What is a Man? What is a Woman?

About the Author

Dr. Leon Podles is the husband of Mary Elizabeth Smith and by her is the father of six and the grandfather of eight. He has written two books on masculinity, The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity and Losing the Good Portion: Why Men are Alienated from Christianity. He is a board member of www.bishop-accountability.org and wrote Sacrilege: Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church. He is a retired Federal investigator and is currently a member of Mount Calvary, a parish of the Catholic Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter.

What is a Man? What is a Woman?

Marriage is the only blessing left to us from before the fall. It was elevated to a sacrament by Christ, but its foundation is in the basic structure of human anthropology. Marriage is the union of a man and a woman. What is a man? What is a woman?

The elementary biological facts are denied by the avant-garde of the sexual revolution, but even in cultures that have not succumbed to this insanity, the answers to those questions are usually not stated in philosophical terms but in the practices and traditions that form men and women.

For women the answer is easier. A female’s first experience is an intimate connection with a member of her own sex. She is in the womb of a female for nine months, and is closely joined to a female by the years of nursing. She can model herself on the person to whom she is emotionally closest: her mother. The role that defines the identity of a woman is that of mother. Her honor as a woman is chastity before marriage, and fidelity and fertility within marriage. Such is the social role and identity of almost all women. There are exceptions of course. Even in pagan Rome the Vestal Virgins were honored, and Christianity honors Mary, who is the model for both virgins and mothers.

Because women’s primary experience is of unity, they are peace-weavers, an Old English term. They try to keep the family and society together by restraining the aggressive instincts of men. Among the rulers of society, marriages cement alliances and, everyone hopes, bring peace. It doesn’t always succeed, but making love is better than making war. The motto of the Hapsburgs was Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria nube -- Let others wage war: thou, O happy Austria, marry. Dynastic marriages were their policy and gave them control of much of Europe. Maria Theresa was the mother of Europe; Queen Victoria’s children created a network of family relationships which helped keep the peace until the fateful year 1914. Some early Christian documents show Mary as the one who sends the apostles on their various missions. She too was a center of unity in the earliest days of the church; she is the only individual mentioned in the group that receives the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

But a man’s identity is less defined by his biological role. He begets the children that are necessary for the survival of a society, but that role is accomplished in a matter of minutes. He may die soon afterwards. The name Postumus, common in antiquity, indicates that the child was born after the death of his father. What is the basic role of a man as a man?

The anthropologist David Gilmore in his book Manhood in the Making surveys numerous societies and concludes: “Men nurture their society by shedding their blood, their sweat, and their semen, by bringing home food for both child and mother, and by dying if necessary in faraway places to provide a safe haven for their people.” A man’s role as a man is to procreate, provide, and protect.

For a young male to become a man who fulfills this role is difficult in all societies. The person to whom he is closest is a woman; but he can’t imitate her to become a man. He must distance himself from the person to whom he is emotionally closest, and always feels the tug to fall back into the safety of the world of women. Even Jesus left his mother to carry out his mission. Lesser men must do the same.

A boy leaves this safe and sheltered world and enters the world of men, and even if he lives in a society that provides a clear path to manhood he must struggle. Boys are  usually initiated in a painful ceremony that breaks the bond with the mother and connects him to the world of man. In simple societies, the initiation is a one-time affair; if he fulfills the initiation and survives, he is now a man.

Often the initiation involves physical pain and the danger of death. But some societies take a different path. After the defeat of Bar Kokhba’s rebellion against the Romans in 132-135 A.D., the rabbis chose to form a manhood that would not destroy Jewry by aggression against the more powerful. The Bar Mitzvah was the initiation; the ideal was the man who studied the Law day and night. Women took care of the practical matters of running the business and dealing with the outside world. The ideal Jewish man was a scholar. But this Judaism provided no protection against the murderous aggression of the Nazis, and Jews have returned to a military initiation which dedicates men to protecting the Jewish people in Israel.

This is a sketch of womanhood and manhood. The potential for conflict in any union of man and woman is clear. Women seek peace and unity in order to carry out their role; men must often seek danger and conflict, both to prove their manhood and to provide for and protect their families. Men fight and die in wars; they take the dangerous jobs in society, jobs that often pay well because they have a high injury and fatality rate.

