Catholic Models

Woman in Christian Tradition
by George H.Tavard, University of Notre Dame Press, 1973, pp. 125-150.
Republished on our website with the necessary permissions

Contemporary Catholic attitudes toward woman may be traced back, in their basic principles, to Saint Augustine. Yet few of the authors that will be mentioned in this chapter have known the thought of Augustine directly without the mediation of Thomas Aquinas, since Thomism, rather than the older Augustinianism, has shaped Catholic thought and sensibility. From Augustine to Thomas significant differences arise, due to the philosophical presupposition of Aquinas’s reflection rather than to his specifically theological positions. In her valuable comparison of these Doctors of the Church on the topic of womanhood, Kari Elisabeth Borresen summarizes their common doctrine in terms of “subordination” and “equivalence”: men and women are equivalent in the Gospel, yet woman is subordinate to man in history.(1) She explains the differences between Augustine and Thomas in terms of two anthropologies, the first being neo-Platonic and the second, Aristotelian, and their unanimity in terms of an “androcentrism” borrowed from society and from what they believed to be the Christian tradition. With his personal experience of feminine relationships, Augustine could treat the problem with deep existential involvement, whereas Thomas, who always remained at a safe distance from women, examined the question as an interesting intellectual exercise. The major differences between the two touch on the soul and its origin. Because for an Aristotelian the soul is the form of the body, in Thomas’s eyes, the female soul must be different from the male soul. And as the female body, is the biology of Aristotle-Aquinas, is a freak of nature, definitely inferior to the physical perfection of the male body, the feminine soul must also be less perfect than the male soul. Although Thomas is far less pessimistic than Augustine as to the effects of sin and does not see a causality, but only an instrumentality, between concupiscence and the transmission of original sin, the overall impact of his thought has been more devasting for the Christian conception of womanhood. Both agree that woman is made only for procreation; she is a helpmate for man in the only area where he cannot be served better by a male. But while Augustine finds no inferiority of woman at the level of her soul, Thomas extends to her soul the inferiority of her body.

The theological background of the question has not changed substantially since the days of Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas. Although the world of the twentieth century has passed through a series of catastrophes, modern men have not recovered the primitive Christian vision of, and wish for, the swift return of the Lord. Far from longing for the end, they dread it. And recurrent dissatisfaction with material progress is not such as to send them to solitude in whatever deserts are left by the population explosion; on the contrary, it has inspired an ever more strenuous search for earthly happiness. The intellectual world did not change in depth between the end of the Roman empire and the beginning of the modern world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Moreover, since religious institutions are generally of a more conservative bent than secular organizations, the theological mind has evolved more slowly than its secular counterpart. For these reasons, the contemporary ideas about women that are assumed in Catholic theology have preserved substantially the same principles as the theology of Augustine and of Thomas Aquinas. The Church still defines itself in relation to the world and the tasks of man in the world, rather than in terms of contemplating God and the transmission of Revelation and grace. Preaching and teaching continue to be practiced; and one finds theological tractates, encyclicals, pastoral letters, and spiritual books in which the search for contemplation still dominates. By and large, however, the primary point of view has become that of doing with faith the task that modern man has assigned to himself: to transform the world into a better one (with all the ambiguities that go with the appreciation of what is better).

It would be pointless at this moment of our reflection to show how this evolution, which is indeed amazing to a student of the early Church, was able to take place. The principle was set in the works of Augustine, with whom the collective hope of the faithful in a parousiac transformation of the universe gave way to an individual orientation, through faith and good works, toward a heavenly reward. With the advent of the modern world and the technological explosion of the last century and a half, the problematic of sanctification through detachment, which the Middle Ages had maintained, has become one of sanctification through involvement. The contemporary Catholic is no longer called upon to live in the city of this world like one who actually belongs to the invisible city of God. He is, instead, invited to share the concerns and projects of the men who try to change this world. The last major event where this problematic was clear was the Second Vatican Council. Beginning in 1962 with a beautiful and very traditional elaboration of the liturgical life, which did justice to both the corporate-eschatological dimension and the individual-holiness emphasis of recent times, it ended, in 1965, with a treatise on “the Church in the modern world” which attempted to counterbalance its previous accent with a theology of involvement and world transformation.

Among the dilemmas that this modern world puts in front of the Church, the question of womanhood is not negligible. For the position of woman has changed and is still changing considerably in society. Should her position in the Church change accordingly, adjusting itself to the newly won freedoms that modem men like to guarantee to modern women? If so, what theological basis can there be for a new position of woman? Is it possible to discard completely the old rationale which, even though it undoubtedly was influenced by the secular questions of former times, gained sufficient status over the centuries to have become part of the Christian patrimony?

As a point of fact, contemporary Catholicism has not given one answer to this type of question, but several. Or perhaps, instead of speaking of answers-—a term which implies an aspect of finality that could hardly be claimed by any of the present assessments of woman in the Church and in society-—we may introduce the notion of models: contemporary Catholic thought operates with several models of womanhood in mind. All of them can, I believe, be related to the theology of the Fathers in some ways; yet they do not all reflect the same point of departure, and accordingly they do not all end up with the same view of the being and function of woman and of the meaning of womanhood. Our present task lies therefore in a description and, if possible, an assessment of these models.

We will find our first models in the debates of the Second Vatican Council.

In October, 1965, while the Council debated the proposed Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, two American bishops submitted to the relevant commission some remarks about the position of women in the Church and in the world of today. The suggestions made by the late Archbishop Paul Hallinan of Atlanta include the confession that “the Church has been slow in denouncing the degradation of women in slavery and in claiming for them the right of suffrage and economic equality.”(2) Then, regretting that women have not yet achieved equality with men in the secular world, even in areas where they would be perfectly competent, Archbishop Hallinan made four constructive proposals:

That the Church define the liturgical functions of women so that they could serve as lectors and acolytes, and, when properly prepared, also, as they once did, in the Apostolic office of deaconess. They could thus, as Deacons do, administer certain sacraments.0

That the schema should include them in the instruments to be set up after the Council to further the lay apostolate.

That women religious should have representation in those matters which concern their interests, especially in the present and post-conciliar agencies.

That every opportunity should be given to women, both as sisters and as laywomen, to offer their special talents to the ministry of the Church. Mention should also be made of women who are not married. Because of the universal call to women (in De Ecclesia), they also promote family values by witnessing in their own way to this universal vocation.

The ideal of equality between men and women undergirds this short statement of goals. The four points assume that women enjoy a basic, natural right to do what men themselves do. Men fulfill liturgical functions; men will undoubtedly be among the instruments of application of the conciliar decisions; men are represented in the Congregation of Religious; men have opportunities to offer their talents to the ministry of the Church. Thus the one point of reference for the status and role of women in the Church is implicitly defined as men. Woman herself is not described, her needs are not analyzed, her wishes and aspirations are not mentioned for what they are in themselves. Rather, man provides the standard for feminine behavior in the Church. To the “secular” sources of this standard we will return later. But here runs an old undercurrent. If we have sensitive ears, we can hear a remote echo-which, I am sure, was not at all in Archbishop Hallinan’s intention—of the saying which the Gospel of Thomas attributed to Jesus:

Lo, I will draw her
so that I will make her a man
so that she too may become a living spirit
which is like you men;
for every woman who makes herself a man
will enter into the kingdom of heaven.(3)

Another American bishop came forward at the same time in favor of a statement on the rights of women. Once again this was not in a public speech, but in a written communication to the appropriate commission. Bishop Fulton Sheen’s approach was very different from Archbishop Hallinan’s. “It was to a woman,” his text began, “that the promise of salvation was given. The news of the Incarnation was given to a woman. Christ first appeared to a woman after his resurrection. A woman spoke for humanity when humble Mary’s fiat responded to the creative fiat of the heavenly Father... .”(4) We can recognize here allusions to Eve, to Mary, to Mary Magdalen, and again to Mary. Fulton Sheen goes on citing more evidence of the actions of women as recorded in the New Testament. He then formulates his understanding of the specific qualities that are proper to women: “These can be characterized as purity, protection of the weak, sacrifice, procreation, the sustaining and caring of human life.” In his mind, these qualities correspond to the general nature and function of motherhood. Yet motherhood should not be interpreted only in the physiological sense. Rather, if motherhood can be physical, it may also be spiritual and social. Finally, on the basis of a concept of social motherhood, Sheen comes out strongly in favor of the social involvement of women and of their freedom to fulfill themselves through social action by entering on a career in the secular world. “In the economic, civil, social and cultural order she will be associated with men, and she should exercise prudence, tenderness and the motherly instinct which is so necessary to compensate for administrative rigidity.” After citing other possibilities of fulfillment in “the sphere of law,” in “the area of communication, radio and television,” and “in the search for peace,” Bishop Sheen concludes: “Every woman without exception is morally obligated according to her capacity and conditions in life to realize one of these forms of motherhood.”

