BINARIES IN THE SERVICE OF THE LORD:
John Cunningham
Professor Fessenden
Women and Religion
19 August 1996
Binaries in the Service of the Lord:
Male Projection and Construction in the Representation of “Woman” in the Church
One of the most interesting and vital studies today concerns women’s place and
role historically in religion. This paper will investigate this question from a feminist
perspective, particularly in terms of Catholic Christianity. I will begin by addressing in
broad outline the background question of how gender and, more specifically, the
category of “Woman,” has been constructed. I will examine how it has been used by men
in the service of patriarchal culture and cosmology. For “[i]t is gender which has been
chiefly responsible for fixing women’s place in society.”[1]
The church’s record is ambivalent and profoundly ironic in this regard. Women
are either humiliated or idealized. Even as the paramount female figure of Mary is exalted
almost to the point of deification, the value of her earthly sisters is downgraded almost to
the point of nullification. How this situation came about says more about the men who
engineered it and the culture from which they speak, than it does about the women who
have traditionally been silenced, objectified, and excluded in the process.
C. G. Jung noted that knowledge comes through the differentiation of opposites.
The universe is structured by dynamic polarities and exists within the creative tensions
they exert. Thus, we are able to know something by means of its opposite. But wisdom,
he would say, comes beyond differentiation in the quest on another plane of the conjunctio
oppositorum. The East seems to have had more of a sense of this. Perhaps it is best
typified by the symbol of the yin-yang in which the opposites are not that far apart or
rigidly cast, but are instead fluid and merge into one another, wedded together in an
embrace of wholeness.
Many Western mystics also experienced this breakthrough of inner illumination
and understanding. But for the most part, the West, up until the very latest discoveries in
genetics and quantum physics, has been highly differentiated in its viewpoint and values.
Indeed patriarchal culture is structured through a rigidly established system of binaries.
The exploration of women’s position in Western culture and in institutional Catholicism,
which both emerged from it and spearheaded it, can only be undertaken by examining this
net of binaries which holds the whole bundle together.
The binary strands of this patriarchal net, like variations on a theme, are familiar to
us: order—chaos, subject—object, spirit—matter, mind—body, reason—passion,
heaven—earth, nature—culture. The binaries are further explicated by certain authors in
their social ramifications along gender lines: agency—communion (Ken Wilber), power—
affiliation (Carol Gilligan), ranking—linking (Riane Eisler).
The naming of binaries is an essential step in our coming to consciousness. The
polarities they define are neutral in and of themselves, but their cultural inscription—the
way value has been invested in one pole and denied in its opposite, the privileging of one
term over the other—is the originating lie of patriarchy. For all these binaries and
countless others that derive from them have been appropriated and encoded and, in some
cases, invented, by males in power to serve their bias and agenda. In this sense they are all
reducible to: Man—“Other”.
In this process, however, the “Other” has been robbed. “[W]omen have had the
power of naming stolen from us. We have not been free to use our own power to name
ourselves, the world, or God.”[2] Not only have women been deprived of naming their own
reality, they have been denied a language of their own. Disqualified as subjects in their
own right, women have been objectified, and objects do not speak. “Language itself
becomes a weapon by which ‘the Fathers’ diminish the range of women’s thought.”[3] The
only categories available to women with which to think or represent themselves are those
of men. Herein lies the deepest level of patriarchal oppression: more insidious than the
inscription of the female body is the confinement of a woman’s mind, whereby she is made
to think herself as thought by her male “Other.”
The result of the suppression of actual women in the classical world created an invention of the representation of the gender “Woman” within culture. This “Woman” appeared on the stage, in the myths, and in the plastic arts, representing the patriarchal values attached to the gender of “Woman” while suppressing the experiences, stories, feelings, and fantasies of actual women.[4]
Freudian theory emerged as the first wave of feminism was cresting and
represented something of a backlash, hailing from the formidable male bastions of
medicine and psychiatry. For it too, in effect, reaffirmed the women-as-misbegotten-males
notion of Aristotle and Aquinas. According to Freud’s theory of gender, women have
refused to accept their castration and have hope of someday obtaining a penis in spite of
everything. Realizing the futility of pursuing her active desire and the unequal terms of the
struggle, the young girl turns from her mother, her first love object, and assumes a
feminine passivity toward her father. Her enemy becomes her beloved. Recognition of
her castration gives her a feeling of inferiority about her genitals and creates a psychology
centered on compensating for her deficiency.
