medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Courtesy of C. S. Lewis in "Perelandra / Vogage to Venus". He argued in this
book that all men, and all the universe, by comparison to God's masculinity
(not maleness) is feminine (not female); a principle of transcendence
explored more fully in general in "The Great Divorce". Is this grounded in
patristic/Bilical teaching?
A longish quote from a passage of this describing the fictitious/allegorical
"angels" in the book:
---
Both the [eldilas' = angels'] bodies were naked, and both were free from any
sexual characteristics, either primary or secondary. That, one would have
expected. But whence came this curious difference between them? He found
that he could point to no single feature wherein the difference resided, yet
it was impssible to ignore. One could try - Ransom has tried a hundred
times - to put it into words.
He has said that Malacandra [=the angel of the planet Mars] was like rhythm
and Perelandra [= the angel of the planet Venus] like melody. He has said
that Malacandra affected him like a quantitative, Perelandra like an
accentual metre. He thinks that the first held in his hand something like a
spear, but the hands of the other were open, with the palms towards him. But
I don't know that any of these attempts has helped me much. At all events
what Ransom saw at at that moment was the real meaning of gender. ...
Still less is gender an imaginative extension of sex. ... The real process
is the reverse. Gender is a reality, and a more fundemental reality than
sex. Sex is, in fact, merely the adaptation to organic life of a fundamental
polarity which divides all created beings. Female sex is simply one of the
things that have feminine gender; there are many others, and Masculine and
Feminine meet us on planes of reality where male and female would be simply
meaningless.
Masculine is not attenuated male, nor feminine attenuated female. On the
contrary, the male and female of organic creatures are rather faint and
blurred reflections of masculine and feminine. Their reporductive functions,
their differences in strength and size, partly exhibit, but partly also
confuse and misrepresent, the real polarity. All this Ransom saw, as it
were, with is own eyes.
The two white creatures were sexless. But he of Malacandra was masculine
(not male); she of Perelandra was feminine (not female). Malacandra seemed
to him to have the look of one standing armed, at the ramparts of his own
remote archaic world, in ceaseless vigilance, his eyes ever roaming the
earth-ward horizon whence his danger came long ago. "A sailor's look,"
Ransom once said to me; "you know . . . eyes that are impregnated with
distance."
But the eyes of Perelandra opened, as it were, inward, as if they wre the
curtained gateway to a world of waves and murmurings and wandering airs, of
life that rocked in winds and splashed on mossy stones and descended as the
dew and arose sunward in thin-spun delicacy of mist. On Mars the very
forests are of stone; in Venus the lands swim. For now he thought of them no
more as Malacandra and Perelandra. He called them by their Tellurian names.
With deep wonder he thought to himself, "My eyes have seen Mars and Venus. I
have seen Ares and Aphrodite."
---
Rob Howe.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Hal Cain" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, December 02, 2005 12:40 PM
Subject: Re: [M-R] angels and gender
> medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
>
> Jo Ann McNamara wrote:
>
>> Angels may have transcended sex but my impression is that they remain
>> gendered male. In early Christianity, ascetics often tried to transcend
>> both sex and gender claiming that they could live and even sleep together
>> without arousal but more conservative opinion always frowned upon making
>> the test and ultimately forbade it. Men who attempt to avoid the test by
>> making themselves literal eunuchs are prohibited from ordination. The
>> exclusion of women from the priesthood as well as the present debate on
>> gay priests underline the idea that priests are still gendered male and
>> expected to be fully sexed as well.
>
> From a 2005 point of view, I have to wonder if the supposition that angels
> "remain gendered male" reflects a mindset: namely that "perfect" (perhaps
> one might better say "complete") beings are inherently male? The same kind
> of supposition seems to me to underlie attitudes about sex and gender in
> relation to priesthood.
>
> However, if I have understood and remembered properly what I was told 20
> or 30 years ago, when one looks at prenatal development and physiological
> characteristics, the female body is the less complicated construction:
> male elements are additional to the basic, female-pattern physiology.
>
> As for castration, isn't it correct that any man who had suffered
> amputation, even after ordination, had to obtain a dispensation in order
> continue to officiate at Mass or other services as a priest? In the age
> of motor vehicle accidents and medical miracles, that sort of thing isn't
> as uncommon as it used to be.
>
> If I were to continue these thoughts in present-day terms, it wouldn't be
> a historical argument (I think every age has to encounter its problems in
> its own terms). So instead, looking back into early Christianity, and
> attempting to exert historical imagination, I wonder: whether ascetics are
> better understood as part of the mainstream of Christian experience, or
> (perhaps like John the Baptist in his time) as a distinctively different
> but prophetic phenomenon -- i.e. showing us things we don't want to notice
> but need to hear?
>
> Hal Cain
> [log in to unmask]
>
>
> --
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