Man in the Image of God: Where Is Woman

Man in the Image of God: Where Is Woman? An analysis of how philosophy and politics have contributed to the misogyny of religion

Dale Kotchka-Smith Honors 215 – Imago Dei Final Research Paper Due December 13, 2005 Chapter 1: Introduction

Religion has been a central facet of human life since the beginning of civilization, providing mankind with explanations for the surrounding universe, a sense of purpose and direction, and a source of comfort and stability in an ever-changing, uncertain world. Religion has encouraged many to live virtuously and has provided a form of identity for both individuals and societies. However, despite the positive impacts religion has had, it has also left behind many destructive legacies, serving as a justification for the exclusion and domination of others and reinforcing rigid and hierarchical power structures. Religion, while attempting to share in the divine and eternal, nevertheless involves human interpretation and creation and is a product of society and politics and hence subject to error. Danger arises when religious teachings are interpreted literally and declared infallible, for analysis and history demonstrate the subjectivity of religious doctrine, how it has built on previously existing myths and philosophy, and how it is often a reflection of human politics.

Chapter 2: Ancient Greek Influences

Since the beginning of mankind, human beings have strived to make sense of the world around them, to explain the seemingly inexplicable, and to justify why things are the way they are. Returning to one of the oldest sites of civilization–that of ancient Greece–one can clearly see such attempts in the realms of literature, myth, politics, and philosophy, the latter of which often included the three former. In attempting to explain the origins of mankind, the Athenians developed a myth that traced their origins to Erichthonius, who was born from his father and the earth. In her book Philosophy without Women: The Birth of Sexism in Western Thought, Vigdis

Songe Møller points out that “this tale does not distinguish clearly between sexual and vegetative reproduction. The earth is like a woman; it is fertilized by a man and brings forth a human child”

2 (5). The child is therefore “a product solely of the father’s seed,” a result of “reproduction without female participation,” which suggests an “ideal of one-sex humanity” (Songe Møller 5).

This mythological portrayal of reproduction is significant because it is indicative of the actual Greek biological view of reproduction. As ancient Greeks did not have knowledge of the vital role of the female ovum, to them the propagation of the human race truly did depend on men, with females being mere “receptacles” for sperm. In fact, in his extremely influential work the Timaeus, through which Plato articulates his cosmology that would later shape many of the foundational beliefs of the early Catholic Church, Plato describes the universe as ideally “self- sufficient” (33d) and comprised of three parts: a source from which perfect and complete forms emanate, a blank receptacle that receives the imitations of these perfect ideas, and the interaction between them that characterizes the reality experienced by humans. He introduces a poignant analogy, writing, “It is in fact appropriate to compare the receiving thing to a mother, the source to a father, and the nature between them to their offspring” (50d). Thus, it is the female that literally is the receptacle, “completely devoid of any characteristics” (50e), able to receive and reflect only what the male imposes on her.

Twentieth-century philosopher and Jesuit priest Bernard Lonergan notes that the current position of the Catholic Church is still based on the ancient Greek biological view of reproduction. He states in a 1968 letter:

[T]raditional Catholic doctrine on the sexual act followed rigorously from the position adopted by Aristotle in his De generatione animalium. That position was that the seed of the male was an instrumental cause that changed the matter supplied by the female into a sentient being … The efficient causality of the male was needed to produce the sensitive principle or soul. On that basis it was clear that every act of insemination was of itself procreative and that any positive interference was an act of obstructing the seed in its exercise of its efficient causality (7).

3 Lonergan remarks on the difficulty the Church is facing in reconciling its traditional stance with modern scientific knowledge, pointing out that Catholic theologians know that “the Aristotelian position is erroneous. Insemination and conception are known now to be quite distinct” (7).

Given this, the question becomes whether the “statistical relationship to conception is sacrosanct and inviolable … If one answers affirmatively, he is condemning the rhythm method. If negatively, he permits contraceptives in some cases” (7-8). The fact that the Church condones the rhythm method but forbids all use of contraceptives provides proof that political considerations factor into Church decisions rather than only natural law and divine will.

Lonergan asserts that the issue at hand “is not whether or not people have to have reasons for accepting the Pope’s decision. The issue is that, when there is no valid reason whatever for a precept, that precept is not of natural law” (8).

