4 Church Mothers Who Changed Christianity Forever

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After the age of the apostles, Christians wrestled with questions about what the faithful should believe and how they should practice the new religion. Many great thinkers from ancient Christian communities wrote to address such issues. These men are called the church fathers, and the study of the texts they wrote is called patristics (from pater, the Latin word for “father”). The patristic era extends from about the second through the eighth centuries, a time when many ideas of Christian belief and worship were formed.

What the traditional study of patristics often omits, however, is the influence of religious women from the same period. These church mothers were equally important in shaping doctrine, and believers can thank them for their contributions to the spiritual lives of congregations today.

In this essay, I will describe four women from the patristic age whose lives, writings, and accomplishments shaped the early church. The first woman shaped doctrine in the same way as many other church fathers: through writings. The other three women, however, transformed thinking in a different way: through buildings. This shows that there is not just one way to change people’s ideas. By looking at the past through these different lenses, the mothers of the church can come into clear focus.

Perpetua the Martyr (182—c. 203) envisions heaven

In AD 203, the cosmopolitan city of Carthage in North Africa witnessed the confrontation between the power of the Roman Empire and the strength of the growing Christian community. In that year, the city had decided to celebrate the birthday of the son of Emperor Septimius Severus by hosting games in their great arena. A central attraction of the games was the execution of criminals, and people who converted to Christianity and refused to worship the traditional gods or the emperor were considered criminals. Among those arrested for the birthday party was a young, prosperous matron named Perpetua, along with five companions.

Through these early centuries of the Christian era, there were many martyrs who died for the faith. Most of those we remember were memorialized by the people who watched them die. Perpetua was different because she recounted her own experience. While she was in jail awaiting execution, she kept a diary of her experiences, today entitled The Passion of Perpetua. She recorded her feelings about her family, her son, and her faith. Most importantly for her impact on Christian theology, she also recorded four dreams she had in prison. After her death, the faithful read her dreams as visions from God.

Perpetua’s first vision in prison reshaped Christian views of heaven. She dreamed that she saw a tall ladder that she climbed after treading on the head of a dragon that guarded it. “Next to the ladder I also saw a huge, beautiful, and most copious garden, and in the middle of the garden an old man, sitting in the habit of a shepherd and milking sheep, and in a circle around him many stood of glimmering whiteness.” This white-haired man welcomed her and offered her a mouthful of milk. As she drank it “all those who stood around said: ‘Amen,’” and she awoke.¹

Perpetua saw heaven as a garden, but this was not the universal afterlife expectation in the early church. Many looked to a golden heavenly Jerusalem—a great city for the faithful. This was not surprising, since many of the first Christian communities were founded in urban communities. Even the most famous vision of heaven, that of John in Revelation, saw heaven as a golden synagogue or basilica (Rev 4). There was one other vision of a garden heaven: the mid-second century Apocalypse of Peter, in which he saw heaven as a great garden. However, the Apocalypse was never as popular as Perpetua’s text.

Perpetua’s text was read every year on her feast day (traditionally, March 7). Two hundred years later, church fathers like Augustine warned people not to take the popular text as Scripture, but by then, Perpetua’s visions had become part of the faithful’s understanding. From then on, heaven was more often seen as a garden than a golden city. The influence of this church mother was lasting.

Helena of Constantinople (c. 246/248—330) founds a Christian holy land (c. 315)

When Constantine became emperor in 313, everything changed for the communities of Christians. His predecessor, Emperor Gelerius, issued the Edict of Toleration in 311 that brought an end to Rome’s persecution of Christians, but Constantine with further. He actively supported Christians and built them churches and presided over their councils.

Many historians have credited his mother, Helena, with influencing Constantine’s support of Christians. In 324, Constantine gave his mother the title augusta, or “empress,” raising her status. Helena’s influence over her son alone may have made her a mother of the church, but there were many Christian women who influenced their husbands and sons to adopt Christianity. These anonymous women were influential, but scholars do not place them in the same category as church fathers who established doctrine. Helena, however, independently did change the direction of Christianity: She believed God needed some earthly real estate.

Helena was a good Roman in that she inherited a belief that spaces were connected with deities. In traditional Roman paganism, each grove, each hill, each city, each home, and even each part of a home was the locality of some god who required some sign of veneration. The early Christians believed the world was coming to an imminent end, so they did not locate spaces for the Christian God; they looked to a future heavenly Jerusalem. Helena changed that.

Helena traveled to Jerusalem to locate the spaces where Jesus had walked. By the fourth century, Jerusalem was a Roman pagan city. Jewish Jerusalem had fallen in AD 70, and the city itself was given the Roman name Aelia Capitolina. The venerable Temple Mount now sported a sanctuary to Jupiter. Helena first organized an archeological search for the sepulcher of Christ from which he rose from the dead, and she believed she found it. She ordered the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to be built over the site, and it has drawn pilgrims for over a thousand years. Some believers today favor a site outside the old city walls called the Garden Tomb as the actual site of the resurrection, but either way, Jerusalem had become the spiritual homeland for Christianity.

Helena also built churches over a cave in Bethlehem where Christ was purportedly born, and she erected another on the Mount of Olives from where Christ was said to have ascended to heaven. Reportedly, Helena had a ship loaded with earth from Jerusalem and sent it to Rome, where she had it placed under a church called the Basilica of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem. Here, pilgrims could literally stand on the land of Jerusalem while in Rome.

