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Sunday, August 23, 2015

"Origin of Our Male God" by John Chuchman

The Paternal Metaphor
for God
did not happen unconsciously
as if by default.

A Maternal Divine
has been actively derogated
and consciously erased
from acceptable images
of the Divine.

This erasure
accompanied the emergence of
a patriarchy
as the dominant ideology
in the Roman Catholic Church.

The all-male hierarchy
necessitated exclusively male
ruling images for God.

Two thousand years of
non-experience of women
in public ecclesial roles
eliminated maternal images for God
for generations.

Contributing to the image of
an all-male God
was Aquinas’ systematic incorporation of
ancient Greek biology
into Catholic Theology.

From Aristotle
and through Aquinas
Roman Catholic Theology
is base on the idea that
in the act of conceiving life,
the male is the active partner
who provides the vital form
and originating movement
while the female
is the passive partner
simply providing the inert matter
that receives the form.

The resulting child
is thus a creation of male energy
working upon an inactive female partner
with the two radical opposites;
the man being the vigorous actor
and the woman a lifeless object.

According to Aquinas,
because the woman has no active part,
she is merely potency
and thus inferior.
For him,
female nature is fundamentally inferior
to male nature.

Hence, per Aquinas,
and Roman Catholic Theology,
a Mother,
who embodies an inferior and passive principle
cannot provide a suitable metaphor
for God,
the active source of all creation.

To use such imagery,
would be for Aquinas and the Roman Catholic Church
to demean the dignity of God,
who is pure ACT
untainted by the shadow of (female) passivity
and unrealized potency.

All this
based on totally faulty biology
raised to a metaphysical level
and
a Roman Catholic Theology
in support of
an all-male hierarchy.


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