The Secret Opportunity Gender Confusion Gives Us – Episode 203

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Being Human Podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Greg Bottaro, and today I’m going to share with you another continuation of this little series we’re doing on man and woman. Specifically, I’m sharing with you the next lecture from CPMAP, our whole certification program.

AI-Generated transcript of this episode:

I’ve been, last week unpacking this idea more with a lecture from, what’s called Anthropology 300, and this is, uh, in that same course. And so this is the follow-up lecture. We’re talking about the real philosophical, theological, psychological way to think about being a man and being a woman. We are obviously starving for this in our world. And as, as I share this next dimension, this next depth, I want to, I want to just make this point because I think in the Church, you know, for the faithful of the Church, we can get really complacent. And, for the sort of fringe people on the outside edges of the Church, uh, you know, I think it—they can become jaded. I think outside the Church they can become suspicious. So, you know, I don’t know, I don’t know who you are listening to this right now, but are you, are you considering yourself on the core faithful center? Are you, are you on the outer edges, maybe in between there somewhere, or are you outside that delineation? It doesn’t matter. This, this podcast is for everyone, and it’s to help all of us become better humans through this exploration of what it means to be human.

And so, you know, I consider myself at the core, in the middle, and, and, you know, adhere fully to the magisterial teachings of the Church. You know, if the Catholic belief system has a certain idea of what’s right and wrong, I’m, I’m going to submit to it and believe in it. Uh, but I still think we, we can have a complacent attitude in the middle there, and especially when it comes to man and woman. And the most amazing thing happens, that no matter what curveball the devil or the world or, you know, sort of pop culture throws at us, God can always smash it out of the park. And this is what happens: He lets the devil use different tactics towards us because He knows He’s going to have the final word. He has the last laugh.

And, and just think about the Theology of the Body as a response from St. John Paul II to the sexual confusion of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s. You know, the Theology of the Body and the confusion around Humanae Vitae and all that—well, we, we all get the Theology of the Body now. Even people who didn’t have an issue with the Church’s teachings on contraception, you know, the central core faithful in the 60s and 70s would have followed the Church teaching from Paul VI and Humanae Vitae, but they still benefited from Theology of the Body. God is doing wonderful things right now in our culture, in our Church, in our teaching, and He’s, He’s helping us develop this idea of man and woman. Even if you already know a man is a man and a woman is a woman, that’s, that’s not the thing that’s in question right now at the core. But the Church can grow from this. God can smash this curveball out of the park as well.

So I just really invite you to think deeply about this. Listen, take the time. This lecture is a little bit longer. It’s a, you know, just over an hour, and it—maybe, maybe take a couple days with it. But I would love to hear your feedback if this moves something for you, if this does something different for you, um, you know, different ways that you can think that this can be applied or needs to be applied. But I open up a lot here, especially, you know, talking about this idea of roles, gender roles. And, and by the way, I’m not at all referring to the priesthood itself, and, and I got some response from the last episode or a couple episodes that I’m making statements to question Church teaching on men only being allowed to be priests. I am not questioning that. This has nothing to do with the kind of ontological change at the level of being and the sacrament of the Holy Orders of only a man can be a priest. That’s 100% true, not being questioned at all.

I, but when I say roles, I’m talking about cultural norms and our adherence to these really stringent cultural norms. And I, and I present the argument here in this lecture that comes from other theologians—not from, I didn’t make this up—but this comes from really solid, really Catholic philosophy and really solid, really Catholic theology, and of course it’s consistent with really solid, really Catholic psychology, that if, if you adhere to an idea of, of cultural norms and roles for man and woman as a kind of cemented objective truth, then it is an anti-Trinitarian approach to understanding our humanity. It is actually anti-Catholic to adhere to that kind of thought about objective cultural norms and roles for women and men.

And so I’m, I’m breaking that open here. And when I tell you we have a lot to do to grow as a Church, whether you know what—no matter what part of the spectrum of, you know, Church authority, teaching, magisterial adherence, practical practice of, you know, liturgy or any of that, we’re all in this together. And instead, instead of being divisive, I’m presenting some of these ideas here to say, hey, let’s, let’s all get on board. Let’s be in this together, and let’s all realize that none of us are perfect. We all have a lot to grow in. And maybe this latest curveball from pop culture with gender confusion is a wonderful invitation from God Himself for us to grow in deepening our understanding of what it is to be a man and what it is to be a woman.

I hope this blesses you.

I spent the last 10 years learning how to help people using the best techniques available in psychology integrated with the Catholic faith. Now we’ve figured out that there’s a better way to help people than just slapping a Catholic label on the same secular model of therapy you find anywhere else. The real question is, how will we make this shift to a new model of truly Catholic accompaniment, keeping the psychological sciences in mind while opening up to a more human and more effective approach? This podcast is here to give you the answer. Join me and follow along as I take you behind the scenes of what this new model looks like using recorded audio from sessions, working with my team, with colleagues, and even directly with clients. My name is Dr. Greg Bottaro, and I want to welcome you to the Being Human Podcast.

Hello and welcome to today’s lecture. We are going to be breaking open some pretty intense, and I believe really important, material. And actually, uh, I don’t know how to overstate how important this material is—there’s no way to overstate it. We have to take what we’re about to enter into really seriously and with great reverence.

I want to actually start with prayer. Hopefully this will give you some indication, as this is the first lecture that I’ve actually recorded us starting together with prayer. I pray before every lecture, before I record, pray constantly for you guys, um, but I want you to enter into this material with a prayerful mindset. So, let’s begin. 

