Returning a bit over 24 hours ago from Christmas holidays (2 weeks) in England, nothing within me is the same anymore. How appropriate on the dusk of day before the New Year transition begins that the whole reworking occurs Departing for England, I anticipated an adventure theologically, but not as much spiritually as I encountered. The most unexpected things can happen to one’s faith when its already pondering questions that it tried previously to dismiss: so much for quietly composing a personal confession of faith in the Cotswold hills of the English countryside! My first day in England was the beginning of a wake-up call from Jesus, i think (dare not say I know anymore) because the air that was thick with suspicion was sliced with the knife of disbelieving eyes that could no longer deny the smokescreen which permiated all of my world. My soul found itself knocked to a compulsion to prostrated itself and cover itself in the dirt before an omnipotent God who really desires my love, not what I call love: honesty.

The hand of the Lover was drawing me to the altar again, which through His perfect sacrifice setting a type, I am called to be pure as well. How different the Lamb’s once sacrifice, forever suspended in time and out of it before the Father for those who would have Him paint the doorposts of their heart in His saving blood; I am called to a daily sacrifice, a living sacrifice, one which lives always through the death of Jesus in the life He won in resurrection for me– dying to myself to live in Him. What a lofty aim, how impossible it seems, when the eyes become caught in downcast gaze of pride stir the basest aims of the self. Yet in the moment-by-moment sacrifice I am able by the Spirit to let go. But do I let go into honesty or hold a bit tighter and try and believe a dream that is just mists around my lonely mountain? This time I let go.

The nights and long hours were spent sorting through the shattered pieces of a thin porcelain my imagination had created, stripping away layer after layer from beneath the broken mask to reveal what was truly beneath; a level which is purely translucent for lack of circulation and sunlight, but in desperate need of something more than the ice in which it has been packed. I think this organ is called a heart. An it is an integral element of stepping into heaven, one I ferquently deplete of life in diverting blood to the head. Some happy medium must exist between the two, but if the mind is to persistent in dreaming life away in a muck of theological rambing and unsatisfied wandering, the heart is forced into a dishonest masquerade to please all the rest of my ambition, stubborn skepticism, and relentless hoping for something more than what is before me.

Jesus took my hand very gently, but firmly, and told me that I was dishonest. I have run the end of a track which I blindly hoped continued, but I am standing at the brink of a cliff, foot poised to go over. My child, this is no way to live your life, Hope again in Me. So I am learning spe salve. And to hope again once orientating my uncertainties into a definitive case of false hope, everything had to come crashing down around me. Not all at once, but with the profundity of the final straw that broke the camel’s back, the last old dream cracked and my spirit found itself naked, as it were, with all delusions in threads about its heels. The questions which have most distressed my soul have been those on doctrine, faith, and praictice.

When the differences of Catholic and Protestant have been brought to my attention, I felt a need to draw up this confession of faith, though in the same time of exploration, I was trying to process all the differences and similarities between me and Catholics/Protestants. In my journalings with Jesus, a phrase which lingered through the confusing twists and turns of discussion was “how intellectually dishonest would it be to convert to ….” and thus I continued to probe and pick at the bits and pieces of my fragmented theology until a splinter came off in my hand, burrowing deeper as if of its own will. Such are the bits of theories I entertain, becoming part of me in my thinking as I allowed them to enter my streams of thought and create the enveloping haze that colored my view of the world. With a final “hope” dashed, the last straw broken, my theology couldn’t take much more.

So back to the drawing board, to look for the change my faith was needing. For the past two months (almost) i have been wondering about scripture and its place in my life now as the Word of God. How does this demonstrate itself in practice and devotion, because its certainly present in reading for liturgy…. but the stuff of the Word that I have craved has been it alive, it moving and breathing and living within me and as the Incarnate Jesus, and the Spirit of God inspiring me to obedience. So what does one do without preaching? I was enthralled with my Bible for the past two weeks, and got a breath of fresh air with it– and continue the wandering, reformulating my life around a text. To continue to wandering, wondering.

Sitting in the deserted streets, remembering the people who filled them only a few days ago, like a widow remembering the festivities of the marriage banquet. Made like a princess in the world, I find myself a slave to all, by my own mistrust I have fallen… all my nights are spent in weeping so my eyes are too swollen to see the sun; salt rivers flow down my cheeks and I am ashamed for anyone to recognize me. I one had more lovers than Solomon himself, but they left me as I destroyed my beauty with mourning, for when Yhwh abandoned me, I had no more reason for life. So here I sit, betrayed by brother and despised by friend in a heap of ashes near the gape of Gehennah… somewhere in the pit of mourning I still hear a voice in my soul.

The soul I thought I sold long ago, or back then it was redemption… whittling away at the self inside so there would be nothing to fill—that I might just be before Yhwh. How cruelly did my own deeds turn on me; to degrade myself for glory, I sold myself to the world and wondered where Yhwh could not be. In late hours of morning, I pined to know my G-d from a bed of sin, from the books of philosophy and sorcery where I sought the answers to my heart’s deepest yearnings. Yet nothing availed me and I was left emptier than before. I wasted away in body, then in soul, and I forgot my God in the attempt to survive so close to death. In the thrills of the edge of a knife, I thought I was finding life, only to discover I had prostituted my heart again. What a wretch am I, hypocrite to the core, purity and holiness in the Temple by day, fasting my life away, to drink deep of poisoned blood by night… all searching for my G-d, to behold the face of Yhwh. Look where searching has got me.

You did not need to make me suffer to show me the emptiness of my life, but only by the blow of Your hand would You cast me to my knees and draw me in again. I insisted that love was self-abasing, self-degrading, and uncomprehending I sought to love You, but cultivated hate over love. However did we move from the loving dance to a mistrustful fleeing from before Your face? I was a vessel of holy water, offering coolness and thirst to those in need of You, yet now how parched and cracked am I, I have no memory of your life-giving fountain. This road has been empty, empty for so long, even the sight of a beetle is company. And how I longed for company, but none could replace the face of You whom my attempts to love had scorned—for in the pursuit of You, I learned the prostitution of the soul… and was scorned for giving all who asked what they came to seek. Yet virtue was the desire of my heart.

I am surrounded by piles of rags, disintegrating clothes I have been here so long in mourning, but there again, I hear a foot on the road. Would it be a merciful priest to offer me absolution, I know I am too far gone for him now… a scornful lover to beat this pulverized flesh once again, a jealous friend to cast a stone and take this life from me, it would all be too merciful. My hands are stained and bloody, the bloody of your fruits from me that I disdained and spoiled, ruining the life of Your own self within me and creating a stench of death around all I touched. I was unworthy, I pleaded, You were too much for me, and now a murder I sit and weep, the still running blood of the prophets I killed in my heart, the angels of men you sent to retrieve my soul… they were all lost, for I refused to trust You. What have I now, that all are dead and gone, though living beyond the reach of this desert soul?

Footsteps, I am not so hopeless yet. A man, no different than any other but with some air of the profound comes toward me on the road. I have become a spectacle, it won’t matter for long. Yet he walks by, and at the brink of the hill falls to his knees and wails.. O Jerusalem, my sister, you ran too far, I have come to bring you to Him who calls You daughter.” He turns back to me and the grief is greater than my own as He joins the ashes, takes the bloodied hands and washes them in His tears. I should have recognized and shuddered. He sees my disgust and is wounded more deeply “You should not touch one as I,” I begin, it has been so long since I spoke… He smiles “Just because you never felt me does not mean I ever ceased to touch you.” How on earth, purity for blood, His hands and forming wounds. The blood and filth of my could be washed to hope. Will I accept, can I bear to leave my misery and be found in joy? I have no choice now by to risk, who would transgress again the Son of God? I take His hand, maybe there is yet life.

Incarnate Sociality: Heidegger and Dasein-with

The contribution of gender dynamics to Heidegger’s social ethic of Dasein

Martin Heidegger’s quest for an existential analytic of Dasein focuses on a very individualistic concept of human beings, but eerily omits any discussion concerning the bodily subject of Dasein. Rejecting any positive contribution of social influences to Dasein’s genuine understanding of itself, Heidegger situates the dilemma of a positive social ethic within the contexts of two worlds, social and work. Limiting human originality to make genuine or authentic discovery about one’s being because of affecting factors in these worlds, the social world is vaguely described and becomes overwhelmed by the utilitarian ethic of the work world. If Dasein is primordially with others, then even in the work world, one finds oneself relation and engaging other Dasein, which aids in one’s understanding of one’s own being. Due to the sojourning nature of Dasein, human beings find it impossible to constantly be authentically with people, yet a state of being genuineness (being as one is) can accompany every interaction.

Seeking an ontology of Dasein’s being, the trueness of Dasein’s possibilities, I challenge Heidegger’s pejorative assertions of the social world on the being of Dasein as an objectification of human beings. Deconstructing Heidegger’s analysis of the social dimension of Dasein’s being through the lens of objectification of the female sex, I will seek to necessitize the social interactions of the sexes to complete Dasein’s understanding of being.

By noting Heidegger’s omission of the positive influences of the ‘they’ world as contradictory to social understanding of self derived from fundamentally being-with others, I intend to demonstrate that Heidegger objectified Dasein by defaulting to a value of work over person. In spite of considering sociality as a detriment to Dasein’s being, Heidegger proposes one social ethic: that persons should not be treated as things because as essentially different constitutions,[1] which I argue are partially demonstrated in the complimentary relating of the sexes. From the dimension of human sexuality, (1) I will discuss Dasein through Ricoeur’s model of self, composed of the two axis of self and others versus purely individual, to demonstrate the necessity of complementary gender tensions to complete the understanding of the being of Dasein. (2) Through surveying historical gender conflict, (a) patriarchical degradation of woman and (b) feminist suppression of womanhood by adopting male roles for women or rejecting the dignity of manhood, I will continue the theme of objectification by discussion how the objectification of women by both men and women has led to creation of a theoretical ‘they’ world in which one can lose personal identity by performing a gender role. Finally, I will suggest that (3) only in respecting the differences that allow for interaction and personal formation between the genders that objectification of Dasein (male and female), determining men and women to be ‘equal but different.’ Such a philosophy of gender relations, based upon the Christian anthropology that man and woman were both created different in the image of God, will permit me to conclude that embodiment of sexual stereotypes is not necessary, but that male and female differences should be embraced, rather than trying to hold one to the standard of the other to be considered equal in human dignity.

I. Heidegger in Relation to Social Being and Gender:

A. Dasein in Ricoeurian Model, a lack of positive sociality:

Noting in Being and Time that the Being in analysis “is in each case mine,”[2] and is incommunicabilis, for I cannot assign the action of my life, because it is inherent in my being is first exposed to me through experience with others. Since Dasein is fundamentally what it is now as well as its future possibilities, where I am in relation to the social world in which I find myself primordially thrown is characterized both by where my relationships with others stand now, and the possibilities each of those relationships has for the future.

