The Regular Contributors to WIT are participating in a round table series, titled “Haunted.” This series will appear every (or every other) week throughout the Fall 2024 semester. Each current contributor to the blog will spend some time reflecting on what they are “haunted” by in their theological project.
What am I haunted by? I was particularly struck by this question when Annie Selak first posed it during the CTSA’s plenary session, and by her quoting of Jessica Coblentz’s idea of the ghost of Mary Daly haunting the halls of Boston College. As a feminist historical theologian, my answer to this question is—in part—expressed by a later quote from Coblentz’s article: “We continue to traverse a number of gendered obstacles in the filed today, often while being told (implicitly, of course) that these problems are negligible” (Coblentz, “Ghosts in the Office: The Ecclesiological and Soteriological Implications of Stereotype Threat among Women in Catholic Theology,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 33, no. 1 (2017), p. 127). That is, what I am still haunted by is the way that, despite the rise of feminist methods in scholarship and efforts to recover women’s voices in history, we still have trouble seeing the voices of men and women equally as theological sources. This is despite conscious efforts to study women and women’s voices in history for over fifty years. I would like to think that, given all this time, the “obstacle” of seeing women’s voices as theological is not seen as “negligible,” but that is unfortunately not true.
Coblentz’s article—which you should absolutely read if you haven’t already—discusses the issue of stereotype threat due to Catholic theological anthropology on Catholic women theologians. For this theological anthropology, she focuses on the twentieth century and the ideas, especially tied to Pope John Paul II, that were prevalent when women were starting to enter the theological profession post-Vatican II. Of course, what I have found in my research is that this negative view of women, especially in relation to their theological ability, goes back to the period of the early Church. One of the texts written against the Port-Royal nuns in seventeenth-century France, Le Jansenisme confondu, includes a litany of heretics who were all associated with women, arguing that it is the allowing of women’s ideas that heads to heresy. The text reads:
Simon Magnus was made nothing without his Helena, most gruesome in the world and more renowned than that of Troy, Apelles without his Philumena, Donatus without his Lucilla, Montanus without his two female apostles Priscilla and Maximilla, and all the other heretics might have never made great progress in their gospel of error without the help of women. And always and everywhere that there is reborn some old Adam in order to lose the world again, he would not come to the end without his Eve.
Jean de Brisacier, Le Jansenisme confondu dans l’advocat du Sr. Callaghan (Paris, 1651)
Now, what is interesting about this litany is that the same argument—with the same litany of heretics with their female associates—can be found in the letters of Jerome (see Virginia Burrus, “The Heretical Woman as Symbol in Alexander, Athansius, Epiphanius, and Jerome,” The Harvard Theological Review 84, no. 3 (1991): 229–48).
What this shows is that despite the exceptional women who have been recognized by the Church—who are often precisely portrayed as exceptional and so not like a typical woman—we are today trying to still overcome the burden of about two thousand years of teaching that has either explicitly or implicitly disparaged women’s ability to do theology.
And today, this is what haunts me. This is what motivates my theological project. I want to look back at these women from history—both the exceptional and the unrecognized—and consider them as theologians in their own right. I want to know: What does this tell us about women to recognize them in this way and how should we let it affect our understanding of theology?
The funny thing about this (to me at least) is that it took me a long time to see myself as a feminist theologian. How long it was really occurred to me when I met another theologian who had similar undergraduate experiences as me, but several years later. She mentioned that as an undergrad she identified as a feminist, but as an undergrad—and even into my master’s degree—I did not. I didn’t want to be pigeonholed to being just another woman studying women. I felt that the feminist work had been done and wasn’t necessary anymore. As Coblentz noted in the quote above, I felt that any obstacles that remained were negligible. I honestly don’t remember exactly what transformed my views, but during my doctoral program I discovered the Port-Royal nuns, and, in a way, the rest is history.
And today I think about the many voices of women throughout history whose theologies we will never have access to—these voices haunt me and motivate me to do my part to raise up the theological voices of the women we do have access to.
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