ABSTRACT
The Fathers are the authoritative teachers of the Christian Church in the centuries of its formation within Graeco-Roman culture. Patristics, the study of their writings, conveys almost overwhelmingly the weight of male authority. Fatherhood meant legal power over children, even over their life or death; Christians, especially the newly baptised, were encouraged to think of themselves as children, even as babies, in relation to the spiritual fathers who raised and directed them (see further Clark 1994). Most of the Fathers were bishops, adding the authority of hierarchy to the authority of intellect and spirituality. It is just possible to identify a few spiritual mothers, and to find a few scraps of what they (probably) said. 1 But even the women who were acknowledged as spiritual superiors were wary of the teaching role – or else their male biographers were wary of showing them in it, for Paul had said (1 Timothy 2.12) ‘I do not permit a woman to teach’ (see further Nürnberg 1988). So in patristics, as elsewhere, we have male perspectives on women, but not female perspectives on men.