Since Dasein is constituted by care, a basic sort of being-in-the-world, a caring one, indicates a primordial sense of relationship and concern for other Dasien. The self is considered “’only’ as a way of Being of [Dasein]”[3] in the social world, in which actions and interactions between Dasein become functions for discovering the Being of Dasein rather than the value of the Being of the other as part of self. Employing the Ricoeurian definition of the self as composed of two axis in being-towards-others, a fundamentally different kind of relationship between two Dasein as differing from that of Dasein and any Thing is permitted. To attempt to structure a social ethic of Dasein from the sparse and overwhelmingly negative Heideggarian opinion of sociality would produce an incomplete model of self, so Heidegger’s Dasein will be discussed in light of Ricoeur’s model. Ricoeurian social ethic fundamentally differs from the Heideggarian anthropology in regards to the loss of self in the ‘they’ world, adding an undeniably positive social dimension to Heidegger’s ‘they’ world. While a Heideggarian anthropology would suggest that ‘ipse without idem’ (self without others) is more authentic and unconfused by the ‘they’ world, Ricoeur regards the loss of ‘they’ or ‘other’ as a loss of both personal identity and temporal self.[4]

This fundamental difference of Dasein-Dasein relations as different from those between Dasein and an object of being with is ready to hand by these two axis if idem and ipse within the being of Dasein. By a break between self (ipse) and same (idem), Dasein is able to call itself before itself in question of its own being. The axis ipse calls my own being before myself, allowing me to become self-aware, though “this self-awareness is not self-understanding as such, or an appreciation of the meaning of oneself; but it is a prompt to self-understanding.”[5] Determining that the ipse prompts and understanding of self beyond the solitary conception of “I”, one realizes the social need of others to permit Dasein a genuine, authentic picture of self. Recognizing Heidegger’s tenant that Dasein is primordially situated within world, an “authentic Being-one’s-Self, does not detach Dasein from its world, nor does it isolate it so that it becomes a free-floating ‘I’.”[6] Finding oneself thrown into a world with others, Dasein’s condition of primordially with other Beings prevents understanding of the human experience apart from others.

Yet while authentic Being-one’s-Self is not solitary, Heidegger paints a very negative pictures of the relational situation in which Dasein is tied: “Dasein’s falling into the ‘they’ and the ‘world’ of its concern, is what we have called a ‘fleeing; in the face of itself.”[7] Turning away from itself, Dasein necessarily turns towards others, which is pejoratively laden in Being and Time with such connotations as anxiety and fear. Dasein ‘falls’ into such states of being as lost in the ‘theyness’ of the social world, fleeing not from some thing within its world, but interacting with an entity that “has the same kind of Being as the one that shrinks back.”[8] It is the idem of Dasein, this shared sense of Being that is threatened by its very own sort of being, a fellow human. Characterizing the possibilities of future possibilities in light of this shared Being, Heidegger indicates that fellow existence with humans in the social world, Being-in-the world as such, is characterized not only by care, but anxiety.

Finding this idem part of the identity which Ricoeur proposes for the self, a sameness and unity with other Dasein in a social sense, neglected and considered detrimental in Heidegger, one discovers Heidegger’s conception of self to be completely limited to the ipse identity. Heidegger’s emphasis on individuality colors others in the negative light of ‘they,’ an everyday source in which to lose authentic self. Even by denoting a certain mode of social function, that of ‘Dasein-with,’[9] Heidegger suggests an inauthentic mode of being human is necessary to function with others Noting Heidegger’s negative regard to the part of personal being which operates in the social world, confusion as to the formative function of society in shaping Dasein through relationship becomes apparent. While Heidegger insists, despite a critical view of social positivity, that persons cannot be treated as “Thinglike and substantial being,” an object, because human beings have essentially different constitutions from Things,[10] his profound neglect of discussion of social function in favor of the work world suggests an objectification of the social being-of-self by default.

Heidegger objectifies being in the social world of Dasein by removing the natural social actions discussed in Being and Time such as idle chatter (gossip), play, and art to functions within the work world. By stating that “essentially the person exists only in the performance of intentional acts, and is therefore essentially not an object,”[11] Heidegger demonstrates how persons in the social world must act socially to be considered persons, not things. Yet in his imbalanced consideration of Dasein, Heidegger has removed the social actions natural to the with-world, reducing persons objects at the mercy of public manipulation. Noting that publicness is obscured by the ‘they’ through its constant presence of being alongside, Heidegger considers society to have subsumed Dasein’s agency, rendering him “disburdened” of necessary cares in life,[12] now merely a social object. It is this sort of social objectification which I am addressing within this essay; claiming that human beings are rendered more aware of self, not less, through social relations. While gender complementarity is one of the characteristics of the idem self into which Dasein finds itself thrown, Heidegger neglects this discussion with many of the positive developments of the social world.

B. Sexuality as an Ignored Trait of Dasein:

Before embarking on the quest for the being of woman as different, but relating to the being of man, it is necessary to first introduce me use of the terms “gender” and “sex” in relation to Heidegger’s discussion of Being in Dasein. Gender as defined for my purposes as a relationship with beings (denoted as “others”) discovers distinction and particularity through being with others. Self is known through others, but self is also lost through others, as Heidegger proposes by the thrownness of Dasein to “others”: Noting that a primordial essence of Dasein is its everydayness, Heidegger notes that there is no way to separate the everyday state of with others from the world of others: “In it, out of it, and against it, all genuine understanding, interpreting, and communicating all re-discover and appropriating anew, are performed.”[13] Thus Dasein in its first instant of being is incapable of knowing itself apart from its first-discovered state of existence, which is wholly determined by Dasein’s state of “Being-in-the-world.” Heidegger notes that this state of “in world” is permeated by “the public,” so that Dasein has been conditioned from the first to know itself in a context defined by that frame of Dasein which is other to itself. Gender is this context which Dasein finds itself thrown into, and out of the mass of public, Dasein must decipher its being in the context of gender—i.e., discover its mode of being-in-the-world as definitively male or female, particular to self—through the publicly assigned construct of gender.

In regards to gender and sexual being, then, gender is the state in which being first discovers itself, the means socially determined by the public world of how Dasein is expected to conduct itself. Understanding gender as primordial to being-in-the-world, which in the state of everydayness is where Dasein first comes before itself, one must recognize gender as a characteristic particular to the state of being-with other Dasein. Sex, on the other hand, is particular to Dasein as my own, a primordial state of being in which no state of Being-with Dasein is necessary. As Heidegger asserts that Being-with is as innate a quality of Dasein as Being-in-the-world, and as I have assigned gender to the interactions of Dasein within the public world, it must be distinguished that due to the relative nature of gender, gender interactions are not uniform throughout universal state of being-with of Dasein. For example, if one were to grow up raised by wolves and live solely in the jungle, as Mowgli of Ruyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book is known to have done, one’s being will retain the quality of being-with other Dasein, but one will not understand the concept of gender, which is distinguished to the world of Dasein.

Having discussed the social when attempting to discern the being of woman, as distinct from the being of men, it is important to consider the world of gender into which woman finds herself. As Heidegger notes the temporal quality of Dasein, that category of being embracing both degrees of humanity, male and female, history is one of the contributing factors to current gender constructs. Especially in uncovering the being of woman, history evidences the interaction of male and female as subject and object, creating a type for the being of woman that was lost in the public definition of male hierarchy. Confusing the distinction between gender and sex, historically, a woman’s “’sex’ is thus expressed by her ‘gender’ which is then fully known and consecrated”[14] as her way of being-in-the-world. Why must the question of the historical treatment of women be asked at all? Heidegger would not provide a suitable answer to such question, for in evading the question of gender, Heidegger ignores the ethical discussion of being-to-being relationship within the co-world, for which he is criticized by Levinas, who was deeply influenced by Heidegger, on his overly individualistic celebration of existence.[15]

While Heidegger attempts to define a neutral potentiality in the primordial existence of being, neglecting the ethical quality intrinsic to human beings. Levinas’ discussion of ethics as essential to being[16] resurrects the concept of justice as intrinsic to human nature, which will be crucial to my discussion of the historical distinction of female sex versus gender. For Levinas, however, feminine is omitted from philosophical ethics[17], which contradicts his tenants of justice, merely replicating “patriarchal structures that feminists have challenged” for years and years, defining woman as the other, or in Levinain terminology, “alertity[18].”[19] Noting the contribution of Levinas’ philosophy to interactions between Dasein defined as face-to-face, enhancing Heidegger’s very impersonal pervasion of co-existence, I will employ Levinas’ language of face-to-face while also adding to my discussion of Heideggarian theory of Dasein’s being in relation to other Dasein; in addition, I will alter Levinas’ conception of alterity to include women, not as forgotten “others,”[20] which is unethical by today’s consideration of human existence, but as co-experiencing this sense of ethical discovery in oppositeness to another human being (by way seeing the reflection of one’s own potentiality in the being of a person that is not one’s own). Thus employing Heidegger’s discussion of lostness of self-being in gender and Levinas’ self-exemplifying concept of women as the other, seeking to assert themselves as equally other with men, I will turn to brief historical account of how the being of woman has been dehumanized as object and other with regards to male being.

In presenting the historical picture of female being, I will discuss how the objectification and relegation of women as “other” to male normality indicate the presence of relationship, as well as the unjust influences of anti-feminine (anti-feminine indicating an inequality in bias of male favor within the public sphere) gender constructions into which the female being still finds herself thrown, and to which extreme feminism has arisen as a negative reaction. Indicating that two wrongs don’t right an unjust public conception of female being, perhaps even if my concluding response to both the historical picture of woman and that of extreme feminism is insufficient in its own right, it will provide a third wrong, adding balance to two polar perspectives of woman’s being through biology. While bodies are the central landscape through which social interaction occurs,[21] objectification of female body alienates the genders from authentic relationship with the other, ultimately alienating one from a true understanding of self. Consideration of personhood should not be divorced from the physical body into which one finds oneself thrown (seen in patriarchal objectification of woman), nor totally focused upon the body of self to the exclusion of the other (the fault of extreme feminism) because such are objectifications of Dasein’s being into Thing versus person.

II. Patriarchy and Feminism: Reverse Objectifications of the Female Being:

A. Patriarchal Domination of the Female Being through Anatomical Differences:

Throughout the course of Western history, the context in which Heidegger’s philosophy was born, an intensely male hierarchical system of gender defined the spatial and relational contexts in which a woman was permitted to explore the possibility of her being. In his work Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, Thomas Laqueur recounts the sensitive discovery of the female anatomy in the male world and the manner in which the biological structure of woman’s body has been interpreted through male terms through the dominance of man in the public arena. Defining a woman in terms of her sexual and reproductive capacities suggests the Levinian projection of “other” to the being of woman as a sex-object to men leads one to question “imperatives of culture or the unconscious dictated language of sex, of how the female body was defined and differentiated from the male’s.”[22] Lacquer writes to show the effect of culture on assumptions about sex, leading to social gender roles, demonstrates how the men tell a woman how she is to be; and somehow it all comes back to sex. “Whatever one thought about woman and their rightful place in the world could, it seemed, be understood in terms of bodies endlessly open to the interpretive demands of culture,” Lacquer says.[23]

Understanding male-determined “facts” about female bodies as the foundations for Western societal construct[24], the overarching theme of bodies determining social value, which translates into the power and control exerted over women. When speaking of Western society, then in its historical context (i.e., through the feminist revolution leading up to current day gender politics and conceptions), this essay will assume the normalcy of male-biased distinctions between the sexes. Recognizing the inherent equation of gender with sex in Western society in which biological sexuality is transformed “into products of human activity,”[25] it is crucial to comprehend the danger of looking towards the physical body as a central reference for female identity. The historical concept of men judging women to be inferior because of different physicality has relegated women to narrow channels of exploring identity under the construct of gender roles in both the public and private spheres of society. Briefly overviewing these limitations, I will illuminate the female social rebellion in terms of embracing or rejecting the feminine body as that which is primordially, existentially encountered in the quest for understanding the being of oneself in the world

From the time of the Greeks, though each specific cultural allotted its women different freedoms and constraints, “a woman’s primary duty was to produce male heirs.”[26] This distinctly sexual qualification of feminine being was evidenced in female relegations to the sphere of the private world. Prohibited from owning property, holding public offices, or voting, the majority of women found themselves placed in. Beginning in the Greek west, male philosophy idealizing reason and intellect polarized “’male’ self-control and its opposite, a convulsive violence, associated with ‘womanish’ lack of self restraint”[27] introduced the idea of male necessity for female comprehension which would later influence Christian Anthropology. While commonly limited to the private sphere of life in Greek society, women were permitted more autonomy in the none-the-less patriarchal society of Rome. Adopting Greek ideals of reason, Roman society perpetuated the belief that femininity was weak and unable of its own accord, assigning women in position of influence to the supervision of a man[28]. This sexual definition of women continued in the pervasion of Christian belief, which greatly influenced later gender politics to which the feminist movement revolted.

