The Concept of Woman, Volume 3: The Search for Communion of Persons, 1500–2015

By Prudence Allen

The culmination of a lifetime's scholarly work, this pioneering study by Sister Prudence Allen traces the concept of woman in relation to man in Western thought from ancient times to the present. In her third and final volume Allen covers the years 1500–2015, continuing her chronological approach to individual authors and also offering systematic arguments to defend certain philosophical positions over against others.

Building on her work from Volumes I and II, Allen draws on four "communities of discourse"—Academic, Humanist, Religious, and Satirical—as she traces several recurring strands of sex and gender identity from the Renaissance to the present. Now complete, Allen's magisterial study is a valuable resource for scholars and students in the fields of women's studies, philosophy, history, theology, literary studies, and political science.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Jan 5, 2017
• ISBN: 9781467445931

Prudence Allen

Sister Prudence Allen, RSM, is a retired professor of philosophy at St. John Vianney Theological Seminary, Denver, Colorado and professor emeritus of Concordia University, Montreal. She is the author of The Concept of Woman, published in three volumes: The Aristotelian Revolution, 750 B.C.–A.D. 1250; The Early Humanist Reformation, 1250–1500; The Search for Communion of Persons, 1500–2015.

Book preview

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INTRODUCTION

METHOD OF APPROACH

This final volume on the concept of woman in relation to man in the history of Western philosophy will analyze women’s reflections on their own identity and men’s reflections about woman’s identity from 1500 to the present. In addition to continuing a chronological approach to individual authors from the first two volumes, I will also offer systematic arguments to defend some philosophical positions over others. Philosophical arguments are those that, generally speaking, appeal to the evidence of the senses and reason.

Four communities of discourse occurring between 1250 and 1500 were identified in volume 2 as academic, humanist, religious, and satirical. In the present volume I continue to draw upon these four communities and compare them, contrast them, and extract from within them various philosophical arguments about the concept of woman. Academic positions tend to be technically philosophical, drawing upon ancient and medieval sources springing from philosophical schools and the newer academic disciplines. In the previous volume, these sources were nearly all written by men because women were typically excluded from universities. Some women, like Christine de Pizan, had access to academic libraries, and so their texts began to include technical philosophical arguments. Humanist positions tended to be expressed in dialogues, letters, and public orations. They included women as imaginary and eventually as real participants. Religious texts often had female authors, and they provided a rich source of reflections by women on their own identities. Finally, satirical texts provided interesting reflections on the concept of woman in popular culture. They often exaggerated characteristics associated with woman’s identity, or they inverted characteristics popularly ascribed to females and gave them to males, or vice versa.

In this present volume, I begin to delineate which characteristics are essential and which are accidental to the concept of woman. Advances in new academic fields, such as physics, biology, genetics, psychology, anthropology, sociology, and cognate disciplines, provide relevant texts for this philosophical inquiry. References to faith and its relation to reason, when directly related to a philosophical argument about the concept of woman, are also important.

Volume 3 builds on the original four areas of questions about the concept of woman identified by ancient Greek philosophers in volume 1:

Although these categories of questions are distinguished, my approach always considers the person as an integrated human being. In addition, I demonstrate that metaphysical foundations have consequences for different concepts of woman, and that some metaphysical foundations are significantly better than others. In this context, I follow P. F. Strawson, who argued that a descriptive metaphysics is content to describe the actual structure of our thought about the world, while a revisionary metaphysics is concerned to produce a [so-called] better structure.¹ My goal is to describe the actual structure of women in the world.

Thomas Aquinas, in question 1, article 1 of the Summa Theologiae, observed that philosophy is difficult, takes much time, and always develops with the admixture of many errors.² In this third volume of The Concept of Woman, the admixture of truth and error inevitably occurring in all areas of philosophy will become evident. I will describe both truths and errors about woman’s identity found in the particular philosophers. Although no one author considered in this volume has all the elements needed to defend the whole truth about the concept of woman in relation to man, several men and women philosophers contribute elements toward a comprehensive and accurate account.

A specific challenge enters into the admixture of truth and error: First, there is often an individual blindness toward some aspects of one’s own sex and gender identity. Virginia Woolf captured this problem well: For there is a spot the size of a shilling at the back of the head which one can never see for oneself. It is one of the good offices that sex can discharge for sex—to describe that spot the size of a shilling at the back of the head.³

Second, there is an engendered group-bias. Women philosophers and men philosophers need one another to overcome effects of group bias. Bernard Lonergan, SJ, explained the blindness this way: Let us name such an aberration of understanding a scotosis, and let us call the resultant blind spot a scotoma. Fundamentally, the scotosis is an unconscious process. It arises, not in conscious acts, but in the censorship that governs the emergence of psychic contents. Nevertheless, the whole process is not hidden from us.⁴ Opening a conversation, a dialogue, about woman’s identity that includes women’s reflections on their own selves, men’s reflections on women’s identity, and women’s reflections on men’s identity may help us overcome some of the admixtures of error and truth about woman’s identity that have persisted over time.

Women live the reality of their specific engendered identity analogically—not univocally or equivocally. A historical tendency to articulate univocal essential characteristics of all women often slides into stereotypes. The opposite tendency to reject any significant characteristic of woman tends to ignore the fact that for the most part there are two ways of being a human person, male and female, man and woman. Only a realistic metaphysics can provide an accurate foundation for the existentially analogical structures of women (or of men). In this volume I will identify specific elements drawn from different philosophers that together can provide such a metaphysical foundation.

We also live developmentally the progressively unfolding reality of our particular engendered identity. Simone de Beauvoir’s often-quoted line: One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman, is true, even though her argument about how that becoming occurs lacks substance.⁵ A more fruitful approach to the genuine becoming of each woman or man is given by Edith Stein: "Actualization comes about progressively, and it pertains to the nature of living beings not to step into existence ‘ready-made.’"⁶ Stein’s characterization of our progressive actualization as a living human being, woman or man, will help orient our approach to the concept of woman, 1500–2015.

