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Much has been written and said of
late years on the subject, of “Deaconesses,” of “Sisterhoods,” in the Protestant
Churches. The “Blue Flag of Kaiserswerth” has had its history recorded ere this
in the pages of Good Words. There is a growing knowledge of the fact that
“Deaconesses” formed part of the economy of the early Church; that “sisterhoods”
have done much of the good that has been done by the Church of Rome. Yet few
people perhaps have asked themselves whether the female diaconate of the early
Church, the Sisterhood of the Roman Catholic, the Deaconesses’ Institute of the
Protestant, represent the same or different ideas; in what they agree, in what
they differ; what may be the outcome of each. The subject is one which has long
been of deep interest to me; and perhaps the following pages, taken from notes
gathered many years since, may at this time prove to be of some interest.
“I commend unto you Phoebe our sister, which is a servant of the church which is
at Cenchrea” (Rom. xvi. 1). If the Greek word here translated “ servant,” had
been rendered as in the 6th chapter of Acts, the 3d of the 1st Epistle to
Timothy, and in many other passages of the apostolical writings, the verse would
have run thus : “ I commend unto you Phoebe our sister, which is a deacon of the
church which is at Cenchrea.” Reserving therefore all questions as respects the
functions of the persons whom the word designates, but adhering to the form
which is nearest to the Greek, we may say that undeniably there is mention of
female “deacons” in the New Testament. The deacon Phoebe must moreover have been
a person of some consideration. St. Paul begins with her name the list of his
personal recommendations or salutations to the Roman Church, and recommends her
at greater length than any other person. “ That ye receive her in the Lord, as
becometh saints, and that ye assist her in whatsoever business she hath need of
you: for she hath been a succourer of many, and of myself also.” Evidently this
“servant of the church,” this “succourer” of apostles, could have been no mere
pew-opener, no filler of a purely menial office.
Turn now to the 3d chapter of St.
Paul’s Epistle to Timothy, where the apostle gives successively those noble
pictures of the Christian bishop, of the Christian deacon. “A.bishop,” he says,
“must be blameless, the husband of one wife, vigilant, sober, of good behaviour,
given to hospitality, apt to teach; not given to wine, no striker, not greedy of
filthy lucre; . . . one that ruleth well his own house, having his children in
subjection with all gravity.” Proceeding next to the deacons: “Likewise must the
deacons be grave, not double-tongued, not given to much wine, not greedy of
filthy lucre... Even so must their wives ” (so says our translation) .“be grave,
not slanderers, sober, faithful in all things. Let the deacons be the husbands
of one wife, ruling their children and their own house.”
Many no doubt will have been struck by the circumstance, that whilst the
deacons’ wives are •mentioned in the above passage, there is no parallel
injunction as to the wives of bishops, although the former are treated obviously
as married men and fathers of families, in precisely similar terms; whereas if
the example of a deacon’s wife be of sufficient moment to deserve a special
apostolic exhortation, that of a bishop’s wife must need it far more.
Accordingly, Calvin and some others have held that the word rendered “their
wives” means the wives of the bishops as well as of the deacons,—an
interpretation which would itself do violence to our text, and which certainly
accuses St. Paul of hasty and slovenly writing. For, if he had meant this,
surely he would more naturally have inserted the verse at the end of the whole
exhortation, after the present ver. 13, than have “thrown in”—to use an
expression of Chrysostom’s in a comment to be presently referred to—something
about bishops’ as well as deacons’ wives at once in a passage referring to
deacons, both before and after. This interpretation, at all events, seems to
have been entirely foreign to the early church. Two meanings only appear to have
been put upon the passage till the Reformation : one which referred it to women
generally; the other, which referred it to the female diaconate.
Both these senses rest indeed upon the literal text. It will be observed that
the word “their,” in ver. 11, is printed in italics, indicating insertion at the
hands of our translators. The Greek word, on the other hand, translated “wives,”
signifies primarily “women.” Literally, therefore, the verse might run thus:
“Even so must women be grave, not slanderers, sober, faithful in all things.”