Unlike Archbishop Hallinan’s statement, Bishop Sheen’s does not start from man, taken as the standard that women should equal. It rests on the underlying conviction that woman’s specific role and function is motherhood; and this of course cannot be patterned on male behavior. This role clearly originates in nature and is given to woman by her physiological and psychological structure. Yet Bishop Sheen advances much further than a mere determination of the dictates of human nature. By extending the concept of motherhood to the spiritual, economic, civil, social, and cultural fields, he takes for granted the philosophical view that we may associate with scholastic thought, that women can be adequately defined as a prospective mother, all other aspects of womanhood being ancillary to this. Theologically, he gives this philosophy increased status by finding it exemplified in the actions of women recorded in the New Testament. Ethically, he concludes to the moral duty, on the part of all women, of fulfilling themselves through motherhood, of “realizing one of these forms of motherhood.”

Comparing the suggestions of these two bishops, we see that one and the same concern—namely, the promotion of woman in the Church and the world —has been inspired by radically diverging principles. In one case, the principle is borrowed from the modern democratic concept of equality; in the other, from a philosophical-theological doctrine about motherhood. In the first case, the ideal is the legal enjoyment by women of all the liberties of men; in the second, it is the attainment of a certain and purely feminine status, that of a mother. In the first model, mankind is ultimately made of only one sex, the male, whom the female ought to imitate; in the second, mankind is made of two sexes, men and mothers. Insofar as she is not, or not yet, or not only, or even cannot be, a mother, woman has been left out of account.

I have not introduced the discussion of these two episcopal statements in order to indulge in the currently fashionable criticism of bishops, but because they provide us with convenient and authorized examples of two main contemporary Catholic points of view. They should by the same token help us to determine where the problem lies today. This is not, in my view, in deciding whether women should be allowed to become cardinals, or priests, or bishops, or to hold important administrative functions in ecclesiastical organizations. These are secondary issues. The preliminary problem is to discover the proper categories of thought within which to envision the role of woman. These categories ought to be theological. Yet the theological dictionary of such a reportedly “progressive” theologian as Karl Rahner does not contain one line on “woman,” whereas it gives more than one page to “man.”(5) Admittedly, it is mankind (the human being as such) which is considered under “man”; what is said there also applies to woman, but only to the extent of what she shares with man, not on the basis of what she is in herself, in her own feminine existence.

Our historical investigation has shown that a large amount of early writing considered some aspects of woman’s life, particularly in the ethical dimension. With many authors, the subject of fashion and make-up has been a favorite. From the considerations of Tertullian on “female dress” to the recent lucubrations of the late Father Francis Connell and other moralists about the amount of female flesh that may be bared without sin, theologians have wasted a great deal of time writing against the current fashions of their times. Yet this has not been sheer stupidity. They did so only because they saw Eve the temptress within every woman. They worked on the hypothesis that Eve, being herself deluded, still approaches Adam with an illegal fruit to be shared, the fruit now being her own body. And being themselves Adam, they took measures to avoid being tempted by Eve. Woman, in this case, is perceived as evil, not the absolute evil of hell, but the relative evil of falling and fallen mankind. (In its crudeness, this approach is not frequently upheld today, although I am afraid we have not seen the last of the ethical columnists who are called on to regulate the length of skirts. Tertullian at least had the excuse that much of his writing was addressed to his own wife.)

A variant of this model presents woman as being not evil, but weak: the weaker sex, as even some Catholic liturgical prayers say. To give a harmless instance, the following collect for the feast of a virgin-martyr illustrates the male triumphalism of some of our official texts: Deus, qui inter cetera potentiae tuae miracula etiam in sexu fragili victoriam martyrii contulisti. . . (O God, who among other miracles of your powers, gave the victory of martyrdom even to the weaker sex . . .). The fidelity of a woman unto death seems to be a greater miracle than that of a man. This is to be compared with the liturgy for the feast of a holy woman, focused on the passage from Proverbs on “the vigorous woman” who is the last to retire at night and the first to get up in the morning and who never ceases working while her husband “sits at the gate with the elders of the land” in a leisurely palaver. Whatever may have been the original purpose of this biblical description, no doubt persists about its meaning in the liturgical context: the vigorous woman whose toil makes it possible for her husband to sit at the city gate is presented as an ideal, as the ideal of feminine holiness. But such an ideal cannot be attained through nature alone; it is the fruit of grace. What is, on the feast of a woman martyr, the weaker sex, remains so; yet grace can make of her a paragon of strength. In the two cases of martyrdom and of daily toil, grace rather than nature provides frail woman with her amazing power. What nature cannot reach, grace gives abundantly. The natural woman is weak, weaker than man, but the holy woman is strong, stronger than the natural man. The strength in question is primarily moral, since our authors are concerned chiefly with holiness; yet is shows itself also through physical strength, as in the two examples of martyrdom and of endless drudgery.

Apart from the absence of an eschatological reference, this is still the Tertullianist model for womanhood. One might object to lumping together the benevolent outlook of men who are aware of the frailty of woman with the excesses of Tertullian writing to his wife: “You are the gate of the devil. It is because of you that Christ died. . . .”(6) Yet the perspective remains truly the same in both cases. For what makes woman frail and what, in Tertullian’s mind, defines her as the gate of the devil, is lack of divine grace. God chose neither to give her strength by the normal process of nature, nor did he assist her out of the serpent’s temptation. Frailty is not sinful; but sin derives from an original frailty, the traces of which can still be discerned in woman.

Such a perspective has a long tradition behind it. Coming from Judaism and from the Fathers, it dominated medieval thought. The Scholastics agreed that woman is a misfit, a freak of nature. For Thomas Aquinas, there is in her “something deficient or accidental. For the active power of the male seed intends to produce a perfect likeness of itself with male sex. If a female is conceived, this is due to lack of strength in the active power, to a defect in the mother, or to some external influence like that of a humid wind from the South. . . .”(7) Granted, the image of God is in the soul, “where there is no distinction of sex.”(8) But in the concrete, every woman results from a disruption of the processes of conception and pregnancy.

The sources of these ideas are to be found in Aristotle’s anthropology and biology, especially in the De generatione animalium, where the philosopher applies his hylomorphic theory to the process of generation. Whereas woman acts as receptive matter, man acts as active form. But the efficiency of the form depends on the balance of docility and resistance in the recipient matter. When there is no resistance, the outcome perfectly reflects the form, and the child is male; where matter—that is, the woman—resists, the outcome is unlike the form and the child is female. In milder cases, the sex is still male although the face looks like the mother’s.(9) The Scholastic explanations are variants of this theory. If all things are made of two coprinciples, matter and form, there must also be in mankind a pole of activity, corresponding to form, and one of passivity, corresponding to matter. Given the function of the form, the being which fulfills that function should be considered the more perfect, the head of the other, whereas the one who stands at the passive pole of mankind should be called less perfect, the servant of man. In this Hellenic-Scholastic tradition, the yin and the yang are essentially interrelated, but not coequal. Their sum total does not trace the perfect circle of the oriental tradition. Rather, the male principle is perfect, and the other fulfills itself by cooperating with that perfection. Perfection is not seen in the whole, but in its dominant part.

