C. S. Lewis’s popular satire, The Screwtape Letters, showed us the way our mind often thinks things through in a way that justifies activity which we know we should not do. This book brought Lewis into the limelight and helped launch his literary career, even though the unique style used a devilish mentor explaining how to convince people to turn away from a path of righteousness, Lewis was not the first, nor would he be the last, to investigate the psychology of justifying ourselves. We can find this theme, for example, within The Book of the Rewards of Life by St. Hildegard von Bingen.

Throughout her book, Hildegard gives various erroneous dispositions, the way they tempt us to follow them, and the proper responses needed to overcome them. For example, she began her work with a vision of seven sins and seven responses to them: Worldly Love, Impudence, Jesting, Hard-Heartedness, Slothfulness, Anger, and Foolish Joy. In each, we are shown elements of truth which attract us:  there is always some good which is abused and leads us to evil. Examining how Hildegard portrayed Worldly Love and Slothfulness offers far-reaching implications for how we should view ourselves in the world today.

First, St. Hildegard had a vision of “Worldly Love:” an Ethiopian, full of youthful vitality, has his hands around a tree with branches containing a large variety of flowers.  The figure then speaks, “I hold all the world’s kingdoms with their greatness in my hands. Why should I be withered when I have all this greenness in my hands? Why should I be old when I could be young? Why should I lose my sight to blindness? If this happened, I would be embarrassed. I would hang onto the beauty of this world as long as I can. I do not understand words spoken about another life when have never seen it.” After the Ethiopian speaks, the tree withers and falls and everything becomes dark.

It might seem difficult to understand how, exactly, this represents “worldly love.” Yet, what is presented is the transitory nature of worldly goods.  What we love is only the world in a particular state of its history. We can be attracted to the good things in the world. They truly represent something great when they are at their peak. This is how we feel when we are young, when we think we can go out into the world and make it our own.

Yet, contained within this vision is its own undermining. What beauty, what strength, what vitality we have shall, one day, no longer be there with us. If all we have is this world and its impermanent beauty, then we have nothing: we will end up being depressed. We will not even be able to appreciate ourselves and our bodies as they age and become weaker and in need of care and attention. We might like who we are in our youth but it is fleeting.  Can we find the beauty and joy in the world when we are weak and infirm? Can we accept our bodily state when it is imperfect? Worldly love, with its affection for impermanent moments, makes us momentarily happy when we meet these sham standards of glory, but it will not allow us to appreciate ourselves once these favored moments pass. We should enjoy the gift of life – as Heavenly Love says in response to Worldly Love – but how can we enjoy it if we only accept a small portion of it and judge everything according to it? We will push for a state which we cannot always have. We will try to grow in self-glory only to find our very bodies keeping us away from such infantile glory. We will find, even though we claim to love the world, we really hate it, because we have no ground to understand it, to accept it for what it is.  Worldly love in this fashion leads to worldly hate as soon as that which we try to love is shown to be false to us. The one who can accept weakness, the one who can accept the not-so-glorious state and transformation of their bodies, those who can accept that they might need the help of others, to stand with others in order to thrive, will be those most capable of appreciating the world, and truly loving it for what it is, instead of the shallow vision of what we want it to be.

Slothfulness presents to us different goods and different temptations. St. Hildegard saw it as a man with the body of a worm and a head where its left ear was like a rabbit’s, so big it covered the whole head. Sloth is shown as self-justifying because sloth does nothing; therefore, sloth does nothing which will make anyone hurt or angry. Is that not a good thing? “I do not want to injure anyone by rushing [….] I will not pay any attention to the holy and the poor since they cannot benefit me in any way. I want to be pleasant to everyone so that I do not suffer. For if I fight with someone, they might hit back with force. And if I injure someone, they might injure me more. As long as I am alike I will remain quiet. Likewise, it is sometimes better to lie and deceive than it is to speak the truth. It is also better for me to gather possessions than to do away with them. It is better to run away from the strong than to fight them.”

Here, as “Divine Victory” points out, “good intentions” are being used to justify inactivity, but if one looks closely at oneself, those good-intentions are lies, self-deceptions seeking to pacify the conscience when one looks at injustice in the world. “I don’t want to harm anyone,” while a good intention, is false because if we let injustices in the world continue without speaking up, we let people be harmed. Sloth is about “looking out for number one,” while claiming it is about looking out for others. It is very easy for us to fall into this trap. We lie to others out of it. “We don’t want to hurt them.” But the truth is if we are dishonest, we are hurting them and ourselves. Sloth only does that which is necessary for relaxation, for “enjoyment” in life, and anything which would trouble us, must be pushed aside, and left for someone else, someone who is stronger, more capable than us. Or so we let ourselves think. After all, the opposition is too great.  Who are we to do anything? But justice demands we try.  Even if we fail, we help more by trying than when we stand idly and let injustice thrive unopposed.