While the Church “acknowledges the ‘unitive sense’ of marital intercourse, it claims that inseparable from it there is a ‘procreative sense’” (Lonergan 8). Clearly, however, the “discharge of two million spermatozoa into the vagina does not mean or intend two million babies. Most of the time it does not mean or intend any babies at all” (Lonergan 8). Lonergan characterizes the

Church as being in a transitional period “between the discovery that Aristotelian biology is mistaken and the discovery that marital intercourse of itself, per se, is an expression and sustainer of love with only a statistical relationship to conception” (8). The fact that Aristotle lived from 384 BCE to 322 BCE, coupled with the fact that it is now the year 2005, demonstrates the long-lasting influence of philosophy on religion and the fervor with which the Church has clung to traditional views, regardless of whether they were later proved erroneous.

In the realm of politics, Songe Møller argues that the Greek ideal of a womanless world and male self-sufficiency “helped shape the political institution that was the very bedrock of the

4 Greek polis, namely democracy” (3). Just as contemporary politics and Church leadership are sometimes described as elite “men’s clubs,” Songe Møller asserts that even in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, the democratic Greek city-state was characterized by an exclusion of women and slaves. Both philosophy and political ideology in ancient Greece exemplify “the notion of women’s superfluity” (Songe Møller 3) and suggest that woman is subhuman, defined only by her relationship to man–namely that she is an incomplete man. In her essay “Woman Is Not a

Rational Animal: On Aristotle’s Biology of Reproduction,” Lynda Lange points out that the female is “quite literally a privation of the male, or as Aristotle puts it: ‘The woman is as it were an impotent male, for it is through a certain incapacity that the female is female, being incapable of concocting the nutriment in its last state into semen’ (728 a 18)” (9). Aristotle also defines human beings as political animals, but women did not participate in politics during the time of

Aristotle, implying again that women were not considered fully human.

The notion of women’s secondary status and incomplete nature found in philosophy was enthusiastically embraced and perpetuated by many religions, particularly early Christianity.

Many early Church fathers claimed that while men were made in the image of God, women were created in the image of man and thus lacked the crucial imago dei. Echoing the Greek philosophical strain that emphasized man’s complete freedom and self-sufficiency while simultaneously reducing woman to the status of an object, property, or slave, John Chrysostom, the influential bishop of Constantinople from 398-404 AD, writes in his homily The Kind of

Women Who Ought To Be Taken as Wives, “The ‘image’ has rather to do with authority, and this only the man has; the woman has it no longer. For he is subjected to no one, while she is subjected to him; as God said, ‘Your inclination shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you’ (Gen. 3:16)” (qtd. in Clark 35).

5 Chrysostom was just one of numerous religious authorities who used statements drawn from scripture to explain women’s inferior social status, employing religion to justify politics.

While contemporary politicians and reporters debate what exactly is entailed in the private and public spheres of life, Chrysostom asserts:

Our life is customarily organized into two spheres: public affairs and private matters, both of which were determined by God. To woman is assigned the presidency of the household; to man, all the business of state, the marketplace, the administration of justice, government, the military, and all other such enterprises … She cannot express her opinion in a legislative assembly, but she can express it at home (qtd. in Clark 36).

While Chrysostom and other Church fathers argued that God preordained the separate roles of men and women and that society and politics were thus reflections of nature, it seems more likely that religion was a reflection of society and politics. Religion was the secondary creation conveniently fashioned to explain and maintain already existing customs.

Chapter 3: The Story of Adam and Eve

Evidence for this assertion lies in the fact that woman’s subordinate social position and attempts to rationalize it existed long before the Bible was compiled, centuries before Christ was born, and years before most of the world adopted monotheism. In fact, much of what religion claims as divinely inspired revelation, bears striking resemblance to prior myths and legends that denigrate women. For example, the story of Adam and Eve found in Genesis closely parallels the

Pandora myth, which the ancient Greek writer Hesiod composed around 700 BCE. Pandora, like

Eve, is the first woman, who initiates what Hesiod calls the “‘death bringing sex, the race of women’ (Theogony, 591)” (qtd. in Songe Møller 8). Like subsequent portrayals of Eve, Pandora is “both evil and beautiful,” and before her creation “mankind had lived in harmony with the gods” (Songe Møller 8). Both Eve and Pandora bring sin and death into the world, depriving man of his immortality and essential goodness.

6 However, evidence suggests that the development and later interpretations of both myths were actually politically expedient maneuvers. In her essay “Pandora and Eve: The Manipulation and Transformation of Female Archetypes,” Marie A. Conn notes, “Prior to the so-called

‘patriarchal revolution,’ goddess-centered religion was firmly rooted in the ancient world” (2).

