Toward an Anthropology

Woman in Christian Tradition
by George H.Tavard, University of Notre Dame Press, 1973, pp. 187-210.
Republished on our website with the necessary permissions

A Christian anthropology should keep a double focus, on man as he is and on what the Christian tradition so far has said about him. By “man as he is,” I understand man as he experiences himself in our time. For we cannot directly experience mankind in any other way. Whether or not we assume that man has physically and spiritually evolved as he has developed culturally, we can experience only the present point of such an evolution. Therefore, an anthropology cannot deal in the first place with man as he was created. This has been the basic tendency of theologians who have considered the question of man in the light of the first chapters of Genesis: from this they are likely to pass, through speculative reflection, to certain assumptions about the nature of man, distinguishing the four aspects of pure nature, actual nature before the fall, fallen nature, redeemed nature. Nor can anthropology speak of man as reflection may determine his chief essential and existential features, though this has been the basic tendency of philosophers. Anthropology concerns man as he lives today. Only from this vantage point can one reach conclusions that will be valid for the men of all times and civilizations, although one cannot be certain a priori that such will effectively be the case. Accordingly, a theological reflection on woman should not take as its chief focus the feminine image of the Virgin Mary, even though this image has long been close to centrality in the faith of large numbers of Christians. The Virgin Mary ought to come within the scope of our study only insofar as she is a woman and thus participates in the general structure of womanhood, if such a structure is to be discovered. For this reason, the ancient or modern models of womanhood which present Mary as the theological pattern for all believing women suffer from a radical fallacy.

One cannot build a theology in historical isolation anymore than in the abstract. Consideration of woman today will avoid abstraction. Insertion of our thought in the continuity of Christian tradition will avoid isolation. What we see and think of woman today is necessarily tied to what was seen and thought formerly. The difficulty comes when we try to assess what in this tradition remains normative and what was too influenced by local or temporary conditions, by contingent cultural patterns, by human prejudice, and by philosophical bias to be valid for today. Our historical survey has shown that the theological stance concerning woman, her function in mankind and her place in the Church, was dominated originally by Jewish, Greek, and Roman patterns of thought and behavior. Into these forms that were borrowed, even the Jewish ones, from the societies of the day, the Christian Revelation, in the wake of the Abrahamic, Mosaic, and Prophetic revelation, wedged an element of newness, of fermentation, perhaps we may even say of revolution. Yet this element could only take shape in the context of prevailing cultural forms, which to a great extent contradicted it. And so forms of thought or behavior essentially alien to the Christian message have carried through the centuries the seeds of transformation which this message entailed. As I see it, the task of a theological reflection on womanhood lies here: we should disentangle the inner message and its containers. For these, whether they were biblical or came to the fore in the course of the Christian tradition, have, like old skins bursting with new wine, shown themselves to be in disharmony with their content.

A central affirmation is undoubtedly to be kept: man (as anthropos or homo, that is, both man and woman) is created in God’s image. This holds true for today as well as for any other period. It is sufficiently asserted in all the biblical and traditional data to be beyond discussion. But what cannot escape discussion is the precise meaning of this “image.” Some options have been proposed that cannot be avoided, although we need not investigate the question of the effects of sin upon this image, for the determination of these effects should naturally depend on the previous identification of the image. In the main, I would distinguish two possibilities.

l) The image of God lies in the spiritual nature of man (I take the word “nature” in this context to cover the data with which man starts life, that which is given to him and which he has to develop, “cultivate,” through what must be called culture). In his spiritual nature, man is endowed with faculties which allow him to act in ways radically different from animals. He thinks and he wills. By his intellectual and voluntary powers, he is the natural image of God, which will be transformed and elevated by grace to a higher level through new strengths corresponding to these faculties, namely faith (transforming the intellect) and love or charity (transforming the will). By and large, this was the Scholastic approach. It was deeply indebted to Augustine’s analysis of the mind in connection with Trinitarian reflection. Both Augustine and his medieval followers could thus relate the image of God to the inner relationships of the Holy Trinity as known through Christian Revelation: the intellect corresponds to the Word, and the will to the Spirit. Hence man is an image of the Holy Trinity, of the Persons in God, of God’s inner life, rather than an image of the divine nature in its undividedness. To the question of what in man corresponds to the Father, the Augustinian-Scholastic answer would have pointed to the very essence or being of man, which is the source of all his potentialities, as the Father is the fountainhead of the divine life. A later author of considerable importance, Saint John of the Cross (1542-1591) identified the most basic element of the Trinitarian image in man with the power of memory, memory here implying not only the retention of knowledge and experience, but also the continuity of man with his own self.

If this analysis is applied to the problem of womanhood, it allows an interesting conclusion. According to the Aristotelian contention, the intellect predominates in man (as aner or vir), whereas the third faculty prevails in woman (the will being affectivity and love rather than the modern will-to-power). If this is correct, it follows that man and woman are differentiated at the most fundamental level of their spiritual existence. For in this case man images the Trinity with the chief focus on the Son, whereas woman images the Trinity with the chief focus on the Spirit. In this case, the anthropologies that make the female soul distinct from the male soul, and those which assign to woman a pneumatic function analogous to that of the Spirit, become plausible.

2) With a concern that is more biblical than speculative and that looks to the earlier rather than the later Christian tradition, the image of God in man may be identified with the duality of human existence. It is not as Adam or as Eve that human beings are images of God, but in their interrelatedness as Adam and Eve, or rather as Adam-with-Eve and Eve-with-Adam. A totally different perspective opens. There may be differences in it concerning the extent to which the duality of mankind, and therefore the image, includes sex in the strict sense. Is the duality inscribed in the structure of mankind a psychological and functional dichotomy to which the complement of physiological sex is superadded (though not necessarily in a later time sequence)? Or does the duality of man and woman imply maleness and femaleness necessarily and from the beginning? Under the influence of Origen and of Gregory of Nyssa, the separation between sex and the duality of the image as man-and-woman tended to prevail among the Greek Fathers. This in turn tallied with the efforts of the monastic and ascetic movement to bring man to the level of an angelic, sexless life. The ambiguity and, at the same time, the rich possibilities of this approach are patent. Should the image reside in a man-woman relationship beyond sex, then the abolition of sex would be theoretically possible in this life. Man and woman must relate to each other, though not necessarily through sex. New spiritual relationships may be envisaged, as in the case of mulieres subintroductae. The fact that such ill-fated experiences were soon discontinued simply shows that what was theoretically possible was not practically feasible; yet this need throw(sic) no doubt on the basic principle that the image of God lies in the interrelationship of man and woman.