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen. Heavenly Father, we give ourselves to you right now in this time, that you would open our hearts and our minds with gentleness. We look for you, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in your Trinitarian mystery and glory, to enlighten our hearts and our minds to the communion we are created for with you and with each other as men and women. Help us to heal the wounds in our own hearts and lives and be a part of healing the wounds of others, so that we can walk with people individually and in some small way participate in the healing of the whole world. All of this in Jesus’ name, Amen. In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.

So, we’re talking about man and woman, and we’ve been setting up for how our perspective is going to be grounded in the biological—the body making visible the invisible—and how that guides our feet on this path of understanding our true vocation, our true calling, our true blueprint of how we’re created.

Now, I want to start with the end of this lecture material, and I want to give you some sense of what is missing by starting at the end, because I’m going to read to you a quote that you’ve probably heard before, maybe have heard before. And I’m making a point here that I want you to hold on to, that we’ve heard this before, we’ve thought some of these thoughts before, but I’m hoping, praying, that when we get to the end and I read this quote again at the end, you’re going to see how different it sounds after going through this material.

So, here’s the quote. This is from John Paul II, it’s from Theology of the Body: Man and Woman He Created Them. This is from number 43, uh, audience 43 number 7. He says, “Human life is by its nature co-educational, and its dignity, as well as its balance depend at every moment of history and in every place of geographic longitude and latitude on who she shall be for him and he for her.”

So maybe you’ve heard that before, maybe not, but it’s a beautiful quote, a beautiful sentiment. Let’s just leave it there for right now, and we’re going to come back again around to that.

Where we’re going to start actually is in the beginning—same as Theology of the Body here—but this is also where Cardinal Ratzinger, before he was Pope Benedict, as Prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, wrote something called “The Letter to the Bishops on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World.” And you’re going to be reading that,  and that’s linked here through the lecture.

He starts off in the beginning, and what he lays out for us is that there are two creation accounts. This is, again, Theology of the Body, this is somewhat familiar. And in the first account, we have, the way that God has brought darkness out of light, light out of darkness, how the water and, the air are separated, how land is separated out of the water. And there’s a lot of these separations that are happening. So he says that “an ordered world is born out of difference, carrying with them also the promise of relationships… God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” And then God created man in His own image, in the image of God, He created him; male and female, He created them. 

So that’s the first gospel account here of creation. We have, uh—not gospel—creation account. We have the separation that’s happening, but always sort of with this eye towards sort of connection. They’re separated, and then there’s a relationship between the two. And then ultimately God says, “Let us make man in our image,” already alluding to the Trinity, the communion of persons in the Trinity. We can see, uh, that there’s this helpmate entering in.

And so we don’t—we don’t, uh, think about mankind as this unity if we did—if it was only one thing—there’s really no way to share. It’s—it’s very, uh, it’s—that’s original solitude, that’s this idea that—that we need to actually have communion.

So he says that, “The creation of woman is thus marked from the outset by the principle of help,” as God makes woman out of man as a helpmate—”a help that is not one-sided but mutual. Woman complements man just as man complements woman. Men and women are complementary. Womanhood expresses the human as much as manhood does, but in a different and complimentary way.”

When the Book of Genesis speaks of help, it is not referring merely to acting, but also to being. Womanhood and manhood are complimentary not only from the physical and psychological points of view, but also from the ontological. It is only through the duality of the masculine and the feminine that the human finds full realization.

So, a lot of times we think about helpmate as like, sort of, Adam needed help so he got Eve. That’s not the way that it works, actually. And what we want to see here is a—a kind of complementarity even in the two gospel—or creation accounts. There’s a complementarity in the way that there’s the first and the second.

And I’m just going to sort of put this out there right now, because we’re talking about creation, and then—and then maybe it’ll make more sense as we unpack. But the first account is more of what I’m going to call the masculine account, and it’s very ordered, and—and it’s sort of just, uh, compartmentalized, and it’s got this sort of abstract kind of nature to it—it’s like the nature of things.

And the second creation account, in contrast, is more narrative. It’s more fluid, it’s more meaningful in terms of relationship. It has more as it speaks more to the experience of the persons involved, and we’re going to see that as more of a feminine creation account. And so I’ve asked some other philosophers, you know, if that sort of paradigm and theologians has ever been set up before, and to my knowledge I don’t know if that’s ever been stated before. So this is just, you know, take it or leave it, this is just Dr. Greg riffing on a bit of maybe being too deep in this content for too long, and some of these ideas are just coming up. And maybe that gets a little squirly, maybe that can’t hold weight if we really test it, but it’s just an interesting idea at least.

We’re going to, as I’m unpacking complimentary ideas that we have, even the two creation accounts themselves being almost complimentary masculine and feminine in the way they come together. And they’re both necessary. We want to know the ontological being of ordered creation, and we want to know the experience of the persons, and the way that the—the—the feeling of what it meant to be human and what it means to be human actually looks like. And we put those things together and we get a beautiful realization of the fullness of what it is to be human as we are created.

So again, first account: ontological. And it has more to do with the fact that there is diversity in communion, that there is equality in man and woman being brought out of the same idea of humanity flowing out, being the image of God—but image of God into two manifestations—and ultimately, through the Theology of the Body as we understand now too, when they come together they image God in a unique way.

But also then, in the second account, talking about the fact that there is need for the other, and that without that we are alone in all of ordered creation, and that we need to be able to commune with one who is like us: flesh of our flesh and bone of our bones. God’s creation of woman characterizes humanity as a relational reality. The Holy Father, St. John Paul II, has written with regard to this text from Genesis: woman is another “I” in a common humanity. From the very beginning they appear as a unity of the two, and this signifies that the original solitude is overcome, the solitude in which man does not find a helper fit for him.

