The Vagina Speaks: Soteriology By Parts and Discourses of External Purity
Yes, I know. The title is rather bizarre. I expect all kinds of interesting Google hits.
A few days ago, Hugo Schwyzer had a post up about an alternative vagina monologue from a blog of a Colorado woman . Hugo, of course, has some good things to say on the subject. But I was disturbed by the piece for other reasons less obviously related to gender politics.
To summarize, the monologue is an address from a vagina to a pubescent girl informing that the vagina is a good and beautiful thing and worthy of care. It is also something which is the object of men's great lust. But all of those advances should be resisted in favor of the one who in future will be joined to her in lawful wedlock. If she keeps her vagina inviolate for her husband, the vagina shall be the means whereby God brings joy and peace into her household through her children.
My first objection to this monologue is that it promotes a soteriology by parts. The vagina has a proper use with biological roots, and it is God's will that it be exercised according to its functional end, the begetting of offspring. Of course, this is not too far from the positions of the natural lawyers throughout Christian history. But I usually give some of them more credit for subtlety. Aquinas sees virginity in terms of the holistic response of the body to the agitation of its parts (which interferes with the rational faculty). He also recognizes that fornication is often the same use of parts as the marital act and both acts often result in the same structural-functional end: children. What makes them differ are other more intangible elements involving fidelity, mutual socioeconomic services, the good of the offspring, and the iconopoesis of Christ and the Church. The integrity of the parts seems to be an obsession of Puritan lawyers trying to convince juries that any penetration suffices to complete the act (though the idea is no doubt prior to Puritans or Christians for that matter). The substance of virginity, if such a problem is worth considering, lies not in acts but the lifestyles or mere living that frame all of our acts.
But why do I call this soteriology? Soteriology isn't always about our eternal state it seems. It also has come to refer the working of grace in our lives through the direction of the conscience to God or the free and special grace of God to us his adoptive heirs. The promise of this vagina monlogue seems to be that such special grace will be bestowed on the married through their children. Ah, if only that were the way. Children are always begotten at the beginning in pleasure and at the end in sorrow. Sometimes, nature is not so kind. Even if you do avoid STDs, no one is born with perfect parts. Moreover, circumstances are not so kind. What joy should we expect is guaranteed by God when even the Most Worthy Lady Theotokos saw her son executed as a criminal? But I suppose it is an open question whether grace is about those things that come by nature or the gifts we bring to their use. Moreover, posing any beautiful teleology next to the name of God also implies that the fruition of that teleology is ultimately salvific. This sounds like the righteousness of the Law to me.
Such a soteriology by parts also seems dependent on structural-functional arguments that cannot be followed further intom necessarily good ground. I know part of my concern here is that I see the teleology of the body itself as conditioned by evolution. Yes, evolution was the means by which our bodies came to be from the dust of the earth and the assertion of God's rule over the elements and chaos that is Creation. But on us was blown the breath of God and bestowed on us the inheritance of reason. Evolution continues in us, but we have a choice about how much we may dominate it. I'm not suggesting anything about genetic engineering. I'm talking about the tolerance we are allowed to have for natural unfitness. We must think of our bodies as somehow meant for more than the evolution that underlay its development. And honestly, the older and sometimes contradictory discourse of structure and function suffers from the same fatal flaw. So much of our body arose from sexual selection that it is hard to see why we shouldn't be mandated to perform highly disciplined foreplay (if only in lawful wedlock). And I find such discourses applied to homosexuality to be strongly inconsistent with what is claimed to be their foundation.
This is not to say that I have objection to the discourse of the theology of the body when it concerns itself with the right use of parts, but it should be done with more care than this alternative vagina monologue. Most importantly, such a discourse should consider that Christian teaching is not just open to right use but no use. My generation in the church is strongly confronted with these issues. Evangelicalism these days is strongly emphatic on purity, virginity pledges, and promise rings. But it is admitted that the end of this hyper-purity should be wedlock. Thus, folks my age in conservative churches feel pushed to be obsessed with purity and marriage simultaneously when their statuses as persons in civil society are still very much in flux. Fortunately, some Roman Catholics I know have had a better idea. In South Bend, for instance, you will find a community of "holy women" who do not presently feel called to marriage (and in fact are called to virginity), which allows them to live and be supported in a lifestyle with other women while they seek to complete their educations and find their place in the world. Some of them honestly probably will end up in the convent (Glory be to God!), but others will find once they are secure in other vocations that marriage now seems worthy (and may be entered nearly immediately if there are men of a similar temperament [sadly unclear]). People of my generation are choosing to live truly celibate lifestyles, not because of parental disapproval or the parietal regulations of Christian schools but because of their own free choice through God's grace. And they are finding ways to make this happen despite misunderstanding by both society and sometimes the church.
