Men and Women

Steven R. Hake

Marriage is the deepest relationship between human beings: it is also the most difficult.  My wife told me, the day after our wedding, that it was the most miserable day of her life.  We have struggled seriously in all kinds of ways.  Yet thirty-four years later we are still married, and have nine children and seven grandchildren.  We have made it this far not because we are better than other couples.  Everything my wife told me on our honeymoon was true.  Rather, we have been working with a paradigm fundamentally different from that commonly assumed today.

I’m a lit professor by trade and taught at Sun Yat-sen University in southern Taiwan for many years.  Our family liked to vacation on the southern tip of the island.  One Saturday evening we entered a restaurant in this remote area and met an English gentleman in his fifties who had been drinking by himself.  He was an engineer based in Singapore working on a special project in Taiwan.  He had been married three times to three women on three continents.  He had a total of seven children by these women.  He was no longer in touch with any of his former wives or any of his children.  He was working on a swashbuckling account of his life, The Singapore Cowboy.  I went back to our hotel that night feeling like a wealthy man.  I was profoundly thankful that I had not jumped ship the day after my wedding when my wife’s dreams were shattered, or during any of the many other crises that Faye and I have weathered since.  An intact and deepening marriage and family is like money in the bank gathering compound interest.  It keeps getting better and better over time.

The stark contrast between my experience and that of this English gentleman motivates me to write this.  I want to give hope.  I want to start a conversation, or introduce into the one now taking place a radically new topic or orientation.  I have some confidence in what I say about men; less so, understandably, in what I say about women.  I have tried to speak clearly, even boldly, yet these are things we need to work out together, to talk about.  I think we have reached an impasse, a logjam.  My rhetorical challenge is to break it up and get things flowing again without being dismissed as a madman in the process.

My paradigm and that currently dominant in our culture both begin in the same place—that men and women are fully equal.  From there the two paradigms diverge radically.  We tend to assume that equality implies identity: that men and women are not essentially different.  A small additional step brings us to competition between the sexes and we find ourselves in the relational wasteland that is modern America.  An alternate path goes from equality to complementarity.  The differences between men and women allow them to work together, to complete and cover for each other, as the parts of our bodies work together when we are healthy.  This cooperation, this teamwork, makes possible intimacy, something we all long for.  This works.  For Faye and me it is not simply a good theory, it is daily experience.

“My” paradigm is not mine, and this complicates (by a factor of ten) the rhetorical challenge I face.  It is based on a book I hesitate to name because it is regarded by many today as the very fountainhead of bad ideas about men and women.  I hope to begin to break through some of the crippling misunderstandings surrounding this book.  I want you to glimpse something of its beauty and balance, at least in this area.  This will involve surprises.  The book is the Judeo-Christian Bible.  Perhaps the single most painful thorn stuck deeply in some of you is your bitter experience with people associated with this book.  I am not saying anything, good or bad, about those people.  I want to talk about the book, regarded as a work of literature, if you will.  A basic principle of literary hermeneutics(1)» involves “suspension of disbelief,” entering into the world of a given work, however provisionally, accepting it on its own terms, listening to it, receiving it: attending to it closely and carefully.  Criticism, of whatever theoretical orientation, is short-circuited if we do not first do this.  So, if I have “doctored the evidence,” holler by all means.  Cross examine ruthlessly. As I get underway, you may find yourself thinking, “Sure, this is an attractive paradigm, but it is unreal and thus pointless.  It is hopelessly ideal, naïve.  It is not my world.”  Glance ahead to the “first reality check”:  this is not simply attractive, it is practical—it works in the real world.

Regard the following, if you must, as a thought experiment, a cough in the back of the room, the ramblings of a professor of literature who’s “read himself crazy.”  And women reading this, please try not to dismiss it as the ranting of an arrogant man.  My students and I talk about this stuff all the time.  I think they would say I am reasonable, if not always helpful.  I hope my wife would say the same.  Let’s talk.

Why read this?  If you are content with your life, your relationships, the status quo, let it pass.  But if you are experiencing any pain or frustration, or just plain curious….  (I meant what I said about wanting to give hope.)  One final word of explanation:  I refer frequently to works of literature other than the Bible.  I want to set the Bible’s view of men and women in a larger context.  In literature we find our characteristic human dilemmas vividly portrayed.  Someone said that history is what happened yesterday.  Literature is what always happens. Literature can help us make sense of life.  It brings the basic issues into dramatic focus.  It takes us toward, and not away from reality.

