Book Review: Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740-1845 by Catherine A. Brekus

Catherine A. Brekus. Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740-1845. (Gender and American Culture.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1998. Pp. x, 466. Cloth $49.95, paper $17.95.

Spinning an intricate thread with which to follow the path of rediscovering the stories of evangelical female preachers who influenced the first and second Great Awakening up until the pre-Civil War revivals, Catherine Brekus in Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740-1845 considers women of varying class and race. Recovering the significant impacts of these women on their evangelical churches in a moving towards recognized denominations, Brekus relies upon primary sources including letters, journals and memoirs along with published reports of camp meetings, religious periodicals, pamphlets and books printed by the women themselves, in parish records or the writings of a male preachers, along with a vast collection of secondary sources. As if restoring a disintegrated work of art, Brekus paints a picture of female religious leadership, which neither conforms to the silent, submissive stereotypes of eighteenth and nineteenth century women, nor the radical social activist positions of early feminists, “platform speakers,” who advocated not only women’s suffrage and reproductive rights, but also the abolition of slavery.
Though a detailed historical work, Strangers and Pilgrims is a useful resource not only for scholars, but clergy and lay people interested in discovering not only the general themes of female evangelists but also the specific struggles women like Harriet Livermore faced. Viewing the King James Bible as the literal Word of God, female evangelists struggled to fulfill their unpaid call to preaching financially by selling handiwork, tracts and books, relying on charity, or relying on the salaries of their husbands. In spite of all the controversy surrounding these women who traversed social expectations of women’s silence in public and religious spheres, most of the female evangelists tended to endorse conservative political position. It is this middle position between traditionalism and radical thinking that Brekus notes is representative of “the same values as countless numbers of anonymous women who sat in church pews every Sunday.” (7)
Drawing out a more realistic picture of women’s lives than the commonly assumed repression of women, Brekus depicts ordinary women who fervent spiritual concerns did not even broach the realm of religious power politics: these female evangelists did not clamor for rights to baptism or ordination, claiming equality with men through scriptural revelation rather than biological nature. Embracing supportive roles, this group of women who “were the first to speak publicly in America” (6) prioritized their preaching calls beneath faith in scriptural revelation. Despite their willingness to accept secondary roles in leadership, female evangelists attracted droves of converts by their condemnations of sin, which thundered as powerfully as any male preacher in spite of a lack of education. In spite of their budding leadership, Brekus notes that within a decade of the genesis of female evangelists, evangelical churches began to more rigidly distinguish the boundaries of “masculine” and “feminine” as the desire to be recognized as denominations increased.
These degenerating egalitarian and populist ideals of evangelical churches led to an emphasis on the importance of a salvation experience over and above distinctions of race, class, and gender. “In many ways,” Brekus observes, “the presence of large numbers of white and black women in the pulpit seems to offer evidence of the democratization of American Christianity.” (11) Finding the evangelical scenario after the Great Awakening to be paradoxical, Brekus discussed the contradictions in celebrating freedom, and instituting governance for those freedoms. In spite of allowing women to preach, women remained “strangers and pilgrims, outsiders in an evangelical culture that reserved its greatest public honors for men alone.” (13) Rhetorical separation of public and private spheres may have influence women’s self-perceptions, but not their actual affect on the shaping of culture. Relating the struggles of the female evangelists in the past to current issues of women’s religious leadership, Berkus provides an example of past societal failures to recognize women, challenging congregations today with the ominous threat of repeating a history of forgetting female contributions.

Hannah M. Mecaskey
Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology

 

Book review: This Female Man of God: Women and Spiritual Power in the Patristic Age, AD 350-450 by Gillian Cloke

Gillian Cloke, This Female Man of God: Women and Spiritual Power in the Patristic Age, AD 350-450. Hb. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. Pp. Vii, 243. ISBN 978-0-415-09469-6. $135.00.

Caught in the eternal struggle of male versus female authority, the sphere of religious leadership once again reverberates with ancient echoes of spiritual warfare. The historically male-dominated Roman Catholic Magisterium continues to refuse women admission into the most intimate leadership role of the Church, ordination into the priesthood, perpetuating a misogynistic hierocracy, which has defined holiness from male perspective since the earliest ideals of “holiness” began to form through the example of martyrs. Is the traditionally masculine picture of spiritual influence derived from the fears of overwhelmingly male literary legacy of the early Church against a depraved female nature? Were men truly the sole perpetrators of doctrine, which evidence the evolution of the Church through masculine social movement? Focusing on the transitional period between martyrdom and empiric rule when asceticism reigned as the definitive standard of personal holiness, Gillian Cloke unveils the influence of women on the Patristic writers of AD 350-450, reasserting the crucial role women played in defining and exemplifying even the most severe forms of ascetic holiness through male literary mutilation of the female sex.

Seeking to answer how women were deemed worthy of the designation of “ holiness,” Cloke introduces her quest for an authentic voice of Patristic women through a comparison of exclusively male-authored classical and Christian historical depictions of women (1-12). In the context of patriarchal Rome, Christian heroines are strikingly similar to classically-deemed disgraceful women: abandoning male-defined paradigms of womanhood, the women most lauded by the Church Fathers ardently practiced spiritual devotions espoused by the Fathers to male practitioners. By noting that her examination encompasses material from not only anecdotal cameos and legends of saintly women, Cloke uncovers feminine influence in its explicit scarcity through a variety of sources. Juxtaposing social perceptions of women disclosed in medical notes, legal asides, epigraphs, letters, tombstones and inscriptions onto the ecclesiastical writings noted for their significant sway of contemporary Patristic thought (13-24),Cloke derives a strongly active image of women through the eyes of their male critics and admirers, while noting limitations of this method.

Finding women as the source of much male inspiration, Cloke reassembles the theoretical Patristic perspective of womanhood as incapable of holiness due to the introduction of original sin at the hand of a woman (25-56). In order to deny this inherently polluted female nature, Patristic writers encouraged celibacy to both men and women. Female piety was more unforgivably judged than male by the presence or absence of a fully sexual marriage. Demonstrating the significance of sexuality to female holiness, Cloke discovers women relegated to a life of consecrated virginity in order to achieve esteem above the depraved state of womanhood (57-81). Virgins were assigned a paradoxical role to their limited public sphere of spiritual conduits for not only specific families, but the Church and Christian spirituality at large. While consecrated virginity rebelled against the societal role of women as reproductive beings, widowhood was embraced as an acceptable form of renunciation (82-99).

Given more public maneuverability than virgins, widows over the age of sixty who remained univira, devoted to their dead husbands in celibacy, were given ecclesiastical duties of prayer and ministering to virgins and other women. Though unable to attain the same socio-spiritual merit as virgin, Cloke notes that widowhood as a sexually renounced order was still more esteemed that incontinent marriage. Married women were considered the lowest order of devout women, though if in a state of sexual renunciation, Patristic writers acknowledged married women as capable of piety (100-133). Able to persuade husbands to conform to the sanctified standard of sexual renunciation or not, the very silent humility of a submissive wife was witnessed to win over many husbands, as seen in the example of Augustine’s own mother, Monica.

Christian wives were influential not only in the conversions of their husbands, but also strongly inspirational to the spiritual lives of their children. While many of the Fathers were directly impacted by maternal spirituality, seen in Augustine whose conversion was a product of his mother’s persistent prayer, this effect was most directly evidenced in the lives of daughters (134-156). Through the Patristic confession that some married women jointly held pious devotion as well as worldly devotion, Cloke finds expansion for the female sphere of influence beyond the moral states of their families to manipulation of power in the social sphere as well. Branching beyond these three “offices” afforded to women, Cloke notes that women sought to manufacture new standards by which to be judged apart from their performance as sexual and reproductive beings in devotional vocations (157-211).

Examining the relationship of independently minded aristocratic women with Fathers, Cloke traces the feminine use of resources such as wealth, contacts, and lineage to circumvent gender restrictions and forge new roles for themselves in symbiosis with the Patristic writers. Non-elite women earned their designation as “holy” through the same defiant attitudes of their aristocratic sisters, confronting the Church and clerics from the desert rather than urban settings. In each case, Cloke indicates that female authoritative innovations rarely outlived the women who introduced particularly feminine strains of leadership the male religious culture, inevitably yielding womanly-acquired leadership to the male officials of church hierarchy.

In her concluding chapter, Cloke reasserts that since women in the Patristic theory were responsible for the destruction of God’s image through sin, women could not attain holiness as women in spite of all their piety (212-221). Adopting societal-determined male devotions of the ascetic life such as sexual renunciation and detachment from worldly concerns, the Fathers lauded women as “male,” having negated female nature through masculine piety. Though fundamentally negative about theoretical positions of feminine holiness, the personal relationships of Fathers with women on each level of hierarchical strata evidence individual exceptions to the standard of sexual renunciation, but in each instance of praise, Patristics deny women the right to be holy as women, praising them rather as men.