However, as “the role of the male as warrior developed and the male part in procreation was better understood, myths increasingly showed goddess-power being threatened by male deities.

Religion began to reflect the new reality, becoming dominated by a warrior Father God of thunder and lightening” (Conn 3). Conn points out that originally, Pandora was “equivalent to

Mother Earth, ‘the Giver of All Gifts,’ creator of nature, intelligence, creativity,” but Hesiod then manipulated her symbol “in order to reflect male fears or needs” (3). Likewise, the “introduction of monotheism demanded that” the goddess Asherah, worshipped by the Hebrews, “officially lose her status. As with the triumph of Zeus in Greek mythology, so the focus on Yahweh may have reflected a ‘new social order … The attempt to establish a monolithic cult paralleled the attempt to establish a society in which father-right predominated’” (Conn 16). It is worth noting that the serpent, who is the bringer of sin and the devil’s associate in the story of Adam and Eve, was “once the life-giving symbol of the goddess” (Conn 16).

The manipulation of symbols for political expediency did not end with the authorship of the Pandora and Eden myths, though. Conn describes a tremendous theological shift in Christian thought beginning in the fourth century that “is still with us in the form of the Catholic doctrine of original sin” (13). Countering other Christian thinkers of the time such as Pelagius, who viewed all creation as inherently good, St. Augustine greatly shaped the notion of original sin, describing “humanity as universally tainted with sin from the mother’s womb” (Conn 13) and lacking free will, for according to Augustine, “Adam’s single arbitrary act of will rendered all

7 subsequent acts of human will inoperative” (qtd. in Conn 14). Despite the fact that Pelagius pointed out that Augustine’s teaching “clearly repudiates the twin foundations of Christian faith, namely the goodness of creation and the freedom of the human will” (Conn 14), it was

Augustine’s view that became official Catholic doctrine and Pelagius who was excommunicated and exiled. Why was such a view adopted, though? Conn notes that “whatever Augustine’s teaching on ‘original sin’ meant theologically, it was politically expedient–‘damaged’ human beings need external government by both church and state. Moral choices are, after all, often political ones” (13).

Perhaps the Church embraced original sin to increase its own power, but in doing so it also propagated a more negative image of women. Not only was the female lacking in the image of God, but now she was also considered responsible for depriving man of his imago dei. While many Church fathers such as Augustine emphasized that Eve was the first to sin, that she led

Adam astray, and that all women have inherited her sin, perhaps none did so as poignantly as

Carthage’s important Christian writer Tertullian. In “his treatise On the Dress of Women that dates from the opening years of the third century,” Tertullian “addresses a female audience”

(Clark 39), stating that each woman has inherited:

the degradation of the first sin and the hatefulness of human perdition. “In pains and anxieties you bring forth children, woman, and your inclination is for your husband, and he rules over you” (Gen. 3:16)–and you know not that you also are an Eve?

God’s judgment on this sex lives on in our age; the guilt necessarily lives on as well. You are the Devil’s gateway; you are the unsealer of that tree; you are the first foresaker of the divine law; you are the one who persuaded him whom the Devil was not brave enough to approach; you so lightly crushed the image of God, the man Adam; because of your punishment, that is, death, even the Son of God had to die. And you think to adorn yourself beyond your “tunics of skins” (Gen. 3:21)? (qtd. in Clark 39).

8 Thus, the story of Adam and Eve has been used for a variety of purposes, from giving females fashion advice to explaining the painful nature of giving birth and the inevitability of death to maintaining women’s inferior political status. In her essay “The Redemption of Eve,”

Jolene Edmunds Rockwood explains how, despite internal “textual evidence” that shows it “is most appropriately viewed as a piece of Hebrew poetry rather than as a literal historical account”

(13), patriarchal religious authorities throughout history have insisted on interpreting the Eden story quite literally to explain both biological and societal differences between men and women.

The Midrash (an early Jewish text), for example, explains that, as women were made from

Adam’s rib, their “voices are high and ‘shrill’ and men’s are not because ‘when soft viands are cooked, no sound is heard, but let a bone be put in a pot, and at once it crackles’” (Rockwood 5).