It would seem to follow from this that neither man nor woman alone is the image of God. In the concrete life of Christians, the image would not be a datum so much as an ideal. The faithful should develop and deepen the image of God in themselves or, better said, their participation in the image of God. How this may be done will depend on the option that has been made concerning sex. If sex itself belongs to the basic structure of the image, then there would seem to be no way to fulfill oneself as the image of God but through the companion of the other sex who will allow us to become, together with her or him, a fully developed image. The image is androgynous and must be actualized through marriage. From this point of view, the ascetic and monastic movements would appear to have been fundamental in orientations. The sacrament of the image would be matrimony. Needless to say, although this path was a distinct possibility, it has never been followed in orthodox Christianity.

If, on the other hand, the image lies in the self-differentiation of mankind as man-woman, yet has been set from the beginning beyond physiological sex, then we face a very different horizon. Manhood and womanhood are two ways of being human, each of which needs the other as its spiritual and psychological complement, even though physiological complementation need not be sought. Neither man nor woman is the image of God; but man and woman participate in the image only to the extent that they share in the functions and characteristics of the other.

In both cases, man will be associated with the Word and woman with the Spirit. No justification for this is needed other than the historical fact of the Incarnation of the Word as the man Jesus of Nazareth and the typification of the Church as the realm of the Spirit’s activity, under feminine images, as has been the case throughout Christian tradition, in continuity with the symbolism of the Old Testament where Israel is the bride of Yahweh.

In both cases, too, the image results from creation: man is created in the image of God. The Incarnation and the redemption and sanctification of mankind add nothing new to this; no added level of grace is needed. Yet the Incarnation transforms the context of human life and assigns to it a goal that could not even be discerned before, the goal of deification through the sacramental and mystical life, that is, through the transformation of human existence by the advent of God into it.

In view of these different trends of the tradition, one conclusion seems to be justified. The image of God cannot be a solipsist endowment of each human being by himself, on this point Scholastic theology must be overcome. Yet I cannot see the image as residing specifically in a man-woman relationship, whether this takes place at the level of sex through the sacrament of marriage, or at a spiritual level through the cooperation and complementation of man and woman in Church and society. This would seem much too narrow, as it would in fact exclude from the image the entire monastic movement, although this was effectively for centuries the heart of the Church in both East and West. If the image lies neither in the soul of man as an entity by itself, nor in the togetherness of man and woman, then only one possibility remains. It resides in the interrelatedness of man with others, regardless of whether these are men or women. The seat of the image is the person, as distinguished from the solipsist individual. A person is interrelated with others; to be a person is to be a center of interpersonal relationships. This expression does not mean that relationships bring together totally constituted persons, but that an individual becomes a person through such relationships. I would therefore say that, insofar as man is born an individual, he is not in the image of God; yet as soon as he interrelates with others (which means, in practice, as soon as a midwife or a doctor or his mother picks him up) he then begins to become a person. Thus man is in the image of the Trinity, in which the Persons are essentially interrelated.

Biblical tradition has focused on man and woman this interrelatedness of the image of God, for the simple reason that the most basic type of human relationship is the one that unites men and women. More than any other one, this relationship calls each of them out of self-centeredness into a new and rather different way of being human, teaching each of them forms of thought or intuition with which they would not otherwise be so familiar and ways of sharing and loving to which they would otherwise remain strangers. This, I would maintain, happens whenever two persons relate to each other, regardless of whether they are men or women. The man-woman relationship is, nonetheless, the very type of this happening. I would therefore conclude that the image of God in man lies in man’s interrelationship with others as exemplified in the man-woman relationship, or, equivalently, in the man-woman relationship as the type of all human relationships.

Such a conception of the image allows us to preserve the valuable insights of the Augustinian-medieval conception. For man relates himself to other human beings through the aspect of his personality which seeks association with others. Human association is radically different from the types of associations that prevail among animals, in that it is free: man can enter into a group or withdraw from it at will, according to his likes and dislikes, his decisions, and his conceptions of himself. In other words, human relationships are not restricted to the tribal networks of associations into which man is born. Men are normally, in the course of their development, called on to transcend the limitations of their clan, caste, class, city, province, nation. Such movements beyond set relations are consummated in the intellect and the will. Accordingly, it is not entirely erroneous to see the seat of God’s image in the two faculties of the soul which classical psychology calls the intellect and the will. Yet these provide only the tools with which one may become the image of God. They themselves are not the image; they are preconditions of it.

We have described the image of God in man in nonstatic terms. Man must grow into the image which the grace of God destines him to be. What this entails cannot fully appear unless we also consider the final purpose. Toward what climax is the spiritual development of man headed? Irnage of God, in the context of Christian Revelation, means image of the Trinity. The Trinity is neither an abstract concept nor merely a way of speaking about God. Some modern authors give the impression of understanding Trinitarianism as a form of thought which primarily affects man and only secondarily tells us something of God. As such, it only points to man’s ultimate inability to think about the absolute in other than dialectical fashion: the absolute is reached by human thought only at the crosspoint of three lines of reflection, each of which corresponds to one aspect of the Divinity, But the Christian tradition sees much more in the doctrine of the Trinity. The Three Persons are real; and there is no God or Divinity outside of them. It is not correct even to say that Godhead is a reality equally shared by three transcendent Persons or centers of awareness and attribution. Godhead is not a fourth reality in which the Three meet. It is the very reality of each divine Person, and it is what each Person is in itself, in relationship to the other Two. These are not aspects of the Divinity (the “modalist” or Sabellian error) but genuine centers of being: three centers of the same transcendental being.

These remarks point the direction in which we must seek for the ultimate scope of the image of God in man. Man is invited by creation and by grace to fulfill himself through participation in the life of the Three Persons. He is the image of God to the extent that he himself experiences the Three-ness of the divine life. This of course cannot be achieved by any merely human means, or reached at the end of an ascetic process of self-purification along neo-Platonic or yogic lines; it is itself a gift from God, who, little by little, measuring man’s progress with man’s capability to progress, brings each man into oneness with himself.

There are several traditional names for this process. The Orthodox tradition, faithful to the emphasis of the Greek Fathers, calls it a “deification,” a term which obviously remains highly symbolic yet which adequately expresses what then takes place: man’s own life becomes itself Trinitarian. It is the very life of God in the recesses of the human being. The Latin tradition has also used the term “deification,” though its Scholastic representatives have preferred to use other terms, like elevation to God, or beatitude, or transformation into God. For example, Thomas Aquinas writes: “It belongs to the rank and dignity of man to be raised to the divine realities inasmuch as man has been made in the image of God.”(1) Or: “As to its object, beatitude is simply the Supreme Good; as to its act, it is the Supreme Good in the beatified creature, not absolutely but insofar as the creature is able to share in it.”(2) The Summa against the Pagans develops the point that the human intellect can be raised to the vision of the divine Essence by “participation” in a “divine light.”(3)