In the ancient construct of normalized male being, women were not entirely powerless to define their being through the marginalized conception of femininity. The Church in antiquity, transitioning between an era of martyrs and persecution to being the socio-political authority itself, permitted women to transcend the stigma of female being by becoming ‘male.’ Any strong or virtuous action demonstrated on the part of a woman was not characterized as a part of the woman’s female nature, but rather she was regarded as having transcended feminine depravity to be in essence “the self-same as men.”[29] Thus the essence of being and the physical body were divorced, reflecting biological conception of the female body as that of an inverted male.[30] This in antiquity, the male was seen as the only true human (i.e. the only image of God),[31] and female merely a deficient male. These renderings determining female being as a corrupted expression of male being on biological bases emphasized the similarities between male and female reproductive systems in order to evidence the inferiority of the being of woman to that of man. A one-sex mentality of being in terms of male biology continued to demean women through the medieval and Renaissance eras of western society.

However, as Lacquer notes, “The cultural politics of at least two genders is never in equilibrium with the ‘biology,’ or alternative cultural politics, of one sex,” insisting that a two-sex conception of human being allows for an equally inculturated definition of female being from within a male hierarchy of biology. The Enlightenment period saw an evolution of two sexes as a further result of scientific innovation and a new emphasis on scholasticism. Determining that self as a thinking subject according to Cartesian philosophy was the androgynous mind rather than body, a new explanation for the differences in man and woman was derived from biological differences in sexual function[32]. Since empirical evidence was no longer deemed a determination of the worth of female self, biology became a tool to disclose the bar women from the public sphere, reinstating a male hierarchy through different means: pregnancy and menstruation[33]. During these two cyclic functions of the female body, men deemed women incapable of public performance, thus “naturally” dependant upon the superior male biological function for political voice. Tired of being ogled as sexual objects under male dominance of political female personhood, women initiated “the feminist discourse of difference”[34] in search of a voice by which to define themselves.

B. Feminist Obscuring of the Being of Woman Apart from Men:

Through the historical dialog of female being, it is crucial to note that in the case of a patriarchy where women were deemed biologically deficient to men as well as in post-Enlightenment thought where “self” was conceptual rather than corporeal, female being was still subjugated to male objectivity on the basis of physicality. Western society has remained lodged in initial experience of lostness, which is found in the everyday Being-in-the-world, and has consequently lost any means of understanding woman apart from her body. While social revolutions have attempted to allow women being apart from an assigned social category, the existential being of woman is difficult for males to overlook when considering the whole of her self. Suggesting that the body is a crucial element to understanding the being of woman, though not the exclusive factor which lies at her disposal, the female body having been mutilated as an object of male projection for centuries. Tracing the historical context into which the modern feminist movement was born, women as defining women apart from men arises not only in a biological sense, but to the abandonment an essential self.

Initially, women began defining our being in the feminist movement on the very tenants against which they were being compared: physiological difference to men. Quoting Dame Millicent Fawcett, Laqueur notes the females desire to represent women not “because there is no difference between men and women; but rather because of the difference between them.”[35] Since the Victorian conception male and female propagated by feminists has evolved towards a denial of an essential being of self, the psychic subject is considered androgynous, rejecting physiological indications of definitive sexuality. Having rejected the male proposition of defining woman and the female gender role by existential difference, feminism in its most extreme sense questions the justice of not only gender, but sexual distinctions. Initially reacting to male-gendered supremacy, feminism seeks to define woman by woman, rejecting the need for female interaction with male in female self-discovery. In surveying the arguments of modern feminism, I will show the deficiencies of solely defining female being by women, requiring both the physiological differences/similarities of men and women as well as the essential differences.

Viewing essentialism as an appeal “to a pure or original femininity, a female essence, outside the boundaries of the social and thereby untainted (though perhaps repressed) by a patriarchal order,”[36] feminists view essentialism as a threat to the autonomy of female expression. The unifying generalization feminism employs in some of its liberating principles for the being of woman is perceived as a burden which disallows individuation, thus producing a similar power hierarchy as the patriarchal misogyny feminism is attempting to critique. Rejecting a unified concept of essential womanhood, feminism becomes deconstructive in defining both gender and sexuality. Noting “gender is separate from biology and takes shape in concrete, historically changing social relationships,”[37] current feminist scholarship rejects a dichotomy between woman’s sex and gender, though maintaining an earlier argument that the being of woman is not destined to a specific role by her biological sex. Arguing that even sexual differences in the biology of male and female are socially constructed, woman is forced to look for an understanding of being beyond any relation to an other, the difference and attraction of male gender.

Before the whole rejection of male can be comprehended in the feminist understanding of female being, the foundations of feminist conception of being must be more closely examined. For the feminist, the concept of “self” being an intrinsic identity rooted in an inner psychic depth is non-existent, but rather woman exists as “subject” apart from the perceivably social constructs of sex and gender[38]. Butler claims that what Western society has sought to identify as the being of self can only be definitively identified when being is divided into two parts: self and other (for other is needfully rejected in order to discern particularities of self). If self is inherently identified in sexual particularity of woman to man, for instance, feminism equates the sexual identity of woman as typified as dependent upon socially constructed (in the case of the west, male-constructed) gender roles. Noting that historical misogyny of women by men became naturalized through “being constructed as an inner or physical necessity”[39] to adhere to gender constructs, Rubin rejects psyche as an inner depth definition of human being as confining to male, hierarchical demands of woman’s being in sexuality.

With the rise of the sexual revolution of women to gain equality with men, feminism has taken on forms in varying range, the most drastic of which seeks to define women apart from the existence of men—women as defined by women alone. This branch of radical feminism is popular in advocacy of Lesbianism, which as particular to women, will be included in my address of the identity of a female being. The Lesbian movement tends in the most extreme strains, side with queer theory in supposing that there is no essential self in terms of sexual identity, but rather an androgynous being exists to which one must formulate gender. Judith Butler questions, “If a sexuality is to be disclosed, what will be taken as the true determinant of its meaning: the phantasy structure, the act, the orifice, the gender, the anatomy?”[40] Questioning the origins of the sex identity behind the gender, Butler notes that none of these qualities are sufficient to identify sexuality, because a full-disclosure of sexuality is not discernable from action.[41] But are women able to define woman without the presence of man? If woman is independent of the definitions of womanhood postulated by male misogyny in order to subdue or subjugate in order to feel some sense of power, how indeed is woman indefinaeable apart from man?

Supposing that engendered action does not form the type of sexuality in which one finds one’s identity, I propose to define the being of woman in contract to the feminist theory of women defined by women, entering the conversation of gender politics by asserting that the sexes cannot be understood apart from one another through discussion of the historical sense in which women have been understood, the feminist premise by which the being of woman is comprehended, and formulating a distinctly biblical theological philosophy as to the nature of woman, created equal but different from man in the image of God. Both patriarchal misogyny women and female objectification of self in response to male objectification both focus the entirety of the genders’ sexual identity on the genitals, which “is a sign of alienated sexuality.”[42] Recognizing the deep misunderstandings that have led to objectification not only of women, but also of men; this social inauthenticity leads to gender constructs referred to in Heideggarian term as lostness in the ‘they;’ Theorizing that objectification can only be avoided through equal ethical treatment of women with men, the differences between the sexes cannot be overlooked as crucial factors producing the relationship of self to others which discloses the self of Dasein to itself.

III. Equal But Different: Women in Relation With Men

Articulating my position as an expansion of Heidegger’s discussion of the being of Dasein through Levinas’ alterity as well as Ricoeur’s dual-axis self, I contest both the biological conclusions of patriarchical though that women are inferior to men because of biology or intellect as well as feminist assertions that separate women from men as objectifications which seek to eradicate the unity of difference natural to human sexual ethics. As Heidegger voices, the human condition into which we are born, male or female sex, is not a result of conscious choice of the will, but we find ourselves thrown into bodies, thus automatic identities and forms of relating between the genders. To separate one gender as superior to the other on the basis of sexual function is to objectify not one, but both genders, which even a weak Heideggarian ethic. From the Levinasian perspective, objectification is unethical, because the other is a subject, which must call forth my self into its potentiality. Ricoeur’s theory of self can also be employed to reject the objectification of women as ‘Things’ because if “self” includes both similarities and differences, applied to gender, the idem (being “same”) corresponds with the gender which one is complimentary to one’s own gender, while ispe is the same gender as oneself.

Understanding the sameness of the idem-identity as not selfhood, but distinct from individual identity, Ricoeur suggests that “selfhood of oneself implies otherness to such an intimate degree that one cannot be thought of without the other, that instead passes into the other.”[43] Since the idem-identity is based on the sense of sameness, I have suggested that in terms of gender, the complementarity of the opposite sexes in relationship provides a ‘complete’ picture of humanity in the image of God (though it is theologically valid to speak of individuals as ‘complete’) in terms of interpersonal relationships. If one were to argue the ‘one-body’ anthropology of antiquity, male and female could be seen as two varying perspectives on the shared condition of humanity: e.g., while the female body is not a deficient variation on the male, woman was taken out of man in the Garden of Eden. Arguing the Edenic depiction of humankind, one man and one woman created from one being and separated in sexuality, complementarity dictates that a unique unity which, though celibacy is equally as fulfilling to the Christian teaching that ever soul longs for unity with God, offers a singular image of God:

The fact that man “created as man and woman” is the image of God means not only that each of them individually is like God, as a rational and free being. It also means that man and woman, created as a “unity of the two” in their common humanity, are called to live in a communion of love, and in this way to mirror in the world the communion of love that is in God… [44]

Maintaining the argument that social unity is possible only with the fact of difference, objectification becomes not only the depersonalization of the being of a fellow Dasein, but also an attempt to make that with is other the same as self. Complementary relationships evoke a sense of one’s true state of thrownness through recognition and interaction with the other, finding qualities and care evoked for the other that would not arise from a world filled with sameness. If man and woman were really separated from the first body of mankind, then unity of two presents a more authentic unity than two of the same sex. Since the physiological capacity of human unity most readily presents itself as evidence of the mutually beneficial relationship of one sex to another, I will conclude with a consideration of the equal dignity of the two sexes in light of, not in spite of, their different biological capacities, focusing on woman.

Advocating that the “body is the subject of human experience, and… desires and purposes are played out in a world that includes other people,” feminist thought offers valuable insights to a world where “conflict is a possibility of social objectifiability.”[45] Integrating feminist insights from the works of Sartre into a solution for the objectification of women into a positive phenomena of relating so as to draw forth the fundamental togetherness of the sexes. While women have often been disembodied from common humanity with men through sole identification with certain parts of the female anatomy, feminist theorist Laurence Thomas suggests “that it is women who are the main source of men’s self-objectification.”[46] Thus the treating of the other as object to oneself as subject is merely a projection of one’s own objectified meaning onto the other. Yet while Sartre did not think direct experience of the other as subject was possible because of the particularly self-conscious capacity of persons, he theorized that could be simultaneously subjects objectifying and focus of objectification of other subject.[47] For Sartre, objectification was not the patriarchal relegation of women as things or the feminist exaltation of female physiological capacity, but treating other as object of attention vs. control. Objectification, when not projected as manipulative of the other, allows the increase of self-understanding through the other, permitting as much mutual subjectification as objectification (freeing of the idem-self through ipse-self understanding).

