Queens of a Fallen World

240811 Queens of a Fallen World: The Lost Women of Augustine's Confessions by Kate Cooper

https://www.amazon.com/Queens-Fallen-World-Augustines-Confessions/dp/B0BLXN23BY/ref=sr_1_1?crid=KEXPLM0RSTFZ&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.qk5z0rhKQG799ySjhTcOizUopmDtk-23XQvJbs4ARSOZcTMRslmtmkkCAO9VKSccQeNg_yN8leN68v3-YUqfJ2Ve39pfWZQo-EdJvI0UvYi6SoVQ5oubd3hg98fhxRQ3YzEq0PIw6-YJwaXQDs8xnMdDFyBmtyTNxS_83HpB5tXmwO0yjIM78C4bPEobDVfuknAdCU-J5Qw3GiSecvNcUGV5yk-6bXBze-NZ8ikp2AE.IkfzkDuxUrkqAVck_XmOhK3pkjMNUiV1NR0eUHs6jww&dib_tag=se&keywords=queens+of+a+fallen+world&qid=1723439077&sprefix=Queens+of+a+fallen%2Caps%2C240&sr=8-1



As the subtitle says, this is a book about the women in St. Augustine's life. Since two of the for women discussed in this book are never named by Augustine and one of the two remaining women are never mentioned in the book, I had two thoughts: first, how much invention and mind-reading would the author indulge, and, second, how much of a feminist polemic would this be. The latter concern almost kept me from buying the book.
The good news is that Kate Cooper pulls off her assignment in a scholarly and interesting way. The historical part is well done. The scarcity of biographical information is rounded out by Cooper's knowledge of Roman society. The theological/historical part is even-handed and avoids any tendency to make St. Augustine into a monster of the patriarchy.

The four women that Cooper discusses are Monnica – Augustine's sainted mother; Tacita – the twelve year old heiress with the fat dowry that Augustine would have married as his ticket to Roman high society; Una – the concubine that Augustine was involved with for twelve years and with whom he had a son named Adeodatus; and Empress Justina, who is not mentioned in The Confessions, but who played a significant behind-the- scenes role.

Cooper provides a good deal of Roman cultural knowledge and history as a way of filling out the stories of these women. For example, she explains Roman inheritance rules and how those rules connected with the institutions of marriage and concubinage. The purpose of marriage in Roman society of the fourth century was to create an heir to property. Only the children of marriage could inherit. Concubinage was an accepted institution in the fourth century and carried no bit of shame or dishonor. It was a relationship of inequality between the man and the women, although it was not uncommon for a man to free a concubine slave in order to marry her.

In concubinage, the man had no duties to the concubine or the children of the relationship. The children of a concubinal relationship could never inherit. When the relationship was over, the woman would take the children with her.

This is why it was so remarkable that Adeodatus remained with Augustine after he ended the relationship with “Una” in order to enter the relationship with “Tacita.” Augustine loved Una. Except for the fact that he was ambitious, he could – he should have – remained dutiful to Una, something that he realized too late.

From the Confessions, one doesn't get a sense that Augustine saw concubinage as morally problematic for the reasons we see it as morally problematic. I think we see it as morally problematic because it involves sex outside of marriage. This doesn't seem to be a problem for Augustine, even when he was writing the Confessions as a Christian bishop. According to Cooper, Augustine's moral problem with his concubinal relationship was that it actually was a marriage, but he didn't recognize it as such until later. This says a lot about the moral change in Western society between Augustine's age and ours.

Empress Justina isn't mentioned in the Confession, but knowledge of her role behind the scenes is informative. Justina was the stepmother of Emperor Gratian, who was murdered in 383 AD, and the mother of Valentinian II, the minor was the sole sovereign of the Western Roman Empire. Gratian was murdered by a usurper named Maximus, who positioned himself to the north of Italy. Augustine's mentor, St. Ambrose, acted as an intermediary between Justina and Maximus to stall Maximus' invasion of Italy. Ambrose was successful – Maximus delayed long enough for Emperor Theodosius to intervene to end Maximus' insurrection.

