The Spear and the Distaff, Part Four: Love and Respect

Here is where you can find Parts One, Two, and Three of The Spear and the Distaff. More to come.

But how is this essentially different from patriarchalism -- from the idea that women are not, or should not be, contributors to the grandeur of the human race, but should simply pipe down, take care of their men, and pump out babies? After all, that is basically what the old notion of hierarchy was.

Well, not exactly; but that would divert us into a historical study of gender relations, which, while fascinating and important in its own right, and relevant, is nonetheless a separate topic. Suffice it to say here that the progressivist view of history -- that all human rights were subject to tyranny and brutality in our dark beginnings, and have continually improved and are continuing to do so -- is a result and a cause of extreme ignorance of history. History shows neither continual improvement nor continual decline; it simply wobbles, as we might have expected from something human.

Yet we still have the issue of misogyny to deal with. I don't expect my treatment to be exhaustive -- I have never been a woman, so half the appropriate perspective on the topic is missing; and even if I had, I am only one person, in one generation of one culture. But here it is for what it is worth.

One thing I have repeatedly emphasized is that gender is about relationship. There is a particular kind of relationship appropriate to marriage, and in that case the genders of the parties do determine which role they have been cast in; but the entering into that relationship in the first place is something freely chosen (or at any rate it should be, and, to be a validly sacramental marriage, must be). The woman has as much right to free decision in this regard as the man. And this dynamic is something that governs their relating, not their every endeavor. Marie Curie's pursuit of chemistry was not unfeminine, or a flaunting of hierarchy, nor was her husband unmasculine or remiss by helping her. Nor was St. Catherine gender-bending or insolent in remonstrating with Gregory XI and convincing him to return the papacy to Rome from Avignon; pointing out the truth is not a specially masculine privilege.*

So what does all the talk about initiation and receiving mean, then, if it doesn't apply to life in general? I tend to think that St. Paul was hinting at it in one of his unpopular passages:

Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the savior of the body. Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it ... So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself. For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the church: for we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones. ... This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church. Nevertheless let every one of you in particular so love his wife even as himself; and the wife see that she reverence her husband. -- Ephesians 5.22-25, 28-30, 32-33

The reasoning the apostle gives here is theological. Yet he knew his flocks well, as we can see in the particularity of each letter he wrote -- he was not laying down only general principles, but addressing specific needs of the churches he wrote to. Considering the placidity with which other authors (like Aristotle) wrote about the supposed superiority of men to women and of wives to husbands, St. Paul's instructions to wives look almost perfunctory in historical context, and the fact that he addresses the obligations of husbands (and spends rather more time on those) suggests an attentiveness to the realities of gender relations which we would rather hope for in a bishop.

But that's icing. Looking at the coinherence of gender as an example of the coinherence of reality in the first part of this series, we might consider whether the theological reasoning set forth by St. Paul might tell us something more about gender than simply who has what formal obligations in a marital context. I think that this says something about the psychology and the needs of women and men. I don't think it is too gross a generalization to say that respect is for men what affection is for women: a sort of social currency, the psychic need through which personal interactions are instinctively and even subconsciously measured. Take insults: as a rule, women tend regard them as, well, insulting; but men frequently use them as a sort of roughhousing gesture of fondness -- an implicit statement that the man being spoken to is tough enough to handle the insult. This is of course not universal, with respect to either gender; but I think it significant that the generalization can even be made. The point is that where one gender tends to speak the language of affection, the other tends to speak the language of respect -- which perhaps explains why each can and does take the other to be selfish and irrational.

Yet St. Paul inverts this. He urges wives to respect husbands, and husbands to be affectionate (indeed, more than affectionate) to wives. In other words, he is instructing each spouse to speak the other's emotional language, as it were. Perhaps that is part of why, in the verse immediately preceding this passage, he gives the general command, "Submit to one another in the fear of the Lord."