While gynocentric feminism argued for the superiority of woman over man because of her biological capacity to nurture and bring forth life into the world, the male role in the producing and nurturing life is undeniable. Avoiding a reductionistic consideration that values the male and female Dasein because of their reproductive sexual functions, I propose that there is a deeper metaphysical difference to the gendered interactions of men and women who, acting as ‘other’ to one another, draw into awareness an authentic understand of the being of oneself, more of the self than interactions with the same gender. Avoiding objectification of woman as seen in feminist and patriarchal politicizations of sexuality, Ricoeur’s model of the self contributes in my proposition that unity requires difference, and thus one gender should not be depersonalized for the sake of the other—in the end, both sexes deserve equal human dignity fulfilling difference capacities, both sexual and beyond the biology of the human person.

As a morally conservative Christian woman, I derived my initial sense of sexual ethics from a Protestant upbringing, which taught me that sex was reserved for the context of heterosexual marriage alone. I was taught that Christian purity was directly reflected in sexual status; to be active sexually, one should be engaged in a heterosexual marriage. Though natural law was not submitted as proof of this, finding natural law in my process of conversion to Roman Catholicism supported my conservative sexual ethic, as well as reinforcing my own idealized standard, celibacy (though natural law considers heterosexual marriage an equally valid fulfillment of human capacities). Having not been taught the doctrine of natural law in my formative belief years, I imagined God to have set an order for the functioning of all things, including sexuality in human persons, and that to act in accordance with the nature God had first created for people was obedience while acting contrarily to that nature was disobedience.

I cannot remember a time when I considered homosexuality natural, because in my own reading of scripture I valued themes of male/female coupling as the basis of nations and as demonstrating a picture of divine unity with mankind. While my theological position on homosexual acts is that they are sinful because not only are they unnatural, but also immoral (because they occur outside the context for marriage seen in the prototype of the first humans, Adam and Eve), I advocate a position of ‘equal but different’ in terms of social rights and treatment of both homosexual and heterosexual persons. Through the tradition of natural law anthropology, I will offer a reasonable social position from an ethical perspective advocating the supremacy of human dignity in ethical approaches to homosexual and heterosexual conduct within the Catholic Church.

Beginning by defining homosexuality in light of natural law, one must pose the question, are some people born with biological/psychological homosexual tendencies or not? Having personally vacillated in opinion over this question I deeply appreciate the Catholic Church’s distinction between homosexual acts and tendencies in its moral teaching. Before encountering queer theory, I would have tended to definitively categorize homosexuality in tendency and practice as deceptive forms of persons’ created nature, because, unlike queer theory, I believe that sexuality is natural, created by God not only as an external, biological identity, but an intrinsic factor of our souls. From a complementarian perspective on the sexes, I believe that male and female, in all their biological, emotional, and spiritual attractions to one another are created in the image of God (Genesis 1.27). Referring back the Edenic roots of humanity, I will address a natural law response to Roger’s critique of Gagnon. From these considerations, I will [1] present the Catholic social ethic towards homosexuality based on natural law (biological sex determining societal gender role), [2] contending queer theorist opponents to critique natural law theory with an analysis of natural law as reinforcing gender imitation (Butler) amongst Catholic laity. I will conclude, however, that [3] human sexuality performed naturally or unnaturally, does not take precedence over the biblical teaching of human dignity in the image of God in social ethics.

Beginning with a brief overview of natural law, Catholic teaching has read a Christian sexual ethic of natural law into Christian tradition from the patristic fathers as early as the writings of the Apostle Paul. Developing the predominant tradition of natural law through the writings of Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, this concept of living “according to nature”[1] defines virtuous living as that which is in accordance with reason. Reading the capacity for goodness as innate within each human being who lives rationally in synthesis with St. Paul, Christian tradition in the patristic era developed the theology that all people, being made in God’s image, are able to derive knowledge of the existence of God from things in creation. This knowledge of God is written on the heart of each person[2] from the very first moment of existence (in the case of sexual ethic, within each person’s biological framework), thus allowing man to structure his own world in a manner like to God, in which all things exist in symbiotic harmony. If “natural law is the divine reason or will of God prescribing the conservation of the natural order and prohibiting any breach of it,”[3] Augustine introduced the need for God’s revelatory intercession to expand man’s reason to discern goodness in matters of nuanced ethical decision, including the current debate around homosexuality.

Thomas Aquinas expanded this insight to include room for goodness and virtue in all people, even those outside of the body of Christ, implying for the Catholic sexual ethic a primordial understanding of sexuality as biologically determined.[4] If, as Catholic theology teaches, God is pure Reason, thus also Truth, and man is made in his image, Aquinas “insisted that the truths of faith and those of sense experience, as presented by Aristotle, are fully compatible and complementary,”[5] revolutionizing the Christian concept of Truth as something exclusive and limited to Christian teaching alone. From such principles of human capacity to reason, Catholic theology develops a picture of God Who invites all through to know Him through that capacity which is specifically intrinsic to human beings, that of reason. If the natural law is common to all people, then Christian moral norms should be rationally accepted by all people of goodwill, theologians argue.[6] Yet since the natural law is not always clear in concrete situations, Aquinas like Augustine taught that divine revelation compensated for the lack in human reasoning. Through this framework of natural law as common to all people, the Catholic Church teaches that the human sexual nature is aligned with the biological self into which one is born. Proponents of accepting homosexuality as a moral norm, however,

charge that “official” Catholic sexual teaching is based on an untenable,“physicalistic” view of natural law, one that makes persons slaves to their biology and one completely irreconcilable with a “personalistic” understanding of the moral order[7]

For the Christian, living in obedience to God does not omit any part of the human experience, including that of sexuality, though many modern theorists seek to reject natural law as irrational to justify the moral acceptability of homosexuality.

The queer theorist Jack Rogers, not a practicing homosexual himself, rejects this idea of natural law as promoting social injustice and oppression whether then freedom in creative unity with God. Having mentioned my personal tradition of natural law as being derived from scriptural themes, I will contrast the perspectives of Robert Gagnon and Jack Rogers on natural law in Romans 1, responding with my own convictions for complementary sexual union of male and female found in Romans, with additional references to human nature as depicted in Genesis. Expanding on Rogers’ brief discussion on natural law in chapter five of Jesus, The Bible, and Homosexuality: Exploding the Myths of the Church, Rogers critiques Gagnon and other authors on the oppressive abuse of natural law in his essay, “Natural Law.”[8]

Critiquing Gagnon’s basis for natural law on portions of Romans 1,2 and 3, Rogers refutes Gagnon’s claim that biology was the basis for Paul’s doctrine of nature.[9] Rogers cites this reading of Romans 1.26-27 as an overemphasis of “unnatural sins” over others, though all have the same end, death. Comparing the homosexual plight to that of women and slaves, Rogers rejects church “discrimination,” unjust repression which robs a person identifying as homosexual of the dignity owed to their personhood as made in the image of God. To Rogers, natural law is an inductive reading of a socio-sexual prejudice into the biblical text rather than a deductive understanding of God’s creation, singling out certain people to target as the scapegoats of sin rather than confessing that all people are sinful.

The passage of Romans 1.26-27 has commonly been cited to proof text that all are aware of a natural performance of their innate sexual identity by the image of God within them. While some consider the sexual practices by which Paul identifies the Gentiles as different from the Jews, linking the passage in the context of Romans 1-3 to form Paul’s argument that all are guilty of sin and in need of Christ (not just Gentiles), such context does not discredit a natural law reading of the same text. Through my limited time in biblical studies, I have encountered much equivocation as to the significance of Romans 1.18-32, which I interpret as similar to the prophetic warnings in the Old Testament, showing the Israelite people the consequences of falling into the sexual sins of their neighbors. Paul’s pejorative discussion of same-sex acts as punishment for idolatry in the passage of Romans 1 suggests the possible equation of idolatry and sexual immorality, both of which are acts against nature, if one considers the most natural setting for mankind to be the depiction of Eden before the Fall: According to Genesis 1, man and woman were created in the image of God, thus suggesting, if sexual relations occurred before the Fall, that they were sexually active with partners of opposite sexes. Viewing the Eden scenario and natural, post-Fall the closest replica of created sexual nature we can practice is heterosexual marriage, portraying the complementarity of the sexes as a unified image of God.

While to Rogers there is “no scriptural warrant for monogamous heterosexual marriage as the norm for all people”[10] because it denies unmarried and homosexual people the ability to reflect God’s image, I argue that natural law does not exclusively limit the imaging of God to heterosexual marriage, but in terms of human sexuality, this is the only context presented for human sexual expression to mirror the Divine Unity of God Himself.[11] Natural law is merely the context we humans have been given to understand our sexual identities and to perform them in a way that honors God. Having established my belief that homosexual acts are against the nature which God created in man (to be heterosexually active in a monogamous relationship or to be celibate), I will turn to a comparison of homosexual act vs. homosexual tendency, using as examples the Catholic tradition’s ethical teachings on the admittance of homosexuals into seminaries as well as the administering of the Eucharist to homosexuals.

In Instruction Concerning the Criteria for the Discernment of Vocations with regard to Persons with Homosexual Tendencies in view of their Admission to the Seminary and to Holy Orders, Cardinal Zenon Grocholewski addressed the issue of admitting homosexuals to priestly seminaries by distinguishing between homosexual acts, which are considered sinful in Catholic teaching, and homosexual tendencies which are not sexual acts, but desires or attractions that might distract from a holy vocation.[12] Thus Grocholewski concluded that “cannot admit to the seminary or to holy orders those who practice homosexuality, present deep-seated homosexual tendencies or support the so-called ‘gay culture,’” requiring that homosexual acts be forsaken and tendencies be abandoned at least three years before application to a seminary. This teaching suggests that deep-seated homosexual tendencies are a sign of masculine immaturity that would prevent partaking in priestly roles of spiritual spouses and fathers. [13] While such a state is considered an “intrinsically disordered” tendency,[14] the Catholic Church passes no moral judgment on those might experience same-sex attractions.

While those with deep-seated homosexual tendencies are prevented from Catholic seminaries, the Church interprets Scripture to indicate that not “all those who suffer from this anomaly are personally responsible for it, but it does attest to the fact that homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered and can in no case be approved of.”[15] Pope Benedix XVI, then Cardinal Ratzinger, supported Catholic rejection of homosexuality as intrinsically disordered, because it is viewed as a “strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil.”[16] Cardinal Ratzinger appealed to natural law to support the thesis that while homosexual inclinations are not sinful, they are tendencies “ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil”[17] because same-sex “activity is not a complementary union, able to transmit life; and so it thwarts the call to a life of that form of self-giving which the Gospel says is the essence of Christian living.”[18] In spite of considering homosexuality as a disorder, the Catholic Church maintains that the human will, a testimony to the image of God, remains in a homosexual person. Therefore, participation in homosexual acts renders one culpable of sexual sin before God, the reason for which the Eucharist, the celebration central to Catholic liturgy, is withheld from practicing homosexuals.

One might contest, is it fair to withhold the Sacrament from individuals who feel impulsively drawn towards homosexual acts? Is it wrong to deny individuals who feel deep-seated homosexual tendencies gratification for desires for loving relationship? Yet if sexuality in the image of God according to the natural law demonstrated in Adam and Eve in their pre-Fall Edenic states, homosexuality is by no means natural and intrinsic to human beings, thus does not offer the fulfilling sort of love intended to be shared among humans by their creator.[19] Catholic teaching is not stigmatizing homosexual individuals as distinctly sinful, nor robbing them of ability to manifest the image of God. Human dignity is never absent from persons, regardless of whether they are in a state of sin or strongly tempted to sin, including sexual sins. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states in statement # 2352, “The deliberate use of the sexual faculty, for whatever reason, outside of marriage is essentially contrary to its purpose.”[20] Thus homosexual acts are no more sinful than heterosexual acts of fornication, prostitution, or adultery. However, is it right to deny homosexuals the moral freedom to perform their same-sex identities forcing the performance of a heterosexual identity?