As used by the Western mystics, the language of participation becomes less guarded than with the systematic theologians. Thus John of the Cross, who blends a rich mystical experience with a Thomistic theology, defines man, in some remarkable texts, as “God by participation.” In the “spiritual marriage,” he writes in The Spiritual Canticle, “the soul becomes divine, becomes God through participation, insofar as is possible in this life.”(4) Then the soul “enjoys in security and quietude the participation of God.”(5) Such a union is of course a union to the Three Persons of God:

Granted that God favors her [the soul] by union with the most Blessed Trinity, in which she becomes deiform and God through participation, how could it be incredible that she also understand, know and love—or better that this is done in her—in the Trinity, together with it, as does the Trinity itself! Yet God accomplished this in the soul through communication and participation. This is transformation in the Three Persons in power and wisdom and love, and thus the soul is like God through this transformation. He created her in His image and likeness that she might attain such resemblance.(6)

These expressions—union with, transformation into, participation in, deiformity—are not the language of a few schools only. They indeed express a theological consensus which is echoed by the more guarded style of the Councils. Thus the Constitution Verbum Dei of Vatican II, quoting a formula already contained in Vatican I’s Constitution Dei Filius, says:

In Divine Revelation God has wanted to show and to share himself and the eternal decisions of his will concerning man’s salvation, “that they may participate in the divine wealth, which utterly exceeds the human mind’s comprehension.”(7)

If such is the Catholic tradition concerning man as image of God, no distinction may be made between men and women at this level. The image of God follows upon the presence of God in man, the Three Persons in each human being. Men and women are alike in this respect. No specific Trinitarian relationship is proper to women or to men. Woman therefore cannot enjoy a special relationship to the Spirit which would not also be open to man, just as man cannot have a special relationship to the Son which would not also be open to woman. The various attempts that have been made to define man or woman by analogy with the Son or the Spirit cannot be followed; they would lead to a differentiation within God which simply does not correspond to the reality. The sophiological efforts in that direction can only lead to erroneous Trinitarian views.

A similar conclusion may be reached by reflection on the mystery of Christ, the “only mediator between God and man” (1 Tim. 2:5) and therefore the savior of men and women equally.

If man is defined, as “God by participation,” if the purpose of the Christian life is a deification by the elevation of man into the realm of the divine, it follows that there is only one perfect man, only one man who entirely fulfills the definition of humanity, in whom participation in God and deification are totally and absolutely achieved: this is Jesus Christ. Being the assumed nature of the Word of God, his human nature fully participates in the divine life. The classical concept of the “communication of properties”(8) between the divine and the human in Jesus is the ineluctable consequence of the extent to which the humanity of Jesus shares the divine life. “Out of his fulness we all have received grace upon grace” (John 1:16). That is, in the mystery of God’s design for mankind, the assumption of the humanity of Jesus into the realm of the divine through its personal link with the Word becomes the means by which every man can be raised to deification. Jesus is the only model and the only mediator. His grace is, in the Scholastic phrase, gratia capitis,(9) a grace which, as head of the human race, he shares with all who believe. Men and women stand on the same footing in relation to the grace of Christ. Here there can be no distinction. It is impossible to hold that men would find the divine-human model of their perfection in Jesus Christ, whereas women would find theirs in the Virgin Mary.

The focus of Trinitarian and Christological reflection invites us to take very seriously the conclusion of our biblical study. Christianity implies the total emancipation of woman, the complete removal of the inferiority in which society has kept her and which the authors of the Old Testament attributed to a curse pronounced at the beginning of mankind as a result of an original sin. Facing their call to the Trinitarian life, men and women cannot be differentiated. Likewise, they are alike in relation to Christ. This is further supported by the sacramental order, in which, in contradistinction to that of the Old Testament, men and women receive the same sacraments. Unlike the rite of circumcision, there is no baptism for men that would not also be a baptism for women.

Through the mystery of baptism, the primal order of the universe is restored. This entails a reversal of values for society, where men have dominated women, reduced to a form of slavery. Does it also imply, as our biblical study also seemed to show, that women should be, as in the Eden described in Genesis, the spiritual model of human perfection? On this point, the final answer cannot be provided by the Old Testament. The authors and redactors of Genesis could conceive of a restored order of the universe only as a return to the beginning. Lacking other terms of comparison they could image this Edenic ideal only by contrast with the daily experience of their times. Thus they presented Eden as the reverse of history, and the lot of Eve before the fall as the reverse of her lot after the fall. Instead of physical, mental, and moral inferiority, they crowned her with spiritual superiority over Adam. In effect, however, the Incarnation did not restore a previous order but instored a new one. The realm of redemption, even as it will be fully achieved in the Kingdom, is not Paradise. It is an entirely new domain. In it, the model of human perfection can be neither manhood nor womanhood; it cannot be a concrete human person, whether male or female. The model is the God-man, the Word made flesh. There is no other to be sought. Thus, the Christian reality is different from that which the Old Testament described as the Edenic order of the universe. The perfection of mankind does not reside in Eve or even in Mary, but only in the Lord Jesus. And what faith perceives in him is neither maleness nor even manhood alone, but manhood as transformed by the pervading presence of the divine Logos, that is, Emmanuel, God-with-us, God become one of us. Accordingly, a Christian anthropology must transcend the differentiation of the sexes which still dominates the prelapsarian anthropology of the Bible. The model of woman, as the model of man, is the Word of God Incarnate.

Several of the trends examined in the last few chapters have connected woman in a special way with the Spirit. We should now face the Pneumatological question as it relates to a Christian anthropology. The differentiation of mankind into male and female has been seen as somehow patterned on the differentiation between the Logos and the Spirit in God. This has been facilitated by the linguistic phenomenon that the word for “spirit” in the Semitic languages (rouach in Hebrew; roucha in Syriac) is of the feminine gender. While neither Latin nor Greek or standard Russian theology was directly affected by this linguistic pressure, Russian sophiology has been influenced by it. This could be grounded theologically in the prophetic application to Israel of the concept of the bride of Yahweh, which was followed by the patristic analogy between the Ecclesia tou Theou (the Church of God) and the bride of the Lord. Accordingly, the relationship between Christ and the Church his bride is seen as an image of the eternal relationship between the Word and the Spirit in the dyad of the divine processions. It is significant that the controversies over the Filioque did not hurt this analogy in either East or West, for Greek theology, which tends to deny the eternal procession ab utroque, nevertheless teaches that, in his mission in this world, the Spirit is also sent by the Incarnate Lord: thus the analogy between the Church and the Spirit may still be deemed acceptable at the level of the order of the Incarnation. Russian theology, which has been less averse to the doctrine of the procession ab utroque, could more easily entertain the notion of an eternal prototype for the marriage between Christ and the Church in the union of the Logos and the Pneuma.

The meaning of this analogy depends in the first place on the theological conception of the Holy Spirit in God and, secondarily, on the understanding of the specific elements of womanhood which would relate to the Spirit. This line of thought I find particularly attractive, although I entertain some reservations about it. On account of this, I will attempt to present it systematically.

