, if Jesus was not—could not have been—a feminist, what did he think about women? How can we know? And does it matter anyway? It is a remarkable fact that traditionalists and feminists have found a degree of agreement on the subject. Both have supposed that he was at variance with the culture of his time. Their agreement involves divergent but related views of the significance of Jesus’s choice of twelve male apostles. Traditionalists see the choice of an all-male apostolate as crucially significant for future developments. It was an exceptional event, contrary they say to Jesus’s habitual attitude to women. As such it was determinative; it determined the constitution of the Apostolic Ministry for all time.
Wherefore, in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church’s divine constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren (cf. Lk 22:32) I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever [declaramus Ecclesiam facultatem nullatenus habere] to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.68
Pope John Paul II has made it