Equality

Let’s begin with equality.  I contend that this book gives the only fully adequate basis or rationale for believing in full equality between the sexes.(2)» This equality is rooted not simply in human nature, but in metaphysics , and ultimately in the nature of God. One of the earliest interpretive battles fought over this book concluded that the three persons of the Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, were ontologically equal, and the relationship of men and women reflects this.  Men and women share alike the Imago Dei:  they share reason, imagination, creativity, language.  Furthermore, they are equal as created, as fallen, and as redeemed.  Neither men nor women, according to this book, have any monopoly, or even advantage, with respect either to virtue or vice.  This is an exceedingly useful idea given the realities of deep relationships.  It levels the field, and cuts through what would otherwise be Gordian knots.  This is the point of Galatians 3:28:  “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

I said above that the critical divide takes place here.  We are all agreed on equality.  This is not controversial.  Why the tendency to go from equality to identity rather than complementarity?  I believe the deepest reason is the death of God, our cultural drift away from the assumptions and world of this book.    If we are alone in this universe equality itself is already very tenuous.  Any kind of difference threatens it.  “Different from” might mean “weaker than.”  We can’t deal with this.  There is a growing body of empirical evidence that suggests that men and women are in fact quite different from each other in all kinds of ways, psychological as well as biological.(3)» This has created a tension in our culture between fact and reason, observation and explanation.  I am well aware that I am now squarely in the middle of hotly contested territory.  Are gender differences natural and inevitable in some sense—essential?  Or are they socially constructed—up for grabs? We opted, in the twentieth century, largely for the latter, which is really a version of equality-to-identity.   Difference is not a threat if it is an arbitrary difference.  I can be anything I want to be at any given time.  But the fruits, the results of this line of reasoning have been disastrous—we no longer know who we are.

Here, then, is the nub of the alternative paradigm:  real equality plus real difference can be okay.  In fact, it can be wonderful.  It can lead to complementarity, cooperation, and intimacy.  The claim is not simply that this is the case, but that it is not an accident.  If men and women are to hold onto equality, and get from there to complementarity, they need an umpire, a mediator, a court of appeal.  The claim is that they have one, a very wise and powerful one indeed.(4)» In other words, when God created man “male and female” after his image and likeness (Gen. 1:26-27) and pronounced this “very good” (vs. 31), it was in fact very good.  That there is such a thing as “human nature,” that our identities as men and women are, in some serious sense, natural and given from the very beginning, that essence does in fact precede existence, can be seen as profoundly scary.  What if this “given-ness” is ugly or limiting?  It can look like a trap against which we ought to rebel.  I have been struck with how frequently in many of our most influential works of literature God is portrayed as a monster.  We see this in Melville’s Moby Dick.  We see it everywhere in Kafka.  Even Beckett’s Godot is far from an attractive character when looked at closely.  The greatest Copernican revolution I am suggesting is that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is neither dead, nor a monster, but what Christ revealed him to be, a loving heavenly Father.  Sexuality, gender, on this view, is God’s idea, and a very good idea indeed.  His plan from the beginning was that equality would lead to complementarity, cooperation, and finally to intimacy.  He is the judge, the umpire, the enabler who brings this about.(5)»

Complementarity

God created us, according to the world of this book, male and female to complement or complete each other, to work together as a team.  We need each other.(6)» This is obviously true biologically and reproductively.  We literally cannot survive as a species without each other.  But the Bible’s view is that this biological complementarity or “fitting together” is a picture of a larger reality.(7)» This plunges us even more deeply into controversy, because it confronts us with the questions, “What does it mean to be a man?” “What does it mean to be a woman?”