Whatever its exact description may be, the image of God in man is not a static quality. It does not simply imply a likeness, a proportionality, a resemblance between God and man. Furthermore, it entails that the reality which is God’s image has become a channel of divine power and presence. This is inseparable from the statement that the image “shares” in what it represents. But what does sharing imply? One can envision it in at least two different ways. God himself, may be thought of in his oneness or in his threeness. Does the image of God in man refer to the oneness of God, to what classical theology calls his “nature”? Or to the differentiated life of the three Persons? In his oneness, God appears, in relation to creation, as the divine ground of all things, as the abyss in and out of which the Three Persons are seen and by which they are sustained, since the content of each Person is no other than the totality of the divine nature. In his threeness this eternal abyss of being manifests itself in three types of life, which we call Father, Son, and Spirit. It can then be looked at from the standpoint of each of the Persons. The Father is ultimately identified with the very notion of divine abyss: he is the abysmal depth of the divine, never to be contacted directly, never to be seen in himself, for he manifests himself only through the two Persons who proceed from him, the Son and the Spirit. The one who tries to see the Father can only reach the Spirit and the Son, the Father standing behind them as the ground from which they come, to which they point, but which they never show face to face. No one has seen the Father. Yet the one who sees the Son sees the Father also, for the Son is all that the Father is, except fatherhood, except origin and abyss. And the one who sees the Spirit sees the Father also, for the Spirit is the Spirit of the Father, sent to do the Father’s work in the wake of the incarnation of the Son. The Son, or Word, expresses the Father: this is his life, and his being consists precisely in this manifestation—manifestation to himself in all eternity and to man by creation and redemption. He reflects, in the sense of receiving and sending back all that the Father is. He keeps nothing for himself and he has nothing of his own, for all that he has is the Father’s. All that he is is the divine nature as present in, and given to him by, the Father. The only element that defines him as a distinct Person is precisely this distinctiveness of being the one who receives in order to give back.

As for the Spirit, his personality, though clearly affirmed in the tradition, is more difficult to visualize. For if the Father has given all he is to the Son, except the precise fact of being the Father and the origin of all, nothing would seem to be left to specify the Spirit. Christian theology has attempted to see the Spirit as the one who returns, who gives back to the Father what came from him: thus he is called the bond of the Trinity, the link of love between the Father and the Son. This is obviously a neo-Platonic diagram: the emanation from the One through the Son returns to the One through the Spirit. Following Gregory Nazianzen and Augustine, most classical thought has understood the Spirit on the pattern of the spiritual faculties of the soul: the Son would correspond to the intellect, and the Spirit to the will. In the Latin Middle Ages, Richard of Saint Victor saw the Three Persons as three phrases of the self-substantive divine love: the Lover (identified with the Father), the Beloved (identified with the Son), and the love which unites them (being the Spirit). Sergius Bulgakov explained the Spirit as necessary to the fullness of fatherhood in the First Person: in human experience, the fullness of fatherhood requires not only a son, but a son and a daughter, otherwise the generative powers of the father have not been fully tested and he has exercised fatherhood with only one-half of mankind. Likewise, the divine Fatherhood would require two Persons, whom we call Son and Spirit, these corresponding to sons and daughters in mankind.

In any case, the Spirit is the more mysterious of the divine processions. In relation to man, he does not reveal, for the only revealer is the Son; but he manifests what has been revealed. He does not redeem, for the redeemer is the Son; but he sanctifies those who have been redeemed, guiding them into all the truth. In relation to the Father, we cannot know for certain what he is, except that he is neither the Father nor the Son, and that all that he is and does is related to the Father as the ultimate fount of divine life, and to the Son as the one to whom all that the Father is and has already been given. His very existence as God emphasizes the gratuitousness of the divine life: he is supernumerary, logically unaccountable, unnecessary, yet He is. His being is the supreme challenge to man’s intellect. How can we conceive in God himself, what strikes us as superfluous? He is also the supreme challenge to man’s love. How can man love the One who is without self-consistence, being totally gift, of whom one cannot even say that the Father gives himself to him (as He does to the Son), the One who never manifests himself, but always points to another; enlightens, but has no light of his own that he can show; guides, but never guides toward himself?

Thus, the Christian life is lived in the Spirit, but never directed toward him. The Spirit is the one “in whom we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). If, in relation to man, there is a divine Person who functions as “the air we breathe”(10) as the womb that bears and nourishes, it is the Spirit. If the Father is the eternal abyss, in whom the Second and the Third Persons subsist, if the Son, being constituted by the Father’s total self-gift, contains in himself the eternal types of all created beings, it is yet the Spirit who bears this world in himself, guiding it, from the first moment of creation, toward the Father, watching over it as over the waters of chaos and bringing order into it, preparing it for the Incarnation and guiding the Church of the Lord Incarnate to fulfill its function in fidelity and holiness. The Spirit is the last and final agent, in whom all things find their eschatologjcal dimension. He is the one who overcomes the divisiveness of the created world, bringing all things to reconciliation and unity.

These remarks throw light on the theologies that find a special correspondence between womanhood and the Spirit. The Father’s eternal partner (what the sophiologists would call the divine Sophia) is the dyad of the Logos and the Spirit. As I understand it, this is the true meaning of the doctrine of Filioque: in his own procession, the Spirit remains in the Son, thus maintaining the Oneness of the two Persons who proceed from the Father. This unity of the Father’s eternal coequal is a di-unity, a di-archy, differentiated into two distinct Persons. On this pattern the created image of God will be bipolar, reflecting back the Son and the Spirit, in a unity of oneness and differentiation. Within mankind as image of God, one pole corresponds to the Son and the other to the Spirit. The Spirit is the divine model of woman, because he is the Third, the last, the one in whom divinity reaches the fullness of its manifestation, just as woman, in the story of Genesis, is the perfection, the bond, the acme of mankind. Thus maleness would correspond to the Son, femaleness to the Spirit; and both together constitute the image of God, just as the diarchy of the Son and the Spirit full manifest the Father.

It so happens that in human experience woman does fulfill some of the functions of the Spirit and somehow acts in a manner more reminiscent of the Spirit than of the Word of God. Woman in history has been hidden, mysterious, incomprehensible, active yet gearing her activity toward another, a husband or a child. In most countries of Western civilization, she has no real name, since she loses her name at marriage and acquires a name which is not hers. She works at home, and even when she works outside, she holds less glamorous jobs than men, being more often than not the adjunct to a man, for instance, as a secretary or a typist. The task where she excels relate to education, so that she may be seen there as a mother more than as a wage earner or as the author of a creative activity she may call her own. The qualities commonly attributed to her are humility, receptivity, fidelity, patience, care for others, concern for continuity, tradition, and unity. The comparison is plain between these aspects and what Christian theology says of the Spirit; and the conclusion that woman is meant by divine design to be the image of the Spirit is very tempting indeed.

