Band of Angels

The Forgotten World of Early Christian Women

Kate Cooper

• Editore: Atlantic Books
• Anno: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781848873315
• Argomento: History
• Categoria: World History

In Band of Angels, Kate Cooper tells the surprising story of early Christianity from the woman's point of view. Though they are often forgotten, women from all walks of life played an invaluable role in Christianity's growth to become a world religion.

Peasants, empresses, and independent businesswomen contributed what they could to an emotional revolution unlike anything the ancient world had ever seen. By mobilizing friends and family to spread the word from household to household, they created a wave of change not unlike modern 'viral' marketing.

For the most part, women in the ancient world lived out their lives almost invisibly in a man's world. Piecing together their history from the few contemporary accounts that have survived requires painstaking detective work. Yet a careful re-reading of ancient sources yields a vivid picture, and shows how daily life and the larger currents of history shaped one another.

This remarkable book tells the story of how a new way of understanding relationships took root in the ancient world. By sharing the ideas that had inspired them, ancient women changed their own lives. But they did something more: they changed the world around them, and in doing so, they created an enduring legacy. Their story is a testament to what invisible people can achieve, and to how the power of ideas can change history.

Contents

Preface

1 Looking for Chloe

2 The Gospel of Love

3 The Galilean Women

4 ‘The God of Thecla’

5 A Martyr in the Family

6 The Emperor’s Mother

7 ‘The Life of Angels’

8 A World Apart

9 The Desert Mothers

10 The Queen of Heaven

Epilogue

A Note on Translation

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

A Note on the Author

Preface

In the house where we lived when I was a child, my bedroom was a tiny room at the top of the stairs. It had space for only a bed and a little table, but it holds a luminous place in my memory. It was there that my mother and I engaged in long talks about serious questions. We debated whether the Narnia children could really be friends with a lion, and whose fault it was that Juliet and Romeo did not live happily ever after.

One of these talks took place not long after the death of my grandmother, my mother’s own mother. With the fierce and selfish love of small children everywhere, I had seen the wider principle behind this first exposure to death. A thing that could happen to my grandmother, I reasoned, could also happen to my mother, the indispensable person around whom the whole universe seemed to revolve. I never entirely recovered from the shock of that thought.

In retrospect, I admire the simplicity with which my mother spoke to this terrible awakening. She had recently discovered a secret, she told me. The love that bound her to her mother, she now knew, was strong enough to unite them in death as it had in life. Her mother was still with her, and would remain with her always. By a wonderful chain of connection, I too was bound in with them, and the love between us was a thread that could not be broken. One day, I would follow them both – my grandmother and my mother – to a place beyond our imagining, where they would be waiting for me. I was not to worry, she told me, about what it meant to say that such a place existed. No one knew much about it, but the details were beside the point. The thing to remember was that love is more powerful than death.

I recognize now that the whole conversation, as it unfolded in my bedroom, was an act of bravura on my mother’s part. It was a gambit, at the end of a long day, to untangle a child from the day’s worries and to set her on the path towards sleep. At the same time, it was an attempt to tame the pain of loss, the loss that she felt as a daughter whose own mother had died. By finding the connection between her own mother’s life and that of her child, she was able to find a place for her grief in the coming and going of generations. In trying to settle a restless child, she had tested the limits of her own understanding of the world, and this had allowed her to glimpse a luminous truth.

Years later, when her grandchildren came into the world, my mother remained fascinated by the connection she had seen between the waxing and waning of life. As she neared her own death, she became more and more certain that her own departure from this life was a necessary and fitting end to the role she had played bringing new life into the world. To the end, she maintained that the flow of time and the handing on from generation to generation are what make life what it is, and it is good.

My mother grew up in the Deep South during the Great Depression, and along with a legacy of plain-spoken wisdom handed from mother to daughter, she was heir to a great southern patrimony of storytelling. When I was a child, the fact that she was a teller of tales seemed to be the most natural thing in the world. To an unsuspecting ear, the telling of stories never seemed to follow a plan. It seemed to happen in conversation quite naturally. Stories welled up at just the moment when they were needed, to help make sense of a problem or situation in our own lives that was being talked about. They were a tool to think with. Remembering how earlier members of our family had met similar challenges was a way of keeping their memory alive.

Yet there was a logic to how the stories came up in conversation. The cycle of family stories was a kind of storehouse of hopeful thinking and advice on how to cope with difficult situations. Stories about the Depression tended to involve low-cost fun at family parties. The more painful stories were angled to highlight the generosity and courage of earlier generations, or to call attention to examples worth imitating. It was as if the women of our family had sent a message in a bottle down the stream of time, to tell us what they had learned about the world.

