Dear Youssef,

The fathers of the Church had a variety of thoughts and opinions on topics, including women. When considering the writings of the fathers, it may be wise to take into consideration the prejudices of their time AND of our time. It may be more difficult, but no less important, to rise above the cultural influences that have formed us into thinking the way we do. Sin in the world has a funny way of skewing how people think at any given time and culture.

To know what the Church teaches on women and all matters pertaining to salvation, i.e. what the Magisterium has officially taught on matters of faith and morals, it's important to check out the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Church fathers were important historically, since they lived closer to the time of Christ than we do. Yet, like the theologians of our time, they weren't perfect.

Peace,

Paul

Dear Youssef,

I am not convinced that St. Augustine taught this, and I'd be curious what the reference is.  For he says,

22, 34. There are some people, however, who have even put forward this conjecture: that at this time it was the interior man who was made, while the body of the man was made later on, when scripture says, And God fashioned the man from the slime of the earth (Genesis 2:7); so that the word used here, made, applies to the spirit, the word fashioned to the body. They have disregarded the fact that man can only have been made male and female with respect to the body. There may be the most subtle arguments, to be sure, about the actual mind of man, in which he was made to the image of God, that its activity as a kind of rational life is divided between the contemplation of eternal truth and the management of temporal affairs; and that in this way it was made, as it were, male and female, with the former function directing, the latter conforming. With this division of roles however, that part alone is rightly said to be the image of God which clings in contemplation to the unchangeable Truth. It was as symbolically representing this that the apostle Paul says the man alone is the image and glory of God, while the woman, he goes on, is the glory of the man (1 Corinthians 11:7).

And so, although this external diversity of sex in the bodies of two human beings symbolizes what is to be understood internally in the one mind of a single human being, still the female too, because it is simply in the body that she is female, is also being renewed in the spirit of her mind in the recognition of God according to the image of him who created that in which there is no male and female. Now just as women are not cut off from this grace of the renewal and reshaping of the image of God, although their bodily sex has a different symbolic signification, according to which the man alone is called “the image and glory of God;” by the same token too in that original creation of man in terms of which “man” included woman as well, the woman of course also had her mind, a mind endowed with reason, with respect to which she too was made to the image of God.

Saint Augustine, On Genesis, ed. by John E. Rotelle, trans. by Edmund Hill, The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2002), XIII, 237–38

And again,

What is a drachma? A coin, but on it is stamped the image of our emperor himself, for men and women were made in the image of God, and they were lost. (Exposition On the Psalms, Psalm 138:11)

Saint Augustine, Expositions of the Psalms 121–150, ed. by Boniface Ramsey, trans. by Maria Boulding, The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2000), XX, 306

At issue here is St. Paul's words in 1 Corinthians 11:7, 

The Sacra Pagina commentary explains,

7. For a man should not cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God: In contrast with women, a man should not be covered. In urging women’s coiffure Paul appealed to the sense of shame. In urging men to wear their hair as he does he advances a theological argument. His words are clearly an echo of Genesis 1:26. Paul’s appeal to biblical anthropology makes it likely that the situation to which he responds in Genesis 11:2–16 derives from a perverted understanding of the new creation in Christ.

Paul’s use of “image” recalls the creation stories of 1 Corinthians (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:49; Romans 1:23; 8:29). He uses a binomial expression, but not the biblical pair “image and likeness” (Genesis 1:26). Had Paul simply written of the man as “the image of God” he would have evoked—at least to his Jewish readers—the idea of sinful humanity (cf. Sirach 17:1–13; the Apocalypse of Moses 10:3; 12:2). Reference to glory, the glory that humans lost through sin (cf. Romans 1:23; Apocalypse of Moses 20:1–2; 21:6), evokes the image of the human as intended by the creator God. Paul himself associates the notions of image and glory in Romans 1:23 and 2 Corinthians 3:18; 4:4. For Paul it is Christ who is the image of God par excellence. As the image of God, Christ possesses glory (See 2 Corinthians 4:4).

and woman is the glory of man: Since “glory” evokes the biblical stories of creation, Paul’s reference to woman as “the glory of man” recalls the etiological narrative of Genesis 2:18–22 (cf. Genesis 11:3b). That story evokes the image of a prototypical man and woman who cling to one another in marital union. In v. 7 Paul is writing about the relationship between a woman and her husband.

Paul does not say that the female gender is the glory of masculinity; rather he is commenting on the role of woman in a society in which honor and shame were dominant factors. In the Hellenistic world a woman was considered to be the glory of her husband, as appears on a Greek epitaph on a Jewish tomb in Rome, “Lucilla, the blessed glory of Sophronius”

(Hermann Vogelstein and Paul Rieger, Geschichte der Juden in Romans 2 volumes [Berlin: Mayer & Müller, 1895–1896] 1:65, 466).

Within Judaism the Jerusalem Talmud tells the story of R. Jose the Galilean being advised to divorce his wife because she was not “his glory.” “The wife of R. Jose, the Galilean, caused him much annoyance. R. La'azar went up to see him. He said to her: ‘Rabbi, divorce her for she is not thy glory’ ” (y. Ketub. 11:3).

Collins, Raymond F., First Corinthians, ed. by Daniel J. Harrington, Sacra Pagina Series (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1999), VII, 409–10

So, I am not at all convinced that St. Augustine believed that women were not made in the image of God. But my colleague Paul's answer still stands as a very useful approach to things. The Fathers indeed were not perfect, and we can look at today's Magisterium to guide us in these matters.

Eric