However, this line of thought runs into a difficulty. The characteristics thus assigned to womanhood cannot be seen in the simple context of “nature,” in which they would represent and correspond to the will of the creator of nature. As far as man is concerned, nature, that is, the datum with which man starts, does not exhaust his environment. For man has built and is continually building a culture, which he adds to and with which he transforms nature. This raises a major question regarding the origin of these characteristics of woman: Do they derive from nature or from culture? If from nature, then woman’s destiny is fixed once and for all; and one may define her task in relation to the Spirit, whom she somehow resembles. But if from culture, then woman cannot be simply related to the Spirit: culture—that is, society and education—has given her what seem to be her major qualities. And one may conceive of another type of society in which a different culture would assign her other tasks. The old myth of a land of Amazons is highly relevant here. Woman can be conceived of as other than she is. In other words, what she seems to be neither derives from nature nor represents an unalterable law of her being. It ensues from culture and has been produced by certain types of civilization. Another type of civilization can emancipate her from the yoke of her traditional functions and attitudes.

Precisely, the Christian message, as we have determined it so far, has been one of liberation. The advent of Christ means the possibility of woman’s escape from the curse, for the curse is now lifted from all who believe. Woman is no longer secondary and subservient; she is second insofar as the first waits for her coming; and she typifies mankind in its perfection, bringing to its climax the process of creation begun with Adam. What therefore the Spirit represents cannot be a final predetermined model for woman, any more than the Word (in his divinity, or in his Incarnate life as Jesus Christ) is a final, predetermined model for man. Christ is a model for all, men and women alike.In these conditions, the Spirit is indeed relevant to woman, insofar as he presents her, not with a destiny, but with a vocation; and he is equally relevant to man, to whom also he offers a possible option.

What this amounts to is that both man and woman, realizing themselves as images of God, imitate the eternal image, the unity of the Word with the Spirit as the revelation and manifestation of the Father. But they may be spiritually attracted to, and they may imitate more specifically either of the two Persons who constitute the eternal image. The Son and the Spirit confront us with distinct, though related, callings, to which certain qualities correspond and which are to be manifested through certain behavioral patterns. That most women who care enough to think about it would find it congenial to carry out the tasks of the Spirit does correspond to the data that have accumulated so far regarding woman in history. Nonetheless, as woman in history is an inextricable mixture of nature (God-made, necessary) and of culture (man-made, contingent), one cannot assert with any degree of certainty that this will be true of all women at all times, or that it is more natural or better for woman to imitate the Spirit and to conceive of herself as an approximation of the Spirit, destined to reach spiritual and psychological fulfillment through the tasks of the Spirit as exemplified in the so-called feminine virtues and qualities. It would even seem that the more a woman has progressed in Christian holiness—that is, the freer she has become from the curse and its consequences in society—the freer she is to follow paths that society does not usually recognize as legitimate feminine pursuits. Thus Joan of Arc, leading a victorious army against the English and Burgundian factions, does not make much sense and is to be considered a freak of history, unless one thinks of her in the words of Charles Péguy, as la sainte la plus grande après sainte Marie.(11) Likewise with Saint Catherine of Sienna, who brought Pope Gregory XI, much against his own judgment, back from Avignon to Rome in 1377.

The more a woman becomes God-like, the freer she is to take positions of leadership, because on the one hand she can imitate equally well the Son and the Spirit in keeping with her charism of the moment, and, on the other, she has risen above the demands and prejudices of society. At the same time, if women may be called to male virtues and situations usually associated with the Son, men also, raised by grace above the conditions imposed on them by society and culture, may become notable examples of classical feminine virtues and be characterized by humility, hiddenness, and devotion to others, thus achieving in their work a sort of motherhood over the Church and the world. And this has characterized many saints.

The previous considerations have been made from the standpoint of God as Three Persons. We have seen how the doctrine of the image relates man and woman to the Son and the Spirit; and we have found that such a relationship can only be a matter of call, grace, and choice. There is no set pattern for either man or woman. Each rnay grow into a living image of the Word or of the Spirit, or of both since each is structurally related to both. The response to one’s vocation, the types of piety and of activity, the attractions and achievements that predominate in a given person result from grace and its charisms, not from predetermined orientations of men toward the Word or of women toward the Spirit.

This is consistent with the basic theological principle that the works of God ad extra, that is, creation and all that is comprised by it, are effected by God in his unity, in what has traditionally been called the divine “nature.” Although creation is usually connected with the Father as the ultimate source of all things, the act of creating cannot be attributed to any of the Three Persons exclusively. It is a common action, an activity of the divine nature which belongs equally to the Three. Accordingly, all that is made by God proceeds equally (though not in the same way) from the Three Persons. Differentiation belongs to the order of the imagination, pedagogy, and manner of speaking, not to the ontological order. There can therefore be only one fundamental attitude of the creature toward God: receptivity. For the creature is essentially constituted by the reception of God’s action, a reception which is so total that it makes this creature to be. Man, just as woman, is purely receptive of God’s will and action. Mankind has agreed to call receptivity a feminine attitute, since in most societies woman has been attributed chiefly receptive functions. If this is so, then womanhood is the very type of creatureliness. All mankind, and all creation seen from the standpoint of the reception of the creative act, is feminine. Therefore, it we remain within the context of the feminine type as determined by our culture, it is not the female, but the male, who is the anomaly. All creation being receptive and feminine in relation to God, a male type of activity, like aggressiveness, drive to power or domination, can only be an attempt to escape the realm of creatureliness, an attempt, needless to say, which in the long run cannot but fail. Original sin is the pride by which the feminineness of mankind, symbolized by Ishah, tries to become God.

We are thus led to a paradoxical conclusion: even within the myth of the male and the female as it predominates in Western culture, the female is, for man and woman alike, the normal type of attitude and behavior. This would seem to confirm our previous conclusions that the male-female myth is basically incorrect and that in the proper order of creation, which the advent of the redeemer has begun to restore, the relationship of man and woman is not what society has made it. This relationship demands the possibility of a choice, not indeed of physiological functions, which belong to the order of nature, but of spiritual attitudes, personal purposes and ambitions, even all the psychological qualities belonging to the order of culture.

A further conclusion is warranted. If the coming of Christ was intended to restore the order of creation and nature over against that of sin and culture, and if the order of nature, insofar as woman is concerned, has been reversed by the order of culture, as culture developed within Judaism and in the context of the Greco-Roman empire, then the Christian faith should have entailed, as its ineluctable consequence, the liberation of woman from the societal yokes that burdened her. It is my view that Saint Paul at least saw this clearly, but shied away from the revolutionary consequences that this implied for society. The Fathers of the Church successfully created and preserved, within the framework of their society, a realm of freedom for the women who would select it as their way of life. Thus the ascetic life and the order of virgins, guaranteed at least spiritual freedom to women. Other attempts that were made here and there to give women equality with men within the structure of the Church eventually floundered before the pressures of societies dominated by the male principle.