Accordingly, the Latin Vulgate translates by the equivalent for “women,” not for
“wives;” our own Wycliffe following in its wake, and writing, “ also st bihoveth
wymmen to be chast,” etc. Upon this construction Chrysostom, in his homilies on
this epistle (the 11th), observes as follows :—“ Some say that this is spoken of
women generally; but it is not so. For why should he have thrown in something
about women amongst the things which he has been saying? But he speaks of those
that have the dignity of the diaconate.” If, therefore, “ women-(deacons)'' are
meant, the sense is plain. Just as the men-deacons must be grave, not
double-tongued, etc., even so must the women-deacons be grave, not slanderous,
etc. Thus, to sum up the argument, if the wives of the deacons be intended, the
omission of all mention of bishops’ wives seems unaccountable; if the wives of
bishops and deacons alike are meant, the reference to the former is strangely
thrown in amidst injunctions specially referring to the diaconal office; if
women generally, the injunction is thrown in still more strangely; but if
“women-deacons” be really meant, instead of either an unaccountable omission or
an illogical insertion, we have a command strictly sufficient, strictly logical,
and in strict accordance, as I shall presently show, with the facts of Church
history.
One great cause of the obscurity in which the history of the female diaconate
has been involved has been the existence in the early Church, from the apostolic
age, of another class of women in later times frequently confounded with female
deacons. “Honour widows that are widows indeed,” says St. Paul (1 Tim. v. 3, et
seq.); “but if any widow have children or nephews, let them learn first to show
piety at home, and to requite their parents, for that is good and acceptable
before God. Now she that is a widow indeed, and desolate, trusteth in God, and
continueth in supplications and prayers night and day. . . . Let not a widow be
taken into the number under threescore years old, having been the wife of one
man, well reported of for good works ; if she have brought up children, if she
have lodged strangers, if she have washed the saints’ feet, if she have relieved
the afflicted, if she have diligently followed every good work. ... If any man
or woman that believeth hath widows, let them relieve them, and let not the
church be charged, that it may relieve them that are widows indeed.”
What does the picture here given amount to? Surely it is that of the almswomen
of the primitive Church ; persons free from all family ties (“if any widow have
children or nephews”), and at the same time destitute of all family support (“
she that is a widow indeed, and desolate” ... “if any man or woman that
believeth hath widows, let them relieve them”), who, after a life of Christian
usefulness (“ well reported of for good works,” etc.), were thought worthy of
being provided for by the Church (“let not the church be charged, that it may
relieve them that are widows indeed”) in their old age (“let not a widow be
caken into the number under threescore years”), being released from all duties
of active benevolence (“she that is a widow indeed . . . continueth in
supplications and prayers night and day”). Now, the details of this picture are
very much the reverse of what is implied in the word deacon, i.e., man or
maid-servant. As the primary function of the deacon was one of a purely
ministerial nature, to “serve tables”—and let it be remembered that the very
necessity for the office arose from the neglect of the Greek “widows” in the
“daily ministration” (the original Greek word is “diaconate”)—so we may at once
assume that the female deacon’s duties must have been active ones. We can hardly
suppose, for instance, that a widow of sixty, such as St. Paul describes, would,
like the deacon Phoebe, have undertaken a long journey under all the
difficulties of ancient navigation, charged, if a tradition accepted by our
translators speaks true; with the care of the epistle in which she is mentioned.
And shall we be far from the truth if, judging from St. Paul’s commendation of
Phoebe, we conjecture that the female deacon was what the widow had been, a
bringer-up of children, a lodger of strangers, a reliever of the afflicted, a
diligent follower of every good work? If so, it would easily follow that aged
female deacons would be adopted into the class of widows; that women who had
actively ministered to the Church during the working-time of their lives should
in turn be ministered to by the Church in their old days, and allowed to devote
themselves to prayer and contemplation. And thus the two ideas might in time run
into one.
Not only the Church widows, however, but a class of persons dating from a
scarcely later age, and who may be considered to have grown up out of a forced
application of' 1 Cor. vii. 25, the Church virgins, as well as the female elders
or presbyters of some schismatical churches, and a class of “sister-women,” a
mere corruption of later days, have more or less been confounded with the female
deacons at some time or other by the views or practice of particular churches,
and the so-called labours of commentators; and the history of the true female
diaconate has to be disentangled from a mass of misconceptions and
misapplications of texts, wilful, stupid, or ignorant, filling the pages of the
best books of reference, repeated without inquiry from author to author, till
they seem to borrow something of the weight of each, almost incredible to any
one who has not traced passage after passage to its source. And I here warn any
student who should wish to examine the subject for himself, never to allow the
most appalling array of modern names, with or without Latin endings, to have any
influence with him against one single text of Scripture, or of an early
authority.