This has already brought us to a third form of this basic model for womanhood, expressed around the central idea that womanhood is essentially receptive. This again is a Greek notion, transmitted to the Middle Ages by the works of Aristotle. It is expressed by Thomas Aquinas in the following terms: “In the most perfect animals, the active power of generation belongs to the male sex, the passive to the female sex.”(10) This is in keeping with the fundamental purpose of woman, created “to help man, not indeed to help him in everything, as some have said, for in any other field man is better assisted by another man than by a woman, but only for the purpose of generation.” This passivity extends to the civic and social order, where woman has been made subject to man by nature, “for nature has given man more intelligence,” and “good order would not be preserved in human society if some were not governed by those who are wiser.”(11)

In taking this position, Aquinas followed his master Albertus Magnus (d. 1280), who had taken his cue from Aristotle. However, the Greeks were themselves divided on the issue of the passivity of woman, and so were the Scholastics. ‘Whatever philosophers would say about the matter, medical science, as illustrated by Hippocrates or by Claudius Galenus,(12) already taught that woman actively participates in the conception of the child and is not a mere recipient and nutritionist of the seed received from the male. Supported by the Moslem philosopher Avicenna, who was also a medical doctor, this position was defended by the Franciscan school of theology, from its early representative Alexander of Hales to Bonaventure and John Duns Scot. For Bonaventure, two seeds contribute to generation, one coming from the father’s body and one from the mother’s. The former acts as “efficient” cause of conception, the latter as “material” cause. Both are endowed with the “power and the seminal reason of the propagation of the body.”(13) Yet for Bonaventure too, “the male sex is in itself more perfect than the female,”(14) for the generation of a male corresponds to the full strength of the seed. Only when the seed—for complicated reasons that Bonaventure, following ancient medical science, analyzes minutely—lacks its full strength does it evolve into a female.(15) In Paradise, if mankind had not sinned, man would have himself chosen the strength of his seed and would have fathered at will a male or a female child. In the fallen order of nature, this escapes the control of the will, so that men and women are conceived haphazardly. Nonetheless, the birth of a woman is not, Bonaventure gracefully concedes, against nature or outside of it; it follows the order of nature, which makes it possible for the full strength of the seed to be impeded by interior dispositions of the man or the woman, as well as by external circumstances which themselves affect the dispositions of man and woman.(16) However, whatever superiority may accrue to men in society or in the Church does not originate in their sexual functions. Bonaventure finds the principle of this factual superiority in his belief that all mankind originates, through Eve, in Adam.(17) He sees it at work in the fact that man is oriented to action, while woman bears suffering better; but in human life leadership belongs to action rather than to suffering. Finally, he accepts the Apostle Paul’s statement that “the head of the woman is man” (1 Cor. 11:3), interpreting it as an expression of the will of God over his creatures.(18)

In more recent thought it is the Thomistic rather than the Bonaventurian concept which has prevailed in theological circles. And in our century, the Thomistic opinion on the question of woman’s participation in conception has been extended by some authors to the entire realm of feminine existence. Woman’s very nature is essentially receptive. A woman gives herself only by receiving—no matter what she receives: the male seed, or commands, or a husband, or children, or God’s inspiration, or the Church’s sacraments. Her fulfillment is reached, not through agressive self-development, but through self-opening to others. She sanctifies herself by making herself available to those in need. And the difference between the saint and the prostitute does not lie in the objective structure of feminine self-offering, but in its direction: the saint gives herself for the greatest good and the prostitute for evil. Simone de Beauvoir and Gertrude Von Le Fort agree that this is womanhood.(19) But Simone de Beauvoir sees it as an aberration that has been bred into woman by male dominance and is maintained by education, whereas Gertrude Von Le Fort rejoices in the providential and universal mission of feminine availability. For Gertrude Von Le Fort, the most eloquent exponent of this view of womanhood, woman is just as favored as man by nature and providence; yet “this does not benefit woman herself, but her offspring. The meaning of her qualities is not narrowly personal; it reaches much further.... Man represents one moment in history, woman the succession of generations; man embodies the eternal value of the instant, woman the infinity of the race.... Personality belongs to man, universality to woman. . . . Woman is not primarily personality, but the gift of it. . . .”(20) Woman is not life, but she transmits life. She is the passive instrument of nature and of mankind. This gives her a second paramount quality, that of anonymity. In most civilizations, she loses her name through marriage. This is a token of the fact that woman fulfills her function “under the veil.”(21) Modern theater has given her an image in the figure of la jeune fille Violaine of Paul Claudel’s famous play, The Tidings Brought to Mary. It is Violaine who, hidden by her leper’s veil, declares: ‘The male is a priest, but it is not forbidden to woman to be a victim.”(22) At the end of the play, while she is dying, her father Anne Vercors praises the beauty of the feminine vocation:

... I was shocked because the face of the Church was darkened and because it seemed about to crumble when everyone deserted her. I wanted to press again the empty tomb, and put my hand in the hole of the hands and the feet and the heart. Violaine was wiser. The purpose of life is not to live. The feet of the children of God are not bound to this wretched earth. It is not a question of living but of dying. Not a question of building the cross, but hanging from it and giving what we have joyfully. This is what is meant by joy and freedom, by grace and eternal youth. . . . Why be tormented when it is so simple to obey and the order is clear? That is how Violaine immediately follows the hand which takes her... .(23)

Here, as in the works of Gertrude Von Le Fort, a reversal of value has actually taken place. Priority in the order of creation does not belong to action, to man, but rather to the reception of God’s creative and redemptive grace—to woman. Of the two vocations - that of the male, who leads and transforms the world by his deeds, and that of the female, who transmits and protects the permanent wisdom of the race—the female vocation is spiritually greater. It is the very vocation of the Church. Thus Gertrude Von Le Fort sums up her conception of “woman according to the Christian idea”:

Woman according to the Christian idea is not just woman, but woman as subject to the great divine laws that rule her. Each of these laws has its own full value, but each also implies a relation to the common pattern where they find their inspiration. The function of every woman in life is first to separate the virtualities of this pattern, to achieve it partially in virginity or in motherhood. But this function is also, finally, to reconstruct the eternal image in its unity: The virgin must arrive at spiritual motherhood and the mother must recover spiritual virginity. If she fails to achieve this close union of contraries, there is no salvation for her, and no end to the two tragedies of virginity or of motherhood. This is tantamount to saying that salvation, for all women, is inseparably linked to the acceptance of Mary’s mission, as also to the imitation of Mary’s image... (24)

This Christian model for woman has been endorsed by several contemporary authors, for example, F. X. Arnold, J. Galot, Willi Moll.(25) It corresponds in our period to the charism of Thérèse of the Child Jesus. Weakness and receptivity form a wedge for the insertion of spiritual strength. The weakness of woman dialectically symbolizes the power of God. Woman is no longer an instrument of evil and an image of sin; she symbolizes the littleness and the spirit of childhood which open the gate of heaven. “Blessed are the meek, for they shall possess the earth” (Matt. 5:4). The same model has been echoed in the writings of another great Carmelite, Edith Stein (1891-1942), although Edith Stein treats her topic with too much philosophical sophistication simply to follow a theological thought pattern.(26) For her, as for phenomenologists in general, woman is not a given nature, but a human being who lives through the experience of specific vocations. Or, femininity is a vocation in the light of which woman experiences the human nature, common to man and woman, which specifies mankind among the animal world. But, and this is the point that interests me here, this vocation is related to the “feminine” virtues glorified by the present model of womanhood. The feminine experience is focused on them.

