Teaching Note: On Confronting Violence Against Women in the Christian Tradition

When I teach theology to undergraduates, I make sure to spend some time on Augustine, typically his Confessions. I don’t think this is a necessary practice for all theology instructors, but I personally find Augustine to be a useful entry point for broader, complex theological and hermeneutical questions.

Specifically, I have noticed that studying Augustine is like holding up a mirror to ourselves. More specifically, how we as contemporary readers weigh in on Augustine’s views of women is greatly telling about our views of women.

Obviously I am not squarely in the subfield of the history of Christianity. I am a systematician who seeks to be historically well-versed, and this concern for how historical ideas are received in our present theological context shows up in my teaching.

That said, onto the specifics.

In particular, I work to insure that, among the many passages we discuss over the course of two weeks or so, we touch upon Augustine’s grief over his mother Monica’s death in Book IX. And within that, I make sure that we touch upon his reflections about her in relation to his father Patrick. Here is the passage I like to focus on (and I have broken down a very long paragraph into sections for ease of reading):

[Monica] was thus nurtured in an atmosphere of purity and temperance, and was subjected by you [God] to the authority of her parents rather than by them to yours. When she attained full marriageable age she was entrusted to a husband; she served him as her lord, but she made it her business to win him for you by preaching you to him through her way of life, for by her conduct you made her beautiful in her husband’s eyes, as a person to be respected, loved and admired.

So gently did she put up with his marital infidelities that no quarrel ever broke out between them on this score, for she looked to you to show him mercy, knowing that once he came to believe he would become chaste.

Although he was outstandingly generous, he was also hot-tempered, but she learned to offer him no resistance, by deed or even by word, when he was angry; she would wait for a favorable moment, when she saw that his mood had changed and he was calm again, and then explain her action, in case he had given way to wrath without due consideration.

There were plenty of women married to husbands of gentler temper whose faces were badly disfigured by traces of blows, who while gossiping together would complain about their husbands’ behavior; but she checked their talk, reminding them in what seemed to be a joking vein but with serious import that from the time they had heard their marriage contracts read out they had been in duty bound to consider these as legal documents which made slaves of them. In consequence they ought to keep their subservient status in mind and not defy their masters.

These other wives knew what a violent husband she had to put up with, and were amazed that there had never been any rumor of Patricius striking his wife, nor the least evidence of its happening, nor even a day’s domestic strife between the two of them; and in friendly talk they sought an explanation. My mother would then instruct them in this plan of hers that I have outlined. Those who followed it found out its worth and were happy; those who did not continued to be bullied and battered. (Confessions, Book IX, #9, 19, Boulding translation)

I don’t know if this will surprise anybody (I really don’t), but I have noticed that most students typically want to defend this passage against critique. And it’s a very specific kind of defense. I have noticed that it is usually not: “Well, husbands beating wives as a matter of course is part of Augustine’s historical context, so it’s not really a surprise that he can’t see it for what it is.”

Rather (and this is important), the defense I tend to hear mostly is that, in this passage, Augustine obviously isn’t condoning men beating their wives; he is simply praising his mother for knowing how to avoid it. It’s praise for his mother, not his father, so it’s fine.

All of a sudden, then, a passage from an ancient Christian thinker reveals the students’ own perduring, contemporary, perniciously sexist assumptions about the dynamics of violence against women, particularly within the context of marriage.

When these discussions occur, I press back here and there, but, while it’s happening, I am mostly listening and watching and taking stock of what’s being said. Usually the only exceptions to what I said about the typical modus operandi of the students are a handful of female students who strike me as deeply uncomfortable listening to their male (and female) peers explain to me repeatedly that Monica was exemplary because “she knew not to poke a hornet’s nest.”

Let me be clear that I am not railing against college students en masse. I love my students. Many of them are still in touch with me from classes past; many of them simply come in to meet with me and talk to me. I very much respect them.

But something I’ve noticed while teaching a few undergraduate classes is just the deeply embedded nature of certain sexist, classist, and racist ways of thinking. Many students are very intelligent, and many more are open to growing intellectually and to changing, but it is also the case that the majority of them have not yet had time to take a step back from and critically interrogate the problematic thought patterns into which they have been socialized for about two decades. And, in a theology class at a Christian university, the instructor is, in one way or another, going to have to confront and even try to dismantle that to some extent.

So, going back. After this discussion about how great Monica is at not getting beaten, I like to send the students a hand-out responding point by point to the arguments they made in class. I also tell them we’re going to be coming back to these issues in various ways for the rest of the semester, so they need to read and understand what I am saying.

The rest of this post is taken from that handout (with slight modification). I don’t think my points will be mind-blowing to the regular readers of WIT, but I thought some people might be interested in one instructor’s attempt to begin to dismantle sexism for college students.

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First, let me make some remarks about the passage we discussed: Augustine’s praise for his mother and her ability to find a way to tiptoe around Patrick (Patricius) so that she does not set him off and get beaten.

Here is what we can and should agree upon about this passage:

-Augustine’s energy in this passage is geared toward praising his mother, who has “learned” not to get beaten (which may imply that she was, at least initially in their marriage)

-Men beating women, particularly within the context of marriage, was widely practiced and accepted at this time.

-We as twenty-first-century readers all recognize that such behavior is utterly despicable and we are glad that it is criminalized today.