Cloke provides a revealing antithesis of feminine presence in the Patristic era, sorting through the words and lives of the Patristic Fathers in a risky endeavor to disclose a more realistic image of obscurely presented femininity. Cloke manipulates the uncertain margin of error in depicting influential women through predominantly male documents to demonstrate the profound affectedness of female spirituality on the Patristic writers’ lives and literature. “These great men of their age were bought and sold by women,” Cloke poignantly emphasizing the femininity of the environment which surrounded and directed the Fathers’ thought processes. Expanding this theme throughout her work, Cloke painstakingly delves into each phase of the female life: virginity, maternity, and widowhood, contrasting Patristic stance to actual interaction of Fathers to women in all such circles. While delineating the evolution of a female holiness within the male ascetic ideal, Cloke stays true to her emphasis on aristocratic women’s influence, which most resoundingly moved the Fathers. Balancing the scope of power amongst women, Cloke is mindful not to neglect the inspiration of non-elitist ascetic women, who continued their socio-religious rebellion in the desert while affecting the most urban of movements amongst (I liked the first old spelling but the second rings wrong) women.

The debate on ordination that was recent in 1995 at the publishing of This Female Man of God remains a current subject of contention for progressive female Catholic Christians, eliciting conversation on issues of holiness and gender equality pervading female spiritual experience beyond the confines of ordination. Questioning the presuppositions of the Fathers and shedding light on their experimentally formed perspective, Cloke indicates the socially-constructed perspective of human holiness. Creatively demonstrating how each form of feminine piety was alienated from the context of womanhood as “male” in Patristic spirituality, I feel this work probes beyond the social spirituality of religion to the bare constructs of female belief: are we going to allow others to define or reject our spiritual practices as holy, or will we, like the innovative Mothers of our faith, use the resources at our disposal to distinguish new sacred spaces of our own, so that we are no longer dependent upon the Patristic paradigm of male holiness versus female unholiness?

Cloke’s work provides a detailed foundation upon which further innovation into issues of women’s spirituality might be delved. Continuing the subject of feminine leadership within Church contexts, what perpetuates adherence to fifth century ideals for female holiness (seen in the Roman Catholic context in the virginity of Mary) and why do feminine attempts at particularizing holiness to women continue to oppose female leadership? Future works by feminist scholars find Cloke’s depiction of 5th and 6th century womanly holiness directly applicable to current conceptions and beliefs concerning feminist spirituality.

Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology, Berkeley                         Hannah Marie Mecaskey

 

Response to Thomas Laquer’s “Making Sex”

Discerning to love like Jesus…to find identity in Jesus, does one need to know what one is? I must confess, in the myriad of Foucault and Nietzsche that I am immersed in, I am relieved by the voice of Martin Heidegger who, though omitting the quest of gender from his consideration of human being-ness, does admit to a state of being that is before one understands it. I whole-heartedly agree… God created man, then male and female He distinguished the human race. I am in a quest to know my Jesus, understand relationship to Him… He I know, and myself I am trying to figure out. I mean, of course, He is far beyond my knowing too… but I am acting in the inherent sense that one can know another far deeper than self. Maybe that was why God created two, to allow the full knowing of Himself, one another, and to each his own self in the loving… a fuller understanding of all the beauty made. It is an interesting question to ask, what it is about one that I would say I love, that I do in fact find to love. Thomas Lacquer suggests that in loving, “bodies do not seem to matter.” (Making Sex 24) I find this to be truth, and yet once love is established beyond body, body matters deeply.

I have “fallen in love” as it were with many people in the essence of who they are… not found them physically attractive or appealing, but drawn to them because of an expressed trait or essence, and from that knowing, have been drawn into an appreciation of their whole selves, in which I appreciate their physicality, yet if it were to change, as I watched the evolution, they would still be beloved as also their features. I have asked friends before “Why do you love me;” I have asked the very thing of God. From Heaven the resounding silence reverberates with the truth that “I AM all Love…” while the human tongue can merely chide me for me questioning… telling me whether or not it can be expressed or whether I can see, I am loved for me. I have been asked the same in return, why I love this person or that person… words escape my heart and I hold out my hands to all they are. I think each must be perfect in his own way.

As much as body becomes beloved, it is something which separates… I am always uncertain with it.

So I just finally finished reading Thomas Lacquer’s Making Sex: Gender and Sex from the Greeks to Freud, saying finally because I spent 2.5 hours reading yesterday and 1.5 today… got a bit distracted with some paper notes in between… but all in all, it felt long. Maybe because human biology, when encountering the sociological/anthropological approach Lacquer takes to sex, can get very awkward. Out of all the books I am reading for my Ethics, the Bible, and Sexuality class… this may have been the best and most versatile. Lacquer’s entire enterprise is to define sex as biology interpreted through culture… into the hierarchical system of politics gender becomes.

By chapter 6, the final chapter, Lacquer is repeatedly articulating through example of historical evidence he construes, that the “distinction between sign and substance is untenable in dealing with the history of the body” (232) noting that the body is the foundation of social practices, as well as the sign of those practices. In other words, I am going to crudely think that sexuality is Lacquer’s emphasis for understanding cultural identity. When I initially encountered all my readings for this course, I was obstinately opposed to sex being defined by culture. Sex, in my world, is equivalent with biological structure. I think what could be more obvious than biology… but apparently not biology itself, for Lacquer recounts the sensitive discovery of the female anatomy… that is, in the male world at least. I am curious at how it is men the fields that have had to come to realizations before they are “known.”

To this, Lacquer addresses, what he feels should be obvious by the end of his book, “that imperatives of culture or the unconscious dictated language of sex, of how the female body was defined and differentiated from the male’s.” (222) The male was the standard, and I am still trying to comprehend how man got himself there in the first place. Another paper I am working on will try and explore that subject of overwhelming maleness in the theology of the early church. Lacquer himself, while addressing comments and assumptions about sexuality as coming from a male unconscious assumption of normalcy, continues to use male assumptive thought when saying “it was known” or making universal statements consistent with scientific discoveries made by major individuals of their days… all of whom were male. I find it hard not to think some woman somewhere was a little more familiar with her own biology than were the men around her. Yet Lacquer’s purpose in writing 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 (217). I wonder who made men the god of sex… no disrespect to men, I enjoy male companionship… I am not a feminist to the degree of despising men and saying women should find understanding of our being wholly apart from men; no I believe God created two genders and they understand what they are in and out of interaction with one another. But beyond the point, women are the subjective to man objective in social history it seems… and our political value and roles determined by that sex. I find it tragically amusing that something so sacred and private should be so exposed… why must sex be so divisive a factor? I wonder why similar characteristics of gender threaten so much, why men seemed to historically have such a need to deem women inferior in ways that could be dominated… it seems like unnecessary pride to me. Lacquer says that how facts about sex “or what were taken to be facts, became the building blocks of social vision” (207); why? Of course, the societal context of the West has predominantly been male-defined… even.

The two saints, Catherine of Siena and Therese of Avila, two young women who lived in 1380 and 1515 respectively, lived during the height of Medieval oppression of womanhood as natural. Both were young girls with particularly devoted to the church… and stubbornly remained virgin, believing in this way they could be most devoted to God. I am currently reading a book that suggests they maintained this ‘un-womanly’ form of existence along with devotions as drastic as eating disorders (which could have ceased female biological functions) as a result of cultural depiction of woman: either passionless and passive, or wholly lustful and therefore to be restrained and married so young she may not yet have reached puberty, that by the time she biologically functioned as a woman, she would be ‘safe’ and able to bear children. Yet the woman was not a true person… I think part of the motivating factor for these two women in their virgin devotion was a refusal to submit to social definition of women.

It just makes me cringe to think of a whole person’s being defined by biological functions: a woman can have babies, a man cannot; their individual biologies in the process of that happening differ. So is one better than the other? Does biology determine authority, as societies have constantly been claiming? Lacquer notes, “when power did not matter or when a utopian sharing of political responsibility between men and women is being imagined, their respective sexual and reproductive behavior is stripped of meaning as well.” (53-4) What if my biology doesn’t function as made? Does that change my gender (political position, not sex)? Why does that need to be a factor? I think I believe in natural order, but I don’t think man is to dominate woman… lead, but not dominate. Convoluded thoughts, far too many from this book. Graphic, informative read. I believe Lacquer’s thesis is that however a society comprehends sex, that determines sex’s interpretation into gender… which often includes the stifling of women. I find that what is man and male seems to be more consistent than woman… can you imagine times when so little was know about female anatomy that ovaries were cut out of the body as unnecessary?

We humans are so fragile… the anatomy factors into the chemical/psychological make-up… we alter at our own risk. So what are women to define ourselves against now? To do so against men seems to get us demeaned… otherwise it might go too far… lesbianism? Where would God put us in relation to Himself in creation?