Self-deception always borrows from the good, where it feeds off of the good like a parasite, using only a small portion of the “good” to discourage us from proper attitudes and ways of living in the world. It is such sloth, for example, which led to the accumulation of injustices towards women throughout the centuries, and it is such sloth which can now be seen in the reverse, when some radical feminists show slothfulness despite acknowledging demonstrable injustices toward men.  This is how, even when injustice is recognized, we find excuses not to care – to let someone else care – sighing with a righteous resignation that echoes through the world.

There are many other examples of self-deception found in St. Hildegard’s work.  It’s a remarkable book with reflections that tell us much about ourselves, and how we think ourselves into error.  St. Hildegard came from a different time, and sees some things quite differently than us today – but in this way, she offers a better light to us, from a time when self-criticism was common.  While nearly forgotten today, self-examination can clearly be a fruitful endeavor in these times of heightened individualism.

In my last post, I discussed the way Peter Jackson’s films have misunderstood J.R.R. Tolkien’s works by including more roles for women in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. I pointed out that Tolkien had already included significant role models for women, and that Tolkien’s work had to be understood in the context of a man’s story representing gender in a masculine way. To complement Tolkien would require a story from a woman’s perspective, not the creation of roles for women, placing them haphazardly into the scene, not exactly fitting right with the narrative. I would like to continue this conversation by examining one of the central themes found in all of Tolkien’s stories and how they represent Tolkien and his own life experiences. This theme is romantic love – but not just romantic love, but heroic love, the struggle that a man might have to go through for his beloved. Women have their own version of this, which one can find in other works of literature, and their version needs to be read and studied on their own, as a way to complement Tolkien’s insight. But Tolkien’s work is a masculine voice and what it can offer about masculine romantic, heroic love is compromised by Jackson.

J.R.R. Tolkien had, for himself, a great, romantic affair, filled with the struggles one associates with heroic love, and it served as the foundation for the great love story found within Middle Earth (the tale of Beren and Lúthien). After Tolkien’s mother had died, the priest and family friend, Fr. Francis Morgan, was given custody over Tolkien and his brother, Hilary. When a young Tolkien met Edith Bratt, they quickly fell in love. Tolkien’s love for Edith was seen to get the best of him, and Fr. Morgan forbade Tolkien from seeing or contacting Edith until Tolkien turned 21. Fr. Morgan wanted Tolkien to focus on his studies; he was also concerned because Edith was an Anglican. Tolkien reluctantly obeyed.

As soon as Tolkien turned 21, Tolkien wrote Edith, only to get a letter telling him that she was engaged and had thought Tolkien had forgotten her. A week later, Tolkien went to visit her, and convinced her to reject the man she was engaged to and to marry him instead (with the requirement that she became Catholic, which she did). It is clear, when one reads what happened over the following years, that their love remained through various struggles, some which hurt both them and their family (one struggle seems to have been a religious one, which later worked itself out). These hardships reminded Tolkien that even with true love, the struggle for that love would always be there, to test it and purify it until the end. The fun they had before being forbidden to see each other, as well as the wait and struggle Tolkien had to go through in order to be married, and the heartaches they felt after, can be seen throughout Tolkien’s works, but none better than in the tale of Beren and Lúthien (an identification Tolkien made early on, calling Edith his Lúthien, even on her tombstone).

The story of Beren and Lúthien is one of the greatest stories of Tolkien. It was one of the first he started to write, working on it throughout his whole life. It’s a wonderful, detailed story but a short synopsis must suffice here. It was a story of the First Age of Middle Earth. The hero, Beren, saw and fell in love with the Elven princess, Lúthien. He was the last survivor of a group of men who had withstood the onslaught of Morgoth, the Dark Lord (who, as Sauron’s master, was far more deadly and evil). Lúthien was the fairest of the elves, and loved by her father, King Thingol. When Thingol heard of Beren and Lúthien’s love, he was set against it. He said he would only give his daughter to Beren if Beren did an impossible task: bring one of the three Great Silmarils which Morgoth had stolen from the Elves and give it to Thingol. Beren said he would do just that, and that the next time Thingol saw him, he would have a Silmaril in hand.