Under the influence of Helena, mother of the church, Christianity gained a holy land, and with that, a more historically-conscious faith. Ever since, pilgrims traveled to these Christian spaces, and Jerusalem became one of the most contested pieces of land in the world.

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Pulcheria the Empress (399—453) exalts the Virgin Mary (c. 431)

In 412, a young thirteen-year-old girl named Pulcheria took over the Byzantine Empire and ruled as regent for her younger brother, Theodosius—until he turned fifteen. She had the title of empress, and even after her brother became officially emperor, she continued to exert a great deal of influence over the growing Christian church.

Her greatest impact was over the status of the Virgin Mary. At the beginning of the fifth century, there was only one church dedicated to Mary, and that was in Ephesus, a city sacred to the virgin Artemis. Ephesian Christians simply changed their allegiance from one virgin to another,² but not everyone agreed that the modest Jewish peasant girl who bore Jesus deserved exaltation.

The problem arose when a new archbishop named Nestorius attacked the empress in particular (and women in general). Not only did Nestorius ban Pulcheria from the church sanctuary, but he went further. He said, “Let no one call Mary the Mother of God. She was a human being, and it was impossible that God was born of a human.”³ Nestorius argued that God’s divinity entered Jesus after his birth.

Emperor Theodosius called a council—the Third Ecumenical Council—in 431 to settle the question of whether the Word became incarnate while still inside Mary’s womb. If so, then that would mean Mary had given birth to God and deserved the title Theotokos (“God-bearer”). He scheduled the council in Ephesus, the one city that venerated the Virgin Mary. Violence broke out in the street in support of Mary as the mother of God, and in this council, the anti-Nestorians were vindicated. Christians gave Pulcheria credit for her influential stand, and from this time forward, Christians believed Mary gave birth to God, who had taken on her flesh in her womb.

Pulcheria followed up this conciliar victory with visible markers of the newly confirmed decision. She built three churches dedicated to the Mother of God in Constantinople, and the decision spread throughout Christendom. In Rome in 432, a newly built church was dedicated to Mary, the first basilica dedicated to Mary in the West: Santa Maria Maggiore.

Pulcheria’s influence continued long into the future. By the twelfth century, all the cathedrals in the West were dedicated to the Virgin Mary. A thirteenth-century mosaic built in Santa Maria Maggiore shows Mary as the Queen of Heaven, ruling next to her son in as much splendor as Pulcheria ruled from her imperial throne.

Radegund the Prioress (c. 520–587) establishes monasticism in Gaul (ca. 546)

By the sixth century, church fathers like Gregory of Tours were writing texts that helped move Christian worship from the Mediterranean basin north to the Germanic tribes who had settled there. Radegund was a mother of the church who had a religious impact in the north.

Radegund was the daughter of the king of the Thuringi, a kingdom in modern central Germany. When she was young, she had read writings of church fathers urging women to remain chaste and stories of female martyrs like Perpetua whose brave sufferings she admired. When she was eighteen, she was forced to become one of the wives of the Frankish king, Clothar. They married in 540, but she never renounced her religious practices.

Everything changed for Radegund in about 546, when Clothar killed her brother. Radegund’s poetry reveals her feelings of guilt for her brother’s death. She fled the court. She ran to the bishop of Noyon, whom she asked him to consecrate her as a nun. The bishop feared two things: The law that said a married woman couldn’t be consecrated, and the armed noblemen from the king who came to return Radegund to his bed. Radegund took matters into her own hands. She donned monastic robes and consecrated herself.

Her fascinating personal story wouldn’t have qualified Radegund as a mother of the church, but she used her power and money to facilitate a religious life for other women. She established a monastery for women in Poitiers. Two hundred women entered into the convent, and Radegund defined the politeia (or “rule”) that guided their lives. Her convent was a model for the monastic life, and many other houses were founded following her example. Radegund died in 587, and her burial space quickly became a pilgrimage site that still draws visitors.

Monasteries were essential in claiming the northern lands for Christian practice, and Radegund’s foundation would be enough to qualify her as a mother of the church. However, there was more. A large body of her writings survive that include poetry and letters. Her friend Venantius Fortunatus wrote her biography celebrating her life. Her biography and writings circulated widely, inspiring others to pursue the Christian life.

Conclusion

The lives of these four women show that Christian history, thought, and practice have been shaped by more people than the church fathers who recorded their thoughts on parchment as they sat in their libraries. These mothers of the church might encourage us to look more deeply into the women and men (and ascetics and peasants) who contributed to our rich religious tradition.

Salisbury’s recommended resources for further study

Cobb, L. Stephanie, ed. The Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas in Late Antiquity. University of California Press, 2021.
Dailey, E.T. Radegund: The Trials and Triumphs of a Merovingian Queen. Oxford University Press, 1982.
Herrin, Judith. Unrivaled Influence: Women and Empire in Byzantium. Princeton University Press, 2013.
Hillman, Julia. Helena Augusta: Mother of the Empire. Oxford University Press, 2022.
Holum, Kenneth G. Theodosian Empresses: Women and Imperial Dominion in Late Antiquity. University of California Press, 1982.
Kraemer, Ross Shepard, and Mary Rose D’Angelo, eds. Women and Christian Origins. Oxford University Press, 1999.
Salisbury, Joyce E. Perpetua’s Passion: The Death and Memory of a Young Roman Woman. Routledge, 1997.