Giving Up on Universals

So the more I read and reflect on theological analyses of social politics… the more people and thoughts I am exposed to, the more I find the condition of my life to separate into the binaries of belief and experience… I believe inessences, in natures, in spirit beyond sense, etc… but in the experience of life, knowledge only comes by senses, by the tangible, by feeling “real” things in a three dimensional substanital existence. So where is the spiritual in an existential world. If I’m just looking around and being present in each situation (ie, not distracted, not mind-wandering through agenda, abstractions, etc…), I find spirit experienced in relationship. In my 3 hour class today, framed off of Emmanuel Levinas’ phenomonological wondering about “otherness” difference, sameness and the interactions between individual people, I was reflecting on this very thing with a classmate towards the end of class. Reflecting on the presentation of Barth’s theology, and the experience and situation out of which his theology describing God as wholly other to man and not being comprehensible or even comparable to (by any analogy) human experience. Some part of me reaches out to embrace that, running. And then here’s Jesus, part of the wholly other, but here too. God with us. That historical presence, and then by revelation, a continued spiritual reality. To me, in an existential world in a church that comprehends God through the tangible stuff by natural theology (our use of reason) and analogy. So where does the amphibious God-Son (love that spiritual/physical word of Lewis) come into the massive problem we have in Christian theology, and thus, my life-thinking…Church?

So supposedly, and hopefully, by any Christian’s reckoning, I don’t care what denomination you are, as long as you’re Christian claiming and living by whatever that little rule of faith we have is..HOPEFULLY you believe the idea of Christian church includes all who claim Jesus. Its supposed to be universal, I think, in a very few things: (1) Jesus, that historical guy who came to earth, is God in body; (2) this Jesus perfected/completed the means to relate with God, which before Him, we weren’t able to do… by living a perfect life, dying an unjust death, and doing something called resurrection and not remaining dead in that body. (3) that somehow all people are meant to be wrapped up in relation with one another, and with God in something unique called unity.. something where all differences unapologetically are, and are beautiful, refracting and reflecting all the glory God made. I know some of my friends think its cheaper to look for the God bits in things… I dont know. I want to love people for them, not for finding God inside them. If God is love, and God enables me to open up all the way to love with whatever is in me,  then maybe relationship with God can only be thought of as a sort of invisible spouse who works to erode the barriers of selfishness and self-protectingness I erect to remain unmoved and untouched by all that human passion that washes over me all the time. Yet, we run into an issue I mentioned earlier this week, or at the end of last week in a blog… that of abstraction from circumstances to relate with God.

See, I guess we call that consecration, when one is set apart to be devoted to God. Fits into this idea of relating with a Wholly Other person… we have to remove from what we are in nature to conform in our part of the relation. It seems that abstraction, though, in theology, can be both sides… we can abstract ourself to community (as we talked about in class today with Barth’s frustration… how his mentors and fellow theologians became so focused on being the German church, that they surrendered their ideas to those of nationalism and nazism), to a position where we are no longer critical (:) shouldn’t we always be when looking at ourselves next to Jesus)… or the problem of being so removed from community that we lose touch. Can we relate if we’ve abstracted ourselves to God. So I used to think that was the way to enter the world… (and this will require more reflection and a re-reading of Henry Nouwen’s “Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life”… from moving out to God, others, and then finding oneself)… and now I wonder. To abstract myself from the context I find myself thrown in is a kind of giving up of life. Jesus talked about how we must lose our lives to save them. Hm. But is that the kind of giving up that’s removal? ‘Cause it seems like the connected fabric, currents, whatever connected, fluid metaphor makes most sense to you… to abstract one life from the many that make up whatever fact of human universal there is for the moment, seems a robbery to the others it was connected to.

