I love this because it puts into words an intuition I’ve had for a while about, as was said, dividing the virtues into pink versus blue.
I’m interested in why fractional complementarianism is so attractive to many? It certainly seems to be on the rise in some segments of Christendom - perhaps as a reaction against the extreme flattening of sexual differences in the broader culture?
Whatever its cause, it also seems just as disembodying as what it’s reacting against (and the two feed each other, if that makes sense.)
I think fractional complimentary is trying to respond to a real truth, we are made to live in relation with others, and the bond across the sexes is an especially important relation.
But fractional complimentary is not an accurate portrait of that coming together.
Have you read C. S. Lewis’ essay Priestesses in the Church (I expect you have); it being written in 1948 by a man not thought by many to be adequately sympathetic to women, the essay speaks to complementarity quite well. My view of Lewis is that his female characters (Especially in ‘Till We Have Faces) are typically strong and important…
Makes sense. But do you also think something similar is driving the opposite, flattening approach, at least in part? It is perhaps reacting to excessive fractioning while also trying respond to the real truth that fractioning ironically flattens, if that makes sense? Of course, this is referring to the best aims of the flattening approach.
This is a great question. When we feel uprooted and adrift, it's easy to fall into a regimented, lifeless, or fractional system, because we're looking for something solid to hold on to.
My thought on why it is that we struggle with being non-reductionistic in our conception of what it means to be masculine and feminine is that it seems rooted in at least two things: (1) our increasing distance from ordinary community and from the ordinary cycles of life and death, around which a community would have specific rituals and traditions (one example is cooking: cooking within a particular food tradition rather than according to whatever a placeless expert says is both more grounding and freeing, and most likely healthier too), and (2) our lack of a symbolic/poetic imagination. We have a really hard time with metaphor and symbol nowadays, such that when we see something amiss—such as the erasure of traditions and differences of any kind—when we try to rectify it, it's easy to replace the lost thing with a kind of hardened and actually imprecise understanding, which can lead to absurd notions, such as fortitude only being a masculine virtue.
Maybe it's like trying to replace a parking lot with a thriving natural ecosystem by installing a factory farm.... or to choreograph a dance that is really a parody of a march.
And I suspect these two strands are intimately related! Perhaps one could say we need both propositional and poetic truth (from stories and images), and they are not at odds.
Chesterton notes that humanity needs both myth and philosophy, and only in Christianity do they best come together. Otherwise. the two needs of human psychology never met in human history. Myth became more entangled in nature worship that paradoxically moved into worshipping the unnatural (especially w.r.t. sex), and philosophy became less and less real.
I think one of the things that makes fractional complementarianism attractive is laziness. It’s easier to believe in stereotypes, even when they put oneself at a disadvantage, than it is to do the hard work of self-knowledge and knowledge of the other person in a marriage (or in any relationship). It seems to me that the happiest marriages and other relationships are relationships where both people know themselves and each other well and are able to use their individual talents and virtues to help the relationship flourish, and where both people are able to perform the same virtues in different ways. Again, that’s hard work, but it’s worth it, and better than the alternative.
I think people just like simple stories, whether "gender is a total social construct and your identity is entirely self-willed" or "the virtues to which you are called are a deterministic result of your gender, no complicated discernment or uncomfortable stretching necessary."
This is occasioned by me being deep in studying for a final for ecclesiology, but integral complementarity vs fractional complementarity seems to better communicate the distinction of clergy and laity within the Church.
It’s not like priests and laity are each part of a whole Christian. Rather each has a full call to holiness but they complement one another.
Does this make sense to anyone else? Does anyone know of someone who has already discussed this?
Love this perspective so much! I’ve heard people flirt around the edges of this idea when we discuss discernment- “the same men who would make good priests would make good fathers” or similar sorts of statements! Ultimately ALL are called to ideals of sanctity, self gift, responsibility, and spiritual parenthood, these things are just expressed in different modes for priests vs laity!
This puts into words what I've been working toward: "Integral complementarity, in contrast, views men and women as whole human persons in their own right. The full range of human traits and virtues is open to cultivation by both sexes." THAT is what I've tried to do/try to do, in my parenting, in my outreach & support of others caring for boys, & in my advocacy for boys & men. I want my boys (all boys!) to have the freedom, space, & support to be full humans. (And I, of course, as a female, want that for females as well).
Sorry but this kind of discourse is dangerous. In secular contexts, it has been the source of a lot of harm for boys.
The misconception is that to be fully human one must necessarily be genderfluid. But ordinary boys and ordinary girls have,
respectively, a predominance of masculine and feminine traits. A full human, in the Christian anthropology, is a sexed human. We're not platonists or hindus: we don't think that men and women are defective parts of a whole metaphysical unity. And since we're not dualist, a full human is sexed in body, mind and soul.
I'm mostly concerned about boys, because those gender-theory based ideas tend implicitly to revile their masculine traits, while they are essential to their flourishing, when oriented to the good. The risk is for them to feel rejected and unloved. So, if you don't want to raise incels or misogynists, my advice is to acknowledge that your boys are male, and that their masculine traits are good, virtuous fruitful when cultivated in the right way.