Let us now turn to a work of which many varying judgments have been held by men
of learning and weight—for some a clumsy forgery, for others a precious and
genuine relic-—the so-called “Apostolical Canons” or “Constitutions.” Observe
that, if they be forgeries, they are forgeries of an early age, and as such,
possessed of real historical value. For every literary forgery must bear the
impress of the time at which it was got up; it must look backward always, never
forward; some vestiges of past reality must linger in it, and ? by those
vestiges we may often complete a subsisting fragment of reality itself. Now, in
the “Apostolical Constitutions,” the female Deacon or Deaconess, the Widow, the
Virgin, all come before us as distinct types; the first as invested with an
office; the second as the object of affectionate regard and support; the third
of religious commendation. Of the Deaconess (as I shall call her henceforth) it
is provided, that she shall be “a pure virgin,” or otherwise “a widow once
married, faithful and worthy;” a very natural provision, since the cares of a
family would prevent a married woman from concentrating her whole energies on
her diaconal functions. At service, whilst the “door-keeper” was to stand and
watch at the men’s entrance to the church, the deaconess was in like manner to
stand at the women’s entrance (a function which indeed, in a constitution of
the. eighth and latest book, is ascribed to the sub-deacon), and was, moreover,
to act in the same manner as the male deacon with respect to placing females in
the congregation, whether poor or rich. She was also to fulfil the duties of a
male deacon in those cases where “a man-deacon cannot be sent to some houses
towards women on account of unbelievers,” i.e., to prevent scandal. Lastly, her
most important offices were those relating to the baptizing of women, the
necessity for which has been obviated in later times by the discontinuance of
the practice of baptism by immersion, or the practice of immersion under a form
which the early Church would not have recognised as valid. It is even provided
that “no woman shall approach the deacon or the bishop without the deaconess.”
And it is said generally, in a constitution concerning the deacons, that “the
woman” (an expression strongly recalling 1 Tim. ii. 11, and affording additional
ground for construing it as relating to the deaconesses) “should be zealous to
serve women;” whilst “to both pertain messages, journeys to foreign parts,
ministrations, services.” The traditional journey of Phoebe to Rome with St.
Paul’s Epistle would thus be strictly within the limits of her functions.
Towards fulfilling these duties,
the deaconess is represented as receiving an ordination from the bishop, under a
simple and beautiful form of service attributed to the Apostle Bartholomew:—
“Touching the deaconess, I Bartholomew do thus ordain: 0 bishop, thou shalt lay
on her thy hands, in the presence of the presbytery, of the deacons, and of the
deaconesses, and thou shalt say:—
“0 everlasting God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Creator of man and woman,
who didst fill with Thy Spirit Mary and Deborah, and Hannah and Hulda: who didst
not disdain to cause Thine only-begotten Son to be born of a woman ; who didst
admit into the tabernacle of the testimony and into the temple the women
guardians of Thy holy gates: Thyself look down even now upon Thy servant now
admitted into the diaconate, and give to her Thy Holy Spirit, and cleanse her
from all pollution of the flesh and spirit, that she may worthily fulfil Thy
work thus intrusted to her, to Thy glory, and to the praise of Thy Christ, with
whom to Thee be glory and worship, and to the Holy Spirit, for ever and ever.
Amen.”
Some may feel shocked at the idea of the ordination of a woman, of the Holy
Ghost being invoked upon her. A distinction has even been made by some
Protestant, as well as Romish writers, between the imposition of hands as a
ceremonial benediction and a real ordination. The original word certainly
affords not the slightest ground for such a distinction, which other writers,
like Bingham, wholly repudiate. But it seems to me that the laying on of hands
upon a deaconess was eminently characteristic of the faith of early times. It
was because men felt still that the Holy Ghost alone could give power to do any
work to God’s glory, that they deemed themselves constrained to ask such power
of Him, in setting a woman to do church work. Nor did such ordination in the
least interfere with any needful distinctions of office. “The deaconess,” it is
said, “does not give the blessing, nor does she fulfil any of the functions of
the presbyters or of the deacons, beyond the guarding of doors, and the
supplying the. place of the presbyters in the baptizing of women.” In other
words, she was ordained not to preach, not to bless, exactly as others were
ordained to preach and to bless. From other provisions, it may be seen that the
deaconess ranked after the presbyter and deacon, and at least on a par with, if
not before, the subdeacon. Very different is the language of these Constitutions
respecting widows, of whom it is said expressly in one place: “The widows should
be grave, obedient to the bishops, to the presbyters, and to the deacons, and
also to the deaconesses and it is specifically stated, in a constitution
attributed to Lebbeus son of Thaddeus, that “the widow is not ordained.” Of the
Church virgin (who is, however, now treated as having dedicated hersdf, not as
having been dedicated by others—as in 1 Cor. vii.—to Christ) it is specifically
stated that she is “not ordained.” The contrast between the ordained deaconess
and the nonordained widows and virgins, illustrates well the typical, universal
character which belongs to the offices of the Christian Church. Deaconesses were
ordained, because the Diaconate was the type of that universal duty of serving
one another, which our Lord so specially inculcated in the washing of His.
disciples’ feet. Widows were not ordained, because widowhood and virginity are
not offices, but mere conditions of life; because they have nothing of a
universal character, but are merely exceptional in their nature. The teachings
of the Apostolical Constitutions on this subject, I must say, appear to me quite
in accordance with the view now perhaps most generally entertained, that they
represent the condition of the Greek Church at some period of the second
century.