Because “‘a bone stays hard,’” women “are rigid and not easily placated like men … It is the man who proposes marriage and not the woman because man lost his rib and must find a woman to retrieve it” (Rockwood 5). While the Talmud, Midrash, and other Jewish writings dating from around 400 BCE to the latter part of the first century utilize “the Adam and Eve account of

Genesis to justify the roles of men and women” (Rockwood 4), so do texts and religious authorities from millennia later. In the nineteenth century, Mormon theologians even used the story to justify polygamy. George Q. Cannon, a member of the First Presidency of the Church of

Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, stated in 1869 that polygamy’s “‘correct practice’ would

‘redeem woman from the effects of [Eve’s] curse,’” helping to “relieve women of their

‘jealousy’” (Rockwood 11). What both ancient and relatively recent examples have in common is that they demonstrate the malleability of the original story and show how “commentators in different epochs have used the story almost at will to justify a particular cultural role for women and a theological explanation for the origin of sin” (Rockwood 13).

9 Even language itself has been manipulated to become a reflection of male power.

Rockwood notes that the original Hebrew text of the Adam and Eve story uses the phrase `ezer kənegdo, which has been translated as “help meet,” in Genesis 2:18, in which God states, “It is not good that the man … should be alone; I will make an [sic] help meet for him” (qtd. in

Rockwood 16). Rockwood notes that while the word “helper” has “the unfortunate English connotation of an assistant of lesser status, a subordinate or inferior,” in Hebrew the word describes:

an equal, if not a superior. The other usages of èzer in the Old Testament show that in most cases God is an èzer to human beings … A more accurate translation in this context would be “strength” or “power.” Evidence indicates that the word èzer originally had two roots, both beginning with different guttural sounds. Over time, the two gutturals were merged into one word, but the two meanings, “to save” and “to be strong,” remained. Later, the meanings also merged into one word, “to help.” Therefore, if we use the more archaic meanings of èzer and translate èzer as either “savior” or “strength,” it clarifies not only the context we are discussing but also the other passages in the Old Testament where èzer is used, especially where èzer refers to God in his relationship with humankind (16).

Numerous other words, if translated differently, lead to an understanding of the basic equality between men and women. Some cases of translation are particularly suspicious, leading one to wonder if words were translated, or rather mistranslated, purposefully in order to promote and justify already existing patriarchal power hierarchies. For example, the Hebrew word “şela` is used more than forty times in the Old Testament, but only” in Genesis 2:21-22 is it translated as “rib” (Rockwood 16). In most of the other places where it appears, it is translated as “side.”

Rockwood observes, “Reading şela` as ‘side’ rather than ‘rib’ also better dramatizes the unity of the man and the woman, enhances the phrase ‘power equal to him,’ and makes the man’s later characterization of woman as ‘bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh’ even more meaningful”

(17). The point is that for centuries only men translated original religious texts, interpreted them,

10 and emphasized which verses they viewed as important, thereby making it inevitable that scriptures and Church teachings would reflect the patriarchal society and privileging of males that men experienced in their everyday lives.

Chapter 4: The Universality of Misogyny in Religion

The use of religion to subordinate women and justify their cultural roles is not unique to the Judeo-Christian tradition, though. In his book Misogyny: The Male Malady, David Gilmore points out that “Eve’s role as the devil’s gateway is played by female surrogates in practically all other origin myths” (79). He notes that “Buddhism emphasizes the moral defects of woman, the primary one being her supposedly exaggerated libido, unrestrained and surpassing the male’s”

(Gilmore 80). Just as male Christian theologians have posited that women both lack imago dei and interfere with men’s actualization of their own imago dei, Buddhism holds that not “only does women’s insatiable sex drive make nirvana impossible for them, it also presents a danger to men who seek transcendence” (Gilmore 80). Just as Christianity consecrated misogynistic attitudes adopted from previous philosophical discourse, “the Chinese-American literary critic

Tonglin Lu” ascribes misogynistic attitudes in China (embodied in Chinese Buddhism, Taoism, and traditional Chinese ancestor worship) to “ancient concepts stemming from sacred and philosophical texts in the Chinese literary tradition” (Gilmore 83). She argues that in China, where there are “few ethnic divisions to inspire prejudice, the majority Han Chinese focus on the female sex as the denigrated other, the opposite, the negative mirror-image” (Gilmore 83). Just as Aristotle’s definition of women as imperfect men profoundly shaped Western philosophy, the

Confucian tradition imbued Eastern philosophy with the same legacy, holding women to be

“‘inferior men’ (xiaoren) who have none of the qualities of superior men” (Gilmore 83).

