ABSTRACT
If, then, our main eyewitnesses for the period are the group of patristic authors-the Fathers-the first objective must be to see from their writings how unified was the thinking of this group: whether we can identify any homogeneous theological thinking applied to women wishing to further their devotions-even a roughly coherent theological line on the female route to salvation. This necessitates examining the kind of criteria that they thought women must meet to be accounted ‘virtuous’, and the routes they approved for its most suitable expression; also the grounds on which a reputation for piety was disqualified or disputed. Patristic attitudes take their root, though adopted in varying degrees, in the writings of the Apostle Paul; for them the first and greatest Christian writer. The ambiguities in Paul, however, complicated further innate divisions in patristic attitudes. In the centuries immediately following the legitimisation of the church, the church authorities were seeking more and more to define and regulate; hence the importance of the distinctions in Paul between what was and what was not a commandment. Women in particular were subject to a great lack of definition with regard to what positions in the hierarchy, if any, they could occupy; and as to acceptable modes of expression of their piety. In the sub-apostolic period the effect of Christian teaching was to seem to make women less heedful of the restrictions of family, upbringing and state; in the fourth and fifth centuries we see the same authorities used as part of an attempt to ‘place’ women within the established environs of the church. It was a period of reinforcement and shoring up of the embryonic existing organisations, of church councils and canons and the troubled attempts to establish a dominant and accepted orthodoxy in the aftermath of divisive persecution, which left wayward strands such as the Montanists, the Arians and the Donatists unaccounted for.
