The Masculine, the Feminine, and the Incarnation

 For the feast of the Holy Family, our priest opened his homily by asking what to many people was probably a fairly deep question: why was Jesus born a man, rather than a woman?

Our priest’s answer was that it is a mystery. Mysteries, he said, call us to accept what has been revealed and at the same time to contemplate them. Through this contemplation, we will come to better know God. He then proceeded to drive at the idea that the Sacraments are mysteries – in the Eastern Church rather than "Sacraments" they are actually called "Mysteries," after all – and encouraged us to spend time contemplating our own baptisms, confirmations, marriages, etc.

This is a worthwhile way of answering this question, but I do have to say that while there’s truth and value in talking about the fact that some aspects of the faith can be described as mysteries – the Trinity, the Incarnation, the problem of evil, to name a few – I think that there is a tendency to be too ready to declare of different questions that “it’s a mystery." While ultimately it is true that something like the Incarnation and all of its aspects are a mystery, if we simply leave it at that we miss out on a lot of what the riches of the Christian tradition can teach us about some of these things. 

For example, we can learn a lot by answering the question from that homily with a little more detail than the priest chose to get into on Sunday morning. Why was Jesus born a man rather than a woman? The answer is simple: it's because we’re not pantheists, of course!

We tend to think of masculinity and femininity as adjectives that we use to describe things that in some ways are like men or are like women. For example, we call ships “she” and “her” and talk about their “maiden voyages” and so on because they carry people within them like a mother carries her child within her womb. We also talk about nations and even the whole earth itself - or, as they'd say in some cultures, the whole earth herself  - in feminine terms for the same reasons.  There are many other examples you can probably think of for “feminine” objects. It’s not as common in Anglo cultures to think of objects as masculine, but we do tend to think of some traits as masculine. For instance, we think of silence or stoicism as more masculine. Even in our modern gender-neutral culture we tend to think of strength as masculine, and we tend to think of different roles or tasks like building and fixing things as masculine.

In other parts of the world it’s more common for objects to have a masculine sense to them. For instance, outside of Anglo cultures tools are sometimes considered masculine. Why tools? Tools enter into a picture only briefly when there is something to be done. They build and then are removed until there is need of a repair. Whereas in biology a woman carries a child for months, the man enters into the scene only briefly, depositing his seed to effect the creation of the child before stepping back. In most cultures, fathers are also traditionally thought of as being somewhat “removed” from their children even after birth, stepping in when it is time to educate or to discipline - but sharply contrasted with mothers whom we think of as being ever-present with a child all the while as it grows up. Other objects which it's common to consider as masculine - at least in many cultures - include the sun and moon.

And here we have almost arrived at the answer to our original question, for while from our human perspective we start with biological male and female and assign our sense of gender to objects which seem similar, from the Divine perspective the reality is actually the reverse. Remember that God uses creation to tell us about himself and about spiritual realities. In Genesis he says, “Let us make man in our image” - the “us” referring to the three persons of the Holy Trinity - and then creates the human family to serve as a type or “model” of his triune nature. He creates a vast, almost limitless universe to help us have some vague sense of his true limitlessness. The book of Hebrews talks about the way that the design of the tabernacle and sacrificial system of Israel were instituted as models of the true heaven and the true sacrifice of Jesus Christ. In a similar way to all of this, God creates male and female – masculinity and femininity – to teach us about deeper spiritual realities.

The fundamental reality of God is that He exists – that He is. His existence is not only essential to who He is, but it defines who He is. When asked His name, God responds to Moses with, “I Am That I Am,” or simply, “I Am.” For Aquinas, this is nothing else than the most basic definition of what God is: that Thing which exists for Its own sake and is contingent upon nothing. Critically, this means that creation is not a part of God (panentheism), and neither is God identified with or as creation itself (pantheism). God exists on His own, for His own sake, independent of everything else and contingent or dependent upon nothing. God’s creation is distinct from and separate from him, completely. Another way of putting this is to say that he is eminent over creation, or put into the context of human language that we have been discussing, he is masculine to creation.

Students of history or religion may recall the fact that Israel was fairly unique among its peers in a way that may at first seem like a random anthropological oddity: they exclusively had male priests, whereas female priests were much more common among the other ancient cultures. When we consider things from the standpoint of viewing the masculine and the feminine as intentional parts of God's "creative symbology," we realize that this is not at all random because Israel was also unique among its peers in that it believed in a God who transcends and is outside of and is beyond creation. Outside of Israel, pagan religions famously worshipped gods that were a part of creation. They built statues and practiced idolatry. They worshipped the sun, the moon, the stars, and other aspects of nature. When God inflicted the 10 plagues on Egypt, these were not simply punishments for the Egyptian people, but were rather acts whereby God exerted and demonstrated control over things that the Egyptians worshipped as Gods. God showed his eminent power over the immanent river, which the Egyptians worshipped, over the Sun, which they worshipped, over the Pharoah, whom they worshipped, etc. Simply put, outside of Israel gods were believed to be, not eminent, but immanent – not outside of and beyond creation, but a part of creation.