While Butler suggests that “the very categories of sex, of sexual identity, of gender are produced or maintained in the effects of compulsory performance,”[21] natural law teaching of an essential subject within each person responds that the only performed sexual identity is one that is false to one’s nature. While gender roles may be performed, I agree with Catholic sexual ethics that sexual identity does not exist because of gender performance, but rather that this sexual nature produces inculterated gender expression. Is it a moral evil then, to oppose the social acceptance of homosexual acts as unethical and to reject homosexual tendencies as unnatural? Having seen that the sexual ethics of natural law indicate human sexual orientation is designed to complement only the opposite gender, heterosexual unions should be the social ideal according to the reason of good-willed people. Judging from the results of the Prop 8 vote in California, the general public still considered monogamous, heterosexual unions to be marital by nature, while homosexuality, though increasing in popularity and social advocacy, remains a formidable barrier in the acceptability of a Catholic approach to homosexual ethics. Since Church teaching from natural law is clear that homosexuality is objectively disordered, the Vatican has been forced to defend the doctrine of human dignity and equality in spite of a theology, which renders the homosexual state of action sinful.

Just a few days ago on December 2^nd, 2008, Father Federico Lombardi, a Jesuit priest who direst the Vatican press office, offered a response to accusations that the Catholic Church is intolerant and bigoted against homosexuals.[22] Fr. Lombardi, responding to an accusation that Catholicis is biased against homosexuality because of a refusal to support a French movement in the “U.N. resolution to decriminalize homosexuality,” believing the next step would be as “imposition of homosexual marriage in natural law.”[23] Lombardi voiced Vatican opposition to same sex marriage not as an indication of a religious ethical position, but as a political movement which disregards human rights and dignity under the very name of respect. By the passing of this bill to legitimize homosexual marriage in Europe, the Vatican feels a religious pressure will descend upon Christian morality to legitimize homosexual unions as ethically acceptable, which runs contrary to the doctrine of the Catholic Church. Yet is a rejection of legitimate homosexuality intolerant discrimination against homosexuals?

Lombardi’s response indicates the Church’s consistency with trying to maintain the least amount of scandal as possible—in such a weighty issue, the choices of toleration versus cooperation are differentiated by very slight details. If the Church were to support homosexuality as an acceptable practice reflecting the image of God, it would be cooperating in what Pope Benedict XVI indicated actions stemming from an intrinsic moral evil.[24] To avoid as much evil as possible, the Catholic Church has chosen the position of toleration rather than formal or material cooperation in the evil of rebellion against God’s created nature, of which homosexuality is a manifestation. Instead, the Catholic Church recognizes the need to tolerate homosexuality, because of the greater importance of the human dignity of homosexual persons. Referencing the rights due to persons simply because of human dignity, Lombardi notes discrimination against homosexual persons because of sexual orientation is itself a sin: “not only the death penalty, but all violent or discriminatory penal legislations in relation to homosexuals.”[25]

Recognizing the difficulty in formulating an ethical position on the treatment of homosexual persons because of the natural law theology against homosexuality which seems to conflict with respect due simply because persons are humans, perhaps a more compassionate understanding of the Catholic position should be taken. According to Catholic teaching, homosexually gendered expression is a confused understanding of natural human sexual expression, though a homosexual has as much human dignity as any other person. Sin does not make a person less human. Since the Church cannot support homosexual acts, its toleration of them in favor of human dignity mirrors the compassion God Himself has towards us as sinful creatures. The valuable emphasis I gleaned from Rogers was that too often homosexuality is made the scapegoat, not only of all sexual sins, but of all sin in general. In the eyes of God, I am just as in need of Jesus’ redemption as a practicing homosexual; there should be no ethical distinction between my rights and those allotted to a homosexual. The degree to which my sin may be “natural” as opposed to homosexuality as “unnatural” in Catholic teaching, allowing me to receive Eucharist when a homosexual cannot, is a deeper question of difference between mortal and venial sin, a distinction which I do not believe God draws, but which may affect people to different degrees in their journeys towards holy union with God.

Incarnate Sociality: Heidegger and Dasein-with

The contribution of gender dynamics to Heidegger’s social ethic of Dasein

Due to the sojourning nature of Dasein, it is impossible for human being to be constantly authentic, constantly intentional in every action completed. Yet a state of being genuine, being as one is, should ideally accompany every action a person does. Finding that our freedom as human beings to make decisions which are genuine or authentic is not entirely situated in originality but is affect by other factors, such as those which are primordial to Dasein: the work-world and the social-world. Seeking an ontology of Dasein’s being, the trueness of Dasein’s possibilities, I am taking Heidegger up on his challenge of tradition: deconstructing part of his analysis of being through Dasein in the social world, and seeking to actualize the need for the social world in conjunction with a full understanding of being. If Dasein is primordially with others, then even in the work world, one finds oneself relation and engaging other Dasein, which aids in one’s understanding of one’s own being. By noting Heidegger’s omission of the positive influences of the ‘they’ world as well as contradictory interpretation of being as fundamentally with other human beings, I intend to demonstrate that Heidegger objectified Dasein by defaulting to a value of work over persons completing the work.

(1)Though a discussion of Dasein through Ricoeur’s model of being, composed of two axis, self and others, rather than a focus on individuality, I will discuss the necessity of complementary gender tensions to a complete understand of the being of Dasein. (2) Through surveying historical gender conflict, (a) patriarchical suppression of women and (b) feminist suppression of womanhood by adopting male roles for women or rejecting the dignity of manhood, I will continue the theme of objectification by discussion how the objectification of women by both men and women has led to creation of a theoretical ‘they’ world in which one can lose personal identity by performing a gender role. Finally, I will suggest that (3) it is only in respecting the differences that allow for interaction and personal formation between the genders that objectification of Dasein (male or female) can be avoided by determining men and women to be ‘equal but different.’ Such a philosophy of gender relations, based upon the Christian anthropology that man and woman were both created different in the image of God, will permit me to conclude that embodiment of sexual stereotypes is not necessary, but that male and female differences should be embraced, rather than trying to hold one to the standard of the other to be considered equal in human dignity.

I. Heidegger in Relation to Social Being and Gender:

A. Dasein in Ricoeurian Model, a lack of positive sociality:

Noting in Being and Time that the Being in analysis “is in each case mine,”[1] and is incommunicabilis, for I cannot assign the action of my life, because it is inherent in my being to live out. Since Dasein is fundamentally what it is now as well as its future possibilities, where I am in relation to the social world in which I find myself primordially thrown is characterized both by where my relationships with others stand now, and the possibilities each of those relationships has for the future. Since Dasein is constituted by care, a basic sort of being-in-the-world, a caring one, indicates a primordial sense of relationship and concern for other Dasien. The self is considered “’only’ as a way of Being of [Dasein]”[2] in the social world, in which actions and interactions between Dasein become functions for discovering the Being of Dasein

rather than the value of the Being of the other as part of self. Employing the Ricoeurian definition of the self as composed of two axis in being-towards-others, a fundamentally different kind of relationship between two Dasein as differing from that of Dasein and any Thing is permitted. To attempt to structure a social ethic of Dasein from the sparse and overwhelmingly negative Heideggarian opinion of sociality would produce an incomplete model of self, so Heidegger’s Dasein will be discussed in light of Ricoeur’s model.

Ricoeurian social ethic fundamentally differs from the Heideggarian anthropology in regards to the loss of self in the ‘they’ world. While a Heideggarian anthropology would suggest that ‘ipse without idem’ (self without others) is more authentic and unconfused by the ‘they’ world, Ricoeur regards the loss of ‘they’ or ‘other’ as a loss of both personal identity and temporal self.[3]

This fundamental difference of Dasein-Dasein relations as different from those between Dasein and an object of being with is ready to hand by these two axis if idem and ipse within the being of Dasein. By a break between self (ipse) and same (idem), Dasein is able to call itself before itself in question of its own being. The axis ipse calls my own being before myself, allowing me to become self-aware, though “this self-awareness is not self-understanding as such, or an appreciation of the meaning of oneself; but it is a prompt to self-understanding.”[4] Determining that the ipse prompts and understanding of self beyond the solitary conception of “I”, one realizes the social need of others to permit Dasein a genuine, authentic picture of self. Recognizing Heidegger’s tenant that Dasein is primordially situated within world, an “authentic Being-one’s-Self, does not detach Dasein from its world, nor does it isolate it so that it becomes a free-floating ‘I’.”[5] Finding oneself thrown into a world with others, Dasein’s condition of primordially with other Beings prevents understanding of the human experience apart from others.

Yet while authentic Being-one’s-Self is not solitary, Heidegger paints a very negative pictures of the relational situation in which Dasein is tied: “Dasein’s falling into the ‘they’ and the ‘world’ of its concern, is what we have called a ‘fleeing; in the face of itself.”[6] Turning away from itself, Dasein necessarily turns towards others, which is pejoratively laden in Being and Time with such connotations as anxiety and fear. Dasein ‘falls’ into such states of being as lost in the ‘theyness’ of the social world, fleeing not from some thing within its world, but interacting with an entity that “has the same kind of Being as the one that shrinks back.”[7] It is the idem of Dasein, this shared sense of Being that is threatened by its very own sort of being, a fellow human. Characterizing the possibilities of future possibilities in light of this shared Being, Heidegger indicates that fellow existence with humans in the social world, Being-in-the world as such, is characterized not only by care, but anxiety.

Finding this idem part of the identity which Ricoeur proposes for the self, a sameness and unity with other Dasein in a social sense, neglected and considered detrimental in Heidegger, one discovers Heidegger’s conception of self to be completely limited to the ipse identity. Heidegger’s emphasis on individuality colors others in the negative light of ‘they,’ an everyday source in which to lose authentic self. Even by denoting a certain mode of social function, that of ‘Dasein-with,’[8] Heidegger suggests an inauthentic mode of being human is necessary to function with others Noting Heidegger’s negative regard to the part of personal being which operates in the social world, confusion as to the formative function of society in shaping Dasein through relationship becomes apparent. While Heidegger insists, despite a critical view of social positivity, that persons cannot be treated as “Thinglike and substantial being,” an object, because human beings have essentially different constitutions from Things,[9] his profound neglect of discussion of social function suggests an objectification of the social world by default.

Heidegger objectifies being in the social world of Dasein by removing the natural social actions discussed in Being and Time such as idle chatter (gossip), play, and art to functions within the work world. By stating that “essentially the person exists only in the performance of intentional acts, and is therefore essentially not an object,”[10] Heidegger demonstrates how persons in the social world must act socially to be considered persons, not things. Yet in his imbalanced consideration of Dasein, Heidegger has removed the social actions natural to the with-world, reducing persons objects at the mercy of public manipulation. Noting that publicness is obscured by the ‘they’ through its constant presence of being alongside, Heidegger considers society to have subsumed Dasein’s agency, rendering him “disburdened” of necessary cares in life,[11] now merely a social object. It is this sort of social objectification which I am addressing within this essay; claiming that human beings are rendered more aware of self, not less, through social relations. While gender complementarity is one of the characteristics of the idem self into which Dasein finds itself thrown, Heidegger neglects this discussion with many of the positive developments of the social world.

