My little church in Swannanoa, NC is blessed with a number of outlets for ministry and worship. One small, five-year old group to which my wife and I belong is called The Faith Discussion Group. There is another adult group for study of the Holy Bible. There are various catechetical groups for children and teens. But we do love our Discussion Group. In it we pick tough books and weigh in for weeks at a time on Sunday mornings between public worship services. Let me add that our Discussion Group likes to spend well under $10.00 for each book which we read. This usually means waiting a couple of years for an expensive book to become available at discount. We are, as a result,  not up to the minute, but then our subjects are often timeless.

We spent 16 weeks on William Saffire's THE FIRST DISSIDENT, an effort to apply the Book of Job to modern politics. (It cost us only $1.00/copy. But its price has since soared.) We are about to tackle the CONFESSIONS of Saint Augustine.

We recently devoted a few challenging months to David F. Noble's A WORLD WITHOUT WOMEN. Noble is Professor of History at York University in Toronto. He is a specialist in technology and the evolution of science. At first blush, therefore, he probably surprised even himself with his 1992 work, A WORLD WITHOUT WOMEN: THE CHRISTIAN CLERICAL CULTURE OF WESTERN SCIENCE. Puzzled by the predominance of men over women among modern scientists, the author found himself pushing farther and farther back in time for an explanation. He found it in the Western Christian Church.

In a nutshell, Professor Noble believes that women finally began a
sustained fight for something resembling equality with men in religion,
education, science and general culture only in North America beginning around the time of the American Revolution. Before that time males dominated Christianity. And Christians founded the universities of Europe and excluded women. Even after the Protestant Reformation, Noble argues, universities, learned societies and scientists in general were long characterized by a monastic, ascetic, even misogynist mind set inherited from Western Christendom.

There were always moments when the women seemed about to break out from a male dominated church. Feminists and co-feminists based their claim to equality of men and women on Saint Paul's preaching to the Galatians, "there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, THERE IS NEITHER MALE NOR FEMALE, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." Early on there were the household study groups of men and women called "didaskaleia." Rich Christian heiresses achieved status and influence through their giving to the Church. Later there were double monasteries in Ireland, England and elsewhere of both men and women.

In the East clerical marriages by the lower clergy were the norm and wives of priests achieved an honored status and opportunity for ministry. In Western Europe, however, the monastic ideal of a celibate clergy steadily won out everywhere except Iceland. The rediscovery of Greek classics found advocates for women in the pages of Plato's REPUBLIC and SYMPOSIUM and in the medieval Arabic commentaries on Plato. But the rediscovered Aristotle and his biological speculations about the inferiority of women won out among Church authorities.

Time and again Professor Noble points to women as involved in changes unwelcome to the ruling orthodoxy, resisted and ultimately crushed. It was not long before every heresy was judged to be associated with, probably caused by,  women. Women, that is, by their very womanness threatened not only the administrative rule of the church by men but also Christian truth and dogma. That was too much guilt for women to shrug off when the Church was founding the universities in France, England, Italy and Central Europe. The universities were in service primarily of theology and philosophy. Only
in Italy, with a longer tradition of lay involvement in education and with
a heavier focus on law and medicine, was celibate clerical domination of universities relatively weak.

As for education: Henry VIII's first wife, Catherine of Aragon, employed
the famous Juan Luis Vives to educate their daughter, the future Queen Mary. Henry's daughter by Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth, was also formidably educated. But these were exceptions. By and large education, learning and early science were preserves of men only and mainly celibate men like Isaac Newton.

In America popular religion beginning around 1775 grew increasingly
anti-clerical. Factories needed the cheaper, dependable labor of women. Harvard was challenged by the new industrialists to produce men of practical learning. When Harvard declined, suddenly M.I.T. was created by business leaders. The education of women in North America began early on with special attention from Moravians, Quakers and others. Oberlin was the first co-educational institution of higher education. From America the movement to empower women in churches, in schools, in universities and in science spread in the late 19th century to Europe. Then came a reaction: scientific and professional societies arose in which women were not welcome. Much of the current resistance to women in society, Professor Noble argues, is best understood as a cultural carryover from the days when the monastic ideal first stormed Europe. Then the church, the universities,
education in general and latterly science became a "world without women."

Depressing reading that book by David Noble. All of us might thank God for inspiring Saint Paul to write to the Galatians that "THERE IS NEITHER MALE NOR FEMALE, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." 

Paul therefore gave us an opening. Whose is the fault if we did not act on his words?

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