From chapter 2 of The Church and the Second Sex, pp. 46–53.
From chapter 2 of The Church and the Second Sex, pp. 46–53.
“Faith of Our Fathers”: hideous hymn extolling a long dead faith of fatherland; perverted paean to dead faith, which is the patriarchal parody and reversal of Wholly Heathen Faith.
—Wickedary, p. 197
In The Church and the Second Sex, Mary Daly tackled the history of misogyny in the Catholic Church. Daly’s work on women’s place in the theology of the church was genuinely pioneering, both because she compiled original material and because her philosophic and Christian theological training enabled her to use forms of argument and analysis more sophisticated than those available to critics external to Christianity. For instance, she tried to understand the reasoning behind even the most odious of theological arguments against women’s full personhood. At the same time, the reason that Daly, after writing Beyond God the Father, referred to The Church and the Second Sex as written by a foresister of hers, can be detected here, in the attempt to defend the ultimate coherence of Catholic thought, the hope that a few sensible reforms might correct the surface errors caused by mistaken social notions of previous eras.
Despite not yet being able to unfurl the full implications of what she was seeing, Daly here grasped the structural nature of women’s ontological place in the schemas of the church fathers (she still capitalizes “Fathers”). In this excerpt, she isolated the theory of exceptionalism, noting that “the existence of exceptions, no matter how numerous, did not change the generalizations about feminine ‘nature.’” Her dry wit and caustic disgust at what she named the “fierce misogyny” of the fathers come through in a taste of the sarcasm she would later utilize when the mere act of reading a text aloud exposes its sexism: “When woman achieves this transcendence which is, of course, not due to her own efforts but is a ‘supernatural’ gift, she is given the compliment of being called ‘man.’”
The most significant aspect of this excerpt for understanding Daly’s thought concerns her presentation of Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274). Those who have difficulty comprehending her lifelong attachment to Aquinas will see how, for her, his philosophic framework and principles outstripped the flaws of his particularities: Aquinas’s sexism reveals itself as a cultural artifact, while the “deep roots of Thomas’s thought . . . clearly support the genuine equality of men and women with all of its theoretical and practical consequences.” Thus, Daly explained that “if woman has an intellectual nature, then her end cannot be man, for intellectuality is the radical source of autonomous personhood.” Throughout her career, Daly would return to Aquinas, for his embrace of intellectual rationality, his universalization of intellect to humans, angels, and beyond, and his rigor in applying rational categories to understanding the world. Reading her gloss on Aquinas at this point in her career holds this advantage: Daly did not have to rationalize her use of a Catholic source! Aside from her earlier scholarly article, “The Problem of Speculative Theology,” this gives the best explanation of why she found Aquinas useful to her radical feminism.1
—Editors
For the [Church] Fathers, woman is a temptress of whom men should beware. That the problem might be reciprocal is not even considered.
There were attempts to balance the alleged guilt-laden condition of the female sex, but these, unfortunately, did not take the form of an admission of guilt shared by the sexes. Instead, Eve was balanced off by Mary. Thus, for example, Origen remarks that as sin came from the woman so does the beginning of salvation.2 Augustine wrote that woman is honored in Mary.3 He claimed that since man (homo) fell through the female sex, he was restored through the female sex. “Through the woman, death; through the woman, life.”4 This type of compensation produced an ambivalent image of woman. Mary was glorified, but she was unique. Women in the concrete did not shake off their bad reputation and continued to bear most of the burden of blame. The sort of polemic, therefore, which attempts to cover the antifeminism of the Fathers by pointing to their glorification of Mary ignores the important point that this did not improve their doctrine about concrete, living women. In fact there is every reason to suspect that this compensation unconsciously served as a means to relieve any possible guilt feelings about injustice to the other sex.
In the mentality of the Fathers, woman and sexuality were identified. Their horror of sex was also a horror of woman. There is no evidence that they realized the projection mechanisms involved in this misogynistic attitude. In fact, male guilt feelings over sex and hyper-susceptibility to sexual stimulation and suggestion were transferred to “the other,” the “guilty” sex. The idea of a special guilt attached to the female sex gave support to the double moral standard which prevailed. For example, in cases of adultery, the wife had to take back her unfaithful husband, but if the wife was unfaithful, she could be rejected.