The tale is one filled with great heroic deeds, of great love and great woe. Beren would prove one of the greatest men in history but he would die soon after completing his task. Lúthien, in sorrow, died from her grief. Being an Elf, and Beren a human, she feared their destinies would keep them apart, but because of her great story and the depth of love and grief in her heart, Mandos, the keeper of the Elven dead, gave to her the desire of her heart: both Beren and Lúthien were given another life together, both as mortals, to enjoy the glory of their love.

Beren and Lúthien became the great tale of love, told by the Elves themselves. The story of Aragorn and Arwen, as told in Appendix A of the The Lord of the Rings, is a secondary version of Beren and Lúthien. Aragorn was a great man, and Arwen, the daughter of Elrond, was like Lúthien reborn. She was the Evenstar, the most beautiful of her generation. They first met when Aragorn was twenty, when Aragorn fell in love with her, similar to how Beren fell in love with Lúthien. Elrond, her father, had taken Aragorn in and loved him, but when Elrond saw what was in Aragorn’s heart, Elrond warned him that Arwen was of a nobler lineage with a destiny among the Elves. Elrond foresaw dark times and counseled Aragorn not to be concerned with things which he could not have, including a wife. Aragorn struggled with this advice, but kept himself from Arwen.

It would be thirty years before Arwen and Aragom meet again and Arwen finds her love for Aragorn. Then, they would pledge themselves for each other. Elrond, when he heard of this, said though he loved Aragorn as a son, he would not allow the marriage and the doom it brought unless Aragorn proved himself by becoming King. This task represented, like in the tale of Beren and Lúthien, the difficulty and sacrifice one must go through for love. As with Lúthien, Arwen would have to face mortal existence and suffer the fate of men, for her love. Jackson’s version of Aragorn and Arwen lost this grandeur, the sacrifice and the nobility of the love itself, when he compromised Tolkien’s concept in order to create a bigger role for Arwen.

In these tales, Tolkien tells the story of how men struggle for love, and how that struggle is shared by their beloved (as well as with many others). Tolkien wrote a happy ending to the two great tales – though, both touched with bitterness – showing the great beatitude of love and how it gives men a sense of value through their struggles for love’s sake. This is how a man can understand love, for it is a man’s way of understanding through his own accomplishments, even accomplishments for love. In the end, if love wins, it is an eschatological joy, which must be earned and not just given for it to be of value. This is also how one can understand another love story in Tolkien’s works, the love of the Ents with the Entwives. The two have become separated; Tolkien himself is not sure if any Entwives still exist in the world. The Ents, in their desire for their Wives, represent their hope for their reunion, a kind of eschatological hope in and of itself:

Ent:

When Winter comes, the winter wild that hill and wood shall slay;
When trees shall fall and starless night devour the sunless day;
When wind is in the deadly East, then in the bitter rain
I’ll look for thee, and call to thee; I’ll come to thee again!

Entwife:

When Winter comes, and singing ends; when darkness falls at last;
When broken is the barren bough, and light and labour past;
I’ll look for thee, and wait for thee, until we meet again:
Together we will take the road beneath the bitter rain!

Both:

Together we will take the road that leads into the West,
And far away will find a land where both our hearts may rest.

Together the two will find rest – the rest found in love, the rest Tolkien represents can only be had at the end of a vast struggle for love. Without it, without such testing, the love is weak and incomplete and lacks value to the masculine sensibility. Love’s labor – it is not lost; the hope for love, in the middle of the struggle, is an eschatological hope which keeps the lovers united even when apart.

Tolkien himself would feel the full blunt of this when his love, Edith, died. He would have to wait, like the Ents, for the reuniting with his love. And yet, it is clear, his hope was that the two of them would be together, in heavenly union, for all eternity, bonded by love. Buried with a tombstone naming them Beren and Lúthien, they now lie together, awaiting the final resurrection, where they too can be in the land where their hearts may find eternal rest

C.S. Lewis, observing how Hollywood adapted novels for film, noted that books without a significant female presence often ended up having one created for the movie.  Lewis believed that the scriptwriter, in doing so, did a disservice to the story being adapted onto film.  The woman often ended up being a romantic interest to the hero, with little to no real connection to the story itself.  So why was she added?  As an appeal to women? ~the thinking being that without such a plot device, the movie would not be to the liking of females.  

