After a long period of patriarchy, women today wish to be treated as human beings in their own right, free and responsible individuals. The leaven of the Gospel is at work, setting us free at last from the old pagan structures. But because the necessary fight for social equality has so often had to be waged against men, there is now some uncertainty about woman’s true identity, what it means to be feminine. The body, the soul, motherhood- these are certainly symbols, but because of the way they have so often been interpreted, they have become more than ever tokens of women’s inferiority.
In Christian thought, masculine and feminine do not form a hierarchy, but are modes of the one human nature. It is therefore important to develop and quietly insist upon a truly Christian way of thinking. We might suggest, like Paul Evdokimov, that the masculine side of human nature particularly reflects the Word, which organizes and defines, and the feminine the Holy Spirit, which inspires, consoles and incarnates. As we said before, the Semitic word for Spirit, Ruach, is often feminine. Moreover in the language of the Church there is a strict correlation between the Spirit of all holiness – Panagion – and the woman par excellence, the Mother of God, venerated as the ‘all holy’- Panagia. In an early Christian text, the Didascalia Apostolorum, we read, on the subject of the diaconate, which was then conferred on women as well as men, ‘The deacon has the place of Christ, and you will love him. You will honour the deaconesses in the place of the Holy Spirit’.
These remarks enable us to understand the symbolic nature of the characteristics of the male and female.
Masculine movement, whether sexual or in mere walking, intellectual activity as well as physical, is at once linear and jerky; while feminine movement suggests irradiation and continuity. There is a similar contrast between the angular geometry of the man’s body and the harmonious continuity of the woman’s.
The man, like an archer, goes straight for the mark. His will is tensed to surmount the obstacle. The woman responds by an act of presence in which the abstract will is less important than the resonance of her whole being. Expressiveness matters more to her than accomplishment. A little boy overacts, his sister dresses up.
The man explodes into laughter or anger; the woman flows like water, and like water she can smile.
The man is the conqueror, ranging afar; his aim is distant, his utterance is poetical. The woman attends to the present moment, she brings us back to material things, she is ironical.
The man makes his escape, the woman yields. Worry belongs to her, and often devotedness.
The man thinks with his head, the woman with her whole being. She carries the child in her flesh, she is in collusion with life.
But to progress from this ambiguous description to the truth of the feminine and masculine as the divine image requires spiritual training and an understanding of transfiguration.
In Eastern churches, above the ‘royal doors’ which stand before the altar and in front of which the faithful receive communion, there are usually portrayed, in an attitude of prayer on either side of Christ in majesty, the Mother of God and St John Baptist. Evdokimov sees in these two figures the true nature of the masculine and the feminine displayed. The Baptist, in the tradition of Elijah, internalizes his natural violence to ‘prepare the way of the Lord’, in the certainty that ‘he must increase, but I must decrease’. Here man the wide-ranging conqueror discovers his cross and his transformation.
The spiritual man, according to the image of the Baptist, is not the bridegroom who dominates and possesses, but the friend of the heavenly bridegroom, the one who knows that the woman, as much as anybody, is close to God. As for the Mother of God, ‘she gives birth to the divine form on earth and the human form in heaven’, fulfilling her spiritual motherhood. In her image, the child-bearing by which the woman is saved, to quote St Paul, is not biological predestination, nor simply the maternal instinct, which as we know can be possessive to the point of suffocation. In this image true motherhood is transfigured in the one who, at the foot of the cross, received the great commandment to be the Mother of all. Pointing to his beloved disciple, the crucified Lord said, ‘Woman, behold, your son’. And who among us is not beloved? Only this sacrificial motherhood, which is disinterested, and perfectly compatible with celibacy, can bring out the meaning of physiological motherhood. Ultimately, as Evdokimov says, the spiritual vocation of the woman is to ‘bring God to birth in ravaged souls’.
~Olivier Clement, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology
