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ASCETICISM and WOMEN's FREEDOM in CHRISTIAN LATE ANTIQUITY: Some Aspects of Thecla Cults and Egeria's Journey

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ASCETICISM and WOMEN's FREEDOM in CHRISTIAN LATE ANTIQUITY: Some Aspects of Thecla Cults and Egeria's Journey ASCETICISM AND WOMEN'S FREEDOM IN CHRISTIAN LATE ANTIQUITY: Some Aspects of Thecla Cults and Egeria's Journey Hiroaki ADACHI* How women involved with history? Recently, there have been many attempts to scrutinize the women's experiences in history. ln this article, I try to reconstruct the women's traditions in late antique Christian society in the Mediterranean World, by reading some written materials on women, especially about Saint Thecla and a woman pilgrim Egeria. First of all, I briefly summarize the new tide of the reinterpretations of the late antique female hagiographies. In spite of the strong misogynistic tendency of the Church Fathers, Christian societies in late antiquity left us a vast amount of the Lives of female saints. We can easily realize how some aristocratic women had great influence on the society through ascetic renunciation. However, we should bear in mind the text was distorted by male authors. On the account of the problem, I pick out the legendary heroine Thecla. She is the heroine of an apocryphal text called the Acts of Paul and Thecla. In the Acts, she is really independent. She abandons her fiance and her mother and follows Paul in the first part. On the second part, Paul disappears and she baptizes herself in the battle with wild beasts. At that time, crowd of women encourage her. Though there have been many disputations about the mythological Acts, all scholars agree with the "fact" that late antique women accepted the Thecla Acts as the story for themselves. In spite of serious condemnation of Tertullian, Thecla cults flourished throughout the late antique times and a woman pilgrim Egeria visited her shirine Hagia Thecla in Asia Minor. She left us a precious testimony of "real" woman in the ancient times. The analysis of her using the grammatical subject "ego" in her diary is my original idea. Keywords: feminism, linguistic tum, folklore, post-structuralism, subject * Lecturer, Nara University Vol. XLI 2006 61 Women's Tradition in History On 15 August, 1945, my mother's younger sister, my aunt, was in her death bed. When my mother came to her and told her that Japan was defeated and the war was finished, surprisingly, she suddenly waked her body up and shouted "Banzai!" Then, she seemed to be really relieved and spent happy two days until she died. A week later, my mother, who had been pregnant, gave birth to a daughter, that is, my elder sister. Talking with my father, my mother named her daughter Tamiko, which means the daughter of democracy. 1 All of these things occurred before Douglas McArthur's occupation of Japan and I can confirm this story is true because I have repeatedly heard it from my mother directly and she still testifies it. This is a quite different picture of the day of Japanese surrender that we used to watch on the TV programs, which always epitomize the scene of people grieving as if all Japanese did so. Regretfully, I could not have realized the particular nature of my family myth before I met the recent interpretations about the ancient female hagiographies. Before that, I had felt my mother's story was a kind of boring Old Wives' Tale. However, after reading several feminist interpretations on the ancient female saints in the east-Mediterranean world, I became to think that there might be a sort of historical "truth" behind this Old Wives' Tale. Women seem to have been telling quite different histories from men telling. Just a sick-teenager girl without any high-education like my aunt was able to give vent to her own emotional feeling. Probably, so was the Christian history in ancient times. In this article, I will pick out several women's testimonies in late antiquity, especially from the Thecla cults. To begin with the article, the general outline of the growth of the female ascetics and pilgrims in late antiquity will be introduced according to the newest feminist or post-structuralist interpretations. Then, the Thecla cults will be singled out as the best example of women's piety in that age. Finally, I will pursue the path of a woman pilgrim named Egeria who met her close female friend Marthana at Thecla shrine. Although this article is basically a rough summary of my past articles written in Japanese, I have made an attempt to reorganize them and to add further recent knowledge to them. 2 Women's traces left in Church Fathers' texts and in the hagiography "It is very discriminative. There are no women and these men renounced women as if they were the source of seduction." One night, late in the 1980's, my wife craned to look at my draft of an