I should note that I find the parietal regulations of Christian schools ridiculous, because they make men and women forbidden fruit to another and a topic of physical obsession often without encouraging high social and intellectual activity within the sex or supervised intellectual interchange between the sexes. If 20 year old men and women are not supposed to live according to nature, you should provide them with something higher than trying to make sure they will live according to nature two weeks after graduation. Of course, in the progressive church, Generation Y rarely hears anything about sex. My college chaplain at least had the subtlety to read the Letters to Timothy as relevant to the college student, advising not against sex and carousing but against the shortsightedness of youth in general that can lead not just to the conventional sins of youth (which everyone reads into the Psalmist) but the excessive pursuit of anything that appears virtuous.
Well, that was bit of a rant. The other major issue that concerned me about the vagina monologue was its participation in the discourse of righteousness through external action. If you strip away all of the soteriological promises about offspring, there is a very little to say about the husband beyond his status as co-creator of children. He is degraded to mere instrument. There is no information about how to choose him. Honestly, the husband simply could be the first man to come along who obviously doesn't want the vagina. He could be vicious in any number of other ways.
Again, the obsession with purity comes to the fore of my mind. You can peg me as a "liberal theologian" by my insistence along with Jesus that external virtue is not the fullness of righteousness. But the ideology behind the monologue if not necessarily the monologue standing on its own seems strongly invested in the discourse of external righteousness. What's wrong with that? Well, chastity often is defined as "having the body in the soul's keeping." This doesn't mean that the body is always to be right with God. The body and soul are joined intimately. Thus, one is not necessarily more responsive to God than the other. The soul can be read as the intangible order that gives our substance form and activity. All of those things of self we have trouble touching belong in the soul. The discourse of external righteousness does not always give the body into the cure of the soul. Instead, the flesh is allowed to meditate (yes, the flesh meditates...but only because I pose it as present in both soul and body) on the question of "How far is too far?" Some acts are permitted. Some acts are not permitted. Intentions and considerations of circumstance do not figure. The set of permitted acts if involving perfect strangers can be seen in this view as having the same moral content as those same acts with one who is genuinely beloved. Is this the order of the worlds?
Moreover, these permitted acts are weighed against the set of permitted acts of others. Oh well, it's OK if I'm doing X because Y is doing it. Or I will resist the culture utterly and not date because I don't want to deal with having to make boundaries, even if I'm terrifically lonely, fearful of the future, and often angry with God. In a relationship in which the souls involved are rectors and vicars of their bodies, such boundaries will arise organically out of the mutual concern of one for the other. But will such a thing be the same as conventional Christian morality? Probably not quite. But if there is to be fornication, the partners might as well be in a mind that will lead them to do what is right (breaking up amicably, setting stricter boundaries with one another, or marrying). What shouldn't happen is this: repentance to God by rejection of that person. One always wants to think not about what acts wants to perform but what good wants to do for the other. And ninety nine times out of a hundred that is not expressed sexually (though it can be). Is the mark of the holy union that it formally or informally seeks the earnest blessing of God on the striving of both persons for the highest goods it is possible in that particular state of being for one to do for another? A. I hope I find out someday for myself. B. I am not going anywhere near the issue of sacramental character yet, since it concerns the ontology of those desired goods.
Finally, a view to external righteousness is a bad thing to lose. The corrupted teetotaller sometimes binges. The fallen among the chaste essentially say to themselves, "I will not obey the code and do all acts I wish." A person who seeks unchastity is a sad thing. But it is a tragic thing for a person to seek unchastity with someone who does not seek even their lowest goods.