In general, the Church was offered to woman as the realm of her liberation. With the exception of the priesthood and episcopacy (and, later, the diaconate, too) women have been equal to men before the sacraments. Insofar as the organizational structure of the Church was patterned on that of Roman society (and this pattern was consciously adopted for diocesan organization), woman was deprived of her legitimate Christian freedom.

The question should now be asked: has not the time come for the Church to reverse its compromise with the society of the Roman Empire and return to what it was originally meant to be, the realm of redemption, of liberation, specifically the liberation of woman from her cultural subservience to the dominant male principle in society? That the Church is the realm of freedom must not remain an empty statement; it ought to be experienced as a fact by all those who are not yet free. It would be easy to show that the universal sacraments of the traditional Catholic way of life provide the dimension of freedom and therefore of liberation: they bring about freedom from sin and weakness (baptism, confirmation, penance), freedom from dispersion and disunity (eucharist), freedom from sickness (unction), freedom from solitude and loneliness (matrimony). Positively expressed, this means the freedom to live and to act, to unite with all men in the Lord, the freedom to be healthy, to love, and to have a family. As to the sacrament of orders, its special function, connected with the presidency of eucharistic worship, does not need to confer similar types of freedom, because it assumes the freedom of the other sacraments in the one who is ordained. Clearly, this is just as relevant to a woman as it is to a man.

Thus, in the experience of the early Christians, the Ecclesia was the mother of freedom, the realm of liberation. The records of the mystics through the ages show that this feeling of freedom never left the Church, even though it has not been realized by all the faithful. Why prolong now an ambiguity that resulted in the first place from a necessary compromise with the society of the Roman empire? Why not take the steps to make the Ecclesia of today the effective instrument and symbol of liberation? It is only a matter of manifesting what the Church already is and always has been in her very essence.

Before spelling out the implications of the principle we have established, several more general consequences in the area of anthropology ought to be examined. For evidently a theology of womanhood can only follow on a theology of mankind.

1. Man as human being cannot be properly defined as a union of soul and body, whether these terms are understood in their Platonic or their Aristotelian sense. Whenever the terms soul and body are used, they act only as symbols representing the two levels of man’s existence here on earth. He is on earth and yet, insofar as he lives in the Ecclesia, he is already in heaven. Man can properly be defined only in relation to his call to participation in the life of God the Father by union to Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit, Homo erectus, homo faber, homo sapiens, and all the other expressions describing some phase of human evolution or some function or aspect of man, must ultimately be subsumed under the concept of homo eschatologicus or homo parousiaticus or homo transfiguratus, or simply homo mysticus: man as transparent to the divine, as the image of God, is the type and pattern that all men are called to exemplify. Man must be defined teleologically, by the spiritual entelechy which guides him toward the Father, the source and goal of all beings.

2. The human community is mankind. One can designate by this term the collection of all individual men and women, or, in a sense which is more familiar today, the organic, the not yet completed but certainly growing unity of all men and women at the level of both nature and culture. But in fidelity to Christian Revelation and the Catholic tradition, one point must be added: the human community can be only the Ecclesia, since it must be the unity of those who are called to deification. The contemporary question “Is the world for the Church or the Church for the world?” has no recognizable meaning once we have identified the unity of man with God with both the entelechy of man’s collective evolution and the teleology to which this evolution tends. The only recognizable unity of mankind is not the world, or the United Nations, or the technological interdependence of nations, or the Pax Americana, or the Pax Sovietica, or whatever world Empire may still come into being. It is the Church. Just as the true man, and the model for all human beings is Jesus Christ, so the true mankind, and the model for all attempts at achieving the oneness of man, is the Church of Christ. Accordingly, the suggestion that the future of Christianity may lie in a diaspora situation is acceptable only for a more or less near future. As far as the absolute future is concerned, however, it is a fallacy: the Church can encompass no less than the universe. The dimension of catholicity guarantees her adequacy to mankind and her ultimate identity with it, although the implications of catholicity still need to be worked out and implemented. Likewise, the modern distinction between the “real” Church and the “institutional” Church derives from the delusion that man and mankind can be abstracted from bodily existence without losing their reality. This fallacy is just as patent as regards the Ecclesia as it is regarding mankind, since the Ecclesia and mankind are two aspects of the same reality.

3. Within the community that I may now call ecclesial man, the concept of race has neither content nor validity. It is based on appearances, on empirical evidence of differentiations within mankind which have not stood the test of scientific investigation. Differences of pigmentation, of facial features, of height, of hair color and fluidity, whatever their distant origins, have no consequences on the data with which man starts in life, except insofar as they coincide with diverse cultural value systems. In other words, culture rather than nature gives the illusion that the concept of race corresponds to reality. The corporate unit which mediates between the individual and mankind cannot be the clan or the tribe, formations that are closely related to the family insofar as they rest on bonds of parental ancestry and of blood. The laws of exogamy and endogamy prevailing in tribal societies show sufficiently that the tribe is part of a broader corporate body made of other clans and tribes with which matrimonial interchanges are thought to be proper. This broader corporate body, in its fully developed form, constitutes the nation. The nation is essentially patterned on mankind, being itself a smaller version of the pluralism of origins, colors, and linguistic differentiations within mankind. It cannot be defined by unity of race or of language, but by community of history. It is precisely the nation which has shaped and is shaping the culture of man all the world over, whether the nation is old, as in Asia, more recent, as in Europe, very recent, as in America, or emerging, as in Africa. The nation has also shaped the Church and its history. This principle has been recognized in diverse ways by the Orthodox Church with its practice of national autocephaly; by the Catholic Church with its lukewarm attempts to nurture “Eastern rites” next to the Latin rite, which expresses the former national unity of the Roman empire of the West, and with its recent initiatives toward the formation of national conferences of bishops; by the Churches of the Reformation, with their separate developments along national lines. Admittedly, there are legitimate and meaningful differentiations within national boundaries (provinces); and several nations may be included within one state (Wales, Scotland, and England within Great Britain). By the same token, historical events have at times merged several nations into one or, on the contrary, split one nation into several (Belgium has recently become two nations, whereas the various cantons of Switzerland form only one nation today). These facts do not detract from the statement that the typical corporate unit within mankind is the nation, shaped by shared history, tradition, and culture, and that the typical unit within the universal Church with which a Christian can meaningfully identify is neither the local parish or congregation nor the diocese, but the national church with its specific religious ethos. Man defines himself by his participation in mankind and, next, by his participation in a nation.