So we can see that the—the—the helpmate idea, it’s almost like there’s Adam as a single person. Man needed a helpmate in being an image of God. That’s really what it means—that there’s no way to be an image of community without another person to be in communion with. So it’s not just that Adam, you know, if he—if he was a little stronger he would have been fine on his own, or if he was able to sort of, you know, make babies himself he wouldn’t have needed Eve, or you know, somehow she was just added on because he needed some help. It’s in the very depth of their ontological purpose and meaning of their being to be an image of God that they actually—there needed to be two to become one.

Now this capacity to be a gift of self through the conjugal act is clearly seen in their bodies. This is original nakedness. And what we’re going to be sort of moving forward in, in understanding, as all of these things have happened in history with difficulty in—in the—the Battle of the Sexes, is because of what—what enters in as original sin, in through original sin. But originally, in the nakedness, there was no shame, which means they saw the differences, and they saw the way that they were called to be in communion with each other specifically through the conjugal act. And there was no—there was no tension, there was no discomfort, there was no—uh—there was no problem, there was—there was no battle of the sexes. There was communion in peace.

In this time, we also want to look at how—and again, this is going to—this is going to make more sense of—of why in the original vision we don’t have the battle of sexes, but, uh, we’re going to talk about how there’s this pendulum swing back and forth. But in the beginning we had equality of dignity, and that was based in being an image of God.

So there are actually two dimensions of being an image of God. And—and this we can also see in the two, uh, sort of different accounts. But in the second account, in the beginning, we have, God makes Adam—that’s the word used for—for the sense of mankind before the woman is taken out of the rib and turned into female and male. But the initial sort of experience of the idea of humankind existing is Adam. Now that historically would never have happened right from the beginning. We would need to have humans existing as male and female if humanity is meant to be an image of God. So it’s—it’s more of breaking out the idea of what it is to be human that we start with Adam. But then, as—as woman is formed out of his rib, we have “ish” and “isha.” That’s the way that the language changes. So “ish” and “isha” are, man and woman, and that is the proper understanding of humanity in the two forms. But Adam is like the idea of humanity itself—mankind.

And so we have two kinds of—of—of dignity that are happening here. And—and first is that every individual, as far as they are part of that—that—that idea of mankind, every human within oneself as an individual carries the dignity of being an image of God. Every man and every woman, individually, even separate from each other, is made in the image of God, and so has infinite dignity.

We’re an image of God. We are masterpieces. We—we are—we are greater than the greatest painting that’s ever been painted, and a painting is only an image of a—of a something else. Yet the painting can be a masterpiece. Well, we are the image of something else, but the something else is not a beautiful landscape or a portrait of a person—it’s God. We are the images of God, we are the masterpieces, we are the most infinitely dignified, valuable, absolutely priceless masterpieces to exist, every single human person.

And yet at the same time, we have a second dimension of being an image of God, which adds even more to our dignity. It—if you can add to infinite, we can add to infinite with more infinite. And it is to become—having the capacity to be in communion with the other. So “ish” and “isha” together are in communion with each other in image of God because God is a Trinity. So we have the three and the one.

Each individual person is in some ways manifesting the dignity of being an image of the unity of God, and each person as they have capacity to be in communion is also manifesting the dignity of being one who has the capacity to be in communion. And every man and every woman has that added dignity, even if they’re not in communion with another man or another woman.

So it’s not just about only being married it means that we have the capacity to enter into everything we’re laying out here and talking about what the communion looks like and ultimately spoiler alert it means the capacity to bring new life into the world. So the actual capacity for fertility to create new persons new infinite masterpieces that are new images of God and and and we have this co-creative capacity to enter into that with God that is also part of our dignity. So it’s great infinitely great that we stand alone and be an image of God and it’s infinitely great that we have the capacity to enter into communion to create new images of God and the new images of God are not just the persons but also so this is almost two parts to the second part of our dignity so to be is is the fact that we are creating the image of Christ being reborn in this world.

So in communion we do have new babies that come and that that that’s the the sort of Trinitarian image but also the fertility is ultimately self transformation. All of this we’re going to break open we’re going to come back to this if you missed it right now it’s okay we’re entering in this is believe it or not slowly and we’re going to keep unpacking this as we go forward. But this is the idea here is that we have equal dignity nothing that we say specifically about masculinity or femininity later is going to be sort of laying claim to why there’s dignity it’s going to be a manifestation in a particular way of the equal infinite dignity that we have. But it’s really important that we start there that this is our foundation on which we build nothing we say about man can take away from woman’s dignity nothing that we say about woman can take away from man’s dignity because we are starting on an equal playing field of infinite and equal dignity that’s where we are right now.

Now another author that I’m introducing you to here is somebody who I hope we can do our part in making more well-known to the sort of regular world not of philosophy but of everybody and and just like we need to make the work of John Paul II sort of spread and more more known there is a philosopher by the name of Sister Prudence Allen and she is doing an amazing job an unbelievable job of unpacking what all of this means to our world today and she has been for decades and unfortunately because she’s a very humble sister she’s not out there with a YouTube and a podcast and a you know all these different things she is she’s very much a philosopher with all of the humility and the virtue that comes with being a Catholic philosopher but she she is brilliant and I’m introducing you to her work here if you’ve never seen it before so that’s also the reading of this week.

Sister Prudence Allen has unpacked what the feminine genius means what it means for complimentarity and why St John Paul II is so remarkably unique in the way that he has developed our understanding in the world today and so he’s taken again this is not a polemic that we’re creating between St. Thomas Aquinas and and St John Paul II but he’s taken Thomas Aquinas into the 20th and 21st century and that’s where we need to be with proclaiming and understanding the truth. She says that it’s it’s clear in the activity of procreation itself that the male and female both provide 23 chromosomes so they give what could be called an equal contribution they must be different in order for fertility and conception to occur “From a simple reconsideration of the relation of male and female on the biological level of generation we find the two premises of sex complimentarity (i.e equality and differentiation) affirmed.”