article on the social function of the holy men in 62 ORIENT ASCETICISM AND WOMEN'S FREEDOM IN CHRISTIAN LATE ANTIQUITY Syria and Egypt, which was mainly influenced by Peter Brown's works [Brown (197la,b, 1978, 1981 and so on)3 and said as above. I responded to her accusation as it was a culture which had been long neglected and I was struggling to restore its value in history. Indeed, as many scholars admitted, Brown's new approaches provoked a tremendous 'cultural turn' in late antique studies.4 Applying the cultural anthropological method, especially hints from Mary Douglas, to the traditional church history, he efficaciously depicted the social role of the low level 'holy men' as the arbiter in the late antique society. His 'holy men' almost wiped out the out-dated, melancholic images about the late antiquity since Edward Gibbon. I still believe that I made a few contributions to rob of the expired old view about late antiquity by introducing the Brown's Works in Japan.5 However, it was just Sumo or Koya-San (a Japanese sacred complex consists of temples and mountains and it totally excludes women) kind of things for her to see these religious men. She said: "What is culture, if it contains discrimination? History of the black people in the United States has also been long neglected and the male leaders disliked and, in fact, tried to squash Alice Walker's Color Purple. However their attempts failed." She continued that everybody then became to know that to understand the women's real miserable status in the suppressed people would lead people to the correct understanding of their culture. That night was the starting point of my wandering into the women's world in late antiquity. Just as she said, the Desert Fathers, Brown's prime model of the holy men, also testified: "there are no women". 6 Antony, Pachomius, and Symeon the Sty lite Elder are famous but there are few Desert Mothers. We know many names of the Church Fathers from Tertullian, Cyprian, Jerome, Augustine, Origen, John Chrysostom, Nestorius and so on but we never know any "Church Mother". Furthermore, these Fathers disdained women like serpents. When the Desert Fathers saw women, they went further in the desert lest they see women. Again, all Church Fathers were, without exception, left a large number of misogynistic writings. According to Tertullian, women are the gateway to the sin and the descendants of Eve. 7 It was she who abandoned God's commandment first and lured Adam to commit the same sin. Unlike Tertullian and the other Early Fathers, Augustine thought of women as the important partner of men. Adam and Eve before the Fall in the Paradise of Eden could be the best model of the married couple. 8 However, he was also strongly convinced that a woman should obey to her husband. Eve lured by the serpent was the worst model for Vol. XLI 2006 63 him too. In the scene of the Fall, it was an ominous sign that Eve spoke first and Adam followed her. It implied a reversal of the natural order of God. 9 However, if we look through the materials carefully, we can find scattered evidence of women in the age. Again, the discourses of the Church and Desert Fathers' are full of women and sexuality, even though they are distorted. Soon after the disputation with my wife, I noticed that Professor Peter Brown himself had already published his massive spectacular, Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity [Brown (1988)], 10 which sketches out vast amount of texts from late antique Christianity related to sexual renunciation. He reinterpreted materials by following the new guide of gender studies, especially the last work of Michel Foucault. 11 It seemed at the time that the rapid stream of gender studies had already become irresistible. In Memory of Her by one of the most influential feminist theologians, Elizabeth S. Fiorenza, had been accepted as an instant classic soon after its publication (Fiorenza 1983). In late antique fields, an anthology of Elizabeth A. Clark (Clark 1986) and especially her article "Ascetic Renunciation and Feminine Advancement: A Paradox of Late Ancient Christianity" (Clark 1981)12 could be treated as a decisive and epoch-making work. Its viewpoint is still accepted widely. Clark epitomizes the social function of the ascetic renunciation that raised women to higher status in society. She especially takes the cases of Western aristocratic women. Although it seems absolutely lonely life to live under the harsh rule of renunciation, the aristocratic women devoted themselves to God 'were more honored as ascetics than they were as mothers, wives, and daughters of the senatorial aristocracy' .13 Their exhortation reaches at an even extravagant level. When a certain lady named Demetorias made her vow of chastity, Jerome praised it as follows, All the African churches leaped in exultation ...
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