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Elisabeth Gössman
from CONCILIUM 1991, NO6, PP 51-60
with the necessary permissions
The construction of gender difference in the Christian tradition is
connected with the reception of the philosophical systems of Platonism,
Neoplatonism and Aristotelianism, which were read into the Bible. Though these
interpretative syntheses made up of the Bible and Greek philosophy may have had
exercised different kinds of influence in particular instances, they were in
agreement over the claim that the man was the principal and that the humanity
of the woman was derived. To claim that the man was the principal meant that he
was the beginning and had a vocation to rule. This presupposition was not
questioned either by the church fathers or by most of the representatives of
mediaeval Scholasticism. The construct ‘woman’ was essentially
explained as a negation or a reduction of the construct ‘man’.
Although there are counter-traditions which deviate from this andronormative
picture of human beings, right down to modern times (and in both confessions)
the main tradition of official theology has proved to be the dominant influence
in history because time and again it has been endorsed by the church. The
counter-traditions, whether grounded in the plurality of theological schools or
conveyed by female mystics or poets, have been put to one side.
Because
the same biblical text has continually been interpreted down the centuries, the
andronormativeness of the picture of human beings has transcended the bounds of
particular periods. Here, apart from some glances back to the patristic period,
I shall confine myself to the Middle Ages, with an occasional look forward to
the early modern period.
1. Adam, first to be created, the perfect image of God, and the defects
of woman. Counter-tradition: Eve, God’s masterpiece
Hannah Arendt remarks that action is the only activity of the active
life which takes place directly between human beings without the mediation of
matter, material and things. The basic condition for action is plurality,
‘the fact that not one human being but many human beings live on
earth’.
According to her, this basic condition becomes clear in the
human beings of Genesis 1, created male and female, in the plural. She
criticizes the account of the creation in Gen. 2 as follows: ‘Here the
plural is not original to human beings, but human multiplicity is explained
from multiplication. Any idea of human beings, of whatever form, understands
human plurality as the result of an infinitely variable reproduction of a
primal model.(1)
This applies particularly to the Christian tradition. The Christian
tradition, neglecting the first chapter of Genesis, the significance of which
as an independent source it did not yet recognize, concentrated on Genesis 2
all human beings, including women, derive from Adam as the primal model. True,
the fact that in Genesis 1 both sexes are in the image of God is not completely
suppressed, but in the case of the female sex there are considerably
qualifications. According to William of Auxerre (at the beginning of the high
scholastic period):
1. the man is directly created in the image of God, but the woman is
created only indirectly, through the man (mediante viro);
2. the man has a clearer intellect and the woman must be subject to him
in accordance with the natural order;
3. all human beings, including women, are to be derived from the one
human being, just as all that is created comes from the one God.(2)
This results in the following defect, as far as woman is concerned: she
is not the image of God directly, but only through the man- here there was a
concern to do justice to 1 Corinthians 11.7. She is subordinate to the male
‘by nature’, which makes her dissimilar to God and puts her on the
side of creation, since she cannot portray God as Creator in his creativity. So
what remains of her imago Dei?
Scholasticism says that she is not inferior to man in portraying the
Trinity through the triad of spiritual powers which Augustine identified (e.g.
memory, insight, will). This is not insignificant, since faith and grace begin
here and the equality of woman is grounded in redemption. But the consequence
of the woman’s defect is that she is not called to rule, though this is
contrary to Gen. 1.2, the charge over creation given to both sexes. Where that
is felt to be a contradiction, it is said that the woman forfeited this calling
through her role as a seducer in Gen. 3.3
The counter-tradition of women(4), which can be traced continuously at
least from the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries, discovers ‘Eve’,
the last to be created, as the most perfect creature, the radiant image of God
and the trace of the divine wisdom. Hildegard of Bingen confirms the
male’s privilege of physical strength because of his creation from the
soil, but accords the woman the privilege of greater skilfulness, subtlety and
agility because she is created from human corporeality.(5) Eve’s bodily
preeminence is used apologetically in the women’s tradition against the
scholastic argument that while the soul is sexless, it can develop its powers
better in a male body than in a female body. Women leave aside in eloquent
silence the scholastic restrictions on the image of God in women, and stress
the image of God in human beings in an egalitarian way, seeking to oppose its
distortions.
