Sir, - May I suggest that perhaps both Fr Sean Fagan (January 9th) and Cardinal Cahal B. Daly (January 15th) in their letters about the Church's attitude to women, see as lying within the Church something (i.e. anti-feminism or pro-feminism) that belongs properly within a wider matrix in the ancient world? The Church, inevitably, was not immune from the social perspectives current in the world in which it came into being.
On the negative side, in classical literature, is the famous lyric poem of Semonides (circa 630 BC) in which the "various natures of women" are exemplified in the sow, the vixen, the dog, the earth, the sea; but, importantly, this largely negative catalogue ends with the positive bee: "in her . . . blame finds no resting place". And the celibate Hippolytus, in his blistering excursus on women in Euripides's play of that name, written in 429 BC, comes to the conclusion that women "are ever uniformly wicked . . . worst of evils". Less negatively, but negatively nonetheless, Virgil observed (Aeneid 4,569-70) that "woman is a thing always variable and changeable".
But the positive emphasis was also there in classical literature. Apart from Semonides's bee, there is the touching recognition scene between Penelope and Odysseus in Book 23 of Homer's Odyssey, where the virtues of the "dear and faithful wife" are extolled; the funeral epigram of Heraclitus of Halicarnassus, circa 250 BC, on Aretemias wife of Euphron (imitated, in respect of other "good wives", by Catullus in his 96th poem and Propertius in poem II of his Elegies Book 4); and above all Ovid in his Heroides, circa 15 BC, the single repeated emphasis of which is that women, not men, are the true heroes.
It seems to me undeniable, on the evidence, but unsurprising, that elements in the Church inherited and absorbed the negative view existent in the ancient world. In the Berlin Papyrus fragments surviving from the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, Peter is recorded as saying, in answer to Mary's claim to have received revelations from the risen Jesus (compare John 20.16-18), "Did the Saviour speak privily with a woman rather than with us? Shall we turn about and all hearken unto her? Has he preferred her over against us?" And in the Coptic Gospel of Thomas, Peter declares: "Let Mary Magdalene go out from amongst us, for women are not worthy of the Life."
These are undoubtedly true and accurate reflections of Peter's misogyny. And Jesus himself severely reprimands Peter for the latter remark and himself declares elsewhere in the same Gospel of Thomas: "When you make male and female a single one, so that male is not male and female not female, then shall you enter the kingdom." In other words, perpetuation of prejudices based on gender renders the perpetuators unready for the Kingdom. - Yours, etc.,
Department of Ancient Classics, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Co Kildare.