 

Women as Medieval Symbols: Part III, Women as Self-Redemptive Agents

Notes on: Woman as Image in Medieval Literature, from the Twelfth Century to Dante
by Joan M. Ferrante

I suppose marriage is a natural state of being for women, unless they remain virgins (and then how do they benefit the spirituality of man? Does Bonaventure merely tweak the Aristotelian view of women but retain their value as amount of benefit to man?), and thus marriage itself if not associated with sin. Mysticism allows Bonaventure to view marriage beyond the physical function and assumed sinfulness by other thirteenth century authors like Aquinas, speaking “of marriage as a sacrament that existed before the fall; originally a symbol of the union of God and the soul.” (106) I admire the boldness of Bonaventure in furthering Bernard’s desire to obtain union with God through identification with the women, who were close to Christ, since of course women picture love, being closest to the male Christ. Bonaventure “wishes to become the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene, in order to experience the compassion they felt at Christ’s crucifixion.” (107) This must have been almost a romantic compassion, I think, because the women, rather than the men, and exalted as examples… furthered by the fact that it was women who first saw Jesus (It interests me that Bonaventure continues to call our Lord “Christ” in the masculine terminology rather than “Jesus” as we women prefer more personally)… which Bonaventure identifies as “a favour they earned by the greatness of their love.” (107) In calling men to salvation, Bonaventure proclaims that “In order to bear Christ in the soul, man must first become Mary for Mary is not only the glorification of humanity and the mirror of all virtues, she is the gate of heaven essential to man’s salvation.” (108)

While Mary is both positively and negatively upheld in religion, Ferrante states that “the philosopher-moralist tends to be antifeminist in attitude and imagery, the mystic does not.” (108) The prevailing attitude towards women is one of suspicion in which procreation is the only reason for involvement with these sinfully dangerous creatures. Poetry continues the tradition of “the entire impulse to love (coming) from inside the lover—the lady is only a passive rose…” (109) though she seems to act as the vehicle of love’s impulse, manipulating the lover out of his own desire for her. The thirteenth century male poet “has both male and female qualities. It is the effeminate side of his nature that makes him vulnerable to love” (110-11). Women are still lustfully portrayed in literature by a discord, which is resolved in the act of intercourse (satisfying the indwelling lust, I imagine), which “can bring the woman into temporary concord by routing the opposing forces.” (112) Did men really see us as so animal-like in our nature? This seems to be just further projection of man’s self onto woman.

Poetry reveals constant conflict in both the woman and the man: “the lady’s struggle is essentially between fear for her reputation and her desire to indulge the man and herself” (112) and the man struggles to justify his own lust for the woman. These desires defy the ideal of “highest love is charity or friendship…” in essence any sort of selfless love, since “sinful love is for gain” (113). The poet compares the lover’s desire to Narcissus, as in allegory, for the lover’s desire is both to reach another point of satisfaction and better understanding of self through the lady. If the lady were to play the part of Echo, a roll that the lover’s narcissism has denied her, leading to the lover’s spiritual suicide—literal damnation if he gives into the sexual desire for the mere sake of pleasure according to allegory. Comparing the ideal of love and the rejection of sexual desire, “we are left to conclude that sexual love must be rejected.” (116) The rejection of such love involves anti-feminist sentiments from women authors of the period too, espousing marriage as a necessary evil “set up to prevent wars and murders over women” (116) who do attempt to tyrannize men with their lusty appeal, though marriage robs women of their desired freedoms. This points to women as rebellious against marriage, that “one sacrament that antedated the fall” (166), and thus the fall was the woman’s attempts to be free of marital restrictions.

I suppose women are then the embodiments of the seduction of love, according to thirteenth century poetry, though authors agree that man’s susceptibility is that of his own choice: “the woman does little or nothing to set off his emotion, but once he gives himself over to it he is in her power and no good can come of their relationship.” (117) This is the rationale for male dissatisfaction once a relationship is attained, I believe. It puzzles me that men would call women more emotional if it is men who are too weak to withstand the women. In the Arthurian legend, women are revealed as opposite the chivalric tradition that “presents women as object of and inspirations for noble activity,” (118) leading to the disappointment and ruin of those who purse their love. Yet even in the quest for the Holy Grail, women must be condemned as a distraction to the physical and spiritual demands for purity. Again, the theme “the only good women…are virgins” (119) is repeated, for the virgin woman is able to figure the ideal of Mary, guiding men to faith as a Christ figure through self-sacrifice. Yet even the virgins are not independent beings, but rely on the protection of men, as is the responsibility of those within the Round Table, for maintained protection against physical jeopardy, which would ruin their spiritual condition as intermediary for men. Men have an obligation to be “concerned with the protection of the helpless…” to maintain the chivalric ethic “but when their attention shifts to the salvation of their souls, the chivalric code falls apart.” (120) Thus even under the guise of chivalry, women tempt men to betray their hope of union with God, and thus men appear selfish and denying of chivalry to maintain their eternal destinies.

Women’s wiles are often portrayed through magic in thirteenth century literature, for their love is the destruction of men’s purity if he is willing to engage her. Writers portray “man’s willingness (as) the source of the woman’s power… the man must come to her, must let himself be caught, before she can control him.” (121) The sin nature of women from the perspective of attempting to be free of God-ordained male domination in marriage portrays women as craftily utilizing the men’s weakness of desire to exercise their rebellion against God and man. This is evident in the story of Arthur and Guinevere: “Arthur, embodying the weakness as well as the strengths of his worlds” (121) is a typical lusty man, whose succumbing to desire provides a means for his own wife to commit adultery in his absence. For men of the thirteenth century, women were preying sorceresses, seizing every available opportunity to take advantage of man’s weakness to exert their inherently sinful desires of rebellion and domination through magical seduction, thereby obtaining heirs to continue their sin.

A more extreme form of controlling men’s lust is proposed in the Vulgate Cycle, “discouraging all human bonds—not only sexual attraction, but family love and chivalric fellowship—and exalting virginity and total devotion to God” (122) as a fulfilment of the ideal of love. If one cannot control oneself, why not cut off the temptation altogether? Provencal poets continues to recognize conflicting desires “in themselves, the need for refinement through the adoration of a perfect creature, and at the same time the strong physical desire to go to bed with a receptive woman” (123). Since men selected the Virgin Mary as the embodiment of this ideal creature, I wonder whether men chose a woman rather than a man because of Mary’s dual “union” with God in bearing Jesus within herself and being immaculately impregnated, whether the nature of woman seemed more innocent than men, or because if a woman could achieve purity, she was already considered so base that a man was guaranteed the ability to be pure. Through the consideration of a woman as divine or alien, she is granted autonomy from the man, but is also removed from the sphere of the living (and thus loses her humanity at the expense of angelic consideration).

The ideal woman becomes aloof and beautiful, gazing on as “the man’s faculties cannot sustain the sight of a woman’s beauty and so they are destroyed.” (123) I cannot pretend to understand the male mind or how a man visually engages a woman to stir him up to a place of fainting, but I have witnessed some men become witless at the sight of a stunning woman. It puzzles me greatly; but the thirteenth century men express their feelings through the lady’s actions of capturing the man’s mind, “threatening his heart, the soul tries to flee, but Love holds her back.” (125) Death almost seems inevitable to the man… he will physically perish if he does not look at the lady, and if he succumbs to the temptation to satisfy his eyes, his soul will die under love’s gentle hand. At close proximity then, thirteenth century men found themselves threatened by women, though at a distance, women remained very purely motivating. Of course its harder to access sin when temptation is kept far from you, but was it for the sake of temptation that men preferred space between them and feminine presence. “The removal of the woman’s presence leads the mind back to the essence of her beauty and ultimately to the source of that beauty, God.” (126) If the woman in her absent figure “is compared, directly or indirectly, to God,” (127) then is the woman truly viewed as a tool through which God moves or an obstacle to man’s desire which causes him to stumble in the pursuit of God? What is it that is so threatening about the woman, the possibility of desiring her impurely?

If reflection upon the woman, in the safe distance of remembrance, leads to contemplation of God (for these writers at least), I wonder about the men with whom we interact now. All that has been discussed is in some form archaic compared with current culture; yet as I read, I feel there must be some common thread of humanity displayed throughout the centuries. Thus far from seeing women as the cause of sin to women being the very embodiment of God in male imagery between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a few like aspects have stuck out to me specifically (at least concerning men, from which I feel is the perspective really portrayed, despite the subject being women): almost instinctive, universal male emotional and physical desire for women; tendency to project onto women as connected to self; position of women inter-tangled with man’s spiritual welfare and relate-ability to God. I am still fascinated by how Christ was described as the Bride, creating a type for women even though submission is required too. Concluding the thought patterns of the thirteenth century, women emerge as “separate entities (from man), instruments of greater forces which work on man’s inherent nobility or weakness to save or destroy him.” (127) Somewhere in all the mess of roles and meaning which women were assigned throughout the entire spectrum of medieval literature, man realized that woman has purpose, beyond her sexual function into a spiritual aspiration by the end of the thirteenth century.