The operative word for created or essential manhood in the Bible is strength.  I submit the following as a working definition of biblical manhood:  perfect strength under perfect control, or gentle strength.  Men go wrong in two ways: the brute and the wimp.  The former is strength, or alleged strength, without gentleness; the latter, gentleness (or what might appear to be) without strength.  There is no true strength without gentleness, and no true gentleness without strength.  Bullies are often cowards.  Wimps may well be arrogant and brutal when they think they can get away with it. A vivid biblical example of the brute is Goliath.  In that well-known story (I Samuel 17), David illustrates godly manhood, whereas Goliath may be seen as a type of the worldly or classical man.  Achilles and Agamemnon, less so Aeneas, also celebrate their own armor and vaunt their own strength.  David, by contrast, responds to Goliath in this way (worth quoting in full):

“You come to me with a sword and with a spear and with a javelin, but I come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied.  This day the Lord will deliver you into my hand, and I will strike you down and cut off your head.  And I will give the dead bodies of the host of the Philistines this day to the birds of the air and to the wild beasts of the earth, that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel, and that all this assembly may know that the Lord saves not with sword and spear.  For the battle is the Lord’s, and he will give you into our hand.” (I Samuel 17:45-47)

Goliath boasts in his own strength, it’s “all about him.”  David boasts in God’s strength.  His concern clearly is to see God exalted.  David’s strength and gentleness here can be described as “perfect” in a way that requires explanation.

Each word in the above definition was chosen with care.  The crux is a key New Testament text. The apostle Paul suffered some kind of affliction described as a “thorn in the flesh” (2 Corinthians 12:7-10).  He asked God three times to take it away, but received this answer:

“My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”  Therefore I [Paul speaking now] will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.  For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities.  For when I am weak, then I am strong. (vv. 9 & 10)

Strength here can be described as “perfect” because it is, quite literally, the strength of God in us.  The corresponding self-control or gentleness is described as perfect because the strength is exercised entirely for God and not for ourselves, as seen in both David and Paul.  The “weakness” here is not a hand-wringing, whining weakness. Neither David nor Paul was weak in this sense.  Rather it is used as a synonym for total dependence on God rather than self, a total commitment to exalt God rather than self.  This is good news for men, for true manhood is thus available to all men, as the grace and mercy of God is freely offered to all men.  One need not have the body of a Goliath, or an Arnold Schwarzenegger, to be a true man.  Most of us don’t.  Yet this is utterly real.  It is not limited simply to physical strength, prowess in battle.  True manhood involves moral and spiritual strength as well.  But it includes the very real “winning a physical fight.”  David, we are told, really cut off Goliath’s head and put the entire Philistine army to flight.

The brute, in a sense, tries too hard.  He overdoes it.  The wimp is unwilling to try at all.  The one is all gas, the other all brakes.  The good news is that a man, by the grace of God, can fight victoriously, when necessary and appropriate.

Let me suggest, however tentatively, a possible corollary for women.  I think it has potential value, but take it with huge brackets around it.  Obviously this is something that women will have to figure out.  I offer this as grist for the interpretive mill.  If strength is a key word for men, I suggest that beauty is for women.  [I can hear the howls of protest—bear with me for these two paragraphs!]  This is by no means an absolute(8)» distinction: the Bible insists that women must also be strong in many ways (see, for example, Proverbs 31), and men must be beautiful.  The bride in the Song of Solomon says of her lover: “His mouth is sweetness itself; he is altogether lovely” (5:16).  Nor is feminine beauty simply or primarily physical, any more than strength is for men.  Just as men need not be Goliath or Arnold Schwarzenegger, so women need not be Helen of Troy or Marilyn Monroe.  As biblical strength is a gift from God, so is beauty.  The key passage here is in I Peter:  “Do not let your adorning be external—the braiding of hair, the wearing of gold, or the putting on of clothing—but let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God’s sight is very precious” (3:3-4).  This does not mean that it is wrong to dress attractively.  The worthy woman described in Proverbs 31 is clothed in “fine linen and purple” (vs. 22).  But the emphasis is clearly on inward, moral and spiritual beauty, the “gentle and quiet spirit.”  Note that this beauty is not dependent on a large budget, it is imperishable, unlike “outward” beauty, and it receives the highest possible notice and commendation from God himself.

Perhaps we can say that women, too, go wrong in two ways analogous to the brute and the wimp (the vamp and the wallflower?).  The first tries too hard, the second not at all.  If we can say that Samson abused his strength, we can perhaps also say that Delilah abused her beauty.  If gentleness is the masculine virtue of strength-under-control, modesty is the corresponding feminine virtue.  Modesty has of course become as quaint and fantastic a concept to women as gentleness has to men.  Yet a hardheaded and shrewd case can be made for both, advantageous to both men and women.(9)» Masculine strength and feminine beauty are both, according to the Bible, horribly abused and distorted in our fallen culture and world, but they are both good things in themselves.  There is a legitimate purpose(10)» for both, and both are available, according to the Bible, to all men and women who desire them.  All this should be good news for women as well as for men.  As David exemplifies many aspects of the good man, so the heroine Esther exemplifies many aspects of the good woman.  Note that both were devoted first to God, both received their strength/beauty from God, and both used these gifts for a constructive purpose much larger than themselves—to deliver many people from death.