Except in the Apostolical Constitutions, up to the latter end of the fourth
century, there is little of real moment, less of real interest, to be found in
Eastern Church writers respecting our subject, although Hermas, as once
mentioned by Principal Tulloch in Good Words, indicates the existence of women
who seem to have had authority over the widows and orphans. The epistles falsely
attributed to Ignatius, whilst referring to the deaconesses as “keepers of the
holy gates,” bear witness of their later date, by the far greater prominence
they give to virgins,—treating them as “ priestesses of Christ,”—holding them up
to veneration,—and confounding them, according to one text at least, with the
widows. Not to speak of a doubtful passage in Clement of Alexandria, writing
towards the end of the second or beginning of the third century, Origen, an
Egyptian writer of slightly later date (184-253), in commenting on Phoebe and
her mission, speaks of the ministry of women in the Church as both existing and
necessary.
If we turn now to the Western Church,—a remarkable passage from the letters of
the Younger Pliny, writing for advice to Trajan, how to deal with the
Christians, shows that it was upon two deaconesses that the elegant
letter-writer—the Chesterfield of antiquity—sought to prove by torture the truth
of those strange confessions of the Christians, “that they were wont on a stated
day to meet before dawn, and repeat among themselves in alternate measure a song
addressed to Christ, as to a God; and by their vow to bind themselves, not to
the committing of any crime, but against theft, and robbery, and adultery, and
breach of faith, and denial of trust, after which it was their custom to depart,
and again to meet for the purpose of taking food. In the Latin Church, however,
the distinction between the deaconess and the churchwidow, and between the
latter and the churchvirgin, appears to have become early obliterated. Neander,
indeed, shows well that the more stringent separation of the sexes in the
Eastern Church created a more permanent necessity there for the peculiar
services of the deaconess, whilst more exalted notions of priestly privileges
tended in the West to impart a something offensive to her position as a
recognised member of the ordained clergy. Tertullian (150-226, or there female
diaconate amongst the Paulianist heretics, and by implication also in the Church
itself, although it has been strangely interpreted to forbid altogether the
ordination of deaconesses. A canon of the Council of Laodicea (360 to 370) has
been still more strongly pressed into this service, although it only forbids the
appointment of female elders in the Church. In the Fourth Synod or Council of
Carthage (whose canons have been considered to be, in fact, a collection of
those of many African Councils) we find, again, passages which have been used,
without the slightest testing of their weight, as authorities in treating of the
female diaconate, whilst in fact they only show us widows and consecrated
virgins invested with some of the functions of the deaconess. By the end of the
fourth and beginning of the fifth century, however, references to the female
diaconate, and notices of individual deaconesses, become frequent in the
writings of the leading Greek fathers.
Theodoret tells of a deaconess in the time of Julian, how she “evangelized " the
son of a heathen priest, encouraged him to stand fast under persecution,
sheltered him from his father’s wrath. He subsequently gives a chapter to the
story of “Publia the deaconess, and her godly boldness who being with the choir
of the perpetual virgins,” and “the Emperor chancing one day to pass, they began
more lustily with one accord to sing forth, deeming the wretch worthy of all
contempt and ridicule; and chiefly they sang those psalms which deride the
impotence of idols. . . . The Emperor, hearing these songs, and being thereby
stung to the quick, bade them be silent while he passed. But she, holding cheap
his commands, filled the choir with greater boldness, and again, as he passed
by, bade them sing, ‘ Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered.’ When he,
bitterly wroth, bade the mistress of the choir be brought before him, . . . and
showing neither pity for her grey hairs, nor respect for her virtue, ordered one
of his guards to strike her on both cheeks, covering his hands with her blood.
But she, taking this shame for sovran honour, withdrew into her cell, and still
continually pursued him with her spiritual songs,” as David was wont to still
the evil spirit of Saul, adds the author; an odd comparison, seeing that, by his
own account, Publia irritated Julian’s evil passions instead of soothing them.
The function of the deaconess, as head of the church-virgins, is referred to in
other contemporary authorities.