Another theological model for womanhood is frequently proposed by Catholic authors, It may be abundantly illustrated from various speeches made by Pope Paul VI. At the close of the Second Vatican Council, Pope Paul solemnly addressed himself to the women of the world, to “woman of all conditions, daughters, wives, mothers and widows . . . consecrated virgins and single women,” whom he identified with “one half of the immense human family.” He reminded them that “the Church is proud to have magnified and freed woman, to have made to shine through the centuries her basic equality with man in the diversity of their temperaments.” Even though Pope Paul might have been embarrassed had he been asked for details about when and where the Church has done this for woman, he voiced the general yet somehow vague feeling, which is shared, I believe, by the majority of Christians, that the Christian Gospel (and therefore, in Catholic context, the Church as preacher and promoter of the Gospel) entails the principle of the liberation of womanhood. The Pope then recognized the modern context of the feminine question: “The time is coming, and has come, when the feminine vocation may be fulfilled in its plenitude, when woman may obtain in society an influence, a scope, a power, never reached before.” This is part of a “profound mutation” now undergone by mankind, and it provides Christian women with a unique opportunity to “help mankind not to fall.”(27

As seen by Paul VI in the modern context, the feminine vocation essentially connected with the home and the family. Although it reaches further, even to the very dimensions of mankind, it still resides in an extension of the “home” virtues of woman as mother of the family and keeper of life. “You, women, you always have for yourselves the guardianship of the home, the love of sources, the sense of the cradle. You are present at the mystery of the beginning of life. You bring consolation in the separation of death.” As nurse of mankind, woman should play a negative function in relation to the fundamental tendency of men, which she should moderate. For men develop technology, and technology may destroy civilization. “Our technique runs the risk of becoming inhuman. Reconcile men with life. And especially watch, we beg you, over the future of our species. Stop the hand of the man, who, in a moment of madness, would try to destroy human civilization.” Woman also enjoys a positive role in education, for mothers are “the first educators of mankind.” The Pope tells them: “Transmit the traditions of your fathers to your sons and daughters, while you prepare them for the unknowable future. Remember always that, through her children, a mother belongs to the future, which she herself perhaps will not see.”(28)

It is therefore in the light of motherhood that Pope Paul sees the vocation of the single woman and of the consecrated virgin: their vocation of “self-giving” still hinges on the family, for “even the families cannot live without the help of those who are without a family” As for consecrated virginity, its meaning lies also in “the infinite love and the service of all”; those who have chosen it become “the keepers of purity, disinterestedness, piety.”

The same central message is more especially addressed to the women who suffer, “standing straight under the Cross like Mary.” These ought to witness, for the benefit of men, that one can fight to the end: “Help them once again to persevere in the boldness of great endeavors, together with patience and the sense of humble beginnings.” Finally, turning once again to all women, (“0 you, who know how to make the truth sweet, tender, accessible.... You to whom life has been entrusted ...”) the Pope urges them to make the spirit of the Vatican Council known and effective, and “to save the peace of the world.”(29)

In this short but important passage of the most solemn discourse of the Second Vatican Council, Pope Paul clearly asserts one basic notion about woman: all her tasks, all her achievements, all her virtues, all her dreams are derived from her call to motherhood. Everything that woman can do is affected by this fundamental orientation of her being and can best be expressed in terms of, and in relation to, motherhood. Woman thus appears as a fugitive figure symbolic of life, hyphening in between the fathers with their traditions and the sons and daughters of the future. All her consistency lies in making herself evanescent, disappearing in her service of the species. Her ambition is to be a guardian, conservative of the wisdom of the past which she transmits to her children and to those of others. Thus, woman does not really exist. She is, but she does not stand out (existere) in her personality. She hides behind a generic vocation which reaches her in whatever she tries to do or not to do, and which stands over her as both an appeal and a judgment.

This analysis, with its tendency toward nonpersonality as the characteristic of womankind is confirmed by a later speech, in which Paul VI explained at length his conception of womanhood and his understanding of the Catholic tradition on this matter.

In a little-known address given on October 29,1966, Paul VI painted a profound and profoundly moving vision of womanhood. Speaking to a congress of Italian gynecologists, he did not, as Pius XII might have done, describe their delicate art and discuss medical problems. Instead he contrasted two views of woman. One, by method, considers her as an object of scientific study; this is necessary to arrive at a better knowledge of the problems and processes of female physiology. There is also another view, to which the Pope drew attention in these terms: “At this moment it is not so much your knowledge and your art which prompts our thinking, as the ideal value, the symbolic significance, the sacred and lofty vision that our religious doctrine and our humanistic training attribute to the feminine creature, to woman.”(30) As contrasted with the first, this theology, which is also a philosophy of woman, dwells in the realm of symbolism. But the previous symbolism has been reversed; far from looking at woman in the perspective of evil (of Eve, the tempted turned temptress, of the wiles which male psychology attributes to womanhood), it turns in the opposite direction, toward a perception of goodness, beauty and oneness. The Pope enters this horizon with full awareness of its symbolic structure, as he admits from the start: “It may also be that our perspective is deeply steeped in feelings and poetry, and expressed in the manifold language of supra-sensory values which belong to the anthropology of faith as well as to a metaphysical and deontological conception of human life.”(31)

Having thus introduced his point of view and indicated its limits, Paul VI continues:

For us, woman is a reflection of a beauty greater than herself, the sign of a goodness that appears to us as having no bounds, the mirror of the ideal human being as conceived by God in his own image and likeness. For us, woman is a vision of virginal purity, which restores the most lofty affective and moral feelings of the human heart. For us, she is, in man’s loneliness, the arrival of his companion who knows the supreme gift of love, the value of cooperation and help, the strength of fidelity and diligence, the common heroism of sacrifice. For us, she is the Mother—let us bow our heads—the mysterious source of human life, where nature still receives the breath of God, the creator of the immortal soul. For us, she is the creature who is the most docile to education, and therefore she is equipped for all cultural and social functions, especially for those which are most congenial with her moral and spiritual sensibility. For us, she is mankind as adopting the best attitude facing the attraction of the sacred, mankind which, when it wisely follows this attraction, elevates and sublimates itself in the most authentic expression of womanhood; mankind which, whether it sings, prays, sighs or weeps, seems thus naturally to converge toward a unique and supreme, spotless and sorrowful figure, the privileged woman, blessed among all women, the Virgin, Mother of Christ, Mary. Such is, gentlemen, the level at which we encounter woman.(32)

This very interesting text opens up a perspective rather different from that of Bishop Sheen’s idealization of womanhood. Sheen started from the scriptural exemplifications of womanhood in the Virgin Mary, in whose light he looked at the tasks and functions of women in society. The Pope’s speech, on the contrary, begins with womanhood perceived in its terrestial embodiment through the light of faith, in an anthropology which is theocentric before being philosophical, ending with the Virgin Mary as the highest concretization of womanhood.

Analyzing this text we can distinguish in it several distinct and complementary strata in its vision of woman:

First, woman as exemplifying the goodness of the creator and specifically the true meaning of creation in God’s image and likeness. Second, woman as insight into ultimate moral and spiritual purity.

Third, woman as man’s companion, who is not just a comrade, but brings with her the true meaning of self-gift.

Fourth, woman as source of life and as ultimately united to God’s creative act in her own conception of human life.

Fifth, woman as disciple and student, especially suited to the pursuit of cultural and social values.

Sixth, woman as embodying the human religious aspirations. At this level the orientation of womanhood toward an ideal, yet real, woman, the Virgin Mary, is clear.

The Pope thus unfolds before our eyes a sixfold vision of woman which, for him, sums up both Christian insights and the highest human desires. We may wonder at this point, what man, the male becomes in such a vision, in which the very best of mankind as a whole is symbolized in and through the feminine sex. Obviously, man is called upon to look at the vision, to follow woman where she leads, to give thanks for the goodness of the creator, for the perception of the moral order, for the reception of the gift of love, for the source of life, for the cultural and social capacities and contributions of woman, for entering into a religious universe focused on the blessed vision of peace. Yet, it is fair to add, the Pope depicts a symbol rather than an achieved reality; his categories ring true in the realm of typology, not in that of the down-to-earth embodiments of womanhood that one may meet. What he describes is an exemplar, an archetype, a divine idea, which women of flesh and blood can only approximate.

One may find this description unreal. It is a dream, or perhaps a myth, with very little relation to actual women and to the tasks of womankind. Mary, whatever devotion one may feel toward her, is only Mary. Not all women are called to be the same. And it requires a good deal of imagination to see Gertrude Von Le Fort’s “eternal woman” embodied in what she calls “woman in time.” Nor is the Christian woman of today likely to become the “woman outside of time” in which Gertrude Von Le Fort sees the meeting point of the eternal feminine and the daily experience of womanhood.