So how do we bring a wholly Other into the everyday. Funny to ask, cause we do it with each other in that spirituality of relationship all the time.We open ourselves up and let the masks fall of, let the guards down and share, or we probe with our curious wondering. Ever get that itch just to know someone, and accepting whatever they give to you, in whatever moments at part of that generous conitinuum they are? I kinda love that feeling. To sit near someone, and know that regardless of how afraid you are to voice your thoughts, and no matter how choppily they will come out, that other person likes to hear them, likes you best when you’ll be scared for a few moments to give out those thoughts, and is secure enough in knowing your thoughts will always be changing to just listen, engage, move on too? If we experience God, if we experience anything naturally of God, of divine bliss, love, happiness, just contentedness… just being who we are without convincing ourselves we need more excuses for that. Its beautiful, practically the most beautiful thing, ever. And it has everything to do with our situations and all the particularities person-to-person. So where do all our wonderings come from, if not sitting in that place of relationship with God, with each other, if not our fears?

Do we begin with reflection on concrete relationship to create a theology? Should we? seems appropriate to me.

 

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?

 

Response to: The Risks of Repeating Ourselves: Reading Feminist, Womanist Figures of Jesus. By Karen Timble Alliaume

Response to: The Risks of Repeating Ourselves: Reading Feminist, Womanist Figures of Jesus. By Karen Timble Alliaume

Over the past year and a half of my final time studying for my undergraduate degree, I have begun to question more specifically God’s use of women in occupational roles/positions. We have in the past gender-specified certain occupations, tasks, etc… and with the occupation I find myself identifying seems to fall into that predominantly male category of collegiate teaching, and in the even more forbidden territory of religious education. I want to teach theology and philosophy on a collegiate level, and involving God in that already-bold ambition of teaching young men has been questioned. What would I give up to teach? The conservative feminine ideal: husband and family (at least for now) because of an almost fanatical, over-ambitious drive at teaching. Probably far too intense, but I love the stuff I study… I converse with authors far too regularly, and am learning how to integrate what I learn into life. Jesus and I have a simple relationship that grows more complex as I experience more… as Jesus matures me into a woman He has married rather than a little girl He may be fond of. He wants me to be able to love Him back just as much as He loves me… and I struggle with that, because somewhere in the picture, that means being like my Jesus. Be like You, Jesus? But You are not a woman, I am not a man, how can I fully live like You? Thus I explore the feminist concepts of Jesus to see how far I can push into “men’s world” and remain a true woman in Your image.

Because these women are feminists that I am reading to obtain one polar perspective on women and Jesus, I have to keep in mind that part of their fundamental belief system defies patriarchal anything; any system that is organized with a man as head of a woman. Feminists in their true form, I think, dwell far too much in the past, assigning blame to men for the suppression of women. And of course, there is plenty of blame to be had there, in the past… but the more I read, the more I am think the feminists are playing the Eden game again… tag, men are “it” for the blame! The more I read, the more I am inspired and my imagination runs wild… but I think feminism need to realize the fundamental stupidity of women. “Maleness” has a bad taste in the mouths of feminists who see manhood as the cause of female oppression, omitting the female sin tendency to over-submit. “Your desire shall be for your husband and he will rule over you” (Genesis 3.16) evidences an innate female sin tendency to voluntarily subject herself to the whims and desires of others.

I think feminism denies something inherently female in our nature.. the sin tendencies: it acknowledges difference between make and female, but those difference remain unclear as feminists try to achieve “equality” for women. But equality of value does not necessarily imply same/like position, which feminism wants to attain: same roles and value. I think we women often forget our own nature, and do look to male nature as the “norm” for how we should be… though even in reality, we cannot make our natures anymore male than they can make theirs female. We are incapable, most of us, of performing “male-ly” in most given tasks because not only are my not built as men physiologically, we are not metaphysically built as men either.

