"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.