I introduced this long discourse about the body, because we are about to discuss:
IV. Of the Resurrection of Christ
Christ did truly rise again from death
Christos aneste! . So the Greeks greet that happy morn. As Paul says, if this isn't true, we are the greatest wretches among those who subsist in reason, for all of our exertions as Christians tend toward walking in the life (and leading others thereto) that is promised and confirmed by the fullness of the verity of Christ risen. If not this...
Joseph Priestley, the famous English chemist and co-discoverer of oxygen (among other things), was a Dissenting clergyman and writer of natural theology. He claims that his confidence in the Resurrection and the resurrection of the dead is bolstered by the apparent reversibility of some chemical reactions. Of course, the Second Law of Thermodynamics precludes this, but I think he realized this even before its formulation. He speaks of metal changed to salt and then returned to metal once more. I suspect he knew he did not get a full yield. But I think he imagined that God could. Well, God did. I'll leave it at that.
and took again his body with flesh, bones, and all things appertaining to the perfection of man's nature
This is why I think I wrote so much about the body above. This phrase has been rolling in my head. Jesus ate and drank. He also disappeared from view, which has led to the ghost/ divine being theory. He also did this in the Gospel of John a lot, which started stories he was a spirit. But read the Acts of the Apostles. Phillip has a similar experience through the mediation of the Spirit. Both Islamic and Jewish mysticism believe that certain holy men have the ability to travel in ways that seem to violate our foundational assumptions about space-time. In Jewish lore, a rabbi who does this is said to do a Kwisatz Haderach (yes, Frank Herbert didn't make it up). In Tayeb Saeh's Wedding of Zein , a Sufi mystic in the Sudan is seen on the same day at two widely separated oases in the desert. Does this violate physics? We really have no way of knowing, but I do know NASA is willing to invest a little money in brainstorming about faster than light travel.
What really gives me confidence in this clause is Thomas' experience. He feels Christ's wounds. Apparently, the perfection of man's nature really consists in an ordering of substance to its natural activities. Thomas probably touched a lot of scar tissue (though it might have been very clean... or even healed but there's still a hole). Christ clearly was not made whole like some sort of superbeing. God raised him to ordinary human functioning, which is miraculous and perfect enough. What is most astounding about this is that Christ a priori had no need for a physical body as part of some sort of future natural and civil life. By taking on human flesh once more, He gives us proof incontrovertible of His Resurrection but also shows us the good of the human body and its potential for something besides the fatal way of nature (and its evolutionary mechanisms and outcomes). Christ doesn't evolve to go to the Father, He is built up in a human body in its fullness, its beauty, its function, its activity, and possibly its messy scar tissue.
wherewith he ascended into Heaven, and there sitteth...
Christ in human flesh therefore presented himself to the Father as the Great High Priest passed through the Heavens to make continual and intercessory sacrifice for us in the Holy of Holies as sinless man. In burnt offerings God did not delight, whether or not this meant that such offerings were concessions to our nature. But there is something beautiful in the account in Hebrews about the perfection of Temple worship in Christ. And the Psalmist tells us a pure and contrite heart is the sacrifice of God. The Eastern Orthodox call the Eucharist, "Bloodless Sacrifice," the icon and yet still verity of the ascended Christ. He is both eternal and omnipotent God but also the perfect gift to God, the greatest reciprocation from nature and from human flesh of the Love that is the source and cause (In broad and narrow senses) of all that is. Enoch, Moses(?), and Elijah may abide in Paradise as gifts and reciprocation of great merit, but Christ made the greatest act of love. It was an act of humiliation, external scandal, and harmful to His parts, but we believe there is no greater Love.
And living in that place where there is no corruptibility, it would appear there may be no need for many of the structural-functional and evolutionarily-derived causality of parts. Nature may have provided substance and suggested what was amenable to order, but the covenant with death is broken and evolutionary ends therefore should not matter. But, of course, we have little knowledge of these things and matters could be entirely otherwise. But Luke 20:34-37 definitely says something about the vagina monologue.
...until he return to judge all Men at the last day.