The progressive historical development in the concept of woman was one of the main foci of the first two volumes of The Concept of Woman. It can be depicted to some extent by various mathematical analogies: a single point, a two-dimensional triangle, and various three-dimensional structures. These analogies are limited because mathematics cannot convey the dynamic nature of real women and men. Yet they do capture one significant aspect of the progressive changes in understanding a woman’s identity, namely, that it shifts from a single dimension, to two dimensions, to three dimensions in various authors who try to articulate the concept of woman. The table below summarizes these historical developments:

Chronological Development of Sex and Gender Identity

Development of the different three-dimensional models will be described in detail in chapters 5 through 7 of this volume. The analysis will go further than simply describing what women and men philosophers have said about woman’s identity at different times in Western thought. It will also include direct arguments for greater accuracy that accord with reality, and for the value of some positions over others. Specifically, I will defend the third three-dimensional model.

THE MEANING OF SEX AND GENDER IN THIS BOOK

One of the purposes of The Concept of Woman, volume 3, is to sort through different theories about sex identity, gender identity, and the relation of sex and gender. In this section, I would like to simply clarify my own use of these words and the concepts to which they apply.⁷ In the book proper, more thorough arguments will be made against contrary positions and in support of my own position. By sex I mean one of two kinds of human beings, male or female. The classification by sex considers the whole human being, from the perspective of his or her chromosomal, biological, anatomical, and physiological characteristics. Aristotle realized that nature always had some exceptions, and so he claimed that all science is of that which is always or for the most part.⁸ Thus, while there are some exceptions in nature, human beings can be classified for the most part as either of the male sex or of the female sex.

Males and females among higher animals are differentiated according to their respective contributions to generation. Aristotle correctly argued that male signified one who generated in another, and female, one who generated in itself.⁹ Aristotle made several incorrect distinctions between the contributions of males and females to generation. These errors over the centuries have been corrected by verified discoveries of scientists. Some of these errors and their corrections will be analyzed in chapter 3 because of their implications for woman’s identity. Since the word sex has the double meaning of sex identity and sex activity, my use of the word will refer to sex identity unless otherwise specified.

The meaning of gender is more complicated because a distinction between concept and word reveals two different historical time lines. The discrepancy in time between the concept of gender, which began several centuries before Christ, and the use of the word gender, which became common only in the twentieth century, leads to confusion about the real meaning of gender. Sorting through this confusion is very important for the concept of woman during the period being studied in this volume, namely, 1500–2015.

Very early in Western history the concept of gender identity was found hidden in its root, gen. The meaning of the root gen in its verb form is to produce or to beget; in its noun form it refers to offspring or kin. This meaning is explicitly integrated into early Jewish history. A clear example, dated variously between 1400 BC and 900 BC, is found in Genesis 5:1, which begins: This is the book of the generations of Adam; it continues through verse 32, marking off different periods of history in recording the generations from Adam, Seth, Enosh, Kenan, through to Noah and his sons.¹⁰ The root gen from the beginning of Judaism establishes the significance of the history of a people living in continuity generation after generation. It incorporates the act of sexual intercourse, of a male and a female, of a man and a woman who become father and mother through their synergetic union. Thus, we can say, the concept of sex is inherently included within the concept of the root of generation, or gen.

A second example is found in Aristotle’s Generation of Animals, generally dated 350 BC. Aristotle examined in this philosophical text how animals generate. Higher animals divided into male and female were distinguished by functions of their respective sexual parts or genitals: "They differ in their logos, because the male is that which has the power to generate in another . . . , while the female is that which can generate in itself, i.e., it is that out of which the generated offspring, which is present in the generator, comes into being."¹¹ Aristotle’s erroneous hypotheses about how this generative activity is accomplished, with the male providing a single seed and the female providing only matter, will be corrected in time. However, the concept of union of the male and female sexes is inherent within the concept contained in the root of generation, or gen.

A third example, some four centuries later, is seen in the beginning of the first chapter of the Gospel of Matthew: The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. In 1:1–16 the Latin word genuit, with the root gen (meaning to beget, to generate, to father), is repeated thirty-nine times. In verse 17 the root gen is repeated in the word generationes (meaning generations) four times. Christianity follows Jewish tradition in recording history through counting fruitful acts of sexual intercourse of a specific man and a specific woman. The incarnation of Jesus Christ as the focal point of Christian history transforms this history through the action of the Holy Spirit at the same time it enters into it and depends upon it. Thus, as in the previous two examples, we could say that the root gen in generation or generate incorporates within it the meaning of sex.

These three historical examples from Jewish Scripture, ancient Greek philosophy, and Christian Scripture, respectively, reveal that for over one thousand years the concept of the root of gender, gen, was commonly used in philosophy and theology, in Athens and Jerusalem. The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology records the continuation of the roots of these theological and philosophical concepts in the development of the English language. It includes the following rich, expanding language-family related to the root gen: gender, genealogy, generate, generous (nobly born), genesis, genetic, gene, genial (nuptial, productive, joyous), genital (external generative organs), genitive (grammatical possessor or source), genius (innate capacity, person possessing prevalent disposition of spirit), genocide, gens, gentleman, gentlewoman, genuine, and -geny (mode of production).¹² From this evidence alone, it would appear that the radical separation of the concept and word sex from the concept and word gender suggested by some twentieth-century authors is artificial indeed.