11 Likewise, the Qur’an, an authoritative holy text of Islam, “says quite unequivocally that

God made men superior to women, that men ‘have a status above women,’ and that men have the right to command over ‘the inferior sex’” (Gilmore 91-92). Muslim texts also echo the common theme of conflating the supposed moral inferiority of women with inferior social and political status: “women cannot work outside the home without the consent of their husbands,” and

“women are generally excluded from mosques, courtrooms, and all other places of power and privilege” (Gilmore 92). “Biblical scholar Jacob Lassner” notes that “throughout the history of the Middle East”–the birth place of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam–there exists a “constantly reappearing … ‘terrifying fear’ that grips men … The fear is that woman, circumventing man’s domination through deceit and seduction, would make short shrift of civilization and reduce men to servitude, obliterating their chance at salvation” (Gilmore 90). This fear is revealed “in a verse attributed to Mohammed on his deathbed,” in which the Prophet warns, “‘[T]here will be no other greater source of chaos and disorder for my nation than women’ (Varisco 1995:10)”

(Gilmore 93). Mohammed’s statement resembles the Platonic train of hierarchical thinking that associates women with chaos and men with order and reflects the cosmology of the Timaeus, in which the supreme male God created the universe by bringing order to chaos because “he believed that order was in every way better than disorder” (Plato 30a). In yet another demonstration of “the common misogynistic thread uniting the world’s great religions, Islam makes a direct association of woman with satanic powers” (Gilmore 93).

In some instances religions portray women not as merely possessing dark powers but as actual monstrous demons, an example being the famous Hindu “death-goddess, Kali. Equipped with death-dealing weaponry and dripping blood, this ferocious she-creature turns desire into fright, intercourse into castration, motherhood into murder, love into death, dramatically

12 embodying man’s most profound terrors of the deadly female” (Gilmore 95-96). Yet, Kali is just one of several gruesome female demons in Hinduism and Indian lore, which reflect “the general misogyny of the Indian ascetic tradition and the upanishadic doctrine of the chain of rebirth”

(Gilmore 95) that holds women guilty of trapping men in the painful cycle of existence through reproduction. However, the diabolical female is not unique to India. Wolfgang Lederer “points out that Kali resembles the female figure of Chicomecoatl in pre-Aztec Mexico, the Terrible

Mother who devours her husband and children;” “the later Aztec Snake Woman;” “Malekula, the man-devouring ogress of Polynesian lore;” and “various Celtic war-goddesses and Nordic woman deities [who] also mutilate, castrate, or kill their male adversaries. And of course, all these she-demons and murderous succubi bear uncanny resemblances to the sirens, lamias, naiads, sorceresses, evil stepmothers, and witches of Greek and Roman mythology” (Gilmore

Chapter 5: An Argument against the “Naturalness” of Misogyny

If the demonizing and subordination of women is universal, does that mean it is natural and indicative of the way the ultimate Creator meant the world to be? Research and analysis suggest that misogyny was not an inherent characteristic of the world, but that it was a gradual development and that its manifestations were often instituted out of political expediency. In his essay “The Subjection of Women,” originally published in 1869, John Stuart Mills compares

“the government of the male sex” with “forms of unjust power” (20), acknowledging that some people may object that male government differs in that it is natural. He rhetorically questions:

But was there ever any domination which did not appear natural to those who possessed it? […] The subjection of women to men being a universal custom, any departure from it quite naturally appears unnatural. But how entirely, even in this case, the feeling is dependent on custom, appears by ample experience (20).

13 Supporting Mill’s argument is “evidence that fertility cults in ancient society at some point took a turn toward patriarchy” (Millet 39), with the accompanying degradation of goddesses and development of patriarchal religions, as mentioned earlier. Also upholding the claim that patriarchy and misogyny are social constructions rather than natural conditions is the

16th-century European conquest of America. In her book Women in the Crucible of Conquest:

The Gendered Genesis of Spanish American Society, 1500-1600, Karen Vieira Powers notes that before the Spanish arrival, the peoples of both Mesoamerica and the Andes lived in societies that were characterized by gender parallelism–meaning “women and men operate in two separate but equivalent spheres, each gender enjoying autonomy in its own sphere” (15)–and gender complementarity, signifying that the gender-specific spheres were “highly interdependent” and

“not intended to divide women and men into two opposing camps but rather to create balance and harmony” (17). In both Aztec and Inca societies “women had their own religious and political organizations with their own female hierarchies of priestesses and officials,” and while women’s roles differed from men’s, they “were not auxiliary” (Powers 17). Powers notes,