The promise of judgment is surprisingly real to my life. I go through life imagining that everything I do will not only be known to Christ (for He knows all) but to the world entire. As Venantius Honorius Fortunatus says, "Everything that is hidden will be revealed. No one will remain unpunished." I really should be concerned with Christ. The risen dead will be the race entire (even possibly species yet unknown, my lens is wide enough to acknowledge the possibility) with standards as many as stars in the sky. But the question that Jesus is going to ask me (no! It will be question I ask Jesus.) will be, "When Lord did I feed you or give you drink? When Lord did I welcome you? When Lord did I clothe you? When Lord did I visit you in prison?" These questions will challenge me the rest of my days. They have very little to do with the kind of external acts of parts which seem to dominate much of contemporary Christian discourse. They have everything to do with the kind of soul and person-loving living that ought to be the laws of our body's earnest government.
Until the next time, the Holy Brothers pray that the Lord keep your members in the health most salutary to your experience of His Creation but more strongly goad you to that mind wherein reason is the rector of your flesh and spiritousness its curate. I, wretched man that I am, furthermore thank God for the life of Brother Roger of Taize whose preaching, example, and community hve brought the presence of Christ more fully into the lives of many I know. May his murderer receive what good may come from civil justice but also find the forgiveness and reconciliation exemplified by him whom she pierced.
5 comments:
The question of parts and use is complicated for numerous reasons. Parts often have many uses and more than one meaning. Sex has a variety of meanings for humans as a perusal of cultures shows us. Also, it seems clear from evolution that we have evolved a more socially complex relationship to sex than most of our creature kin, bonobos and chimpanzees being exceptions. And G-d breathes on that, that relational aspect, and shows us in Christ by the Spirit that this is the direction of our salvation, our "unnaturalness", relationship with neighbor, in ascesis, through, with, and in G-d. In some sense, we are never just natural. We are always "unnatural", due to cultural constructions without which we could not survive. The Christian revelation gives us a grounding context that challenges our relationships godwardly, toward good of the other as you put it, toward upbuilding, holding all in common (community), discipline in virtures (ascesis). In a word, toward virginity--which the celibate is an outward sign, and challenge to any romanticized notions of heterosexual marriage that would make itself the good rather than G-d. Toward chastity, to which we are all called, chastity meaning ultimately that our grounding is in G-d.
To often, Christians have adopted a rather pagan approach to sex, meaning a biologistic, physicalist approach, that is about salvation through procreation in sharp contrast to earliest Christians who adopted celibacy in defiance of upper class Roman norms of marriage and procreation, bringing an end to the cycle of decay.
As William Countryman puts it though, each generation's solution is another's problem. We cannot simply adopt 2nd century attitudes for the concerns of our day, though we can take their paradigms of holiness and rework them for our own--handing on the tradition.
Aquinas is more subtle, but frankly, he ranks heterosexual rape as more okay than same sex loving because the right parts are in use. Something more subtle is called for in my opinion because clearly this is a very male pov. Such an approach violates deeply a virtues understanding and raises violence to a higher moral consideration than relationship, seeking the good of the other.
Of course, being a gay man and one who has been only with men (sometimes through a right use of parts--I'll get to that in a moment--and sometimes not), vaginas do not figure into my life in a soteriological way at a biological level at all. And how could they? Or, if I were celibate, how could they? Such an approach, the romanticizing of heterosexual marriage, is deeply problematic, as are some complementarity theologies like that of JPII for this very reason. Women do figure in my life muchly as friends, family, co-workers, presiders, etc. In a word, as persons with whom I am in relationships.
What I find most troubling is the reduction of a woman to her vagina. That'd be like me reducing a man to a penis, anus, so forth. This is pornography in a sense, one definition of which is the reduction of another into parts and acts without context.
Worse, the soteriology involved is the purely biological as you point out, and in a sense, rooted in US through procreation. What grounds this in someone greater than ourselves--relationship on the model of the Holy Trinity? That is the Christian question and the Christian context and the Christian salvation. G-d saves! Saves us through relationship with G-d, ourselves, neighbor, transforming our human relationships toward the divine perichoretic and kenotic movements by G-d's very indwelling in us in Spirit and through Eucharist. And saves us even beyond death--which frankly is more satisfying for a "dry tree" like myself, than merely that I will pass on my genes and be saved through children--which I cannot do literally (turkey baster jokes aside). That is the proper starting point for such reflections in my opinion, anyway.