In her final chapter, Ferrante delves into the writing of Dante, who sought a revolutionary explanation for love… not merely seeking the internal reasoning but looking for external explanation beyond a mere acknowledgement of “the beneficial effect of the woman” (129) to his own soul. Dante seeks to understand the true selflessness of love by probing “to find a deeper significance in her existence and in his love for her.” (129) Instead of allowing his love for the woman hinder his love for God, but attributes the attraction he feels for the woman because of her beauty to the source of that beauty, God. God is still understood through the use of a woman: “man reaches God through woman” (131) for as the salvation of all mankind is figured in Mary, Dante found his hope of redemption in Beatrice. Ferrante clarifies that women’s participation in the salvation of man is not just limited to the symbolic, but all women “can be intermediaries between God and man through love, moving men with their beauty and God with their prayers.” (131) I find it interesting that male writers figure their own need for God intertwined with their need for women and the influence of women in their lives, even if by mere presence. This places an unrequested responsibility on women, for Dante figures the desire of men to be close to and receive guidance through women.

Dante states that his self-disclosure to women is enacted based on trust formed through their guidance of him “away from the selfish love of the early lyrics to the kind of love that will end in God.” (131) But Dante also “reserves the traditional roles so that man can act as intermediary with God for a women,” (132) making allowance for either gender to be vessel of God’s grace to the other. In seeking a woman to picture the beauty of God to him, Dante seeks after other women once Beatrice has died, though he retains his claim of loving her, attempting to divide his heart and mind “between two ladies with perfect love,” (133) rationalizing their coexistence by loving the beauty of one for delight and the virtue of the other for her action. It is interesting to travel the Divine Comedy with Dante, because while he is conflicted in love after the loss of Beatrice, part of himself is always returning to her memory and devotion to her. Dante views other women, even after Beatrice’s death, as mere replacement figures for the woman who could never be replaced. Because it is through Beatrice that Dante is equipped with “the power to ascend through the heavens,” (135) he can love no other woman because he tends toward the “identification of Beatrice with Christ in the fullest sense, as the Logos, as Theology and Faith.” (135) In this sense it would be idolatry to love another woman.

Dante’s connection with Beatrice as a crucial aspect of his salvation ascends even closer to Christ, realizing her significance as a guide for his soul to God only after her death, when she descends “even to Hell, to save the sinner who refused to heed the divine message is another echo of Christ.” (136) Dante sees love as he grows to associate Beatrice with God, revealing that there is more to love, more to God than meets the eye. Love of Beatrice allowed him to encounter Love in its veiled disclosure of God while she was alive, but through her death, Beatrice becomes even more one with the Divine in Dante’s mind. Throughout Divine Comedy, Beatrice acts as Mary’s messenger, beginning and ending the poem “with the Virgin, the mediatrix between man and God, the woman in whom all compassionate women are contained.” (139) What am I as a woman saying by objecting to the place of the Virgin Mary in a man’s perceived need of redemption? Am I denying man a typical, fundamental need for a woman in his life and subsequently in the maintenance of his purity, his existential salvation, by removing the Virgin from her assigned significance in theology? Dante sees Christ in lady Beatrice, who figures Mary as Christ figures Mary through her physical features that he took on (139). Dante invests the power of unifying the person of Christ with souls in Mary, whom he sees as the first to be fully one with God—the archetype of Christianity.

“Mary is, in other words, the counterpart of God the father, but the female side of God, the mercy that can break harsh justice.” (140) While Bonaventure and Bernard infiltrate Mary into their salvation through finding her the most relatable figure to their needs, Dante composes a “concept of a trinity of female figures who affect his salvation, all historical women—the mother of Christ, the third-century martyr (Dante’s patron saint Lucy), and the thirteenth-century Florentine woman (Beatrice).” (141) While glancing through the notes I have compiled on the these medieval writings thus far, I was struck by a notable difference in the male tone used for figures of religious intermediaries: Mary is spoken of more often by her personal name, “Mary” rather than her title, “The Virgin” or “The Virgin Mary.” Contrastingly, however, the male writers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries speak of Jesus as “The Christ” rather than His personal name, “Jesus…” indicating a greater feeling of distance with Jesus than Mary. I wonder if men found it easier to love Mary than Jesus, based on their almost exclusive understanding of love through the marriage analogy. While one theologian dares to make Jesus the Bride figure, the marital understanding of love requires a feminine figure, and not many were willing to make Jesus feminine; they would rather sacrifice their own masculinity through identification with Mary.

Since Dante sees love and mercy as feminine traits of God, he sees these same traits in man as good, though in weakness, these same traits are sometimes portrayed in the Comedy as moral instability, attempting to depict “that there is no essential distinction of sex in eternity” (141-2). Only in Hell and Purgatory does Dante evidence gender distinctions, intending to convey shame and the guilt associated with gender sin tendencies, but “in Paradise the confusion of sex contributes to the sense of mankind as one. When I was speaking with a friend conveying my confusion of human nature and conception of Heaven, I expressed an interest in never obtaining the sorts of desires that are specific to gender, but rather while still being woman, being ambiguous in my discernment between man and woman. Unlike Dante, I mentally allow for gender distinctions in my picture of Heaven… for the beauty of thought difference and complement, but in Heaven, I think we will understand a sort of love that transcends human gender. I think Jesus embodied this love, which I say confidently, although His love did not abolish His gender. Man and woman were created before the Fall with gender, in perfect harmony, but without sin. Somehow there must be a divine form of perfect love that will not imply sin to the interaction of the genders, but free men and women to be wholly as they were made through equalizing distinctions.

For men, women’s love binds him “not only through sexual ties but through family ties” (147) as a part of her action in his salvation: from Dante’s perspective, the family continues in Purgatory, but are not active in Hell. In Purgatory, “family ties also connect souls with earth” (147) referring to the Catholic tradition of praying for the repose of the dead, which benefits the soul in purgatory. Women in their childbearing abilities are men’s ties to this redemptive act of prayer, Dante espouses, though men are called to pray for the repose of women’s souls too. Since gender is nonexistent in Dante’s Paradise, family is universal, not bound by the distinctions of specific earthly relations. I find it interesting, if gender is not distinguishable in Heaven, that figures such as Jesus and Mary retain the male/female identity; perhaps then, gender is just distinguished as an active feature rather than a fact. Though Dante’s Paradise eliminates marriage, it is interesting to see the coupling he assigns to the figure of Mary: “she is usually paired with men, seldom with other women” (148) as examples of virtue. I wonder if Dante is playing on his theme of male need of females in salvation, part of the larger theme of mutual dependency for salvation. If one is seeking a practical abstraction of this concept, I think men and woman are not only needed in the universal body of Christ, but also to offer contrasting spiritual benefit. In the end of Earthly Paradise, however, “where man is restored to a state of innocence, they (virtues) appear as women,” (148) images of a restored Eve (whom Dante does blame for sin).

Through Comedy, Dante portrays salvation, the end goal of men and women (though emphasized as of men in medieval literature in general and Dante’s writing specifically) is perfection achieves “by the reunion, in a restored state of innocence, of man and woman.” (150) Is this too not the goal of Christianity, which Paul encourages us can be achieved in our loving of one another here in earth: “There can be neither Jew nor Greek, there can be neither slave nor freeman, there can be neither male nor freeman, there can be neither male nor female—for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3.28, NJB) Because love is central to Dante’s idea of Paradise, he includes “earthly human love (as) a major part of love, which he does not deny even in heaven.” (151) Dante confuses me with his marriage allegory between men and women who are unconcerned with love in the sense of sexual distinction. Thus Dante adds to the picture of unity with God depicted at the end of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, continuing to utilize woman as images through which man achieves salvation, all focused on Mary “through whom Christ brought salvation to all men…Dante says that it is through Mary and through human love for a real woman that he can achieve union with God.” (152) Dante allows men the expression of their emotion in ideals, but forces some sense of realism in acknowledgment of the need to love the woman in whom the man can invest himself. I think out of all perspectives on women espoused through male use of female imagery, I am most appreciative of Dante’s assignment of sacramental meaning to womanhood. By requiring a self-sacrificing love on the part of the man, not just the woman, Dante ends the thirteenth century with redemption of the female image in spite of his continued blame for initial sin. We women remain paradoxical in male thought… he tries to project himself upon us, but the need overwhelms the desire for a scapegoat.

 

Women as Medieval Imagery: Part I, Sinful Except for Procreation?

