Church's View Of Women

[Paddington]

This is really sexist stuff here. What and how and why? I don't know what to ask exactly. But does the Church have some good apologetics for the issues raised in this article? The website is listed. This is only a middle section of the article that I pasted. Tertullian and Luther are mentioned. But...so are Augustine, Chyrsostom, Aquinas.

[mod]Anti-Christian site - L_D[/mod]

The Church Father Tertullian tells us “the woman should wear a simple dress, be mournful and full of repentance to suffer for her inheritance from Eve, the shame of being the one who committed the original sin and the guilt of being the cause of mankind’s condemnation.” According to the apocrypha Egyptian gospel, Jesus said, “I have come to abolish the deeds of women” (Edwien). It is reasonable to interpret this as referring to “Original sin”, that is female sexuality, procreation and childbirth. This is also in accordance with the bizarre Christian celibacy ideal. Women were a constant threat and challenge to the male priests and monks pledge of celibacy and chastity. The pious Francis of Assisi f.ex. warns his fellow Franciscan brothers against having anything to do with women at all, even to talk to them.

Of lesser value
The Church Fathers St. Augustine, Ambrosius and John Chrysostomos (Gold-mouth) all had the opinion that woman was an inferior creature of lesser value than men. She was not created in Gods image (because God is a man), and her main purpose was to serve and obey the man. The church fathers argued that the very caption “woman” or “female” (femina in latin) was in itself kind of obvious linguistic proof that women were inferior to men. They argued that the word “femina” consisted of the two words fe = fides (faith) and minus (less), thus “femina” meant “of lesser faith”. Christianity’s “great thinker” Thomas Aquinas also saw women as both bodily and spiritually inferior to men. He meant that women in reality were “failed” men. This alleged holy cerebral genius was convinced that girls were the result of poor semen quality or a faulty uterus. He wondered if the reason for the birth of girls could be the damp winds from the south, which besides causing rain also caused babies with an extra high water content (!), - girls (Deschner 1987). Martin Luther, who in fact contributed to abolishing celibacy, also saw women as inferior, woman were only “half a child” or a “magnificent animal” in his view (Ibid).

Are women human?
At the church council in Mâcon towards the end of the sixth century, a bishop asked the question if women were to be considered as human beings (or more precisely: belonging to the species “homo” [sapiens]). The bishop answered this very intelligent question himself with a firm No! The majority of the council however, agreed upon that according to the Bible, women, in spite of all their faults and shortcomings, had to be considered as a member of the human species. Some of the delegates insisted however that the female gender only is of this earthly world, and that after Judgement Day all women will be transformed to genderless beings.
One realises that the cognitive abilities of the prominent delegates of the Christian Church in the first centuries left something to be desired. Even a Catholic has to admit, “none of the official Roman bishops in the second and third century could be considered as real theologians” (A. Erhard in Deschner 1987).


Paddington

[Aloysius]

So they pick a couple random quotes from a few of the fathers and then a particular local council... and have proven what? that some people in the past had sexist opinions? ALERT THE MEDIA!!!

The entire paragraph mentioning Augustine, Aquinas, et al. makes wild claims and accusations without even so much as a quote such that one could find context. These were most definitely statements taken out of context.

Church teaching has always existed that women were of equal human dignity but ought to have a different role than men in society. The Church raised in high honors the greatest of all humanity (except Christ, who doesn't count as much cause He was also Divine): Mary. Women have had great roles to play; Teresa of the Child Jesus even being raised to the position of Doctor of the Church. Pockets of sexist times in history have come up, sure, but picking random local councils and such from obscure places proves nothing. Let them give us a quote in its context which shows Aquinas being sexist... and, sure, it may sound sexist by today's androgenous society; but I have a feeling it won't compromise Church doctrine that even existed at that time that women were equal in human dignity.

Many even try to call St. Paul sexist; his words are merely misunderstood by our androgenous society.

[Paddington]

'As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active force in the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex; while the production of women comes from a defect in the active force or from some material indisposition, or even from some external influence." (Summa Theologica IV, QXCII art 1,2)


Here is a quote from Aquinas. What kind of context could help that?

Another one attributed to Aquinas is..
"Good order would have been wanting in the human family if some were not governed by others wiser than themselves. So by such a kind of subjection woman is naturally subject to man, because in men the discretion of reason predominates."

[Aloysius]

Oh, my dear friend, never let it astound you the depths to which some go to mislead in attacking great Christian men of old... even to the extent of leaving out one sentence which makes their view sound much more logical.

