Women in the Syrian Tradition:
Holy Images
Prof. Susan Ashbrook Harvey
Syriac legend holds that Christianity was brought to India by the apostle Judas
Thomas in the middle of the first century AD. At the beginning of the Acts of
Thomas, the form in which this legend survives, two striking encounters with
women take place. The first occurs soon after Thomas arrives in India as a
slave, bought to serve King Gundaphorus as a carpenter. The only person to
recognize that Thomas is not what he seems is a young Hebrew flute girl. The
servant girl is portrayed as one whom others consider of no account. Yet it is
she who perceives that Thomas is a messenger of holy tidings and a minister of
holy works. Declaring that Thomas is either God or an apostle of God; she
confesses her faith in Christ, leaves her livelihood, and devotes herself to
God.
Shortly thereafter, the king takes Thomas to bless his newlywed daughter in her
bridal chamber. Thomas’ prayer brings about the appearance of Christ—in Thomas’
own likeness—to the bridal couple that night. The vision converts the young
couple to Christianity, and specifically to the life of virginity in devotion to
Christ. In the morning, the king and queen are scandalized to find their
daughter sitting joyfully with her husband, her face unveiled. To the horror of
the royal household, both bride and groom declare their freedom from the
“shame,” obligations, and harshness of earthly marriage; instead, they now live
in joyful betrothal to the Lord, awaiting their heavenly bridal chamber. Their
decision represents an assault on the social and moral code of the kingdom: bold
and unveiled, a woman who turns away from all that society dictates she should
do. Soon, more women will follow her example as Thomas preaches his message
throughout the land. Fearing the destruction of their social and political
order—an order dependent on defined gender roles fulfilled through the
patriarchal family and its biological procreation—the horrified husbands finally
murder Thomas. Thus his story ends.1
Susan Ashbrook Harvey
The Acts of Thomas is one of our earliest documents for the history of Syrian
Christianity. In it, the first person to recognize God’s messenger is a woman;
the first person to heed the Gospel message and to leave the familiar world of
marriage, family, and political loyalties for the sake of the Gospel is a woman.
Women are the first to receive and the first to pursue the Gospel. Just as the
Virgin Mary was the first to learn of God’s salvific plan by her conception of
Jesus the Christ; just as Mary Magdalene, a disciple of Jesus who had left her
home and family to travel with her Lord on His ministry, was the first to
receive the news of the resurrection and to see the risen Lord; so, too, are the
women of The Acts of Thomas the first to hear and to act. Two unnamed women of
the Syrian legend, a servant flute girl and a royal bride, encapsule in their
brief stories the issues and imagery of women in the Syrian Christian tradition.
Let us use their memory as a guide for exploring what that tradition has held
for the women who have been present within it.
Holy Images
The two women from The Acts of Thomas are characters in a story, and they are
more. The Hebrew servant flute girl and the royal bride of India: these two
images portray the radical equality of the Christian message: in Christ there is
neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female, but all are one
(Galatians 3:26–7). The Syriac Christianity of the patristic period was notable
not only for the variety and breadth of roles it allowed its female adherents,
but also for the powerful feminine imagery that stood at the heart of its
spiritual tradition. One example deserves particular notice: the Syriac
tradition of the Holy Spirit as feminine. I have deliberately left this issue
for the end and will sketch it only briefly, because the place of this imagery
in women’s experience is ambiguous—that is, the relationship between symbols and
social reality is a difficult one to determine. Cultures with powerful female
symbols, or with female divinities as the central focus of their religious
systems, have not necessarily provided positive political and social positions
for real women. Moreover, we have no access to knowledge of how women themselves
responded to this imagery in the course of Syriac Christian history.
Nonetheless, the images are compelling for the theological implications of their
feminine elements.
A basic feature of early Syriac Christianity is the complex gender imagery of
the Holy Spirit.2 In Syriac literature prior to the year 400, the Holy Spirit
was most often understood to be feminine, referred to as “She,” because the
Syriac noun for spirit, ruha—related to the Hebrew ruah—is grammatically
feminine. However, early Syriac writers did not present the Holy Spirit as a
feminine being, distinct from though not necessarily in opposition to a male
God. This was not a concrete identification such as characterized the
traditional pagan religions of the Syrian Orient, where a triad of mother,
father, and son was a common configuration of divinity, and where the Syrian
Goddess held a notable place.