While the authority spoken of by the apostle is assigned specifically to marriage, the illumination provided into the common functioning of each gender is more broadly useful. Male and female, masculine and feminine, coinhere outside of the specifically sacramental context of marriage, and it never hurts to understand half the human race better. In other words, while the specifically hierarchical application may be limited, one of the functions of marriage may well be to teach us -- whether directly, in the person of our spouse, or through seeing other people's marriages -- how to relate to the half of the human race that we aren't.

And why, then, should initiation and receptivity be spoken of as characteristically masculine and feminine, if it is not always the man's job to initiate and the woman's job to receive, in every relationship? Well, I think full weight should be given to the word characteristically -- I tend to agree with Jung that there are feminine elements in a man and masculine elements in a woman; again, coinherence. But additionally, I have a hunch that there is an internal need for these things in men and in women. A man who cannot open himself up and make himself vulnerable will not be everything he could be, and a woman who is unable to initiate will not be everything she could be; yet such imperfections are common enough, and seem rather to limit a person's happiness and sense of self than to ruin them. But a man who cannot initiate, cannot take risks and responsibilities, is not likely to respect himself (an essential ingredient of masculine self-worth), and it could be argued that he doesn't have a right to. Conversely, a woman who (metaphorically) will receive nothing and no one -- the woman to whom the door held open is a chauvinistic implication that her arms are too weak, rather than a gesture of courtesy -- it is impossible, for me anyway, to imagine such a woman being happy.

*There have been believers who, on the basis of I Corinthians 14.33-35 and I Timothy 2.11-15, have thought precisely that women ought not to make theological contributions to the Church or to rebuke male members. I fully assent to the authority of these Scriptures, and don't think they mean that at all. Because the Greek words for husband and wife are the same as the words for man (as specifically male) and woman, my interpretation (in part) is that St. Paul is guarding against wives embarrassing their husbands in the congregation, which would be damaging to the individual husbands and to the Church's reputation. Whether that interpretation is adequate or not, the idea that women ought not be theologians is, for a Catholic, given the lie by the female Doctors of the Church if nothing else. One can imagine, say, the simultaneously self-deprecating and devastating reply that St. Teresa might have given to those who would try to defend Catholicism by attacking the authoritative declarations of the Church.

The Spear and the Distaff, Part Three: The Monstrous Regiment

The difference between the genders, and the mention in my previous post of feminism, make some discussion of the idea of hierarchy inevitable. To that subject I now turn. (I have by no means exhausted even my own amateur thoughts on the subject, but it was getting a bit wall-of-text-y, so I shall continue the subject in my next.)

Catholicism is linked in the minds of most people to the notion of hierarchy. This is one of the major objections people bring against traditional Christianity. That priests should have the power to perform the sacraments while laymen do not, that the Magisterium should have the power to define doctrine while the individual believer does not, that a husband should be the head of his wife, that only males should be eligible for the priesthood -- all of this hierarchy, to most modern secularists and many modern Christians, is intolerable. It's backward, it's chauvinistic, it's undemocratic.

I do not think hierarchy is chauvinistic, though many Christians have in fact been chauvinists, and culpably used the notion of hierarchy as their apron of fig leaves. I do not find the word backward useful: if it means that our ancestors believed it, well, yes, but that does not decide the question of its truth or falsity -- it must be examined on its intellectual merits; and if it means something else then I don't know what. Hierarchy is most certainly undemocratic: given that my own political sympathies lie chiefly with anarchy and monarchy,* that does not deeply trouble me, but let us divert ourselves to that subject for a moment.

There are three reasons for being a democrat (in the sense of believing in rule by the people). One is the optimistic reason, along the lines of Rousseau, that people are so good that if you give them all a say, things will turn out for the best. This, judging from my own observations and knowledge of history, is one of the most extraordinarily silly ideas in any field. Another is the pessimistic reason, that "power corrupts" and no one should be trusted with permanent or unrestricted power over others. There is a great deal in this view. But it does nothing to explain why many monarchies and empires have been, often for long periods of time, stable, happy, and well-governed, whereas democracies, as James Madison pointed out in the Federalist Papers, have on the whole "been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths."

