And what about Woman?

Now we have to console the ladies who might be offended by the absence of female archetypes in this series of blogs. Frankly speaking, I don’t think there are any female archetypes. An archetype implies acting as an fundamental example for the growth of spiritual life. It implies the figuring of something superior primordial by something imperfect, and the latter that must efface itself, when it has been seen and understood. In a way each woman is too unique and ultimate, and her presence too permanent for her to be an imitable archetypal example.

As we have seen repeatedly the masculine mediation is for the transcendent and implies being a witness to necessary truths by respecting objectivity and emotional distance. All of which requires a renouncement of personal worldly profit. To be truthful this renouncement of the world must of course be sustained by a contemplative proximity of the divine, which is hidden as is the secret of a man’s solitude.

In a way, feminine presence is too close and too intimate, her mediation would be too subjective. She communicates life immediately. 

The child’s first experience of the father is hearing his voice from afar and seeing his face after birth. But its first experience of the mother is to ‘abide’ inside her from the instant of conception, and receiving everything that can be given. The mother has the privilege of having all first experiences of the new life, with the exception that the father is naturally the first to see the child. To be in the child’s first ‘face to face’ is the unique privilege of the father.

The woman’s direct mediation of life figures less clearly the work of the human reason than man’s often nerve-racking mediation for the transcendent – except maybe during the crucial hours of birth, when mother and child are united in a mysterious fight. But on the other hand, her mediation of life figures clearly the intelligence insofar it receives directly the ultimate gift from above. Her gender is disposed rather to receive wisdom than to push science forward.

Man’s mediation is a mediation properly speaking. His body is like ‘toolkit’. In considering his own flesh as an instrument for the sake of a higher cause, he will try to unite himself as much as he can to the principal agent. The woman however is in a way beyond mediation. Her body is an ‘abode’. Instead of disposing her to be united to an initiator of movement, it disposes her to be united to the end, where the movement comes to a halt.

I am deeply convinced that naturally men are more religious than women, whereas in the Kingdom of God this disparity is more than compensated by women’s privileges in receiving Gods wisdom.

The motive for writing all this is to rediscover the meaning of masculinity in religion and thus to understand better the revelation of Jesus Christ. He tenderly respected the natural gender difference and used it to communicate the divine truth. Our modern culture does not respect the gender differentiation and inevitably becomes more and more deaf and blind for the gift of God.

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