On the surface Freud’s explanation appears to be based on anatomical differences
between the sexes. Yet he repeatedly stressed that all adult sexuality derived rather from
psychic development. Consequently, we move into the realm of the symbolic as the real
shaper of culture and the source of gender construction. Thus, it is not so much the penis
that is crucial, but the phallus, symbolizing the privileged signifier of power. A woman
does not have a phallus, but she can “get” the phallus through intercourse where it is
transformed into a child—always a gift from a man, never as hers to give away.
In a brilliant essay, Gayle Rubin cites a correspondence between Freud’s
psychoanalytic theory and Levi-Strauss’ anthropological account of the primordial gift
exchange of women by men. Here, the relationships between male kin are constituted by
the transfer of women. Power, a male prerogative, is passed on through the woman-in-
between. It has been suggested that “the reason women are so often defined as stupid,
polluting, disorderly, silly, profane or whatever, is that such categorizations define women
as ‘incapable’ of possessing the power which must be transferred through them.”[5]
According to Levi-Strauss the origination of marriage, as well as of the incest
taboo, arose through the exchange of women as commodities or possessions which
strengthened kinship bonds between men, in Foucault’s words, “relative to status:
handing down a name, instituting heirs, organizing a system of alliances, joining
fortunes.”[6] Men had overriding rights in women, but the latter did not have the same
rights in their male kin, nor did they have full rights to themselves. Rubin summarizes this
analysis of kinship: “At the most general level, the social organization of sex rests upon
gender [a culturally imposed construction of the sexes], obligatory heterosexuality, and the
constraint of female sexuality.”[7] Thus, phallic culture was created.
Central to phallocentric assumptions is that the female body is male property.
From this derives male supremacist construction of sex roles. Furthermore,
[i]f one body was there only to serve the other—to give it care, pleasure and offspring—this not only provided a basic template for all superior-inferior rankings; it also imposed a particular view of how the bodies of women and men should relate in their most intimate sexual relations. And this view . . . was that both women and sex are “naturally” to be controlled by men.[8]
Freud’s disciple, Jacques Lacan, continues in the same vein in his analysis of
gender construction. For him, woman is the negative of man: his signified opposite. The
female body is “read” as “Lack” or “Other,” in effect, existing to reflect male subjectivity
and desire. “In the Lacanian model, woman, as the culturally constructed, as Other, is
trapped in man’s self-representation, existing only to reflect back his image of reality,
‘only as a function of what she is not, receiving upon her denied body the etched out
stamp of the Other, as a signature of her void and a mark of his identity.’”[9]
Consequently, the binaries become “loaded.” One term is privileged and held up
as normative; the other is denigrated and declared deviant. If woman equals man’s
“Other,” she will be represented as the carrier of all that he considers himself not to be.
From the time of Zeus, a supreme male deity appearing about 2500 BCE followed by
the advent of Abraham, the first biblical patriarch and his solitary male God, Yahweh,
around 1800 BCE, men have identified themselves as rational and represented women as
irrational. The thinking was that only men had a capacity for culture and spirituality,
whereas women were innately “wild” and stamped in nature’s image. Hence the
androcentric fear of women and their dangerous ability to stir up the dark forces and rouse
the blind passions in a man’s soul.
Christianity was primarily shaped by the Hebrew heritage which gave it birth and
the Hellenistic milieu into which it moved. It’s origin was Jewish, but its mind became
Greek. Both of these sources were pervasively masculinist cultures. But nowhere was
patriarchy more in evidence and gender divisions more pronounced than in classical
Greece, the fountainhead of Western Civilization and a primal influence on later Christian
thought and discourse. Here a massive reworking of myths took place to ensure that
female figures, unlike in earlier times, would hardly be presented in a positive or
benevolent light in the drama of human destiny.
For giving men the gift of fire, Zeus bound Prometheus to a rock and punished the
creatures of Prometheus by creating women. In Hesiod’s Works and Days woman is
represented as the root of all evil. The first woman “is called Pandora, the all-giver—
perhaps because she was originally an earth goddess. . . . [W]hen Hepaestus created
Pandora ‘into her heart he put lies and false words and treachery . . . so that she might be
a sorrow to the men of the earth.’”[10] In classical Greek theater and literature women were
constructed, at best, as sacrificers of themselves in the cause of male glory, or as enigmatic
creatures and hapless victims, or, at worst, as wily temptresses, brazen witches, or
inhuman monsters.
Citing the paradox of women in Athenian culture, Virginia Woolf poignantly
remarks,
a very queer, composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents fixed a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband.[11]
Much of the same idealization-denigration split vision with regard to women comes to be
adopted by Christendom.