Even in the face of such oppressive conditions a few women managed to attain stature. Jerome admitted that many women were better than their husbands.5 But more significant is the fact that the existence of exceptions, no matter how numerous, did not change the generalizations about feminine “nature.” Hence the strange ambivalence which we have noted.
On the whole, then, the Fathers display a strongly disparaging attitude toward women, at times even a fierce misogynism. There is the recurrent theme that by faith a woman transcends the limitations imposed by her sex. It would never occur to the Fathers to say the same of a man. When woman achieves this transcendence which is, of course, not due to her own efforts but is a “supernatural” gift, she is given the compliment of being called “man” (vir). Thus there is an assumption that all that is of dignity and value in human nature is proper to the male sex. There is an identification of “male” and “human.” Even the woman who was elevated by grace retained her abominable nature. No matter what praise the Fathers may have accorded to individuals, it is not possible to conclude that in their doctrine women are recognized as fully human. [ . . . ]
Theological opinion of women was hardly better in the Middle Ages, although some of the fierceness of tone was mitigated. The twelfth century theologian, Peter the Lombard, whose Sentences became a standard textbook to be commented upon by teachers of theology, went so far as to write that woman is sensuality itself [ . . . ].6
What was new in the picture in the Middle Ages was the assimilation into theology of Aristotelianism, which provided the conceptual tools for fixing woman’s place in the universe and which, ironically, could have been used to free her. In the writings of Thomas Aquinas, which later came to have a place of unique pre-eminence in the Church, Aristotelian thought was wedded to the standard biblical interpretations, so that the seeming weight of “science” was added to that of authority. Thus, following Aristotle, Aquinas held that the female is defective as regards her individual nature. He wrote that she is, in fact, a misbegotten male, for the active force in the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex. Her existence is due to some defect in the active force (that of the father), or to some material indisposition, or even to some external influence, such as that of the south wind, which is moist. He adds that, as regards human nature in general, woman is not misbegotten, but is included in nature’s intention as directed to the work of generation.7 She has, then, a reason for being—that is, she is needed in the work of generation. It seems that this really is all she is good for, “since a man can be more efficiently helped by another man in other works.”8
It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that Thomas thought woman has a major or even an equal role, even in her one specialty, i.e. reproduction. He wrote:
Father and mother are loved as principles of our natural origin. Now the father is principle in a more excellent way than the mother, because he is the active principle, while the mother is a passive and material principle. Consequently, strictly speaking, the father is to be loved more.9
He continues:
In the begetting of man, the mother supplies the formless matter of the body; and the latter receives its form through the formative power that is in the semen of the father. And though this power cannot create the rational soul, yet it disposes the matter of the body to receive that form.10
Thus, the role of the woman in generation is purely passive; she merely provides the matter, whereas the father disposes this for the form. This view of woman as a purely passive principle which merely provides the “matter” of the offspring is, of course, linked to an entirely outdated and false biology: that the mother is, in fact, equally “active” in the production of the child was unknown in the thirteenth century.
This idea of women as “naturally” defective, together with the commonly accepted exegesis of the texts concerning woman in Genesis and the Pauline epistles, and the given social situation of women in a condition of subjection are three factors whose influence can be detected in Thomas’s arguments supporting the traditional androcentric views. Thus, in regard to marriage, he judged that, although there is proportional equality between man and wife, there is not strict equality; neither in regard to the conjugal act, in which that which is nobler is due to the man, nor in regard to the order of the home, in which the woman is ruled and the man rules.11 Moreover, the exclusion of women from Holy Orders is upheld on the basis that a sacrament is a sign, and that in the female sex no eminence of degree can be signified, since the woman has the state of subjection.12 There is no probability at all that Thomas was able to see this “state of subjection” as merely the result of social conditioning, of a situation which could change. He believed that social inferiority was required by woman’s “natural” intellectual inferiority: “So by such a kind of subjection woman is naturally subject to man, because in man the discretion of reason predominates.”13 This, he thought, would have been the case even if sin had not occurred, i.e. even before the Fall. Thus, in Thomas’s view, the question of woman’s autonomy is hopelessly closed. The best she could hope for, even in the best of worlds, would be a kind of eternal childhood, in which she would be subject to man “for her own benefit.”