This was Aquinas' idea of the physical nature of man and women; he inherited it from Aristotle... but in the very next sentence he affirms what I said: that women are equal in human dignity

[quote]Objection 1. It would seem that the woman should not have been made in the first production of things. For the Philosopher says (De Gener. ii, 3), that "the female is a misbegotten male." But nothing misbegotten or defective should have been in the first production of things. Therefore woman should not have been made at that first production.[/quote]

[quote]Reply to Objection 1. As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active force in the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex; while the production of woman comes from defect in the active force or from some material indisposition, or even from some external influence; such as that of a south wind, which is moist, as the Philosopher observes (De Gener. Animal. iv, 2).[b] On the other hand, as regards human nature in general, woman is not misbegotten, but is included in nature's intention as directed to the work of generation. Now the general intention of nature depends on God, Who is the universal Author of nature. Therefore, in producing nature, God formed not only the male but also the female.[/b][/quote]

Aquinas played the part of reconciling Aristotle, previously thought to be the Ancient Greek Philosopher only compatible with Islam, to Christianity. The portion of the quote you provided shows his fidelity to Aristotle: he says "yes, Aristotle is correct, but on the other hand as regards human nature and dignity the woman is perfectly part of human nature in God's plan". Whereas Aristotle makes woman merely a defective man; Aquinas does not question Aristotle's understanding but adds the Christian perspective that woman is not defective in nature, because nothing is defective in nature; that woman is perfectly part of God's plan. reading the whole section, it becomes clear that Aquinas's intention here is to life the view of women up as equal in humanity with equal importance in God's plan

[url="http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1092.htm"]http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1092.htm[/url]

Your second quote speaks of the different roles I spoke of before. There are different roles to be played in the dance between the sexes; man is made to lead the dance and woman to follow (but, think of it like a dance, the role of following in a dance actually has quite a bit of power towards where the dance goes). Think of all explanations of St. Paul's direction that women be subject to their husbands in this light; for the man is called to love the wife to the point of self-sacrifice for the sake of her and her nature.

"the discretion of reason predominates" does not necessarily give men the larger intellect; he is speaking of a role, as in the role of the leader of a dance. the leader of the dance has a certain discretion over where it goes; this does not mean that the follower has no idea about the dance. Likewise, the man may have a discretionary role in the exercise of reason; but that does not mean the woman does not also possess or exercise reason. nuns were well educated in this time just as much as monks and priests... Aquinas does not represent an attitude here that women are inferior in reason but rather than women ought to play a distinct role in the human drama.

If I give Aquinas too much the benefit of the doubt, as I may do, it is only to counteract those who would give him no such benefit but rather assume he, and all the other dead Christian white males, have ruined society. All men are in some way tainted by the follies of their age and as such I cannot say Aquinas did not have some views or interpretations of the above things which may indeed be sexist; he may have held that women were not as smart as men et cetera et cetera... only because at the time no woman's vocation led her to exemplify her intellectual ability. But any such view seems clearly tempered by the concept that they are equally human in dignity, especially because he argues here to the shigrin of his hero Aristotle that women are not defective in nature's designs but are rather intregal in them.

[Laudate_Dominum]

[quote name='Paddington' post='1185211' date='Feb 5 2007, 07:03 AM']
'As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active force in the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex; while the production of women comes from a defect in the active force or from some material indisposition, or even from some external influence." (Summa Theologica IV, QXCII art 1,2)
Here is a quote from Aquinas. What kind of context could help that?

Another one attributed to Aquinas is..
"Good order would have been wanting in the human family if some were not governed by others wiser than themselves. So by such a kind of subjection woman is naturally subject to man, because in men the discretion of reason predominates."
[/quote]
The first quote is attributed to Q. XCII? What about the second quote?

I'm familiar with the Thomas quotes as I wrote a little something about this very thing a while back: [url="http://www.phatmass.com/phorum/index.php?showtopic=46237"]http://www.phatmass.com/phorum/index.php?showtopic=46237[/url]

This thing includes links to more comprehensive articles as well as references to St. Thomas.

[LouisvilleFan]

All I know about this is, for one, we are completely detached from the Roman culture that Tertullian and Augustine lived in and we can't take something they said and just copy-and-paste into 2007. Never mind the fact that they were sinners. You have to die to become a saint.

Secondly, God created Eve as Adam's "helpmate." I know of one other fairly important character in the Old Testament who is also called "my help" on countless occassions, especially in the Psalms. So if anyone wants to disrespect women, I take they also wish to disrespect their Creator.

[Paddington]

[quote name='Laudate_Dominum' post='1185286' date='Feb 5 2007, 01:10 PM']
The first quote is attributed to Q. XCII? What about the second quote?
[/quote]

I'm sorry, but I don't know. It was a quick Google-job. I would've put the quote's origin if it were ther.



A quick question about the Summa.

Things that are included in "Reply to Objection" are all Aquinas' real thoughts?