Just as the word sex has a double meaning of sex identity and sex activity, so also the word gender has a double meaning of gender identity and gender division of words. In ancient Western philosophy, the concept of gender and the word gender were mentioned in the context of dividing language into masculine, feminine, and neuter kinds of words. In one passage of the Rhetoric, Aristotle specifically applies a concept of gender to the study of nouns. He refers to the pre-Socratic philosopher Protagoras (485–415 BC) as the first to offer a science of language: The fourth rule consists in keeping the genders distinct—masculine, feminine, and neuter, as laid down by Protagoras.¹³ The original Greek is relevant here, not only because of the use of the word genē for gender, but also because the word for neuter (skeuē) actually means inanimate—that is, not living.¹⁴

Not until the seventeenth century did authors begin to link grammatical gender and human gender in satires by intentionally attaching a masculine article to a feminine noun (Hic mulier), and a feminine article to a masculine noun (Haec vir). This development will be carefully considered in the section on satires in chapter 2 of this volume. It also occurs in twentieth- and twenty-first-century attempts to break apart the meaning of gender from its historical association with the root gen and the synergetic effect of men and women who generate together, each contributing particular elements of their respective sexes.

To summarize: First, I apply gender identity always to an integral whole person, qua woman or qua man, and include within it a respective sex identity as female or male. This use is defended in the context of arguments against contrary positions in this book. Second, my analysis follows the pattern of the first two volumes of The Concept of Woman,¹⁵ in which various theories of sex and gender identity are classified according to their answers to two basic questions: (1) Are women and men of equal dignity and worth? (2) Are women and men significantly different or the same? Unisex theories argue that there is an equal dignity, but no philosophically significant distinctions, between women and men. Plato (through Socrates) in book 5 of the Republic made this argument. Traditional polarity theories argue that there are philosophically significant differences, and that the male is by nature superior to the female. Aristotle was the first to make a systematic argument defending this position. Reverse polarity theories defend philosophically significant differences but argue for the natural superiority of the female over the male. These theories will be described in chapter 2 in their first articulations by later humanist authors such as Henricus Cornelius Agrippa and Lucrezia Marinella.

Complementarity theories defend the simultaneous equal dignity and philosophically significant differences of women and men. In the period being examined in this volume, two versions of complementarity are articulated: fractional complementarity and integral complementarity. In fractional complementarity a woman and a man are described as contributing fractional portions to a relation that together add up to one single person. In integral complementarity a woman and a man are each considered as a whole person and together they synergetically generate something or someone more.

The table below summarizes aspects of the structures of various theories of sex and gender identity. The text itself will unfold the details of each of these classifications.

Structure of Theories of Gender Identity

Readers familiar with my classification of theories of gender identity from the second volume of The Concept of Woman will notice that I have changed the last category from Gender Neutrality to Gender Ideology. The original use of the category Gender Neutrality referred to philosophers who never write about gender identity, but rather use the inclusive man to describe the human being throughout their works. These authors do not typically consider the concept of woman to be of philosophical importance. While some authors fall into this category, there is a significant new category of authors who make direct arguments that distinctions between male and female or woman and man should be destroyed. I characterize these views as ideologies.¹⁶

My approach contrasts a theory of gender reality with one of gender ideology. I am concerned to describe how the world always or for the most part really is and to evaluate what can be defended as true about woman’s identity. An ideology seeks to change the way we think about something—in this case about woman’s identity and about her relations with other women, with men, and with children. So we will explore, from the perspective of the concept of woman, how our gender identity relates to the persons we are, to the women we are, or to the men we are.

Today the word gender in popular American usage has been kidnapped by a particular ideological stream of thought. I argue that we should ransom gender from gender ideology’s artificial and distorted view of the human person, qua woman and qua man. Although Martin Heidegger’s own philosophy assumes the stance of gender neutrality, he nonetheless offers, in What Is Called Thinking?, a very helpful metaphor for my purpose to defend the root of gen buried in the word gender: Words are not terms, and thus are not like buckets and kegs from which we scoop a content that is there. Words are wellsprings that are found and dug up in the telling, wellsprings that must be found and dug up again and again, that easily cave in, but that at times also well up when least expected. If we do not go to the spring again and again, the buckets and kegs stay empty, or their content stays stale.¹⁷ In The Concept of Woman, the word gender in gender identity reveals its wellspring in the meaning of the Greek and Latin root gen.

CAN INTEGRAL GENDER COMPLEMENTARITY BE PROVEN? NEWMAN’S NOTION OF PROOF

For over forty years the following question kept stirring in me: Is it possible to discover a philosophical proof for the integral complementarity of woman and man? Does this one theory accord better with reality than others? While pondering this question, I discovered John Henry Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, which provides criteria for evaluating whether or not an idea is a true development throughout history. Newman describes what he means by true development: The process, whether it be longer or shorter in point of time, by which the aspects of an idea are brought into consistency and form, I call its development, being the germination and maturation of some truth or apparent truth on a large mental field. On the other hand this process will not be a development, unless the assemblage of aspects, which constitute its ultimate shape, really belongs to the idea from which they start.¹⁸

Newman offered the following seven criteria, which he called notes, for assessing whether or not an idea is a true development:

Preserve identity of original type through all its apparent changes and vicissitudes from first to last.

Continuity of principles in the type remains entire from first to last, in spite of process of development. Changes do not destroy the type.

Assimilative power for dogmatic truth.

Logical sequence in fidelity of development.

Anticipation of its future in favor of fidelity of development, ethical or political.

Conservative action of its original type on its past with corruption tending to its destruction.