So this is the complex both and that we are building into our understanding of complimentarity and the relationship between masculinity and femininity that there is at the same time equality and differentiation. We I want you to think about holding these two realities and and how much it takes to actually hold them both together this is a this is a prime example of the Catholic both and in so many ways because the mysterious imaging of the Trinity is happening here the both end of three and one. We find that in the world which which is very uncomfortable with mystery and wants to be able to find all the answers and figure all these things out always gravitates towards one or the other we always separate out the both ends in the world but the Catholic approach is to be able to hold at the same time so we’re going to have equality and differentiation Sister Prudence Allen is naming that here and she’s using this awesome analogy to chromosomes and little did she know when when she was writing this in in 1990 was when when and actually she was working on this even from the 70s that she was so prophetic in the ways that we can take the body and the body makes visible the invisible and now this is our entire premise of our whole project so we have this awesome way now to look at even chromosomes.

So I want to come back to this for a second because I mentioned in the last lecture this Catholic spiritual idea of divinization now divinization is a fairly difficult spiritual concept even for a lot of Catholics and not not a lot of Catholics talk about it or write about it or really even accept it but there are some basic foundational points that go back to the most the earliest Church fathers and we can look at St. Irenaeus who says that God became man so that man can become God, so that man can become God.

Now, this makes a lot of people really uncomfortable, but I want you to be able to see how this makes sense because we’re taking this body approach, looking at the male and female contribution, and then we’re going to point towards a relationship that we’re created to be in and how that actually points us to a relationship with God. I’m going to unpack that for you here a little bit more in a minute.

So, Cardinal Ratzinger unpacks this for us most clearly in his letter to Bishops, actually talking about what happened after the fall. And as he’s describing this, he says that the Genesis account of original sin establishes a relationship of cause and effect between the two differences. When humanity considers God its enemy, the relationship between man and woman becomes distorted. When this relationship is damaged, their access to the face of God risks being compromised in turn.

So, this is really fundamental to our whole theory here of complementarity and also of relationship with God. And so, we’re going to keep in mind—remember the bevel gear, that gear one turns this way and one turns that way—that we are created in such a way to be an image of God, and that in that, we are also accessing our relationship with God. So, the image— we’re not just a painting of a landscape; we are also, by being an image, entering into the landscape. This is far beyond any analogy to a painting. That’s what’s so beautiful about how infinitely dignified we are and valuable we are. And that, the way we image God, actually, we are entering into relationship with God. And not just relationship, but something that marriage is an image of. In other words, we’re not entering into marriage with God; marriage is the image of what we enter into with God. This is the communion of saints. This is eternal. This is heaven. This is the beauty and the glory of heaven. There’s nothing on this earth that can be like infinite union with God in heaven for all eternity. Marriage is just an image of that.

And if we think about man and woman coming together and we think about the chromosomes, and we have, you know, think about the ways that two halves, the 23 chromosomes and the 23 chromosomes, match each other, and then we have the 46 chromosomes of a human person, and that’s the goal the creation of that thing is created by these two parts. And we can see that we are the other half of God entering into the goal of communion with God. That’s the goal, and the fruitfulness is that we become one with God.

So, let’s back this up a second. So, we have in this letter to Bishops, Cardinal Ratzinger is laying out this parallel. And he says that there’s two differences being discussed here. There’s the difference between God and mankind, the creature and the Creator. So, we have the way that there’s the difference there, and then there’s the difference between man and woman. And God creates man and woman as two manifestations of mankind as “Ish” and “Isha” out of Adam so that there can be an image of God himself in his Trinity. But it also establishes a relationship, and this is where the person of Jesus Christ comes in. And this is why we all enter into relationship with God through Jesus Christ. We’re made out of an image of Jesus Christ. We’re made in the image of Christ. Christ is the model. He’s the form. He is the perfect blueprint that we were made out of in our humanity. We’re made out of the humanity of Christ, and so that’s the connection between God up here and us down here. We’re his creatures, but we’re made out of an image of himself in human form. And then that makes, establishes a relationship between us and God.

So, the differences are really important here. That’s like the difference between the Father and the Son. But the Father and the Son, though different, are also equal. And man and woman were made originally to be different and equal. And in the difference between man and woman, it speaks of the difference between us and God. And in the equality of man and woman that we’re called to through communion, leading to procreation, that leads us to the understanding of the way that God and mankind were made to be in equal relationship. This is the thing that we don’t get because we’re fallen. Because of original sin, this seems preposterous to us. And when we start to really put these pieces together and really think about what all of this means, and then we lead towards this idea that the best our words can come up with is divinization, it’s almost scandalous. It’s almost like we can’t even accept that that’s what we’re really called to. But this is what I call the genetic logic. It’s the logic that comes out of the Book of Genesis, and it’s also found in our genetics because we can look at chromosomes and we can look at the way that our 23 chromosomes in a man and 23 in a woman will come together and become the 46 chromosomes of a new person. That there’s an equality there. But what happens when a new person is created? It’s not like a somehow, some kind of weird half and half, it’s half mom, half dad person. It’s actually a new person. It’s greater than the sum of its parts. And in the same way, our new life in Christ is this new creation.

So, as we enter into this, we hold this idea that this is what we were created originally to be like before original sin. So, original sin, and we have to look at that in light of this parallel relationship. What happens practically speaking? What happens? The serpent enters the garden, and the serpent is tempting Eve to think that God is the enemy. Let’s reformulate that a little bit in our terms here that we’re coming up with. If God is the creator, then he has the right as the Creator to tell us as creatures what is good for us and what is bad for us. He knows what’s good for us and what’s bad for us. He told us, eat of anything of the garden, just don’t eat of that tree. And as a Creator, he knows what we should do and not do because he made us. And that speaks to the difference between Creator and creature.