“Female religious organizations were dedicated to female deities who were conceptualized as the forces of procreation and regeneration” (23). Differing significantly from Plato’s cosmology in which the supreme Creator was male while the receptacle that was devoid of all characteristics was female, Powers suggests that the “equivalent participation of women and men in the political and religious systems of Inca and Aztec societies was connected to, or perhaps derived from, cosmologies that conceptualized supernatural beings (or gods) as possessing both masculine and feminine characteristics and, at times, as having both male and female bodily manifestations”

14 In stark contrast to such gender parallelism and complementarity, the Europeans who encountered the indigenous peoples of America came from a highly patriarchal continent. Men from Iberia were arguably even more sexist than other Europeans as “their attitudes about gender had been formed in the crucible of the Reconquest–an 800-year war” that created “a culture that eulogized wartime deeds and glorified male bravado” (Powers 40). Thus, when the Spanish forced their imperial organization on the peoples of the Americas, they removed women “from their former positions of authority, thereby annihilating the female political sphere and disenfranchising all Aztec and Inca women of their traditional rights to participate in government” (Powers 42). Likewise, the imposition of Christianity severely denigrated women’s status, cutting them off from direct access to the supernatural world and forcing them “to depend on men to intercede for them with a male god and mostly male saints” (Powers 47). Powers poignantly observes, “We can only imagine the terror and emptiness that indigenous women must have felt upon having their spiritual lives thrown into such a state of ‘free fall’” (47). Once again religion was used to justify subjugation, as the Spanish claimed to be saving the souls of ignorant, pitiful savages.

Chapter 6: Illogical Logic

The logic behind colonization and domination stems from the dualism of ancient philosophy, which conceives of the world in terms of pairs of opposites with one item in each pair being clearly superior. In her book Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, Val Plumwood explains that the “set of interrelated and mutually reinforcing dualisms which permeate western culture forms a fault-line which runs through its entire conceptual system” (42), creating “an interlocking structure” (43). A few of these many pairs include reason/emotion, mind/body, freedom/necessity, rationality/animality, civilized/primitive, production/reproduction,

15 public/private, subject/object, and of course male/female, thus linking males with reason, mind, spirit, and freedom while associating women with body, animality, savagery, and subjugation.

Throughout history various philosophers have emphasized different pairs of these dualisms, obscuring “the pervasiveness of dualistic and rationalist influence in philosophy” (Plumwood

45). Nevertheless, this highly hierarchical way of thinking has shaped human culture and behavior for centuries, serving to justify numerous forms of oppression as well as to subtly yet inextricably link females to anything that is a symbol of inferiority. Plumwood notes that because the differentiation involved in dualism necessitates making one of the items in each pair inferior to the other, it “demands not merely distinctness but radical exclusion, not merely separation but hyperseparation” (49).

Throughout the ages women have indeed been radically excluded from the fields of philosophy, politics, and religion, the fields through which men have gained knowledge and power. Consequently, women have been denied educational opportunities and means to gain power, only for men to then cite their powerlessness and lack of knowledge as proof of their inherent inferiority. In her essay “Aristotle and the Politicization of the Soul” Elizabeth V.

Spelman points out similar circular logic in Aristotle’s argument for the natural rule of men over women:

He argues for the position that men by nature rule over women. How do we know that they do? We know this because the rational element of the soul by nature rules the irrational element. And how do we know this? This is where we come full circle: Because men rule women (and also because masters rule slaves, because tutors rule children) (26).

Thus, the very premise on which men have based their claim of superiority to women–namely logic–is itself illogical.

Chapter 7: The Internalization of Inferiority

16 Unfortunately, however, this seems to be beside the point. While the majority of people today recognize justifications of colonization and slavery as just that–justifications and excuses– and while most would laugh at the notion of the divine right to rule, which political leaders used for centuries to justify their reigns, many still seem to accept the assertion that women are naturally distinct from men and were intended to fulfill radically different roles. While men and women indeed possess some biological distinctions, their similarities are far greater than their differences. Plumwood explains:

Where items are constructed or construed according to dualistic relationship, however, the master tries to magnify, to emphasise and to maximise the number and importance of differences and to eliminate or treat as inessential shared qualities, and hence to achieve maximum separation (49).

Perhaps it is because only women have the incredible ability to bear children that men have so vigorously insisted that only men possess certain characteristics such as rationality.

Perhaps it is because men are, in a way, naturally excluded from the life-giving process that they have artificially excluded women from the realms of philosophy, politics, and religion. This radical exclusion, however, has led to men determining the very definition of women without their presence and input. In her book She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological

Discourse, Elizabeth A. Johnson asserts:

Rosemary Ruether astutely formulates the fundamental question: Is it not the case that the very concept of the “feminine” is a patriarchal invention, an ideal projected onto women by men and vigorously defended because it functions so well to keep men in positions of power and women in positions of service to them? (49).