Not to dwell on Epiphanius, who in two separate passages sets forth specifically
(in general accordance with the Apostolical Constitutions) the institution and
certain of the principal functions of the deaconesses, taking at the same time
occasion to point out that the Church “never established elderesses or
priestesses,” the history of Chrysostom is essentially interwoven with that of
the female diaconate, through the names of several deaconesses, his devoted
followers.
‘Olympias, the most prominent of all, was an orphan of good birth, who had been
married when young, but whose husband had died twenty months after, and whom the
emperor Theodosius had sought in vain to marry a second time to one of his own
kinsmen. She was, when still young in widowhood, ordained a deaconess. Her
unbounded liberalities drew upon her the reproof of Chrysostom, who exhorted her
to moderate her alms ; and this counsel is assigned as one of the motives of the
deep hatred borne to Chrysostom by the greedy priesthood of the metropolis. Of
her stanch adherence to Chrysostom on his expulsion from the episcopate, her
“manly” conduct under persecution, as well as of that of the deaconess Pertadia,
who “knew nothing but the Church and her room,” details will be found in Sozomen.
The relation of Chrysostom to Olympias was peculiarly intimate, so that she
looked after his daily food when he was in Constantinople. Eighteen of his
letters are addressed to “My Lady the Deaconess Olympias, most worthy and
beloved of God.”
After saying that he will not dwell on her almsgiving, “whereof thou boldest the
sceptres, and didst bind on the crown of old,” he proceeds: “For who should tell
thy varied, manifold, and many-sided endurance, and what speech should be
sufficient for us, what measure for our history, if one should enumerate thy
sufferings from thy earliest age until now : those from members of thy
household, those from strangers, those from friends, those from enemies, those
from persons connected with thee by blood, those from persons in nowise
connected with thee, those from men in power, those from the prosperous, those
from the rulers, those from the common people, those from men reckoned in the
clergy. . . . But if one should turn also to the other forms of this virtue, and
should go through no more thy sufferings received from others, but those which
thou hast contrived for thyself,—what stone, what iron, what adamant shall he
not find conquered by thee r For having received a flesh so tender and delicate,
and nourished up in all kinds of luxury, thou hast so conquered it by various
sufferings, that it lies no better than slain, and thou hast brought upon
thyself such a swarm of diseases as to confound the physician’s skill, and the
power of medicine, . . . and to live in perpetual fellowship with pain.
“For thy self-control as respects the table, and thy continence, and thy
steadfastness in night watchings, if any should choose to set it forth at
length, how many words will he need! Rather we must seek out some other much
greater name for these virtues. For we call that man continent and
self-controlled, when he is pressed by some desire and conquers it; but thou
hast not what thou mayest conquer; for having blown from the first with great
vehemence upon the flesh, thou hast extinguished all its desires. . . .
Insensibility alone remains to thee. . . . Thou hast taught thy stomach to be
content with so much food and drink as not to perish. . . That desire being
quenched, the desire to sleep was quenched with it; for food is the nourishment
of sleep. And indeed thou didst also destroy sleep in another way, having from
the beginning done violence to thy nature, and spending whole nights without
sleep; latterly, by constant custom, making a nature of the habit. For as sleep
is natural to others, so is watching to thee. . . . But if any should examine
the time, and how these things took place in unripe age, and the want of
teachers, and the many that laid stumbling-blocks, and that from an ungodly
house thou hast come now of thyself to the truth in thy soul, and that thine was
a woman’s body, and one delicate through the nobility and luxury of thy
ancestors, how many seas of wonders will he find opening out at every point! . .
. Willingly would I tarry over these words, and sail over a boundless sea, or
seas rather, following the manybranched tracks of each virtue of thine, whereof
each track should bring forth a sea again, if I were to dwell on thy patience,
and thy humility, and thy many-shaped almsgiving, which has stretched to the
very ends of the world, and on thy charity, that hath outdone ten thousand
furnaces, and on thy boundless prudence, full of grace, and surpassing the
measures of nature. . . . But I will endeavour to show the lion by his claw, by
saying a few words of thy dress, of the garments that hang simply and at
haphazard around thee. This indeed seems a lesser achievement than others ; but
if any should view it diligently, he will find it very great, and needing a
philosophic soul, which tramples upon all the things of life, and takes flight
to the very heaven. . . . For I do not only marvel at the unspeakable coarseness
of thy attire, surpassing that of the very beggars, but above all at the
shapelessness, the carelessness of thy garments, of thy shoes, of thy walk; all
which things are virtue’s colours.”