An objection to the denial of similarity to Christ to women is expressed
in the saying of Christ that Gertrude the Great receives in a vision:
‘As I am the image of God the Father in the Godhead, so you will be the
image of my being for humankind.’(6) What the women’s tradition
reclaimed was the image of God in women, not just as human beings (which was
the restriction which Scheeben was still putting on it), but as women. In Marie
de Jars de Gournay this is even associated with a disguised demand for ministry
in the church;(7) there is also a sign here of the degree to which the concept
of the image of God functioned as a forerunner to that of human rights and in
this social significance was known to both women and men.
2. Sinful Eve. Counter-tradition: Eve, deceived or indeed innocent
Because (for Catholics at any rate) the interpretation of Genesis 2
which is hostile to women already begins within the Bible, in Sirach 25.24, and
is continued in 1 Timothy 2.13,(8) it was almost inevitable for the Christian
tradition to project sin and death on to women, a process that also happens in
other religions. Granted, church fathers and scholastic theologians attempted
to maintain a formal equality of original sin in man and woman by putting more
of the burden of original sin on the man in some instances and on the woman in
others; however, as the history of the idea demonstrates, it was far more
significant that the woman was made primarily responsible for the sin of
wanting to be like God.
Augustine dismissed the sin of Adam de facto as a trivial failing,
seeing Adam as having indeed been sinful in disobedience, but making him an
accomplice of Eve, who had already incurred guilt, out of sympathy with her, so
that she would not be the only one to be lost. In the twelfth century Peter
Lombard, on whom all would-be theologians had to comment, speaks of the
(cancerous) sore of arrogance in Eve’s breast.(9) In the scholastic view,
the woman’s sin was also made more serious in that she sinned not only
against God and against herself, as the man did, but in addition also against
her neighbour, by leading him astray into sin.(10).
The identification of the female sex down the centuries with ‘Eve,
the seductress’ provoked a particularly sensitive defence. Whereas
Hildegard of Bingen portrayed the first woman as being more deceived by the
serpent than sinning and refers to the tumour of pride in the male breast,(11)
and Mechthild of Magdeburg stresses the equality of the sin of man and woman,
Christine de Pizan begins to acquit Eve. We also sometimes find such an
approach among males, but usually in an ambivalent way, as in Henricus
Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, in whose work the ‘bad Eve’ and the
‘good Eve’ are simply put side by side. However, with women the
defence of their own sex in the world in which they live is the motive for the
acquittal of Eve, in order to tackle the evil of discrimination at the roots:
Finally, I must look at the most frivolous arguments of some men. For
the most part they argue that Eve was the cause of Adam’s sin and
consequently of our fall and our misery. My reply is that Eve in no way led
Adam to sin, but I believe that she rather simply suggested that he should eat
of the forbidden fruit . . . But she did not know that to eat of it was sin,
any more than she knew that the serpent . . . was the devil (Lucretia
Marinella, 1600) (12)
On the basis of the particular character of Renaissance Platonism,
Marinella even succeeded in incorporating the physical and psychological
advantages of her own sex into the step-by-step ascent above the beautiful to
the divine One, and thus in assigning to the woman the function of being the
man’s mediator. So this was the opposite of seduction to a
‘descent’.
3. The active man anti the passive woman. Counter-tradition: the
co-operation of the sexes
The claim in Augustine and in Scholasticism that the male intellect has
greater clarity is based on biological views from antiquity, derived from
natural philosophy and historically obsolete, above all the theory of elements
and humours. In the twelfth-century school of Chartres, which was influenced by
Platonism, we read that in creating woman God did not mix the elements as well
as he did when creating man.(13). The superior elements of the cosmos (fire and
air) are identified as ‘masculine’ and the inferior elements (water
and earth) as ‘feminine’. From this there results the heat and
dryness of the man, which effects a mixture of temperaments more favourable to
intellectual development (hence his clearer intellect); the moistness and
coldness of the women is the cause of the less favourable mixture of
temperaments and consequently of her intellectual weakness.