Contributing in part to the ancients’ view of female nature was faulty biological
knowledge. From Egypt came the notion of the wandering womb. The belief was that
when the womb left its place and moved up in the body it affected reason so that a woman
became hysterical. Hence, until fairly recently hysterectomies were performed to cure
hysterical women.
Perhaps the greatest biologically based setback for women lay in the centuries old
belief that the female body was merely an incubator for the male seed. According to this
model, the male was the active agent in reproduction, the female was but a necessary
receptacle in which a father’s offspring could be brought to term. The standard Athenian
wedding formula is illustrative of this, where the father of the bride gives his daughter to
the groom “for the ploughing of legitimate children.”[12] This represented a complete
reversal of neolithic and paleolithic people’s sense of wonder and reverence before the
mysterious creative power of the female to give birth, to bring forth women and men from
her own body. As Riane Eisler points out, in the pre-patriarchal epoch of the Mother
Goddess “the central religious image was a woman giving birth.”[13]
In the classical Greek version of things, Aeschylus’ seminal play, Orestia, was
heralded as celebrating the triumph of the order of law over the chaos of barbarism. At
the heart of it an amazing claim was made, one quite suited to the purposes of patriarchy,
seen, symbolically, as a victory for civilization and the polis. Orestes slays his own
mother. In standing trial before twelve Athenian male judges, his advocate Apollo, the
sun-god of reason—who himself had defeated the moon serpent and vanquished nature—
argues on his behalf that the mother is more the nurse to what she has borne, while the
father, who commits his seed to her, is the child’s true parent. He reasons, therefore, that
Orestes cannot be guilty of killing his parent. The court agrees with this logic and acquits
Orestes. “The implication of the patricentric mentality signaled by this proclamation is so
inescapable that we cannot fail to see in it the total depreciation of the generative powers
of women and the consequent demotion of their cultural and political status.”[14]
Another faulty biological datum that was to influence early Christian understanding
of gendered sex was the notion of ejaculatory “heat,” of which male offspring received an
excess and females a deficiency.
“For it is the semen, when possessed of vitality, which makes us men, hot, well braced
in limbs, heavy, well-voiced, spirited, strong to think and act.”
Women, by contrast, were failed males. The precious vital heat had not come to them in sufficient qualities in the womb. Their lack of heat made them more soft, more liquid, more clammy cold, altogether more formless than men.[15]
Indeed, men of this culture, contemporaneous with the emergence of Christianity,
feared nothing more than a cooling of this “heat” and the prospect of being rendered
“womanish.” It was not sufficient to be male, men strove to remain “virile,” and, at all
costs, to not be seen as taking on the “softness” and half-formed state of a woman.
Among other things, church fathers railed against effeminacy.
The culture in which Christianity took shape and articulated itself was not a
female-friendly, egalitarian environment. Peter Brown states, “In the second century
A.D., a young man of the privileged classes of the Roman Empire grew up looking at the
world from a position of unchallenged dominance. Women, slaves, and barbarians were
unalterably different from him and inferior to him.”[16] Since classical times the Greek
sexual hierarchy had been stringently established. Subordinate to free males as sex objects
were in ascending order: slaves, women, foreigners, and boys. The cultural paradigm
became church custom: women were in all cases inferior. “In the long history of
Christianity, women have been defined (as sources of evil in the world or as
complimentary helpmates), described (as frivolous minors or mysterious creatures), and
had their lives determined by males who claimed to speak for God.”[17]
Where a woman, favored by fortune, fared better than her sisters, she was still seen
in a patronizing light as a poor, vulnerable creature in need of protection by her man. So
where male hierarchical dominance was not cruel, it was paternalistic. The great
rhetorician, Quintillian, upon losing his wife, the mother of his two sons, remarked, “[H]er
death was like the loss not merely of a wife, but of a daughter.”[18] So to the standard
binaries that structured civic and ecclesiastical thinking, such as: superior man—inferior
woman, normative male—defective female, public political husband—silent domestic wife,
we can also add: father—child. “According to Aquinas, a woman is ‘naturally defective,’
suspended at best in a state ‘of eternal childhood,’ in which she would be subject to a man
‘for her own benefit.’”[19]
Perhaps the most influential binary was: culture—nature, man being the creator
and representative of the former, woman the embodiment and link with the latter. From
this, of course, spun off clusters of related binaries, for instance: male reason—female
passion, man’s governed moderation—woman’s uncontrollable excess, his ascent to the
One—her descent into the Many.