He then says that his object has not been to praise, but to console her, in
order that, “ceasing to consider this man’s sin and that man’s fault, thou
mayest bear in mind perpetually the struggles of thy endurance, thy patience,
thy abstinence, thy prayers, thy holy night-long watches, thy continence, thine
almsgiving, thy hospitality, thy manifold and difficult and frequent trials.
Reflect how from thy first age until the present day, thou hast not ceased to
feed Christ when a-hungered, to give Him drink when thirsty, to clothe Him when
naked, to take Him in when a stranger, to visit Him when sick, to go unto Him
when bound. . . . Be proud, and rejoice in the hope of these crowns and of these
rewards.”
I do not wish to soften one line of this most painful picture, which might be
developed to almost any extent, as the “sea” of Chrysostom’s panegyric, to use
his own favourite image, flowed again and again. The days are gone when Phoebe
travelled forth from land to land in charge of an apostle’s letters. The days
are gone when the deaconess went from house to house, carrying the good tidings
into the seclusion of the women’s apartments. The demon of ascetic
self-righteousness has entered in, and is fostered by the preachings even of one
of the greatest men, the most exemplary prelates of the age. The deaconesses, we
are told, do not “depart from the Church.” Profuse in almsgiving they may be,
but how little can they be effectual “succourers of many,” when by their
austerities they ruin their health, when it is one of the features of
Chrysostom’s panegyric of Olympias, that she has brought upon her such a swarm
of diseases as to defy all means of cure? No wonder that Epiphanius,
Chrysostom’s contemporary, mainly dwells upon that one duty of theirs, of
assisting in the baptizing of women. Such easy, stay-at-home functions were the
only ones now fit for them. No wonder that he adds a third to the classes from
which the deaconesses are to be selected. They are to be, he says, either
continent, by which he means virgin wives, once-married, or once-married widows,
or perpetual virgins. The Apostolical Constitutions know of no such monstrosity
as voluntary virginwives. They do not say that the “pure virgins ” who may be
made deaconesses are to be perpetual ones.
There has grown up, moreover, a real analogy of character, if not of position,
between the deaconess and the apostolical widow. I say the apostolical widow;
not by any means the person known by that name in the age of Chrysostom, one of
whose achievements was the reform of the Church widows, and from whose writings
it is palpable that this class, instead of having been raised to the level of
the deaconesses, had, on the contrary, fallen far below its own original
station; that the respectable almswoman had degenerated into the clamorous
prayer; nay, that the still greater abuse had crept in of allowing the young and
well-to-do to usurp the place of the aged and the destitute. The true pattern at
this period of the apostolical widow, continuing in supplications and prayers
day and night, was obviously exhibited by deaconesses such as Olympias or
Pertadia. Nothing was more natural than that the laity at least should confound
the two, and shotdd endeavour to impose upon the latter all the restrictions—as
to age for instance— which St. Paul laid down for the former. A struggle for
this purpose now takes place between the State and the Church; the State (in the
Theodosian Code, 438) seeking to subject the institution to the disabilities of
actual monachism. On the other hand, a canon of the Convent of Chalcedon, almost
contemporary with the promulgation of the Theodosian Code (451), enacts, that
“the deaconess shall not be ordained before her 40th year, and this with the
utmost deliberation; but if, receiving the imposition of hands, and remaining
some time in the ministry, she gives herself over to marriage, doing despite to
the grace of God, let her be accursed, together with her paramour.” By the time
of Justinian, the State, after endeavouring for awhile to split the difference
(at 50) as to the age of ordination of the deaconess, finally gives in. The
distinction between widows and deaconesses is recognised; the number of
deaconesses in the church of St. Sophia is fixed by law (80, to 100 male
deacons). If the deaconess leave the ministry to enter into marriage, or choose
any other mode of life, she is made subject to the penalty of death, as well as
her husband or seducer, with confiscation of property for both. These are but a
few instances out of many which occur in Justinian’s legislation refering to the
institution.
At this period, therefore (first half of the sixth century), the office of
deaconess in the Eastern Church has become purely sacerdotal, forming a sort of
connecting link between the secular and the regular clergy. She is even
included, in the heading of one law, under a name (sanctimonialia) which in
later days is synonymous with “nun”. So nearly does her condition approach to
that of actual monachism, that the punishment, as we have seen, for the marriage
of a deaconess is death against both parties, the legislator not being ashamed
to quote as an authority the Pagan one of the Vestal Virgins,—though indeed the
repeated provisions on this head seem to show that there was considerable
difficulty in enforcing these ascetic rules on the deaconesses. There are now,
moreover, two classes of deaconesses, those residing in convents or asceteries
(the “skeets” of contemporary Russia), and those attached to churches and living
alone. The former must obviously have become almost identified with the nuns
among whom they lived; the latter alone could have answered in somewise still to
the old Church deaconess, “ servant” of the Church.