However, there’s still a question on the table about Augustine’s attitude toward his mother learning to avoid getting beatings because she learns to read and to play Patrick. It is true that you can easily make the case that Augustine does not respect his father: Patrick doesn’t show up very much in Confessions, and, when he does, it is often negative. Augustine clearly admires his mother much more, so it is absolutely fair to say that he does not actively condone his father’s potential predisposition to beat his mother.

And yet, should his father beat his mother, it is not so easy to say that Augustine would entirely blame his father and not at all blame his mother. Perhaps it is the case that if Monica were receiving beatings, then Augustine wouldn’t lay any blame on her and would simply not put in anything about this in his story. Given that this is a speculation, all we can do is say that this is possibly true. However, we do need to look more closely at what Augustine actually does say in the passage to really get insight into this issue:

There were plenty of women married to husbands of gentler temper whose faces were badly disfigured by traces of blows, who while gossiping together would complain about their husbands’ behavior; but she checked their talk, reminding them in what seemed to be a joking vein but with serious import that from the time they had heard their marriage contracts read out they had been in duty bound to consider these as legal documents which made slaves of them. In consequence they ought to keep their subservient status in mind and not defy their masters.

Now, the bolded words offer us some key information: the “gentler” husband still regularly beat their wives severely enough to leave “disfiguring” on their faces. And yet, Augustine seems more immediately judgmental about these women “gossiping” about getting beatings than he does about the men who actually issue the beatings. At the very least, he speaks approvingly of the way that Monica shuts down their conversation with each other about getting physically abused specifically by reminding them of their “wifely” subordination. And since Augustine approves so thoroughly of his mother’s actions in this story, we can by the transitive property deduce that he agrees with her worldview about marriage: namely, that it is constituted by wifely subordination.

This little section in this larger passage therefore clues us into what is likely Augustine’s attitude toward marital abuse: men should ideally practice self-control (and therefore not beat their wives) because part of the Christian life involves such self-discipline, but men do exercise a kind of ownership over their wives so that it is still their very understandable prerogative to issue physical punishment when  “tested” by their wives. Domestic abuse is within a man’s sphere of rights that have been arrogated to him by virtue of his role as head and husband, though he should try to avoid it when possible. A husband abusing his wife is not ideal but, realistically, it happens and is understandable given the fact that women’s subordination constitutes the structure of marriage at this time.

If Augustine didn’t hold these kinds of assumptions, then he wouldn’t be so seemingly irritated by women who talk to each other about getting beaten (why does he spend any energy on that, of all things?) and he wouldn’t approve of his mother shutting them up through an appeal to wifely subordination.

If Augustine were truly clued into the horror of marital abuse (in the way that we hope we today are) but he still wanted to praise his mother for surviving in a terrible situation with limited options (and it is this interpretation that I saw most of you arguing for in our class discussion), it is likely that we would have gotten even one sentence where he condemns the phenomenon of men beating their wives. Here’s an example that I made up of what we might read if that were the case:

“O God, through his hot temper my father was prone to beat my mother until she learned how to offer him no resistance and to avoid his bad moods. Why is it that men feel prone to think they can beat women, especially their wives? Why be so cruel to the people they are to love the most? This is certainly a result of the sin of Adam. Such men make themselves very far from you because they are in love with their own filthy pride and display of power. A man can be very learned and civilized and polite within society but then return home and, at the slightest agitation, fly off the handle and issue the most severe beating upon the woman he has vowed to love. What greater hypocrisy and tragedy is there?” (Not bad, huh?)

But guess what: we don’t have anything like that from Augustine. The same man who writes at great length about the glorification of violence in the gladiatorial rings, in the theater, and in the school system cannot take the time to devote one sentence to bemoaning the violence of domestic abuse. He cannot forgive himself for stealing the pears, but in relative silence he passes over his father’s potential predisposition to beat his mother.

Based on what I have said, it is not unreasonable to conclude, therefore, that he does not have the same moral sensitivity to the issue of domestic abuse that we hope we have today. For this reason, throughout this passage he slips into a dangerous logic whereby he ends up shifting a great deal of the moral responsibility of Patrick’s actions to Monica, and in general of men’s actions to women. For Augustine, women have the moral responsibility to avoid “getting beaten.” Please note how this sentiment presupposes that men don’t have to take moral responsibility for the violence they render unto women (men should be offended by this assumption since it suggests a very low view of men’s moral reasoning capabilities, by the way!). Presumably this is the case for Augustine because men are “naturally” in the leadership role and, in a sense, “own” their wives, so part of their role might be rendering violence “when necessary,” and it’s the correlative job of women to try and avoid this. All in all, Augustine’s words suggest that women are the ones who decide whether they themselves are brutally beaten by their husbands or not (which, by the way, is not true to reality since those who have more power in a relationship and who choose to abuse tend to do so whenever they feel like it, regardless of how the other person acts). This is the status quo regulating the terms of a marriage.

And why would we as contemporary readers expect Augustine to have the same moral sensitivity about domestic abuse that we try to have today? He was a man who was born in the fourth century and who died in the fifth. We acknowledged at the outset that domestic abuse was an accepted part of Augustine’s context; how could this not warp his moral sensitivity here?

On that note, though, I encourage you to do a Google search on “Christian pastors deal with domestic abuse” and see what comes up. Apparently it is still quite a problem today that Christian leaders counsel wives to stay with abusive husbands to help them “change” (we can acknowledge that this trivializes the horror of this violence and, again, reduces men’s moral agency while inflating women’s). Augustine’s skewed moral sensitivity on this topic is not at all a thing of the past. So are we even as morally sensitive as we think we are?

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The end.