Feminine role-models

“4) The Catholic Church and Orthodox Church have models of femininity that are vastly superior to those endorsed by Evangelicals; and they are able thus to commend these to women for their emulation with the net result that if they were so to be emulated by the women in question, then these women will turn out to be holier and more feminine than the women who emulate other models.

5) The Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church uphold the fundamental intution that Christ would not have wanted His mother to ever surrender her virginity; and this because of the fundamental purpose that her virginity had been designed to serve. (I know that Jason and Steve will accuse me of begging the question at this point, but I can’t help myself but believe that Christ would have been unwilling to allow his mother to surrender her virginity). If Mary had surrendered her virginity, then virgins and mothers would have had to cultivate their feminity by way of their emulation of feminine role-models that in the nature of the case cannot have been commensurable with each other (in certain relevant senses); and this may have caused the one group to feel superior (in the sense of their feeling that they would able to be more feminine) than the other group, and this would consequently have made both groups falsely believe that the feminine virtues of motherhood and virginity were mutually opposed to each other (in their purest respective and mutually exclusive expressions), and thus that there could not be a pure expression of femininity which would be able to embody perfectly both sets of virtues. The Orthodox Church and Catholic Church teach that Christ did not want His mother to cease to be a virgin and thus presumably did not want to leave Christian women (virgins and wives and mothers alike) bereft of such a perfect instantiation of both sets of feminine virtues, who could serve as their common role-model. This belief shows forth the magnanimity of Christ better than the contrary belief, specifically by way of showing forth Christ’s provision for women, in the matter of defining for them what a perfect femininity should amount to. St Ambrose appears to have shared similar sentiments to those which I have expressed on this score.”

http://catholica.pontifications.net/?p=1482

i) The most fundamental error here lies in the way in which Ben and another Catholics (and Orthodox) educe their theology out of an a priori idea rather than a historical event.

Protestants take historical revelation as their point of departure.

ii) With all due respect, the kind of argument that Ben is mounting here is no better than those apocryphal infancy gospels about how Jesus would change his playmates into animals and back again, just because he could.

We have passed out of history and entered into the realm of inspirational fiction.

Even if Mary were a perpetual virgin, we have not a single syllable from Jesus on that particular subject. What we have, instead, is Ben’s “fundamental intuition” stuffing words in the mouth of Christ, as if he had a direct dominical quotation to authorize this view.

This is nothing short of make-believe.

iii) It isn’t merely that Evangelicalism has a different model of femininity. Evangelicalism doesn’t have the same kind of modeling process.

Since Evangelicalism has no cult of the saints, it has no formal role-models, period.

What we have, rather, is the Bible, which is, among other things, a record of the faithful.

iv) There is also an unspoken assumption here according to which women need direct role-models in the same way that men need direct role-models. Just as men need other men to look up to, women need another women to look up to.

Now, Rosemary Reuter would agree, but I do not.

For there is a certain asymmetry in sexual role-models. The woman is to the man as the church is to the Christ.

Our sexual identity is relational, and a Christian woman defines her own role primarily in relation to Christ, as the archetypal husband, rather than in relation to an archetypal mother.

v) The virgin birth is sui generis, so there’s no direct parallel, but as long as Ben is attempting to mount an argument from analogy, for exemplary purposes, I’d just point out that as far as intuition is concerned, a son does not allow or disallow his mother to have a normal family life. If, say, his mother is a widow, and wants to remarry, it’s none of his business whether she takes another husband. That’s her decision, not his. A son who’s that fixated on his mother’s sex life is a son who lacks the emotional emancipation and sexual maturity to transfer his masculine affection from his mother to a wife of his own.

vi) Let’s also keep in mind that, as Ben well knows, the perpetual virginity of Mary is a very specific dogma. It’s not merely that Christ was conceived without any male contribution—a fact attested in Scripture and affirmed by all Evangelicals.

It is not merely that, after giving birth to Christ, his mother never entered into normal relations with a man—a dogma with no clear revelatory warrant.

Rather, it’s the additional and highly esoteric claim that even in process of giving birth to Jesus, the Christchild did not open the womb, or pass through the birth canal, or rupture the hymen.

Instead, he was directly transported out of the womb, Star Trek style.

vii) What we end up with is a sort of freak mutant hybrid or “Docetic” Mariology in which Mary is true virgin, but not true woman. Fully virgin, but less than fully maternal, and not in any ordinary sense a wife to her husband.

I don’t see that a Docetic or monophysitic Mary, who only “appears” to be a wife and mother, does greater justice to the mother of our Lord than the Evangelical conception of Mary as a real woman with a real family life.

viii) Finally, devout Catholics have a way of talking themselves into quite unnatural views of human sexuality.

They pretend to think and feel in ways with which no normal man can honestly identify. And since Catholic men are normal men, this affectation fosters a terribly ethereal and atrophied piety, devoid of spontaneous conviction or concrete practicality. It’s not something you can live. It can only exist by an act of the will through the abstract suspension of disbelief. This bifurcated spirituality will revert to a state of nature under the slightest provocation.