God and Gender

Let's continue with last Friday's post on the cosmic implications of human sexuality. I suppose we have to start with the cosmic implications of humanness as such, and then go from there. Again, human beings are in the image of the Creator, such that there are traces of our origin even in our physical form.

How so? Let's answer that in the form of an aphorism or two:

The laws of biology alone do not have fingers delicate enough to fashion the beauty of a face (Dávila).

For that matter, the feminine body is far too perfect and spiritually too eloquent to be nothing more than a transitory accident (Schuon). Can I get a witness?

Thus, Christianity does not deny the splendor of the world, but rather invites us to search for its origin, to climb towards its pure snow (Dávila).

The journey is more aesthetic than epistemological; or, to be perfectly accurate, it is epistemology via aesthetics, or knowledge through beauty:

Approaching religion through art is not the caprice of an aesthete: aesthetic experience spontaneously tends to expand into a presentiment of religious experience (ibid.).

For which reason, When religion and aesthetics are divorced from each other, it is not known which is corrupted sooner (ibid.).

So, the human form is an aesthetic object, which in turn draws us toward its nonlocal spiritual source.

Recall Schuon's gag about the human station being both the summit of and exit from terrestrial conditions. The former goes to immanence, while the latter goes to transcendence; equally, the former goes to man's splendor, while the latter goes to his humility: man is a kind of everything/nothing, depending upon how we look, i.e., with two eyes or three.

Now, God is either beyond gender or the synthesis of both. Thus there is an aspect of man that is beyond gender, but in this regard, the left commits what Wilber calls a pre/trans fallacy, in that God is beyond gender, not before it. Insofar as man is concerned, he may transcend gender, but only after he is one. This is why the left is committing a systemic cruelty to children in trying to deny them, or confuse them about, this primordial identity.

As Schuon says, "the liberating Way may be either 'virile' or 'feminine,' although it is not possible to have a strict line of demarcation between the two modes" -- partly because each is always in a dynamic rapport with its projected complement. In Jungian terms, for the male, the animus relates to the projected anima, while for the female it is the other way around. We are all searching for the archetypal other who completes us on this plane.

Schuon points out that our deiformity must be a feminine attribute, in that we are the passive partner vis-a-vis God, who is active. Here, Mary represents the archetype of archetypes, i.e., of human receptivity to the Divine energy.

For which reason female has an ambiguous relationship to male. I don't want to trigger anyone, but Schuon suggests that "there are two ways of situating the sexes, either in a horizontal or in a vertical sense." According to the horizontal, "man is on the right and woman on the left," whereas considered vertically, "man is above and woman below" (as reflected in the God-Mary relation).

Anyone who uses this as a pretext for domination or oppression has thoroughly misunderstood the cosmic lesson. I would suggest that, to the extent that women are oppressed -- most conspicuously, in the Islamic world -- it is because of a pathological perversion of the vertical relationship, or an infection of that relationship by horizontal mind parasites.

Which I think Genesis 3 goes to. Consider the verticality of its metaphysic: Adam comes from God, and then Eve from Adam. The relationship is inverted when Eve listens to the serpent (a quintessential archetype of horizontality), who then pulls Adam away from God. This is not to blame woman per se, because Adam is still ultimately responsible for his ontological reverse metanoia, such that he turns from the above to the below. Eve only tempts, she does not compel.

And again, Mary represents the reversal of this reversal. Thus, the Eve/Mary axis is the same as the Nothing/Everything axis alluded to above. You might say that the serpent promises man everything and delivers nothing.

Like the left.