There is irony in the fact that, at its core, Catholic Christianity celebrates the
reconciliation of opposites, the marriage of spirit and flesh in four cardinal doctrines:
Creation, Incarnation, Eucharist, and Resurrection, as well as in its whole sacramental
system. Yet it became a decidedly “ascending” religion in its direction and emphasis.
Philosophically and in terms of popular spirituality, by far, its focus was other-worldly; its
stress was on the supernatural; its aim was to “ascend” through a transcendence of the
body, of sex, and of the earth—all of which “Woman” symbolized. She, on the other
hand, represented “descent,” immanence, and engagement with matter. The downward
arc of her attraction lured the soul into multiplicity, temporality, and insatiable desire.
Culture was seen to be man’s work. It clearly represented an “ascent” above
untamed, unpredictable chaos and the thralldom of nature’s determinism. “[I]n every
known society women are identified as being closer to nature than to culture [because of a
certain reading of their body functions]. Since every culture devalues nature as it strives
to rise above it through mastery, women become symbolic of an inferior, intermediate
order of being.”[20]
Lerner’s thinking on this is that male and female anatomical sex differences are a
given, but that gender is a product of historical process. Both women and men struggled
together to harness nature in their drive toward civilization. In this process, however,
women were for a longer time than men constrained to “species essential activities,” which
rendered them more vulnerable to exploitation. Both women and men accepted and
adapted to biological necessity, but this is a world apart from the subordination of women
through culturally constructed customs and institutions.
A further inheritance from the patriarchal past which would especially influence the
Catholic Church was the binary: pure—impure. The sexes, already polarized in stark
opposition to one another were also contrasted along a somewhat more comparative scale.
Women were deemed “less clean” than men and, we might add, less presentable.
Hellenistic culture esteemed the male form as a glorious work of the gods, whereas the
female body was an object of shame. Eva Keuls brings out how it was not uncommon for
Greek men to go about in public dressed in a way that proudly exposed their genitals. Of
course, in the all male gymnasium nothing was worn. Women, on the other hand, were to
be well-wrapped and modestly draped at all times, and, when not confined to their
quarters in the back of the house, respectable women on the street always were veiled.
In Hebrew and other ancient cultures “it was common to view women as a source
of disease and bad spirits, especially during menstruation when intercourse was often
prohibited. Both pagans and Jews looked upon menstrual blood as infectious and
poisonous.”[21] This view was enshrined in the purity codes of Leviticus where a
menstruating woman is declared unclean for seven days (Leviticus 15:19-24). Anyone
who so much as touched a woman in this state, or touched articles she had touched,
likewise incurred impurity. For centuries Christian mothers did not attend the baptisms of
their children, since they were considered defiled by childbirth and had to first undergo the
required ritual purification, popularly called the “churching of women.” Only then could
they reenter the congregation.
Androcentric culture was constructed as the only “right order” of society. It was
buttressed and blessed by the highest religious sanctions. Its model was based on a kind
of “sexual asymmetry,” in which the different roles and tasks assigned to men and women
were defended as divinely ordained, that is to say, “natural.” In the Old Testament
patriarchal scheme, God created sex differences and these, in turn, determine one’s
gendered place in society. Focus on women’s reproductive capacity ascribed them the
role of motherhood as their chief goal in life. By implication, women who did not marry
were deviant and the “barren wife” was cursed.
The misogynistic legacy of the Hebrew tradition carries its own shadings, its
peculiar values, set forth in its own articulation of binaries. If, for the Greeks, Pandora
brought disruption and calamity into the world and was the source of all folly, for the
Hebrews, Eve—painted with an even grimmer brush—was the instigator of man’s fall.
This vain, gullible woman became the gateway of evil, including death and sex as we know
them.
The resulting curse, which Eve brought upon herself and all women after her,
focused on her reproductive role and her permanent subjugation to her mate. Yahweh
says to the woman, “I shall give you intense pain in child bearing, / you will give birth to
your children in pain. / Your yearning will be for your husband, / and he will dominate you
(Genesis 3:16).”[22] The psychological implications are not easy to miss: alienation from
her own body, guilt for the sin committed and passed on to her children, and a lingering
sense of shame and dependency.
Long standing, institutionalized, male supremacist values were canonized in the
Judeo-Christian tradition. No one is to blame for sexual inequality, indeed no one
questioned it, since Adam and Eve, by divine decree, it is just the way things are.
Christian writers embraced and amplified this ideology masked as revelation. The author
of the First Letter to Timothy, after stating how women ought to dress, goes on to
command that “a woman should be quiet and respectful . . . [not] . . . teach or . . . have
authority over a man . . . because Adam was formed first and Eve afterwards, and it was
not Adam who was led astray but the woman who was lead astray and fell into sin.