In her essay “Theory of Sexual Politics,” Kate Millett concurs:

Under patriarchy the female did not herself develop the symbols by which she is described. As both the primitive and the civilized worlds are male worlds, the ideas which shaped culture in regard to the female were also of male design. The image of women as we know it is an image created by men and fashioned to suit their needs (49).

17 The implications of men defining women are enormous, as women’s images of themselves have come to reflect the sense of inferiority incessantly instilled in them. John Stuart

Mill notes in “The Subjection of Women” that, differing from other master-slave situations, men typically want not only the obedience of women but also their adoration. Mill states:

They have therefore put everything in practice to enslave their minds … and they turned the whole force of education to effect their purpose. All women are brought up from the very earliest years in the belief that their ideal of character is the very opposite to that of men; not self-will, and government by self-control, but submission, and yielding to the control of others. All the moralities tell them that it is the duty of women, and all the current sentimentalities that it is their nature, to live for others; to make complete abnegation of themselves, and to have no life but in their affections. And by their affections are meant the only ones they are allowed to have – those to the men with whom they are connected, or to the children who constitute an additional and indefeasible tie between them and a man (21).

With such omnipresent patriarchal socialization, then, it is not surprising that women often conceive of themselves as inferior creatures lacking the imago dei and that even if they would never articulate such a belief in words, often allow it to guide their behavior, preventing them from referring to God as a female, reporting sexual abuse, or running for political office.

How dangerous it is to accept the alleged superiority and authority of men cannot be emphasized enough, though. Acceptance of male assertions of divinity and authority has led to decisions being made about women rather than by women. For example, between 1545 and 1563 the Council of Trent established many influential guidelines concerning marriage and celibacy.

In her essay “Separation of the Sexes: The Development of Gender Roles in Modern

Catholicism,” Ellen M. Leonard notes, “Women were not present at the council and had no say in decisions that would affect their lives and the lives of future generations of women” (117).

While in religious contexts men often defend their decisions with claims of divine ordination and divine revelation, just how contingent and human their decisions are is evidenced by the example

18 of the Council of Macon in 584. In “Towards a Single Anthropology: Developments in Modern

Protestantism,” Wendy Fletcher-Marsh reveals, “The debate asked, ‘Do women have souls?’

[…] Ultimately the church fathers determined that indeed women did have souls and were therefore human. The issue was decided, however, by only one vote” (131). How would history have been different if one man had voted differently? What would women’s experience of life today be like because of one decision made by one man in 584?

Chapter 8: Reclaiming Power = Becoming Male?

Perhaps the more important question, however, is “Are women willing to let men continue to make decisions for them, dominating philosophy, politics, and religion and practicing exclusion and oppression in perhaps subtle but nevertheless destructive ways?” It cannot be denied that women have made great strides in achieving equality with men in multiple fields, including philosophy, politics, and religion. However, in the United States today, God is still referred to almost exclusively as male; only 81, or 15.1%, of the 535 seats in Congress are filled by women (CAWP 1); and in the top fifty doctoral programs for philosophy, women fill only

18.69% of the tenured/tenure-track appointments (Tenured 1). In addition, some women express feeling as though they must give up their womanhood in order to be successful; they may feel compelled to not have children, wear primarily pants suits to work, or demonstrate excessive aggression and competitiveness. Thus, while proving that they can accomplish the same tasks as men, women still sometimes unwittingly fuel the notion that women must become men in order to gain power and succeed, again reflecting a typical religious tradition. For example, in The

Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitus from the early third century, Perpetua gains courage and strength from a vision preceding her martyrdom in which she actually transforms into a man:

“And I was stripped and I was made a man” (qtd. in Clark 101). From this she understands that

19 she will be victorious over the devil, as masculinity symbolizes power, divinity, and righteousness.

In his book God Is a Woman, Rafael E. López-Corvo defines what he calls the three stages of Eve. He labels “the period between the beginning of time to the present century, when the women’s liberation started,” the stage of:

the “Delinquent Eve,” as a condensation of the woman depicted by the myth of Genesis: plundered of her maternity by a male God, accused of conniving with the devil, and guilty of the external loss of Paradise. The second period, believed to be experienced by women now, I have labeled as the “confused Eve” because I think it represents the need of women to achieve their identity by imitating certain idealized features of men: their apparent freedom, political power, money, external genitality, and so forth (x).