But then the serpent enters in and tempts Eve to think that the directive that comes out of that difference is not for our good, that there’s something bad about the difference. There’s something where God is jealous or God is afraid that we’re going to have the power that he has, that somehow difference is a sign of danger. And she chooses to doubt the goodness of God and to doubt the goodness of the difference where the Father, the Creator, is loving his creation, is loving his creatures, his children, and is protecting us in the ways that he knows we would be in danger because he created us.

So, when doubt enters in, the doubt specifically is about the goodness of the difference. And at the same time, what it ends up affecting is the relationship between the difference of the two, man and woman. And now, because of this original sin, because of this idea of doubt, now doubt necessarily influences the relationship here. And now the difference is held in suspicion. The difference is what’s doubted. The goodness of the difference is now something gone, and it’s now the difference that brings shame. And shame is that account in Genesis of that experience of suspicion and negativity. And this is something we can see paralleled in lots of ways. And as you’re reading through this letter to Bishops, you’re going to see how this makes sense. So, Adam and Eve hide behind the trees when God enters in because the difference now is something to be afraid of. And the same way they hide behind fig leaves from each other because the difference is something to be suspicious of. It could be dangerous. It could be bad.

So, we want to see this again. Listen again: the Genesis account establishes a relationship of cause and effect between the two differences: when humanity considers God its enemy, the relationship between man and woman becomes distorted. When this relationship is damaged, their access to the face of God risks being compromised in turn.

So, we’re going deeper now, and I’m going to point us more in the direction of the rest of our lectures here. But what we’re making here in this parallel is a connection between the way we see each other actually being our visible indication of the path towards God, and we’re going to draw this parallel out even more between the access to the face of God. Access to the face of God.

I want you to hold that phrase; we’re going to come back to it, but we’re going to keep repeatedly coming back to it. We can see God through each other when we recognize the dimension of our complementarity, which is equality and differentiation. When we can see how we’re created, what we’re created for, and we can live in that experience it, when that is the driving force and the lifeblood of our lives, then we have access to the face of God. Doesn’t this make sense? Doesn’t this point towards that conclusion? We are created out of love, and the relationship between man and woman is meant to be one lived in love. When we live in love, we see love. These are not just fluffy, spiritually abstract ideas. This comes down to the very way we think about each other, and we’re going to again unpack all of this very practically and sort of psychologically and emotionally. It has to do with the whole picture.

But as we recognize this parallel between these two differences, we need to enter into healing these differences because healing the relationship between man and woman is going to restore our access to the face of God. It is what restores our relationship; it’s what heals all of the wounds and the rupture between us and God “…concerning the topic of man and woman created in the image of God. I wonder if the crisis of collective trust in God, ,,, is not also connected to the crisis of the alliance between man and woman. The Earth is filled with harmony and trust when the alliance between man and woman is lived properly. And if man and woman seek it together between themselves, and with God, without a doubt they will find it.” There’s a deep mystery here. Again, we’re entering into this with reverence because we’re talking about divinization. We’re talking about God becoming man so that man could become God, and we’re also talking about the wounds between men and women, which is restricting our access to the face of God, which is keeping us from that union. Both things are tremendously powerful and filled with such deep meaning and also emotion that we need to step into this carefully, slowly, and reverently. That’s where we’re going.

So, original sin enters the garden, and it changes everything. It really messes up the way God planned for us to experience life, and that’s because we opened up to doubt. Doubt brings in death, and that is the consequence of separating ourselves out from what the Creator planned for us and created us for, and set up for us in terms of following the blueprints, the rules, the frameworks for what He knew would be life for us to have life. When that doubt enters in, when we doubt His goodness, we doubt each other’s goodness, and then we doubt the goodness of the plan to be different. So then we hide differences, we hide from God, we hide from each other. This is death entering into the garden.

And also, what about the thing that we’ve already been talking about with the rest of the concentrations through psychology and understanding the source of all of our defense mechanisms, of all of our self-protective personality patterns? What are we talking about? Death anxiety. So, this is the connection here. When death enters the garden, death anxiety enters the garden, and that’s when we have to start thinking about protecting ourselves. In fact, the protection in the garden was Adam and Eve hiding from each other with a fig leaf. And so the fig leaf can almost be a sign of death anxiety. That could almost be the first defense mechanism. Think about that fig leaf being a representation of the first defense mechanism. And that’s because we now have a sense that we can use each other.

If we go back to Love and Responsibility, the core premise or proposal from John Paul II is that we have two ways that we can treat other people. Either we love people, and persons are the type of being that warrant a disposition of love—to be loved and not used. That’s the other way we can treat people. So, it’s either we’re giving ourselves to other people, making a self-gift, of which is love, or we’re taking. When we’re taking, we’re using. And it’s that you exist not based on your own infinite dignity, not as a good unto itself because you’re an image of God, but you exist because of what you can do for me, and I’m going to use you in some way. Now, we have that in ourselves. All of us have that as a result of original sin. This is the effect of original sin, and as soon as it entered into humanity through Adam and Eve, it becomes every single human person’s story. We’re all born with original sin. That is what concupiscence means, and that means that not only are we afraid of the other person using us, we have good reason to be afraid of it because we all have the capacity to use, and we see it in ourselves. So, it’s not like we’re just making up the need to protect ourselves; we know in ourselves we have a proclivity towards using other people. If you ever need evidence for original sin, it’s because you have within you the desire, at times, the proclivity, the movement, the disposition towards using other people.

