Sitz im Lieben

The following is an essay presented at a faculty panel on women's bodies in 2004. It is still relevant. It is still "true."

 

MY focus today will deal with women’s bodies and the Christian tradition. Allow me to begin my comments with what Elisabeth Fiorenza calls a

Sitz im Lieben or life setting.

 

I was raised (obviously) female, in a devoutly Roman Catholic family. I was an obese child, an obese teenager and an obese young woman. In fact, I did not know what it was to be of an average weight for my height until I was 25 years old.

 

I was raised within the context of a faith that was suspect, if not hostile to my being and a culture that was rejecting and disapproving of my appearance. It is a wonder that I survived (somewhat) psychologically intact.

 

In part, this experience led me to an interest and a subsequent study of the Christian tradition and its popular and doctrinal views towards women and women’s bodies.  The initial critique of course includes an acknowledgement that attitudes and beliefs about “who woman are” were constructed within a patriarchal religion and as such women’s anthropology was derived androcentrically, that is, within the assumption that men constitute the norm for what it means to be human and stand at the center of human existence.  Women then are placed on the margins of that assessment. It also means that women’s very being was represented through the eyes and experience of men. Men, and as regards much of Christian anthropology and theology, celibate men, have defined and determined descriptions and definitions of women’s nature, women’s sexuality, of women’s acceptable roles in society and of women as they stand in relation to the divine.

 

 

As I so often point out in my courses, if one is to understand the “anthropology of woman” in the tradition, one cannot ignore influential and powerful interpretations of Eve as she is presented in the mythology of creation. That she is created second in the order of the creation of humanity (in Chapter 2), that she is created differently and that the myth provides a purpose for her creation has not escaped centuries of notice. From Saint Paul to Saint Augustine, to Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Calvin and Karl Barth this distinction in creation provided the justification for finding her (and consequently all women), wanting, inferior and in need of subjugation. Her body was the locus for her association with male temptation, carnal license and moral weakness.

 

In the myth, woman is not created as an end in herself but as a helpmate for the purpose of procreation for according to both Augustine and Thomas Aquinas the man would have been better served in any other endeavor by a helper who was male (both in companionship and work). Indeed, Thomas included in his Summa a chapter that dealt with the question of whether or not it was necessary that woman had been created at all. He concluded that since men are the better companions of men, the only purpose for woman’s creation is her role in procreation.

 

But in order to accomplish the purpose of her existence, she must engage in sexual activity, which is associated in a dualistic worldview as base, sinful, and even within the context of marriage is described by Augustine as a “legalized depravity.” Motherhood was a double-edged sword.

 

Margaret Miles, commenting on Augustine’s view in Carnal Knowing, writes:

        

          Between men and women ‘there is no difference except in

          relation to the body.” But this difference was a large one

          As Augustine’s statement suggests, women’s “nature” was

          determined by their physical difference from men, that is,

          by their bodies. Although women possess rationality, men’s

          “nature” was determined by it.

 

So determined in fact, that by the middle of the 16th century, at the Council of Trent the ongoing debate as to whether or not women even possessed souls was finally put to rest. It was decided that they did.

 

The body or more specifically, women’s bodies separate them from the realm of the divine, which is associated with Mind, Logos and Spirit. And very early, though not immediately in the tradition, women were barred from serving officially as the mediators between God and men. Never did that become more stunningly clear to me than when in Paris 3 ½ years ago, while visiting one of the churches, and while purchasing an icon, I misinterpreted a gesture as one instructing me to follow a young man as he made his way up the center aisle towards the altar. As I took my first steps into the sanctuary I heard two screams behind me. An older man, praying in the front pew had risen and shouted, clearly filled with anxiety, almost dread. My friend, having seen his reaction called to me as well.  It was only then that I realized my grave error. I, possessed of a women’s body, had entered and thereby violated sacred space, space that was forbidden to me simply by virtue of my being a woman.

 

It has become a part of the feminist “canon of critique” to cite the now-famous Augustinian reflection on how women and men uniquely reflect the image of God, found in his treatise On the Trinity:

          

            …that the woman together with her husband is the image

            of God, so that that whole substance is one image.  But

            when she is assigned as a help-mate, a function that pertains

            to her alone, then she is not the image of God; but as far as

            the man is concerned, he is by himself alone the image of God,

            just as fully and completely as when he and the woman are

            joined together into one.   

 

The juxtaposition of Eve with Mary, the mother of Jesus does not lessen the tradition’s anxiety.  Mary is doctrinally described as both Virgin and Mother, an accomplishment, I daresay, no mere ordinary woman can imitate. And yet, it is this very construction that has been presentedto women throughout the ages as that image of womanhood to be emulated.

 

Motherhood or virginity then, both biologically based, became the essential ways of being.  But they were not equally valued. Margaret Miles writes:

                  

                  

                    In orthodox Christianity two roles were acceptable for women-

                    Virginity or motherhood…No reader of patristic literature could

                    miss the difference in interest, tone and length in discussions of

                    virginity and marriage…for example, Jerome, ‘The woman will

                    then be saved if she bear children who will remain virgins:

                    if what she has herself lost, she attains  

                    in her children, and makes up for the loss and decay of

                    the root by the excellence of the 

                    flower and fruit.’

 

    And Saint Ambrose, “The marriage bond is not to be shunned as though it were sinful, but rather declined as being a galling burden.” 

 

    Gregory of Nyssa, “The more exactly we understand the riches of virginity,the more we must bewail the other life…how poor it is.’

 

And lest we think that this construction is an exclusively medieval idea, in 1988, in his Apostolic Letter On the Vocation and Dignity of Women, Pope John Paul II named motherhood and virginity as “the two dimensions of women’s vocation.”

 

There are of course, women in the tradition who broke the bonds of restriction placed upon them, not the least of which was Mary Magdalene for whom there is no scriptural foundation at all for an association with sexual promiscuity. There is suspicion by modern scholars of Christian antiquity that sexual promiscuity was attached to Mary Magdalene in an effort to discredit her power and authority in the early Christian churches.

It does not escape notice that in an effort to undermine her apostleship, the worse that could be said about her was that she had sex. 

 

Other women also, like Saint Teresa and Saint Catherine of Siena who are named Doctors of the Church, the Medieval Rhineland Mystics and Julian of Norwich who offered an apology for being a mere woman, “ignorant, feeble and frail,” but who appealed to the tradition’s affirmation, beginning with Saint Paul, that women can experience the “inward workings of the Holy Spirit.” According to Rosemary Ruether, “these women mystics evoked the Wisdom tradition of female-identified divine immanence [that] potentially overcomes concepts of a male God and androcentric concepts of the human.”

 

I have spent most of this presentation focusing on the past. The theme of this panel is “The Human Body and the New Millennium.” The human body in the new millennium is constructed FROM the past and if it is to “look” differently in the future then critical analysis of the past must be a part of the project. Biblical scholars, theologians, and scholars of religion who are engaged in the work of re-constructing Christianity’s origins in order to determine women’s “real” roles, who invoke feminine images to describe the divine, who examine the depiction of women in Christian art and anthropology, and who challenge androcentric ideology are constructing that future. The human body in the new millennium is changing its shape right now, right here.