Which gets me back to the right use of parts given my homosexuality. Your thoughts on the good of the other are well taken, and a deeper understanding of Aquinas and natural law. When I have used another man for his parts, and he I, even being "in love", without the context of friendship coupled with commitment in Christ, and a direction toward G-d, I have sinned. We used our genitalia more for our own pleasure and exploration and getting off rather than mutual upbuilding of a relationship in which the third party is always G-d. (This is why I recommend giving thanks to G-d before making love, a la 1 Tim. 4). That doesn't mean a bit of grace still didn't glimmer through in such "romps in the hay", but the context Trinitarian ascesis, kenotic, perichoretic, orientation in a godward direction is not fully possible without a binding of some sort for us humans, otherwise we can walk away from another when we sin against them (no strings attached) and we have no vows/bounds upon our wayward hearts and parts ;-)and to make our relationships ascetic.
Bodies are important as the Resurrection makes very clear, and I have a physicalist take on that, but I also recognize Christ's body in the Resurrection is the fullness and completion of a human body that is more than we presently experience and yet also carries the scars, the wounds, as marks, signs of G-d's redemptive power. Hence, say Luther's ubiquitous presence approach to the Eucharist as opposed to Cranmer and Calvin's insistence that Christ's body is located in heaven only and we can only partake in Spirit (spiritually).
In one of the seminaries I attended, I worked for a prof who did a lot of writing and thinking about people with disabilities. One of the discussions that naturally was present was the question of the body and the resurrection. That is, in the resurection is the body made "perfect" or "whole" and if so, can it really said to be the body of the person who lived in it when it was not these things? Would a person with disbailities recognize their own body and be at home in their own skin minus the thorns of the flesh--the thorns that have formed them as the person they are? I don't know...Is the resurrected body still limited and corruptible? Paul certainly seems to suggest not at least for the latter--we put on the imperishable as far as he concerned. Who knows. It's a topic that raises far more questions than answers but they should be aske and fooled with none the less...
Thanks for the thoughts, guys. I especially appreciate Christopher taking a look at parts in a way that is alien to my experience. Aquinas' assessment of rape etc. never has pleased me, but I use him a lot to show how an older "conservative" view can be more nuanced than the current "conservative" view.
And Christopher, you're absolutely right about the multiple meanings and uses of parts, which is something that the discourse of structure and function either ignores or treats inconsistently.
I also liked the view of the somehow incompletely healed wounds as signs of God's redemptive power.
But I do wonder what a woman of our general theological orientation would have to say...
Derek, as always, you ask a very good question...
Derek's question is one to ask with regards to ability, sex/gender, orientation, race, and so much which forms us. Would we recognize ourselves? I should hope so, otherwise, we're not ourselves at all. And if we're not ourselves though completed/perfected, then the Resurrection isn't good news. It'd be just another immortality where we as tending-toward-personhood are lost forever this time to an amorphous whatever (rather than to having offspring). Of course, we'll be completed in ways we probably can't even understand here and now...as long as we continue to confess the Resurrection and our participation in that, we can discuss endlessly and fruitfully what that might look like (after all the Fathers did and disagreed with one another)...
I take that Christ still had his wounds after the Resurrection as signs of G-d working redemptively, and indeed a sign of continuing outpouring love...so much wonderful blood imagery...
Limited? I don't know. We're not G-d, so perhaps, no likely, but not in the same ways we are now? Even some saints have had certain gifts for bilocalism and whatnot.
I would say incorruptible. Paul seems clear about that and the bodies of certain saints point us that way in my opinion as well.
Caelius, you might ask Karen at Kinesis (a generally Anglo-catholic sort) for her take also as she's in a same sex relationship as well, that'd provide balance not only to the male perpspectives here, but especially to my obviously male-only orientation that can't really relate to vaginas or women sexually at all except intellectually, which means I have to "zoom" the discussion outward in order to enter the discussion at all. Both you and derek can say more than I can, even if limited.
I'll try to catch her after she returns from South Africa. Her blogging time is valuable.
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