4. Within this corporate context, man is a self. That is, he is a center of awareness. Awareness both relates him to those other selves with whom he is in contact and distinguishes him from them. Thus, selfhood must not be conceived only as a principle of individuality by which one man would detach and separate himself from other men; it is also a principle of relatedness. A self is a person, structurally related to other persons; and this structural relationship is experienced existentially by all men, at a minimum within the confines of the family, from which center it tends to expand and embrace more and more relationships. A self is potentially related to all men, even though the limitations of existence are such that although he relates and identifies more concretely with only a selected number of persons and really understands only a limited number of civilizations and cultures. The balance of self-awareness demands both the universal potentiality of relationships with all men and the actuality of limited relationships with some men. The generality is necessary to the breadth of the concrete relationship; and the closeness of the concrete relationship is required for the depth of the universal.

It is in this context that the relationship of man and woman ought to be seen. For among all human relationships, the one that joins two persons of different sexes has a capacity for concreteness that can never be reached by relationships within one sex. There alone can a unity and union of soul, mind, understanding, sympathy, and concerns be expressed bodily in a union and unity of sexes. Nowhere else can the universal unity of man with man become so concrete and particular.

In the Christian context, the self is not turned on himself and self-enclosed. What constitutes it, Christianly speaking, as a self is its calling to become the image of God. In the self, the collective and the individual aspects of mankind converge to the point of coinciding; it is destined to participate in the divine life. The self of the secular man is called to become ecclesial man; and the self of ecclesial man lives on earth while already sharing in heaven, encompassing in himself all that the Three Persons of the Divinity are, because they dwell in him, thus making him the image of God. All that was said above concerning the image refers to the self.

The meaning of sex, and thereby the differentiation of mankind into two sexes, appears clearly in this context. Sex is a means of relationship. It is, properly speaking, the means to make most concrete and particular the oneness of the children of God and their sharing in his life, by bringing the whole body into play as the expression of this oneness. Sex experienced and satisfied demands a one-to-one relationship, that is, the stability of marriage rather than general promiscuity, polygamy, or divorce, for only in such a relationship can two persons be fully committed to expressing their participation in the image of God through their union. As to sex denied, which has often been the standard for the more spiritually sensitive sections of the Church, it also has a purpose when, in the traditional vocabulary, such a denial is motivated by aspiration after “the Kingdom of God.” Its purpose is to make visible the belief that relationships among human beings can also be fully developed at another level. Men and women do not become the image of God through sexual unity, but through the relationship of friendship or love, which may, but need not, be expressed through sex. On the contrary, because it particularizes a virtually universal potential for relationships, sex restricts the universality of a man’s ties and contacts. Human beings, therefore, are given the choice between universality and particularity, between spiritual friendships that may be multiplied and a sexual relationship which cannot be. In both cases, however, in a Christian universe, it is still the same image of God which is then experienced and actualized, though in different ways and to various degrees.

That mankind is divided into two sexes, then, means that it is called to unity, not by necessity or destiny, but through choice and love. It means that men are to actualize the image of God in themselves by seeking the sort of relationship with others that, for them, may best develop and express the image.

5. In this case, womanhood and manhood have a meaning—that of showing the possibility of, and the vocation to, relatedness with others in the progressive manifestation of the image of God. We run into difficulties as soon as we look for a specific meaning of each that would not also be that of the other. The establishment of relationships requires at least two terms. Hence man and woman, the male and the female sex. Yet at all levels but the strictly sexual one, the roles of both may be interchanged. There is no dominant and no subservient half, no leader and no led, no superior and no inferior, no intellectual and active and no sensitive and passive, no reasoning and no intuitive section of mankind. Each person can be both, the variations depending not on sex but on the congeries of heredity and circumstances which make up the individuals of either sex. On this point, the findings of contemporary psychology, at least in the Jungian school, and those of physiology corroborate the conclusion that we have arrived at theologically.

In these conditions, the question of the specificity of man and woman is irrelevant, except in the obvious area of sexual intercourse and of the follow-ing tasks of pregnancy, birth, and feeding which determine woman’s physiology. For everything_else, including education, men and women are alike by nature, whatever differences have been bred into their customs and habits by

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differing cultures. One may still ask how Christian women and Christian men understand themselves and each other as they go through the stages of their lives. On this point, however, very little can truly be said, as this self-understanding again is a matter of culture. It varies according to the type of society one lives in, to the roles and functions expected of, and available to, men and women in that society, to the sort of education provided for them. Without entering into details of a nontheological nature one can put forward some norms which ought to shape society in a Christian order of things and should at any rate help form the Christian’s attitude and response to the culture of

his times.

The Christian tradition was not wrong in specifying diverse roles and functions for woman as virgin and for woman as mother, although it tended to neglect her as wife, which was obviously a major oversight. It often provided the additional category of widow, a category which is bound to exist-al-though one may doubt its specificity, except in cultures where widows do not as a rule remarry. Seen from the standpoint of the image of God, of participation in the divine nature, of progressive “deification,” the virgin, the wife, and the mother have in common that their life is focused on relationships. This is particularly evident in a sexually oriented civilization like that of the second half of the twentieth century. Before marriage, the girl is frequently involved in the relationship called dating, but whether she dates or not, she relates to all sorts of friends of both sexes at school, at home, and in society at large. In marriage she is closely related to her husband in love and companionship. As mother she relates to her children in love and responsibility. So is all this true of the man, since to be a human being implies relatedness to God and to other human beings. The theological self-understanding of each depends on what these relationships mean to each person. What they do in fact mean is a matter of sociological investigation. How they are experienced and translated in language and behavior is a topic for psychological studies. How they ought to be experienced may be considered proper matter for moral philosophy and theology. At this moment we can only look into some doctrinal or dogmatic elements of this self-understanding.

Woman as virgin is placed before a choice that will largely determine what life she will live. She has to decide freely in what way she is to respond to the call to participate in the divine life. Will she do it, as most in fact do, through the relationships of marriage? Supposing her answer is affirmative, how will she find a suitable companion who will make this possible? What will her reaction be to sexual intercourse, to pregnancy, and to motherhood? These questions build up the girl’s self-understanding. They show her becoming the image of God through the preparation and the anticipation of the human relationships to come that are to shape her life. In all this, however, the main question has not yet been formulated, although it underlies all others: how

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spiritually free will she remain through the bonds into which she will enter freely? This may often be asked at the level of a superficial freedom, relating to freedom to work or to have her own friends. The true level where the question is apposite is that of spiritual life: will she be able to share her life constantly with others and still preserve the core of interior silence in which alone she can experience God’s presence? That is, theologically speaking, the ultimate question that needs to be faced at this stage of life.