Nevertheless, she will be saved by childbearing, provided she lives a sensible life and is
constant in faith and love and holiness” (I Timothy 2:12-15).
The shadow of the Creation myth fell across Christian writers like a spell and
inspired Augustine’s development of the doctrine of Original Sin, with its dramatic
heightening of the sexual aspect. Augustine saw the primal sin as one of pride and
disobedience, but its consequence was an unruly sexual appetite set against the will’s
control. Other theologians interpreted the sin itself as a sexual revolt. In either case, the
female body bore its most telltale inscription.
It was one thing to see women as needing to be controlled, governed by men; it
was another to see the female sex as utterly despicable. Some of the most ribald
expressions of misogyny anywhere came from the church fathers. Thomas Fox records
some of their androcentric conclusions. In the second century, Clement of Alexandria,
who claimed to respect the feminine principle, observed that “a woman should properly be
shamed when she thinks of what nature she is.” The fourth-century woman-hater,
Augustine, wrote, “The good Christian likes what is human, loathes what is feminine.”
And from the eminent thirteenth century doctor, Thomas Aquinas: “woman is defective
and misbegotten . . . it is not possible in the female sex that any eminence of degree can be
signified.”[23]
Lacan’s signification of “Woman” as “Lack” and “Other” was an attempt to
explain the origin of gender. It is a start, if one can get around its male-centered
perspective. One may not agree with it, but it sheds some light and offers an angle of
understanding. In Simone de Beauvoir’s words, “Humanity is male . . . man defined
woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being.
. . . He is the Subject, he is the Absolute—she is the Other.”[24]
But in my view this talk of “othering” is too neutral and does not go far enough to
account for the degree of scorn, the depth of denial, and the almost demonization of
women over the centuries in our masculinist church and culture. Another side of the coin,
of course, is that the problematic of women, to a lesser degree, has been dealt with
through the opposite abstraction, namely, idealization. But this has always been by way of
exception. If rare women were exceptions to the rule, “Woman” as a category was not.
The whole familiar web of binaries, which exalted the male and demoted the
female, empowered men and disqualified women, I think is best understood in terms of
Jung’s notion of projection. The idea is that what we do not know, cannot recognize, or
refuse to accept in our own personalities, we unconsciously project unto another person or
group. This counterpersonality he called “the shadow.” It is as real as what I call myself,
yet it threatens me (understood as my ego) to no end, so I spontaneously project it unto an
“Other.” I disidentify with it diligently and separate it as far as possible from my self-
image. Thus, what is in fact an aspect of me becomes the alien, the enemy I most fear.
The “Other” who is made to carry this projection is not unlike the biblical scapegoat,
burdened with my evil, which must be destroyed in my place. Jungian analyst, Erich
Neumann, writes about this process, “It is our subliminal awareness that we are actually
not good enough for the ideal values which have been set before us that results in the
formation of the shadow.”[25]
According to Gerda Lerner, women were the first ones in human society to
experience systematic oppression. She maintains that female subjugation provided what
she calls the “template” for all succeeding forms of domination, including slavery.
Women, then, were the original scapegoats. They were constructed not only as “Lack” or
“Other,” but, more forcefully, fearfully, as the object of man’s most troubling, twisted
projections.
We should not forget that the psychological mechanism of scapegoating derives its
name from a religious ritual. Likewise, the victimizing so named is similarly imbued with
an ardent religious sense of justification and divine ordinance. It constellates a
polarization of attitudes: a sublime righteousness in one’s self-estimation and a fierce
virulence toward the object of one’s attack. Tertullian knows where to place the blame as
he excoriates women for being man’s downfall. “You are the devil’s gateway. . . . you are
she who persuaded him whom the devil did not dare attack. . . . Do you not know that
everyone of you is an Eve? The sentence of God on your sex lives on in this age; the
guilt, of necessity, lives on too.”[26]
But it is not all that simple, for not all women were seen as evil. Some were
pedestalized. Just as patriarchy drew a sharp distinction between male and female and
their derivative genders, so it further divided women from one another. The category of
“good girls” emerged as a contrast to “bad girls.” The one constellated the other. “The
existence of ‘good’ women—according to male standards of being unmolested private
property—has required the existence of ‘bad’ women who have been sacpegoats for male
sexual guilt.”[27] The veil has traditionally been the sign distinguishing what kind of woman
a woman was.
