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By Root 820 0

monks have that women pose a threat to their celibate way of life. It is painfully obvious that one method of coping with celibacy has been to denounce sexuality itself, and that celibate men have often projected onto women the more demonic elements of their lust. The grief this has caused is incalculable. Imagine, if you will, an eleven-year-old girl publicly humiliated by a priest, who, angrily summoning her out of a parochial school classroom, tells her that she is an “occasion of sin” for a boy she’s grown up with, who for years has been one of her best friends. Unfortunately for her, the priest has his eye on the boy as a likely candidate for minor seminary, and he tells her to leave him alone, that she is an evil influence.

Now that responsible voices within the Catholic church are calling for the ability to build and maintain friendships with both men and women as a requirement for priesthood studies, that priest himself might be called an “occasion of sin.” As for the girl, now a married woman with teenage children, she has never gotten over being called evil on the verge of her adolescence. The hatred she experienced has turned into a lasting hatred of the Catholic church. Mention Thomas Aquinas in her presence, and she begins to sputter with rage.

Early monastic literature contains many tales of monks projecting their lust onto demons who appear in female form and advice to young monks regarding women in general that, while it may have served a practical purpose, also fueled the fires of misogyny: “do not sleep in a place where there is a woman.” “It is through women that the enemy wars against [the monks].” A much more complex picture emerges, however, where real women are concerned. When women approach monks for healing prayers for themselves and their children, they are not spurned but are blessed and prayed over. When Abba Poeman sees a widow mourning at a tomb, he speaks of her as someone from whom his young disciples might learn a spiritual virtue: “If all the delights of the world were to come, they would not drive out the sorrow from the heart of this woman. Even so the monk would always have compunction within himself.”

Often, when real women appear in the monastic stories, the message for the listener does not concern sexual temptation so much as the commandment to love and not to judge. When Abba Ammonas goes to a cell of a monk of low repute, after hearing that he has a woman there, and that a crowd of monks is on the way to chase them out, he sees the monk hiding the woman in a large cask. When the crowd arrives they find Ammonas seated on the cask, demanding that they search the cell. His anger is reserved for the monks who would dare to judge another: “What is this? May God have mercy on you!” To the monk he says only, “Be on guard, brother.”

After a woman accepts a dare that she tempt a renowned hermit in exchange for money, she appears at his door one night claiming to be lost in the desert. The monk allows her in out of pity, but when his lust is aroused he lights a fire, saying, “The ways of the enemy are darkness, whereas the Son of God is light.” The monk spends the night standing at the fire, burning his fingers as a way to overcome his desire, and the woman watches, petrified with fear. In the morning, her friends come to find her, and the monk tells them that she is inside his cell, asleep. Instead, they find her dead. The monk says, “It is written, ‘Do not render evil for evil,’ ” and he prays over her until she is restored to life. We are told that she goes away “to live wisely the rest of her life.” Who wouldn’t after a night like that?

I find it encouraging that there is a genre of monastic story that Columba Stewart discovered when translating fourth-century Egyptian material for his book The World of the Desert Fathers, stories which, as he puts it, “show how a tempted monk may come to recognize his confusion and learn that self-knowledge can free him from his obsessions.” These stories depict women who “strengthened, rather than threatened, monastic vocations,” and I value them