More critically, one can note that, as in the concluding conciliar address, the very orientation of feminine life lies away from herself: she “reflects”; as a “vision,” she shows something other than herself; she accompanies man, driving away his loneliness and comforting him; she is the source of life; in her social activities she places herself at the service of society and of culture. Once again, what she can be in herself gives way to what she is for others. Her personality is not hers, but mankind’s.

Here, too, a long theological tradition stands behind this address of Pope Paul. The idealized vision of woman derives from the Old Testament descriptions of divine wisdom. It inspired Methodius of Olympia, Ambrose, and even Augustine with pages that stand in happy contrast with the strictures of Tertullian and of Jerome on the dangers inherent in womanhood. It flourished above all in the Middle Ages. Denis de Rougement has studied some of its manifestations in medieval literature and especially in the poetry of the troubadours.(33) It reached its acme in Dante’s Divine Comedy, where the feminine figure of Beatrice-a real girl who had walked the streets of Florence and who, after dying very young, remained the muse who guided Dante’s poetic genius-introduces the poet into Paradise and accompanies him there until he leaves. This has remained one of the recurrent themes of Western poetry, even with poets who were not exclusively religious and were hardly theological, like Goethe (“Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan”)(34) or Baudelaire (“Je veux batir pour toi, Madonne, ma maitresse, / Un autel souterrain au fond de ma détresse . . .”).(35) Above all, it was familiar to the medieval theologians who developed the theme, already formulated by Ambrose of Milan, of the intrinsic correspondence between four terms, the Ecclesia, Mary, the soul, woman. Originating with Justin of Rome, who suggested a parallel between Eve, the original woman, and Mary, this theme gained prominence, still in this double form, with Irenaeus of Lyon. Ambrose of Milan exploited it in a threefold and a fourfold form: Ecclesia, Mary, the virgin woman, the virgin soul.(36) The Middle Ages used it, varying from the two to the four points of the comparison. Best known is a passage from a sermon by the Cistercian abbot Isaac of Stella (c. 1100-1169), where the three terms, Ecclesia, Mary, the soul coincide in their being bride, mother, and virgin, that is, in the qualities of the fourth term. This famous text deserves quoting at this point:

Mary and the Ecclesia are two, yet one single mother, two virgins and yet one. Each is mother; each is virgin. Both conceived by the same Spirit without human seed. Both bore to God the Father a spotless child. The one, without sin, gave birth to Christ’s body, the other restored his body through the power of the forgiveness of sins. Both are the Mother of Christ, but neither can bring him to birth without the other. Thus in the inspired Scriptures what is said in the widest sense of the Virgin Mother the Ecclesia is said in a special sense of the Virgin Mary. And what is spoken of the Virgin Mother Mary in a personal way can rightly be applied in a general way to the Virgin Mother the Ecclesia. But every faithful soul is in a sense the bride of the Word of God, the Mother of Christ, his daughter and his sister, virgin yet mother. And moreover what is said of God’s eternal Wisdom itself can be applied in a wide sense to the Ecclesia, in a narrower sense to Mary, in a special sense to every faithful soul.(37)

Perhaps the most intriguing recent exploitation of this theme has been made by Teilharde Chardin in a prose poem entitled, “l’eternel Feminin,” which Henri de Lubac has considered important enough to write an entire book about.(38) Teilhard’s vision of the Feminine is far from simple. He does not idealize woman in the sense of removing her from an existence of flesh and blood. She does not descend from heaven, a celestial type proposed to this vale of tears as a dream, a model to imitate, and a saint to pray to. Here, the Feminine emerges from below, with the self-evident proviso that, the entire cosmos being created by the hand of God, it is from the hand of God that the Feminine originates. In the dynamic universe of Teilhard, the Feminine takes many forms; it is a common principle with universal applications diversified in their forms and gradually ascending from latency in the world of matter to total and perfect explicitness in the spiritual world, where it becomes the Church and the Virgin Mary. In between, the Feminine individualizes itself, passing from the stage of universal principle to that of concrete human feminine being. Here, again, the Feminine takes many forms. It is recognized by man in the faces of concrete women. Yet even there it is more than concrete: in each woman there hides the essential and universal magnetic presence of the Feminine, so that the man who associates himself with a woman in love enters a realm which is far deeper and wider than the two persons concerned. “Soon he is astonished by the violences of the forces unleashed in him at my approach, and trembles to realize that he can not be united with me without inevitably becoming enslaved to a universal work of creation.”(39) Woman has many faces and many tasks. Man sees her as “the Temptation,”(40) not because she would be evil, but as a result of the sin of mankind. If indeed the expression “original sin” does not appear in the poem, the reality is very much present. The sin of mankind consisted precisely in misreading woman:

When he saw that I was for him the universe, he thought that he could encompass me in his arms.
He wished to shut himself up with me in a closed world, the two of us, where each would be sufficient to the other.
At that very moment I fell apart in his hands.(41)

What saved woman from being taken as, and remaining, the gate of evil, was no other than the coming of Christ. The Incarnation redeemed womanhood, to which a new dimension was then assigned. It can no longer be only the “feminine essence,”(42) underlying all created being and placing in it a nisus toward life; or the “feminine universality,”(43) activating each and every “monad” of being as well as the general orientation of the universe. It cannot be only what the feminine metamorphoses through history have progressively unveiled: the “feminine attraction,”(44) which animates the vegetal and the animal worlds, “the Gateway of the Earth, the Initiation,”(45) which reveals to man the face of glory of the universe and of life. And it cannot flounder for ever in the tragedy of mankind: it cannot become, as it could indeed have become had it not been for Christ, “forever evil.”(46)

A critical remark should be made here about the problem of translating Teilhard’s prose poem into English. The translation of Writings in Times of War (New York, 1968) by René Hague, systematically makes the Feminine into a substantive: “I am the essential Feminine ... the universal Feminine ... the magnetism of the Feminine ... the ideal Feminine ... the eternal Feminine.” However, in Teilhard’s text, “feminine” is not the noun, but the adjective (“1’essentiel Féminin . . . 1’universel Fminin . . . 1’attrait Féminin ..... 1’ideal Féminin ... l’eternel Féminin”). That is, it is never a substance, always a quality. Its consistency does not reside in itself; it comes from another, from a personalization of Essence, Universality, Ideal, Eternity. In final analysis, the Feminine qualifies an aspect of the Universe as God’s work.

Henceforth, then, Woman, after revealing to man the Earth, will reveal to him God. She is “set between himself [Christ] and men as a halo of glory.” The Feminine is the very halo in which Christ shows himself. It is “changing” its “form,” yet “without impairing” its “former nature.” Hence one must distinguish between the “deceptive image” of the Feminine as it may be seen on the face of a woman, and the “reality” which “floats between the Christian and God.”(47) At this stage of its development, the Feminine acquires a new name: “I am now Virginity.”(48) In other words, if the feminine function - to bring mankind to unity and to fertility - remains, its sign has changed; its orientation is entirely new, although it was already present in some way, latently, in all the metamorphoses of the Feminine. From now on, the Feminine leads, not to slavery in the enmeshment of man in the tasks of this material world, but to freedom.

Freedom is not escape. Teilhard insists that “the voice of Christ is not the signal for a rupture, for an emancipation, as though the elect of God rejecting the law of the flesh, could break the bonds that tie them to the destiny of their race, and escape from the cosmic current in which they came to birth.” But “Christ has left me all my jewels,”(49) and he has given an impetus to the natural functions and tasks of woman. The Feminine continues, but it also evolves. Indeed, woman will still be wife and mother, for new generations are to come. She will still—in analogy with the experience of Dante—harvest the fruits of art and science in her task as “Beatrix.” Yet through all this the Feminine becomes something greater still than those great achievements: “I am the unfading beauty of the times to come—the Feminine ideal.” As nisus toward the future, as hope, the Feminine calls its lovers to change with itself, for it leads more and more toward the Spirit. “It is God who awaits you in me.”(50)

At this point of its avatars, the Feminine becomes, as so often in the experience of men, a concrete being; but this concretization faces the entire human race. The Feminine is the Church, which Teilhard, in keeping with the old tradition that has been mentioned, associates with Mary:

I am the Church, the bride of Jesus.
I am Mary the Virgin, mother of all human kind.(51)

This leads to the climax of the poem. The Feminine is of the earth, of creation; yet it will change again into an eternal form. “The Cosmos, when divinized, will not expel the attraction of my influence.” It keeps in store an eschatological significance and function. “Even in the rapture of the divine touch I shall subsist, entire, with all my past.” And one aspect, at least, of eternal life will consist in the progressive discovery of the deeper layers and of the highest points of the Feminine, “an inexhaustible in my development as the infinite beauties of which I am always, even if unseen, the raiment, the form and the gateway.... I am the Feminine eternity.”(52)

In the meantime, the Feminine leads men to his cosmic and transcendent fulfillment. Though forgotten by man, Eve attracts him higher. In a reminiscence from Hopkins’s poem on “the Blessed Virgin compared to the air we breathe,” the Feminine is shown as “the air of your lungs and the light of your eyes.”(53) These elements are so near to man that he is hardly aware of them, yet he could not live in their absence.