Thankfully I have some distance these days from conservative-evangelical-complementarian-land where I witnessed a fair amount of made-up nonsense around these topics--similar but not identical to the discourse being referenced here--but my time in that theological environment has definitely shaped my current thoughts and questions about gender.
The line about "a human act played in a feminine key" reminded me of something I think Aimee Byrd said amid the Great Eternal-Subordination-of-the-Son Controversy of the 2010s. Something to the effect that it doesn't make sense to say she is not enacting femininity correctly, because when she does something *as a woman*, she necessarily does it in a feminine way. Hopefully I am representing her thought reasonably well.
Re: Favale's distinction: Even "first-order" differences may exist on some kind of a spectrum. To me, any vision of gender which doesn't have room for intersex people or people w/ various intersex conditions is incomplete b/c it fails at the edge cases. I object, for example, to a Bible reading plan with exactly the same list of daily readings, only printed in men's (nautical) and women's (floral) themes. There are enough significant differences between the sexes without inventing ones that aren't there, or exaggerating the second-order kind! We don't need to make people "pick a team" for things that are not essential. This has felt especially pertinent to me as a woman who falls into the stereotypically male "side" of some things like logical vs emotional thinking.
I don’t think that all of my acts are feminine acts by virtue of being done by a woman. There is no necessity that virtues have to play out “in a different key” in response to the body of the person doing it. We should be wary of going from a descriptive “men and women sometimes tend to enact virtues in observably different ways” to a totalising “virtues always become different when enacted by a man or a woman.” Sometimes what we are embodying is not “man” or “woman” but simply “neighbour” or “friend” or indeed “parent.” I’m all for recognising the importance of the specific relationship between a woman and the child she has birthed, but even then there are parental acts that need not take on a sexed character.
I think Sr Hodder has inadvertently implied that something has gone wrong if a woman is, at any given moment, not enacting the feminine in some sense. No doubt it is comforting, given that assumption, to hold that this has always already been achieved, but it actually needn’t always be necessary in the first place.
(Not Catholic, by the way. Agnostic existentialist who believes in Something! And no doubt this affects my position. I’m wary in general of attempts to discern Meaning with a capital M, whether of sex differences or anything else. This is not because I believe such Meaning doesn’t exist but because I think it possible that it does—and that we’re much worse at discerning it than we sometimes think. Whatever it is that men and women are “for,” it must be something at least as complex as God. Better to be open to possibility than attached to a specific narrative of how it ought to go.)
Your last paragraph definitely resonates, though I am coming from a different theological/philosophical perspective. I am sympathetic to *the idea of* teleological arguments, but I agree that we are often pretty bad at discerning actual teleology or design. And this can have disastrous consequences when we say that God, or some god, is actually the author of our opinion. Tricky stuff.
Yes, I think Sr Hodder's claim is true. Since my world is mostly shaped by the study of early Christian theology, I'll say it reminds me of the post-Chalcedonian Christological debates. Both sides (miaphysites and Chalcedonians) agreed that priority must be given to the concrete over the abstract (actually, this goes back to Cyril of Alexandria's fight against Nestorius, and before that to the Cappadocian defense of the Trinity). Maybe that's a stretch, but I see a similarity in the sense of prioritizing the concrete.
As for Favale's distinction, I think it's a useful heuristic, but I do wonder if there is a risk in isolating traits and comparing them one by one. I'd be curious what it would look like to combine them and see if there is some identifiable "emergent property" that arises that is greater than the sum of their parts. I think it perhaps goes against Hodder's position in that it's abstracted from the concrete (which is, by nature of its concreteness, going to exist within a combination of such traits).
I just discovered your new book via the Law & Liberty review. I'm thankful for a human per se approach, and for more complexity around equality and difference when it comes to gender. Re: "integral complementarity," it is absolutely necessary for Christian soteriology. In Christ, God becomes *human* (and coincidentally male), and his full humanity (per se) is necessary for salvation.
An interesting variant on integral complementarity might be Timothy Patitsas's "Marriage of Priests: An Orthodox Theology of Gender" (available at his academia.edu page https://www.academia.edu/12035379/The_Marriage_of_Priests_Towards_an_Orthodox_Christian_Theology_of_Gender), where difference has more to do with the order of acquisition of the same set of, in this case, christological roles (rather than virtues): priest, prophet, king. I read this paper a decade ago, and I'm still not sure what I think about the idea.
I haven't read your book yet, but I'm already fully persuaded that interdependence is an obvious characteristic of all humans, as such. I would hesitate to say: men are "independent"/individualistic, while women are "dependent"/communal, or some such. (Not saying this is what you claim.)
In any case, an important corollary of interdependency could be that all humans have identities or "selves" that extend well beyond body limits. There are again deep theological implications. Strongly sacrificial theologies, for example, will misfire because they assume I sacrifice my "self" for you -- when in the case of a mother, for example, her child is already part of her extended sense of "self." A child is not an "other" to sacrifice for. Acknowledging strong interdependence would reduce atomistic assumptions about self-sacrifice as a basic theological precept, which to my mind is a good thing. (It does create a bit of havoc for some theological currents -- which again, I'd take as a good thing.)