The third reason was put best by Chesterton. "The democratic contention is that government ... is not something analogous to playing the church organ, painting on vellum, discovering the North Pole ... and so on. For these things we do not wish a man to do at all unless he does them well. It is, on the contrary, a thing analogous to writing one's own love-letters or blowing one's own nose. These things we want a man to do for himself, even if he does them badly" (Orthodoxy, ch. IV). The idea here is that the goodness or badness of men is irrelevant: that our ideas must proceed from the nature of mankind and not from the character of its individual specimens. It is the idea that every rational creature has, as one of its intrinsic rights, a say in its society as a whole. Democratic rulership is, in this view, not a consequence of individual worth, but an office, held by every person.

Whether this is true about politics or not, the Catholic concept of hierarchy relies on this same distinction. For example, the sacrament of Holy Orders does not confer personal superiority upon the ordinand; it confers an office, a function, which he has neither the right nor the ability to assume for himself; and the power of this office comes through his actions, but it does not come from them.

Likewise, to the extent that there is any hierarchy between the sexes, I believe it can only be approached in this manner. Masculinity and femininity are offices; even if, in the specific context of marriage, the masculine spouse is given the job of headship, it does not follow that men are better than women, and no husband (or gender theorist) has any right to pretend such superiority. The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstruous Regiment of Women was a piece of sexist nonsense and bad commentary,** and other works of the same cast are of the same value. Indeed, if we are going to talk about superiority as opposed to function, since functions are often given to notably unworthy persons, the greatest (simply) human being was and is the Mother of God, a function that by definition could be held only by a woman. If anybody objects to hierarchy because of fears that hierarchy means that men are better or more important than women, then their objection is entirely sound, and a defense of hierarchy consists in showing that it does not involve that misogynistic view -- and, further, of showing that the chauvinistic interpretation of hierarchy is untrue.

But if the distinction between masculine and feminine has to do with office, rather than person, why have it at all? Why not have complete egalitarianism, of function as well as of being, in which women can hold masculine roles and men can hold feminine roles? Well, for one thing, that seems to me rather to spoil the fun of having different things to begin with: everyone could be "It" in a game of tag, but it'd get boring fast. But it also seems to neglect the full import of the archetypes, and of the relational coinherence they possess. The masculine and the feminine are not simply about humanity, as was suggested in the first post of this series. C. S. Lewis addresses something of this in the last installment of the Cosmic Trilogy:

"[S]he had been conceiving this world as 'spiritual' in the negative sense -- as some neutral, or democratic, vacuum where differences disappeared, where sex and sense were not transcended but simply taken away. Now the suspicion dawned on her that there might be differences and contrasts all the way up, richer, sharper, even fiercer, at every rung of the ascent. How if this ... were not, as she had supposed, merely a relic of animal life or patriarchal barbarism, but rather the lowest, first, and easiest form of some shocking contact with reality which would have to be repeated -- but in even larger and more disturbing modes -- on the highest levels of all?
"'Yes,' said the Director. 'There is no escape. If it were a virginal rejection of the male, He would allow it. Such souls can bypass the male and go on to meet something far more masculine, higher up, to which they must make a yet deeper surrender. But your trouble has been what the old poets called Daungier. We call it Pride. You are offended by the masculine itself: the loud, irruptive, possessive thing -- the gold lion, the bearded bull ... The male you could have escaped, for it exists only on the biological level. But the masculine none of us can escape. What is above and beyond all things is so masculine that we are all feminine in relation to it.'" -- That Hideous Strength, ch. 14, part 5