Chronic vigor of a true development of an idea distinguished from its corruptions, perversions, and decays.¹⁹

While Newman applied these criteria to the theological and ecclesiastical question of the true development of Christianity, I saw immediately that two separate but related ideas in the theory of integral gender complementarity also met his criteria. Therefore, I decided to work out in more detail Newman’s way of proof as an underlying theme of this final volume. Newman himself recognized the similarity between theological principles and principles in Christian philosophy in both their implicit and their explicit articulations: Principles of philosophy, physics, ethics, politics, taste, admit of both implicit reception and explicit statement; why should not the ideas, which are the secret life of the Christian, be recognized also as fixed and definite in themselves, and as capable of scientific analysis?²⁰

TWO ORIGINAL IDEAS ESSENTIAL TO INTEGRAL GENDER COMPLEMENTARITY AND THEIR DEVELOPMENT DESCRIBED IN THE CONCEPT OF WOMAN I

Identity of First Original Type: Aristotle’s Soul/Body Composite Unity of a Woman or a Man

The original type of the first living idea is the soul/body unity of an individual woman or individual man. It contains the principle that each woman or man has a soul/body composite unity, metaphysically understood as a form/matter composite. Aristotle (384–322 BC) introduced this living idea that is essential to understanding the individual human being as a woman or a man.²¹ The Greek term hylomorphism, so common to Aristotle’s metaphysics, is derived from hyle, meaning matter, and morphe, meaning form. In English the order is typically inverted in the phrase form/matter metaphysics. The form in higher living things is called by Aristotle a soul. Aristotle’s principle of the soul/body composite unity of each existing woman and man is opposed to Plato’s dualistic principle that a sexless soul can be reincarnated into different kinds of bodies, male or female, human or animal. In Aristotle’s words from De anima: [T]he soul is the first grade of actuality of a natural body having life potentially in it. The body so described is a body which is organized. . . . That is why we can wholly dismiss as unnecessary the question whether the soul and the body are one: it is as meaningless to ask whether the wax and the shape given to it by the stamp are one, or generally the matter of a thing and that of which it is the matter. Unity has many senses (as many as ‘is’ has), but the most proper and fundamental sense of both is the relation of an actuality to that of which it is the actuality.²² The principle of the soul/body composite identity of an individual man or individual woman is an essential element in a proof for integral gender complementarity.

Identity of Second Original Type: Augustine’s Complementarity of Woman and Man in Heaven

This original type of the idea of integral gender complementarity contains the two principles of equal dignity and significant difference. Augustine of Hippo (AD 354–430) introduced the original type of the second living idea essential to integral gender complementarity.²³ In The City of God he argues that in heaven women and men are both present in the perfection of their respective identities, significantly different by virtue of their sex but equal in dignity and worth by virtue of their human identity. Book 22, chapter 17 of The City of God begins with Augustine asking Whether the bodies of women will be raised and remain with their own sex.²⁴ He begins to articulate his answer with an argument: The Scriptures say: ‘Till we all come to a perfect man, to the measure of the age of the fullness of Christ,’ (Eph 4.13) and: ‘Conformed to the image of the Son of God.’ (Rom 8.29). On account of these sayings some believe that women will not rise in female sex, but that all will be males, since God made only man from clay, and the woman from the man. But I think that those are wiser who do not doubt that both sexes will rise.²⁵ Augustine’s reflection introduced the assimilative power of belief in the resurrection of the body to reject the conclusion that the female body will be changed into the male body in heaven.

It is worth pondering whether in addition to this scriptural rationale offered in The City of God there may have been a philosophical influence of those whom Augustine refers to in the phrase some believe that women will not rise in female sex, but that all will be males. Well-known Aristotelian texts circulating for centuries in the Mediterranean region consistently argued that the female was an imperfect male, a deformed male, an infertile male, and a misbegotten male.²⁶ This may have contributed to some people thinking that, since all imperfections are removed in the resurrection, imperfect women will be turned into perfect men at the resurrection of the body.²⁷

Augustine defends his position that both sexes will rise: "For there will be no lust there, which is the cause of shame. For before they sinned they were naked, and the man and woman were not ashamed. So all defects will be taken away from those bodies, but their natural state will be preserved. The female sex is not a defect, but a natural state, which will then know no intercourse or childbirth."²⁸ Augustine distinguishes in this passage between sex identity (the natural state of females and males) and sex activity (sexual intercourse leading to childbirth). Sex activity will no longer exist in heaven, but sex identity will continue, perfected in its complementary male and female reality, in heaven.

Augustine’s significance in the history of the concept of woman in relation to man stems from his striking phrase the female sex is not a defect, but a natural state. By this claim Augustine removes the rationale for devaluing woman’s identity in relation to man in their respective perfect states in heaven. While Augustine had the theological insight that before the Fall and after the resurrection in heaven men and women are equal and significantly different, he did not carry this insight throughout his analysis of the relation of woman’s identity after the Fall while on earth. Married women were described within a gender polarity devaluation, and nuns within a unisex lack of differentiation.²⁹ Still, his remarkable insight into the necessity of the two principles, equal dignity and significant differentiation, in a historical context that tended to reject them, supports my claim that Saint Augustine articulated the original type of living idea of gender complementarity.

FIRST DEVELOPMENTS OF THE TWO ORIGINAL TYPES WITH PRESERVATION OF TYPE, CONTINUITY OF PRINCIPLES, AND ASSIMILATIVE POWER OF THESE LIVING IDEAS

The first type of living idea (woman’s soul/body composite identity), introduced by Aristotle in the fourth century BC, was philosophical in origin, but it had a theological dimension in its development in Saint Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. The second type of living idea (the integral complementarity—the simultaneous equality and significant differentiation of male and female), introduced by Augustine in the early fifth century, was theological in origin, but its philosophical dimension was developed by Saint Hildegard of Bingen in the twelfth century. These two developments reveal continuity of principles with their original types—the second note of Newman. In addition, they demonstrate evidence of their assimilative power of dogmatic truth—the third note of Newman—through a fertile interaction of faith and reason with respect to the resurrection of the body.