Thus, Teilhard places, in the substratum of creation, a Feminine principle which takes higher and more spiritual forms as we pass from the realms of matter to those of the Spirit. It is the same principle throughout, and the highest form is already latent in the lowest, although it is only through the highest that the lowest acquires its full meaning. In all its epiphanies and in all its avatars, this is the principle of life; it is a drive with positive orientation; it is the Call, the Dream, the Inspiration, the Appeal toward self-transcendence. Degraded by man, it can appear as a call to sin, for even when distorted it continues to function according to its inner structure, namely, to allure and to attract. As embodied in mankind, it takes the form of woman, who can herself consciously seek to function in one or in several of the forms of the Feminine: woman can make herself all that the Feminine can be. (This, at least, is my way of reading the poem, for Teilhard does not apply this to any woman other than the two he mentions by name, Beatrix, the inspirer of art and of science, and Mary, the woman who is twice feminine, for she is the inspirer of the Church, who is herself the bride of Christ.)

The symbol of womanhood, which examplifies goodness and devotion, has undergone a double transformation under Teilhard’s pen. First, it has reached a deeper level than the moral qualities which it represents, say, in Pope Paul’s address. The Feminine is now a cosmic quality affecting everything in the universe. It is the inner dynamism which leads the universe as a whole and its component parts separately toward spiritualization. Second, the symbol has attained to the dimensions of a myth. The essence of the prose poem is precisely to indicate the successive transformations of the Feminine from the lowest layer of matter to the highest degree of spirituality. It is an ascending myth, tantamount to the myth of creation, with a major difference: in the myth of creation which Christian theology developed by drastically altering the neo-Platonic myth of descent and ascent, of emanation and return the universe comes down from the Father until, at the turning point of the redemptive Incarnation, it starts the ascent which will effect its return to the Father. With Teilhard, all in the universe is laid out on an ascending scale, occasionally interrupted by failure or sin. Thus, the evolution of the Feminine, while it carries the universe in its ascent toward union with God, undergoes crises and dramas, when the possibility of warping the entire scheme of life raises immediate dangers that call for drastic options. Only through the direct intervention of Christ is the Feminine able to pursue the ascending effort of mankind and of the cosmos toward God, until the moment when what was hitherto “essential,” “universal,” personal as in “Beatrix,” transpersonal as in the Church, again personal (but at a higher level of personality) in Mary is finally haloed into the eternal Feminine.

Can we aim further than Teilhard de Chardin? Is it possible, remaining within the context of the Catholic tradition, to place the “eternal feminine” beyond the realm of creatureliness, however privileged, and to set it in God himself? After all, it is to a Catholic mystic of the most certain orthodoxy that we owe profound insights into the “motherhood of Christ.” The Revelations of Divine Love of Dame Julian, the twelfth century English recluse, refer to the savior as being “our very Mother, in whom we be endlessly borne, and never shall come out of him.”(54) Not only is Jesus our Mother in his humanity, which somehow enwombs all the elect; his divine Personality, too, exhibits the qualities of pregnant womanhood: “In our making, God, Almighty, is our kindly Father; and God, all-Wisdom, our kindly Mother; with the Love and the Goodness of the Holy Ghost: which is all one God, one Lord.” “I beheld,” Dame Julian adds, “the working of all the blessed Trinity ... the property of the Fatherhood, the property of the Motherhood, and the property of the Lordhood. . . . And in the Same Person in wit and wisdom we have our keeping as anent our Sensuality: our restoring and our saving; for he is our Mother, Brother and Savior... .”(55)

Thus, in the Trinitarian relationships, insofar at least as they relate to creation, the Word is Mother, the Father being Father and the Spirit Lord. From the Mother as “Mercy” we draw our “increasing,” as we obtain our Being from the Father, who is “Kind” and our “Fulfilling” from the Spirit, who is “Grace.” While the Trinity as Power entails Fatherhood, it implies Motherhood as Wisdom and Lordship as Love.

The Divine Motherhood affects our substance or being. By taking on our “Sensuality” in the Incarnation, it becomes also our Mother in Mercy: “And thus our Mother is to us in diverse manners working: in whom our parts are kept undisparted. For in our Mother Christ we profit and increase, and in Mercy he reforms us and restores, and by the virtue of his Passion and his Death and Uprising, ones us to our substance. Thus works our Mother in Mercy to all his children which are to him buxom and obedient.”(56) In keeping with traditional Trinitarian thought, the Motherhood of Wisdom, the Second Person, belongs to the whole Trinity and the mutual relations of the Three are reflected in it. Thus Julian of Norwich can explain: “I understood three manners of beholding of Motherhood in God: the first is grounded in our kind making; the second is taking of our kind—and there begins the Motherhood of grace; the third is Motherhood of working—and therein is a forth-spreading by the same Grace, of length and breadth and of height and of deepness without end. And all is one love.”(57) Julian does not rest here. Having obviously borrowed her analogy of Motherhood from human experience, she now affirms that the word “Mother” can properly be applied only to “our tender Mother, Jesus.”(58) All other applications are deficient and secondary:

This fair lovely word, Mother, it is so sweet and so kind itself that it may not verily be said of none but of him; and to her that is very Mother of him and of all. To the property of Motherhood belongs kind love, wisdom, and knowing; and it is good: for though it be so that our bodily forthbringing be but little, low and simple in regard of our ghostly forthbringing, yet it is he that does it in the creatures by whom it is done.(59)

Thus, motherhood is achieved in God in its fullness. It is manifested next in the Virgin Mary, the human mother of our heavenly Mother. Finally it is embodied in ordinary human motherhood, a distant image of our inclusion and nurture in divine Wisdom. Critically examined, the insights of Julian of Norwich into the motherhood of the divine Wisdom (the Word) and of its incarnate manifestation, Jesus, fall short of assigning femaleness to God himself. For Julian takes account only of one aspect of femininity, motherhood. Yet woman is not only mother; and the feminine principle as embodied in the lives of women is not tantamount to the principle of motherhood. The task therefore remains of looking for the divine archetype, if there is one, of other aspects of the feminine.

Motherhood comes last in the human experience. Woman is first of all virgin, rich with possibilities that are both precise and indefinite, a ground waiting for, preparing, and seeking the activating force that will make it pass from the innocence of expectation to the experience of fulfillment, a closed garden (to borrow a biblical metaphor) some of whose charm derives from its internal debate whether and to whom to open the gates and from its dream of the male figure who, knight or savior, will lead the passage to the second type of womanhood, woman fulfilled in relationship.

At this second stage of development, woman is related to another person in the human, spiritual, and sexual relationship of married love. If the virgin may be called agapè on account of her universal yet indefinite availability, the wife is philia, friendship, working its way through eros. Related to a man in a stable relationship, she shares her personality with him and she mutually shares in his. It is only as a consequence of this that woman can reach the third stage of her development, where, becoming mother, she experiences another level of agapè: her agapic love is no longer the indefinite and protected availability of the virgin; it is the poured out giving of her own substance to her child.