López-Corvo notes that even “feminist attempts to overcome the pressure of discrimination” (x) often unwittingly subscribe to the notion of male superiority by encouraging female imitation of males and turning to exterior remedies for an interior problem of identity. Instead of ceasing to wear make-up and refusing to shave their legs (which, there is need to note, are praiseworthy choices if that is what a woman wants to do), López-Corvo asserts that women need to look inward to find their identity and power and become what he calls the “Vindicated Eve.” He claims:

The future change from “Confused” to “Vindicated Eve” will depend not so much on the relationship between men and women, but on women themselves, in their capacity to search inside without fear, to find the genuine roots of their own identity, their hidden sexuality, the power of imprinting and the legal rightness for their own intellect (118-119).

Chapter 9: Interior Consciousness

However, even turning inward does not ensure that women will escape the sexism inherent in language and society. The very claim that women can have a unique interior experience of God is often rooted in patriarchal understandings of how a woman can experience.

20 In her essay “The Question of Woman’s Experience of God,” Elizabeth A. Morelli notes,

“Contemporary feminist critiques of traditional accounts of woman’s religious knowledge examine the noematic” (222-223), or the external objects or contents of consciousness such as models, images, symbols, metaphors, and words. In contrast, Morelli addresses the noetic correlates of consciousness, or the operations or “acts that give rise to such formulations, metaphors, concepts” (223). Given “the attribution of rationality exclusively to men” (Morelli

224), the only cognitive ability attributed to women has traditionally been intuition. As the 19th- century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer so eloquently puts it, “For women, only what is intuitive, present and immediately real, truly exists; what is knowable only by means of concepts, what is remote, absent, past, or future cannot really be grasped by them” (qtd. in

Morelli 225). Thus, even woman’s spirituality has been considered to lack rationality and transcendence. Hilda Hein offers an observant critique, speaking of the mysterious power attributed to woman:

But it is not an individuating, intellectualizing, or morally elevating property. It is rather an elemental and undifferentiated force that “passes through” and occupies a woman … Woman’s spirituality is in no way incompatible with her passivity or with her lack of moral authority (qtd. in Morelli 229).

Whether addressing spiritual or secular matters, women are often said to “just know.”

People refer to “woman’s intuition” as though it were a “unique, incomprehensible power,” and although feminists have at times embraced “this identification of women with the intuitive”

(Morelli 233), doing so still supports the myth than women do not have the same intellectual capabilities and rationality as men. Morelli notes that what is called “woman’s intuition” is truly:

a matter of pre-reflective or unobjectified conscious acts of perception, intelligence, affectivity, and reason … The only difference between a cognitive claim such as “It’s a simple matter of deduction, my dear Watson” and the claim “I just know it – woman’s intuition” is a habit of objectifying and appropriating conscious operations traditionally accepted as gender-appropriate (234-235).

21 Thus, if “the process of conscious intentionality is not gender-specific, it follows that there is no conscious access to God unique to woman” (Morelli 235). Morelli remarks that, although they have differed in their accounts of how human beings gain conscious access to God, several philosophers have suggested that humanity’s access to God is “the most fundamental core of the human spirit” (236). Morelli concludes:

Insofar as we understand our access to God to be the very ground or core of the human spirit, then we cannot attribute to woman qua woman a specific conscious access to God. To do so would be to assert that woman is not quite human, or that there are two distinct human natures (236).

Chapter 10: Conclusion

Understanding all humanity to possess the image of God, women’s reassertion of their humanity necessarily includes the reassertion of their imago dei. While the historical traditions of religion and spirituality are rich and offer contemporary human beings much wisdom and beauty, they have also been shaped by philosophy, politics, and society in ways that have often been detrimental to women. The politics and hierarchies of power both within religion and outside of it have contributed to justifications for colonization, slavery, domination and destruction of the environment, and sexism, linking women to everything that is a symbol of inferiority. Yet the wonderful thing about symbols, as men with misogynistic agendas have so aptly shown, is that they can be manipulated and transformed. Women can both change the meanings of preexisting symbols and formulate new symbols of God, making their experience of imago dei unique to them not as women but as individuals. Each human being will undoubtedly have a unique identity, a unique experience of life, a unique conception of God, and a unique understanding of his/her relationship with God. It is this uniqueness of experience as well as the commonalities among all human beings that religion should recognize, promote, and embrace. For it is when all

22 human beings recognize the imago dei both within themselves and in the creatures and world around them that harmony, peace, equality, love, and oneness with God will finally be achieved.

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