[Mateo el Feo]

[quote name='Paddington' post='1186129' date='Feb 6 2007, 02:02 AM']A quick question about the Summa.

Things that are included in "Reply to Objection" are all Aquinas' real thoughts?[/quote]I guess you could say that. In each question, he attempts to present the most convincing objections to each question. Then, he responds to each objection.

For example, one of the first questions is: [url="http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1002.htm#3"]Does God Exist? (link)[/url]

The objections are in the negative (e.g. "It seems that God does not exist..."). As you can guess, St. Thomas disagrees with this objection, and soon replies that God does exist!

[Laudate_Dominum]

[quote name='Paddington' post='1186129' date='Feb 6 2007, 02:02 AM']
I'm sorry, but I don't know. It was a quick Google-job. I would've put the quote's origin if it were ther.
A quick question about the Summa.

Things that are included in "Reply to Objection" are all Aquinas' real thoughts?
[/quote]
np, I thought maybe that was how the article had it. Back when I read a bunch of radical feminist articles on the subject I found that the references were often false or simply lacking. Fortunately in this case the references at the end of my old tract contain the location of that first quote.

[Aloysius]

Are you looking for the first quote? I posted it along with a link to the newadvent summa where it was contained in context... I didn't understand the citation either so it took me forever to find it.

[Laudate_Dominum]

[quote name='Aloysius' post='1186447' date='Feb 6 2007, 04:20 PM']
Are you looking for the first quote? I posted it along with a link to the newadvent summa where it was contained in context... I didn't understand the citation either so it took me forever to find it.
[/quote]
The references I gave in my little article thing were as follows (oh, and thing you linked is included):

In 2 Sent., 20, 2, 1, ad 1;
In 4 Sent., 44, 1, 3c, ad 3;
Summa Theologiae, 1, 92, 1, ad 1;
Summa Theologiae, 1, 99, 2, ad 1;
De Veritate, 5, 9, ad 9;
Summa Contra Gentiles, 3, 94, n.10.

If anyone knows of any other places where Thomas says something about the sexes, or women in particular I'd love to have the reference.

I feel the need to reproduce three of the links given at the end of my tract thing because they're really quite good.

Short and sweet:
[url="http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9811/nolan.html"]http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9811/nolan.html[/url]

The background:
[url="http://talesuntold.com/working/ArFt1FinlTahoma.htm"]http://talesuntold.com/working/ArFt1FinlTahoma.htm[/url]

A pretty thorough analysis:
[url="http://www.catholicculture.org/docs/doc_view.cfm?recnum=2793"]http://www.catholicculture.org/docs/doc_view.cfm?recnum=2793[/url]

[Laudate_Dominum]

I think anyone who takes the time to read the articles and things thus far presented will realize that the beef against St. Thomas is nothing more than an ignorant lie.

What about the other claims put forth in Paddington's post? I will first say that you can indeed find figures in the Church's past who by today's standards were no doubt sexist. By today's standards it is easy to find various forms and degrees of sexism throughout history, it is not something specific to the Church by any means and in fact it is in the history of the Church (in contrast with secular history) that one finds many singular affirmations of the dignity of woman and the fundamental ontological equality of the sexes. The Aquinas case even illustrates this since the problem with that lie can be described as the imposition of Aristotle's sexism onto Aquinas, but of course when one reads Aquinas himself it is clear that he states the equal dignity of the sexes as being made in the image and likeness of God.

So what about the other claims of Paddington's post? They will need to be examined one by one to determine if they are accurate or are perhaps slanders and lies.

The Council of Macon assertion is a well known piece of nonsense so I'll take on that claim next. Since this is a message board and long posts go unread, I will respond with a summary; and since I am not the best writer in the world I will in fact respond with a summary written by Michael Nolan (who is fairly well known).

[quote]The Myth of Soulless Women

Josh Billings remarked profoundly that "the trouble with people is not that they don't know but that they know so much as ain't so." There are those who know John Chrysostom said that "the image of God is not found in Woman." (Actually, he said that "the image of God is not found in Man or Woman.") There are those who know that Thomas Aquinas said that a woman is a defective male. (Actually, he explicitly denies this no fewer than five times.) There are those who know that Aristotle said that a woman is a deficient male-a description based on an appalling mistranslation.

And there are those who know that an early council of bishops, held at Macon in Burgundy, France in a.d. 585 decreed that women do not have a soul. The bishops of course decreed no such thing, for if women do not have a soul how could they be baptized, how receive the Eucharist, how be venerated as martyrs in heaven? Yet it may be worthwhile to look at the story of this alleged decree, for one can see a myth in the making.

