Saint Anthony: a Medieval feminist

In Anthony’s time, it wasn’t politically correct, yet it was certainly morally necessary, to speak up against a number of socially accepted evils and attitudes. Anthony always took the moral high road while most other people were posturing to the powers in place. Anthony’s treatment of women is one way in which Anthony’s attitude reflected Christ’s while contradicting the sentiment of his times.

During the Middle Ages, many women did live somewhat self-directed lives. Some women were shop keepers, most frequently running their husbands’ businesses. Francis of Assisi’s mother Lady Pica, for example, most likely helped out a great deal in her husband’s cloth business. Other women, called Beguines in the Lowlands and other names in other countries, banded together in a quasi-religious mode of life to support each other through weaving. In convents, women, as abbesses, could achieve some measure of power. Many convents were quite wealthy, managing both property and servants.

Seen but not heard

Nevertheless, women were considered the property of their husbands, fathers, and other male relatives. As such, they were expected to be obedient to male authority, to earn and maintain respect, and to perform well and without complaint the duties assigned them. While ballad singers often extolled women’s virtues and beauty, they never sang of women’s independence for, in the mindset of the times, women had no such thing.

Women were supposed to be subservient to men. In churches, women were not permitted to touch the altar. Women, not men, received wedding rings to signify marriage and to protect them from demonic assault. The new couple’s bed chamber was blessed to dispel any curse against fertility and to wipe away any taint of female adultery. Whether married or single, disobedient women were physically abused and punished.

A fairly well-known instance of male domination of women is that involving St. Agnes of Assisi. In 1212, fourteen-year-old Agnes ran off to join her sister Clare in religious life. Agnes’s uncles came seeking her. When she refused to return home with them, they pounced on her and dragged her down a scrubby hill, pulling out clumps of her hair and ripping her dress as they went. Upon Clare’s fervent prayers, Agnes’s body suddenly became so heavy that more than a dozen men could not lift it. Thereupon, one of Agnes’s uncles raised his hand to beat the semi-conscious young woman into either compliance or death. Through a miracle in which the uncle could not lower his raised fist, Agnes was left to join her sister. These same uncles, about a week earlier, had been about to force Clare to return home with them when she bared her tonsured head. The tonsure proved that Clare was consecrated to God. It also showed that her most distinguishing mark of beauty, her golden hair, was gone. Who would want to marry her now?

Ten years after the incident with Agnes, Anthony began preaching in the Romagna, the province north of Umbria where Agnes and Clare lived. Anthony’s response to the many women he met was vastly different from that of most men.

An enlightened perspective

Most men viewed women as a snare and temptation. Anthony viewed them as human beings. Pure as he was, Anthony blamed any lustful feelings not on the woman who induced them but on the man who fantasised over and sometimes acted on them.

Many of Anthony’s miracles were worked for women, and not well-known women at that. Women were considered the lower of the sexes. Peasants, lepers, and beggars occupied the lowest rungs of the social ladder. Peasant women were far down on the social scale. Yet one of Anthony’s most touching miracles involves a peasant woman and her wine.

The scene is imagined in the book St. Anthony: Words of Fire, Life of Light (Pauline Books, 1995). An elderly French peasant woman is busy indoors when she hears a knock at her door. Upon opening it, she discovers two friars who are on their way to Italy. They ask if they might rest a bit before continuing their journey. She invites them in. Overhearing them converse, the woman suddenly realises that one of the friars is Father Anthony, the famous preacher. Eager to make a good impression, she runs to a neighbour to borrow an expensive crystal goblet which she places on the table before the friars. Then she bustles to her wine cellar to fill a pitcher with wine. When she returns, the goblet is broken. The friar with Father Anthony had picked it up to admire its loveliness and had dropped it.

In the midst of her misery the woman suddenly gets more flustered. In her excitement, did she remember to turn off the wine tap? Hurrying downstairs, she discovers that the tap is open and three quarters of her winter’s supply of wine is now soaking into the earthen floor. Despairing, the woman turns off the tap, trudges upstairs, and wonders how she can transform this disastrous visit into something pleasant for this famous man. Instead, Anthony, who is returning to Italy because Francis of Assisi has died and the Order is in turmoil, forgets his own grief and concern. He hands the woman the goblet, now miraculously mended and looking as good as new. He then tells her to recheck the wine barrel because it is full. The woman hurries down-stairs and discovers it just as Anthony said.