This I find myself identifying with Alliaume,“McLaughlin’s own yearning for the answer to her question ‘How can I a woman, find myself, see myself as made in the image of a male God, a God whose human face is seen in the man Jesus?’ (140)” But the more preposterous solution cannot be so simple as McLaughlin proposes: “to ‘re-dress’ the problem of Jesus’ maleness by reading him as a transvestite, as one who shatters the opposed duality of male/female.” Jesus really did more than dress-up in flesh, though… He took on human nature (hypostatic union theology?). This proposition seems to have been given in response to Jesus’ apparently unmasculine behavior: “Jesus’ behavior is anxiety-provoking; he behaves in a manner inconsistent with our expectations of him as a man.” When did we ever assign gender to behavior? I guess Jesus’ avoidance of a gender-stereotype label makes Him frustrating to identify with. Why can we not just accept Jesus for who He tells us He is? Who He demonstrates to us He is? Why must we identify what He is to identify ourselves with Him? I think Jesus tried to picture humanity rather than a gender.

I guess we “dress” Jesus with gender-specific qualities so as to know how to emotionally engage Him. Do I want to emotionally engage Jesus like Alliaume? Is it a choice I have or something I just do, especially as a woman? Emotionally identify with Jesus? Jesus, do you feel as I feel, are you broken like me? Do I not engage emotions, distance myself from them because I don’t see You in them? All of me to all of You Jesus, please.  Alliaume points out an interesting confliction in how we view Jesus: “Christians believe in a Jesus ‘dressed’ in flesh, that most female of symbols, and they believe in a God in man-flesh who behaves like a woman.” I wondered at first how flesh was a female symbol, but if it is thought of in terms of Greek thought… separating us from the forms, true stuff, spirit, then flesh is evil, which would further explain to me that imputation of sin/guilt of all humanity onto women. (I tangent in my thought to make note to try and find the origin of existential guilt, since its presence is undeniable) We cannot make Jesus into a woman… but can we make a woman into Jesus? Can one be done but not the other? This “transvestite Jesus” is McLaughlin’s christologically playful attempt to shock her congregation, is seems.

“McLaughlin’s yearning, and mine (so speaks Alliaume), to see ourselves made in the image of a male God is a yearning to be recognized, as women, as capable of representing divinity; a recognition that is not made available to us in the conventional manner.” I need to find a way to convince/persuade women that they need to do this. That we women need to identify with Jesus, our living sacrifice, we need an emotional connection, to realize Jesus in all parts of our lives, including those emotions, which are beyond my comprehension. Since women are typically considered very emotional human beings, what if one does not engage her emotions or even find them within herself as typically defined femininity prescribes? Is she then any less a woman in the same way that feminists want to consider Jesus not really masculine because of His behavior? Again, who dictates the standard of gender-specific behavior? Society, surely. Yet we live in society, and so must work within the socially acceptable definitions of male and female in pursuit of a more Jesus-like life.

For Alliaume, this Jesus-like life and identification require an understanding of Jesus as a man being different, fundamentally speaking, from women. Alliaume does not delve into the differences of nature and personhood based on gender, which I acknowledge, but at least begins with anatomical differences. Alliaume desires to picture what Jesus would look like in the person of a woman, something she terms as “citing” Jesus: “To ‘cite’ Jesus with one’s body refers to what appears to be a preexistent relationship on congruity between Jesus and a woman, a relationship that is actually created in that citation.” So with this whole identification through citation or picturing (the world sacrament as living picture comes to mind)… does it deepen an existing relationship, create a whole new form of relationship? Unimaginable? Why bother trying to “cite” Jesus as a woman if men do not do so as well? There is a need for men to “cite” Jesus, because the typical man illegitimately represents Jesus in his definition of maleness (why do we more often call Him the Christ then Jesus… sounds so distant, so masculine, identifying my Jesus by what He’s done. He’s more than that though) similarly to “illegitimate congruencies of women’s bodies and practice with Jesus’ body and practice.”

“Some Christian feminist theologians, finding orthodox figurations of Jesus’ significance irredeemably harmful to women, determine Christianity itself irredeemable for women” (maybe the male/typical Christianity?) How does the person of Jesus pose an oppressive figure? I look at my Jesus in the Bible and I cannot imagine how He could be oppressive even as a slave master. Feminism , I think, identifies “maleness” by the male sin tendencies, which historically have been asserted through oppression, domineering over sinful women who tend to want to over submit themselves. Feminism seeks to balance these natures of men and women, but we will never be on a level playing field, and Jesus cannot be thought of as oppressive simply because of historical male sin tendencies. I wonder how much a passive man would be judged as oppressive by the very maleness within him? “We have trouble with Jesus’ maleness because the Christian ‘convention’ of Jesus becoming human in a male body has not seemed to ‘cover’ women, has not seemed to fulfill the Athanasian adage that ‘what is not taken up is not redeemed.’”