The story begins, innocently enough, in the late sixteenth century. A young scholar, Valentius Acidalius, was working as a teacher in Silesia, and, like many young scholars, he was short of money. He thought to turn an honest penny by publishing a "diverting" pamphlet. In Latin the word homo, like the word man in English, primarily means "a human being, male or female, young or old," but has the secondary meaning of "adult male." Valentius thought it would be fun to use this ambiguity to "show" that in the Bible only adult males have souls. If he thought the pamphlet would amuse, he was grievously wrong. Simon Geddicus, a Lutheran scholar, launched a mighty counter-pamphlet entitled A Defense of the Female Sex, in which he proposed "manfully" (he actually uses the word viriliter) to "destroy each and every one of the arguments put forward by Valentius," who, the reader will learn with regret or satisfaction as the case may be, took a seizure and died.

The pamphlet, however, often bound with the refutation by Simon Geddicus, survived, and it appears that it was published at Lyons in France in 1647. It was now in Italian, and was entitled Women do not have a soul and do not belong to the human race, as is shown by many passages of Holy Scripture. One gathers from a commentator that "the ladies of Italy took this system very differently. Some were vexed to have no souls. Others were pretty indifferent about the matter, and looking on themselves as mere machines, hoped to set their springs so well agoing as to make the men stark mad." Not all the ladies were silent, and the splendidly named Archangela Tarabotti wrote A Defense of Women. One way or another, the offending book caught the attention of Pope Innocent X, who put it on the Index of Prohibited Books (Decree of June 18, 1651). So much for the allegation that the Church holds that women do not have souls.

But the suggestion that women do not have souls was obviously in the air. It apparently came to the ears of Johannes Leyser, a Lutheran pastor from the region of Frankfurt in Germany, for he took up the idea and then sought confirmation for it in the doings of the Council of Macon, a small council of some forty-three bishops held in Burgundy in the year 585. Leyser had become a chaplain in the Danish army. The excitements, and no doubt opportunities, of military life seem to have sharpened his zest for feminine variety, for in 1676 he published a volume called The Triumph of Polygamy, in which he proclaimed the merits of a plurality of wives. Seeking support for his view that women are inferior, he decided to misquote the decrees of the Council of Macon. Leyser wrote: "Among the holy fathers [at the Council] there was one who insisted that women cannot, and should not, be called 'human beings' (homines). The matter was thought so important that it was discussed publicly and in the fear of God. Finally, after many arguments on this question, [the bishops] concluded that women are human after all."

Now this is wholly untrue. The acts of the Council of Macon contain no such discussion. They contain neither the word "woman" nor the word "soul." What Leyser did was to misinterpret a story told in The History of the Franks by St. Gregory of Tours. Gregory was bishop of that city in the sixth century and wrote a splendid history of the region. At one point he tells of a council that may, or may not, have been the Council of Macon. Gregory writes:

There came forward at this Council a certain bishop who maintained that woman could not be included under the term "man." However, he accepted the reasoning of the other bishops and did not press his case for the holy book of the Old Testament tells us that in the beginning, when God created man, "Male and female he created them and called their name Adam," which means earthly man; even so, he called the woman Eve, yet of both he used the word "man."

So what the bishops discussed was the meaning of a word, not the substantial issue of whether women have souls.

Leyser was inventing stories. His untruths were taken up by Pierre Bayle, a Dutch Calvinist with a marked distaste for the Catholicism to which he had once adhered. Bayle brought the matter further by writing in his Dictionnaire: "What I think yet more strange is to find that in a Council it has been gravely proposed as a question whether women were human creatures, and that it was determined affirmatively [only] after a long debate." Early in the nineteenth century a certain M. Aime-Martin wrote a touching book on The Education of Mothers in which he recorded sorrowfully that "people had gone so far as to doubt the existence of their souls." Politicians, as is their way, saw an opportunity, and the French National Assembly, no less, deplored the Church's insult to women. Later still the myth appeared in English in a journal titled John Bull, published by Horatio Bottomley, a fraudster Member of the British Parliament who would soon end in jail.

The myth was by now securely established, and will no doubt be retailed as confidently in the future as it has been in the past. If the first casualty of war is the unwelcome truth, the first weapon of the discontented is the welcome lie.[/quote]

I have a .pdf document which contains a thorough examination of this myth (the myth of the council of macon) if anyone is interested in references, quotes, etc..

Actually here's Nolan's full treatment as well: [url="http://www.churchinhistory.org/pages/booklets/women-souls-1.htm"]http://www.churchinhistory.org/pages/bookl...men-souls-1.htm[/url]

[Aloysius]

[Paddington]

Thanks for replying, everybody.

It took me a while to see how Aquinas was not saying "yea, they're lesser. But, that doesn't mean God made them for no reason."