In other words. Insofar as the masculine office represents that which initiates, that which comes in from an outside, and insofar as the feminine office represents that which receives, that which opens itself to that outside, they are icons of God and humanity, and more particularly of Christ and the Church (as St. Paul makes explicit). The distinction and even, in a specifically marital context, authority that Catholic doctrine recognizes with respect to gender, is preserving a symbolic or ritual lesson about the relationship between God and man: He initiates and we respond; He enters us and we receive Him; He is the Bridegroom, and we -- female and male, as St. John of the Cross understood very well -- are the Bride. This is one of the reasons I have tried to stress the relativity of gender, the fact that it exists in the context of relationship rather than as an abstract absolute. Gender is not a ranking system; it is a mystery play. Our genders, and the sexes that go with them, are the roles we have been cast in by the Director of the play. I suspect (suspect, not assert) that this is why, in the Church and in the family, authority is associated by Scripture and tradition with the masculine. (To avoid red herrings, I shall say here that I see no reason why the state -- which is properly governed by reason and lacks the added data of revelation -- should follow the same pattern; so that excluding women from equal participation in the political process, democratic or otherwise, is not a necessary corollary of this doctrine of hierarchy and is not something I desire.)

This is part of why there can be a simultaneous distinction between masculine and feminine roles, and yet equality between their worth. It should be noted, too, that though the authority of husbands and of priests is thus connected to masculinity as the icon of the divine, the feminine is, in a sense, the higher and more human of the two. The highest activity of mankind is to open itself to God -- to be the feminine to His masculine, speaking metaphorically. It is therefore no coincidence that, as was previously alluded to, the highest created being should be a Woman.

*It sort of makes sense, I swear.
**Though it must be admitted that the title, with its delicious and archaic polysyllables, is fairly entertaining, particularly the now quite obsolete spelling Monstruous.

The Spear and the Distaff, Part Two: The Mythical Archetypes

To read this shambling attempt at a queer Catholic gender theory from the beginning, go here.

So the simultaneous distinction and interdependence of gender -- a reality Charles Williams delighted in describing as coinherence, in this context and others -- this is itself rooted in the Trinity, which is the fundamental reality. Fine; everything real is going to be related to reality somehow or other, I dare say. And the biological expressions of sex contain suggestions of the nature of gender: the masculine being initiatory and protective, the feminine receptive and nurturing. But these seem like awfully restrictive concepts. Does this mean that a gentle man is less masculine than other men, or that an independent woman is made unfeminine by her independence?

I would answer with a firm and resounding no. I have no special liking for feminism (mostly, having had it blasted in my ears for a quarter of a century, I am merely bored by it), but here it is absolutely right. The point is worth some attention.

Radical feminists, who argue that traditionally masculine traits are simply strategies for socio-cultural success and dominance, have drawn the conclusion that emulating these traits is the best thing to do; thus leading to the (somewhat unfair) stereotype of the aggressive and arrogant feminist, of the sort that provoked the remark, "When a woman acts like a man, why can't she act like a nice man?" The mysterious contempt of motherhood evinced by many radical feminists suggests something deeply wrong with this approach. Cultural feminists, on the other hand, argue -- quite rightly -- that, while women have certainly been treated unjustly throughout history, servility was never a genuinely feminine attribute in the first place. Feminine gifts and talents have always had a distinct and rightful place in human society; if that place has not been appreciated, or if women have been muscled out of it by men, that is a specifiable injustice, not a sign that the nature of gender needs to be reinvented.

Turning to the atypical masculine -- that which exhibits traits often thought of as feminine, such as gentleness, tact, and romanticism -- this too has been denigrated. Contempt for men who exhibit these things, often taking the form of accusations of effeminacy, seems to be causally connected with disdain for women. Not all of these traits have been equally or always derided by all cultures or in all times: good manners, for example, were not in the least unmanly to a Victorian, and neither was a romantic sensibility. The supposedly advanced culture of the twentieth century actually showed a marked retrogression into childishness in its ideas of gender, inventing restrictions and taboos unknown to earlier ages (e.g, that physical affection between two men is a sign of homoeroticism). One of the promising things about queer theory -- though this has by no means established itself, given the extreme diversity and, at times, infighting of gay culture -- is its potential for dismantling false notions of the masculine: what I like to call machismania. Preoccupation with the aggressor impulse, which is a valid biological expression of maleness but must be subordinated to the lordship of an integrated psyche, is a very silly way of defining masculinity.