Woman as virgin has the choice. Indeed, she is specified by the fact that she has not yet chosen. As soon as she chooses, she orients herself toward away of life which already participates of that which is to follow, though their choices are not final until they are sealed by marriage. The other option is that of celibacy as a stable way of life, which the Christian tradition has called “virginity for the sake of the Kingdom.” Here the questions that ought to be answered for a satisfactory self-understanding are reversed. Granted that the center of such a life will be relationship to God and the awareness of God’s image in oneself, will it still be possible to grow in the human relationships that are necessary to the full flowering of the image of God? Will it be possible to lead a life of friendship, including friendship with persons of the other sex, without which the possibilities of human relationships are not exhausted? What sort of career can make this feasible? What sort of community, of companionship, of sharing with others? The answer need not be a religious community, although it will be in many cases. Yet it must be a choice of a way of living sui generis, for which no abstract pattern can be given beforehand, except the very pattern endorsed by a given religious community, or the one corresponding to the career selected.

Woman as wife can be defined in only the most general of terms: she has linked herself permanently to a certain man. The specificity of this relationship, however, depends on the personalities involved. Theology can indeed provide doctrinal and ethical norms for such a relationship. A wife, like a husband, ought to deepen her awareness of the depths of traditional theology concerning what Pius XII called “the redemptive value of marital union.”12 Scripture and the theological tradition from the time of the Fathers to our own have reflected on the analogy between the unity of Christ with the Church and the unity of man and woman in marriage. How this sort of insight can be incorporated into the specific experience of a man and a woman in marriage is theirs to discover. Such a discovery implies a degree of spiritual sensitivity and commitment that may be rare and that is not promoted by the main trends of secular society. Whoever has this insight, however, will easily solve any conflict arising between the concrete, particular relationship of marriage and the broader and always needed relationships of friendship and social life. For marriage is only one type of unity, and man needs many types. The woman who is so enclosed in the universe of her marriage that the outside

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world counts only as a commercial adjunct to the amenities of life together can hardly be ecclesial man as described above. The dimension of universality must never be lost if God’s image is to develop in the framework of marriage. For this reason it is absurd to hold that the Christian ideal of marriage requires the wife to stay at home, busy with the care of her husband and children and with the chores of the household. The Christian ideal demands a proper balance of the particular and the universal. And this can best be achieved by most women through involvement in some tasks of society outside the home. This is a matter for each woman’s choice of the way most appropriate to her own spiritual development.

Woman as mother has occupied the main seat in the preoccupation of Catholic churchmen, as witness our survey of contemporary theological models for womanhood. This tallies with the place and function of motherhood in the very idea of the Church. But when seen in the wider context of womanhood, this insistence on motherhood has been exaggerated. Woman is not only mother. She is also wife. And before being wife, she is unmarried girl. In the early Church, woman as virgin held the center of attention. This simple fact shows sufficiently that the recent stress on woman as mother is not normative for the Catholic tradition. The time has come to redress the balance and to give equal importance to the three basic stages of womanhood. Be that as it may, motherhood remains a major category, one that is more questionable in modern civilization than in the past. One cannot avoid the problems raised by the rising ghost of overpopulation, by the practical necessity of some forms of birth control, by the availability, with the manufacturing of progesterone and other pills, of new methods of birth control, by the spread of the social acceptability of premarital intercourse, by the resulting multiplication of unwed mothers, and by the growing leniency of society and law on such matters as abortion. I will not deal with these questions at this point, since I intend to speak of ethics in the next chapter. From the doctrinal point of view, motherhood is open to woman as one of the ways to fulfill her calling as a human being. In the context of Christian freedom, the notion of free motherhood becomes a proper theological category. That is, the Christian woman who enters marriage chooses a way of life which does not entirely take away her own further choice of motherhood. By choosing marriage, she accepts motherhood, but it still remains for her to choose it within the context of her marriage in relation to the children to be born to her. Thus, planned parenthood, birth control, or what Pius XII preferred to call “regulation of offspring,”13 is a live option for every married woman. The only moral problems that need to be raised in this area by Catholic ethics concern the morality of the contraceptive intention and of the means taken to avoid procreation. It is enough for the moment to note that the principle of the regulation of offspring is entirely consistent with the theological concept of womanhood as outlined in this chapter.

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Enough has been found in the preceding pages that extols motherhood and its spiritual marvels. I would add that, in the long run, it is up to each woman to discover motherhood, just as she had to discover both virginity and the marital relationship. The principle of Christian liberation frees woman from society’s concept of marriage and motherhood. Rather, the Christian woman is tied to a doctrine of motherhood which sees the mother as the very embodiment of the Ecclesia helping ecclesial man in his birth and growth. How she will implement and experience this in her relationship to her own children is left to her initiative, her sensitivity, and her spiritual insight.

In the context of the theology outlined here, a Christian anthropology is normative only as regards the divine model—the Holy Trinity revealed through Christ and made active in our life by the Holy Spirit—and the eschatological goal of divine participation by man and woman. Within the context of the Ecclesia, the sacramental life and the elements of asceticism necessary to human personal development are also normative. But how these are lived, experienced, and practically understood by each man or woman is a mystery that each must enter under the Spirit’s guidance. Accordingly, one cannot define woman. One can only present her with the divine model, with the means of participation in the divine life, and with the records of experience and self-understanding that have been left by great women. What this may mean in the concrete case of each woman cannot be described in advance. In this sense, there is no specific theological model for womanhood any more than there is one for manhood. The models are for mankind, to be diversified and specified according to the charisms of each person. Ecclesial man (which includes woman) is always in the making. What must be offered woman as her Christian ideal is an open future, a perspective of successive self-understandings as virgin, wife, and mother (and we may add, although this need not be elaborated upon, as grandmother and as widow). The vertical dimension of self-understanding can be pointed out normatively: it corresponds to the traditional doctrine on the image of God in man and on its development through the spiritual life. The horizontal dimension cannot be normatively described: it has to be invented anew by each Christian.

Notes

1. Summa theologica, II II, q. 175, a. 2, ad 2.

2. Ibid., I, q. 26, a. 3, ad 1.

3. Summa contra gentes, III, chap. 53.

4. Spiritual Canticle, 22, 3, in The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez (New York, 1964), p. 497.

5. Spiritual Canticle, 25, 5 (p. 503).

6. Spiritual Canticle, 39, 4 (p. 558).

7. Verbum Dei, 6 in Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, trans. George H. Tavard (New York, 1966), p. 60.

8. This expression designates the qualities appertaining to the divinity and to the humanity of Jesus as they are predicated of the one Person who is both divine and human.

9. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, III, q. 8, a. 5, ad 3.

10. This expression is applied by Gerard Manley Hopkins to the Virgin Mary in his poem ‘The Virgin Mary Compared to the Air We Breathe."

11. Charles Peguy, La Tapisserie de sainte Genèvieve et de sainte Jeanne d’Arc, huitième jour.

12. Pius XII, Address, July 29, 1957 (text in La Documentation Catholique, no. 1263, col. 1354).

13. Pius XII, Address, November 26, 1951 (text in The Pope Speaks [New York, 1957], p. 45).

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