If one accepts male headship, then of course Jesus covers women, because somehow Paul thought we needed that. What does feminism think of male headship? Probably that male sin tendency has disabled it and it is no longer desirable. So I am going to play in feminist thought for a little bit, imagine according to experience that all I knew of male nature was the indulged sin tendencies it has, then of course a male Jesus would seem bad and unredemptive; I would join Alliaume in stating, “The figure of Jesus has not ‘worked for us because the continual citations of him as Lord, king, Son have not figured in Jesus that we recognize as redemptive.” Beyond that cry of feminism for relief from a male presence which cannot be so bad as they allow (I almost want to assert that we women tend to let ourselves be taken advantage of in the initial naïveté of our natures, and our tendencies to assume guilt for sins that are not ours. We are easy, willing scapegoats, are we not?). As a woman, though, if I am told to live like Jesus that is what I want to do, fully in my womanly nature and self. Thus I concur, “the ‘reality’ of Jesus lies in the extent to which figurations and stories of Jesus constitute us and our lives.”

McLaughlin’s “transvestite Jesus” is an attempt to figure Jesus into a person acceptable to the feminist who over generalizes maleness in regards to women as being full of those terrifying sin tendencies. The “transvestite Jesus” utilizes unconventional actions of women, which did not depict typical acceptance of femininity. These are “gender-bending actions by female martyrs and saints, and looks forward to further reformulations and inhabitations of a cross-dressing Christic body.” Feminists have far too much a problem with Jesus’ maleness as an inhibiting factor to their identification with Him (though I have like concerns at times), and pose two solutions to this problem of maleness: a post-Christian abandonment of the name of Jesus, retaining only the example of His life, or those who are committed to Jesus as the most promising figure, but can’t accept Him as they first encountered Him (in His male nature, seemingly oppressive), and so attempt to reinvent His example. So how does this Jesus, who came as a man, undeniably and unmistakable, save women?

I wonder what we women want in a savior? I suppose we need some sort of identification to say our sins died with Him… we need someone that feminine spirit of ours can align ourselves to, someone to mimic even our gender-specific behavior after. After all, what do we do with those distinctly female awkward functions? There must be some identification for even our physiological/anatomical differences within Jesus. I have attempted at least one that used to be a separation factor with God, which rendered us as women physically weaker than men, but gave us a great value as the bearers of life: we lose blood differently than men. Jesus gave life through the losing of His blood, and I suppose in a way, we women do also. Can we any more deny our femininity positionally in our striving after traditionally “male” occupations and roles than we can those differences in anatomy that separate us? And yet somehow in our very difference from men, we find value through the complementing aspects of our female personhood. So how is Jesus, who came as a man, redemptive for a woman? “Jesus’ redemptive power lies ultimately in this ideal humanity, not in his maleness, nor in a spurious identification of him with the transcendent Greek Logos. His maleness is significant insofar as he renounces the privileges that accompany it.” What sort of privilege did Jesus set aside to be redemptive to the whole community, men and women, as well as provide embodiment for the whole community of Himself? I suppose we in our complementary natures need each others’ differing abilities to embody Jesus in our communal interactions.