Hildegard of Bingen’s Complementarity of Woman and Man in the World

Saint Hildegard (1098–1179), a Benedictine abbess and doctor of the church, was the first woman philosopher and theologian to defend both the soul/body unity of an individual woman’s identity and a theory of the integral complementarity of woman and man in all four categories of metaphysics, generation, wisdom, and virtue. For that reason, I identify her in the first volume of The Concept of Woman as the foundress of sex complementarity.³⁰

Hildegard developed the principle of the soul/body composite unity of the human being in the metaphors describing human generation: the soul . . . permeates the entire body just as water flows through the entire Earth; it pours into the foam and intertwines into all its limbs like a strong, warm wind that sweeps across the plains; and it wanders through this form like a caterpillar spinning silk.³¹ She also reaffirmed this soul/body unity and differentiation of male and female in her description of the resurrection: Thus all men in the twinkling of an eye shall rise again in body and in soul without any contradiction of cutting off their members, but in the integrity of their bodies and their sex.³²

The originality of Hildegard’s approach to the complementarity of women and men is seen in her defense and development of its two principles: fundamental equal dignity of women and men simultaneous with their significant differentiation. Where Aristotle devalued the female by relating her to the two lowest elements of water and earth and elevated the male by relating him to the two highest elements of fire and air, Hildegard argued that the female was more related to the two middle elements of air and water and the male to the highest and lowest elements of fire and earth. This argument was derived from Adam’s creation from the earth.³³ Hildegard also inverted Aristotle’s identification of the male with heat and the female with the derived contrary, cold, when she argued that in generation the male deposited cold seed in the female, which she then warmed up.

In addition to the two principles: (1) equality of dignity of women and men (2) simultaneous with their significant difference, Hildegard elaborated a third essential principle of integral gender complementarity: (3) the synergetic fruitfulness of their interrelations, biologically, personally, and spiritually. Hildegard offered an extensive analysis of woman’s identity in relation to man in her analysis of the interaction of four types of women and four types of men. Drawing upon a medieval science of elements and humors, she carefully distinguished between a woman’s experience of her own embodied identity and a woman’s experience of relations with four different kinds of men. Anticipating a phenomenology of integral sex and gender relations, Hildegard balanced and differentiated relations among the sexes in the areas of sexual activity, children, health, diseases, friendship, families, ethics, and religion.³⁴

In her Book of Divine Works, Hildegard describes how man and woman are the work of one another: "So God gave the first man a helper in the form of woman, who was man’s mirror image, and in her the whole human race was present in a latent way. . . . Man and woman are in this way so involved with each other that one of them is the work of the other [opus alterum per alterum]. Without woman, man could not be called man; without man, woman could not be named woman."³⁵ Commenting on this passage, Jean Bethke Elshtain (1941–2013) draws implications for political philosophy from this interactive dimension of Hildegard’s early theory of sex complementarity:

Hildegard insists that men and women help to create one another. . . . This is fascinating in part because Hildegard seems to be working with an appreciation of human powers as plural, potentia rather than potestas. Potestas is a political construal of power as rule or dominion; power over others. Potentia points us towards something more open, less codified, from which our notion of potential is derived.

The co-creation of man and woman in relation to one another (each as the work of the other, in Hildegard’s term) is not an image of blissful harmony and unlittered landscape of indistinguishable oneness. Indeed, the latter view of oneness presupposes the sex unity [unisex] posture that I am challenging. In the sex complementarity mode, we are equal in dignity but we are distinct from one another as well. This complementarity relationship will, at times, be one of struggle as men and women work with one another, grappling with sameness and difference.³⁶

Hildegard of Bingen’s development of the original ideas of soul/body unity and complementarity of women and men preserves the essential principles in their original identity. Her writing also demonstrates the capacity of these living ideas to assimilate three dogmatic principles articulated in the Apostles’ Creed: the communion of saints, the resurrection of the body, and eternal life. In all these principles the integrity of the concept of woman in relation to man is firmly held and dynamically real.

Thomas Aquinas’s Soul/Body Composite Unity Expands Soul as Form and Spirit

Saint Thomas (1224–1274) developed the Aristotelian ideal of the soul/body composite identity of a human being without changing its original type. Aristotle left open the question of whether the human soul continued to exist after the death of the body. He did not seem to think that a unique personality would continue to exist after the material component of the soul/body composite was gone. With Christian belief in the resurrection of the body extending into eternal life and a communion of saints, Thomas argued in the Summa contra Gentiles that It is, then, contrary to the nature of the soul to be without the body. . . . Therefore, the immortality of souls seems to demand a further resurrection of the bodies.³⁷

Following Augustine’s lead, Thomas considered the question of woman’s and man’s complementary presence in the communion of the saints: One ought, nevertheless, not hold that among the bodies of the risen the feminine sex will be absent, as some have thought. For since the resurrection is to restore the deficiencies of nature, nothing that belongs to the perfection of nature will be denied to the bodies of the risen. Of course, just as other bodily members belong to the integrity of the human body, so these which serve for generation—not only in men but also in women. Therefore, in each of the cases members of this sort will rise.³⁸ Although in the Summa Theologiae Aquinas repeated the Aristotelian view of his teacher Albert the Great, that while nature intends to produce both females and males, a female is defective in her individual generation,³⁹ Thomas proposed another explanation that completely avoided any polarity devaluation of women. A commensuration of each soul to a particular body solves the problematic legacy that Aristotelian metaphysics of contrariety (the female is a privative contrary of the male) left for the history of generation of females and males.

Thomas described his new proposal this way in the Summa contra Gentiles: "[D]iversity, nevertheless, does not result from a diversity in the essential principles of the soul itself, nor from otherness in respect of the intelligible essence of the soul, but from diversity in the commensuration of souls to bodies, since this soul is adapted to this and not to that body, and that soul to another body, and so in all other instances. . . . Now it is as forms that souls have to be adapted to bodies."⁴⁰ While Aristotle thought that the individual soul power was provided by the father, Thomas introduced the theory that the human soul had its origin in God, who collaborated with the father.

