One of the things one soon soon discovers when one starts studying some period in history is that half of the things popularly ‘known’ about that period are manifestly false. Often as not, these myths arise because polemicists can safely appeal to false historical ‘facts’ in support of whatever view they are promulgating, since historical literacy is so dismally low that most of their audience will never suspect them.
Anyway, here’s one myth that I have encountered a few too many times, including in more or less respectable places: An early council of bishops seriously debated the question of whether women have souls. If the parrot of this piece of historical nonsense happens to be particularly well-informed, he or she may also name the council in question as the ‘Council of Macon’, which was held in a.d. 585. Even more learned parrots may report that the vote was 32 to 31 in favour of women having souls (as does this website).
Plenty of warning bells should be ringing even for people who know nothing about the Council of Macon. For example, one might wonder how these Christian bishops were planning to reconcile the view that women have no souls with what the Christian Scriptures say about women. Furthermore, what exactly is the point of having women be baptized, taking the Eucharist, and so forth, if they have no souls? Having occasionally read some ancient, patristic, and medieval stuff myself, I was really sceptical when I first heard about the ostensible debates of this council. After all, the usual rule is that souls are ascribed to far more things back then, not fewer. Notably, standard philosophical (Aristotelian views, for starters) views had it that all living things had souls, including plants and animals. And if you think that the Christians would have had very different views on souls, see Augustine, De trinitate X.7, for example. Now I realize that lots of people still seem to think that being a Catholic entails being a stupid, bigoted, subservient believer in idiotic doctrines. But that stupid? Stupid enough to seriously debate whether women are living things or whether they are dead like rocks?
Anyway, warning bells ringing, we might wonder what the Council of Macon was about. Well, for one thing, the words ‘woman’ and ‘soul’ do not appear in the decrees of the council. Stuff about tithing and various other matters does.
But hold on, you say: myths usually have at least some basis in truth, no matter how tenuous. After all, why would somebody just make up all these claims and pick the Council of Macon, if it doesn’t even say anything about women?
Here’s how the myth got started (see here for a more detailed version, with footnotes and such). There’s a story in the classic The History of the Franks by St. Gregory of Tours that includes these lines:
There came forward at this Council a certain bishop who maintained that woman could not be included under the term ‘man’. However, he accepted the reasoning of the other bishops and did not press his case …
Note that this is a linguistic dispute, i.e., it’s a dispute about whether the Latin word homo can be used of women or whether it applies only to males (just like the English word ‘man’ was traditionally used both for humans in general and for adult males in particular, likewise for the Latin homo). Now, the relevant verb that’s used in the St. Gregory of Tours’ Latin is vocitari. A seventeenth-century Lutheran fellow by the name of Johannes Leyser, writing a defense of polygamy, cited St. Gregory of Tours but replaced vocitari with vocari. With this change, the bishop’s question is no longer the linguistic one, but rather has become the question of whether women can be called human. Leyser also says that there was a lot of argumentation about this vexed question, where St. Gregory of Tours makes it clear that the one bishop received no support from any of the others present.
Leyser is a pretty obscure fellow. Pierre Bayle was not. He wrote the most popular work of the eighteenth-century, the Dictionnaire historique et critique. And, being virulently anti-Catholic, repeating Leyser’s lies served his purposes rather well.
Sydney
Alan Schmierer