From Athens to Antioch: How Platonism Shaped the Church Fathers’ View of Women

From Athens to Antioch: How Platonism Shaped the Church Fathers’ View of Women

The supposed “Christian” hierarchy of men over women did not arise from the teachings of Jesus, who welcomed women as disciples and elevated their status socially and spiritually. Rather, it can be traced to a long philosophical inheritance — a Platonic worldview that saw women as lesser forms of humanity, defective reflections of the ideal male form. The Church Fathers, steeped in Greek education, absorbed and baptized this hierarchy into theology, cloaking philosophical misogyny in biblical language.

The Platonic Seed: Woman as a Degeneration of the Male

Plato’s Timaeus (90e–91a) lays the groundwork for a cosmic hierarchy of being. Souls that fail in virtue are reincarnated into lesser forms — first as women, and then as animals:

“And those who are cowards, or who have lived unrighteously, may, according to the likelihood, be transformed into women in the second generation.”

— Timaeus 90e–91a

In this framework, femininity is not simply different; it is ontologically inferior. To become a woman is to descend in the moral and metaphysical order. This theme echoes throughout later Platonism and becomes the philosophical DNA of later Christian anthropology.

Middle Platonism: Woman as the Extension of Man

Plutarch, writing in the first and second centuries CE, extends the idea of woman’s subordination into the domestic and social realm. In Advice to Bride and Groom (Moralia 139c), he advises:

“A wife ought not to make friends of her own, but to enjoy her husband’s friends in common with him.”

Here, woman’s moral and social identity is not autonomous but derived — she exists within the orbit of her husband’s life, not as a peer but as an appendage. Friendship, virtue, and social participation belong to the man; the woman partakes secondhand.

Neoplatonism: The Chain of Being and Female Descent

Plotinus, in the Enneads (III.2.15), reaffirms Plato’s schema of spiritual descent:

“The unjust man’s soul passes into a woman’s body, and from woman into a beast, and from a beast into a plant.”

Being reborn as a woman is a metaphysical fall — one step further from the divine intellect. Here again, femininity is not merely physical but symbolic of soul-corruption and moral failure. The feminine is not only lower but also less rational, an image that later Christian thinkers would internalize when contrasting Eve and Adam, body and spirit.

Aristotle: The Biological Philosophy of Inferiority

Even though Aristotle diverged from strict Platonism, his Politics codified the same assumption:

“Again, the male is by nature superior, and the female inferior; and the one rules, and the other is ruled; this principle, of necessity, extends to all mankind.”

— Politics I.5, 1254b13–14

This passage naturalized the metaphysical hierarchy — turning a cosmic myth into a biological argument. Woman’s subordination became not a moral defect but a feature of “nature” itself.

The Church Fathers: Baptizing Greek Misogyny

Educated in the very philosophical schools that taught Plato and Aristotle, the early Christian theologians inherited these hierarchies almost uncritically. In their writings, the Platonic chain of being merges with biblical interpretation to justify the exclusion of women from spiritual authority and intellectual equality.

Thomas Aquinas

“As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten.”

— Summa Theologiae I.92.1 ad 1

Aquinas, centuries later, simply rephrased Aristotle’s logic in scholastic Latin. Woman was a defective version of man — a teleological failure of nature, excused only by divine providence.

Tertullian

“Do you not know that you are Eve? You are the devil’s gateway.”

— On the Apparel of Women 1.1 (ANF 4:14)

Here the metaphysical inferiority becomes moralized. The woman is not only lower in being but also the cause of cosmic ruin — the “gateway” through which sin enters the world.

Epiphanius of Salamis

“Women are not permitted to baptize, nor to claim any [male] ministry.”

— Panarion 79.3 (Williams, p. 502)

Epiphanius transforms Platonic hierarchy into ecclesiastical structure. The spiritual order mirrors the metaphysical: only the rational (male) may lead; the emotional (female) must follow.

Origen

“It is improper for a woman to speak in an assembly, even if she says admirable things.”

— Fragment on 1 Corinthians 14 (Cramer, Catenae ad loc.)

Origen’s commentary echoes both Aristotle and Plato — even truth itself becomes less valuable when uttered by a woman.

Clement of Alexandria

“It has also been commanded that the head should be veiled and the face covered, for it is wicked that beauty be a snare.”

— Paedagogus 3.11 (ANF 2:290)

The body, long despised in Platonism as the prison of the soul, becomes doubly suspect when female. Clement fuses Greek asceticism with Christian piety, treating the woman’s body as the embodiment of temptation.

Jerome

“I praise wedlock, I praise marriage, but it is because they give me virgins.”

— Letter 22.20 to Eustochium (NPNF2 6:32)

Virginity becomes the Christian ideal — not for liberation but as a metaphysical escape from the female’s carnal nature.

Augustine

“I do not see in what way woman was made a helper for man, except for begetting children.”

— De Genesi ad litteram 9.5.9 (CSEL 28.1:280)

Augustine’s reasoning mirrors Aristotle’s “natural subordination”: woman’s purpose is reproductive, not intellectual or spiritual.

Conclusion 

Far from being a fresh divine revelation, the patristic doctrine of gender hierarchy is a baptized version of Greek metaphysics — the shadow of Athens cast upon the early Church.

The supposed “Christian order” of man over woman was, in fact, the old Platonic order dressed in ecclesiastical robes.