But the activity of the man and the passivity of the woman are also
explained in this way: this is a doctrine which becomes increasingly
influential, the more Aristotle is accepted without reservations. As a result,
with few exceptions, for theologians in the tradition too there is a
philosophical explanation for the ‘biblical’ hierarchy of the sexes,
male and female. The harmony of ‘Bible’ and ‘philosophy’
proved attractive, and there was no recognition that this was a circular
argument.
However, it was not accepted without objections. So already in the
twelfth century Hildegard of Bingen developed a cosmic anthropology which broke
up the hierarchy of the sexes by pointing to the prominence of the median
elements, air and water, in the body of the woman, and of the extreme elements,
fire and earth, in the body of the man.(14) Consequently the characteristics of
the sexes develop in a polar way; their activities complement each other and
each comes to the help of the other. There is an addition to Paul’s saying
that Eve was created for Adam: as he was created for her.(15) Even if this was
long opposed by a legal order determined by androcentrism, here already there
are indications of a more or less hidden infiltration of sexual hierarchy.
Strictly speaking, the Franciscan school also took this course, though a
first inspection may prove deceptive. Aristotle, who did not understand
anything of sacra scnptura (= the Bible and salvation history), was not
an authority for the Franciscans in this sphere. We notice this at the latest
in studying Franciscan Mariology, though at the same time Bonaventure’s
doctrine of creation also shows a certain proclivity towards a polar image of
human beings.(16) The man receives benefits from the woman as she does from
him, though the latter is rated higher in the context of the sexual hierarchy
of male and female. As the Franciscans did not follow Aristotle, but
Hippocrates and Galen, in their biology and psychology of the sexes, (17) they
assumed that there was an effective female seed - here they come considerably
nearer than the Aristotelian line to the discovery of the female ovum in the
1820s.
Actively and passively there is reciprocity between the sexes, even if
the activity of the male predominates. So the Franciscans were also interested
in a conception of Mary that was free from original sin: Like any woman, she
too is active in her motherhood, and despite her virginal conception, which
prevents the transference of original sin to her child, can nevertheless
bequeath her Son a human nature which has been violated and weakened by the
consequences of sin, which would disqualify him as redeemer. (18)
This also explains the lack of interest of Thomas Aquinas and his
school in the immaculate conception of Mary. There is no question of her
handing on any of the consequences of original sin to her son because of the
passivity of the woman, to which she is no exception. By contrast, with its
objection to the sheer passivity of the woman, the Franciscan tradition
overcomes a defect in the female sex.
4. Woman, disadvantaged by the natural order, natural law and divine
law. Counter-tradition: male usurpation
One question often raised in the tradition is whether monogamy is called
for by natural law, since the fathers of the faith in the Old Testament
evidently did not live in that way. In order to exonerate the Old Testament
patriarchs, the answer was that, depending on the requirements of individual
periods of history, natural law required at one time that a man should increase
his offspring with several wives, or could limit himself to the children of one
wife. The latter was regarded as an irreversible rule for the time of the
gospel. However, a wife’s polyandry was from the beginning and always
declared to be an offence against the order or the law of nature: as the
Franciscan Summa Halensis put it, covering many schools and periods,
this was because a woman could not be pregnant by several men at the same time,
but several women could bear the children of one man at the same time (quia
una non potest fecundari a pluribus, sed unus bene potest fecundare
plures).(19)
It is illuminating that in the fiction of a woman’s polyandry the
hierarchy of the sexes is not reversed; the second reason given as to why such
a state is contrary to nature is that for many men to be ruled by one woman
would not further peace in the family.