Notes on: Woman as Image in Medieval Literature, from the Twelfth Century to Dante
by Joan M. Ferrante

In 12th Century literature, females were utilized as “symbols, aspects of philosophical and physiological problem that trouble the male world” (1) rather than independent, real people. In the male minds of literary inventors, “women personify cosmological forces that govern men’s life… they represent his ideals, his aspirations, the values of his society life.” (1) Women, though considered the least important of people, are invested with the most significance and importance because of men’s considerations of them. This was reflected in literature through women’s domination of the twelfth century hero for good or evil. Even “biblical women, if they are good or potentially redeemable, are said to represent the church; if bad they stand for the lower or weaker parts of “man, for carnal desires, or for inconsistency of mind.” (2) Something about this male desire for women almost seems an inherent (or sinful?) need for women; I would be interested in a man’s perspective on this, as I am only speaking from appearances as a woman. Male justification for this opinion states, “woman, as the most obvious object of male concupiscence, is made to represent lust and is thus held responsible for it; the object of temptation becomes the cause.” (2)

Since women are men’s ways of expressing themselves—their eternal delight or unending sorrow, I think maybe male emotions are tied up with female figures. Women are limited as much as men really limit themselves—maybe to dominate a woman before of a need for her seems equivalent to domination of self. Negative symbolism of women is more prevalent in twelfth century religious writing and positive symbolism of women is more prevalent in philosophical writing. Neo-platonic “marriage of male/female elements requires the cooperation (rather than compulsion) of female elements to preserve and maintain order. This is more positive than the religious consideration of marriage, because the love of women was considered comparable to idolatry or heresy. “In the battle between vices and virtues, which is central to the Christian morality, both groups are female; inner conflict is seen in terms of women pulling in opposite directions towards good or evil.” (2) So man’s highest and lowest impulses gravitate towards women?

Courtly literature uses female imagery to probe men’s emotions; as a lady represents the force of love to a man, “love awakens man to a new sense of himself, to higher aspirations, but sometimes he is drawn away from his love by worldly desires, which in romance, are often other women.” (2) Thus man seeks to embed his highest and lowest impulses in the figure of a woman. I wonder, could man think of himself apart from a woman? He seems to find so much of himself in her… do we women feel we can embody those values as men desire us to? How do we picture and understand our own feelings and virtues? In thirteenth century literature, “the romance quest becomes a religious quest, a personal one, which can be achieved only when the individual alienates himself from his society.” (3) This change, “the rejection of the courtly ethic” causes women as symbols to become “a temptation rather than an inspiration.” (3) Thirteenth century literature evidences the strong influence of two anti-feminist views; the Aristotelian, of women as defective men, creatures lacking in reason and useful only to bear children, and that of the moralist—of woman as a threat to man’s salvation. I wonder how we women were supposed to get salvation, or are we incapable of redemption?

I am sure I never knew more how a man deemed me as un-human than in the two who I most invested myself in and who perhaps thought too much of me, beyond my comprehension: I will call them A and B. A started off telling me all his views on women which my rebellious mind was not OK with: no discussion of spiritual or intellectual matters, no mutual sharing though I was expected to remain open; woman in the home, almost commune-like in its “protectiveness.” I remember the phone call in which that relationship shattered when I heard all these new guidelines for friendship… I remember crying and whispering, “what can I talk to you about then?” My soul would have been starved. B, on the other hand, wanted to keep me all to himself and for me to go nowhere by myself. I was expected not to engage in discussions with other males, witnessing a jealousy that scared me. For a while, I thought of the jealous as a desire to protect, and thus I submitted myself more. But the relationship grew more and more controlling as I submitted more: my sin, my sin, my terrible sin. Was that capable of redemption as I continued to encourage the unhealthy dominance through my behavior?

Women retained positive place in poetic and mystical writings, but now “man’s goal is not union with her, but union with God through her” (3) because she became separate from man, no longer symbolizing something within him. Dante’s writing yearned “for harmony, and the harmony he presents as the ideal for himself and all mankind is possible only through women.” (3) Dante’s writing on union with women in order to reach God is spoken through the perspective of his love for Beatrice, who figures Mary, and thus Christ, in Dante’s Comedy. I speculate on the figure of the Virgin Mary: did men manufacture the ideal associated with her historical personhood in order to identify with Jesus? Back to Dante, he was one of the few (though significant) writers of the thirteenth century who wrote encouraging the female side of human nature. I wonder, Jesus; how can I marry a man when I am married to You? I do not understand, when You are all I need, why would I a woman consider allowing that unity to change to be joined with a man? I suppose this was not so much a question in the medieval ages, where the alternative to marriage was a convent, for women posed the possibility of threat to the male ideals: am I still considered a threat to anyone (I am unmarried)?

The female side of human nature seems to find its legitimacy in its ability to embody and personify, that which is within men. 12th Century art and literature fuses male and female characteristics that may be mere gender stereotypicized tendencies, resulting in “a confusion of male and female characteristics in literature and art” (4): heroes and heroines as well as angels are often interchangeable in their gender roles. Jesus, too is not spared from this transgendering tendency, for “Christ is both Logos of the New Testament (masculine) and the Wisdom of the Old Testament (feminine.” (5) “Anima Mundi is another figure of sexual ambiguity; an orthodox concept at best, the Neo-Platonic world soul, always female, was sometimes identified with the Holy Spirit, normally male.” (5) I think figuring the soul as ambiguous gender allows for personal interpretation… maybe our souls mirror or balance our own particular gender: mirroring our own gender or refracting the opposite gender (if any gender at all). “The fact that a human quality or a divine attribute was represented as a woman meant that it must have female characteristics like giving birth or milk, that there was something essentially female.” (6)

Twelfth century men theorized on women in terms of sexual desire (which is a factor far too focused on within all of humanity, I believe)—deeming her more “cold and wet” (signifying a lessened and dampened presence of desire than man) according to Abelard of Bath and Guillame de Conches (6-7). “Since a woman is cold and wet, the fire is hard to start, but burns longer,” (7) Guillame declared, adding to the perceived danger of women to men, trapping him in persistent “sin.” “Guillame insists that the woman produces a seed toward the conception of the child just as a man does,” which seems to me an attempt to redirect the biblical concept of sin traits passed on from the father’s seed. The woman’s “seed is converted blood” (7), whose presence cannot be denied in women, emitted in the onset of desire, but whose presence is supposedly proved through boys’ display of their mother’s traits. This suggests that weakness in women produces sexual desire, even in rape situations, resulting in conception (Guillame makes desire an imperative aspect for conception). Because women were viewed as always giving way to desire, men feared and distrusted them, because desire inevitably resulted in conception.

“Women were often mistrusted by church establishment for their religious fervor as well as seductions, and they were rarely permitted to play important roles after the middle ages.” (8) Thus sects and heresies did appeal to and draw many women by allowing them to have voice, fueling the misconception of women as inherently sinful. Women did, however, have opportunity to play important roles in social life of the middle ages. By the thirteenth century, “a pervasive intellectual constraint” (11) led to decline of positive symbolism of women. “When men cling to orthodoxy and defend the status quo against all attack from outside or from within, they begin to look on all identifiable groups as suspect and dangerous,” (11-12) which I guess targets women and Jesus. Women as a threat were targeted in the late medieval witch-hunt, which “was the product of ‘a world made schizophrenic by masculine anxieties and masculine fears.’” (12) Men already feared the desire of women—because they identified us with lust and sin, but wouldn’t they be some, rather than no, desire? What are men afraid of in us?

The religious shift between 12th and 13th centuries included adopting Gothic rather than Romanesque cathedrals, and changing from symbolism to realistic human figure-representations (12). The figure of Mary and male obsession with her comes to mind. Ferrante says that “it is when men think of desirable qualities as female, even as female impulses within themselves, that they exalt female figures in literature.” (13) Women again picture polar opposites… nuns figuring virtues and townswomen, common women, picturing worldly distractions of men. How can women only be “child-bearers or temptresses” (13)? “In literature before Dante, it is only women writers, as far as I know, who seem to believe that a man can inspire a woman through love in the same way a woman can inspire a man.” (14) Even those who assert “that man and woman can attain divinity through each other’s love” make the female a symbol of and embodiment “for her love the fountain of Wisdom.” (14) From male literary descriptions of females, I am inclined to see more man in men’s presentation of woman than of the woman herself.

Women’s danger “to men’s moral state is introduced into Judeo-Christian tradition with Eve’s temptation of Adam.” (17) Religious writers thought physical beauty allowed women to seduce men from the perfection of thought to the sin of physical matter. Therefore, they viewed women extolled by the Bible as “divested of their human nature by commentators and are made to represent impersonal abstractions like the church.” (17) Male authors found it impossible to deny “the connection of women with the flesh, with matter… partly based on her biological function, her ability to give birth.” (19) I find it interesting that Ferrance compares flesh to the act of circumcision as “a physical feature which denotes a moral state,” (19) the cutting off of which signifies a denial of lust. Salvation was linked to the salvation of men, but women were considered still capable of salvation in spite of being unable to be circumcised. (19) However, eunuchs and virgins were still most highly extolled in religious though because marriage includes “the act of intercourse, which involves the sinful impulse of lust, (and) is morally dangerous to man.” (20) Mary’s perpetual virginity was championed as a glory, enabling her to “be the mother of a living son without intercourse.” (20) Religious literature tended to prefer the idea of immaculate conception because no “sin” was involved propelling to “fleshly” acts.

