The Punishing Theology of the Body

I am almost completely recovered from Pope Francis’ wonderful visit to the hemisphere and pay even more attention to his heartfelt endearments on Twitter. I am also grateful for the oceans of intrigue coming out of the Vatican about the visit and the current Synod of the Family taking place in Rome. The conservative theologians at the Synod have already fired warning shots across the bow of progressives about traditional views of sex, marriage and priestly chastity that for all practical purposes are written in stone.

I recall reading about the fuss some European bishops made about contraception during the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s. The bishops warned that the Catholic Church was inviting another Galileo problem in ignoring science and modernity. The conservatives won that round and a vast majority of American Catholics proceeded to ignore the Vatican on matters dealing with sex, contraception and abortion. American Catholic bishops continue to battle these issues on a number of fronts, including contraception mandates in the Affordable Care Act and restricting tubal ligations in Catholic-affiliated hospitals.

I am a Catholic and think that the Church is wrong on these issues but accept its right to promulgate doctrine as it sees fit. But I do wonder about this centuries-old preoccupation with sex, especially the sexuality of women. With this matter on my mind, I came across the book, “Women’s Bodies as Battlefield: Christian Theology and the Global War on Women” by Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, a Professor of Theology at Chicago Theological Seminar. While I have reservations about some claims in the book, I think that the professor sheds crucial light on how the present day theology of sex was born, prospered and became doctrine over the course of 2,000 years at the hands of mainly celibate men.

Years ago, I was told by a religion professor that one reason you don’t mess around with the Catholic Church is that it has these 2,000 years of Biblical exegesis, church councils, a long line of scholastics, received wisdom plus an occasional pinch of Papal infallibility. The man was joking but deadly serious. I was warned but still poke around the edges. I wrote my PhD dissertation on the Catholic Imagination but that wasn’t enough to put out the fire.

Professor Thistlethwaite examines the feminine principle in early foundation myths, including Genesis, and notes that from earliest recorded history the female goddess and women in general were associated with chaos, the absence of order and unbridled creativity. In turn, this Chaos required the male to enter this monstrous existential mess and induce order. This is the articulation of the Combat Myth where Yahweh is the Holy Warrior. As the Professor notes, there is a continuous, unending need to combat this chaos. Order is the muscular offset and the documents invoked can be called theology.

Plato was not immune to framing his philosophy around this foundation mythology. In his “Timaeus,” Plato writes that the feminine is formless and without body. He compares a woman’s uterus to a living creature that becomes discontented and angry, wandering through her body causing all manner of disease. As Thistlethwaite observed, Plato can’t completely ignore the physical existence of women but he mainly focuses on the eternal forms. The woman receives forms and impressions from others. She is not real. The professor sees sexual connotations and perhaps a kind of sexual violence in Plato’s language about things entering this receptacle of a formless woman without her consent.

The professor rightly asks what Plato’s metaphysics sets up for Western Culture in describing a woman as formless, passive and without agency. She notes that this philosophical flesh/body dualism is still very much with us in the 21st century, passing right through his student Aristotle, who linked women to matter and men to reason. The soulful province of reason is warmer and more fertile than the cold body. Aristotle saw women as weaker and deformed in a natural way. The female, again, is the receptacle that awaits the arrival of the formed, soulful male, who will ensure that any offspring are protected from any inevitable female deformity. Thus, the maker gives shape, life and form to what the female receptacle passively carries.

In the 4th century, St. Augustine was not far from the Greeks in his thinking about women and sex. With the gradual decline of Rome in the background, Augustine focused on two wars: the war between nations and the war within. The latter referred to the war against lust and desire born of original sin. According to the Augustine, this sin is transmitted through semen to each generation. The semen in itself is not sinful; it’s the accompanying lust that associated with the sex act that is sinful and associated with man’s original act of disobedience.

Augustine, who had a fairly busy secular life before he found his calling in his “City of God,” is absolutely blunt about begetting children without lust and making sure that the members created for this purpose should not be stimulated by the heat of lust. He reminds us that lust requires for its consummation darkness and secrecy for both legal and illegal intercourse. We hide in the dark during sex because we are ashamed and know this act which by nature is fitting and decent is accompanied with a shame-begetting penalty of sin.

Professor Thistlethwaite challenges Augustine’s views on rape of consecrated virgins and other Christian virgins by barbarians during the sacking of Rome. He argues that during rape, even if the woman feels pain, it was part of God’s plan. The churchman goes on to suggest that those who were raped might have had some lurking infirmity that made them prideful. The humiliation they felt during the rape was therefore a lesson in humility. As the Professor notes, these sentiments have a very modern and disturbing ring.

This view of feminine inferiority can also be found in the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century. Thistlethwaite suggests that Aquinas picked up where Aristotle left off. The church father gave us the term “the great chain of being.” In this realm, soul was superior to body and men naturally were superior to women. This hierarchy is natural and part of God’s plan. With Aristotle, Aquinas believes that, as individuals, women are defective and misbegotten. This defective nature means that women are subservient to men in all things. In this universe, the male seed produces a perfect likeness while the production of women comes from a defect in the active force or from some material indisposition. But in the general sense, women are not misbegotten because God would not author anything less than perfect.

In Aquinas, one can note the modern theology of sex take hold. He considers rape not as sinful as masturbation and homosexuality because rape of a female by a male is unlawful. On the other hand, masturbation and homosexuality are against nature. Aquinas quotes Augustine on this: “Those foul offenses that are against nature should be everywhere and at all times detested and punished, such as those of the people of Sodom….For even that every intercourse which should be between God and us is violated, when that same nature, of which He is the Author, is polluted by the perversity of Lust.”

There should be no surprise that we hear this same 4th century language from present day theologians, politicians and men who assume their favorable positions just under God in that Great Chain of Being. We of the laity are anxious to hear how these views from saintly men play out in the 21st century.

In the meantime, I’m having a look at these issues through a fictional lens. My novel “Chanting the Feminine Down” is scheduled to be published next year. It explores the psychological, theological and philosophical burdens put on the bodies and souls of women. Theology is not so easily undone. Nor am I.