Hugo Grotius still thinks just like the Scholastics on this point. Some
authors identify marital authority grounded in natural law with that of an
absolute ruler. However, Pufendorf limits the polygyny of the man which is
possible by natural law by stressing that the marked increase in the number of
the population throughout the world has really made it superfluous.
In 1669 Gisbert Voetius of the Reformed Academy at Utrecht held in his
Politica Ecclesiastica that the greater dignity of man than that of
woman was inscribed in the heart of all human beings by the natural law which
destines men to rule and women to obey. For him, too, the authority of the
father of the house is by divine and natural law. Thomas Aquinas had once, in a
Neoplatonic-sounding sentence, described man in his character of ultimate
principle within the world and the image of the creator God as origin and goal
of woman; (20) Voetius does the same thing but without citing him. The total
withdrawal of the woman behind the man can hardly be expressed more
clearly.(21)
Of course there was also resistance to this during the transition to
the early modern period, when natural-law thinking moved from the sphere of
moral theology to that of law. Here we should think not so much of the party
with a positive attitude in the struggle for gynaecocracy, since it required
women who succeeded to the throne in hereditary monarchies because of the lack
of male offspring to give up the feminine ethic of obedient subjection and
adopt the male ethic, i.e. as it were undergo a mental change of sex. (22) It
is more important to remember the attempt of highborn wives like Marguerite of
Navarre, who like many other women, especially in France, wrote an apologia for
her own sex. In it she cites the privileged creation of Eve as God’s
masterpiece as the reason for the political skill of women and roundly declares
that the whole of male rule is usurpation.(23) For her the subordination of the
woman is the consequence of a male transgression of the law which was noted
only by God (Gen. 3..16).
5. Women are to become male. Counter-tradition: We shall encounter
Christ in the completeness of our sex (Hildegarde of Bingen)
There is a well-known passage in the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas in
which Peter seeks to send Mary Magdalene away from the group of disciples on
the grounds that women are not worthy of life. The Jesus of this text replies
that he will guide her so that she makes herself masculine, so that she becomes
a living spirit and thus can enter the kingdom of heaven.(24) It is also
well-known that church fathers like Ambrose and Jerome make similar statements:
the wife who still serves husband and children and has not yet arrived at full
knowledge of faith is called woman, but the one who abstains from procreation
or is advanced in the faith is called man (25) Women are enjoined to give up
the fleshly and to become spiritual, this being understood as a symbolic (or
real?) change of sex, or the possibility is held open for them; here
Christianity is by no means alone, but precisely at this point shows parallels
with Buddhism (mediated through Gnosticism?).(26)
From the male side, the perfection of a feminine being can be thought of
only as elevation and assimilation to the male sex, as a reduction to the one,
authentic humanity with a male stamp. So the offer of equality, (27) gladly
accepted by those women of Christian antiquity who with male hair-styles and
clothing lived as eunuchs in the wilderness or as virgins with their families,
was - ‘Become like us!’ In the situation of the time no hostility to
women was intended, but the invitation allowed two quite different
interpretations: first, the sublation of the feminine (as the imperfect) into
the masculine-perfect (as the first and the last); and secondly, the abolition
of sexuality altogether, including male sexuality, as a liberation conceived of
in Neoplatonic terms. Scotus Eriugena is to be understood in this sense.(28)
But the eschatological character of the ascetical movement of late antiquity
points to a utopia of sexless human beings.
This is the point at which Augustine tried to direct thought in another
direction. Although in his work in particular the positive-negative symbolism
of the male and female is presented very strongly where it affects earthly
life, Augustine guards against giving up the otherness of the woman as
something which would not be worth preserving for the world to come. He
resolutely rejects a resurrection of all women as males. As transfigured
corporeality has left behind it libido and vitium, i.e. its
weakness conditioned by sin, no conflicts can arise any longer through the
female form of humanity, so that Augustine can recognize it in its creaturely
beauty: To be a woman is no vice, but is natural. (29)
This had to be said at all because of the mood of the culture of late
antiquity into which Christianity was born, and to which it had assimilated
itself in its interpretation of the Bible. With his doctrine of the
preservation of womanhood in the eschaton, Augustine gave the Middle Ages a
good dowry. This gift also proved useful in the fight against dualistic sects
which still spoke of women (eschatologically) becoming men. Mediaeval women who
write and who stress their womanhood as virgines - though also showing
signs of solidarity with the matres - leave the symbols of becoming male
behind them and combine their theme of feminine modesty, with which they
introduce their works, with a strong consciousness of election.