From this period I am aware of but two or three scattered notices as to the
female diaconate in the East. The last occurs in Balsamon, a writer of the
twelfth century, as quoted by Suicer, who treats the office as nearly extinct.
No deaconesses, he says, are now ordained, though some of the “ascetes” may be
improperly so termed. And the way in which he speaks of them shows that the
institution had become lost and stifled in female monachism. “As virgins,” he
writes, “they were received by the Church, and guarded according to the command
of the bishop, as consecrated to God, except that they wore the garb of the
laity, . . . and at forty years old they received ordination as deaconesses,
being found qualified in all respects.” Among the Jacobites, however, the
institution seems to have lingered till a still later period.
If we turn now back from the Eastern to the Western Church, a curious feature
presents itself. Ignored by the great Latin Fathers of the fourth and fifth
centuries—Jerome, for instance—who yet treat widows, as unmistakably as
Chrysostom himself, as objects of charity only, the female diaconate, confounded
with Church widowship, suddenly makes its appearance under its own name in the
decrees of Gaulish Councils of the fifth and sixth centuries, but invariably to
be denounced and prohibited. Thus the Synod of Orange, 441; the Synod of Epadne,
517, absolutely forbid the ordination of “widows who are called deaconesses,”
says the latter. The Synod of Orleans, 533, enacts the excommunication of “any
woman who, having received hitherto the blessing of the diaconate against the
interdicts of the canons, shall have married again; ”a text which shows that, in
spite of previous prohibitions, the practice of ordaining deaconesses still
existed. The explanation of this prominence in Gaul of the female diaconate in
the fifth century I take to be this. Southern Gaul was always one of the great
battlefields between Eastern and Western feelings. Massilia-Marseilles was an
old Greek colony; the relations between “the Province” and Greece, intimate in
the days of Cassar, were intimate still in the early days of the Christian
Church. Irenaeus, one of the earliest Greek fathers, was Bishop of Lyons in the
second century. New relations were opened between the two countries in the fifth
century, through the settlement in Provence of the Basilian monks, and the
foundation of the great monasteries of Southern Gaul. Now the fifth century, as
we have seen, was, in point of honour, the golden age of the female diaconate in
the Eastern Church; and it would be almost unaccountable if, amidst the new tide
of Greek influence brought in at this period into Southern Gauh the female
diaconate, in its then halfmonastic state, should not have been sought to be
revived or re-introduced.
At any rate, it is about this period, and even later than the last interdiction
of the female diaconate, that we meet with the most interesting incident
connected with it to be found in the annals of the Western Church. It occurs in
the story of St. Badegund, a Thuringian princess, wife of the Merovingian
Chlothar I. of Neustria, forming the fifth narrative in that most delightful of
histories, most truthful of tale-books, Augustin Thierry’s Narratives of
Merovingian Times. After a long period of domestic wretchedness by the side of a
brutal husband, and after seeing at last her only surviving brother, a hostage
at Chlothar’s court, put to death by his orders, the queen fled to St. MSdard,
bishop of Noyon. As he was in his church officiating at the altar, “Most holy
priest,” she cried, “I must leave the world, and change my garments; I entreat
thee, most holy priest, do thou consecrate me to the Lord.” The bishop
hesitated. He was called upon “to dissolve a royal marriage, contracted
according to the Salic law, and in conformity with Germanic customs, which the
Church, while detesting them, was yet constrained to tolerate. . . . The
Frankish lords and warriors who had followed the queen began to surround him,
and to cry aloud, with threatening gestures, ‘Beware how thou givest the veil to
a woman who is married to the king! priest, refrain from robbing the prince of
his solemnly-wedded queen!’ The most furious among them, throwing hands upon
him, dragged him violently from the altar-steps into the nave of the church,
whilst the queen, affrighted with the tumult, was seeking with her women a
refuge in the vestry. But here, collecting herself, . . . she threw a nun’s
dress over her regal garments, and thus disguised, proceeded towards the
sanctuary where St. M^dard was sitting. ... ‘If thou shouldst delay consecrating
me,’ said she with a firm voice, ‘ and shouldst fear men more than God, thou
wilt have to render thy account, and the Shepherd shall require of thee the soul
of His sheep.’ . . . He ceased to hesitate, and of his own authority dissolved
Radegund’s marriage, by consecrating her a deaconess through the laying on of
hands. The Frankish lords and vassals, carried away in their turn by the same
feelings, durst no more take forcibly back to the royal residence one who in
their eyes bore from henceforth the twofold character of a queen and of a woman
consecrated to God’s service.” She subsequently formed a sort of free convent,
where the pleasures of literary society, even with men, were combined with
devotional exercises and good works. The above narrative points us to a
startling fact, which has no parallel ' in Eastern annals, that ordination to
the female diaconate in the West was by this time considered equivalent to
divorce.