Just to clarify, I'm Eastern Orthodox, not Roman Catholic.
The idea that an act becomes masculine or feminine based on who's carrying out the act rings true to me as a stay at home dad. As my wife notes, there is something masculine about how I care for our kids and take care of our house, just like there's something feminine in how she does her work. It's hard to tease out all the differences, and how the work I do looks different by virtue of me being a father and a husband, but there is a difference there, certainly.
I have always intuitively felt this too! Parenting and household matters are obvious examples. A funny one that comes to mind is when Harry styles wore that dress on vogue and everyone went crazy and called it feminine and at the time it just felt so funny to me because it felt SO masculine, like he was somehow wearing that dress the way a man wears a dress?? Not making any statements on the act itself here, just that it felt like an incredible example of “oh huh he’s wearing a dress masculinely. If I wore that dress it would not be that way. It is masculine simply because he’s a man doing that”
It rings true to me as well. It makes sense that men and women both can and do carry out the same virtues in different “keys,” and it also makes sense to me that each individual person carries out universal human virtues in different keys (e.g. 2 different women can carry out the same virtue in unique feminine keys and 2 different men can carry out the same virtue in unique masculine keys).
Reflecting on this a little, one thing I often get complimented on is how calm and unfazed I am with my children, and how well my kids respond to that. (It's something that I don't see too much myself, I get frustrated plenty, but fish don't see the water they're in, so I guess there's something there.) Being calm isn't exclusively or even stereotypically a masculine trait, but I know that for me it's something that comes out of being a father, and others see it and respond to it.
I think fractional complementarity has become popular because human experience shows the inadequacy of the completely neutered versions of masculinity and femininity that have been culturally approved and that are (oddly and contradictorily, to be sure) necessary for gender ideology. It is an oversimplified rejection of an idea that has failed to account for human experience. But it itself threatens to make the same mistake.
Kudos to those helping us all articulate a more coherent (and more true to life) account of masculinity and femininity.
My problem is that the Catholic system Favale describes makes ir clear that women are in every single aspect inferior to males. Men image GOD and JESUS. Women, at best, image only humans as Mary or the church. Why can’t you see how inferior this makes women?
So men get more of the Imago Dei than women because men can be priests but women never can. Women are therefore inferior to men in the Catholic worldview. Just admit it ànd give up the sophistry.
I think you are misunderstanding the Catholic Church’s teachings and writings on this. Both men and women are reflections of the image of God (not just men). There are many writings by Catholic thinkers that meditateon God’s life-giving-and-life-sustaining qualities, which are best reflected in women, and multiple excerpts from the bible where God’s relationship to his creation is likened to mother and child:
Isaiah 49:15: "Can a mother forget her nursing child? Can she have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, but I will not forget you." (Shows nurturing love).
Deuteronomy 32:18: Describes God as the one who "gave birth to you" and "nurtured you".
Hosea 11:3-4: God is depicted as teaching Ephraim to walk, taking them in His arms, and lifting them to His cheek, like a parent caring for a child.
Psalm 91:4: "He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge," similar to a bird protecting its young.
God chose to manifest himself as man within salvific history, but this shouldn't be mistaken for some sort of value judgement between men and women. Perhaps he chose to be incarnate as a man because post-Fall men can only be led by another man (which would speak to men’s need for particular support in working out their salvation, not an spiritual superiority).
Lastly, when relating to God, both men AND women are described in the feminine; because God is the active principal, and both men and women receive God’s grace and life. There is much much more nuance and rich theological writings on this, but I hope this informs your initial understanding helpfully.
Catholic doctrine expands on Aristole via St. Thomas (primarily), and enriches and elevates many of the truths that Aristotle identified in his works; this doesn't mean that everything Aristole asserts is confirmed and promulgated in Catholic thought. The baseline assumption that Active = good and passive = bad is already a flawed starting place. At a baseline, there is no moral weight to the qualities of "activity" and "passivity" when speaking about men and women; the Catholic Church doesn't assert that the "active principal" is more virtuous, more human, etc. All we need to do to refute this false worldly belief is to look at Jesus: he was "meek and mild, like a Lamb led to the slaughter". Pretty pasive if you ask me, and absolutely no one in the Catholic Church's teachings would claim Jesus is weak or dumb.
I understand that there is an overwhelming amount of negative ''War of the Sexes' talking points out there (many of which are viciously exacerbated by online 'Catholic' personalities), but I just want to assure you - who I hope is expressing you understanding in good faith - that these are NOT the formal views or teachings of the Catholic Church.
I genuinely am arguing in good faith. I am a Christian, in a main line Protestant congregation, and have always understood Jesus as beyond gender roles. My problem with Catholicism is that, in practice, having an exclusively male hierarchy means that whatever the church SAYS about the equality of women and men, it clearly doesn’t ACT like women are equal to men. I can’t understand why a woman would want to be part of a group that says by its practices that she’s too stupid to hold any position of authority .