All of this plays out, unmentioned, in the background of the time that Augustine is in Milan studying under Ambrose. All the time of Augustine's spiritual turmoil, his conversion after hearing “tolle lege,” and his baptism by Ambrose are foregrounded against a never-mentioned reality that an army was about to invade Milan. In fact, people were fleeing Milan and Italy, general. Augustine's departure from Italy may have been motivated by the threat of the invasion, but this is never mentioned.

The woman most clearly described is Monnica. In Cooper's telling, Augustine had a loving relationship with his mother, Monnica was a wise woman, and Augustine respected her intelligence. Monnica taught Augustine that social status was less important than personal merit. Monnica's lessons were propagated into Western society.

Usually, Augustine is blamed for being addicted to lust, who transmitted a negative attitude about sex to the future. Cooper disagrees with this understanding. In her eyes, Augustine's addiction was to greed and ambition, not lust. The following is such a revision of the traditional picture of Augustine, that it deserves quoting in full:

But reading the Confessions carefully, we encounter a different story. Augustine tells us that he and Alypius had debated whether marriage was a better way of life than asceticism, but he makes clear that he, Augustine, had won the debate. Largely by pointing to the example of his own harmonious home life with Una and their small son, Augustine had persuaded his friend that marriage had to be better than the single life. As he saw things in hindsight, the problem he had faced in the summer of 386 was not that sex and marriage were obstacles to communion with God. Rather, it was that his way of pursuing them had been immoral.

On this reading, the received view is not wrong that Augustine was recoiling from sin when he decided not to marry. But the sin that repulsed him was not lust; it was greed. What shook him, finally, was his willingness to betray the woman who ought to have been his wife—the mother of his child—for a lucrative arranged marriage. The root of his problem was not sexual desire. It was ambition.

Years later, after returning to Africa, Augustine would go on to become first a monk and then a Christian bishop, and his pastoral writings would repeatedly recognize a spiritual value in romantic partnerships outside wedlock. He would argue that a man who had lived with a concubine should not be allowed to marry, since in his day, second marriages were prohibited. Even if Roman law saw concubines as a having no legal standing, he argued, the church should see the union as spiritually equivalent to marriage. In other words, neither one of the pair should move on to marry someone else while the other was still living. This was and remained a minority view. Many Christians shared Monnica's view that divorce was impossible, but this only applied to marriage, while others believed that under the right circumstances, Christians could divorce and remarry. With the exception of Augustine, no one seems to have believed that men should be forever faithful to a concubine whom they had specifically chosen not to marry.

If Bishop Augustine came to argue that a man who takes a concubine has a moral obligation to her, his contemporaries mostly saw a concubine as a person there to be exploited. Whether slave or free, she provided a service, and if she earned genuine affection from her partner, this spoke well of her but did not alter her position. By sleeping with her, the male partner acquired no long-term obligation toward her or her children, even if he was the biological father. Augustine would break with this tradition by arguing that in moral terms an established extramarital relationship carried the same responsibility as the legal bond of marriage.

We can see this in the famous scene in the garden at the climax of Book Eight of the Confessions, when Augustine decides to dedicate his life to God. This momentous scene has been persistently misunderstood. Certainly, he was guilty of a terrible sexual sin, but the sin was not sleeping with his concubine. It was casting her away.

Augustine's story of his conversion begins with an admission that he had been a slave to lust and to worldly ambition. But now, God had freed him: “I will tell the story of how You, my help and my salvation, set me free from the chains of sexual desire, which held me so tightly, and from the slavery of my worldly ambition.”3 That Augustine addresses God by the term dominus—which means both “lord” and “master”—here is no accident; he wants to underline the helpless subjection he had labored under. “I was going about my usual activities,” he says, “with anxiety mounting ever higher, and every day I sighed for You.”4

Cooper, Kate. Queens of a Fallen World: The Lost Women of Augustine's Confessions (pp. 195-196). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.

This crystallizes something for me that I had long intuited. I've read The Confessions three or four times. I've never formed the picture that Augustine was a particularly “lustful” guy. His relationship with “Una” was one of faithfulness. He was obviously torn by putting her away. Admittedly, he said that he needed to have a woman in his life, but we do not hear about him visiting prostitutes, which were plentiful in the Roman Empire.

Based on what Augustine says, Cooper's understanding is that Augustine came to understand himself as actually married to “Una.” This meant that marriage was not simply about inheritance. It involved a mutual willing of the “goods of marriage,” a term that the Church would use to describe the openness to children and the unity of life.