And there’s no amount of prayer, or grace, or salvation, or anything that happens in this world on this side of death that makes that go away forever. That will never eradicate that from our lives; it’s printed into our humanity. And we can purify it, we can grow, and we can become more and more perfect along the way, and little by little, it can become diminished. But that is the mark of concupiscence that we have until we are in our eternal resting and union with God. So, we can see that—we see it in ourselves, and we know it’s in other people. That becomes the disposition of self-protection. We don’t want to be used by other people, and that’s how death anxiety is connected to death entering into the garden. Now, that sense of being used by other people means that we are going to be suspicious, and we are going to see, “How can I protect myself? How can I put the other person at arm’s length or distance myself?”

And this is where we start to talk about a pendulum that starts to swing. And throughout history, because of the difference that is recognized as being pain-inducing or threatening, that difference is a cause for fear. That difference is a cause for self-protection because you’re other than me. And so we can see throughout that—that’s basically the entire history of the relationship between man and woman in a nutshell. In a sentence, it’s the fear of being used, and then it’s the response to that fear. There are lots of different various ways throughout history that the fear has been responded to, but that’s our basic way of looking at it.

The other side of the pendulum, though, which is sort of full eradication of the differences, is siding with equality. This is where we erase the distinctions, and this is where we’ve come to now in our culture. So we can see that, and the culture has gotten to the point of the deepest kind of eradication, but we’ve gotten to this point in different places as the pendulum has swung back and forth in history, by talking about the eradication of roles, of differences, of roles. So by focusing on roles, that’s one way that in the past, people have tried to make sense of this swinging back and forth between differentiation and equality.

But let’s talk about that for a minute because this is what happens, especially today in Protestantism. There’s a big movement in Protestantism to decide which camp you’re in when it comes to marriage and man and woman. There are two sort of theories, and it’s actually called egalitarianism on one side, or complementarianism on the other. But complementarianism is very different from what we mean by complementarity, and in case you’ve heard of this or know about this or are in conversation with people about this, it’s really important that you understand that complementarianism is a Protestant understanding of the difference between the roles of man and woman. And so they are very much crystallized in what a man is supposed to do, what a woman is supposed to do.

There is a certain way in which culturally that may have more or less ways of making sense, at times, in different places in the world. But something that we’ve seen by exploring different cultures around the world, those ideas are not glued in to every man and every woman throughout all of the world and all of time. There are cultural norms that should be considered when talking about roles, and there is a place for talking about roles, but it’s not necessarily what we think it is.

And so, the Protestant complementarianism is a very deep planted idea that roles and identity are fused, and that this is the right way to be a man. It’s that you have to do these things and not others, and the right way to be a woman is you do these things and not others. And we don’t agree with that. That’s not our idea of the both end. It’s not just because we’re going to say, “Well, you have your roles, but they’re equal in dignity.” No, there’s a much, much, much deeper kind of true complementarity, which goes deeper than complementarianism; it’s not an “ism”, it’s that essence, it’s our identity itself.

True complementarity has moved towards expression in the 20th century. One thing that we’ll talk about here, and you’re going to read about from Sister Prudence Allen, is the work of Edith Stein. So, St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, who was Edith Stein, was a brilliant philosopher. She was a phenomenologist, and she was part of the same sort of movement of philosophy that we’re studying through John Paul II. But she had some limitations, and we’re not going to get very deep into all of these intricate pieces, but just to say that Edith Stein was moving in the right direction, and yet because of a certain cultural sort of feel or Zeitgeist, or sense of the way things are coming out of the entire history of the world and philosophy, and all of these very significant misogynistic and wrongfully patriarchal kinds of structures, Edith Stein was pushing out of that. She got significantly far out of that, but she didn’t go far enough. And that’s something that Sister Prudence Allen will talk about, and something that John Paul II then comes in and takes it all the way. He goes far enough—he goes further than anybody else had ever previously gone. And this is what’s so remarkable and beautiful about the work of John Paul II.

Sister Prudence Allen is also talking about how much this makes sense in her articles. She talks about Edith Stein and somebody who was recently made a doctor of the church by Pope Benedict, Hildegard of Bingen, who is a philosopher. She was an abbess, actually, and she wrote extensively about femininity and about women and their role in the church, and she’s now a doctor of the church. But she also had some of these same ideas that Edith Stein had in terms of the roles and dignity and beauty of femininity and the feminine genius—not using those words, but they were already talking about it in that way. And yet still, they didn’t go far enough.

So, Sister Prudence Allen says, “Neither of them foresaw contemporary development in papal teachings which supports a theory of “mutual subjection” of spouses in marriage. Pope John Paul claims that in the relationship between husband and wife, the subjection is not one-sided but mutual.” Further, she says, it is not surprising, perhaps, that Hildegard and Edith Stein followed the tradition of their times in understanding the subjection of women to men to be natural and one-sided. John Paul II, however, emphasizes that one-sided subjection is more a result of the fallen condition of humanity and that mutual subjection, flowing from mutual self-gift, is present in the redemptive condition of humanity.

Further along, she says that the trinitarian and marital structure of reality of humanity, demands that we dismiss those paradigms of social relations drawn from the monadic anti-trinitarian rationale.

Okay, there’s a lot, a lot, a lot. Sister Prudence Allen is dropping bombs here, and we need to sit with this for a little bit and really unpack this because this is really important. First of all, what is she referring to subjection? This is coming from the scriptural quotation about women being submissive to their husbands. And this is what’s used in these Protestant camps of complementarianism when talking about roles. And this is what his sadly really infiltrated and permeated a lot of Catholic culture as well. And there’s a sense sort of a man is called to be the head and a woman called to be the heart, and therefore, this is what a man is supposed to do, and this is what a woman is supposed to do. We’re going to break apart why that is completely wrong and how being a head and being a heart can no less be separated from each other in a family as they can in an individual person.