I do not find this in any Bible-based understanding of people. For example, consider the very active (though feminine) ways that 7 different women were crucial to the survival and ministry of Moses. Not passive, not stupid, and absolutely courageous and clever in their bringing Moses to his role as leader.
Where have the overlapping bell curves of personality-traits-by-gender felt most germane to you?
In my professional experience as a biomedical scientist and physician, the overlapping bell curves of personality-traits is easily seen in the women and men found in healthcare and health science professions. And, in my experience, this overlapping is a very good thing!
@James J. Heaney @Dylan Campbell @Steven Umbrello @Eric Anderson @Donald Paul Maddox @J. A. Siemer @Ray Alex Williams @Jonathan Dunn @Brandon Ward 😎 @J. M. Terry @Thomas Salerno @Matthew Becklo check this out!
The idea that an act is feminine by virtue of being carried out by an embodied female human person does ring true to me. But it also seems to beg a further question: what does a human act in a feminine (or masculine) key look like? E.g., my wife and I discipline our children in feminine and masculine keys, I think. And we both find that very valuable, for each other and for the kids. But we, like you and Abigail and Srs. Prudence and Carino, don't want that to imply that one or the other of us has some kind of monopoly on a given virtue. So, if patience or courage or some other virtue is available in both feminine and masculine keys (which seems absolutely right to me), how might we describe patience in a feminine key vs. patience in a masculine key?
FWIW, I have found some data from evolutionary psychology helpful here. One key difference between men and women is our primary bonding hormones. And a brain on oxytocin is meaningfully different than a brain on vasopressin. It goes a long way, e.g., to explaining the radical differences I see in how my sons' baseball team bonds (teasing each other, roughhousing) compared to how my daughter's softball team bonds (making up cheers and chanting them together). But I worry that this could also be used to absolutize differences that are far from absolute.
“The act becomes fem/masc by nature of the actor” sounds appealing but not quite rich enough to me. The place I have pondered about masc/fem recently relates to our invitation to participate in giving of ourselves. Jesus sacrificed his body through death (and resurrection and ascension); Mary, through pregnancy, childbirth, nursing. But they both lived and died. The red martyrdom vs the white martyrdom - dying for Christ vs living for Christ - the difference to me today is which moment is more /obviously/ heroic. Continual renewal of purity of heart is painful, but usually invisible. Your literal heart ceasing to beat cannot be hidden. But rarely does one dare to die for Christ if one has not already lived for Christ; or, rather, to die in the body if not already in the will. Jesus lived, doing the Father’s will and not his own, his whole life, not just during his passion and death. If he hadn’t had that last bit, he would have died a white martyr; and plenty of women saints have died a red martyrdom (or died in childbirth). No definitive conclusions, more musings.
Fractional theories of complementarity might flow genealogically from Empedocles (c. 494–434 BC). He held that originally there were ὅλοφυεῖς τύποι (whole-natural types (B57-62, Diels-Kranz)). These wholes unfortunately broke apart, split by Zeus into complementary male and female beings (as Aristophanes recounts in Plato’s Symposium (189c–193e)). The split beings each contained a fraction of the original whole. They needed to recombine under the influence of Φιλότης (physical love) to regain their wholeness once again. Do you think these complementary theories can be traced that far back?
I think Empedocles is definitely one of the sources of complementarity theories, and one of the oldest documented sources, if not the absolute oldest source (there were probably older sources that either weren’t written down or didn’t survive).
On second reflection, this misrepresents Empedocles in one critical way: the philosopher of course, believed that love (Φιλότης or Κύπρις) was at work as a primal force from the beginning, but hadn’t yet worked its way completely through the developing φυσικά. Hedwig’s “The Origin of Love,” sees it as a modern performative sex-act, which hadn’t been done prior to Zeus‘s electric scissors (wonderfully depicted in the YouTube animation). Empedocles would’ve seen this as a new part of Φιλότης, but not its origin!
That’s an eye-opener! I have never seen “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” being somewhat shy about these things. I know it’s not popular to avoid these kind of shows, but I generally do. But it’s a great teaching tool for Empedocles, and the animation is good too. I’m grateful that you pointed this out!
Your book sounds very interesting. And I read the law liberty review which was quite good. But Christianity Today? I’m surprised they gave it a good review and selected it for a top yearly award… I downloaded it via a Kindle and I’ll read it as soon as possible, over winter break…
I love this because it puts into words an intuition I’ve had for a while about, as was said, dividing the virtues into pink versus blue.
I’m interested in why fractional complementarianism is so attractive to many? It certainly seems to be on the rise in some segments of Christendom - perhaps as a reaction against the extreme flattening of sexual differences in the broader culture?
Whatever its cause, it also seems just as disembodying as what it’s reacting against (and the two feed each other, if that makes sense.)
I think fractional complimentary is trying to respond to a real truth, we are made to live in relation with others, and the bond across the sexes is an especially important relation.
But fractional complimentary is not an accurate portrait of that coming together.
