ABSTRACT
For the early Christian view of woman as it was developed by the Church Fathers contained a fundamental ambivalence that derived primarily from statements in the letters attributed to the apostle Paul. In Jesus’ Jewish, Hellenistic and Roman environment, his treatment of men and women as equals had been exceptional. In symbolical terms, man corresponds to Christ and to the head, and woman to the Church and the body. The same distinction between woman as a person on the one hand and sensuality in feeling and act on the other is made when Gregory lets a plundering, but evidently still relatively pious, soldier seize the relics of a saint from a burning church without even being scorched. In goodness and wickedness, purity and sensuality, heroism and piety, wilfulness and cruelty, the women whom Gregory describes are not different from men.