Likewise, in early Christianity the distinction was made between two kinds of
women: the sacrificing mother and the lustful whore. And though motherhood was
approved as the lot of most women, it too was seen as necessarily tainted by its
involvement with the flesh and forbidden carnal desire, from which the married could
hardly be free. The highest and best kind of woman in Catholic estimation was the one
free from sex altogether, namely, the virgin. As Marina Warner observes, “Woman was
womb and womb was evil: this cluster of ideas endemic to Christianity is but the
extension of Augustine’s argument about original sin.” She goes on to quote St. Jean
Eudes in the seventeenth century: “‘It is a subject of humiliation of all the mothers of the
children of Adam to know that while they are with child, they carry within them an infant
. . . who is the enemy of God, the object of his hatred and malediction, and the shrine of
the demon.’”[28]
As early as Paul, living in expectation of the Parousia, the preference of virginity
over marriage is stated in his wish that, like him, everyone were voluntarily celibate for the
sake of the Kingdom (I Corinthians 7:7-8). Certain schools of Gnosticism, with their
pessimistic view of the material universe, further influenced Catholic Christianity in terms
of anti-sexual attitudes. Oddly enough, however, women fared better in Gnostic circles
and enjoyed equality with men, whereas in the mainline church they were subjugated,
signified as the embodiment of carnal passion and fallen materiality.
Other strong influences on nascent Christianity were the neo-Platonist worldview,
with its penchant for the spiritual realms, as well as Stoicism, extolled by the sages in their
pursuit of apatheia: the tranquil transcendence of all passion, the esteemed self-control of
a man over his own soul. The Christian Stoic Tertullian writes,
Let us look at our own inner world. Think of how a man feels in himself when he abstains from a woman. He thinks spiritual thoughts. If he prays to the Lord, he is next door to heaven; if he turns to the scriptures he is all of him present to them; if he sings a psalm, it fills his whole being with enjoyment; if he exorcises a demon, he does so confident in his own strength.[29]
Clearly, we hear in this a recurring note sounded, the familiar representation of
“Woman”—constructed by philosophers and adopted by churchmen—namely, the
dangerous “Other” capable of distracting, destabilizing, and destroying the “spiritual” man.
In the first three centuries the undisputed sacred heroes of the church were the
martyrs for the faith. In this time of sporadic persecutions, differences between the heroic,
who had endured hardship and not wavered, and the cowardly, who had apostatized under
pressure, were manifest. A kind of stratification, producing first and second class
members of the church, came into vogue. If martyrdom, which definitively revealed one’s
holiness, was not a possibility, an asetic “religious life,” a “white martyrdom,” was the
next best thing. Serious Christians assumed a monastic spirituality in their endeavor to
become “like angels.” A holy man fled the world’s temptations, especially the company of
women. A holy woman pursued the higher state via her virginity through which she
became, to use Jerome’s words, “like a man.” All Christians were bound to observe the
Ten Commandments, but the best embraced the Evangelical Counsels (poverty, chastity,
and obedience) as the royal road to perfection.
As far as women were concerned, their categories were definitively constructed.
They were either whores, wives, or virgins. Witches came later, a variation which
rendered a woman the devil’s whore. Even nuns “never escaped the male assumption that
[they were] a danger, a source of contamination.”[30]
Another way of understanding male church leaders’ and theological writers’
treatment of women is in terms of Jung’s idea of anima projection. Granted some
feminists would criticize what they see as essentialism in Jung’s notion of the masculine
and the feminine, nevertheless, leaving aside the question of whether this binary is
archetypal or cultural, it is a psychological fact that such projection takes place.
Jung maintained that everybody has an internalized archetypal image of the
contrasexual aspect of his or her psyche. For a man it would be his anima, his inner
feminine. The less conscious a man is, that is to say, the less aware he is of his anima, the
more readily he unconsciously projects it onto external women. We can see this operating
in the case of infatuation, where a man’s head-over-heels adoration of his new love
consists of an idealization based on his anima projection. The object of his gaze appears
to him as a goddess of beauty and perfection rather than an actual, particular human being.
The infatuation ends when the projection is withdrawn; the idealization ceases when a
realistic view is achieved.
In the church, I would submit, this kind of projection and its resulting idealization
is most operative in the cult of the Virgin Mary. In a bizarre switch, Mary carries the
positive anima projection of churchmen who elevate her almost to the zenith of the
Trinity, while women carry the negative anima projection with its attendant vilification.