Have you read C. S. Lewis’ essay Priestesses in the Church (I expect you have); it being written in 1948 by a man not thought by many to be adequately sympathetic to women, the essay speaks to complementarity quite well. My view of Lewis is that his female characters (Especially in ‘Till We Have Faces) are typically strong and important…
Makes sense. But do you also think something similar is driving the opposite, flattening approach, at least in part? It is perhaps reacting to excessive fractioning while also trying respond to the real truth that fractioning ironically flattens, if that makes sense? Of course, this is referring to the best aims of the flattening approach.
This is a great question. When we feel uprooted and adrift, it's easy to fall into a regimented, lifeless, or fractional system, because we're looking for something solid to hold on to.
My thought on why it is that we struggle with being non-reductionistic in our conception of what it means to be masculine and feminine is that it seems rooted in at least two things: (1) our increasing distance from ordinary community and from the ordinary cycles of life and death, around which a community would have specific rituals and traditions (one example is cooking: cooking within a particular food tradition rather than according to whatever a placeless expert says is both more grounding and freeing, and most likely healthier too), and (2) our lack of a symbolic/poetic imagination. We have a really hard time with metaphor and symbol nowadays, such that when we see something amiss—such as the erasure of traditions and differences of any kind—when we try to rectify it, it's easy to replace the lost thing with a kind of hardened and actually imprecise understanding, which can lead to absurd notions, such as fortitude only being a masculine virtue.
Maybe it's like trying to replace a parking lot with a thriving natural ecosystem by installing a factory farm.... or to choreograph a dance that is really a parody of a march.
And I suspect these two strands are intimately related! Perhaps one could say we need both propositional and poetic truth (from stories and images), and they are not at odds.
Chesterton notes that humanity needs both myth and philosophy, and only in Christianity do they best come together. Otherwise. the two needs of human psychology never met in human history. Myth became more entangled in nature worship that paradoxically moved into worshipping the unnatural (especially w.r.t. sex), and philosophy became less and less real.
I think one of the things that makes fractional complementarianism attractive is laziness. It’s easier to believe in stereotypes, even when they put oneself at a disadvantage, than it is to do the hard work of self-knowledge and knowledge of the other person in a marriage (or in any relationship). It seems to me that the happiest marriages and other relationships are relationships where both people know themselves and each other well and are able to use their individual talents and virtues to help the relationship flourish, and where both people are able to perform the same virtues in different ways. Again, that’s hard work, but it’s worth it, and better than the alternative.
I think people just like simple stories, whether "gender is a total social construct and your identity is entirely self-willed" or "the virtues to which you are called are a deterministic result of your gender, no complicated discernment or uncomfortable stretching necessary."
Makes sense. We love our Ockham’s razors, don’t we? Simple categories or no categories, and certainly no uncertainty.
That is, can the fractioning extreme be just as anti-female as the flattening one?
Ha! Surely so, because of the alliteration! 🤣
This is occasioned by me being deep in studying for a final for ecclesiology, but integral complementarity vs fractional complementarity seems to better communicate the distinction of clergy and laity within the Church.
It’s not like priests and laity are each part of a whole Christian. Rather each has a full call to holiness but they complement one another.
Does this make sense to anyone else? Does anyone know of someone who has already discussed this?
You should email Abigail Favale
Thank you!
Love this perspective so much! I’ve heard people flirt around the edges of this idea when we discuss discernment- “the same men who would make good priests would make good fathers” or similar sorts of statements! Ultimately ALL are called to ideals of sanctity, self gift, responsibility, and spiritual parenthood, these things are just expressed in different modes for priests vs laity!
This puts into words what I've been working toward: "Integral complementarity, in contrast, views men and women as whole human persons in their own right. The full range of human traits and virtues is open to cultivation by both sexes." THAT is what I've tried to do/try to do, in my parenting, in my outreach & support of others caring for boys, & in my advocacy for boys & men. I want my boys (all boys!) to have the freedom, space, & support to be full humans. (And I, of course, as a female, want that for females as well).
Sorry but this kind of discourse is dangerous. In secular contexts, it has been the source of a lot of harm for boys.
The misconception is that to be fully human one must necessarily be genderfluid. But ordinary boys and ordinary girls have,
respectively, a predominance of masculine and feminine traits. A full human, in the Christian anthropology, is a sexed human. We're not platonists or hindus: we don't think that men and women are defective parts of a whole metaphysical unity. And since we're not dualist, a full human is sexed in body, mind and soul.
I'm mostly concerned about boys, because those gender-theory based ideas tend implicitly to revile their masculine traits, while they are essential to their flourishing, when oriented to the good. The risk is for them to feel rejected and unloved. So, if you don't want to raise incels or misogynists, my advice is to acknowledge that your boys are male, and that their masculine traits are good, virtuous fruitful when cultivated in the right way.
Thankfully I have some distance these days from conservative-evangelical-complementarian-land where I witnessed a fair amount of made-up nonsense around these topics--similar but not identical to the discourse being referenced here--but my time in that theological environment has definitely shaped my current thoughts and questions about gender.
The line about "a human act played in a feminine key" reminded me of something I think Aimee Byrd said amid the Great Eternal-Subordination-of-the-Son Controversy of the 2010s. Something to the effect that it doesn't make sense to say she is not enacting femininity correctly, because when she does something *as a woman*, she necessarily does it in a feminine way. Hopefully I am representing her thought reasonably well.