Thomas developed Aristotle’s notion of the human soul as the form of the body by considering how form mediates existence as air mediates light.⁴¹ Msgr. John Wippel (1933–) summarizes Thomas’s innovation: "[I]f form in some way communicates the substantial act of being (esse) and if a thing’s unity follows upon its being, there can be only one substantial form in any given substance.⁴² Thomas argued that there are not two forms in the human soul but only one, which is its essence. Hence it is through its essence that the human soul is a spirit and through that same essence that it is the form of the body."⁴³ The original type of soul/body composite unity of a woman is preserved in its principles, while its development of the soul as both spirit and form of the body does not change the original type.

Furthermore, Thomas’s principle of the metaphysical unity of a human being whose soul is both spirit and form of the body provides a foundation for the development of the integral complementarity of woman and man. W. Norris Clarke, SJ (1915–2008), explains how the commensuration hypothesis joined with Thomistic hylomorphism can explain the differentiation of individual women and men without falling into the Aristotelian devaluation of woman:

[I]n the matter/form, body/soul composition, each component is correlative, adapted to the other. Thus, St. Thomas speaks of each soul being commensurated or adapted actively by God to its own particular body. . . . Thus the soul itself becomes differentiated in itself from every other, not because it is a different kind of soul, but because it is joined with this particular body as its permanent instrument of self-expression.

Just think of the difference in how the soul can operate from being infused into a female or a male body! The differences are deep, running all through its personality and mode of self-expression, but they are not because it is a different kind of soul, but because the human soul in each case has to operate and express itself through this particular body, which allows some of its many potentialities to develop, others not, or some more than others. Thus a human soul operating in a male body just cannot conceive, bear in its womb, and give birth to a human child, because it has no womb with which to do so.⁴⁴

The Thomistic development of the Aristotelian form/matter structure of reality has important implications for the concept of woman as soul/body composite being. This composite structure of real things is both ontological, that is, about how a real woman or a real man is in the world, and epistemological, that is, about how we come to know analogically what it is to be a woman or a man. Norris Clarke introduces a beautiful metaphor to describe the connection between our knowledge and the reality to which it refers: "If there are no form/matter compositions in reality, then we cannot abstract form from matter and so cannot form general or universal concepts which, though abstract, still retain an umbilical cord of direct connection with the real."⁴⁵

CONSERVATIVE ACTION OF ORIGINAL TYPE ON ITS PAST WITH CORRUPTION TENDING TO ITS DESTRUCTION DESCRIBED IN THE CONCEPT OF WOMAN II

Satires Devalue Women While Humanist Dialogues of Complementarity Spring Up

By the middle of the thirteenth century, the new universities in Europe had made the works of Aristotle required reading for their undergraduate faculty of arts. This Aristotelian revolution was described in detail in the first volume of The Concept of Woman. While this revolution in thought and teaching strengthened the first living idea of the soul/body composite unity, it undermined the second living idea of the complementarity of woman and man. Instead, traditional gender polarity, with its devaluation of the female in relation to the male, entered with renewed strength in the academic fields of philosophy, medicine, and theology. Equal dignity of men and women was replaced with increasingly contorted arguments for woman’s natural inferiority or defective generation contrasted with man’s superior and more perfect generation.⁴⁶ Through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, gender polarity arguments, given respectability by academics, appeared with new virulence in corrupted forms of satires in popular literature (Le roman de la rose and Le livre de Mathéolus) and in public trials of women.⁴⁷

During the fourteenth century, examples of male-female complementarity began to surface in new literary forms. Dante (1265–1321) wrote poetic dialogues drawing on faith and reason in relation to Beatrice in the Divine Comedy (Purgatorio), and Petrarch (1304–1375) elaborated on his relation with Laura in Triumphs. Boccaccio (1313–1375) wrote both a scathing satire against women in Corbaccio and two strikingly positive works about women: The Decameron and Concerning Famous Women.⁴⁸ These literary examples included imaginary dialogues between male and female characters as well as real elements drawn from the lives of the authors. Their impact on the history of gender identity was to position dialogue between a woman and a man, especially about relations of love and the search for truth and goodness, at the center of the concept of woman in relation to man. They provided a dynamic historical context for the extraordinary contributions of our next author to the true development of integral gender complementarity.

Christine de Pizan’s Vigorous Defense of Complementarity against Corrupt Satirical Devaluations of Woman

In the historical context of Italy and France, the corruption of Aristotelian inheritance of traditional polarity surfaced in a string of vicious satires against women. These satires exaggerated and generalized differences between women and men by claiming that women are naturally passive; weak, with little or no control over their emotions; full of the vices of greed, lust, anger, and inconstancy; lacking self-governance; seeking to deceive; and either blindly obedient or seeking to dominate men. Into this context of the corruption of extreme gender polarity emerged new defenses for man-woman complementarity.

Christine de Pizan (1363–1431) was an Italian-born Catholic laywoman, mother of three, and widowed caretaker of an extended family. A brilliant thinker and writer, she authored in France over forty-one texts between 1394 and 1429. While her accomplishments are described in detail in volume 2 of The Concept of Woman,⁴⁹ they will be briefly evaluated here using Newman’s sixth note for testing whether an idea is a true development or a corruption: A true development, then, may be described as one which is conservative of the course of antecedent developments being really those antecedents and something besides them: it is an addition which illustrates, not obscures, corroborates, not corrects, the body of thought from which it proceeds; and this is its characteristic as contrasted with a corruption.⁵⁰ Christine de Pizan exemplified this sixth criterion of Newman through her vigorous defense and multiple illustrations of the complementary identities of women and men in heaven in the communion of saints. In addition, she defended the integrity of marriage between a man and a woman and built on her friendships and professional collaboration with both women and men in the world.