A Christian woman lives both in the world with its biological and physical demand and in the world of the Gospel. But there is little conflict between the role of the woman as woman and the demands of Christian life. Nurturing and bringing peace are what a woman does both as a woman and as a Christian.

A man is in a much more difficult position. The clearest conflict between the man’s role as a man and the Gospel is in warfare. To protect his people a man must be prepared to fight and kill; but he is told “Blessed are the peacemakers,” “To one who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also, and from one who takes away your cloak do not withhold your tunic either.” Some Christians are pacifists, and the old-fashioned Quakers and the Amish are admirable. But what should Ukrainian men have done when the Russians invaded? “If the Russians take one province, give them another province”?

A Christian man’s warfare is a spiritual warfare, but as a member of society he also has a role in the physical survival of society. Unlike the Amish, almost all churches have had to live with the conflict between the role of men to protect and the seeming demands of the Gospel not to resist evil doers. In the sexual abuse crisis that afflicts the Catholic Church, bishops sometimes really felt that they had to be merciful to abusers by not punishing them; but this caused bishops to fail in their role as protectors of children. Bishops tried to avoid conflict and to maintain the unity of the church by not exposing and punishing evildoers in the clergy. This policy failed, and failed because bishops saw their role as a feminine rather than a masculine one. They were like mothers who try to maintain the unity of the family by ignoring a father’s incestuous relationship with a daughter. Women do this because they are formed as women to be peacemakers and unifiers. 

The roles of women and men have in-built weaknesses. It is easier to see in men who seek out unnecessary danger and conflict; but women fail when they allow their role as unifier to prevent them from necessary confrontation and conflict. Both men and women are fallen, and their fallenness is present in their very roles as man and woman.

But these weaknesses are only the negative side of the positive roles that men and women bring to marriage. A woman is the unifier. When she conceives, the bodies of the man and woman are united forever in the child. The child leaves his or her cells behind in the mother to help protect her – even if the child is aborted. The mother feeds the child from her own body and gives the child his or her first experience of a human relationship. The man sees the love of the mother for the child, half of whose genes are his. The love that first united the man and woman grows and includes more and more in its circle. And all of this is on the natural level, but already bears the marks of charity. As  St. Paul said, woman will be saved by childbearing, and the man also can participate in this giving of new life and fulfill his role as procreator.

The man, as I mentioned, has the more difficult role, if he is conscientious. He participates in this circle of charity, but his role also includes providing and protecting. Work may take him away from his family, making it difficult to cultivate his relationship with his wife and children. He may dislike his work, it may be dangerous, but it is necessary. The more important the work to society, the more it tends to take him away from his family: doctors often must work odd hours or be on call at all times, firefighters and police and emergency medical technicians have odd hours and face dangers.

But in doing his work the man builds up society and provides for and protects his family and other families, extending the love that has its source in the love of man and woman, but which reaches out more and more to include others.

In his role as protector a man faces the gravest difficulties. Men are disposable; women and children are not. Any man knows that when something bad comes through the front door, he has to face it so that his wife and children can escape out the back door. He may be called on to defend his country from invasion, and die in battle to give his wife and children, to give all families, a chance of survival.

A Christian man also has the role of headship, but it is the headship that Christ the King exemplifies from the cross. As C. S. Lewis said, the man has the crown in the marriage, but it is a crown of thorns. Man’s greater musculature was given to him so that he could carry the cross.  He must sacrifice himself for his wife, as Christ sacrificed himself for the church. As the church responds to Christ with love and gratitude, so should the wife respond to her husband with love and gratitude. Men receive honor and privileges in society, but the price they pay is the possibility of an early death.

But the crown is also the crown that the man and woman wear in the wedding ceremonies of the Eastern churches. The man and woman are a new and better Adam and Eve, and from their love new life comes, life that will endure forever in heaven, and be deified in the way that Adam and Eve tried to grasp on their own, but which we can receive only as a gift from God by being incorporated into the body of Christ. In this way the love of man and woman is taken up into charity, into the Holy Spirit, into the friendship which the Three Persons forever have, into the processions of the Trinity, to endure in God for all eternity.