In spite of all prohibitions, indeed, the idea of a female diaconate seems to
have lingered nearly as long, within a century or two, in the West as in the
East. The canons of the Council of Worms in the ninth century repeat an earlier
canon against the re-marriage of deaconesses. In the Roman Ordinal, and other
rituals in use about the ninth century, will be found, it is said, a service for
the ordination of a deaconess. This is especially to be remarked, as otherwise,
in some of the latest mentions of deaconesses, the word might be taken to be
used, as Bingham shows it to have been by one Gaulish Council, in the sense of
wife of a deacon. The extinction of the office in the West must thus have nearly
coincided with that great victory of the Romish system in the eleventh century,
when God’s order of the family was finally expelled from the ministry of His
Church. Still, a French author, writing on the Councils of the Church a few
years before the outbreak of the great French Revolution, notices some vestiges
of the office then yet subsisting in France.
There is surely a lesson for us in this history. Of what the female diaconate
did, we know little. But knowing so little, it is sufficiently wonderfid that we
should find traces of its existence, both in the East and West, for from nine to
twelve centuries—about two-thirds, in fact, of the Christian era. This strange
obscure persistency indicates, either that it did far more work than is recorded
of it, and lived thereby, or that its title to existence was in itself so
unquestionable that even its own impotency barely sufficed to extinguish it.
Why did it perish? Evidently through the growth in the Church of the false
ascetic principle, and in particular of the practice of religious celibacy, to
which, according to its original constitution, it must have been a serious
obstacle, by which it suffered itself to be overlaid. The scope of the female
diaconate in the primitive Church was, as we have seen, to afford a full
development to female energies for religious purposes; to associate women, as
far as possible, in rank and practices with men, while preserving to each sex
its distinct sphere of activity; to the one the supremacy of the head, to the
other that of the heart; to the one power, to the other influence ; to the one
the office of public preaching, exhortation, relief, to the other that of
private exhortation, consolation, helpfulness; yet each acting under the
inspiration of that Holy Spirit who was invoked alike over the head of deacon
and deaconess at their ordination. • True in this was the Church to the laws of
man’s being, as displayed progressively throughout Holy Scripture, from Genesis
to Revelation. By a pre-ordained and eternal marriage, man and woman must be
one, in order to fulfil the great destinies of humanity. Genesis shows us how it
is not good for man to be alone, how woman is made a help-meet for him. The New
Testament discovers to us the deep spiritual ground of this relation, by showing
us Christ as the Holy Bridegroom of his hallowed Bride the Church. History
confirms the lesson from age to age, from country to country, by showing how, if
you deprive either sex of its free action, of its free influence over the other,
the result is national sterility; the man a savage, the woman a fool. Restore
Eastern women to their rights, and the whole Eastern world will rise up
new-born.
Now, there is one most subtle way of sterilizing that eternal wedding. It is,
without wholly debasing either sex in the other’s eyes, to teach them to live
apart, think apart, love apart, for the greater glory of God and of themselves,
— as if they were different species of one genus, the union of which could
produce nothing but hybrids. Where thus marriage assumes in the eyes of the
candidate for superhuman sanctity the shape of a fleshly pollution,—where woman
ceases to be man’s earthly help-meet,—where it becomes good for man to live
alone,—the familiar mingling of the sexes in the active ministrations of
religion, unfettered and untrammelled, is impossible. The deaconess should be
free as the deacon himself to leave her home at at any time for those
ministrations ; she should be in constant communication with her brethren of the
clergy. But place her under a vow of celibacy, every fellow-man becomes to her a
tempter whom she must flee from. Hence the high walls of the nunnery, in which
eventually we find her confined; hence the vanishing away of her office itself
into monachism.
The details above given are sufficient, I think, to show that there is a wide
difference between the Deaconesses’ Institute of our days and what is recorded
of the early female diaconate. That was essentially individual; and the only
analogy to it lies in the “parish-deaconess,” who goes forth from Kaiserswerth,
or elsewhere, to devote herself to a particular congregation; although even she
is far from holding that position as a member of the clergy (cleros) which is
assigned to her by the records of Church history.
In the gap between the two lies the “sisterhood” of later times. |