I hope that it has become clear from this much abbreviated account that
despite the tenacity of the androcentric, patriarchal tradition, some
modifications were possible to its construct woman . For want of relevant
research we cannot determine clearly to what extent counter-traditions were the
occasion for this. However, the fact that the counter-traditions had to
struggle for centuries in attempts to refute the same prejudices against the
female sex indicates their lack of success.
If the impression has arisen that the doctrines of the
counter-traditions were mere reversals, i.e. over-valuations of feminine
humanity which had been previously been undervalued, the answer must be that
this is not the case. For the counter-traditions are concerned with a negation
of negation.(30) The construct of a femininity which has not attained complete
humanity, defined in andronormative terms, is rejected: the starting point is
that of the originality of woman’s being and an attempt to describe this
not as derived, but as independent humanity. Meditating on texts like this can
help present-day women and men to get past thinking in terms of a single
principle and develop that dual (not dualistic nor even just polar) model of
humankind which we still lack.
Translated by John Bowden
Notes
1. Hannah Arendt, Vita activa odervom tatigen Leben,
Stuttgart 1960, 15f
2. William of Auxerre, Summa Aurea, ed.
Pigouchet (Paris 1500), Frankfurt am Main 1964, fol. s8v.
3. Ian
Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Women, Cambridge 1980.
4. Cf. my
article ‘Eva, Gottebenbildlichkeit und Spiritualitat’, in
Worterbuch der Feministischen Theologie, Gutersloh 1991 .
5. Elisabeth
Gössmann, ‘Ipsa enim quasi domus sapientiae. Zur frauenbezogenen
Spiritualitat Htldegards von Bingen’, in Margot Schmidt and Dieter R.
Bauer (eds.) ‘Eine Hohe uber die nichts gebt. ‘ Spezielle
Glaubenserfahrung in der Frauenmystik? Stuttgart and Bad Cannstadt 1986,
1-18, esp. 9-11.
6. Gertrude the Great, Legatus divinae pietatis,
translated by Johanna Lanczkowski, Heidelberg 1989, 25.
7. There is an
introduction to Marie de Jars de Gournay in Elisabeth Gossmann (ed.), Archiv
Jrur philosophie- und theologiegeschichtliche Frauenforschung, Vol. 1,
Munich 1984, Ch. 1, cf. esp. 28f.
8. Cf. Helen Schungel-Straumann, Die
Frau am Anfang. Eva und die Folgen, Freiburg 1989.
9. For Augustine and
Peter Lombard see the relevant chapters in Monika LeischKiesl, Eva in Kunst
und Theologie des Frubchristentums und Mittelalters. Zur Bedeutung ‘Evas
‘fur die Anthropologie der Frau, Theological Dissertation, Salzburg
1990.
10. For this theme see also the chapter, ‘Der Mensch als Mann
und Frau’, in my Habilitation thesis, Metaphysik und
Heilsgeschichte. Eine theologische Untersuchung der Summa Halensis, Munich
1964, 215-29, and my ‘Anthropologic und soziale Stellung der Frau nach
Summen und Sentenzenkommentaren des 13. Jahrhunderts’
MiscellaneaMediaevalia 12.1, Berlin 1979, 281-97.
11. Cf. Barbara
Newman, O feminea forma. Cod and Woman in the Works of St Hildegard, PhD
dissertation, Yale University 1981.