So, man is the head. A man, as an individual, man as a person, has to be within himself a head and a heart. A man needs a head and a heart. A man is not existing as a head alone, and so a family can’t have a man being only a head. A family has a man being a head and a heart, and a family has a woman being a heart and a head. So again, we’re going to unpack all this stuff when it comes to roles, but what does it mean to be a head and a heart? That has real meaning, and masculinity is tied to headship, and femininity is tied to heartship. However, the way we think about that manifesting into roles of actual activity in daily life is totally separated from the complexity of that Trinitarian both end.

So, as Sister Prudence Allen says, we must dismiss the paradigms of social relation drawn from monadic anti-Trinitarian rationale. Again, with reverence and sensitivity, because everybody’s got their own history and wounds, but if you are holding on to these ideas of cemented roles based on identity, you have to realize that there is a certain sense in which that is a monadic anti-Trinitarian way of thinking about social relationships.

“Monadic” meaning one singular and solitary. In other words, there is a place for the equality and the singularity in this oneness, and there is a place for the “threeness,” and we put those together in the Trinity. That’s how each individual person is an image of God. Each individual man is a head and a heart; each individual woman is a head and a heart, and yes, together in the image of the family, there is an imaging of God in the Trinitarian dimension.

However, we are not walking around making decisions, speaking words, or being in social relationships as a relation. We are individuals. So, every single man has to think about this as it relates to him, and every single woman thinks about this as it relates to her. Roles are not to be separated out from the depth of our full humanity. Hopefully, that’s starting to make a little bit of sense here, and it will make more sense we gonna keep on plugging away at this.

Sister Prudence Allen introduces a term here that obviously I love, and you’re gonna know why in a second, but it’s something we’re going to hold on to as we’re moving forward here as well. And that is a sense of “integral sex complementarity”, integral complementarity. So, “integrated” it means that it’s going to be this fullest vision of our human destiny and our vocation.  At times Both Hildegard and Edith Stein appeared to support a theory of fractional complementarity rather than the full integral complementarity, which Pope John Paul II suggests. By fractional complementarity is meant a rigid separation of roles in which the woman provides one set of characteristics and the man the other, and together they make up one whole being. By integral complementarity is meant, instead, a theory in which an individual woman or individual man are both complete whole beings with the full range of masculine and feminine characteristics integrated within them, albeit in different ways, and together they form a community of persons which is more than the two of them considered separately.

So, what’s happening here is that what John Paul II proposes and teaches—not just proposes—we should make this point very clear. What he teaches as the Vicar of Christ, as the manifestation of the truth of the Gospel in which Jesus says, “I will never leave you.” I will never leave you, Jesus tells us from 2,000 years ago, even though He died, and was resurrected, and ascended into heaven. He said, “I will never leave you,” and He was with us. He came to us through the Paraclete, the one who is with us in the Holy Spirit, and is with himself in this world as the body of Christ and His Church, never to leave us.

So, when we’re talking about John Paul II, he’s not just a philosopher. This is not just another nice idea.  This is not just a way to contrast the teachings of Thomas Aquinas. And this is not just another sort of manifestation of a school of philosophical thought. He’s not just a phenomenologist. He’s the Vicar of Christ, and he’s leading the magisterial teachings of the Church, the body of Christ, the embodiment of what it is to be in communion with God Himself in this world. This cannot be overstated. We’re not learning here just another neat idea or another a way to think about man and woman. We’re learning here the way that God is teaching us who we are. This is the blueprint of being human.

And what John Paul II is saying, what the Vicar of Christ told us, is that previously for the last 2,000 years, you’ve been operating as if subjection of women to men is the Gospel call. And now, I am telling you that that was incomplete. That was a way of thinking about things because of concupiscence, because of original sin. But what you’re really made for is the fullness of being an image of God and the mutual subjection of husbands and wives to each other, which also is in the Gospel, by the way. It’s the mutual subjection of man and woman to each other.

And Edith Stein, and going way back to Hildegard of Bingen, they certainly were not in a world in which that would have been acceptable. And if you think today that it’s unacceptable, then think about, you know, times 10 how difficult that would be to hear, accept, or understand. So, we’re now at the point, coming through the 20th century, and in a lot of ways, again because of the mess of the 20th century, it pushed us to this emergence of openness to understanding the fullness, the beauty of the call to be in communion with each other. We got there, and JP II was there. The Vicar of Christ was with us, God was with us, to fill us with His Holy Spirit, to fill John Paul II with His Holy Spirit, to teach us His Church this beauty.

This is where we’re actually at in unpacking this. We need to go very deep with this. This is why she says that this Trinitarian and marital structure of reality demands that we dismiss paradigms of social relation drawn from anti-Trinitarian rationale. We have to go forward with this. She also says the awareness that in marriage there is mutual subjection of the spouses out of reverence for Christ and not just that of the wife to the husband must gradually establish itself in hearts, consciences, behaviors, and customs.

This is really important for us. And listen, this is not just theoretical, this is not just theological. This is not just about how to have a Christian home. We’re going to show how this is how to be human. This is how to become a saint as a man and how to become a saint as a woman. This is essential. Because what I’m going to teach you here is how women need to learn how to become better women through masculinity by becoming more masculine, and men need to become better men by learning how to become more feminine.

That is not possible in an atmosphere of doubt and suspicion, and self-protection, and hiding. That is not possible in an atmosphere of hierarchical domination, and trying to get the best of the other, manipulate, or restore balance or any other of these things. That’s only possible in an atmosphere of love, and then we can see with clarity, with new eyes, the beauty of our dimension of difference, of differentiation, of complementarity, which is ordered toward unity, which is ordered toward each of our own growing in the perfection of our own individual humanity.

