For four hundred years the word Holy Spirit was ruha, a feminine word derived from the Hebrew ruach

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Christian Misogyny

 

Rooted in the Hebrew Scriptures and flourishing in a patriarchal

culture, Christianity developed its own negative attitudes towards

women and the old religion of the Goddess. At times subtle, at other

times brutal, the movement was away from partnership and towards

hierarchy, from feminine images of the Divine to strictly masculine

ones. Despite Jesus' radical inclusion of women as friends and

disciples and his refusal to treat them as second-rate, sinfully

sexual, or stupid, his followers quickly established as orthodox an

all-male priesthood, a masculine Trinity, and a theologically

expressed aversion to women.

 

Thus Tertullian, a Christian theologian in the third century,

described Eve as the gateway to the devil because, according to the

Genesis myth, she first broke God's law and brought about the loss of

original purity. He held her personally responsible for the death of

Christ, and his general distrust and distaste of women was based on

this rationale.

 

Origin, a theologian contemporary with Tertullian, wrote of the

feminine and the corporeal as essentially one, and unworthy of God.

He believed that God saw only the masculine and spiritual aspects of

creation, since the Creator could surely not be expected to stoop so

low as to regard the feminine and fleshy. St. Jerome, writing a

century later, expressed this same equation of woman with sexuality

and sin by reasoning that since Paul had written that it is well for

a man not to touch a woman (1 Cor 7:1), then it must always be bad to

touch a woman. Women were dangerously physical, inferior to men at

best and destructive to the eternal souls at worst.

 

Virginity and celibacy therefore became elevated as spiritually more

pure than marriage or sexual activity of any kind, and sexual sin was

judged severely. Expressions of Christianity such as Gnosticism that

gave women and men an equal place in the community, in liturgy, and

in leadership, and that refereed to the Godhead as " Mother " as well

as " Father " were suppressed as heretical, and their sacred writings

were destroyed.

 

Where the Wisdom tradition was brought to bear on Christology, with

Christ seen as the incarnation of God' eternal and universal wisdom,

the feminine word Sophia was replaced by the masculine Logos. And in

Syria, where for four hundred years the word Holy Spirit was ruha, a

feminine word derived from the Hebrew ruach, and where the Holy

Spirit was described as Mother, complementing the parental imagery of

Father and Son in the Trinity, the association of feminine language

with heresy led authors to assign masculine gender to the word—

grammatical nonsense but evidence of the theological desire to

defeminize the Divine.

 

She changes everything: seeking the divine on a feminist path

Lucy Reid, pages 32-33

Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd. (2 Feb 2006)

ISBN: 978 0567026316