12. There is an introduction to
Lucretia Marinella in Elizabeth Gössman (ed.) Archiv fur Philosophie-
und theologiegeschichtliche Frauenforschung 2, Munich 1985 Chapter 1; the
quotation is on p. 41. For Henricus Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim cf. Vol. 5
of the same archive (Munich 1988), introductions and text.
13. Cf. Hans
Liebeschutz, Kosmologische Motive in derFrahscholastik. Vortrage
derBiloliothek Warburg1923-24, ed. F. Saxl, Leipzig and Berlin 1926,
esp.128.
14. Cf. Prudence Allen, The Concept of Woman. The Aristotelian
Revolution, Montreal and London 1985; id., ‘Two Medieval Views on
Woman’s Identity: Hildegard of Bingen and Thomas Aquinas’, Studies
in Religion. A Canadian Journal 16, 1987, 21—36
15. Scivias
I.2, Migne, PL 197, 393; CCM 43, 21.
16. Cf. my attempt to investigate the
connection between system and the image of woman among the Franciscans in
Theodor Schneider (ed.), Mann und Frau Crundproblem
theologischerAnthropologie, Freiburg 1 989, 44-52.
17. Cf. Emma Therese
Healy, Woman according to St Bonaventure, Erie, Pennsylvania 1965, 11f.
Albertus Magnus also assumed that the seed in woman was inactive. Cf. Paul
Hossfeld, ‘Albertus Magnus uber die Frau’, Trierer
Theologische Zeitschrift 9 1, 1982, 221- -40.
18. Cf. Elisabeth
Gössmann and Dieter R. Bauer (eds. ), Maria fur alle Frauen oder uber
allen Frauen?, Freiburg 1989, 63-85.
19. Summa FratrisAlexandri,
Tom. IV L.III, Quaracchi 1948, nos. 253-5.
20. Thomas Aquinas, Summa
Theologia I q 93 a. 4 ad 1; ‘Nam vir est principium mulieris et
finis, sicut Deus est principium et finis totius creaturae.’
21. Politicae Ecclesiasticae Pars II, Amsterdam 1669, Liber I Tr. 4,
De mulieribus, p. 186: ‘direst origo et pnncipium ex quo mulier, et est
finis propterquem producta est mulier.’
22. Cf. Maclean,
Renaissance Notion (n. 3), 62f.
23. For Marguerite of Navarre, cf. Archiv
(n.7), 13f.
24. For the Gospel of Thomas and its cultural environment see
Peter Brown, The Body and Society. Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in
Early Chnstianity, New York and London 1988, esp. 113, with further
literature.
25. A long time ago attention was already drawn to these texts
and connections by Haye van der Meer, Pnestertum derFrau? Eine
theologiegeschichtliche Untersuchung, Freiburg 1969. For Jerome and Ambrose
see 97f.
26. Cf. Elisabeth Gössmann, ‘Haruko Okano, Himmel ohne
Frauen? Zur Eschatologie des weiblichen Menschseins in ostlicher und westlicher
Religion’, in Das Cold im Wachs, Festschrift fur Thomas Immoos, ed.
E. Gössmann and G. Zobel, Munich 1988, 397-426.
27. Cf. Ruth Albrecht,
Das Leben des hl.Makrina auf dem Hintergrund der Thekla-Traditionen, Gottingen
1986; Kari Vogt, ‘Becoming Male. One Aspect of an Early Christian
Anthropology’, Concilium 182, 1985, 72-83.
28. For Scotus Eriugena cf.
the works by Werner Beierwaltes, esp. Denken des Einen. Studien zur
neuplatonischen Philosophie und ihrer Wirkungsgeschichte, Frankfurt am Main
1985.
29. ‘Non est autem vitium sexus femineus, sed
natura’, De civitate Dei 22. 17,18.
30. The formula comes
from Katharina Fietze, Spiegel der Vernunft. Theorien zum Menschsein der
Frau in derAnthropologie des 15. Jahrhunderts, Munich philosophical
dissertation 1990 (planned publication Paderborn 1991).
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