Augustine wrote on marriage in several books. He also wrote pastoral letters where he expressed these ideas. In a letter to a married woman named Ecdicia, he gave her counsel about her relationship with her husband. Augustine insisted that marriage was more than a contract, it was a spiritual fellowship. According to Cooper:

The letter to Ecdicia caught the eye of these later divines for it contained many distinctive ideas about the spiritual value of the marriage bond. It argued that marriage was not, as the Romans had always believed, simply a contract between families to organize the transmission of property. Instead, it was a spiritual fellowship that could be undertaken between individuals who had no intention of having children or even sleeping together, and it involved a vow before God that would last into eternity.

No one would have been more surprised than Ecdicia to learn that something good had come of her troubles. But in the eyes of the medieval church, her predicament was nothing less than providential; it was the grain of sand around which the pearl of the medieval Christian sacrament of marriage later grew.

Cooper, Kate. Queens of a Fallen World: The Lost Women of Augustine's Confessions (p. 229). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.

In a treatise, Augustine equated marriage with fidelity. According to Cooper:

In his treatise On the Good of Marriage, Augustine makes an unprecedented argument for an element of fair play between the sexes. The Confessions and On the Good of Marriage have traditionally been dated to the same period, the years directly after Augustine's consecration as a bishop in 395, but in fact the date of both is uncertain. Yet the two texts need not have been written at the same time for us to see what they have in common. Both develop an impulse of self-criticism and offer an implicit critique of male privilege in relations with women.

Marriage is about trust, Augustine argues—the Latin term is fides, often translated as “faith” or “fidelity.” This means that each partner should be accountable to the other in the same way. A husband and wife enter the bond on the same terms: “They owe equal fidelity to each other.”18 So far, Augustine might not have ruffled too many Roman feathers—but only if he held back from spelling out in detail what his words actually meant.

But Augustine did not hold back: “Betrayal of this fidelity,” he says, “is called adultery, when through the prompting of one's own lust, or through acceding to the lust of another, sexual intercourse takes place with another man or woman contrary to the marriage-pact.”19 With a stroke, he makes radical departure from the Roman understanding of marital fidelity, which deemed the relationship exclusive only for the wife.

By suggesting that for a man to sleep with a woman other than his wife constitutes adultery simply because he himself is married, even if she is single, Augustine steers definitively away from the Roman legal definition of adultery as a crime that turned exclusively on the violation of a married woman's chastity. That definition was still in force at the time he was writing.

Cooper, Kate. Queens of a Fallen World: The Lost Women of Augustine's Confessions (pp. 239-240). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.

This is getting closer to the modern – Christian – understanding of marriage. It is hard for us to see how a Christian marriage could be otherwise, how it could be “Roman,” but that is an artifact of shapers of culture like Augustine.

This is a good work of intellectual history. It manages to demonstrate that the past is a different county and how we got from there to here. I do question one thing in this book. It seems that Cooper believes that Arianism was an invented issue:

Originally, the presbyter Arius taught that the Son of God was a human being born like any other creature, while his rival Athanasius, later bishop of Alexandria, taught that the Son of God was much more than a historical person: he was also the Word of God—the Logos—which had been spoken at the creation of the world. The creed proclaimed at the Council of Nicaea in 325 captured the idea by speaking of the Son of God as “eternally begotten of the Father.” After Nicaea there was no enduring “Arian” movement—Arius himself quickly modified his views to try to keep the peace. Still, the Nicene party discovered that constant accusations of heresy against their rivals was a powerful tool for populist crowd-building, and the fact that “Arianism” was an empty accusation made it particularly useful as a slur to aim at whomever the Nicene bishops disagreed with.2

Cooper, Kate. Queens of a Fallen World: The Lost Women of Augustine's Confessions (pp. 137-138). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.

First, I believe that the issue was whether the Son was created or eternal. Arianism agreed that the Son was divine, but also claimed that the Son was created by the Father, i.e., “there was a time when he was not.”

Second, there were emperors, churches, and entire Germanic tribes, such as the Ostrogoths, who were Arian. These groups persecuted Catholics, and vice versa, to be fair.

I am not sure what Cooper means here.

Nonetheless this is a short, accessible read that provides interesting background for one of the most interesting men in history.