End of brackets!

I once shared an international flight with a group of young American males.  I learned from their conversations that they were kungfu experts.  Immediately upon boarding, they each “commandeered” a long row of central seats so they could stretch out full-length and sleep comfortably during the long flight.  There were several families on board with young children who were not quick or aggressive enough to stake these claims, but needed the space much more than those young men.  To this day I regret not having the presence of mind to ask them why they were strong.  For what reason was their strength given?(11)» The Bible’s answer to that question is clear—certainly not to serve themselves.  God gives a man strength to shepherd, protect, and provide for his wife and children.  The Bible’s emphasis is always on our responsibilities, never on our rights.  But this is not obnoxious, because God himself leads the way.  He always gives of himself to us, sacrifices himself for us, filling us to overflowing with every good thing.  Christ himself kneels down and washes our feet like a common servant.  The response this naturally evokes in us is a desire to treat each other in the same way.  God can well command us to love each other, because he has first loved us.  He can command a man to shepherd, protect, and provide for his wife and family, because he first does these for us.  His very nature is to give of his abundance, so when he fills us and we begin to become like him, a clear sign is selfless, sacrificial giving.

First Reality Check:  The Ideal and the Real

Are you thinking, “Hopelessly naïve!”?  Robert Browning’s “God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world” evoked anger even in Victorian England, but no one who knows even a little bit about Browning and his poetry can seriously charge him with naïveté.  A fifty-eight year old man who has been married for thirty-four years, fathered nine kids and lived all over the world might be suspected of many things, but not usually of this.  One of the amazing things about the Bible (the same can be said about God himself) is that it is at the same time both utterly, witheringly realistic, yet also hopelessly, impossibly idealistic.  Usually these don’t go together—we must choose.  Our culture, indeed the twentieth century in its entirety, has chosen realism, naturalism, low expectations.  With Hemingway, we reject Purple Land fantasies (The Sun Also Rises).  With Jake Barnes, the most we are willing to say about relationships is, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

The Bible’s view is balanced.  I said above that men and women are equal as created, as fallen, and as redeemed.  This gives us the real and ideal together:  Jesus calls us to be wise as serpents, innocent as doves (Matt. 10:16).  As created, we are ideal, perfect:  we are God’s masterpiece, his image bearers and representatives on earth, the crown of creation.  We are inherently, intrinsically, originally altogether good.  This is an astonishing assertion, as it contradicts in its entirety the twentieth century’s experience of itself.  Our history can be seen, in some helpful sense, as pre-modern (in both its classical and Christian forms), modern, and now post-modern.  The watchword of modernity was confidence in human goodness and ability.  The fall was denied.  We are grown up now.  We have Reason, and Isaac Newton, and can save ourselves.  God is for children.  And so books like Gulliver’s Travels and Candide were needed to prick this proud bubble.  Post-modern nihilism has brought this house of cards down completely.  We now deny creation and redemption and believe only in fall.  We now need to be told that we are indeed very great, of enormous value.  Our despair needs to be challenged.

The Bible challenges both our pride and our despair.  The cross of Christ breaks our pride, because it says to us: “Your sin, your wickedness, your need is this large, this serious, and demanded this price.”  But it also breaks our despair: “This is how much I love you, what I am willing to do for you, how valuable you are to me.” Fantastic ideal and daily-grind reality are thus wedded in a deeply spiritual, but thoroughly practical way.  In Christ’s justification, we are given “up front” full forgiveness and righteousness as a gift.  Because this is so, we are able to love and forgive each other, even when we don’t feel like it.  It ain’t automatic, and it’s never easy, but it’s possible.  We know.  We’ve lived it.

