Band of Angels: The Forgotten World of Early Christian Women

325 Pages·2013·1.9 MB·English

by  Kate Cooper

BAND OF ANGELS
Also by Kate Cooper
The Virgin and the Bride
The Fall of the Roman Household

Published in Great Britain in 2013 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.
Copyright © Kate Cooper, 2013
The moral right of Kate Cooper to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make
good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Hardback ISBN: 9781848873285
Ebook ISBN: 9781848873315
Paperback ISBN: 9781848873308
Set in Latin 725 BT 11/15.9 pt
Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk, Stirlingshire.
Printed in Great Britain.
Atlantic Books
An Imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd
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London
WC1N 3JZ
www.atlantic-books.co.uk
Margaret Robb Shook Cooper (1925–2012)
Mary Louise Shook Wilkinson (1919–2001)
In memoriam
Contents
Preface

1 Looking for Chloe
2 The Gospel of Love
3 The Galilean Women
4 ‘The God of Thecla’
5 A Martyr in the Family
6 The Emperor’s Mother
7 ‘The Life of Angels’
8 A World Apart
9 The Desert Mothers
10 The Queen of Heaven

Epilogue
A Note on Translation
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
A Note on the Author
Preface
I
n the house where we lived when I was a child, my bedroom was a tiny room at
the top of the stairs. It had space for only a bed and a little table, but it holds a
luminous place in my memory. It was there that my mother and I engaged in
long talks about serious questions. We debated whether the Narnia children
could really be friends with a lion, and whose fault it was that Juliet and Romeo
did not live happily ever after.
One of these talks took place not long after the death of my grandmother, my
mother’s own mother. With the fierce and selfish love of small children
everywhere, I had seen the wider principle behind this first exposure to death. A
thing that could happen to my grandmother, I reasoned, could also happen to my
mother, the indispensable person around whom the whole universe seemed to
revolve. I never entirely recovered from the shock of that thought.
In retrospect, I admire the simplicity with which my mother spoke to this
terrible awakening. She had recently discovered a secret, she told me. The love
that bound her to her mother, she now knew, was strong enough to unite them in
death as it had in life. Her mother was still with her, and would remain with her
always. By a wonderful chain of connection, I too was bound in with them, and
the love between us was a thread that could not be broken. One day, I would
follow them both – my grandmother and my mother – to a place beyond our
imagining, where they would be waiting for me. I was not to worry, she told me,
about what it meant to say that such a place existed. No one knew much about it,
but the details were beside the point. The thing to remember was that love is
more powerful than death.
I recognize now that the whole conversation, as it unfolded in my bedroom,
was an act of bravura on my mother’s part. It was a gambit, at the end of a long
day, to untangle a child from the day’s worries and to set her on the path towards
sleep. At the same time, it was an attempt to tame the pain of loss, the loss that
she felt as a daughter whose own mother had died. By finding the connection
between her own mother’s life and that of her child, she was able to find a place
for her grief in the coming and going of generations. In trying to settle a restless
child, she had tested the limits of her own understanding of the world, and this
had allowed her to glimpse a luminous truth.
Years later, when her grandchildren came into the world, my mother remained
fascinated by the connection she had seen between the waxing and waning of
life. As she neared her own death, she became more and more certain that her
own departure from this life was a necessary and fitting end to the role she had
played bringing new life into the world. To the end, she maintained that the flow
of time and the handing on from generation to generation are what make life
what it is, and it is good.
My mother grew up in the Deep South during the Great Depression, and along
with a legacy of plain-spoken wisdom handed from mother to daughter, she was
heir to a great southern patrimony of storytelling. When I was a child, the fact
that she was a teller of tales seemed to be the most natural thing in the world. To
an unsuspecting ear, the telling of stories never seemed to follow a plan. It
seemed to happen in conversation quite naturally. Stories welled up at just the
moment when they were needed, to help make sense of a problem or situation in
our own lives that was being talked about. They were a tool to think with.
Remembering how earlier members of our family had met similar challenges
was a way of keeping their memory alive.
Yet there was a logic to how the stories came up in conversation. The cycle of
family stories was a kind of storehouse of hopeful thinking and advice on how to
cope with difficult situations. Stories about the Depression tended to involve
low-cost fun at family parties. The more painful stories were angled to highlight
the generosity and courage of earlier generations, or to call attention to examples
worth imitating. It was as if the women of our family had sent a message in a
bottle down the stream of time, to tell us what they had learned about the world.
Many of my mother’s stories were from her own childhood, but others
reached back further, to her grandmother’s youth during the Civil War and
Reconstruction. Perhaps because they were handed from mother to daughter, the
stories tended to revolve around the women of the family. As daughters and
granddaughters remembered them, our foremothers formed a parade of heroines
set against a kaleidoscope of changing circumstances. They had shown spirit in
the face of great and small tragedies. Babies and children, including two of my
mother’s own siblings, had died of fever. Husbands, sons, and brothers had been
killed in war, or – worse – by the lawless vigilante groups who ruled isolated
rural communities during the Reconstruction. The widows in my family had not
fainted in drawing rooms. They had worked tirelessly, in the face of illness and
other dangers, to protect and sustain the lives of those who depended on them.
It was a landowning family, so they had responsibility not only for children
It was a landowning family, so they had responsibility not only for children
but for a community of male and female dependants. Some of the stories
celebrated the leadership of the family’s matriarchs, often in difficult
circumstances. Others remembered the pluck of women who had worked long
hours in the households of my family’s history: servants and, in my great-great
grandmother’s time, slaves. It was not all sweetness and light. A frequent moral
was that the person in charge in any situation was not necessarily the one who
had the most common sense. Even our heroines had had failings: the fact was
acknowledged with affectionate laughter, but not dwelt upon. For the most part,
the stories tended to idealize their protagonists, and to encourage the idea of
making the best of a bad lot.
I do not remember when or how it was that I became aware that the
fearlessness of our family heroines was bound up with their religious faith. It
seemed clear that theirs was a god from whom they could draw extraordinary
strength. Yet there was a paradox here. These women had lived in nineteenth-
and early twentieth-century Alabama, an environment known not only for its
spirited women, but also for its men-folk’s tendency to impute inferiority to the
‘weaker’ sex. To the untrained eye it looked as if the Church had tended to be on
the side of the men. If one reads the standard histories, the world of my great-
grandmother was one in which wives were subject to their husbands, children
were seen but not heard, and the Bible was used to keep the women and children
in their place.
But the world of stories handed down from mother to daughter was somehow
different to the world of the standard histories. It was a parallel universe, one in
which female good sense would always have its day, and the opinions of fathers,
husbands, and the clergy were taken with a grain of salt. In reality, our heroines
had had to hold their ground repeatedly in the face of male arrogance. But if this
fact was acknowledged in the world of stories, it was thrown off with a wry
observation about men’s inability to perceive the superiority of women. In my
mother’s day, the joke was that Fred Astaire was the greatest dancer in the
world, but Ginger Rogers did everything Fred did backwards, and with high
heels on.
There were one or two skeletons in the family closet where the men-folk were
concerned. Certain husbands and sons had caused pain and suffering to their
wives and mothers. But for the most part, these unedifying characters were
quietly written out, except where their failings offered a valuable moral lesson. I
realize now, remembering how the aunts and matriarchs talked, that there were
two versions of the family’s history. In one, the men strode about doing
important things, and the women were barely in view. But the women’s version
paid equally scant attention to the men. If men had more power than women, this