Sister Prudence Allen says, “The challenge for supporters of integral sex complementarity is to reject forms of devaluation, one of sexuality itself and the other of one sex or the other.” So, in other words, the complementarity that comes through in sexuality itself, or the fact that there is one that’s better than the other. And what she talks about the other sex equality or sex polarity. Again, that’s her way of talking about these two pendulums that swing back and forth. “Instead, sex complementarity theorists must choose to affirm the simultaneous equality and difference of men and women and to avoid the extremes of a sex unity, which disregards difference, or a sex polarity, which disregards equality.”

So, this is holding these two in balance again. Remember that we said every man and woman individually has the dignity of being an image of God, and each carries the capacity to be in communion with the other, which is another way of imaging God. And, it’s participating in this dignity on a totally different level. It’s both, it’s both end. “Integral sex complementarity has as its foundation the belief that a man and a woman are each whole and integral, and that in their mutual gift of self to the other, they enter into a union that is more than either of them considered separately. One that is blessed with fertility. In fact, the complement bonding of a man and a woman serves as the prime model for communion of persons because of this blessing of fertility—the eternal mystery of generation which is in God Himself, the one and Triune God, is reflected in the woman’s motherhood and the man’s fatherhood. At the outset, the mother generates within herself, and the father generates outside the self. This shared parenthood has different dynamics: biologically, psychically, intellectually, and spiritually.” 

Something that we’re going to start to reflect on and look very deeply at is this idea of fertility. What does fertility show us? What does it teach us? Now, even Sister Prudence Allen, I think, can be sort of added to a bit here in terms of our model of integration. And she is writing from a position of when she talks about psychology of say 30 years ago, when there was a huge movement of more empirical psychology based on behaviors. And there was a lot of limitations in psychology as there are today, though on a totally different level. But what’s happened in the last 20 or 30 years is that we’ve developed a much more intricate technology for looking at the brain, and looking within the body, and understanding the physical biological movements that are occurring.

So, a lot of her formulation here is based on just the very fact of fertility — the fact that a baby comes from a man and a woman joining together. And then, in other places, she talks about the limits of empirical psychology because a lot of that is just based on making observations of people’s behavior, and that is part of psychology. However, what we are looking at and what I’m going to take you a little bit deeper into is the way that we can actually see in the brain, through chemical and hormonal interactions and physiological differences in the structures of a male brain and a female brain, manifestations of the things that we’re talking about in gender, between masculinity and femininity.

And it’s really beautiful. The more we see of the person through the biology, the more is revealed to us. Some people have trouble with this idea of the Church as a growing body of understanding. It’s like, how can the truth be timeless? All that has ever been revealed by Christ is all that ever needs to be revealed. Jesus is the beginning and the end, and He is the fullness of revelation — we believe that. So, there’s nothing to add to what Jesus told us about anything. And yet, our understanding of what Jesus taught us is continually being unpacked. It’s making more sense as time goes on. Nothing can ever contradict what Jesus said; nothing is ever going to be radically different or fundamentally apart from what Jesus said.

But as we begin to understand or continue to understand more fully our sense of our relationality, being man and woman, of our vocation to our destiny to sainthood in some ways, it’s developing. In some ways, if we go back to St. Irenaeus, we’ll realize that divinization, for instance, has always been the case and we’ve lost a sense of that, but we need to reclaim it. But this is an ongoing thing. My point here is to point out how in the sciences themselves, it’s almost like a little image of that reality. Because as we learn more about the body through advancing technology, we understand the person more. It doesn’t mean the person has changed.

And so, one interesting very specific application of this is the work of John Bowlby in the 50s and 60s when he was looking at attachment theory. And attachment theory was a theory, and he had observable insights and his hypothesis that then he tested cross-culturally and tt seems like it held weight and it was like, “Alright, this is a solid theory.” It’s now attachment theory. And then, in the 90s and 2000s, because we developed ways of looking into the brain, the work of Allan Schore points out how we can see now the brain structures, the neurochemical pathways that are happening when a mother and child have attunement, when there is attachment happening in a healthy way. So, we’re taking the theory of John Bowlby and fleshing it out even more and seeing it fleshed out even more specifically, so it enhances our understanding of the truth that was there the whole time.

So, just an analogy there, but just to say that we’re taking this work of Sister Prudence Allen and we’re gonna continue to unpack. And shat she was pointing out is, at the time when she was writing a lot of this, these instruments didn’t exist to look into the brain and see the kinds of things that are possible. But as we now see what’s possible, we can make even more sense and understand on an even deeper level how much we do actually exist one for the other.

So the same way that chromosomes — she knew about chromosomes, obviously, we knew about chromosomes in the 90s — that’s only the tip of the iceberg. And we’re gonna be unpacking, through the focus on the feminine genius and the focus on the masculine genius, what we know about the biochemical and physiological differences between man and woman. More than that, we’re gonna be able to ask this question of fertility itself. Fertility between a man and a woman — and what does that signify?

Because we know now that there’s equal parts contributing to make a fruitfulness, and that fertility is this fruitfulness. But how does what the man brings to that as an integrated whole — which is not just as the XX chromosomes, but actually biologically, psychically, intellectually, and spiritually as a man and there is a woman bring in to the picture in the same way, how do they contribute to each other? And what does this now mean?

Sister Prudence Allen says it is incumbent upon us to enter into profound reflection on the question of how our interaction with others as woman and as man, and building up different communions of persons, so particularly reflects the image of God, who is a communion of persons. How is it then that we can make sense of being created as man and woman?

Thanks for listening to the Being Human Podcast. If you’ve enjoyed this episode and want to help us spread the word and hear more, please head over to iTunes, leave us a review, and subscribe. As it really helps us get our content out to more people. Be sure to listen next time as I take you deeper into what it means to be human. If you want more free content and information about what we do at the Catholic Psych Institute, head on over to catholicpsych.com. God bless you.