Women Healing/Healing Women

The Genderisation of Healing in Early Christianity

Elaine Wainwright

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781845531355
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351223843
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

'Women Healing/ Healing Women' begins with a search for women who were healers in the Graeco-Roman world of the late Hellenistic and early Roman period. Women healers were honoured in inscriptions and named by medical writers, and were familiar enough to be stereotyped in plays and other writings. What emerges by the first century of the Common Era is a world in which women functioned as healers but where healing becomes a contested site for gender relations. By the time the gospels are written the place of women as healers is effectively erased. The book uses the historical and cultural evidence to re-read the gospel texts and discover healers in a woman pouring out ointment, healed women bearing on their bodies the language describing Jesus, and even in women possessed by demons.

Chapter 1
WHERE THEORY AND PRACTICE MEET: A WAY TOWARD TRANSFORMATION

It is usually at the edges where the great tectonic plates of theory meet and shift that we find the most dramatic developments and upheavals. When four tectonic plates of liberation theory – those concerned with the oppressions of gender, race, class and nature – finally come together, the resulting tremors could shake the conceptual structures of oppression to their foundations.¹

[P]erhaps it is at the margin, not at the center, where we can find authorization to work out alternatives that can remake experience, ours and others. In that sense, I suppose, the margin may be near the center of a most important thing: transformation. Change is more likely to begin at the edge, in the borderland between established orders.²

This chapter is concerned with theory, the development of a framework to shape analysis of the subject matter – women healing. It will, therefore, consider the interrelationship of these ‘great tectonic plates’ that Plum-wood acknowledges – gender, race, class and nature – in the development of a lens for reading. It also prepares the methodological ground for the interpretation of the wide range of texts and text-types that constitutes this study.

Such a movement between theory and practice is not simply a move from hermeneutic to methodology. As Beverley Skeggs acknowledges,

[m]ethodology is itself theory. It is a theory of methods which informs a range of issues from who to study, how to study, which institutional practices to adopt (such as interpretative practices), how to write and which knowledge to use. These decisions locate any knowledge product within disciplinary practices and enable and constrain engagement with other theoretical and political debates.³

The task is one of naming the ground or space of this investigation, not in a rigid way that would stifle exploration, but in a way that will enable creative praxis as sources are chosen and new interpretations undertaken. As this study begins, I am aware that its scope needs to be clearly articulated. The arena of consideration, healing, is vast, as has already been indicated in the introduction. The theoretical discussion of this chapter will enable the range of this particular study to be established in terms of the topic itself, the perspective of this particular interpreter,⁴ and the tools and approaches which will enable a particular reading or readings to emerge. Initially the very topic must be explored in order to determine the field in which this study will move and it is to this that I now turn.

Scoping Healing

Even a quick glance at dictionary definitions of the verb ‘to heal’ indicates that its usage belongs to a number of fields. One would expect the most basic definition, ‘to restore to health or soundness’,⁵ which links it primarily with the field of human health, illness, sickness and restoration to wholeness. The second definition given in this same text is ‘[t]o set right; repair…the rift between us’ and hence includes human relationships. A third definition is to ‘restore (a person) to spiritual wholeness’. What this definition draws to our attention is that healing is not concerned only with the intra-human or inter-human but can encompass the other-than-human, a point which will be taken up later in this study.

The Encarta Dictionary likewise gives the first two of its definitions to the medical aspect of healing, the making of a person or an injury healthy or whole.⁶ The third refers to the inter-human healing and a fourth to the getting rid of some ‘evil’ which goes beyond the scope of the previous categories.

A recognition of the multifaceted aspects of these dictionary definitions draws attention to the tendency today, particularly in the West and in a world dominated by the West, to focus healing only on the biomedical: a healing of a particular disease which has affected a particular part of a human body. Cure the disease and healing has been effected. Sargent and Brettell point to some of the causes of such a focus:

This medicalization occurs through such phenomena as language, the technological domination of the body, the subordination of alternative sources of knowledge and experience that are not derived from biomedicine, and the influence of market forces on medical practice.⁷

As a result of this, other possible understandings of the healing of the human body and the curing of diseases, in other eras and other locations, that took or take account not only of the body but also of the mind and the spirit have been marginalized in the thinking of the West.⁸ This study’s focus on healing in the Graeco-Roman world and early Christianity will need, therefore, to be attentive to the breadth of possible understandings of healing in those worlds, understandings that transgress the biomedical. As interpreter, I will need to allow aspects of healing other than the cure of disease to emerge in seeking to understand women healing in another time and another place.