This is why pagan religions had female priests but Israel had only males: pagans offered worship to gods who were with them and who were immanent to their existence and so they had priestesses, whereas Israel offered worship to a God who was apart from them and eminent over creation and so they had male priests. To moderns, these ideas about the deeper meaning of the masculine and the feminine have for the most part been lost, surviving only in the way that we sometimes talk about some objects as female or some traits as male, but to the ancient peoples these ideas were much more a part of the fabric of their understanding of reality. It made sense to them - heck, it was obvious to them - to have priestesses for the worship of gods who were a part of creation, because they understood the symbology of the masculine and the feminine. This is also why God reveals Himself as masculine – as “He” – when of course He does not have a biological sex. Biological sexes – male and female and sperm and eggs and all of that – were created by God, but they are not something that God Himself has or is bound to. He created these to reveal deeper realities to us, and He reveals Himself as “He” because He is not a part of creation but is over and apart from it, just as in our everyday experience a father is “over and apart” from his children. The way human, biological males “work” is ultimately intended as one of the many lessons God intends to teach us about Himself by weaving them into the very fabric of creation.

This is why Jesus was born as a male rather than a female: because Jesus is God, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, and God is eminent over creation. We say that in the Incarnation Jesus entered into creation, and that “mere” fact – that to be with us in creation he, being totally separate and distinct from it, first had to enter into creation – means that he would be a male. For, although Jesus was for a brief time in creation he was still and is still something distinct from and other than creation. Could Jesus have been born as a female? Metaphysically speaking, I suppose so. God has no biological sex, and the hypostatic union of the Divine and human natures in Christ is already so miraculous and impossible a reality that there’s no reason to think God couldn’t have become incarnate as literally anything he chose to be – even something other than a human being. Yet He had revealed himself as masculine, not to mention that he had established the entire society and structure of the Jewish religion around the idea of God as masculine, to convey his otherness, His eminence... in short, to help a world obsessed with worshipping the things they could see and touch that He was not one of those things but was beyond the bounds of nature and even of the world itself. 

One might reasonably ask where this leaves women. If masculinity helps to reveal God’s otherness and eminence, does that mean that femininity is somehow “less Godly” or less special?  Surely not, for whereas God in His being is other and eminent, in His actions he is with us.  God acts within the world, and femininity is one of the ways that He reveals his active presence in the world to us. As God gives life, so too does a mother (consequently, this is why the modern attack on motherhood is ultimately just an attack on God Himself). As God comforts and heals, teaches and guides, sustains us and gives of himself to meet our every need, so do the women of our world do these things, and not only for their own children, but – at least traditionally – for all of society. There is a reason that in the gospels we see a group of women constantly accompanying Jesus, helping out with things, and a reason that it is Martha, a woman, who is found worrying about taking care of everybody’s needs. There is a reason that since the earliest days Christianity extolled the Virgin Mary as a key part of the faith and that Christians have since the first centuries of the faith turned to her for things they hope to see done in the world even as they have given exclusively to God Himself their transcendent worship. 

In fact, historically there have been some suggestions of a certain feminine quality to the Holy Spirit, especially in Eastern Christianity. Ultimately the Holy Spirit is in fact masculine because the Holy Spirit is God and God is other, but the reason that these suggestions ever existed is because Holy Spirit is God’s active Power in the world. The Holy Spirit is that by which God does things and effects His ends. It is the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, that remains with us after the Ascension – and femininity represents immanence and withness. Finally, let us be careful: that Jesus is “God With Us” does not alter the fact that He is still in His being apart, other, separate from creation.

Jesus, then, was born a male because, instructed by God's own self-revelation we are not pantheists or panentheists or adherents to any number of other doctrines which would hold God to somehow be part of or within creation. Jesus' Incarnation as a male can teach us an enormous amount about Himself and, ultimately, ourselves - especially when we consider that the Church - that is to say, all of us - is ultimately feminine in relation to God. Altogether, we - male and female - make up the Bride of Christ! Still, after all of this, could we say that Jesus’ Incarnation as a male rather than a female is a mystery? Certainly so. The Incarnation itself is already definitively a mystery – something that we can never fully plumb the depths of. It’s one of the central mysteries of the faith, in fact. Clearly, then, aspects of that great mystery - like what sex Jesus took upon himself - can also rightly be called mysteries. A mystery, in the Catholic faith, is often defined as a set (or a pair) of facts which we can confidently understand each on their own, but which we cannot through reason alone understand how to harmonize. God is three, but God is one. Jesus is man, but Jesus is God. Etc. They are truths of the faith which we can always consider and analyze and ultimately contemplate until we understand them better than we did before, but which we can never fully understand. There are a lot of clear logical reasons for Christ’s incarnation as a male, but ultimately there will always be more that we don’t understand than that we do.