The common belief of the time, “the mind is the door-keeper of the soul; if it is female, that is given to carnal thoughts, it allows evil to enter,” evidenced male projection of sin tendencies onto women. I wonder when weakness came to mean prone to vice? If women were categorized as such, I would argue that in the weakness, we are more prone to permit solicited vice because it is harder for us to reject sin than sinful tendencies involving men. As base and the fountain of all evil desires, women were viewed as “whores… connected with heresy as well as carnal lust.” (21) As the objects of temptations because of man’s own sinful tendencies, women were made unclean in man’s thoughts because he projected his own weakness upon them. This continues to mystify me, because no matter how purely I have tried to act, how much I have covered myself, the unwanted attention seems inevitable. Being the focus of male attention to my physicality makes me feel unclean. There is no way I can hide from being implicated in fornication within a man’s own thoughts, no matter how much I hide myself; does this mean there is something wrong with me? At list this genre of writing would say so.

Religious writing attempted to trace seduction “to the nature of women, to her tendency to lewd movement and the resulting flowing of her robes.” (21) I almost laughed at this: so does every move a girl makes with an element of grace or in a skirt/dress have to be considered lewd and unclean? Alanus obviously thought so in deeming women “the objects of hedonism.” (22) Even stories of biblical women were twisted to point guilt to women, evidencing them as the root of sin—flesh without intellect. Of the twelfth century religious authors, Abelard had an unusually positive view of women, “emphasizing the greatness of their virtue when it asserts itself despite the weakness.” (24) This perspective continued to advocate the origin of sin as female, but indicated more to her personhood than simply failure. Religious opinion was reflected in rationalizations, such as the teaching that “Christ showed that the female sex is essential to salvation when He chose to assume human body through a woman.” (25) Hence the belief that women truly do achieve eternal salvation through childbearing? I continue to wonder why a male couldn’t be involved in Christ’s conception to result in the sinless savior. The biblical women who are chosen as examples of virtue, are either redeemed from lasciviousness or ever-virgin, like the figure of Mary, representing the Church.

In the same line of thinking, the love of women is always viewed as a secondary sort of love, for “woman is imperfect, hence not the safest object for love.” (27) The biblical bride metaphor of a man completely enraptured with the love of a woman, then, represents the Church’s relationship to Christ. Maybe men created the ideal of the Virgin Mary to express emotion and their own selves in a female figure who is strong and constant against perhaps men’s greatest weakness… opposite of other women, whom men saw as “completely languid, soft, feminine.” (28) “Bernard’s devotion to the Virgin is such that he can identify himself, through her, with a woman’s role and speak of himself as a mother to his monks.” (29) Men have never been able to understand the sense of belonging, which exists between a mother and child—doesn’t God express the same womb-love, sense of belonging for us, as a mother to child? In Song of Songs, “the man’s soul is identified with a woman in its love for God.” (30) This creates a contradiction in imagery, as “Eve was the first woman to fall, but she is also the first to be led out of Hell by Christ: she was guilty of original sin, but she is also a symbol of the church.” (30)

Sin is pictured in conception as the destruction of a woman’s virginity both physically and metaphysically. According to Augustine, in pre-fall conception, “male semen would have entered the woman’s womb without destroying her virginity, as the menses come out.” (31) Marriage does have merits beyond procreation, church fathers advocated, because of the human “need for love, and mutual self esteem.” (31) Yet Augustine and others believed this complementary relationship of the genders improved as sexuality decreased. I wonder if men continue to busy their feelings and desires in women; male friends have told me and other young women that if we intend to never marry, we will break hearts. Do male still see aspiring women as potential embodiments of virtue that they themselves with they could embody? Marriage is far too commonly spiritualized as “the sacrament and image of God to the soul,” (34) first seen in Adam and Eve. So “Eve represents a part of Adam that he must learn to control and use properly, not to reject; he is to achieve the reintegration of the human being and he must accomplish that before he can achieve union with God, the reunion with his creator which is his ultimate goal.” (34-5) Thus to blame women alone for sin is to abdicate man’s role of reflecting God to her. Thus religious through viewed woman as both of part of man, an outward embodiment of himself, as well as a tool to benefit his ascent to God.

The difference between exegetic and allegorical tradition is that exegetic contains stories from which meaning must be derived and in allegory the meaning/form is given and must be constructed into the story (38). The meaning of allegorical stories is found in the degree to which a man allows himself to be controlled by a vice and virtue: “the vices and virtues have a real existence for medieval man and the figures that personify these concepts in literature have more than a metaphoric relation to them.” (39) Have we lost a “belief in the extramental reality of universal concepts persists through the middle ages” (39)? Christians use Neo-Platonism to demonstrate that “matter is the mother who receives the species; providence, the sphere of divine ideas, is the father who supplies the image.” (40) Matter as the prime locus is feminine and passive, receiving the formed-given image by the male. “Creation itself is the wedding of opposites, of matter and idea, body and soul.” (41) Figures in allegory/personifications have female gender “because of an inherent femaleness in the concepts they embody,” (42) thus “in allegory, then, women can be forces for good as well as for evil, they can protect and nourish, not just seduce and destroy.” (42)

In allegory, “marriage… (is) a metaphor for the reconciliation of opposites, as well as the means by which God’s plan is carried out within the moral order.” (43) Man’s goal is “the presence of wisdom, of Christ, in the individual mind, which man can achieve by overcoming the evil in his heart.” (44) Prudentius reverses roles expected of the female virtues and vices “to make a moral point about the relative strength and weakness of vices and virtues.” (45) Human vices, it seems, are more vulnerable than expected. Men continue to puzzle me with Mary. What do men envy about women so as to want to imagine to be as her? “After Mary, all flesh is divine which conceives God, which builds the temple to wisdom in the soul. That is, by overcoming vice, man can bear Christ with his soul; he can become Mary and achieve the highest feat—union with God.” (46)

In allegory, Philosophy teaches “that the soul is imprisoned within the body and can only free itself through learning, that is made in the image of God and can only fulfill itself when it is concerned not with things but with causes.” (49-50) Following in this tradition of masculinizing the women, as seen in Athena as “a masculine goddess, born of a father without a mother.” (52) Interesting that wisdom must bear a sword, but be a woman, a fundamental contradiction. “Through Philosophy, we are told, Jupiter permits anyone to ascend into the heavens.” (53) Bernard equates the quests for knowledge and goodness as the same thing, “but his concern is less with this quest and the union that is its goal, than with the union that produces life.” (54) Through the sexual act, man becomes part of the process of creation, reflecting the image he bears of God in the conception of life (54). Man must maintain his involvement with creation, because “all the agencies of creation in this work (of life) except God the Father, are female.” (55) So is how women achieve salvation through the procreation of life, childbearing? If women are to achieve salvation in a male way, are we to become men to get their same salvation? If we can’t bear children, what is our worth, how do we achieve the working part of salvation?

 

Review and Response: “Towards a Feminist Christology” by Julie M. Hopkins

Review and Response to Julie M. Hopkins’ Towards a Feminist Christology:

I have been journeying with Jesus for a long time towards what it means for me, a woman, to identify with the person and work of Jesus. I guess right now I am discovering that I am not typical as far as women and their feelings go at this time of my life; at 20 years old, I do not have the same sorts of emotional attractions or desires as I guess many girls my age, so people tell me I’m weird, but Jesus and I are OK with that. How do I as an abnormal woman love and live like Jesus? So He and I had a chat about this interesting book on female identification with Jesus—feminine Christology? My Christology as a woman? Hopkins lent me quite a number of thoughts to incorporate with my own as I try to let go of the selfishness within me which tries to bend Jesus the way my feminine sin wants to go.

I have professed to marrying Jesus, have I not, multiple times? I guess in that spiritual sense of marital considerations, I have committed myself to loving Him and becoming like Him in my life… from the inside out. Jesus has given me a new heart inscribed with His love letter, the Torah, and through our relationship, He balances out the way sin has bent me. I am learning that Christology, which I want to think of in the un-traditional, un-systematic theological definition of Christology being involving Jesus in my life through conversation with Him, relating with Him through interactions in which I act in order to please Him… studying His life so as to learn what it really looks like to lay aside my pet sins, which are partially defined by my female nature. As a woman, I think I tend to sin differently than men because of that curse on my nature that I obtained in Eve by biting that apple… sins which I tend to think of as characterized by over-dependency and over-submission.