Okay, so stereotypes are not the same thing as archetypes. And where does that leave us?

To be honest, I don't entirely know. I feel that I understand gender better now than I did five years ago, but at the time I had no grasp of gender so that isn't saying much. However, I did come across a quote from (I think) Angelo Cardinal Scola once, in a little pamphlet from the Knights of Columbus,* that has been one of the few Christian resources to offer more than a superficial approach to gender: "Men receive love by giving love; women give love by receiving love."

This statement is like a mental lozenge -- it has to dissolve in the mind over time in order to take effect. But think of some examples, stereotypical in themselves, maybe, but useful as illustrations of the larger principle. If a man holds the door open for a woman, he is attempting to give love; if she goes through it and thanks him, he will receive love through that gift, but if she rejects his kindness he will feel, well, rejected. Conversely, one of the most characteristic things a wife or a mother will say to her husband or her son on their arrival home is "Tell me about your day." Here, her attempt to receive them is the manifestation of her love; if that gift-of-receiving is met by silence (or the sort of reply that amounts to silence), her love will be frustrated.

Cardinal Scola's statement is a summary of the genders' coinherence: it illustrates their interdependence just as much as their contrast in emphasis or psychological style. Both feminine and masculine are designed both to receive and to give. Similarly, Carl Jung, whose psychological theories sometimes bordered on the mystical, thought that each gender contained elements of the other, which had to be integrated into the psyche as a whole for proper balance, and that these outposts of our own opposites were a major factor in erotic affection (healthy or unhealthy).

Taking that maxim as a starting point, I believe we can begin to understand why the types represented in art, from ancient myth down to postmodern pop culture, are at once so tied to the cultural standards of gender and so apt to subvert them -- sometimes in socially destructive ways, but at other times in a manner that displays real insight into the artificial limitations of a culture's view of gender. Every "spear" character concept will have a "distaff" counterpart; sometimes the strength of the contrast between the two will emphasize how really different masculine and feminine are, while other times the similarity between the spear and the distaff types will show their inter-animation of one another.

This in turn, since one of the functions of art is to express our subconscious to us in a safe way, can deliver us from false or overly-narrowed concepts of gender. Our own culture seems replete with these confining stereotypes, though the trend is changing, largely (though not exclusively) as a result of the feminist and queer movements; the cultural confusion caused by these movements does of course do damage, but so did the repressions and restrictions of their artificially clear predecessors, particularly in the fifties. There is no social order which gets everything right -- except "that Rome where Christ Himself is Roman," i.e. Heaven itself.

I think that a general acquaintance with literature, preferably over a period of several hundred years at least, will give us a fairly good, comprehensive approach to the real archetypes of both genders, which is a good antidote to wrongly narrowed definitions. So, for instance, the aggressive character is often thought of as exclusively masculine; but it was a far more fastidious age than our own which produced the refrain "The female of the species is more deadly than the male," and the stories of the Amazons and the Valkyries suggest that the Warrior-Maiden archetype may be as old as humanity; nor is it without historical and wholly Christian expression in Saint Joan of Arc. Conversely, the traits of gentleness, peace, and sensitivity are frequently taken to be specifically feminine -- yet these received a pretty unambiguously masculine expression in the boyish boisterousness of Saint Francis.

This, I think, demonstrates one of the ways in which a simply conservative approach to society will not do for a Christian, and especially not for a Catholic. Every culture -- however baptized and catechized it may be -- has flaws, and it is among the special tasks of the Church to help a culture recognize those flaws and compensate for them, and to repent of them when they become sins. It is also one of the places where Christianity and the queer world can find common ground, albeit a limited one. Given how few those are, we should try and make as much of this as we can. If St. Paul could take advantage of an altar to an unknown god to proclaim the invisible Deity, I believe we can do the same; and if he was not embarrassed to quote pagan playwrights and poets, perhaps we need not be ashamed of Tony Kushner and Camille Paglia.

*No, Matt Curley, I am not becoming a Knight of Columbus. Shut up forever.