While there might be some merit to the idea of adding a feminine character to an otherwise masculine film, what we get from Hollywood is rarely complimentary to women.  The woman has little to no real place in the story, and so is placed in situations which do not matter.  The woman, therefore, is unimportant to the movie and her role is denigrated as a secondary, accidental feature.  Why should such a character be introduced?  Won’t her insignificance in the story reinforce old stereotypes about women in general?   While some might applaud the idea of appealing to women,Hollywood too often appeals, not to the best qualities of women or their complementary nature with men, but rather, to qualities which make her irrelevant in the world scene. 

I find Peter Jackson’s attempt to “include women” in movies based upon Tolkien’s Hobbit and Lord of the Rings to be not only ironic, but utterly wrong.  Tolkien’s work The Lord of the Rings certainly has prominent women.  For example, Eowyn plays a pivotal and significant role, and, through her, Tolkien provides an important statement of the value and place of women like St Joan of Arc in the world.  Tolkien shows us that there are things which men just cannot accomplish, and women, with their strengths, can.  Eowyn was able to dispatch the Witch King, the Lord of the Nazgul, the most powerful of the kings of men.  No man could do so, but her strengths, her integrity, her assurance of herself and her mission in the world allowed her to do what no man could, to overcome the supposed might of men and show it to be utterly powerless. 

Galadriel, Tolkien’s Marian figure, also held an important place in Tolkien’s world. She was able to bridge racial biases, as can be seen by the way Gimli the Dwarf ended up giving her the highest form of veneration and respect.  Dwarves and Elves were rivals and yet Gimli, in seeing Galadriel, felt a deep, pure love for her.  And it is good that he should.  Galadriel is shown to be one of the few who could and did transcend the temptation of Sauron’s Ring.  Frodo offered it to her, and she could have taken it, to become a powerful Queen over all creation – but she said no.  Deep within her and her femininity she was able to find that no, the need to reject a masculine call for dominance. 

Galadriel and Eowyn together show the integrity of women and their transcendent, complementary authority to men.  It is not that men have no value, of course, but rather, men and women need each other, and what is seen as a weakness in one is a strength in the other.   Yet, Peter Jackson, Hollywood’s Tolkien scriptwriter, felt Tolkien did not do enough to represent women.  He used Arwen, Aragorn’s beloved, as a third representation of women, having her accomplish feats in his films which were not in Tolkien’s work.  Like Hollywood writers before him, Jackson felt the need to appeal to women and provide them a platform beyond the role Tolkien gave women.  Jackson thought Arwen would provide this in his adaptation of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.  But in doing so,Jackson shows that he does not appreciate the value and strength shown in Eowyn and Galadriel.  Jackson does not see that the portrayal of strong women that he wanted had already been done by Tolkien’s female characters.  By creating a woman to act like a man (Arwen),Jackson denigrated the strength and character of women.

The Hobbit, now split into three films, once again gives us Peter Jackson’s desire to appeal to women by making up a character not in Tolkien’s works: Tauriel.  She has a brief role in the first Hobbit film, but when the Dwarves find their way into Mirkwood, she will be given a significant role.  She is a Wood Elf and the head of their guard.  Now, why is she needed? What exactly is the point of her character?  ~to say women are undervalued by Tolkien?  But by suggesting such, the women of Tolkien’s stories find their value and their purpose diminished.  By creating such a superficial role for a woman,Jackson only makes women superficial.  This is exactly the problem with the creation of feminine roles in movies and stories which do not need them.  Not every story has a place for women, just as not every story has a place for men.  It is good to desire the proper respect for both genders, but forcing a story to do so, as is seen in the world at large, often denigrates one or the other. 

Tolkien, whose works are masculine and from a masculine perspective, ascribes great value to women.  Women have their own stories and interests, which complement men and their stories. Just as it is best not to try to force men in women’s stories where they do not belong, so women should not be forced into men’s stories where they do not belong.  It is not to say men do not belong in women’s stories: clearly they do, but often in a secondary fashion, just as women might not hold a prominent place in a man’s story.  These stories must be seen as reflexive of the gender and what their values in the world, and what is needed is not the imposition of one gender in the stories of another, but the combination of stories, of men’s stories and women’s stories, allowing each to show and provide something of the human condition, showing aspects of both genders which such an imposition which deny. 