Rosemary Radford Ruether describes Christ’s redemption as portrayed through the community of Christ who continues to embody Him, extend His identity and ideals. If this is true, “we can now encounter Christ even ‘in the form of our sister’.” If “the prototypical ‘human’ is male, while the female has always been seen as lesser than or other to full male humanity,” then the feminine status as “honorary human” must be harder to redeem than that of the typical male. Jesus came as a male, yet McLaughlin says He divested Himself of the male privilege that accompanied His gender, for she “figured Jesus’ maleness in terms if its absence.” What is the privilege exactly that Jesus forfeits? Jesus made Himself nothing, Philippians 2 tells us, taking on the nature of a servant: this reminds me of what Hopkins noted about the evolution of the ministerial position of ministers. In ancient patriarchal society, the servile positions were given to women, and now ministers are being expected to hold such positions, rendering ministers today more feminine, according to Hopkins. Again, I question how we assigned behaviors to genders. I completely agree that Jesus emptied Himself of His Godness and associated privileges in becoming human, but did He divest His humanity of anything? Isaiah 53-like description rings through the mind, for Jesus was despised and rejected; He did take on the lowest form of humanity… that of a slave or a servant… is this the way we try and see Jesus as “womanly”?

Its interesting that Jesus on a one-on-one level seemed very egalitarian but He was not revolting against the patriarchal community on that sort of a level, but in relationship. Alliaume quotes Sojourner Truth, one of those strong women who defies gender stereotypes, thus figuring Jesus, “Jesus was made by God and a women; man had nothing to do with Him.” Such seems an attempt to define Jesus by too exclusively feminine overtones—there needs to be room in Jesus for male identification too, and often I feel that feminist Christology in extreme forms attempts to exclude Jesus to women. One must wonder, if Jesus was made without the presence of a man, thus somehow without that fatherly passing on of something to do with sin (one might be able to argue about sin nature here, but that can be dealt with at a later point), did Jesus’ solely human maternity and divine paternity affect His bio-chemical make-up? The crucified, suffering Jesus obviously is too passive for men, but is He too much for women too?

Alliaume thinks that “Haraway is right that Jesus as incarnation of the ‘suffering servant’ is too easily subsumed back into the Christian patriarchal narrative of supersessionism, and I would add, the valorization of feminine sacrifice.” Thus the crucified Jesus has been deemed by feminist Christology as an unfit role model for women, and the men have already rejected Him. What are we looking for in our Jesus, then? What sort of sign or wonder would the Jesus Christianity exalts in theology have to perform in order to provide a life fit for modeling if neither gender will assume Him as a role model? Yet I have met women who have been told that in order to be obedient to God, they must assume the role of Christ as the silent, suffering servant… in obedience to the man/husband who assumes the role of God. I too at different points of my life submitted willingly when perhaps the more Jesus-like thing to do would not be submission. We cannot allow for abuse between man/wife in the assumption of roles; man cannot play the part of God over Jesus in the crucifixion, though the human unity of man and wife is supposed to picture the oneness of the Father and Son—albeit, marriage continues to pose and incomplete picture. Indeed, God’s abuse is different from man’s (if we want to use that terminology), for we cannot “abuse well” (morbid joke); human abuse is always selfish. And yet we women continue to try and love and subject ourselves to such enablement because we don’t know how else to love Jesus. We think we’re supposed to… and so until we can no longer tolerate such an understanding of Jesus, perhaps our overly trusting senses and desire to belong, be needed cause us to submit ourselves to abuse. Do we understand our Jesus through such abuse? Maybe the Father out of love for us abused Jesus, but human abuse cannot be from anything but selfishness.

So in order to prevent women from succumbing to the masochistically seductive temptation for women to voluntarily subject themselves to abuse, which is pictured as Christ-like, Alliaume attempts to find another model of behavior. Sojourner Truth is looked at as “a paradoxical figure for ‘humanity’” because of her strength of personhood in spite of being not only a woman, who were considered honorary humans, but also a black woman who was considered nothing at all. Of course it is obvious that Truth is a woman, but somehow she is significant beyond the bounds of womanhood itself, and into the area of humanity in general. Haraway uses the figure of Truth to evidence that gender and race matter in identification with Jesus, because they constrain humanity. Of course to Jesus, race is insignificant, as is gender, but we sinful, selfish humans limit the work of His grace socially between gender and ethnicity. Haraway, along with fellow feminist Fiorenza, attempt to identify “certain ‘Jesus stereotypes,’ to figure theoretical/ theological subject positions for women that do not rehearse the dangerously worn-out conventions of ‘humanity,’ but instead seek to honor differences among men and women in different social locations.” Feminist theologians are tired of righting womanly abuse of the crucifixion, and are searching for a new identity in Jesus. He was resurrected, right? Perhaps feminist christologies tend to miss the further purposes of Jesus’ life and death: to bring us to life (1 Peter 3.18).