B. Sexuality as an Ignored Trait of Dasein:

Before embarking on the quest for the being of woman as different, but relating to the being of man, it is necessary to first introduce me use of the terms “gender” and “sex” in relation to Heidegger’s discussion of Being in Dasein. Gender as defined for my purposes as a relationship with beings (denoted as “others”) discovers distinction and particularity through being with others. Self is known through others, but self is also lost through others, as Heidegger proposes by the thrownness of Dasein to “others”: Noting that a primordial essence of Dasein is its everydayness, Heidegger notes that there is no way to separate the everyday state of with others from the world of others: “In it, out of it, and against it, all genuine understanding, interpreting, and communicating all re-discover and appropriating anew, are performed.”[12] Thus Dasein in its first instant of being is incapable of knowing itself apart from its first-discovered state of existence, which is wholly determined by Dasein’s state of “Being-in-the-world.” Heidegger notes that this state of “in world” is permeated by “the public,” so that Dasein has been conditioned from the first to know itself in a context defined by that frame of Dasein which is other to itself. Gender is this context which Dasein finds itself thrown into, and out of the mass of public, Dasein must decipher its being in the context of gender—i.e., discover its mode of being-in-the-world as definitively male or female, particular to self– through the publicly assigned construct of gender.

In regards to gender and sexual being, then, gender is the state in which being first discovers itself, the means socially determined by the public world of how Dasein is expected to conduct itself. Understanding gender as primordial to being-in-the-world, which in the state of everydayness is where Dasein first comes before itself, one must recognize gender as a characteristic particular to the state of being-with other Dasein. Sex, on the other hand, is particular to Dasein as my own, a primordial state of being in which no state of Being-with Dasein is necessary. As Heidegger asserts that Being-with is as innate a quality of Dasein as Being-in-the-world, and as I have assigned gender to the interactions of Dasein within the public world, it must be distinguished that due to the relative nature of gender, gender interactions are not uniform throughout universal state of being-with of Dasein. For example, if one were to grow up raised by wolves and live solely in the jungle, as Mowgli of Ruyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book is known to have done, one’s being will retain the quality of being-with other dasein, but one will not understand the concept of gender, which is distinguished to the world of Dasein.

Having discussed the social when attempting to discern the being of woman, as distinct from the being of men, it is important to consider the world of gender into which woman finds herself. As Heidegger notes the temporal quality of Dasein, that category of being embracing both degrees of humanity, male and female, history is one of the contributing factors to current gender constructs. Especially in uncovering the being of woman, history evidences the interaction of male and female as subject and object, creating a type for the being of woman that was lost in the public definition of male hierarchy. Confusing the distinction between gender and sex, historically, a woman’s “’sex’ is thus expressed by her ‘gender’ which is then fully known and consecrated”[13] as her way of being-in-the-world. Why must the question of the historical treatment of women be asked at all? Heidegger would not provide a suitable answer to such question, for in evading the question of gender, Heidegger ignores the ethical discussion of being-to-being relationship within the co-world, for which he is criticized by Levinas, who was deeply influenced by Heidegger, on his overly individualistic celebration of existence.[14]

While Heidegger attempts to define a neutral potentiality in the primordial existence of being, neglecting the ethical quality intrinsic to human beings. Levinas’ discussion of ethics as essential to being[15] resurrects the concept of justice as intrinsic to human nature, which will be crucial to my discussion of the historical distinction of female sex versus gender. For Levinas, however, feminine is omitted from philosophical ethics[16], which contradicts his tenants of justice, merely replicating “ patriarchal structures that feminists have challenged” for years and years, defining woman as the other, or in Levinain terminology, “alertity[17].”[18] Noting the contribution of Levinas’ philosophy to interactions between Dasein defined as face-to-face, enhancing Heidegger’s very impersonal pervasion of co-existence, I will employ Levinas’ language of face-to-face while also adding to my discussion of Heideggarian theory of dasein’s being in relation to other dasein; in addition, I will alter Levinas’ conception of alterity to include women, not as forgotten “others,”[19] which is unethical by today’s consideration of human existence, but as co-experiencing this sense of ethical discovery in oppositeness to another human being (by way seeing the reflection of one’s own potentiality in the being of a person that is not one’s own). Thus employing Heidegger’s discussion of lostness of self-being in gender and Levinas’ self-exemplifying concept of women as the other, seeking to assert themselves as equally other with men, I will turn to brief historical account of how the being of woman has been subjected as object and other with regards to male being.

In presenting the historical picture of female being, I will discuss how the objectification and relegation of women as “other” to male normality indicate the presence of relationship, as well as the unjust influences of anti-feminine (anti-feminine indicating an inequality in bias of male favor within the public sphere) gender constructions into which the female being still finds herself thrown, and to which extreme feminism has arisen as a negative reaction. Indicating that two wrongs don’t right an unjust public conception of female being, perhaps even if my concluding response to both the historical picture of woman and that of extreme feminism is insufficient in its own right, it will provide a third wrong, adding balance to two polar perspectives of woman’s being through biology. While bodies are the central landscape through which social interaction occurs,[20] objectification of female body alienates the genders from authentic relationship with the other, ultimately alienating one from a true understanding of self. Consideration of personhood should not be divorced from the physical body into which one finds oneself thrown (seen in patriarchal objectification of woman), nor totally focused upon the body of self to the exclusion of the other (the fault of extreme feminism) because such are objectifications of Dasein’s being into Thing versus person.

II. Patriarchy and Feminism: Reverse Objectifications of the Female Being:

A. Patriarchal Domination of the Female Being through Anatomical Differences:

Throughout the course of Western history, the context in which Heidegger’s philosophy was born, an intensely male hierarchical system of gender defined the spatial and relational contexts in which a woman was permitted to explore the possibility of her being. In his work Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, Thomas Laqueur recounts the sensitive discovery of the female anatomy in the male world and the manner in which the biological structure of woman’s body has been interpreted through male terms through the dominance of man in the public arena. Defining a woman in terms of her sexual and reproductive capacities suggests the Levinian projection of “other” to the being of woman as a sex-object to men leads one to question “imperatives of culture or the unconscious dictated language of sex, of how the female body was defined and differentiated from the male’s.”[21] Lacquer writes to show the effect of culture on assumptions about sex, leading to social gender roles, demonstrates how the men tell a woman how she is to be; and somehow it all comes back to sex. “Whatever one thought about woman and their rightful place in the world could, it seemed, be understood in terms of bodies endlessly open to the interpretive demands of culture,” Lacquer says.[22]

Understanding male-determined “facts” about female bodies as the foundations for Western societal construct[23], the overarching theme of bodies determining social value, which translates into the power and control exerted over women. When speaking of Western society, then in its historical context (i.e., through the feminist revolution leading up to current day gender politics and conceptions), this essay will assume the normalcy of male-biased distinctions between the sexes. Recognizing the inherent equation of gender with sex in Western society in which biological sexuality is transformed “into products of human activity,”[24] it is crucial to comprehend the danger of looking towards the physical body as a central reference for female identity. The historical concept of men judging women to be inferior because of different physicality has relegated women to narrow channels of exploring identity under the construct of gender roles in both the public and private spheres of society. Briefly overviewing these limitations, I will illuminate the female social rebellion in terms of embracing or rejecting the feminine body as that which is primordially, existentially encountered in the quest for understanding the being of oneself in the world

From the time of the Greeks, though each specific cultural allotted its women different freedoms and constraints, “a woman’s primary duty was to produce male heirs.”[25] This distinctly sexual qualification of feminine being was evidenced in female relegations to the sphere of the private world. Prohibited from owning property, holding public offices, or voting, the majority of women found themselves placed in . Beginning in the Greek west, male philosophy idealizing reason and intellect polarized “’male’ self-control and its opposite, a convulsive violence, associated with ‘womanish’ lack of self restraint”[26] introduced the idea of male necessity for female comprehension which would later influence Christian Anthropology. While commonly limited to the private sphere of life in Greek society, women were permitted more autonomy in the none-the-less patriarchal society of Rome. Adopting Greek ideals of reason, Roman society perpetuated the belief that femininity was weak and unable of its own accord, assigning women in position of influence to the supervision of a man[27]. This sexual definition of women continued in the pervasion of Christian belief, which greatly influenced later gender politics to which the feminist movement revolted.

In the ancient construct of normalized male being, women were not entirely powerless to define their being through the minimalized conception of femininity. The Church in antiquity, transitioning between an era of martyrs and persecution to being the socio-political authority itself, permitted women to transcend the stigma of female being by becoming ‘male.’ Any strong or virtuous action demonstrated on the part of a woman was not characterized as a part of the woman’s female nature, but rather she was regarded as having transcended feminine depravity to be in essence “the self-same as men.”[28] Thus the essence of being and the physical body were divorced, reflecting biological conception of the female body as that of an inverted male.[29] This in antiquity, the male was seen as the only true human (i.e. the only image of God),[30] and female merely a deficient male. These renderings determining female being as a corrupted expression of male being on biological bases emphasized the similarities between male and female reproductive systems in order to evidence the inferiority of the being of woman to that of man. A one-sex mentality of being in terms of male biology continued to demean women through the medieval and Renaissance eras of western society.

However, as Lacquer notes, “The cultural politics of at least two genders is never in equilibrim with the ‘biology,’ or alternative cultural politics, of one sex,” insisting that a two-sex conception of human being allows for an equally enculturated definition of female being from within a male hierarchy of biology. The Enlightenment period saw an evolution of two sexes as a further result of scientific innovation and a new emphasis on scholasticism. Determining that self as a thinking subject according to Catersian philosophy was the androgynous mind rather than body, a new explanation for the differences in man and woman was derived from biological differences in sexual function[31]. Since empirical evidence was no longer deemed a determination of the worth of female self, biology became a tool to disclose the bar women from the public sphere, reinstating a male hierarchy through different means: pregnancy and menstruation[32]. During these two cyclic functions of the female body, men deemed women incapable of public performance, thus “naturally” dependant upon the superior male biological function for political voice. Tired of being ogled as sexual objects under male dominance of political female personhood, women initiated “the feminist discourse of difference”[33] in search of a voice by which to define themselves.

B. Feminist Obscuring of the Being of Woman Apart from Men:

Through the historical dialog of female being, it is crucial to note that in the case of a patriarchy where women were deemed biologically deficient to men as well as in post-Enlightenment thought where “self” was conceptual rather than corporeal, female being was still subjugated to male objectivity on the basis of physicality. Western society has remained lodged in initial experience of lostness, which is found in the everyday Being-in-the-world, and has consequently lost any means of understanding woman apart from her body. While social revolutions have attempted to allow women being apart from an assigned social category, the existential Being of woman is difficult for males to overlook when considering the whole of her self. Suggesting that the body is a crucial element to understanding the being of woman, though not the exclusive factor which lies at her disposal, the female body having been mutilated as an object of male projection for centuries. Tracing the historical context into which the modern feminist movement was born, women as defining women apart from men arises not only in a biological sense, but to the abandonment an essential self.

Initially, women began defining our being in the feminist movement on the very tenants against which they were being compared: physiological difference to men. Quoting Dame Millicent Fawcett, Laqueur notes the females desire to represent women not “because there is no difference between men and women; but rather because of the difference between them.”[34] Since the Victorian conception male and female propagated by feminists has evolved towards a denial of an essential being of self, the psychic subject is considered androgynous, rejecting physiological indications of definitive sexuality. Having rejected the male proposition of defining woman and the female gender role by existential difference, feminism in its most extreme sense questions the justice of not only gender, but sexual distinctions. Initially reacting to male-gendered supremacy, feminism seeks to define woman by woman, rejecting the need for female interaction with male in female self-discovery. In surveying the arguments of modern feminism, I will show the deficiencies of solely defining female being by women, requiring both the physiological differences/similarities of men and women as well as the essential differences.