Medical anthropology is an important contributor to our establishing of the scope of ‘healing’. This relatively new discipline has made clear that healing is, in the words of Coyle and Muir, ‘more than a clinical event’.⁹ Medical anthropological studies have shown that healing is a process which includes making meaning of life’s lesions.¹⁰ As such, its ambit is not only healer and patient but rather these actors within a socio-cultural context. A study of women healing will need, therefore, to give attention not only to women healers and women patients but also the meaning-making process in which they are engaged in a socio-cultural context where gender plays a very significant role in the construction of meaning.

Meaning-making has, in many eras and many societies both ancient and contemporary, significant links with religion, and the Graeco-Roman world was no exception.¹¹ While Hippocratic medicine may have distanced itself from the religious dimension of that society in order to develop a more ‘scientific’ approach, certainly in the society at large, such a distancing was inconceivable. And so, even as the dictionary definition would indicate, healing of the body in this project will be placed within the meaning-making system of the particular era and social group under consideration that will include the religious dimension even when these are in tension. Where women and gender intersect with these tensions and compatibilities will be of significance to this study.

Just as the contemporary discipline of medical anthropology provides significant insight into the establishing of the dimensions of healing appropriate for this study, so too does that of ecology. The language of healing, making whole and establishing or re-establishing wellbeing within the entire ecological system is one which is becoming more and more familiar in our day. Elias and Ketchman, for instance, use such language when they speak of the call ‘[t]o right the imbalance, fix the brokenness, heal the wounds, and become whole again’,¹² reminiscent of aspects of the definitions of healing evoked above. Those engaged in what Zana Daysh has established as the field of ‘health ecology’ extend or perhaps make more explicit what has begun to emerge even in dictionary definitions, namely that ‘health in its broadest sense’ can be understood ‘as a matter of energy, upheld by a spiritual force which necessarily encompasses all aspects of life of individuals and communities, and their environments’.¹³ Morteza Honari likewise emphasizes, in the same collection of essays, the significance of placing healing ‘at the centre of human and environmental interactions’.¹⁴

Some of the issues raised here will receive more detailed development within the hermeneutical section of this chapter. For the present, however, they have contributed to the establishment of the scope of healing particular to this study. Healing will not be considered as simply somatic, limited to a focus on a specific dis-ease and its cure and those engaged in that process as healer and/or healed. It will also be explored as socio-cultural, concerned with human meaning-making in particular contexts, and as ecological or environmental in its location in material worlds.

Si[gh]ting Gender

It has been demonstrated above in scoping the field in which this study will play, that the material world of bodies, their physical/biological wholeness or malfunction, their environment, and the socio-cultural world of meaning-making are intricately interwoven. There is no ‘out-there’ definition of healing that can be separated from the world-view/s of those who would define it. As a result, feminist anthropologists and historians have drawn attention to the gendering of healing, as material and as socio-cultural, in the past as well as in the present.¹⁵ Both women and men have been engaged in the healing process but often in quite different ways depending on how gender functioned within the meaning-making processes in their contexts.¹⁶ Recognition of such gendering gives rise to the specific focus of this study. Explorations of healing within early Christianity have taken little or no account of gender and so have not only skewed the resultant readings of this history but have contributed to the normalization and thereby the authorization of male-centredness in this particular aspect of life. They have participated, therefore, in the construction and maintenance of what Val Plumwood calls the ‘master’ paradigm of Western consciousness.¹⁷ It will be argued that, for the sake of women and the Earth, a study of the gendering of healing in early Christianity is not only opportune but urgent. Below, some of the factors that contribute to both the rationale for, and the scope of, a gendered study of healing will be made clear.