“Feminists use two strategies, abandonment and unmasking, in resisting the effects of orthodox Christological formulations,” which feminists tend to feel suppress women into a cross beneath the angry, berating of men and male authority. Feminist theology wants to cling to Jesus in Christianity without allowing for the possibility of abuse within His personhood. Jesus doesn’t need to be a third alternative… He can be a male Jesus and provide salvation for women if we want to play around with that whole idea of Jesus denying the stereotypical male privilege. Perhaps Jesus did deny the social benefits afforded to His masculine nature by hanging around with prostitutes, tax collectors, and sinners, but even more than this, Jesus fundamentally denied and conquered the male domineering sin tendency. I wonder, does this mean Jesus was tempted with male versions of every sin (since He was tempted in all manners as we are), or did He face female temptations as well? Feministis like Fiorenza reconcile the maleness of Jesus with the necessary redemptive covering for womanhood by viewing Him as a paradoxical representation of womanhood in male form, “a figure for a reimagined feminist theological practice” as well as a figure that slyly/deceptively sinks into present christologies, exposing their “hierarchal interests” to reform the identity of Christianity. I guess Jesus needed a face-lift from what we have done with Him; we need to redeem the person of our Redeemer from the

My mind keeps wandering back to these origins of these explorative attempts with Jesus’ gender: We try and make Jesus into what He is not, something more than He is; we want more miraculous signs and wonders that He can cover our gender-particular needs and temptations. Perhaps we are not looking for re-incarnated persons of Jesus, but in the over-the-top feminism movement, we are shamefully stripping the person of Jesus of the nature He assumed, masculine devoid of sin, in order to invent our own signs and wonders: feminine versions of Jesus. Somewhere, we need to understand a line between female configuration of the person and work of Jesus and making Jesus into a woman or an un-man. Jesus did in fact die, and our continual sign and wonder to evoke remembrance of that sacrifice and the life we live because of it is embedded in the Eucharist. Jesus’ last act was to promise us the wonder of the Holy Ghost’s indwelling and commission us upon receipt of it. Somehow we need to remember and revitalize the sign we have been given… reimagine our Jesus or refigure Him so that we don’t forget instead of always looking for a new sign. “In other words, we must re-cite, re-site, our refigurations so that they do not reflect ourselves back to us;” I think this means I should not look at my understanding of Jesus and looking back at myself.

Looking back at myself shows nothing, because I just continue to perceive myself as perfectly or imperfectly as my imagination reveals. To see the truth, I need a mirror, I need to look at Jesus. Can a male Jesus reflect me, a woman accurately? Alliaume continues to want to use the word “covering” to refer to Jesus’ redemptive act, so she asks the question, is Jesus’ blood the sort that can wipe out female sins, female uncleanness? “Since Jesus’ incarnation as a man has not been understood as ‘covering’ women, when we ‘put Him on,’ as McLaughlin suggests, we do so illegitimately.” She does not equate covering, protection from the Father’s wrath, with the husband’s covering for his wife; that would be too much of a stretch for the Jesus sacrifice. A feminist does not want to involve a man in her redemption, in her resulting sanctification, that “putting on” of Jesus. So McLaughlin searches for a legitimized identification in Jesus, because she still finds in congruencies between His actions (from which I refuse to remove the cross sacrifice) –a  refiguration of Jesus that has to be more than a reinstatement of humanity. Perhaps this Jesus question of an identifying point for women as well as men must be prefaced with something Grant notes: “the maleness of Jesus is superseded by the Christness of Jesus.” Jesus’ messiahship holds redemptive qualities for men and women, so says Paul and the other Apostles; Jesus’ death and life affect the community. Alliaume appreciates this communal factor through stating, “what is divine about Jesus is also found in the ‘new humanity’ represented by those around Him.”