The problem of the femaleness of God does not reside primarily in the virginity of the creator, whose divine actuality implies the potentiality of the universe. Nor does it refer with any great mystery to the motherhood of the creator and the savior, who project their image into creation and who incessantly nurture the created child of the eternal womb. Julian of Norwich rightly expressed this motherhood of God as creator and redeemer; and the virginity of God is clearly attested in Bonaventure’s insistence on the “unbornness” of the Father, understood as a positive principle. The crucial question regards the relatedness of God. Is there a transcendent nuptiality of which human nuptials can be no more than shadowy evocations?

In two chapters of his book Soul and Psyche (1960), the late Victor White, drawing on the psychology of Jung, suggested that Catholic thought ought to recover the dimension of the divine femaleness.(60) Using Dame Julian’s texts, which he related to the patristic and medieval statements about the Church and Mary, he also referred to the notion, which is to be found in some Catholic mystics, and mainly in those of the Rhineland school, that the divine Essence in the Father has the feminine characteristic of encompassing all in itself. It is not only being and act, but also abyss. Blessed John Ruysbroeck describes it as “an abyss so dark and unconditioned that it swallows up every divine process and activity and all the attributes of the Persons within the rich compass of the essential Unity... .”(61) There, it would seem, the eternal feminine is, beyond all created images of it, the Essence of the divine Oneness, which encompasses in itself the Word and the Spirit and, in the Word, the eternal types of all created forms. This line of thought could be related to the “exemplarist” doctrine of medieval authors, particularly of Bonaventure and the Franciscan school.

Trying another line of thought, Victor White suggested also that the image of the virgin-mother, as presented in Catholic dogma and experienced in Catholic Marian devotion, constitutes an icon of the feminine dimension of God. Of the people of God praying to Mary he asked: “Can they be finding in her image less than a true theophany, a manifestation of something truly divine, and which they do not find in other images?”(62) In other words, Mariology would really mean that our traditional presentations of God as one-and-three fail to reveal to us a dimension of the divinity which is nonetheless true, the feminine dimension: this is communicated to us, instead, through the created embodiment of it in Mary the Virgin.

Valuable as these suggestions are, they do not take us further than Dame Julian’s insight into the motherhood of God and of Jesus. Woman as virginal womb and woman as fruitful womb, as virgin and as mother, have their eternal image in the all-encompassing wisdom of God arising in all eternity out of the silence of the Father. Woman as relatedness to another is not yet accounted for.

The preceding pages have studied two “good” models of womanhood as presented in contemporary Catholic thought, followed by suggestions for an unfinished third model. The third model, which has few witnesses, will not detain us at this point, as we will consider it again in the next chapter. In the first two, the feminine is seen as essentially good, yet their accents are rather different, stressing as they do woman as the handmaid, or woman as the eternal ideal. There is of course no contradiction between the two, insofar as the way of the handmaid leads to the ideal, and the most telling image of the woman begins, in the Gospels, as the handmaid of the Lord. For this reason, the basic problem of Catholic thinking and practice in this matter does not arise from this plurality of models. It arises from a real dichotomy between these types of the feminine and the remnants of that section of the patristic, especially the Latin, tradition which viewed woman as a symbol of evil and temptation.

The tradition to which Paul VI and Teilhard have, each in his own way, witnessed and the tradition of Gertrude Von Le Fort are not the only ones. The problem cannot be simply of reconciling two views that are neither identical nor contradictory (as would be the case between woman as handmaid, and woman as cosmic force). It arises from the fact that one form of the tradition that sees the female vocation as that of a servant actually constitutes a countertradition. Servanthood (patterned on the songs of Isaiah and their image of the Servant of Yahweh) is translated as slavery (on the social patterns of Hellene-Latin civilization). Woman must always be a slave, because she is radically evil. Whether this corresponds to their actual purpose or not, the names of Tertullian and of Jerome have remained attached to this view. Certainly, these did not consider woman as entirely evil, but as dangerous on account of her potential for evil. This thought was infinitely more complex than most accounts would lead the reader to believe, and we shall see that the most antifeminist statements of modern times have not been made by Catholics or Christians, but by pagans. Yet a misogynist strain that may be called Tertullianist has existed within the Catholic Church; and it is difficult to escape the impression that it has tainted much popular pious literature and a certain amount of educational policy. Woman is not evil, yet many Christians, including theologians, have seen her as a symbol of temptation, to be kept at arm’s length—or even as a symbol of evil. Must we choose between these two traditions? Are they exclusive of each other? On what basis, other than one’s own experiential preconditioning, should we choose between them? And when we choose, how can we explain the existence of the contrary tradition?

It will not be out of place to insist that these traditions be taken seriously, even if we eventually decide that they are not adequate or even that they are seriously misleading. Much contemporary theological journalism behaves as though we could now interpret the Gospel for our times without paying any attention to the insights of those who lived before us. If Catholicism has meant something clear and constant, this has been indeed continuity with the past no less than anticipation of the future. Tradition grows and increases, thus preparing for the future, but it also derives from antecedents that cannot be ignored without impoverishing our thoughts, our understanding of Christianity, and our effectiveness as witnesses to the Christian faith. The good news of salvation cannot be recovered anew every morning as though it had not been lived and announced the day before.

In the context of Catholic theology, this is all the more serious, as Catholic thought has always been deeply sacramental. It cannot be satisfied with preaching a nude Gospel, with proclaiming an absolute Word from God for our situation, with discerning the way of the Spirit in the circumstances in which we have been individually and corporately placed. It is also concerned with the specific forms of approach that God himself has endowed with numinous power among his manifold creative mercies. God does not only come to man. He comes to man in Christ, that is, in an enfleshed situation as one man among a multitude of men. And since the ascension and pentecost, Christ reaches men through the innumerable lanes of the Spirit, who also becomes, though in a different manner, a Spirit incarnate. One may speak of the esthetics of Revelation because the Spirit uses the creative material like an artist who selects the proper medium for the effect he seeks. Thus, the sacraments confront us with realities from this world, bread, wine, water, oil, gestures, words, actions, which channel divine grace and through which the Spirit activates the presence of the Lord in us. But the sacramentality of creation and of the Church does not end with seven sacraments. Men and women also are imbued with sacramental power, as is clear in the sacrament of marriage, in the lives and activities of the prophetic personalities whom we call saints, in the sense of the sacred which should be inspired by the liturgical actions of the People of God, in the sense of peace and serenity which some persons radiate. In this sacramental universe we do not look at things whose meaning ends and dies with themselves, but at symbols whose scope extends indefinitely, and which open up vistas on the invisible world. What can be the meaning of man being male and female in such a world? What symbolic implications are carried by the person who, as he passes from childhood to adolescence, discovers that he has been made not just man, but precisely this type of man, that he or she is man or woman, that manhood is experienced along two distinct, if related, lines by persons who are called men and those who are called women? Does this last word, woman, imply an addition to man, or (as medieval authors thought) a subtraction from man? And suppose it should imply neither addition nor subtraction but simply otherness, what kind of otherness is this and what meaning should it convey? Above all, manhood (in the limited sense) and womanhood are not objective data alien to the life that meets them; rather, they themselves are experiences in which the human being is subjectively involved to a greater extent than one could suspect before the advent of Freud. This series of questions points to the urgency of elaborating a Christian anthropology that has been updated from what it was with the Schoolmen. Pope Paul’s speech to the gynecologists mentions in passing the existence of an anthropology of faith. But if there is one, it still remains largely embryonic, and, as I think I have shown, it is still too ambiguous to be entirely satisfactory. There are several anthropologies, which imply diverse evaluations of sex, diverse understandings of the purposes of marriage, diverse moral judgments on some activities related to sex (as, for instance, on birth control and its methods), diverse opinions as to the advisability of introducing women into the governing offices of the Church, diverse positions on the possibility of ordaining women to the priesthood, diverse spiritualities also, which adversely appreciate the nature and role of the male-female relationship in love and friendship. These divergences do not remain academic, for they inspire opposite philosophies relating to the education of girls, to coeducation, to dating, different understandings of the authority of parents over their unmarried daughters; and the generation gap is caused not so much by differences in age as by differing philosophies of life, that is, it rests on, and betrays, anthropologies with incompatible orientations and assumptions.