In Genesis 3:16, NJB, God says to Eve “I shall give you intense pain in childbearing, you will give birth to your children in pain. Your yearning will be for your husband, and he will dominate you.” I have a perpetual argument with psychologists who state that dominance is a result of the curse on women… because I think women will desire her husband so much that she will invite misuse in order to feel loved. This I think can include a sense of manipulation, allowing herself to be exploited in order to gain his attention and attraction. The curse motivates a female type of selfishness… that I will tend to describe as “over-submissiveness” or the desire to be conquered.

Sure, we appreciate protection and caring, guarding, but in extreme forms, I think the curse can tend to motivate masochistic tendencies within the female for dealing with the guilt of sin. Somehow, I have read numerous books and articles dealing with the subject of women and sin, both spiritual and existential effects of sin on women, and I find myself incapable still of explaining the whole mess. However, the following statement continues to strike me as true: “For many women, sin-talk functions as a “rhetoric of otherness”: a cultural mechanism that assigns to women false guilt and self-blame, and in so doing traps them on the underside of the economy of gender relations” (McDougall, Sin-No More? A Feminist Re-Visioning of a Christian Theology of Sin. Anglican Theological Review. Spring 2006. <http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3818/is_/ai_n17174906>.)

The only reason I testify alongside feminists as to the substance of the female nature is that I have witnessed and experienced similar feelings of guilt and responsibility, not only for my own sins, of which I am always solely responsible, in spite of the deception factor, but also those sins of others. Feminist theology, I think, tries to balance the scales of sin distribution and female approach to relationship with God—but its attempts swing more radically than needful to bring Christianity back into a correct perspective. From Hopkins’ perspective, however, “Feminist theology is the last gap of many thinking women in the churches to renew the faith before Christianity perishes for lack of vision.” (9)

I have always appreciated the perspective of feminist Christianity, because I think it readily acknowledges aspects of the female nature, which are too commonly ignored. Hopkins claims that the goal of exploring a feminist Christology is the “critical transformation of women and men into a new way of being church where salvation in its broadest sense as physical, social, and spiritual fullness is enjoyed and shared as a sign of hope to the world.” (9) However, mainstream theology (which has become the systematic theology of male theologians, in spite of their own divorce and distancing from God in its midst) captures a Christological significance of Jesus which is threatened through feminist exposure of “the layer of mystification and dialogical abuse which has brought Christology in dispute in the eyes of many women,” (9) so claims Hopkins. She feels male theologians make Christology sexist in systematic theology, which is a misuse, because Christology should be universally applicable. This is what Hopkins pursues throughout the entirety of Towards a Feminist Christology, an application of the work of Christ and identification with Christ that extends universally to men and women.

What a risky statement though: “If culture and socio-economic conditions have such a formative influence upon Christology, then one must accept that all christologies are contextual and that this relativises our understanding of the truth.” (11) Can we deny that culture and circumstances affect one’s understandings of God? Of course not, all of scripture bears witness to man’s understanding of God through the situations of life. It is also true that “people in different cultural and socio-economic contexts have different existential needs and therefore different understandings of what salvation is and how it is to be realized or received.” (12) I guess this means my different needs will dictate the different ways in which I “feel” the presence of Jesus—and I want to extend those circumstances to gender differences as well. I think gender differences are some of those situations/circumstances that dictate different needs for which Jesus is provision. That ties back to what I noted about the curse; my feminine bent to over-submit and to selfishly desire so much that I give beyond what is right and good, or the flip-side… my good and right ability to love, but to a point beyond boundaries where my love enables people to continue in sin or unhealthy dependency. Jesus can meet those parts of my insufficiency, just as well as He can fully compensate for the male curse tendencies.

“We need to rediscover the original Protestant emphasis on faith as living without security, of living without evidence and proof in the love of God.” (13) If I am to live as a woman in this world where my femininity leaves me vulnerable, I need to learn trust and love of Jesus in my community setting to be the all I need without some sort of preemptive proof. Yet of course I want some sort of existential assurance that Jesus is always with me, for “the process of objectifying and ordering the world around us and developing a conscious ego is mediated to us through the language we learn as children.” (13) Maybe some truth is really best left unsaid… I need to leave those gaps in my set of beliefs for the movement of Jesus beyond my imagination; I cannot box Him in too tightly. I call this boxing in of my Jesus, my God, into a predictable rubric of behavior by the same term as Hopkins, “domestication.” We have definitely domesticated Christianity, and because of it our Christology. This effects the emasculation of our ministers… who were one representations of the powerful, kingly Jesus, but now are expected to hold the service, foot-washing position of Jesus (14). Here we encounter the masculine problem of Jesus… such servile work as foot-washing is too humiliating to the male ego, and thus left for the women, who would more willingly submit to anything in order to maintain peace.

Hopkins observes that this progression of emasculated men to brash and unapologetic women occurred somewhat simultaneously with change of ministerial role from dominant to subservient. (15) In her surroundings on the Netherlands and Western Europe, Hopkins further notes that women ministers typically serve in ecumenical or small congregations. She offers a touching example of a group of female ministers in Amsterdam who went to live and serve among the needy, like Jesus (16). Yet “these women began to perceive that an unbridled passion to love and care for everybody and redeem Amsterdam could prove a motor for self-destruction.” (16) Developing a club, “Eve Around Amsterdam”: “Now they regularly organize study days for their own in-service training, to develop new theory and practice for the pastorate based on developing critical awareness of the dynamics of power in church and theology which pressurize women to offer themselves as living sacrifices, to collude to their own exploitation and self-denial in the name of Christ.” (16)

How many of we women are getting so desperate as to offer ourselves to God’s service in spite of the costs? Hopkins believes that “many lay Christian women are presently wrestling with the negative consequences of inherited Christological doctrine.” (16) If our Christology has been defined be emasculated men who didn’t themselves find true identification with and embodiment in the person of Christ, how can we truly the theology we have been handed down? Over the past 10-15 years upon composition of her book in 1994, Hopkins observed a shift in the Christological beliefs amongst Christian women (17). I am speculating here, but I see how the shift in belief could have resulted from desperation to be free from societal guilt and personal conscience developed through societal guilt. We women have learned to define our being and the nature of our personhood from a Christian community that expects self-sacrifice of Christian women; but now this feminine self-sacrifice expected by culture must combine with self-sacrificing Jesus who embodies all the “feminine virtues” in order for women to identify with Jesus.

It is so easy for we women to develop of sense of female subjectivity for sins, like the feminists, because each woman “feels need to accept personal responsibility for what she does.” (25) We take on the burden of guilt draped over out shoulders, and some of us decide that to identify with Jesus, it is necessary for us to go to the cross to pay for sin as well. Oh how easily the weight of glorious grace and mercy slips through the fragile hands of desperate women.

Maybe the liturgical cycle, which moves annually through Jesus’ life, death and resurrection allows women a powerful medium of identification with the crucified Jesus (25) that can be easily abused by the selfishness of our female sin tendencies. I think the desire to pay for my own sins rather than heaping them on Jesus is rooted in my selfish sin. “In the Latin tradition, certainly since the fifth century, sin has been inextricably associated with sex.” (51) Maybe this is Hopkins attempt to fault liturgy itself with female difficulty over grace and atonement. Thus, “the question arises, is it possible to preach ‘Christ crucified’ without evoking forms of guilt and masochism.” (52) This “question about the appeal of the crucified Christ is a complex one. On the one hand, Jesus on the cross encouraged oppressed people to accept their suffering under their taskmasters as in some sense redemptive, but on the other hand, the suffering Jesus gave them a sense of comfort, for God in Jesus, understood their heavy load.” (53) New Testament believers did not turn to the masochistic desire to pay for sin like Jesus, but found meditation “upon a suffering Jesus-messiah” to prompt steadfastness when undergoing suffering and “strategy to survive through hope in a new liberated future.” (53) How do we women relinquish that selfish desire of self-atonement in order to strategically imagine our liberating hope enough to experience that grace of God?

God’s mercy may be defined by the simple fact that regardless of who we are, who we consciously or unknowing harm, God is with us if we have entered into covenant with Him. I know I often feel I do not deserve such covenant, something I am very justified in feeling, but Hopkins encourages me that my failing “is also a part of the history of the presence of God with us and finally it is a question of hope that the God who knows and feels everything in our hearts shall deal justly and mercifully with us.” (61) How will I remember and re-experience that presence when I am tempted to deny grace again for my selfish self-reliance? Brueggemann espouses this phenomenal, biblical idea of speaking into being… mimicking my Father God and the power of my Jesus, the Living Word. But “even dialogue about Christology could become another form of literalism, of dead words, if those who dialogue have never danced to the rhythm of the celebration of life and resurrection.” (77) Dying to self, I guess is the key… and the atonement is a sacrifice I cannot offer, because I am not a sinless priest to offer up the offering for sin; my sin prevents me from sacrificing to God… so no matter how much self-atonement I may masochistically exact from myself, I am still in need of a mediator, an intercessor on my behalf.

