Woman is a misbegotten male
There's been a good deal of discussion over the last few weeks about the "trouble" caused by the idea of women becoming bishops. Why is this such a troublesome idea? Why is the church so slow to get hold of the idea that women are a gift, not a problem? Rachel gives a bit of the history behind the church's attitude to women, quoted from Radford Reuther. If you read it in terms of how much progress we've made you might find it hopeful. On the other hand, it's sobering to realise just how deep negativity towards women has been, and how much damage there is to undo.
“You are the Devil’s Gateway. It is you who plucked the fruit of the forbidden tree. You are the first who deserted the divine law. You are the one who persuaded him whom even the Devil was not strong enough to attack. All too easily you destroyed the image of God, man. Because of your desert, that is death, even the Son of God had to die. . . Therefore cover your head and your figure with sack-cloth and ashes.”
Augustine, On the Trinity: “Why must a woman cover her head? Because, as I explained before, the woman does not possess the image of God in herself, but only when taken together with the male who is her head, so that the whole substance is one image. But when she is assigned the role as helpmate, a function that pertains to her alone, the she is not the image of God. But as far as the man is concerned, he is by himself alone the image of God, just as fully and completely as when he and the woman are joined together into one.”
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica: “As the philosopher says, ‘Woman is a misbegotten male.’ Yet it is necessary that woman was made in the first production of things as a helpmate. Not indeed as a helpmate in any other works than procreation, for in all other works man can be more efficiently helped by another man than by a woman, but as a helper in the work of generation… The woman is in a state of subjugation in the original order of things. For this reason she cannot represent headship in society or in the Church. Only the male can represent Christ. For this reason it was necessary that Christ be incarnated as a male. It follows, therefore, that she cannot receive the sign of Holy Orders.”
Malleus Maleficarum (fifteenth-century manual of the Dominican Inquisitors against witches): “When a woman thinks alone she thinks evil, for the woman was made from the crooked rib which is bent in the contrary direction from the man. Woman conspired constantly against spiritual good. Her very name, fe-mina means ‘absence of faith’. She is insatiable lust by nature. Because of this lust she consorts even with Devils. It is for this reason that women are especially prone to the crime of witchcraft, from which men have been preserved by the maleness of Christ.”
Martin Luther. ‘On Marriage’: “Eve originally was more equally a partner with Adam, but because of sin the present woman is a far inferior creature. Because she is responsible for the Fall, woman is in a state of subjugation. The man rules the home and the world, wages war and tills the soil. The woman is like a nail driven into the wall, she sits at home.”
Rosemary Radford Ruether, 'Women-Church Theology and Practice of
Feminist Liturgical Communities', Harper and Row, San Francisco, 1985,
pp. 137ff
7 Responses to “Woman is a misbegotten male”
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Maggi has kept a blog since September 2003, writing about theology and faith, the arts and literature, and a little about life and random nonsense...
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Of course, this all rests in a scientific paradigm to which we no longer hold, namely the notion that females are (biologically) of the same sex as males, just less successfully. In this account, women are cooler, damper, less perfect versions of males. (See Laqueur’s Making Sex for a fascinating reading of this one-sex model and a persuasive argument about how we read out of even the “irreducible” biology of bodies exactly what we expect/want to see there.) More recently, there has been a sense that femaleness is a “default” setting which persists if maleness doesn’t get “triggered” by testosterone and other androgens. This is also problematic, though, because it still suggests that females are males who didn’t quite make it. Our current paradigm suggests that rather than sharing in one sex, there is more of a sense of something proactively female about femaleness; femaleness is neither a “default” setting nor a failure to become fully male, but something actively and positively its own.
Nonetheless, it would be naive to ignore the fact that much of our physiology is strikingly similar – for example, the penis and clitoris start as exactly the same structure, which is why it’s possible to have “ambiguous” genitalia which have not entirely differentiated along male or female lines. In my own work on theology and intersex I’ve wanted to say that contemporary theological accounts of human sex don’t take sufficient notice of this, or of the other ways in which the demarcations marking where male ends and female are more blurry than we often suppose.
susannahcornwall.blogspot.com
Well, that’s that then. The Fathers have spoken. I’d better just stay in bed!
I notice that all of these are written from a masculine perspective. Perhaps they needed to look inward and see that God created Man and Women in his image. And I even think that the paternalistic image of God is wrong.
Jesus came as a male, perhaps this causes the confusion, but whatever does, it is detrimental to women, who are just as fitted for Ministry as Men, and in some cases better!
So it all hinges on a literal reading of Genesis 3! How many of those who oppose the calling by God of women believe in a 7 day creation?
I agree with Hugh about the literal interpretation of Genesis, but I always find it interesting reading these statements about how the fall was all Eve’s fault because she was hoodwinked by the serpent; when Genesis 2 is quite explicit that Eve wasn’t actually created at the point God spoke to Adam about the fruit and what could and could not be eaten. Eve was created after that. I know in Genesis 3 she is aware of this rule but intresting all the same.
Following on from Dot, I have never quite got, why it should be so much worse to be tempted to disobedience by a serpent than by a women…
building on Christine’s point
it took the ‘father of lies’ to mislead the woman, that and the hope of ‘wisdom’…
I took but a moment’s lack of thought to get the man off track…
so, tell me which ‘model’ should I be worried about being in a leadership position?
harrumph