 Outright misogyny is rare in Augustine, but he lived in a society and worked from a tradition—both Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian—that took the natural and social subordination of women to men largely for granted (cf. Børresen 2013: 135 and, for a sketch of the social and familial realities of late-antique Roman Africa, Rist 1994: 210–213; 246–247). Augustine interprets the Genesis tale of the creation of woman (Genesis 2:18–22) to mean that, Eve having been created as a helper to Adam and for the sake of reproduction, she was subordinate to him already in paradise (De Genesi ad litteram 6.5.7; 9.5.9). This situation is exacerbated by the Fall; under the conditions of fallen humankind, marriage is, for the wives, a kind of slavery that they should accept with obedience and humility (as Monnica did; cf. Confessiones 9.19–20 and, on marriage in Augustine in general, E. Clark 1996). In his early anti-Manichean exegesis of Genesis, he allegorizes man as the rational and woman as the non-rational, appetitive parts of the soul (De Genesi contra Manichaeos 2.15, cf. De vera religione 78; De Genesi ad litteram 8.23.44; the pattern is well attested in the philosophical tradition). On the other hand, he insists—as until then few Christian theologians had done—that the meaning of the Genesis tale was not purely allegorical but that sexual differentiation had begun to exist in paradise and would persist in the resurrected bodies of the blessed because it was a natural part of God’s creation (De civitate dei 22.17). Following the Greek philosophical (in particular, Platonic) conviction that the soul and especially its highest, intellectual part is not gendered as well as the Pauline eschatological promise that in Christ “there is neither male nor female” (Galatians 3:28), Augustine argues that the words of Genesis 1:26–27 on the human being having been created in the image of God imply that woman is human like man because she has an intellectual soul and because it is not the gendered body but the intellectual soul that makes the human being an image of God (De Genesi ad litteram 3.22.34; Børresen 2013: 136–137; cf. also  6.2 The Human Mind as an Image of God;  the view that woman is made in the image of God is far from uncontroversial in ancient Christianity). The inner tension of the view that woman is intellectually equal and, at the same time, by nature socially inferior to man makes itself felt in Augustine’s exegesis of Paul’s saying that women, but not men, should veil themselves because man is made in the image of God (1 Corinthians 11:7). Augustine compares man with theoretical and woman (the “helper” of Genesis 2:18) with practical reason and claims that while theoretical and practical reason together or reason in its entirety is an image of God just as the human being as such is, in virtue of its reason, an image of God, practical reason alone, being directed toward corporeal things and but a “helper” of theoretical reason, is not. (By implication, woman is an image of God qua human being, but not qua woman.) The practice enjoined by Paul is meant to signify this difference (De trinitate 12.10–13). This exegesis safeguards the godlikeness of woman against a widespread patristic consensus and, it appears, against Paul himself, but at the same time defends social inequality and even endows it with metaphysical and religious significance (Stark 2007a).