Jesus told a story of a man who had been forgiven a debt of hundreds of thousands of dollars by the king.  He was then expected to forgive his fellow servant his debt of ten or twenty dollars (Matt. 18:21-35).  Not unreasonable.  It’s practical, and it works.  (I know how many times my wife has forgiven me—for Christ’s sake, not for mine.)  And justification is followed up with sanctification, in which God himself undertakes to grow us, to make us more like Christ over time.  We work with him, but it is his work and he guarantees it.  Aldous Huxley was wrong.  In his last work, Island, his own answer to Brave New World, he said of Christianity (in the words of Susila MacPhail):  “[Christianity has] the highest possible ideals, and no methods for realizing them.”(12)» This is not true.  The gospel is not simply good advice.  That’s law.  The law says, “Do this and you will live.”  But that’s like telling a paraplegic, “Exercise and you will have good health.”  Law can only point out our inability.  But the gospel gives us life as a gift.  God himself undertakes, by the same power that raised Christ from the dead, to raise us to new life (cf., for example, Eph. 1:15-23, esp. vv. 19-20).  The final step is glorification which doesn’t take place until death, in which redemption is complete and the original perfection of creation is completely regained.  That’s amazing grace. The “real” is not simply the fallen and tawdry (our culture’s view), but it is even more profoundly the created and the redeemed (the ideal).

Back to our paradigm—step three.

Cooperation

Complementarity implies and makes possible cooperation.  The parts of a body complement each other, and cooperate to produce health and growth.  The members of a team work together to best their opponents.  Men and women were created to fit (and work) together in marriage.  Much could be said about this, but let me here attempt only to grasp and remove one large nettle that obstructs even an initial consideration of this topic: the Bible’s idea of masculine headship and feminine submission.  This is developed most clearly by the apostle Paul in Ephesians 5, a chapter that Viscount Fenton’s wife Marjory is alleged to have torn out of her Bible in an episode of violent marital discord (early seventeenth century).(13)» A close look at this chapter makes this anger unnecessary.  Paul clearly urges wives to be subject in all things to their husbands as the church is to Christ (vv. 22-24).  This is difficult, and our (fallen) nature rebels against it.  But Paul does not go on to command husbands to rule over their wives, but rather to love them sacrificially as Christ did the church, to love and cherish them as their own bodies (vv. 25-30).  This is just as difficult, just as self-denying, as submission, and just as contrary to our (fallen) nature.  God here, in other words, is being completely fair.  He gives men and women different responsibilities (just as the Father, Son, and Spirit have different responsibilities, both in creation and redemption), but equally challenging ones.  In fact, both are given the opportunity to imitate Christ in different ways.  Women imitate his submission to his father, which is voluntary and in no way compromises his dignity or equality with the father.  And men imitate his sacrificial love for his bride, the church.

We can go farther.  We are here given insight into created, essential manhood and womanhood.  God commands wives to respect and support their husbands because that is what men need most profoundly.  In the same way, God commands husbands to love and cherish their wives, because that is what women need most profoundly.  There is a sense in which a man most deeply needs significance, and a woman security.(14)» As a man, I know that I don’t need flowers or chocolate from my wife; I need not to be mocked or derided, even when I make a stupid decision.  My wife, on her own testimony, needs to know that my heart is completely hers, that I love and cherish her.  She told me years ago: “It is amazing what a woman grasps at, and how devastated she is if she doesn’t get it.”  This is what romance, at its best, is intended to convey:  “You are loved, you are cherished, you are secure.”  (We even sin in distinctively masculine and feminine ways:  my sin initiates, hurts, devastates, while my wife’s responds, complicates, exacerbates.)  The Bible’s constant emphasis is not masculine privilege to indulge in domination, but masculine responsibility to lead in love.  Headship and leadership are duties and responsibilities that fallen men seek to evade.  The fallen woman’s temptation is to take over, the fallen man’s to take off.(15)» The claim is that this need for love and respect, for security and significance, is created and essential—it corresponds to the real desires of our hearts as men and women.  You can test this experimentally.  You may not believe that such people exist, but if you met a man who loved and cherished you, or a woman who respected you, what would you think?  How would you respond?