Viewing essentialism as an appeal “to a pure or original femininity, a female essence, outside the boundaries of the social and thereby untainted (though perhaps repressed) by a patriarchal order,”[35] feminists view essentialism as a threat to the autonomy of female expression. The unifying generalization feminism employs in some of its liberating principles for the being of woman is perceived as a burden which disallows individuation, thus producing a similar power hierarchy as the patriarchal misogyny feminism is attempting to critique. Rejecting a unified concept of essential womanhood, feminism becomes deconstructive in defining both gender and sexuality. Noting “gender is separate from biology and takes shape in concrete, historically changing social relationships,”[36] current feminist scholarship rejects a dichotomy between woman’s sex and gender, though maintaining an earlier argument that the being of woman is not destined to a specific role by her biological sex. Arguing that even sexual differences in the biology of male and female are socially constructed, woman is forced to look for an understanding of being beyond any relation to an other, the difference and attraction of male gender.

Before the whole rejection of male can be comprehended in the feminist understanding of female being, the foundations of feminist conception of being must be more closely examined. For the feminist, the concept of “self” being an intrinsic identity rooted in an inner psychic depth is non-existent, but rather woman exists as “subject” apart from the perceivably social constructs of sex and gender[37]. Butler claims that what Western society has sought to identify as the being of self can only be definitively identified when being is divided into two parts: self and other (for other is needfully rejected in order to discern particularities of self). If self is inherently identified in sexual particularity of woman to man, for instance, feminism equates the sexual identity of woman as typified as dependent upon socially constructed (in the case of the west, male-constructed) gender roles. Noting that historical misogyny of women by men became naturalized through “being constructed as an inner or physical necessity”[38] to adhere to gender constructs, Rubin rejects psyche as an inner depth definition of human being as confining to male, hierarchical demands of woman’s being in sexuality.

With the rise of the sexual revolution of women to gain equality with men, feminism has taken on forms in varying range, the most drastic of which seeks to define women apart from the existence of men—women as defined by women alone. This branch of radical feminism is popular in advocacy of Lesbianism, which as particular to women, will be included in my address of the identity of a female being. The Lesbian movement tends in the most extreme strains, side with queer theory in supposing that there is no essential self in terms of sexual identity, but rather an androgynous being exists to which one must formulate gender. Judith Butler questions, “If a sexuality is to be disclosed, what will be taken as the true determinant of its meaning: the phantasy structure, the act, the orifice, the gender, the anatomy?”[39] Questioning the origins of the sex identity behind the gender, Butler notes that none of these qualities are sufficient to identify sexuality, because a full-disclosure of sexuality is not discernable from action.[40] But are women able to define woman without the presence of man? If woman is independent of the definitions of womanhood postulated by male misogyny in order to subdue or subjugate in order to feel some sense of power, how indeed is woman indefinaeable apart from man?

Supposing that engendered action does not form the type of sexuality in which one finds one’s identity, I propose to define the being of woman in contract to the feminist theory of women defined by women, entering the conversation of gender politics by asserting that the sexes cannot be understood apart from one another through discussion of the historical sense in which women have been understood, the feminist premise by which the being of woman is comprehended, and formulating a distinctly biblical theological philosophy as to the nature of woman, created equal but different from man in the image of God. Both patriarchal misogyny women and female objectification of self in response to male objectification both focus the entirety of the genders’ sexual identity on the genitals, which “is a sign of alienated sexuality.”[41] Recognizing the deep misunderstandings that have led to objectification not only of women, but also of men; this social inauthenticity leads to gender constructs referred to in Heideggarian term as lostness in the ‘they;’ Theorizing that objectification can only be avoided through equal ethical treatment of women with men, the differences between the sexes cannot be overlooked as crucial factors producing the relationship of self to others which discloses the self of Dasein to itself.

III. Equal But Different: Women in Relation With Men

Articulating my position as an expansion of Heidegger’s discussion of the being of Dasein through Levinas’ alterity as well as Ricoeur’s dual-axis self, I contest both the biological conclusions of patriarchical though that women are inferior to men because of biology or intellect as well as feminist assertions that separate women from men as objectifications which seek to eradicate the unity of difference natural to human sexual ethics. As Heidegger voices, the human condition into which we are born, male or female sex, is not a result of conscious choice of the will, but we find ourselves thrown into bodies, thus automatic identities and forms of relating between the genders. To separate one gender as superior to the other on the basis of sexual function is to objectify not one, but both genders, which even a weak Heideggarian ethic. From the Levinasian perspective, objectification is unethical, because the other is a subject, which must call forth my self into its potentiality. Ricoeur’s theory of self can also be employed to reject the objectification of women as ‘Things’ because if “self” includes both similarities and differences, applied to gender, the idem (being “same”) corresponds with the gender which one is complimentary to one’s own gender, while ispe is the same gender as oneself.

Understanding the sameness of the idem-identity as not selfhood, but distinct from individual identity, Ricoeur suggests that “selfhood of oneself implies otherness to such an intimate degree that one cannot be thought of without the other, that instead passes into the other.”[42] Since the idem-identity is based on the sense of sameness, I have suggested that in terms of gender, the complementarity of the opposite sexes in relationship provides a ‘complete’ picture of humanity in the image of God (though it is theologically valid to speak of individuals as ‘complete’) in terms of interpersonal relationships. If one were to argue the ‘one-body’ anthropology of antiquity, male and female could be seen as two varying perspectives on the shared condition of humanity: e.g., while the female body is not a deficient variation on the male, woman was taken out of man in the Garden of Eden. Arguing the Edenic depiction of humankind, one man and one woman created from one being and separated in sexuality, complementarity dictates that a unique unity which, though celibacy is equally as fulfilling to the Christian teaching that ever soul longs for unity with God, offers a singular image of God:

The fact that man “created as man and woman” is the image of God means not only that each of them individually is like God, as a rational and free being. It also means that man and woman, created as a “unity of the two” in their common humanity, are called to live in a communion of love, and in this way to mirror in the world the communion of love that is in God… [43]

Maintaining the argument that social unity is possible only with the fact of difference, objectification becomes not only the depersonalization of the being of a fellow Dasein, but also an attempt to make that with is other the same as self. Complementary relationships evoke a sense of one’s true state of thrownness through recognition and interaction with the other, finding qualities and care evoked for the other that would not arise from a world filled with sameness. If man and woman were really separated from the first body of mankind, then unity of two presents a more authentic unity than two of the same sex. Since the physiological capacity of human unity most readily presents itself as evidence of the mutually beneficial relationship of one sex to another, I will conclude with a consideration of the equal dignity of the two sexes in light of, not in spite of, their different biological capacities, focusing on woman.

While gynocentric feminism argued for the superiority of woman over man because of her biological capacity to nurture and bring forth life into the world, the male role in the producing and nurturing life is undeniable. Avoiding a reductionistic consideration that values the male and female Dasein because of their reproductive sexual functions, I propose that there is a deeper metaphysical difference to the gendered interactions of men and women who, acting as ‘other’ to one another, draw into awareness an authentic understand of the being of oneself, more of the self than interactions with the same gender. Avoiding objectification of woman as seen in feminist and patriarchal politicizations of sexuality, Ricoeur’s model of the self contributes in my proposition that unity requires difference, and thus one gender should not be depersonalized for the sake of the other—in the end, both sexes deserve equal human dignity fulfilling difference capacities, both sexual and beyond the biology of the human person.

Memoirs of the Drawing of a Feminist Icon
Pilgrimage from religion of the body to devotion of the soul

Everything about my spiritual journey this semester has culminated in the depiction of Feminine Imitatio Christi and the two accompanying collages I am submitting as my “icons.” Embedded within the images these works contain is a desperate struggle between me and my God, who is women into the most intimate threads of my being, and to continue His work of conforming me to the image of Christ. From the first day class, I contemplated my final work… which not usually compelled to artistry, was going to be an essay on the mystical depictions of St. Catherine of Siena in her mystical marriage to Jesus and St. Theresa of Avila’s ecstasy. In beginning my research, I stumbled across a book called Holy Anorexia by Rudolph Bell, and became more intrigued with the idea of feminine holiness. Over the course of the semester, I have struggled with what it means for women to be made equal but different from men in terms of God’s image between the sexes. And so the desire to compile a drawing of the images which depicted these struggles. As I began to imagine and express them, I grew bolder in my questions and in my embrace of the quest I found myself on to reclaim the female personhood, as well as the female body to be transfigured into that of Christ’s.

Drawing the Images:
The first idea I had was that of a crucified, anorexic woman. I felt it would be more powerful to have the woman suspended in mid air, but to convey the power of a crucifixion, I thought it necessary to include a cross in the picture. Thus, the central figure of the drawing is a bony, anorexic-looking woman vaguely drawn, sharing the center of the paper with the Sacred Heart of Jesus, encircled by a crown of thorns, topped with fiery passion, and bleeding with stigmata similar to the crucified victim. This female figure could not be more clearly depicted because she herself is not what is to be seen; for to focus on the woman as the sacrifice would be to objectify the what rather than see the why: she has become Christ for those who see her. This figure was inspired by my readings amongst the Virgin Martyrs; mirroring that which is described of Blandina of Lyons:
Blandina was hung on a post and exposed as bait for the wild animals that were let loose on her. She seemed to hang there in the form of a cross; she prayed continually in a strong voice, strengthening the brethren in their ordeal. In their torment the brethren there saw with their eyes Christ crucified for them in the person of their sister, to assure them that all who suffer for the glory of Christ will live forever in communion with the living God.
None of the animals touched Blandina, so she was taken down from the post and led back to the prison. She was kept for a new struggle. The victory won in further contests would bring final and inevitable defeat to the wicked serpent, and strengthen her brothers by her example. Tiny, weak and insignificant, she was clothed in the strength of Christ, the mighty and invincible athlete.

In line of inspiration, the second image was the altered Virgin of Guadeloupe into the matron of Guadeloupe. I seem to be recalling a conversation I can’t quite be confession to have had with a coworker at the library on the virginity of Mary and why we Catholics have this doctrine of Mary’s immaculate conception… which was never necessary for me to understand Jesus as Holy. Nor diminish her role as His mother! Yet one could take a pregnant Virgin of Guadeloupe as acceptable, but I wanted to push the Catholic theological limits a bit. One idea with this Guadeloupe image I was running with came off of my anorexic crucified victim (mainly from Bell’s book which I found fascinating) on female rebellion to male hierarchical domination. Writing a history paper on women in early church leadership, I found the exalted status of virginity as an ideal a little too easily acceptable, so challenged myself in making this figure a matron, not just a mother. I tried to depict this paradox by adding a lily, the symbol of virginity, and a crown of thorns, nearby the Guadeloupe image.

I still felt the need for a cross behind my crucified victim to portray the message, but felt the distance from the cross itself would speak to my ardent desire not to draw a heretical picture, as well as suggest a perceived separation (and perhaps real) between a woman and her ability to truly imitate Christ. Part of the human condition is separated from exact replication of Christ’s sacrifice, since no one is going to be crucified today. I contemplated adding nails, protruding from the cross as a sign of a finished sacrifice, but left the cross open to allow each to interpret it as their burden to bear with Christ. Yet still, the cross could not stand alone. I imagined a figure holding the cross, as in the Throne of Grace, where the Father holds up the crucified Jesus, and the Holy Spirit hovers in them both. One could read a similar Throne of Grace-like depiction in the 3 upper figures: The crucified anorexic, the Matron of Guadalupe, and Hagia Sophia, who supports the cross.