First, the gendering of healing in the past as in the present has been and is political. Medicine is a significant arena for the interplay of power in a society.¹⁸ The participation of women in health care systems both as healers and active patients has been and continues to be a source of women’s liberation.¹⁹ History, however, provides a more pervasive perspective, namely, that medicine and the health care system in which the process of healing is embedded have been among the most oppressive arenas of women’s lives across history. A study of the gendering of healing will need to be one which takes account of power but in a way which does not construct and maintain a dualistic oppression/liberation model. Rather the multiple nuances of this power will be more explicitly explored in the hermeneutical section below. A new reconstruction of women healing, taking account of the power dynamic, will enable the rich texture of ancient women’s participation in the fields concerned with healing in their societies to emerge in all their diversities.

A second factor which colours the study of the gendering of healing is that across contemporary societies, women are actively engaged in myriads of ways, depending on contexts, with ‘new creativity and passion’, Christina Feldman says,²⁰ in the healing of wounds of gender, ethnic, racial and colonial oppressions as well those of the planet. The particularity of this engagement from standpoints of women’s historical, social and cultural experiences, enables them to reconstruct, remap or revision women healing in a way that is not only significant for a vision of the past but will shape a different present and future. Women’s participation in this healing of wounds is not to be seen as a result of their greater affiliation to healing in a way that essentializes them.²¹ Rather, they contribute, as do men, as gendered historians of healing. This results from their engagement with the challenges of contemporary healing from the perspectives of their reflection upon their particular experiences of ecological, postcolonial, or gendered oppression and discrimination. It is women’s location as particular subjects which makes possible their particular reading of healing.

Hence, si[gh]ting gender in a study of healing cannot lead simply to an add women/add gender and stir approach. Rather, it will shape both what will need to be studied, giving particular attention to the dimensions of healing explored above, and the way in which it will need to be studied. It is this second aspect which now demands attention as some of the hermeneutical issues already raised and the way in which they will shape this study are explored.

Chan[g/c]ing Lenses – Shaping Vision

Feminist

As a critical feminist scholar seeking transformation or healing of human-human and Earth-human relationships, I am aware that I stand at this point in history. I am, therefore, conscious of ‘a globalized world increasingly interconnected and multilayered with meaning’.²² Such a location necessitates the construction of a hermeneutic for this reading of ancient women healing that is responsible and responsive to the complex issues of that world. Mary John, however, has raised some radically challenging questions in relation to first-world, Western women’s attempts to articulate their reading positions in response to the critiques that have emerged in contemporary feminist literature regarding the extension of gender analyses to include attention to race, ethnicity, class and other axes of difference. She advocates a more thorough questioning of our positionality than Haraway’s ‘situated knowledge’ would suggest.²³ Indeed, she points to the need for feminists to continually historicize both reading positions and knowledge even in the face of the frightening prospect ‘that the culture she was raised in may embody nothing worth saving’.²⁴

For the feminist scholar of early Christianity who stands within the contemporary Christian tradition, such a possibility may, indeed, be frightening since the tradition being studied is not just a historical artefact but the living tradition that may have nurtured her spirit and in aspects of whose gospel tradition she may continue to find meaning.²⁵ It is, however, a necessary stance if re-articulations of the Christian tradition and its history are not to serve a continuation of the oppressions inherent in the ‘master’ paradigm in which it was forged and which it embraced/embraces in different ways throughout its history. A transformative vision for a more holistic future for both humanity and the Earth community may not, however, readily emerge from a reading of the tradition and its historical documents.²⁶ In order not to impose such a vision, I find myself informed by Anne Elvey’s continual re-articulation of the ‘not-yet’ which she says needs to characterize an eco-feminist reading of the Christian tradition.²⁷ The unfinished nature of feminist, postcolonial and ecological dismantlings of the ‘master’ paradigm that is implicated in all our knowledge and our histo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Plates
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Where Theory and Practice Meet: A Way toward Transformation
• Chapter 2 Women Healing/Healing Women: A New Listening to Antiquity
• Chapter 3 Pharmaka, Magica, Hygieia: When Reality and Stereotype Meet–What Lies Beyond?
• Chapter 4 Telling Stories of Women Healing/Healing Women: The Gospel of Mark
• Chapter 5 Re-telling Stories of Women Healing/Healing Women: The Gospel of Matthew
• Chapter 6 Women Cured of Evil Spirits and Infirmities: The Gospel of Luke
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of References
• Index of Non-biblical Names
• Index of Modern Authors