Rosemary Radford Ruether sees this process as a compensation on the part of churchmen,
who, lacking real sexual relations, create fantasy love objects. In this case “celibates
whose sexual feeling could not be expressed honorably with the opposite sex. The
beautiful virgin of heaven was then a safe idealization to whom these feelings could be
directed. At the same time such devotion reinforced aversion to real women who were
thought defiled by sex and procreation.”[31]
Christian writers constructed their representations of “Woman,” much the same as
Greek authors before them invented their fictional women. Though women were almost
totally excluded from public life, “they dominate the imaginative life of Greek men . . .
Greek writers used the female—in a fashion that bore little relation to the lives of actual
women—to understand, express, criticize, and experiment with the problems and
contradictions of their culture.”[32]
Something like this happened in the church. Where women are silenced and
excluded as shapers of a religious tradition, men, to fill the void of this repression, conjure
and construct their fictive representation of “Woman.” As churchmen divided women
among themselves they further divided Mary from women, rendering her, in the words of
Maria Warner, “alone of all her sex.” What is more, Mary as model holds up the two
traditionally approved roles for women in her binary identity: virgin—mother. But in
comprising both simultaneously, she represents, not a model, but an impossibility, and thus
confounds all women. Only one is permitted to fulfill both at the same time, the rest of
womankind can never achieve this. Mary also constellates another binary in terms of her
and all other women: sinlessness—sinfulness, innocent one—guilty collective. Only she is
free from sin, all others are contaminated. In other words, there are women and there is
this singular exception. “Mary is indeed Eve’s other face; the female symbols excite that
very emotion that the story of the Fall sought to explain and the story of the Incarnate
God sought to heal: the feeling that in its very nature humanity is fatally estranged from
goodness, which, for a believer, is God.”[33]
If virginity is the highest calling of women in the church, this supreme virtue is
progressively woven into Mariology as well. In the two gospel accounts where it is
indicated, the story of the virgin birth points to God’s election of Jesus and his
incomparable destiny in salvation history. The earliest church councils developed this idea
into a doctrine meant to affirm Christ’s divine Sonship and his dual natures as God and
Man. But a further construction was soon underway, which expanded the notion of
Mary’s virginal birth of Jesus into the doctrine of her perpetual virginity and, ultimately,
into the dogma of her own Immaculate Conception. This was a major theological
reconstruction which shifted the emphasis away from incarnation to the need for
preservation from original sin understood, according to Augustine’s biological model, as a
kind of inherited stain transferred through coitus. The sexual act itself was also, to some
degree, a sin because of its carnal nature. Mary, then, had to be preserved from the sin of
sex and the original sin transmitted through it to her offspring.
The ultimate symbol construction of a culture is its God-image. The Medieval
alchemical axiom: “as above, so below,” can be reversed in this regard: a culture projects
its superlative values onto divinity. When women and the marginalized of the earth are at
last involved in imaging and naming the Divine, we will leap forward in our realization of
what Meister Eckhart called “the God beyond God.” For this world’s power hierarchies
are reflected and validated in the heavenly pantheon. This secures their unquestionable
authorization. Historically, one of the signs of conquest was the imposition of the gods of
the conqueror. We know that the great Mother Goddess receded into oblivion with the
ascendance of male warrior deities. This cosmological revolution corresponded to the
institutionalization of women’s oppression in the new order of male dominators. The
drama on earth is mirrored in heaven. Where God is male, the male is God.
To reverse or heal the church’s binary legacy of “the Fathers” more is needed than
revisionist history, inclusive language, or women priests. Nothing short of reimaging the
Divine in which women have a full share will do.
Monotheistic religions speak to us of God the Father and God made man; nothing is said
of a God the Mother or of God made Woman or even of God as a couple or couples. Not all the transcendental fancies, or ecstasies of every type, not all the quibbling over maternity and the neutrality (neuterness) of God, can succeed in erasing this one reality that determines identities, rights, symbols, and discourse.[34]
This is the hardest hurdle of all: overcoming ages of exclusivist male projections
and constructions, bound up as they are with “divine revelation” and the very economy of
salvation. The sexist assumptions underlying institutional Catholicism are so sacroscant
that to question them is tantamount to heresy under the current pope. Nevertheless, not
to question, not to seek reform, is to betray the integrated, egalitarian vision of Jesus in
the interests of continued male, clerical power and its illusions.
Bibliography
Arkins, Brian. “The Reign of the Phallus: Women in Fifth Century Athens.” U. C. G.
Women’s Studies Centre Review. Ed. Pat Byrne, Jane Conway, and Alan Hayes. Galway, Ireland: University College Press, Vol. 3, 1995.
Brown, Peter. The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early
Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.