Re: Favale's distinction: Even "first-order" differences may exist on some kind of a spectrum. To me, any vision of gender which doesn't have room for intersex people or people w/ various intersex conditions is incomplete b/c it fails at the edge cases. I object, for example, to a Bible reading plan with exactly the same list of daily readings, only printed in men's (nautical) and women's (floral) themes. There are enough significant differences between the sexes without inventing ones that aren't there, or exaggerating the second-order kind! We don't need to make people "pick a team" for things that are not essential. This has felt especially pertinent to me as a woman who falls into the stereotypically male "side" of some things like logical vs emotional thinking.
I don’t think that all of my acts are feminine acts by virtue of being done by a woman. There is no necessity that virtues have to play out “in a different key” in response to the body of the person doing it. We should be wary of going from a descriptive “men and women sometimes tend to enact virtues in observably different ways” to a totalising “virtues always become different when enacted by a man or a woman.” Sometimes what we are embodying is not “man” or “woman” but simply “neighbour” or “friend” or indeed “parent.” I’m all for recognising the importance of the specific relationship between a woman and the child she has birthed, but even then there are parental acts that need not take on a sexed character.
I think Sr Hodder has inadvertently implied that something has gone wrong if a woman is, at any given moment, not enacting the feminine in some sense. No doubt it is comforting, given that assumption, to hold that this has always already been achieved, but it actually needn’t always be necessary in the first place.
(Not Catholic, by the way. Agnostic existentialist who believes in Something! And no doubt this affects my position. I’m wary in general of attempts to discern Meaning with a capital M, whether of sex differences or anything else. This is not because I believe such Meaning doesn’t exist but because I think it possible that it does—and that we’re much worse at discerning it than we sometimes think. Whatever it is that men and women are “for,” it must be something at least as complex as God. Better to be open to possibility than attached to a specific narrative of how it ought to go.)
Your last paragraph definitely resonates, though I am coming from a different theological/philosophical perspective. I am sympathetic to *the idea of* teleological arguments, but I agree that we are often pretty bad at discerning actual teleology or design. And this can have disastrous consequences when we say that God, or some god, is actually the author of our opinion. Tricky stuff.
Yes, I think Sr Hodder's claim is true. Since my world is mostly shaped by the study of early Christian theology, I'll say it reminds me of the post-Chalcedonian Christological debates. Both sides (miaphysites and Chalcedonians) agreed that priority must be given to the concrete over the abstract (actually, this goes back to Cyril of Alexandria's fight against Nestorius, and before that to the Cappadocian defense of the Trinity). Maybe that's a stretch, but I see a similarity in the sense of prioritizing the concrete.
As for Favale's distinction, I think it's a useful heuristic, but I do wonder if there is a risk in isolating traits and comparing them one by one. I'd be curious what it would look like to combine them and see if there is some identifiable "emergent property" that arises that is greater than the sum of their parts. I think it perhaps goes against Hodder's position in that it's abstracted from the concrete (which is, by nature of its concreteness, going to exist within a combination of such traits).
I just discovered your new book via the Law & Liberty review. I'm thankful for a human per se approach, and for more complexity around equality and difference when it comes to gender. Re: "integral complementarity," it is absolutely necessary for Christian soteriology. In Christ, God becomes *human* (and coincidentally male), and his full humanity (per se) is necessary for salvation.
An interesting variant on integral complementarity might be Timothy Patitsas's "Marriage of Priests: An Orthodox Theology of Gender" (available at his academia.edu page https://www.academia.edu/12035379/The_Marriage_of_Priests_Towards_an_Orthodox_Christian_Theology_of_Gender), where difference has more to do with the order of acquisition of the same set of, in this case, christological roles (rather than virtues): priest, prophet, king. I read this paper a decade ago, and I'm still not sure what I think about the idea.
I haven't read your book yet, but I'm already fully persuaded that interdependence is an obvious characteristic of all humans, as such. I would hesitate to say: men are "independent"/individualistic, while women are "dependent"/communal, or some such. (Not saying this is what you claim.)
In any case, an important corollary of interdependency could be that all humans have identities or "selves" that extend well beyond body limits. There are again deep theological implications. Strongly sacrificial theologies, for example, will misfire because they assume I sacrifice my "self" for you -- when in the case of a mother, for example, her child is already part of her extended sense of "self." A child is not an "other" to sacrifice for. Acknowledging strong interdependence would reduce atomistic assumptions about self-sacrifice as a basic theological precept, which to my mind is a good thing. (It does create a bit of havoc for some theological currents -- which again, I'd take as a good thing.)
Just to clarify, I'm Eastern Orthodox, not Roman Catholic.
The idea that an act becomes masculine or feminine based on who's carrying out the act rings true to me as a stay at home dad. As my wife notes, there is something masculine about how I care for our kids and take care of our house, just like there's something feminine in how she does her work. It's hard to tease out all the differences, and how the work I do looks different by virtue of me being a father and a husband, but there is a difference there, certainly.