Many of my mother’s stories were from her own childhood, but others reached back further, to her grandmother’s youth during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Perhaps because they were handed from mother to daughter, the stories tended to revolve around the women of the family. As daughters and granddaughters remembered them, our foremothers formed a parade of heroines set against a kaleidoscope of changing circumstances. They had shown spirit in the face of great and small tragedies. Babies and children, including two of my mother’s own siblings, had died of fever. Husbands, sons, and brothers had been killed in war, or – worse – by the lawless vigilante groups who ruled isolated rural communities during the Reconstruction. The widows in my family had not fainted in drawing rooms. They had worked tirelessly, in the face of illness and other dangers, to protect and sustain the lives of those who depended on them.

It was a landowning family, so they had responsibility not only for children but for a community of male and female dependants. Some of the stories celebrated the leadership of the family’s matriarchs, often in difficult circumstances. Others remembered the pluck of women who had worked long hours in the households of my family’s history: servants and, in my great-great grandmother’s time, slaves. It was not all sweetness and light. A frequent moral was that the person in charge in any situation was not necessarily the one who had the most common sense. Even our heroines had had failings: the fact was acknowledged with affectionate laughter, but not dwelt upon. For the most part, the stories tended to idealize their protagonists, and to encourage the idea of making the best of a bad lot.

I do not remember when or how it was that I became aware that the fearlessness of our family heroines was bound up with their religious faith. It seemed clear that theirs was a god from whom they could draw extraordinary strength. Yet there was a paradox here. These women had lived in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Alabama, an environment known not only for its spirited women, but also for its men-folk’s tendency to impute inferiority to the ‘weaker’ sex. To the untrained eye it looked as if the Church had tended to be on the side of the men. If one reads the standard histories, the world of my great-grandmother was one in which wives were subject to their husbands, children were seen but not heard, and the Bible was used to keep the women and children in their place.

But the world of stories handed down from mother to daughter was somehow different to the world of the standard histories. It was a parallel universe, one in which female good sense would always have its day, and the opinions of fathers, husbands, and the clergy were taken with a grain of salt. In reality, our heroines had had to hold their ground repeatedly in the face of male arrogance. But if this fact was acknowledged in the world of stories, it was thrown off with a wry observation about men’s inability to perceive the superiority of women. In my mother’s day, the joke was that Fred Astaire was the greatest dancer in the world, but Ginger Rogers did everything Fred did backwards, and with high heels on.

There were one or two skeletons in the family closet where the men-folk were concerned. Certain husbands and sons had caused pain and suffering to their wives and mothers. But for the most part, these unedifying characters were quietly written out, except where their failings offered a valuable moral lesson. I realize now, remembering how the aunts and matriarchs talked, that there were two versions of the family’s history. In one, the men strode about doing important things, and the women were barely in view. But the women’s version paid equally scant attention to the men. If men had more power than women, this did not mean they were more important.

It did not occur to me at the time as something unusual, but my mother and her sister had quite a distinctive way of reading the Bible. The Bible stories that came up again and again in conversation were those in which Jesus defended the weak or put the arrogant in their place. He had been a great teacher, and yet his message was marvellously simple. It seemed to boil down to loving one’s neighbour and trying not to think too much about one’s own importance.

The most troubling of the stories of Jesus was about his visit to two sisters, one called Mary, like the mother of Jesus, and the other Martha. Martha seemed to be like my own mother’s sister, older and more responsible. When Jesus came to visit their house, Martha organized hospitality not only for him but for the rag-tag entourage who accompanied him. Mary, by contrast, was like my mother: younger, somewhat impetuous, willing to talk all day about ideas and a bit resentful when asked to get back to the ‘women’s work’. In the story, Mary sat at the feet of Jesus drinking in his marvellous preaching while her sister Martha saw to food and drink for the visitors. Martha became agitated about this, and mentioned it to Jesus. But instead of asking Mary to help her sister, Jesus told Martha that Mary should be praised for caring more about his preaching than about giving him supper.

This surprising answer was the subject of much debate when I was growing up. Should we be delighted that Jesus had taken up for the sister who could not quite manage to do what was expected of her, or should we be irritated at his willingness to take for granted the ‘woman’s work’ of feeding him and his disciples? The story left an unsolved problem hanging in the air, and this made it interesting.

Curiously, the boys and men in our world seemed to hear the story differently. For them, the story was simpler. Their attention was captured by Mary’s desire to be close to Jesus, but not by Martha’s shock at a guest who was prepared to belittle her hospitality even as he accepted it. We found it odd and somehow reassuring that the Bible story held a message – a little thorn of moral difficulty – that only the women seemed to ‘get’.

I learned much later, when I became a historian, that there is a reason for these ‘secret messages’ to one group of readers or another in the Bible. Most historians now believe that many biblical narratives did not originate with a single writer. Rather, many of the books, such as the Gospels which tell the story of Jesus, were a collective effort. At first, stories were handed down orally from parent to child, or teacher to disciple. Later, as the people who had known Jesus began to g...