Daly, Mary. Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation.
Boston: Beacon Press, 1973.
Daly, Mary. The Church and the Second Sex. New York: Harper and Row, 1968.
Dolan, Jill. The Feminist Spectator As Critic. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1988.
Eisler, Riane. Sacred Pleasure: Sex, Myth, and the Politics of the Body. San Francisco:
Harper-Collins, 1995.
Eisler, Riane. The Chalice and the Blade. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987.
Forte, Jeanie. “Women’s Performance Art: Feminism and Postmodernism.” Performing
Feminisms. Ed. Sue Ellen Case. Baltimore: Johns hopkins university Press, 1990.
Fox, Thomas, C. Sexuality and Catholicism. New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1995.
Foucault, Michel. The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality, Volume Three. Trans.
Robert Hurley. London: Penguin Books, 1984.
Highwater, Jamake. Myth and Sexuality. New York: New American Library, 1990.
Irigaray, Luce. “Equal to Whom?” The Essential Difference. Ed. Naomi Schor and
Elizabeth Weed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.
Jaggar, Allison. Feminist Politics and Human Nature. Sussex: Rowman and Allanheld,
1983.
Keuls, Eva C. The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens. New York:
Harper and Row, 1985.
Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of Patriarchy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Neumann, Erich. Depth Psychology and a New Ethic. Trans. Eugene Rolfe. New York:
G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1969.
Pagels, Elaine. Adam, Eve, and the Serpent. New York: Vintage Books, 1988.
Ranke-Heinemann, Uta. Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality and the
Catholic Church. New York: Penguin Books, 1990.
Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women.” Toward an Anthropology of Women. ed. Pam Reiter. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975.
Ruether, Rosemary Radford. Mary, the Feminine Face of the Church. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1977.
The New Jerusalem Bible. Gen. Ed. Henry Wansbrough. Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1985.
Warner, Maria. Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary. New York: Vintage Books, 1976.
Weaver, Mary Jo. New Catholic Women: A Contemporary Challenge to Traditional Authority. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.
-----------------------
[1] Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1986), 21.
[2] Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), 8.
[3] Allison Jaggar, Feminist Politics and Human Nature (Sussex: Rowman and Allanheld, 1983), 114.
[4] Jill Dolan, The Feminist Spectator As Critic (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988), 96.
[5] Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women,” Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Pam Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 192.
[6]Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality, Volume Three, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin Books, 1984), 74.
[7]Rubin, 179.
[8]Riane Eisler, Sacred Pleasure: Sex, Myth, and the Politics of the Body (San Francisco: Harper-Collins, 1995), 165.
[9]Jeanie Forte, “Women’s Performance Art: Feminism and Postmodernism,” Performing Feminisms, ed. Sue Ellen Case (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 255.
[10]Jamake Highwater, Myth and Sexuality (New York: New American Library, 1990), 57.
[11]Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, cited in Brian Arkins, “The Reign of the Phallus: Women in Fifth Century Athens,” U. C. G. Women’s Studies Centre Review, ed. Pat Byrne, Jane Conway, Alan Hayes (Galway, Ireland: University College Press, 1995), vol. 3, 66-67.
[12]Eva C. Keuls, The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 100.
[13]Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987), 20-21.
[14]Highwater, 67.
[15]Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 10.
[16]Ibid., 9.
[17]Mary Jo Weaver, New Catholic Women: A Contemporary Challenge to Traditional Authority (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 110.
[18]Brown, 25.
[19]Weaver, 56.
[20]Lerner, 25.
[21]Uta Ranke-Heinemann, Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality and the Catholic Church (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 21.
[22]Scriptural references are from The New Jerusalem Bible.
[23]Thomas C. Fox, Sexuality and Catholicism (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1995), 218.
[24]Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex. Cited in Weaver, 7.
[25]Erich Neumann, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, trans. Eugene Rolfe (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1969), 53.
[26]Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (New York: Vintage Books, 1988), 63. Author’s emphasis.
[27]Daly, Beyond God the Father, 44.
[28]Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Vintage Books, 1976), 57.
[29]Cited in Brown, 78.
[30]Mary Daly, The Church and the Second Sex (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 50.
[31]Rosemary Radford Ruether, Mary, the Feminine Face of the Church (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1977), 72.
[32]Helene Foley, Civilization of the Ancient Mediterranean: Greece and Rome. Cited in Arkins, 67.
[33]Warner, 254.
[34]Luce Irigaray, “Equal to Whom?” The Essential Difference, ed. Naomi Schor and Elizabeth Weed (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 76.
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