I settled upon Sophia as bearer of the cross because she, Wisdom, guides us on our path with God, speaking His words to our hearts. I have read about how Shekinah (Hebrew feminine sometimes used for Spirit of God) was the type for the Goddess Wisdom, and so the Holy Ghost in Christian theology can be read as a woman. I maintained the classical icon from Eastern Orthodox reverence for Hagia Sophia, though her upraised crux could be interpreted as a warning gesture or a sign of victory, that the crucified victim has conquered and achieved holiness, or that Christ has removed the nails from the cross so each may die to self. Sophia supports the cross as wisdom, warning all who approach its path of imitation to count the costs before doing so.

Even the sacred heart bleeds with stigmata similar to the victim’s; if one has a theology in a culture of death, especially to the passions of human existence. The flames in the heart between the anorexic victim and Matron of Guadaloupe indicates that there is no hierarchy between sexual statuses of women (celibate or not), as well as the love of Christ. A crucifx of an anorexic ideal mingles with the real world as a cheerful young woman rejoices over the stigmata. A naïve and beautiful picture of a young woman who may not be realizing what these wounds mean for the rest of her life. Maybe she is too young and in love with her Savior to feel different… but she is receiving the wounds via an imperfect woman. Notice the strength of the angel holding her, though, she isn’t really falling.

The other ‘earthly’ figure is the woman crouching at the foot of the crucifix, wearing the thorns missing from the anorexic victim’s head. She too punishes her body, though it is through inferiority, not starvation. I contemplated making this definitely Mary Magdalene, washing the feet of the crucified victim, but this depiction of another suffering woman, whose hair flows over the feet of the anorexic, may indeed be offering a grace or mercy to the suffering woman. Yet the crouching Mary holds deeper significance, gesturing towards the chalice, as if to offer the Eucharist or collect the blood of the victim. Looking up to heaven, she still waits for a course of action.

The addition of the St. Hannah was to compliment the stigmata victim collapsing in bliss, who was drawn as my twin sister. St. Hannah, the mother of the prophet Samuel, praised God in similar prayer to Mary’s magnifacot… and showed the kind of relationship I think God invites us as women to have, direct and personal. Though I struggle with that (brought up later in contributing thought as female misogyny). I feel very blessed to bear both St. Hannah and St. Mary’s names in my own name, and so felt as a true personal reflection; Hannah’s contribution to the imitation of Christ for women could not be left out.

Contributing Thought Processes: Just a collection of things I processed while this piece was evolving.
A Reasonable Faith?
How Orthodox Catholic Doctrine Fostered Dualism in Women

All too familiar with “be holy as I am holy,” Christian women in the developing hierarchy of the Catholic church found themselves in a fundamentally different place in the order of creation than their fellow human beings, men. Considered inferior to men in ancient society for numerous reasons, among those the facts of monthly menstruation and Eve’s part in acquiring original sin, women were denied the basic human right of being considered created in the image of God. Relegated to such a sub-human state, holiness was unimaginable in the womanly state and body. Thus, in order to transcend the womanly state to attain male virtue, women found themselves consigned to a sort of spirit-flesh dualism, even though theologically the Church condemned dualism at the Council of Trent via Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria. Caught in a paradoxical state between condemnation of dualism and degradation of femaleness (spirit and body), one can easily see the appeal of heretical movements to marginalized women: faced with the fact of dualism to achieve holiness, would a woman rather be considered male or legitimized in her femininity in that state of holiness? When prohibited from leadership positions within the church, women obtained a further motivation to practice faith in “heretical” traditions, which permitted equal authority between men and women.

Towards and Equality of Difference: I am a devout laywoman in a modern Catholic Church; You are the Vatican Council of Bishops, assembled to hear my plea: Why is it that what qualifies me to teach the children of the church discredits me from teaching men? Flash back: I am a dedicated virgin in the early 4th century, you are a collection of bishops gathered over the controversy I have stirred: why is it that what permits me to give and nurture life within my home prohibits me from extending a similar spirit of life in public? My trans-centennial woman-selves are presenting the Church with the same case: why is my sexuality lesser than a man’s? Why am I judged in light of my sexual status and function, while men are never qualified sexually? Of course it doesn’t take rocket science or metaphysics to evidence difference between me and a man. But maybe there’s more to both of us than meet’s the eye. I am neither advocating that we women be divorced from our sexual possibilities not that we be fatalistically confined to them: where is the equality of Christ for women and our bodies in the Catholic Church?

Ecstasy of Faith Imperfectly Enfleshed
The Spiritual Experience of St. Catherine of Siena and St. Therese of Avila in light of Alleged Eating Disorders

Idea: St. Catherine of Siena and St. Therese of Avila, two well-known young mystic women, canonized in Catholic tradition, are recorded to have experienced fantastic encounters with Jesus, immortalized in holiness in various works of art. While devoutly religious, these two young women were not so inhumanely spiritual as to be divorced from the flesh, though each attempted her own form of godliness through aestheticism. This form of holiness was the cry from each as an impassioned soul, deeply in love with God, to be freed from the social constraints that rendered these her a passive object, subject to the imposition of male desire. Deeming the desire repulsive and her own desire thus impure, both Catherine and Therese directed the burning embers of life within their young bodies to devotion to the Lord Jesus Christ. Their delicate spiritual natures inclined them towards the church, and their passion drove them to severe acts of aestheticism, allowing for mystical experiences such as the stigmata, visions, and sensations which were deeply rooted not only in the young women’s intensely devoted dispositions, but also in their physiological conditions which were stringently maintained under obligation of life, barely considered because of deference to spirit. Social construct propelled these young women’s spirituality—religious responses, which were deeply spiritual because we women cannot divorce from our bodies

I find it fascinating that we never try and change Mary, but just let her be a woman, although virgin, thus without sin. So to achieve salvation, at least out act in it, to accept Jesus, why do the extremely religious favor abstinence and struggle with food? Fleshly appetites of course… and in Holy Anorexia, Bell suggests they are related. I wonder why men never seemed so strictly policed as to purity. Augustine was a rampant womanist after his conversion and he remains canonized. So strange. The things we do to Jesus out of love for Him.

Is this analogy too extreme: I have researched in the past the prophet Jeremiah’s day… wondering what would compel a woman to sacrifice her baby… the baby legitimized her womanhood, made her a little more than an object. External. In aesthetics, we have women fighting the internal, maybe they were then too… by remaining virgin to be holy… can I use a comparison to an abortion for such sacrifice, internal? I propose as an analogy for these women, perhaps, instead of talking about them killing children they never had, seeing their maintained state of sexual innocence, self-enforced, as such a sacrifice: desperate devotion because of the desperate measures in which they found themselves socially. I am aware than Catherine expressed a desire for motherhood, if only it did not require marriage, I believe Therese may have as well. A combination of their self-enforced stringent lives as well as the eating disorders causes my imagination to propose a similar sacrifice to that of the Jeremian women: yet internal this time, since both remained virgin… comparing to their own degradation of their womanhood to abortion rather than infanticide.

Slightly tangenting, Jesus’ lady friends were all sexual variant: widows, hemorrhages, prostitutes, virgins. Its an interesting combination

Misogyny: of Women and by Women (Not Always Mutually Exclusive)

“We are seekers. We desire to know an authentic God. We want our faith to help us understand moral and ethical choices in work, education, economics, politics, and even out families. We want to integrate spirituality into every facet of our lives. We are questing for voices that have never been heard before. We are reclaiming women’s spirituality and listening to the voices of nondominant cultures to help us find our way. We are a generation of questioners. We do not want to be told what to do, what to think or believe. We insist on figuring it out for ourselves. Faith must make sense and seem logical. It must stand up to face our challenges. We want to encounter God, not merely learn about God. Our spirituality must be grounded in this perpetual search.” (Swan, Lisa. The Forgotten Desert Mothers.151-2)

In the middle of my young life, at the core of my being, I have these things called questions. The rather bluntly stated truth of what is above comes from a book I have just finished on my quest. I am challenged to the core of my tradition, to the core of my being, to be authentic, for only there is Jesus truly revealed in me and do I really know my Jesus. What hinders me, well, I think to be transparent, there is something in my core that is afraid to probe places because I think others will cease their love. As long as my questions and wonderings remain anonymous, people don’t care who or what I am, but find something in me open and desiring to know them enough to engage in a dialogue of life, which I think is an expression of love. I can love and talk to anyone, I think, because Jesus did, and I want my heart to be His. Do I? Another, story, no not always. But the sheer fact is I imagine I can. But I know I hold back, I am terrified of losing the love connection with people. Does that element of care make me human or evidence that I really don’t love Jesus enough?

I am challenged on both sides by women in leadership… and Martin Heidegger whom I have just read for class warns me that “fallenness,” the act of being determined or swayed substantially by society against my inner inclination is inauthentic, therefore, what inside me could Jesus be saying. He must speak often through a nature I don’t here. On Tuesday, I was asked why I resisted women in leadership, priesthood. I have never cared for the idea—perhaps I am prejudice against my own sex. Misogyny of women… I hope that is not my authentic place of being, and if it is, I mean to change it and be determined out of love. Do I need to be determined? Everything hardly seems as set in life as it is often advocated. More from Heidegger’s readings today, I realize something that my hands are shakingly reaching out to accept: that life comes from within. Jesus lives in my heart, and as much as I want to find Him in others and need to, how I am to be with Him, with others, with my very self cannot be externally determined.

Do I even believe what I just wrote; I think I must, now. And so long, Jesus and I have struggled because I naturally go inward, naturally repel the feminine of me, naturally deny by my very life the weakness I have been given for blessing to allow love. Because I am so afraid of it. I have been just like everyone else, giving into the temptation of allowing the public society determine the condition of my interior life… I care far too much about what other people think. Yet, how can I not care, in love? I must be fundamentally confusing what it means to deny myself and pick up my cross to follow Jesus. I am no longer asking to by martyred, Rabbi warned me that would come with loving like Jesus. It is this whole loving business I still don’t understand. I think I am still operating out of a presupposition that I must please in order to gain enough love to love in return, to be allowed to love as it were, because I am doing things still to try and qualify my love. You can have all this world, but give me Jesus, really? Where is the line of Jesus in the world and Jesus in heaven… I must make my heaven on earth, be one with the people, but not at expense of Jesus. I have no sense of balance or direction there.

I have a very conditioned belief structure and keep my thoughts on gender minimal, because it seems a two-edged sword. I talk with my male friends enough to know that some have felt incredibly unwary with a woman questioning social structure. Yet there are definitely, as my professor at the Franciscan school told me and demonstrated within me Tuesday, more men advocating women’s roles then maybe women ourselves. The misogyny of women, she called the movement. Maybe I hold back and doubt, because I just want us to be able to be women… and I really don’t know much about what that naturally means. I am not always very submissive, though part of me just collapses when it comes to Jesus. Intimacy is formed, to me, in the open exchange which can involve some disagreement and struggle. I don’t know what God and Jesus think about men versus women other than the words in that Holy Bible and the multiple ways I have heard those words interpreted.

“Not all courses are suitable for all people. You should have confidence in your own disposition. For many it is profitable to live in community; for others it is helpful to withdraw on their own…. Many people have found salvation in a city while imagining the conditions of a desert. And many, though on a mountain, have been lost by living the life of townspeople. It is possible for one who is in a group to be alone in thought, and for one who is alone to live mentally with a crowd.” (Life of [Amma] Syncletica)

What This Work Has Led Me to Conclude: There is so much to learn and explore and uncover about the female imitation of Christ, and it will include pushing all my conservative limits, beginning with a potentially scandalous drawing, to get the message across. Must remain balanced, and not launch into any theory to the point of being lost in it. Embodied theology even in contrasting male and female hagiography in my history class has drawn me to a realization that these bodies must be imagined to be able to imitate Christ, even in the mystical sense I prefer, so that we are more open to the fluidity of His love.