Hopkins notes the Jesus tradition of “a mediating Logos or Heavenly man brings salvific knowledge from God to initiates who are divinely reborn and freed from the evil world for ultimate union with God.” (84) The evil of the world towards woman is the enemy which Hopkins as a feminist passionately rejects as a male problem imputed to women as their own sins: “ the objection, the denigration and sometimes demonization of female biological processes and sexuality” (93) are the feminist’s enemies affecting the female difficulty in identifying with Jesus. “Women suffer from this problem directly through experiences of incest, sexual abuse, pornography, rape, and their exclusion from some holy orders.” (93) We women are truly a weaker sex, more easily deceived, and therefore the fragility of our personhoods is more easily lost, because we too often allow these cruel treatments because of our own sin tendencies, selfish subjugation of ourselves. Hopkins is right to encourage women that “they do not need to internalize these male projections or passively accept violence against their bodies and minds.” (93) Instead, she suggests that we can “reclaim their embodied selves as made in the image of God and potentially a source of divine presence,” (93) which I find to be a fascinating concept.

A meeting place of divine presence? I suppose Paul does talk about the body being the temple of the Holy Spirit, and common Christian language locates Jesus as residing “in my heart.” Hopkins takes this idea of the female body being just as much God’s temple as a man’s one step further to self-image/self-esteem, which I think has been a historic battle of woman against herself, though not uninfluenced by her society. Hopkins believes that “the meeting of the divine essence and the human essence in the female flesh can only take place if women can learn to love and cherish their own bodies.” (93) This process of learning to love and cherish our own bodies, which I think most of we women tend to hate and reject as imperfect has no narcissistic connotations to the suggestions of love, but rather self-definition. I appreciate the aspect of feminism that encourages women to explore our own identities– feminist Christianity encouraging the exploration of self with Jesus rather than merely accepting the systematic Christology we have been handed over the years. The problem with self-definition, however, is that there are very few role models by which we women can learn to establish our own identities (93).

Historically women have been considered the possession of men; “Even exceptional women such as queens, abbesses, mystics and writers were protected by powerful male sponsors who influenced their values, thoughts an behaviors.” (93-4) However, female self-identification is crucial to the understanding of true self before God and learning how we truly are to be Jesus and love Jesus because “there are in fact fundamental differences between the sexes based upon a complex interaction between biology (sex) and socialization (gender).” (94) I don’t think that’s groundbreaking news, women do life differently than men for we have been built both internally and externally different than men: we have different spirit-natures just as much as we have different physical natures. The male being and the female being drastically differ. Thus, our language of explorative self-definition will differ.

Language becomes key in the female self-definition; we must be careful what sort of language we utilize in our self-definition, Hopkins warns, since “from the moment a girl is born she hears only the language created by a male culture to enforce the power of father/God the Father.” (95) This, Hopkins pronounces, evidences that “all language is mediated through though and all thought is created by language which comes from society and culture not from the individual.” (95) Thus we have the burden of reinvention, for we “must begin to create new language and culture based upon a positive affirmation of their embodied existence and desires.” (96) This creation of language and development of new substance from which to define ourselves and our feminine identities allows us to bridge the dualism of emotion and reason in ourselves, and allows for simultaneous comprehension of God and transcendent and immanent.” (96) Female self-definition affects not only her self, but also her theology. I like Hopkins’ explanation of this process“…twin projects of external collective action and internal personal mysticism need to be developed simultaneously.” (96)

That “personal mysticism” is something like that experience of Jesus that meets out own individual needs as male and female. I guess since my natural desires and interests aren’t those of typical women, He will meet what I need by His provision… maybe I need to better understand that everything boils down to just my Jesus in the end. I am almost terrified to take Hopkins up on the challenge to “emphasize the becoming of God in the female flesh rather than the presence of God in the abstract human being.” (96) But I suppose I have been asking my Jesus to embody me… to help me be Him to others. Hopkins asserts that for me, a woman, God in flesh, my Jesus, must somehow embody my own sexuality. Somehow my womanhood affects my nature and the ways in which I reflect the person of Jesus, relate to Him. So Hopkins suggests a feminine alternative within the Bible itself to a male Jesus: “Sophia is describes as the female hypostatis of God who is the creative, revelatory wisdom and justice of God.” (84) Wisdom. She adds that “an older tradition of speculation upon a divine mediator between God and humanity, namely ‘Hokma,’ or in the Greek ‘Sophia,’ the wisdom of God.” (84) So in Jesus, am I as a woman to recognize a male embodiment of wisdom, “a promise of the grace of God?” (97). Is Jesus the male New Testament equivalent of the feminine Hokmah of the Old Testament?

I must recognize distinctiveness in my embodiment by Jesus, because my life experiences being a woman will be different from His as a male. Somehow, Hopkins ties in the difference of mine and Jesus’ experiences of the nature and essence He embodied to a transcendent nature of “the wounds of love and the thirst for justice” beyond “the differences between women and men, women and God.” (97) The Kingdom of Heaven is as much with me as a man reflecting, loving, living out Jesus because we are both in His image, but it is so very different. Regardless of gender, Hopkins wants us to find a universally relevant Jesus. But we must sort this Jesus, the son of God with whom men and women identify differently out from amidst a myriad of Christologies: “the test for a contemporary Christology in a time of change is how far new understandings and imaged of Jesus empower us to seek in the depths of our present, the qualities and values necessary for the healing and renewing of ourselves, our societies, and our planet.” (100-101)

Who I see Jesus to be is a spiritual conception that should have existential results, I think. Belief motivating obedience? The Jesus Hopkins is searching for corresponds with a “fluidity of identity for feminism has meant rejecting artificial structures of unity in factor of ever-changing and transforming process of dialogue, interaction and creativity.” (102) How complicated our understanding of this Jesus gets, using human experience as “the starting point and ending point of the hermeneutical circle.” (104) Our experiences as Western women are based in this “either-or” sort of mentality, deriving separatistic thinking from a separation between self and those to be related with. We segregate ourselves culturally as “a form of ‘epistemic control’ which has led to an inability in the west to listen to ‘the other’ with genuine openness and vulnerability.” (105) So in the end, our Kingdom of Heaven and the differences within each of us should motivate towards expansiveness through sharing. Through such suggestion, Hopkins aims at reconstructing Christology for women regardless of how “intellectually or doctrinally risky that appears to be.” (105)

The Christological reconstruction requires techniques “from below,” referring to basic and sufficient information on the texts about Jesus “to be able to read the gospels without completely projection (our) own presupposition, values and norms onto the text.” (107) The presuppositions we bring, Hopkins would espouse, are brought to the text from the male-defined culture in which live, either what we have learned or our reactions. Thus Hopkins seeks to encourage women to redefine our Christologies through the text without the influence of the masculine language we have been fed—another quest after self-definition. This is because Hopkins perceives that masculine language offends women because “their relationships as mothers, daughters, lovers and friends is shut out of the inner circle of their relationality within the ‘immanence ‘of the Godhead’.”(109) This probably motivates the sort of distancing we women do between Jesus and the Father, and subsequently ourselves from the person of Jesus as well as the Father.

Relational distancing driven by externally-defined/culturally-defined language rather than internally-defined, self-defined language leads Hopkins to note negatively that “in my opinion most Christians are monotheists.” (110) When we women distance the relationship between God and Jesus, we tend to neglect Jesus’ divinity… though this is a separation I am trying to work against, and I think Hopkins in some way too, striving towards an embodiment of the hypostatic unity of Jesus. “Women searching for their own Christological discourse wish to go beyond the effort to deconstruct tradition.” (109) We want to put something back together. We want to draw on our experiences and the language we learned through them to express to Jesus and depict out Jesus. “If our spirituality is deep enough to embrace all aspects of life, whether personal, social, natural or cosmic then the theological controversies surrounding the nature of ‘Christ’ can respectfully be circumvented.” (111) Jesus causes “ever aspect of discrimination, exploitation and abuse of power is exposed as deconstructive to the holiness and goal of life.” (113)

So I come back almost to where I started in seeking a mode of relating with my Jesus… I have married Him, yes, is that as close as I can picture to embodying Him? How comfortable are we with the language of spiritual possession? So my selfish sin tendency of over-submission seeks to serve my selfishness and maybe when my Jesus gets convicting, I try and distance myself through the excuse of male language. I am a woman, however weird of a female I may be, and my being, spirit and body, and female in nature. I relate to Jesus as a woman… so I must embody Him in my imaginative language in order to somehow define myself on His terms as I can understand and implicate them. What a terrifying responsibility, for after that, I must do so with others… in that community which will keep breaking my fragile Christology with new challenges. Jesus, thank you for being so much bigger than me! I can only be part feministic.