The puzzlement which characterized patristic thought on women is again starkly evident in Thomas’s writings. This is all the more striking because his thought is worked out in an ordered synthesis; it is not a collection of disconnected snatches of rhetoric, as is sometimes the case with the Fathers. The very existence of women seems to have been an awkward snag in the orderly universe which he envisaged. For the modern reader, it is startling to read the question posed in the Summa Theologiae: “Whether woman should have been made in the first production of things?”14 The very existence of the question is significant. Although Thomas argues that human bi-sexuality15 should have been “from the beginning,” his whole mode of argument reveals a naïvely androcentric mentality which assigns what is properly human to the male and views sexual union as merely “carnal.” Woman is seen as a sort of anomaly.
The anomaly of woman had nevertheless to be assimilated into the system. A striking ambiguity, which looks very much like a contradiction, resulted. It was necessary to admit, for example, that the image of God is found both in man and in woman, for this Thomas recognized to be the teaching of Genesis. Yet Paul had said that “woman is the glory of man,” and indicated that she was not the image of God. Thomas concludes that
in a secondary sense the image of God is found in man, and not in woman: for man is the beginning and end of woman; as God is the beginning and end of every creature.16
The degrading idea that “man is the beginning and end of woman” is reinforced by the parallel: man:woman::God:creature. Besides the intrinsic unacceptableness of this idea, there is an extreme difficulty in reconciling it with the assertion in the same paragraph that the image of God in its principal meaning (i.e. the intellectual nature) is found in both man and woman. If woman has an intellectual nature, then her end cannot be man, for intellectuality is the radical source of autonomous personhood [ . . . ].
It is abundantly clear, therefore, that even according to Thomas’s own principles, the alleged defectiveness of women, both as to their role in generation and considered as products of the generative process, becomes extremely difficult to uphold. Indeed, in the light of these principles it becomes impossible to uphold. According to Thomas, it is the intellectual soul which makes the human person to be the image of God.17 This is neither caused by the male, nor is it essentially different in man and woman.
We said earlier that there is a striking difference between Thomas and the Fathers. The latter often manifest an unresolved tension between their idea of woman in her “nature” and woman with grace, to such an extent that when she has grace, she no longer is called “woman,” but “man.” Thus, there is an identification of “male” and “human,” which is overcome to some extent by grace. Thomas, of course, shares the feeling that women as such are not quite human. However, leaving all questions of grace aside, there is indecision in his thought on the level of nature itself. For Thomas, possession of an intellectual soul is natural and essential to men and women. In the light of this radical natural equality, it makes little sense to say that man is the principle and end of woman. Why, then, does he say it?
The discord between the philosophical anthropology of Thomas and his androcentric statements is due to the then commonly accepted biblical exegesis, Aristotelian biology, and the prevailing image and social status of women. The deep roots of Thomas’s thought—his philosophical conceptions of the body-soul relationship, of intellect, of will, of the person, and his theological ideas of the image of God in the human being and of man’s last end—clearly support the genuine equality of men and women with all of its theoretical and practical consequences. In opposition to the outdated exegesis and biology which he accepted, these Thomistic principles are radically on the side of feminism. Thomas himself could not see—or would not permit himself to see—the implications of these principles in regard to women. And we have seen why: the logical conclusions he might have drawn would at that time have appeared contrary to faith and contemporary experience.
Today, fidelity to truth and justice requires that thinkers who are aware of these implications make them explicit, rather than parroting as “Thomistic doctrine” harmful and untenable ideas which Thomas surely would not propose, were he alive today.18