In Syriac literature, the grammatical gender of the noun ruha led to a feminine
identification of the Holy Spirit, enhanced by various images used to describe
Her activity that were clearly feminine: images of the Spirit comforting as a
mother, or giving birth to, or nurturing the believer. Other actions ascribed to
the Spirit did not carry gender connotations in their meanings, even when
conjugated in the feminine with the noun ruha: to come upon, dwell in, search
out, lead. Thus the understanding of the Spirit as feminine had to do with the
experience of some of the Spirit’s actions and not with an attempt to define an
identity. Feminine imaging for the Holy Spirit was not exclusive among early
Syriac writers, but it was quite common, and was assumed to be an appropriate
way of speaking about the Divine. Occasionally, Syriac writers used feminine
imagery for Christ or for God as well.
Christians of every language have occasionally used feminine imagery for the
Divine, but no other language of the early Christian world allowed the specific
feminine identification that Syriac afforded the Holy Spirit. In Syriac the
concept of the Holy Spirit could be developed theologically because of the
language itself, and it was. At some point, this became problematic for the
larger Church institution.
Around the year 400, a change appears in Syriac literature: the Holy Spirit
begins to be referred to almost exclusively in masculine terms. After 400, the
Spirit as “She” is found only on rare occasions, in poetry where it might be
required for metrical pattern, or in ancient prayers preserved in liturgical
texts. When the word ruha is used to mean wind or spirit generally, it is
construed in its feminine form; when used for the Holy Spirit, it is construed
as masculine despite the grammatical strain this puts on the language. Other
images take the place of the early feminine ones, in general keeping the sense
of earlier images without involving gender: the Spirit overshadows, or indwells,
or enfolds. These are not used as gendered images; a “masculine” Spirit does not
emerge in Syriac theology or religious poetry as a “feminine” one had in the
earlier period.
We do not know how or why this change took place. Apparently, in the larger
ecclesiastical structure of the Church, some people perceived the idea of a
feminine Holy Spirit to be dangerous. For whatever reason, an image of great
beauty and theological power was lost.
Other aspects of Syrian spirituality relied upon feminine imagery. Devotion to
the Virgin Mary was especially rich in the Syrian Orient, where a profound
Mariological tradition flourished from the second century—an unusually early
flowering of such devotion. The cults of female saints continued in their
popularity, although the numbers of women recognized in hagiography shrank
during the Middle Ages. The Syrian preference for portraying baptism as new
birth, following John 3:3–7, led to a vivid imaginal tradition of the baptismal
font as the womb, and of baptism as mother. Christ’s life was imaged as a series
of births: first from the womb of Mary, then from the womb of the Jordan at his
baptism, and finally from the womb of Sheol at the resurrection. In mystical
writings, the ascetic’s body became a womb in which to receive the Word. Yet no
parallel to the Holy Spirit as feminine has ever reappeared in Syriac theology
or spirituality. Indeed, all these other instances place the feminine imagery
clearly outside the Godhead proper.
The correlation of social reality and theological imagery is not easily
established. But the Syrian Church, in its first six centuries, demonstrated
great openness to the works of women in the Church, and to the possibilities of
extensive imagery, both male and female, for the Divine. Centuries of domination
by other political and religious authorities followed, and women’s roles were
seriously curtailed. Yet the Syriac tradition has continued to live, and its
women have continued to honor their early legacy even while seeking its
renewal.3 Like the flute girl, like the royal bride, women of the Syriac
Christian tradition continue to hear the Word and to respond.
Notes.
1. The Acts of Thomas were originally composed in Syriac, but circulated widely
in both Syriac and Greek. See “The Acts of Thomas” in Edgar Hennecke and Wilhelm
Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha, English translation edited by R. McL.
Wilson (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1965), vol. I, pp. 425–531; and The
Acts of Thomas, trans. with commentary by A. F. J. Klijn, Supplements to Novum
Testamentum 5 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1962).
2. What follows is a summary of my articles, “Feminine Imagery for the Divine:
The Holy Spirit, the Odes of Solomon, and Early Syriac Tradition,” St.
Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 37 (1993), pp. 111–139; and “The Odes of
Solomon,” in Searching the Scriptures, Vol. 2: A Feminist Commentary, edited by
Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (New York: Crossroad, 1994), pp. 86–98.
3. Avril M. Makhlouf, “Hindiye Anne Ajeymi in her ecclesiastical and political
situation,” Actes du 3e Congrès International d’études Arabes Chrétiennes,
edited by Samir Khalil Samir, Parole de L’Orient 16 (1990 - 1991), pp. 279–287;
Francis M. Zayek, Rafka: The Blind Mystic of Lebanon (Still River, Mass.: St.
Bede’s Publications, 1980); Elishba Gülcan, “The Renewal of Monastic Life for
Women in a Monastery in Tur Abdin,” Sobornost 7 (1977), pp. 288–298.