It should be said that these differences are not absolute.  A man also needs security, a woman needs significance.  The head of every man and woman in an absolute sense is God.  God is the apex of the triangle, with man and woman at the two lower corners.  But the Bible also teaches that “the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man, and the head of Christ is God” (I Cor. 11:3), not triangular, but linked like a beads on a string.  Masculine headship over the woman in this sense is relative, not absolute.  It is important, but it is not everything.  Once, one of my students in Taiwan was questioning the fairness of God creating Adam first.  I thought of this passage: “In the Lord, however, woman is not independent of man, nor is man independent of woman.  For as woman came from man, so also man is born of woman.  But everything comes from God” (I Cor. 11:11-12).  The first woman came from the first man, but all subsequent men have come from women.  The point, Paul explains, is that men and women need each other (relatively), and both need God (absolutely).  This is the foundation upon which cooperation rests, ultimately.

This clears the way for the next, and final, step.

Intimacy

Let me raise the ante.  Intimacy is life at its very best, at its most intense and meaningful—it is what we all long for.  To see this, we need to plunge into the heart of the Bible, literature, and life—examining the pastoral and the heroic. In so doing, we will see also the extent to which life assumes and requires equality, complementarity and cooperation.

If strength and beauty are in some sense the operative words that define biblical manhood and womanhood, for what purpose are the strength and beauty given?  The central narrative of the Bible is paradise created, lost, and regained.  The meaning of life, according to the Bible, is building and enjoying relationships.  The Bible’s word for this is covenant.  This is most profoundly true of our relationship with God himself.  Paradise, in its deepest sense, is God dwelling in the midst of his people: in Hebrew, Immanuel, “God with us.”  The last book of the Bible concludes:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away and the sea was no more.  And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.  And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man.  He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.  He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”  (Revelation 21:1-4)

This is the telos, the End: the dwelling of God in the midst of his people.  This is good in itself, indeed the summum bonum, the beatific vision, Dante’s white rose at the end of the Paradiso.  What is called here heaven or the new Jerusalem is prefigured throughout literature as the Good Place, the journey’s end, whether Homer’s Ithaca or Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.  And usually, as here, marriage imagery is prominent.  Just as paradise began with a man and woman, so it ends.  God is seen as bridegroom and his people as bride.

A striking final touch in Homer’s Odyssey is Penelope’s last test enabling her to establish conclusively Odysseus’ identity as her husband and embrace him as such.  She asked her maid to move the marriage bed out into the hall, and he protests:

“Woman, by heaven you’ve stung me now!
Who dared to move my bed?
No builder had the skill for that—unless
a god came down to turn the trick.  No mortal
in his best days could budge it with a crowbar.
There is our pact and pledge, our secret sign,
built into that bed—my handiwork
and no one else’s!”  (XXIII: 208-214)

He goes on to explain how he made the bed out of an old olive tree rooted immovably in the center of their bedroom.  This is their sign and their secret.  The aptness of the symbolism here is precisely the permanence, the inbuilt rootedness of the marriage relationship that is foundational to the paradisal or pastoral vision.  This is the secret that Odysseus and Penelope share that enables them to reunite after so many years and so much suffering.

Indeed, the Odyssey well illustrates a central biblical insight—that only the pastoral justifies the heroic.  Only the Shire justifies the Quest; only true Life justifies a fight to the death. This also answers our earlier question as to the purpose of strength and beauty.  Strength is given to cherish, provide for and protect beauty, and beauty to respond to and reward that strength.(16)» Odysseus’ contest with the suitors is a classical example of strength under control.  Odysseus and his son Telemachus exercise their strength responsibly and for a worthy purpose: to deliver wife and mother and restore peace to their home.  This is not really about Odysseus in the way that his earlier contest with the Cyclops was.  It is about Penelope and Ithaca.  Odysseus has matured as a man.

In The Iliad, Achilles, though much stronger than Odysseus, uses his heroic strength for himself, instead of for a pastoral end. (He is more like Goliath than David.)  It is interesting that when the living Odysseus meets the dead Achilles in the underworld, Achilles as much as admits the superiority of Odysseus’ choices and values (Odyssey XI:579ff.).  The contrast between Odysseus and Agamemnon is also illuminating.  Odysseus, for all his vagaries, ultimately chooses whole-hearted commitment to his wife in a way that Agamemnon does not.  The differences between Penelope and Agamemnon’s adulterous and murderous wife Clytemnestra are explained, in part at least, by the differences between their husbands.