Much of the recent literature on womanhood keeps a veil of silence on what I would identify as the central problem of the recent Catholic tradition in this area, namely its open schizophrenia: contradictory streams of thought to see woman as weak and as symbol of temptation and to idealize her as symbol of transcendent goodness. At first sight, the Inferior place effectively assigned to woman in the organization of the Catholic Church reflects the Tertullianist-Scholastic concept of woman’s submission to man because of her native incapacity to cooperate with him in anything but procreation. Encomiums of the feminine ideal and praises of the Virgin Mary notwithstanding, the position of woman reflects the idea of her debility rather than any other of the elements of the total Catholic tradition. The fact that the misogynic tradition has seldom been as violent as its adversaries have formulated it need have no special significance, besides showing once again that the necessary theological groundwork has seldom been done. Yet, in the absence of this groundwork, most recent critics of the status quo have borrowed from other sources than the Christian past. Thus it happens that Catholics who wish to promote the rights of women today confront us with the humanistic tradition of Simone de Beauvoir, with Freudian reconstructions or, at a lower level of sophistication, with statistical data on women in and out of wedlock. The theological picture is clouded by the fact that, whatever model of womanhood has been favored by speculative theologians or spiritual authors, the practical life of women and their participation in the Church’s activity have been regulated, since at least the end of the Middle Ages, by the Tertullianist view rather than by the more generous assessments of womanhood that have always existed in the Church, thus a view that may well be of lesser theological value has gained dominance over canonical legislation. And it is a practical question of great importance whether theology or law should have pride of place in the Ecclesia.

If we are thus faced with basically two theological models, one of these corresponds to the canonical model in existence: woman as the handmaid of man, physically weak except for what pertains to pregnancy, receptive, and finding her salvation in extending this receptivity to the whole realm of her spiritual being. The other model idealizes woman, seeing her as the proposed embodiment of holiness; but this seems to have no effect on the status of woman in the Church militant, whatever it may imply concerning the Church triumphant. Misogyny has often been appended to the first view; woman has then become so weak that she is evil embodied, the eternal temptress. Mariology has come to the support of the second view: woman finds the very type of her existence in the emergence of “the eternal woman,” “the eternal feminine,” the Virgin Mary. The most sophisticated exponents of the first view relate it to the Holy Spirit. For, in the words of Willi Moll (these are the titles of several chapters of his book), “The Holy Spirit and the woman are receivers,” “The Holy Spirit and the woman are God’s great ‘and,’ ” “The Holy Spirit and the woman are life-givers.” The introduction of the Spirit into the discussion of womanhood brings in our unfinished third model, in which some form of the feminine is attributed to God himself. Perhaps Pneumatology will provide, next to Mariology, a workable model of womanhood.

Notes

1. Kari Elisabeth Børresen, Subordination et equivalence. Nature et role de la femme d’après Augustin et Thomas d’Aquin (Oslo-Paris, 1968).

2. Vincent Yzermans, ed., American Participation in the Vatican Council (New York, 1967), p. 202.

3. Gospel of Thomas, No. 112 (Robert M. Grant, The Secret Sayings of Jesus [New York, 1960], p. 197).

4. Yzermans, pp. 202-203.

5. Karl Rahner and Herbert Vorgrimler, Theological Dictionary (New York, 1965), p. 270.

6. De cultu feminarum, I, 1.

7. Summa theologica, I, q. 92, a. 1, ad 1. See Børresen, op. cit; Josef Fuchs, Die Sexualethik des hl. Thomas van Aquin (Cologne, 1949).

8. Summa theologica, I, q. 93, a. 6, ad 2.

9. De generatione animalium, IV, chap. 3.

10. Summa theologica, I, q. 92, a. 1.

11. Ibid., ad 2.

12. Hippocrates (c. 460-c. 377 B.C.), Oeuvres complètes, 10 vols. (Paris, 1839-1861); Loeb Classical Library, 3 vols. (London, 1923-1927); Galen (c. 131-201 A.D.), Opera omnia, 20 vols. (Leipzig, 1821-1833).

13. Commentary on the Sentences, II, D. 20, q. 2. See Thérèse Healy, Woman according to Saint Bonaventure (Erie, Pa., 1956).

14. Commentary on the Sentences, II, D. 20, q. 6 ad 2.

15. Ibid., q. 6.

16. Ibid., q. 6, ad 1.

17. Ibid., IlII, D. 12, a. 3, q. 1.

18. Ibid.

19. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York, 1953); Gertrude Von Le Fort, The Eternal Woman (Milwaukee, 1954). My quotations from Von Le Fort will be borrowed from the French text, La Femme éternelle (Paris, 1946).

20. Von Le Fort, p. 30.

21. Ibid., p. 31.

22. Act 3, scene 3. English translation by Wallace Fowlie (Chicago, 1960).

23. Act 4, scene 2. Much of Claudel’s work deals with the meaning and task of woman; see Cinq Grandes Odes, première ode.

24. Von Le Fort, pp. 156-157.

25. F. X. Arnold, Woman and Man: Their Nature and Mission (New York, 1963); J. Galot, L’Eglise et la femme (Paris, 1965); Willi Moll, The Christian Image of Woman (Notre Dame, Indiana, 1967). See also Louis Sahuc, Homme et femme (Paris, 1960); Françoise Danniel and B. Olivier, Woman Is the Glory of Man (Westminster, Md., 1966); Suzanne Cita-Malard, Les Femmes dans l’Eglise à la lumière de Vatican II (Paris, 1968).

26. Frauenbildung und Frauenberufe (Munich, 1949).

27. Osservatore Romano, December 10, 1965.

28. Ibid.

29. Ibid.

30. La Documentation Catholique, 1966, no. 1482, col. 1923.

31. Ibid.

32. Ibid. The doctrine of Pius XII on woman was Identical with that of Paul VI, as appears from his two major speeches on the topic, pronounced in October 1945 and in October 1956. In both cases, the address was delivered chiefly to Italian women, a point which should be held in mind when assessing the limits of their doctrine. In the first case, the pope’s concerns were dominated by the problems of the reconstruction of society after the war and the passing of the Fascist era. See La Documentation Catholique, 1956, no. 1238, cols. 1415-1424; see also below, chap. 9, n. 12 and n. 13.

33. L’Amour et I’occident (Paris, 1939).

34. This is the ending of Faust.

35. Poem “A une Madonne,” in Les Fleurs du Mal.

36. See above, chap. 5.

37. Sermon 51 on the Assumption (P.L., 194, 1863).

38. L’Eternel Féminin. Etude sur un texte du Père Teilhard de Chardin (Paris, 1968).

39. Teilhard’s text is in Ecrits du temps de guerre, 1916-1919 (Paris, 1965), pp. 253-262. This quote, p. 255.

40. Ibid., p. 256.

41. Ibid.

42. Ibid., p. 253.

43. Ibid., p. 254.

44. Ibid., p. 255.

45. Ibid., p. 256.

46. Ibid., p. 257.

47. Ibid., p. 258.

48. Ibid.

49. Ibid., p. 259.

50. Ibid., p. 260.

51. Ibid., p. 261.

52. Ibid., p. 262.

53. Ibid.

54. Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, chap. 57, in Roger Huddleston, ed. (Westminster, Md., 2nd ed., 1952), p. 118.

55. Ibid., chap. 58, p. 119.

56. Ibid., p. 120.

57. Ibid., chap. 59, pp. 122-123.

58. Ibid., chap. 60, p. 124.

59. Ibid., p. 125. On divine motherhood, see Claude Chavasse, The Bride of Christ (London, 1940); J. Plumpe, Mater Ecclesia (Washington, 1943); Hugo Rahner, Mater Ecclesia: Lobpreis der Kirche aus dem ersten Jahrtausend christlichen Literature (Einsiedeln, 1944); Karl Delehaye, Erneuerung der Seelsorgsformen aus der Sicht der frühen Patristik (Freiburg, 1958).

60. Victor White, Soul and Psyche (London, 1960), chaps. 6-8 and appendix VI.

61. Quoted by Victor White, ibid., p. 124, from The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage, trans. C. A. Wynschenk (London, 1916), p. 177.

62. White, p. 137.

Copyright (c) 2007: All of the texts and techniques (pedagogical and relational)
displayed in this site are copyrighted materials.