The incident reverses society’s expectations. Usually women waited on men and met their needs. Here Anthony, who is of noble lineage, works two miracles to serve the needs of a peasant woman.

Another miracle told in Words of Fire involves another peasant. We might image this one to be young and impetuous. Her mistress tells her that the friars have nothing to eat. She sends the maid to the garden in a dreadful downpour to pull vegetables to take to Anthony’s friary. How angry this disgruntled, complaining girl must have been as she pulled cabbages and onions in the driving rain! What she must have thought as she raced through a drenched and dripping wood to the friary! Yet, when she returns home, she is not even wet.

To keep a servant girl from getting wet in a rainstorm is a unique miracle. The author has researched and written over 700 stories of patron saints for baptismal names and has never read anything else like this.

Anthony was not in favour of wife abuse, a common practise in his time. This is evident in two stories. In one, a woman is rushing to hear Anthony preach. Like many of us, she is running late. Maybe putting on all her finery took longer than she anticipated, for she wants to be seen while seeing Anthony. In her haste, she slips and falls into a muddy puddle, a common accident on rutted, medieval roads. Now her woe increases. Her dress is ruined. Her husband will beat her for it. Dishevelled, confused, terrified, the woman haltingly proceeds to the sermon. What will she do about the dress? When she arrives at the site, her dress is perfectly pressed, clean, and dry. What relief she must have felt!

In a second incident, a husband discovers that his wife has been donating meat to the friars. The stingy man beats his wife and pulls out her hair. The distraught woman runs to Anthony, her pulled-out hair in her fist. Anthony restores her hair, and the miracle transforms her husband. He begins to accompany his wife in her almsgiving.

Upon hearing Anthony preach, many prostitutes converted and confessed their sins. Anthony never condemned women as lustful, lust-inducing beings. Instead, he preached against all types of sin while extolling God’s mercy for the repentant sinner. Anthony’s faith and gentle manner brought sinners of both sexes to their knees.

Anthony often used women to illustrate positive attributes of God. For example, in his Prologue to the Cycle of Sunday Sermons (Sermones for the Easter Cycle, Franciscan Institute, 1994), he writes: Hence, we are told in Isaiah: ‘I am the Lord your God, who take you by the hand and say to you: Do not be afraid, for I have helped you.’ (41:13). Just as a loving mother holds the hand of her child trying to climb up the stairs behind her, so with an equally loving hand the Lord takes the hand of the humble penitent to enable him to climb up the steps to the cross.

Jesus’ treatment of women

Anthony writes in his sermon for Easter Sunday that, after Jesus’ resurrection, First he appeared to Mary Magdalen. So, the grace of the Lord manifests itself first to a repentant sinner before showing itself to others. Later in the same sermon, he adds, Second, he appeared to the women returning from the tomb. The Lord appears to those who return from the tomb, that is, to those who return from the mournful thought of their own deaths only to consider their equally plaintive birth into life.

In one of his most beautiful passages on redemption, Anthony compares Our Lord to a mother. Jesus Christ feeds us thus every day with Gospel teachings on the cross, he gathers us. Hence, John says: ‘that the children of God, who were scattered, he might gather into one’ (Jn 11:52), and thus ‘take them to his bosom’. He lifts us to the bosom of his mercy as a mother takes her child... He nourishes us with his blood, as if it were milk. On Mount Calvary he was wounded in or under the breast with a lance for us, so that he could supply us with his blood, as a mother supplies her child with milk. And he has carried us ‘in his arms’ extended on the cross (Sermones for the Easter Cycle, Second Sunday - See Fr. Claude Jarmak’s article in the May edition of the Messenger - ED.)

Anthony’s respect for women derived from his love for the Mother of Christ. Frequently he mentions her in his sermons. He devotes several sermons and many prayers to Our Lady. One of his loveliest prayers shows both Anthony’s devotion to Mary and faith in Christ, as translated by Father Claude Jarmak in the book Praise to You, Lord (Messenger of St. Anthony, 1986). O Mary, you are a throne in which is located the glory of the Father. On this throne, Jesus Christ, true Wisdom, took his place, Glory Itself, greater than any of the angels, who lived on the earth in our flesh. You, blessed Mary, became the seat of that Glory, Jesus Christ, to whom be honour and praise from age to age. Amen.

Anthony’s sympathetic treatment of women in a society that tended to dominate them calls us to self-examination. How do we treat the powerless people in our society? Can we show them the love, respect, and justice that Anthony displayed and that Christ requires?