The Church Taught Us to Listen to Women

Mr Holdsworth points out that it was the Catholic Church that raised the status of women, starting in the Middle Ages.

It may surprise some, as I’m embarrassed to say it did me when I learned that there has never been a matriarchal society in the history of human civilization. There are no records of societies in which women played the lead role. In every place and in every time, men have assumed the dominant positions of power. We’re not even talking about most of the time, like 80% of the time men have been the dominant sex and 20% of the time women. It was men 100% and women 0%. So at some point in human history, there had to have been a deliberate relinquishing of the power and control that men had because it isn’t something that just naturally occurs. If human beings are given enough license to do what they want and let the chips fall how they may, men will end up in control. So for women to have ever made any strides towards having a say in how society conducts itself, it must have involved men being compelled to look to women for their influence and in the case of Western civilization, we have Christianity and the influence of the Catholic Church to thank for that.

Even if our understanding of the middle ages is full of prejudice and inaccuracies, one thing that is true is that it was a far more violent time than what most of us in Western Civilization are used to today. The nobility was composed of a military class and because that was something of a vocation for them, they found it irresistible to find reasons to fight each other, a lot. But the Church, never one to go with the flow of trends and fashions, wanted to curb these inclinations among Europe’s elite, so they first tried to promote a peace movement, in fact the first ever peace movement in all of human history, called the Peace and Truce of God. Chief among its demands was the protection of non-combatant members of society such as the clergy, women and children, and the peasants class. And while the movement enjoyed some success, it wasn’t enough to produce the full effect of what the Church had envisioned and the Church noticed something fairly obvious which was that this tendency towards violence was primarily a masculine tendency. We often hear people say thing like, if women ruled the world there’d be a lot less war. Well, that’s pretty much what the Church thought too, so it continued to push this peace movement into what became the chivalric code or Chivalry. And instead of imposing this code of behaviour through law, it was popularized through medieval literature, especially Geoffrey Monmouth’s tales of King Arthur. Monmouth was a Catholic Cleric who wrote about an idealized brotherhood of knights who used their resources and aptitude for combat in the service of others and in the cultivation of virtue rather than as a vehicle for selfish ends – like the acquisition of wealth and land.

And this new code of behaviour placed an especially high premium on the deference of behaviour to the sensibilities and genius of women. Devotion and honor in the service of women is at the heart of chivalric codes.

It meant that if a Lord or a Knight was compelled to resolve some problem violently, they should first consult and honor their wives or ladies to decide the best course of action and that if violence was necessary, it should be conducted in an honorable and civilized manner.

And in a world in which women never had a say in politics, governance, or basically anything at all, this was a revolutionary shift towards a world in which the wisdom of women would be heard and able to balance out the sensibilities of men – offering a more completely human vision of the world.