Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/126

 118 REVIEWS OF BOOKS January the one band, and, on the other, fatal constriction by the dead hand of the past. Anyhow, in dealing practically with so important and distinc- tively modern a problem, or set of problems, it is well that those responsible for action should know the facts of history that underlie the church's action in the past. Confining ourselves then to the historical aspect of the work, we find that in the early church (down to the immediately post-Nicene age) the ministry of women in the church is entirely bound up with the question of the female diaconate. We meet with an order of ' widows ' in the New Testament and following generations. But these widows, although partly confused later on with the surviving deaconesses, were in the pre- Nicene age totally distinct. The ' widows ' constituted a roll, not of church officers, but of church pensioners. They mainly belong to the poorer class, while the deaconess tends to gather to herself a touch of social superiority. The ' virgins ' again are for two centuries at least not an organized body, still less holders of office. But the rise of monasticism, from the third century onwards, reacts upon the virgins ; they become organized into communities of nuns. Here, too, in later centuries there is confusion ; certain abbesses and ' consecrated ' nuns become vested with the clerical status, and in them the female diaconate, of late introduction and early decay in the west, lingers on. Some very interesting illustrations are shown in the book, where the nuns or canonesses in question are vested with clerical and sometimes distinctly diaconal ornaments, such as the siirplice, rochet, cope (cappa), maniple (more frequently on the right arm), amess, stole, and, in the case of abbess or prioress, crozier and even mitre. But all these are medieval instances. Going back to the early ages the question of female ministries is practically confined to that of deaconesses. In the west, little or nothing is heard of a deaconess till after Nicaea. Then the institution begins to make headway against opposition in some quarters. We read in one late western version of the erotic story of Cyprian of Antioch (often confounded since Gregory Nazianzen with the famous bishop of Carthage) that Cyprian on his conversion made Justina a deaconess (* in diaconissarum numerum retulit '). But this may be a mere touch taken over from the Metaphrast. Excepting for the slender thread which links the consecrated abbess, nun, or canoness to the tradition of the female diaconate, the latter never took deep root in the western church, and even in the east is not heard of after about 1300. Beginning in the New Testament with some appearance of parity (Phoebe in Romans xvi is definitely a deacon of the church of Kenchreae), from the very first there was a natural disparity of function. But the deacon (Acts vi), appointed for the service of tables, inevitably gravitates, in the case of Stephen and Philip, towards the ministry of the word. And so, too, deaconesses, charged from the first with the physical care of women in baptism, seem to have inevitably been entrusted with their spiritual preparation for the sacrament. But as centuries went on, the growing comparative disuse of adult baptisms left the deaconess with her most characteristic occupation gone. And the tendency of the deacon to rise in the hierarchy was accompanied by a tendency of the deaconess to sink. Finally the deacon came to be regarded as stamped with the