Abstract
In this volume Cristina Lledo-Gomez takes up the question of the femininity of the church with a thoroughgoing analysis of the sources and contexts of female imagery in ecclesiology. By disentangling thoughts on the church as a mother from their more recent conflation with Marian imagery for the church, she gives depth and context to the ways in which prominent thinkers have turned to the reality of women’s lives as a source for the ecclesial imagination. Beginning with biblical images of Jerusalem as a woman in a variety of contexts (wife, consort, mother, whore) and moving through Irenaeus, Tertullian, Cyprian, Ambrose, and Augustine, L.-G. identifies not only how various theologians in the Tradition have employed female imagery and metaphor, but perhaps more importantly, she explores the broader context of women’s lives from which these thinkers were drawing their imagery.
The bulk of the book shows how patristic writers utilized cultural understandings of womanhood and women’s roles to strengthen the faith of Christians, illuminate the nature of the church, highlight its mission, and respond to heresies. Irenaeus’s use of the image of church as a mother who labors and nurtures exemplifies this inculturation: the church as a mother giving birth to children through martyrdom uses contemporary Roman beliefs about maternity and breastfeeding to refer to the church as a nurturing mother who passes on true doctrine on which her children feed (against the false doctrine of the Gnostics). Tertullian relies on the Roman figures of materfamilias and the virtuous univira to “adopt highly valued familial associations such as inheritance and belonging to reinforce a church that demarcated between outsiders and insiders to the Christian faith” (46). In doing so, Tertullian marries Roman cultural values to Christian ecclesial concerns. By Cyprian’s time, the Roman figure of matrona (previously rejected by Tertullian as frivolous) had become a symbol of virtues, including peace and piety, and so Cyprian used the image of Mother Church’s lap or bosom to comfort Christians in a time of instability in the Roman Empire.
L.-G.’s analysis of virginity as a metaphor for the church similarly points to how the Church Fathers drew on what she calls “culturally resonant” images of womanhood both to appeal to average citizens and to address particular ecclesial problems. The metaphor of the church as bride gets similar treatment. Of particular value is how the author unravels the oft-conflated notions of the virginity and motherhood of Mary from that predicated of the church.
Uniquely interesting is the author’s historical leap forward, into the pontificate of Francis, to apply her method of reviewing the culturally resonant images of womanhood that are utilized by the pope in his invoking of the church as a woman and a mother. Here, L.-G. focuses on the notions of the good woman and good mother of the mid-twentieth century, the cult of domesticity, and the ways in which these cultural idealizations of women’s lives and roles are deployed from Leo XIII on. In the case of Pope Francis, his emphasis on encountering persons in their lived reality seems to conflict with the ecclesial tradition of utilizing idealized images of women to speak about the church, and many of his statements about the genius of women have been ambiguously received as a result.
In all, L.-G.’s thorough analysis of the patristic use and contextual origins of female metaphors for the church proves helpful for ecclesiology, feminist theology, and for systematicians interested in broadening what we understand “contextual” theologies to be. The author’s intriguing research is valuable for its content, but perhaps more importantly it reveals that in each case, theologians relied on easily recognizable images of women in contemporary society to point to ineffable or contested ecclesiological realities. The images of women drawn from daily life illuminate the complex reality of the church, where in contemporary framings of the church as female, the notion of “woman” seems removed from recognizable contemporary contexts. Moreover, more recent reliance on female language and imagery in ecclesiology seems designed not only to describe the nature of the church but also to prescribe appropriate roles for women and consequently proscribe other roles as inherently unfeminine. L.-G.’s work highlights that the ground has shifted when it comes to our understandings of womanhood, of marriage, and of motherhood, but ecclesial metaphors remain rooted in historical contexts to which we have limited access, such as the dominance of the Roman univira, materfamilias, and matrona. She shows us, too, the great possibility that plural, multivalent understandings of women drawn from the contemporary context might continue to illuminate the ineffable, and in many ways, eschatological nature of the pilgrim church.