Pizan’s scholarship included translating Thomas Aquinas’s commentary on the first book of Aristotle’s Metaphysics from Latin into French. Her work also manifested her familiarity with Aristotle’s Physics and his On the Soul, Augustine’s City of God, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Boccaccio’s Decameron and Concerning Famous Women, and numerous other sources from pagan and Christian authors.⁵¹

Pizan’s first set of conservative actions toward the two original living ideas—soul/body unity (Thomistic hylomorphism) and intergender complementarity—was directed at corrupt accusations about women in satirical arguments. In one early (1399) popular work, The Poem of Cupid, she states her goal of defending both the character of women and the integral love between a woman and a man through the character of Cupid:

It’s my conclusion, and I want to prove, / That women do so very much to be / Applauded, and therefore I recommend / Their traits, which show no inclination towards / Vices that scathe the human character / And bring to human beings pain and woe. / So through these just, veracious arguments / I demonstrate that reasonable men / Should value women, love and cherish them; Nor should they have a mind to deprecate / The female sex, from whom each man is born. Let none return them evil for their good, / For woman rightly is that single soul / whom man loves deeply through the natural law.⁵²

In this text Pizan uses the same line of reasoning that Hildegard of Bingen did in her interpretation of the creation of woman and of man:

Now God created her resembling Him; / He gave to her intelligence and skill / To save her soul, and judgment and good sense. When God created her He gave her form / Majestic, made of very noble stuff: For not from earthly mud was she derived, / But made uniquely from the rib of man, / Whose body was already, summing up, / Among the things of earth the noblest one.⁵³

From 1401 to 1403, Pizan engaged in several public debates against Catholic satirists in what became known as the Querelle de la rose.⁵⁴ These public debates were in the form of written letters and texts between Pizan and several male authors. Every time a male author devalued woman or marriage, she argued against the original claim using the following logical structures: pointing out fallacies of generalization; correctly negating the consequent; appealing to proper authority; providing multiple counterexamples to universal claims; appealing to conclusions of reasonable demonstration; introducing arguments, by clarification, about relations of whole to parts and of causes to remote effects.⁵⁵ The content of her arguments was drawn from classical historical sources and her own observation of women and men.

In public debates, Pizan collaborated with Jean Gerson, the chancellor of the University of Paris, and for her private study with Gilles Malet, the royal librarian at the Louvre. While her arguments contain multiple defenses of woman, we provide one example from her letter to Jean de Montreuil: But truly since he blamed all women in general, I am constrained to believe that he never had acquaintance of, or regular contact with, any honorable or virtuous women. But by having resort to many dissolute women of evil life (as lechers commonly do), he thought, or feigned to know, that all women were of that kind; for he had known no others. And if he had blamed only the dishonorable ones and counseled men to flee them, it would have been a good and just teaching. But no, without exception he accuses them all. . . . Rather, he should be blamed who carried his argument to the point where it was simply not true, since the contrary is so obvious.⁵⁶ Pizan’s consistent method of approach was a combined appeal to logic and her personal experience. After drawing the letters of debate together into a single text, she requested Isabeau of Bavaria to join the conversation with her support of women. She appealed to the queen’s reason to accept [her] argument rather than to female solidarity, to find true defenses against false opinions about women.⁵⁷

Toward the end of this raging public debate, Pizan wrote in 1402–1403 Le livre du chemin de long estude (The book of the long road of learning—long path of study). In it she reflected on her appreciation for her father’s library, and that his love of learning passed on to her admiration for ancient Greek philosophers.⁵⁸ In addition, Pizan reflected on her marriage to Etienne du Castel, a brilliant young French humanist: In my opinion, he was without equal in the world; I could not have wished for anyone more wise, prudent, handsome and good than he was, in all respects. . . . Our love and our two hearts were completely in accord, much more than between brothers and sisters; our two wills were one, whether it was a question of joy or of sorrow.⁵⁹ Her experiences of relationships of equal dignity and significant differentiation with her father and her husband provided a rich counterpoint to the satirical attacks devaluing both women and marriage.

Pizan’s second set of conservative actions shifted from direct intergender dialogue with contemporary male authors to fictional dialogues with historical male pagan and Catholic authors who manifested different kinds of biases against women; these dialogues were set in an imaginary celestial city of women that she created. For example, in the 1405 Le livre de la cité des dames (The book of the city of ladies),⁶⁰ Pizan defends the soul/body composite identity of a woman and rejects any traditional polarity attitudes that undermine the real complementarity of women and men. In this text she uses the same variety of argument forms as in her public debates, and adds various forms of ad hominem arguments against particular satirical claims of Theophrastus, Ovid, Jean de Meun, Mathéolus, and Walter Map. Her work begins with the following reflection on what she calls the lies about women and the lack of integrity that these texts contain:

But just the sight of this book, even though it was of no authority, made me wonder how it happened that so many different men—and learned men among them—have been and are so inclined to express both in speaking and in their treatises and writing so many wicked insults about women and their behavior. Not only one or two and not even just this Mathéolus (for this book had a bad name anyway and was intended as a satire) but, more generally, judging from the treatises of all philosophers and poets and from all the orators—it would take too long to mention their names—it seems that they all speak from one and the same mouth. They all concur in one conclusion: that the behavior of women is inclined to and full of every vice.⁶¹

While Pizan’s metaphysical foundation for a woman’s identity and for man-woman relations is clearly Aristotelian/Thomistic, her defense of women extends into broader areas of wisdom and virtue. To just give a few examples: against the claim that women are naturally passive, she provides multiple examples of active women; against the claim that women are naturally weak, she argues that if women are weak, then why are there such elaborate means to deceive them, and she provides many examples of strong women; against the claim that women have no understanding of their history, she argues that women become wise through appropriating the history of women’s past achievements. Against the claim that women have little or no control over their emotions, and are full of greed, lust, anger, and inconstancy, she argues that women have control over their emotions through the practice of the virtue of self-governance; and she adds many examples of women who are generous, chaste, self-controlled, and constant in their promises. Finally, against the claim that women’s virtues ought to be limited to the private sphere of activity, she offers multiple examples of virtuous women acting in the public sphere with boldness, prudence, daring, strong discipline, and even by taking up arms.