I have always intuitively felt this too! Parenting and household matters are obvious examples. A funny one that comes to mind is when Harry styles wore that dress on vogue and everyone went crazy and called it feminine and at the time it just felt so funny to me because it felt SO masculine, like he was somehow wearing that dress the way a man wears a dress?? Not making any statements on the act itself here, just that it felt like an incredible example of “oh huh he’s wearing a dress masculinely. If I wore that dress it would not be that way. It is masculine simply because he’s a man doing that”
It rings true to me as well. It makes sense that men and women both can and do carry out the same virtues in different “keys,” and it also makes sense to me that each individual person carries out universal human virtues in different keys (e.g. 2 different women can carry out the same virtue in unique feminine keys and 2 different men can carry out the same virtue in unique masculine keys).
Keep it up, Bandit!
Reflecting on this a little, one thing I often get complimented on is how calm and unfazed I am with my children, and how well my kids respond to that. (It's something that I don't see too much myself, I get frustrated plenty, but fish don't see the water they're in, so I guess there's something there.) Being calm isn't exclusively or even stereotypically a masculine trait, but I know that for me it's something that comes out of being a father, and others see it and respond to it.
I think fractional complementarity has become popular because human experience shows the inadequacy of the completely neutered versions of masculinity and femininity that have been culturally approved and that are (oddly and contradictorily, to be sure) necessary for gender ideology. It is an oversimplified rejection of an idea that has failed to account for human experience. But it itself threatens to make the same mistake.
Kudos to those helping us all articulate a more coherent (and more true to life) account of masculinity and femininity.
I usually order e-books but today I ordered a hard copy of this book to be able to share it with my girlfriends! Can’t wait to read it.
My problem is that the Catholic system Favale describes makes ir clear that women are in every single aspect inferior to males. Men image GOD and JESUS. Women, at best, image only humans as Mary or the church. Why can’t you see how inferior this makes women?
Men and women both image God. "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them."
And men image Christ in a distinct and exclusive way in the priesthood, but they are also members of the Church, the bride, in relation to Christ.
So men get more of the Imago Dei than women because men can be priests but women never can. Women are therefore inferior to men in the Catholic worldview. Just admit it ànd give up the sophistry.
I think you are misunderstanding the Catholic Church’s teachings and writings on this. Both men and women are reflections of the image of God (not just men). There are many writings by Catholic thinkers that meditateon God’s life-giving-and-life-sustaining qualities, which are best reflected in women, and multiple excerpts from the bible where God’s relationship to his creation is likened to mother and child:
Isaiah 49:15: "Can a mother forget her nursing child? Can she have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, but I will not forget you." (Shows nurturing love).
Deuteronomy 32:18: Describes God as the one who "gave birth to you" and "nurtured you".
Hosea 11:3-4: God is depicted as teaching Ephraim to walk, taking them in His arms, and lifting them to His cheek, like a parent caring for a child.
Psalm 91:4: "He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge," similar to a bird protecting its young.
God chose to manifest himself as man within salvific history, but this shouldn't be mistaken for some sort of value judgement between men and women. Perhaps he chose to be incarnate as a man because post-Fall men can only be led by another man (which would speak to men’s need for particular support in working out their salvation, not an spiritual superiority).
Lastly, when relating to God, both men AND women are described in the feminine; because God is the active principal, and both men and women receive God’s grace and life. There is much much more nuance and rich theological writings on this, but I hope this informs your initial understanding helpfully.
So males are active ànd women are just dirt for males to work on. Making agency into sômething only males do definitely makes women inferior to men.
This is not the Catholic Church's understanding or teaching in any way. I'm sorry if this is your understanding or feeling!
Catholic doctrine follows Aristotle in stating that men are active ànd women are passive. Passive = weak ànd stupid. Can you dispute that?
Catholic doctrine expands on Aristole via St. Thomas (primarily), and enriches and elevates many of the truths that Aristotle identified in his works; this doesn't mean that everything Aristole asserts is confirmed and promulgated in Catholic thought. The baseline assumption that Active = good and passive = bad is already a flawed starting place. At a baseline, there is no moral weight to the qualities of "activity" and "passivity" when speaking about men and women; the Catholic Church doesn't assert that the "active principal" is more virtuous, more human, etc. All we need to do to refute this false worldly belief is to look at Jesus: he was "meek and mild, like a Lamb led to the slaughter". Pretty pasive if you ask me, and absolutely no one in the Catholic Church's teachings would claim Jesus is weak or dumb.
I understand that there is an overwhelming amount of negative ''War of the Sexes' talking points out there (many of which are viciously exacerbated by online 'Catholic' personalities), but I just want to assure you - who I hope is expressing you understanding in good faith - that these are NOT the formal views or teachings of the Catholic Church.
Also, the ancient/medieval “passive" (able to be moved/acted upon) is closer to the modern "receptive” than the modern “passive" (inactive).