Longinus believed the Odyssey to be the work of a senescent Homer past the peak of his powers.  While this may be true in some literary sense, the vision it sets forth is the work of a mature man who has finally figured out what really matters in life.  The central heroic act of the Bible, the crucifixion of Christ, is for the sake of the central pastoral vision, the dwelling of God with us:  the bridegroom enters into single combat with sin, death, and the devil to deliver his beloved bride, the church, that they might dwell together in peace.

The Aeneid also offers an instructive contrast to both the Bible and Homer. Aeneas is portrayed as having the strength of the young Achilles and the responsibility and control of the mature Odysseus.  (His affair with Dido is of course the obvious exception to this.)  Aeneas’ strength is used for an end higher than his own glory:  he is founding an empire which will flourish for many generations.  But this vision is less obviously pastoral:  Rome is not Ithaca, and Aeneas’ relationship with Lavinia is not even a shadow of that of Odysseus and Penelope.  Aeneas “loses” his original wife, Creusa, presumably through some kind of neglect.  He carries father and son, while his wife follows behind.  Little is said of her and the quality of their relationship, though Virgil does mention that she does not blame him for her death, and urges him on in his mission (II:1007ff.).  Dido is the one woman about whom a lot is said.  She indeed may well have been as suitable a companion to Aeneas as Penelope was to Odysseus, enabling some real complementarity and teamwork.  But that relationship is not to be and ends tragically.  The two women in the story’s final books can perhaps be seen as illustrative of two extremes:  Camilla as Amazon and Lavinia as cipher.  The one fights against Aeneas unsuccessfully.  The other marries him in the end, but she has no lines of her own and we know very little about her.  This is a relationship, in dramatic contrast to that of Odysseus and Penelope, that happens offstage.  Rome certainly had a public vision, even a dynastic one, but it was not as clearly pastoral, with a strong man and woman at the center.  Virgil’s poetic successor, Dante, does have a woman at the center, the heavenly Beatrice, but she is definitely not the pilgrim Dante’s equal, companion, and complement.

A disturbing theme in many more recent works of literature is a parody or inversion of this biblical vision:  salvation through feminine suffering.  One of the most dramatic examples is Goethe’s Faust and the sufferings of Margaret.  We see it also in Crime and Punishment’s Sonia Marmeladov and in Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters.  Not that the Bible’s vision of womanhood is that of the late nineteenth century as portrayed, for example, in Ibsen’s The Doll House or Conrad’s Heart of Darkness:

“It’s queer how out of touch with truth women are. They live in a world of their own, and there had never been anything like it, and never can be.  It is too beautiful altogether, and if they were to set it up it would go to pieces before the first sunset.  Some confounded fact that we men have been living contentedly with ever since the day of creation would start up and knock the whole thing over.”(17)»

Rather, it is perhaps more accurate to say that men and women suffer equally, but are called normally to suffer in different ways.  The original curse envisions men suffering in their agricultural labors and women in childbirth (cf. Genesis 3:16-19).  Both agriculture and childbirth are good, created things, but both become painful, even fatal sometimes, as a result of the fall.  Men are called to love their wives sacrificially, “as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Ephesians 5:25, emphasis mine).  Carl Jung describes the way in which mothers can sometimes “love” their sons in a way that stultifies them, that turns them away from Christlike suffering and sacrifice:

… there appears before you on the psychological stage a man living regressively, seeking his childhood and his mother, fleeing from a cold cruel world which denies him understanding.  Often a mother appears beside him who shows not the slightest concern that her little son should become a man, but who, with tireless and self-immolating effort, neglects nothing that might hinder him from growing up and marrying.  You behold the secret conspiracy between mother and son, and how each helps the other to betray life.(18)»

I see this as a fallen distortion of a healthy and nurturing mother love.  Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ answers this.  As Jesus literally staggers to his death his mother Mary is watching him.  At one point he stumbles and Mary remembers him stumbling as a little boy and cutting his knee.  She moves to help in some way, and Christ stops her, saying, “I am making all things new.”  Men are called to suffer, to sacrifice, to protect, and to deliver: to suffer as farmers and soldiers.  Perhaps we can say that women are called to reflect the sufferings of the church, and men the sufferings of Christ.  The twentieth century lost sight of this and both men and women shrunk as a result.  The pastoral vision represents life at its very best, at its most intimate, and always has a man and woman at the heart of it.  Only this justifies and gives meaning to the heroic and the epic.  This is what intimacy is all about.