Having mentioned Sojourner Truth in her attempts to find a female point of comparison with Jesus-like tendencies, Alliaume turns to a social difference between women in identification with Jesus. The difference in Christology between black women vs. white women is typically more for black women as Jesus suffering with them, while white women are placed in a different sort of social circumstances: they are unable to think of Jesus as a co-sufferer because they are not trodden down to such a low place as the black women have been… they are captured in aristocracy while being quietly abused and exploited behind closed doors. The black women were mistreated in public, and so could identify more closely with the publicness of Jesus’ pain and suffering. “Grant recognizes that, for Christians ‘there is a direct relationship between our perception of Jesus Christ and our perception of ourselves.’” While we cannot see look at our figure of Jesus and just be looking at another picture of us, the Jesus we cling to us one whose social circumstances, ethnicity, maybe even gender offer hope for our specific situations. Such is true for the different races of women that Alliaume choses to become involved with: “After the abolition of slavery, social and economic pressure kept black women in such substitutionary roles of ‘voluntary’ surrogacy as domestics for white families, or heads of their own single-parent families” The female sin tendency of over-submission out of selfishness continues to fascinate me as I watch women manipulate Jesus in order to prevent themselves from sinning, and in the end, only find themselves without means of redemption: if Jesus does not suffer and die in one’s Christology, we miss out on the life He has already lived and have to die unworthily, unable to pay for our own unrighteousness.

Through the biblical Hagar, Alliaume sees a picture of the normal/formative experience shared by all women: submission and survival, submission for survival, and often, ultimate rejection in response for the submission. She refers to this time of Hagar’s life as her “wilderness experience.” For the black woman, Hagar’s God is felt very real-ly… making “’a way out of no way.’” This is not a liberation experience, but rather a new understanding/revelation of resources, which were not previously recognized. Equating Hagar to Jesus, we understand that we women cannot deny suffering, Hagar’s character testifies “to the impossibility of theodicy, offering only a chastened hope that, while God neither prevents nor provokes her suffering, s/he does, compassionately, ‘make a way out of no way.’”Hagar, then, is used to picture the black women of America’s Jesus, for she acknowledges the suffering and absence of new redemptive means—but that Jesus is present in the suffering and renews understanding of situations to reconfigure into redemptive possibility. Sojourner Truth, Alliaume states, is the white woman’s stereotypical figure of identification with Jesus… conquering the hardships of experiences life to achieve an ambiguous state of uncertain equality with men… performing male tasks/roles in a female body.

The Virgin Mary is also used by feminists as “corrective to the maleness-of-Jesus problem” (which really isn’t a problem, just the male sin tendency problem, I think). Somehow the submissive, gentle Mary figure is viewed as “’a model of full womanhood and liberated humanity’ for all Christian Asian women…” potentially because she retains her womanly roles which feminists continue to rebel against. “It is our own formation, whether by oppressive structures or no, that agency paradoxically lies.” Agency in this case refers to the picking up and bearing, I think, of representing…. How we are going to resemble Jesus. Alliaume plays with the difference I the words reassemble and resemble, suggesting that if a woman is going to take on the likeness of Christ, she must first reassemble the image to one into which she can step as a women: female take on male likeness? Jesus will change shape again with each female attempt to reconfigure our life-depiction of Him. We have so much freedom, then, to try and be like Jesus, if we will only let Him be who He is and stop manipulating His sacrifice, our own redemption, to extract for ourselves a life example. Of course we need to reconfigure Christianity, but that includes a realization of Jesus as our mirror, whose death and resurrection are undeniable, and thus we too are called to die to self. Feminist Christology seems to omit the need to lose the self, that female sin tendency by placing oppression’s blame on all the males. We need the promise of a salvation in our Jesus figure who will not only redeem, but continually transform us. If we deny His maleness, which truly was devoid of action in sin tendency, can we do this? How can a woman really be like Jesus?