I genuinely am arguing in good faith. I am a Christian, in a main line Protestant congregation, and have always understood Jesus as beyond gender roles. My problem with Catholicism is that, in practice, having an exclusively male hierarchy means that whatever the church SAYS about the equality of women and men, it clearly doesn’t ACT like women are equal to men. I can’t understand why a woman would want to be part of a group that says by its practices that she’s too stupid to hold any position of authority .
I do not find this in any Bible-based understanding of people. For example, consider the very active (though feminine) ways that 7 different women were crucial to the survival and ministry of Moses. Not passive, not stupid, and absolutely courageous and clever in their bringing Moses to his role as leader.
This is true, which gives the lie to everything Aquinas — and therefore the Catholic church — taught about women.
Where have the overlapping bell curves of personality-traits-by-gender felt most germane to you?
In my professional experience as a biomedical scientist and physician, the overlapping bell curves of personality-traits is easily seen in the women and men found in healthcare and health science professions. And, in my experience, this overlapping is a very good thing!
@James J. Heaney @Dylan Campbell @Steven Umbrello @Eric Anderson @Donald Paul Maddox @J. A. Siemer @Ray Alex Williams @Jonathan Dunn @Brandon Ward 😎 @J. M. Terry @Thomas Salerno @Matthew Becklo check this out!
The idea that an act is feminine by virtue of being carried out by an embodied female human person does ring true to me. But it also seems to beg a further question: what does a human act in a feminine (or masculine) key look like? E.g., my wife and I discipline our children in feminine and masculine keys, I think. And we both find that very valuable, for each other and for the kids. But we, like you and Abigail and Srs. Prudence and Carino, don't want that to imply that one or the other of us has some kind of monopoly on a given virtue. So, if patience or courage or some other virtue is available in both feminine and masculine keys (which seems absolutely right to me), how might we describe patience in a feminine key vs. patience in a masculine key?
FWIW, I have found some data from evolutionary psychology helpful here. One key difference between men and women is our primary bonding hormones. And a brain on oxytocin is meaningfully different than a brain on vasopressin. It goes a long way, e.g., to explaining the radical differences I see in how my sons' baseball team bonds (teasing each other, roughhousing) compared to how my daughter's softball team bonds (making up cheers and chanting them together). But I worry that this could also be used to absolutize differences that are far from absolute.
“The act becomes fem/masc by nature of the actor” sounds appealing but not quite rich enough to me. The place I have pondered about masc/fem recently relates to our invitation to participate in giving of ourselves. Jesus sacrificed his body through death (and resurrection and ascension); Mary, through pregnancy, childbirth, nursing. But they both lived and died. The red martyrdom vs the white martyrdom - dying for Christ vs living for Christ - the difference to me today is which moment is more /obviously/ heroic. Continual renewal of purity of heart is painful, but usually invisible. Your literal heart ceasing to beat cannot be hidden. But rarely does one dare to die for Christ if one has not already lived for Christ; or, rather, to die in the body if not already in the will. Jesus lived, doing the Father’s will and not his own, his whole life, not just during his passion and death. If he hadn’t had that last bit, he would have died a white martyr; and plenty of women saints have died a red martyrdom (or died in childbirth). No definitive conclusions, more musings.
Fractional theories of complementarity might flow genealogically from Empedocles (c. 494–434 BC). He held that originally there were ὅλοφυεῖς τύποι (whole-natural types (B57-62, Diels-Kranz)). These wholes unfortunately broke apart, split by Zeus into complementary male and female beings (as Aristophanes recounts in Plato’s Symposium (189c–193e)). The split beings each contained a fraction of the original whole. They needed to recombine under the influence of Φιλότης (physical love) to regain their wholeness once again. Do you think these complementary theories can be traced that far back?
I think Empedocles is definitely one of the sources of complementarity theories, and one of the oldest documented sources, if not the absolute oldest source (there were probably older sources that either weren’t written down or didn’t survive).
Best musical version of fractional complimentary remains “The Origin of Love”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HWW89yndhT0&list=RDHWW89yndhT0&start_radio=1&pp=ygUsdGhlIG9yaWdpbiBvZiBsb3ZlIGhlZHdpZyBhbmQgdGhlIGFuZ3J5IGluY2igBwE%3D
On second reflection, this misrepresents Empedocles in one critical way: the philosopher of course, believed that love (Φιλότης or Κύπρις) was at work as a primal force from the beginning, but hadn’t yet worked its way completely through the developing φυσικά. Hedwig’s “The Origin of Love,” sees it as a modern performative sex-act, which hadn’t been done prior to Zeus‘s electric scissors (wonderfully depicted in the YouTube animation). Empedocles would’ve seen this as a new part of Φιλότης, but not its origin!
That’s an eye-opener! I have never seen “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” being somewhat shy about these things. I know it’s not popular to avoid these kind of shows, but I generally do. But it’s a great teaching tool for Empedocles, and the animation is good too. I’m grateful that you pointed this out!
Yes, I think plenty of people who wouldn’t want to see the whole movie would like this number!
Your book sounds very interesting. And I read the law liberty review which was quite good. But Christianity Today? I’m surprised they gave it a good review and selected it for a top yearly award… I downloaded it via a Kindle and I’ll read it as soon as possible, over winter break…