Final Reality Check:  Traditional and Biblical

We sometimes equate traditional and biblical.  The Bible itself does not do this.  It sees the old as sometimes bad and the new as sometimes good.  Jesus warned against the blind following of tradition (cf. Matt. 15:1-9, for example).  Fiddler on the Roof clearly shows the difficulty of following traditions without absolutes.  An earlier version of this is Aristophanes’ The Clouds.  Just as I do not want anyone to dismiss this paradigm prematurely as “hopelessly idealistic,” so I do not want them to dismiss it because they have some twisted traditional idea that they mistakenly assume is “taught by the Bible.”  What I am urging you to consider is what the Bible does in fact teach, and not simply “human traditions” (good or bad).  Engage it directly, let it speak for itself.  This is only fair.  It claims, as the word of God, to stand above human history, to be the plumb line by which all individuals and all cultures are measured.  Just as we do not have to choose between the ideal and real—the gospel confronts us both with the reality of our need and God’s ideal provision—so also we need not choose between the past and present:  the gospel invites us to live in the presence of a God who stands above time.

Milton’s Paradise Lost illustrates the danger of confusing traditional and biblical.  Professor Jean Hagstrum, in his last book Esteem Enlivened by Desire: The Couple from Homer to Shakespeare, has credited Milton with the discovery of the importance of companionship between a man and a woman in marriage:

Where, then, in Western culture, can something like the ideal promised in my title [“Esteem Enlivened by Desire”] be found?  I locate that ideal in the period from the late seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century, from Milton’s Paradise Lost in 1667, with its portrait of Eden, at least to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina in 1875.(19)»

Milton clearly derived this from a careful study of the early chapters of Genesis, especially 2: 18-25.  His description of the intimate relationship between Adam and Eve is indeed remarkable, unprecedented, yet it is not without flaws.  If you detect these flaws, don’t assume that they also came from Milton’s principle source, the Bible.

A case can be made that Milton’s Adam and Eve, as portrayed in Paradise Lost, are not fully equal as created, fallen, and redeemed.  Eve seems to have certain pre-fall tendencies to sin that are not present in Adam.  Her hair, for example, is described as “Dissheveld, … in wanton ringlets wav’d …” (IV:306).  It is doubtful, also, that Milton conceived of Eve as Adam’s equal intellectually.  This is not the place for details, but my point is that Milton did have the remarkable insight into Scripture noted by Hagstrum above, but was also influenced, to some extent, by the traditions of his day, as are we all.  None of us gets it completely right—we build slowly.

The final years of the twentieth century saw the publication of two bestselling novels about men and women:  Thomas Wolfe’s A Man in Full and Jane Smiley’s Thousand Acres.  Wolfe’s vision is a positive one, reaching back to pre-modern values, to classical stoicism.  The novel’s vision of responsible manhood rises almost to that outlined here.  Smiley’s retelling of King Lear is much bleaker.  Indeed, the conclusion of her novel almost makes the conclusion of Shakespeare’s tragedy look brightly optimistic.  It can be argued that at the end of Shakespeare’s play Goodness and Meaning themselves are not corpses on the stage.  In Thousand Acres the three central women, King Lear/Larry Cook’s daughters, exemplify the three alternatives open to women at the century’s end:  ignorance, anger, and oblivion.  This is one illustration of the difference between a pre- and post-modern vision.(20)»

Note Lear’s final moments with Cordelia, according to Shakespeare:
No, no, no, no!  Come, let’s away to prison.
We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage;
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgiveness; so we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too,
Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out;
And take upon’s the mystery of things,
As if we were God’s spies; and we’ll wear out,
In a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones,
That ebb and flow by the moon.  (V.ii.8-18)

Lear seems to have finally found true humility and faith.  He seems finally to see clearly Cordelia’s great worth.  He says, in effect, “If we have each other, we can lose everything else and still be rich.”(21)» This vision is very close to that developed in this article.

If the Bible presents the man as the head of the home, it presents the woman as the heart.  In some sense, men represent God as light, and women God as love, his justice and his mercy respectively.  Woman is neither angel nor witch, but equal as created, fallen, and redeemed—companion, complement, and completion.  This is a very old vision, a very good vision, but most importantly, it is one rooted in real life, one that corresponds to the human heart and human experience as we actually know them.  As such, it merits a hard second look.

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