Pizan employs three metaphorical figures (Lady Reason, Lady Rectitude, and Lady Justice) to make her arguments. Lady Reason distinguishes among different factors that may cause men to attack women: faulty reasoning, their own vice, hatred, a defect of their body, jealousy, a tendency to slander, and the desire to show off.⁶² Together the figures discuss Aristotle’s view that the impotence and weakness which cause the formation of a feminine body in the womb of the mother . . . as though it were something imperfect, must be due to an irrational blindness and the height of folly because God created the soul and placed wholly similar souls, equally good and noble in the feminine and in the masculine bodies.⁶³ In addition to this beginning challenge to the academic Aristotelian view, Lady Reason addresses the lack of education available to women, and confirms that Nature does give women the same qualities of body and mind as the wisest and most learned men, and unless they fail to learn, they will possess great learning and understanding as the following examples will demonstrate.⁶⁴ Both of these themes raised by Pizan in volume 2 of The Concept of Woman (the critique of Aristotle’s theory of the generation of the female as defective in contrast to the male and the defense of women’s capacity for higher education) are central to arguments about women’s identity we will describe in volume 3.

Finally, Pizan gives an important place to Mary, Mother of God, in her discussions of women’s identity. Lady Justice brings her to rule and govern the City of ladies.⁶⁵ Lady Justice asks her: My Lady, what man is so brazen to dare think or say that the feminine sex is vile in beholding your dignity? . . . and Mary answers: ‘O Justice, greatly beloved by my Son, I will live and abide most happily among my sisters and friends, for Reason, Rectitude and you, as well as Nature, urge me to do so. They serve, praise, and honor me unceasingly, for I am and will always be the head of the feminine sex.’⁶⁶ Pizan also anticipates, by her introduction of Mary as actively governing and exercising motherly dominion over those under her care, the many different ways that philosophers would respond to various visitations of Mary from the year 1500 to the present.

To conclude, Pizan strengthened the principles of complementarity in the face of cultural corruptions during the Renaissance. She defended the equal dignity of woman and man, recognized their significant differences, and continuously supported integral relations among women and men in marriage, friendship, and professional collaboration. She always sought the common good of all men, women, and children. For these reasons, Pizan is the most important early humanist reformer and defender of sex and gender complementarity.⁶⁷ Her life and writings fulfill Newman’s sixth note for a true living idea. In Newman’s words: It is the general pretext of heretics that they are but serving and protecting Christianity by their innovations. . . . That is, they assume, what we have no wish to deny, that a true development is that which is conservative of its original, and a corruption is that which tends to its destruction.⁶⁸

Christine de Pizan is the third defender of sex and gender complementarity identified by my historical analysis. Augustine identified the theological principles in the original idea of the complementarity of woman and man; Hildegard of Bingen elaborated philosophical defenses for application in the four areas of metaphysics, philosophy of nature, wisdom, and virtue; and Pizan defended the original ideal of complementarity against corruptions in the same four areas of discourse. Finally, this account of the true development of integral sex and gender complementarity, by the fact that its first three defenders were of the clerical, religious, and lay states, respectively, offers a hint of further developments in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the complementarity of their respective vocations.

THE STRUCTURE OF VOLUME 3

Volume 3 consists of an introduction, chapters 1 through 7, and a conclusion. A bibliography and an index are also included. The seven chapters of this book are divided chronologically and thematically to focus on major developments in the concept of woman in relation to man from 1500 to the present. While the concept of woman in individual philosophers will be mainly located in a particular chapter, the index at the end of the book will indicate other pages where a particular author is mentioned. At times, a theme introduced in an earlier century will be traced in that chapter through subsequent centuries.

Chapter 1: Engendered Identities in Religious Events and Authors. This chapter describes developments in the concept of woman discovered in engendered identities in religious events and authors. It begins with two images of unexplained origin: a pregnant woman in Mexico and a crucified man in Europe. Next, it analyzes engendered discussions in collaboration among women and men for the higher education of women and dialogues among women and men about the role of obedience and conscience in the Reformation. Finally, it traces the beginning of the Carmelite age in the Counter-Reformation by considering the original thought about woman’s identity, femininity, and masculinity in the works of Saint Teresa of Ávila and Saint John of the Cross.

Chapter 2: Woman’s Identity in Academic and Later Humanist Texts. This chapter begins with five authors who articulated beginning reverse sex and gender polarity arguments. These authors drew upon Scripture, philosophy, literature, history, and personal experience to defend the claim that women are by nature superior to men. The second part of the chapter turns to popular culture to describe satires about women, masculinity, and femininity. One set of satires occurred in the context of Lutheran Europe, and another in the context of Anglican England. These satires contain many linguistic plays on words that directly relate to sex and gender identity.

Chapter 3: Gender Identity and the Copernican Revolution in Macrocosm and Microcosm. Two major scientific discoveries deeply influenced historical developments in the concept of woman. The first discovery, popularly known as the Copernican revolution, overturned Aristotelian cosmology through the scientific use of the telescope in studying the macrocosm. It influenced the valuation of father sun and mother earth in cosmic theories of generation. In the second scientific discovery, the use of the microscope to study the microcosm of the female body affirmed the existence of fertile female seed. The Aristotelian theory that had claimed specifically that the female contributed no seed or infertile seed dominated thinking about traditional sex and general identity as a kind of sex polarity ideology for nearly two thousand years. It contained significant elements devaluing the female as a defective male. In this chapter some biases associated with traditional Aristotelian thought are shown to have continued as a displaced kind of sex ideology at the same time that Aristotle’s specific theories were radically overturned by advances in scientific