Tolkien, I think, understood this point.  He expressed it a few ways.  One way could be found in the division between the tree-herders, the Ents, with their Ent-Wives, where the two were divided from each other, looking for each other, and will only find each other in the eschaton (that is, the end of the world, if the Ent-Wives still exist).  Another can be found in his Dwarves.  We know there are Dwarven women.  We know they exist.  They have to exist, because the Dwarves, as a race, continue to propagate throughout Middle Earth.  Yet, they are mysterious and hidden.  We are given only secondary glimpses of them.  We are not given their perspective of the events in Tolkien’s world. But we are given the fact that Dwarven women are rare, and when encountered, they can be mistaken for Dwarven men, as Tolkien related in the first Appendix to The Lord of the Rings: 

Dis was the daughter of Thrain II.  She is the only dwarf-woman named in these histories.  It was said by Gimli that there are few dwarf-women, probably no more than a third of the whole people.  They are in voice and appearance, and in garb if they must go on a journey, so like to the dwarf-men that the eyes and ears of other peoples cannot tell them apart.  This has given rise to the foolish opinion among Men that there are no dwarf-women, and that the Dwarves ‘grow out of stone.’ (The Return of the King, Appendix A). 

While we know they exist, their direct voice is more or less absent.  Tolkien, in a way, cannot tell their story, because their story lies outside of the events of his histories.  Yet their story is integral to those same events.  The lack of a homeland for the Dwarves makes their plight greater; they need to be protected and kept safe, so that the Dwarven race can continue to thrive: 

It is because of the fewness of women among them that the kind of the Dwarves increases slowly, and is in peril when they have no secure dwellings.  For Dwarves only take one wife or husband each in their lives, and are jealous, as in all matters of their rights.  The number of dwarf-men that marry is actually less than one-third.  For not all the women take husbands: some desire none; some desire one that they cannot get, and will have no other. As for the men, very many also do not desire marriage, being engrossed in their crafts.  (The Return of the King, Appendix A). 

For the other races of Middle Earth, the Dwarven women are a riddle.  Their absence in the story is not because of their insignificance, but rather, their outright importance to the Dwarves and their society.  The Dwarven women have a place and a destiny, that we know is occurring – but it is a story which is not to be told to us.  Their mysterious nature, their hiddenness from ordinary view, shows their absolute value and significance. Trying to place them in the story would undervalue them.  They have a story of their own, a story which cannot be told to us, to outsiders.  That is their point.  When we don’t see Dwarven women, when we don’t encounter them on screen (or in Tolkien’s stories), it is natural to wonder , “What about the Dwarven women?”  Is their place being ignored?  The answer is “no” – their absence reflects their value, not their lack of value. And in a way, this is what we should expect. Tolkien’s story represents, for the most part, the stories of the men of Middle Earth (and the few, extraordinary women who have a significant role in that story).  Trying to put them into the story would undermine them. Silence about them represents the mystery of women to men. (This absence is not to be seen as their denigration but their exaltation.) 

The role of women in the world often differs significantly from the role of men.  Women have their own history, their own stories, which would only be denigrated if placed as some minor feature in the story of men.  To complement each other, men and women need universal stories together, but also need stories of their own.  Ignoring this, the genders, and their values, are lost. When we don’t see Dwarven women, we should resist the modern tendency to equate their absence with unimportance.   By being mysterious, even to the rest of Middle Earth, Tolkien points to the complementary nature of men and women, where one cannot even begin to tell the story of the other except by leaving space for them to tell their own tale.

Humility is one of these great virtues which can make us soar.  If practiced, it can bring us great peace, as St. Anthony of Egypt was to find:  Abba Anthony said: ‘I saw the snares that the enemy spreads out over the world and I said, groaning, “What can get from such snares?” Then I heard a voice saying to me, “Humility.”’ (The Sayings of the Desert Fathers).  

Humility allows us to understand and accept our own limitations. If we know our limits and work with them, they teach us why we need others, why we need to work together in a community, not thinking we can do all things by ourselves.  If we can accept ourselves, our weaknesses, we can accept others and their weaknesses.  We can learn to love and respect each other without trying to manipulate them.  Even if we know the truth, we are still limited in its execution, and we must be willing to accept such limitations, otherwise we end up in bitter distress, taking it out bitterly on those who do not agree with us.  Ilias the Presbyter said it well: 

Truth without humility is blind. That is why it becomes contentious: it tries to support itself on something, and finds nothing except rancour. (“Gnomic Anthology I” in The Philokalia. Volume III.)

By truly knowing and understanding ourselves, we do not try to become something which is impossible for us to be and we avoid frustration by our lack of success.  This is not to say humility is about accepting unjust impositions upon ourselves, such as social constructs meant to limit us and prevent us from achieving our full potential.   

Humility is not humiliation, though humiliation often tries to use humility to force a given end on us.

For example, it was quite common throughout the centuries for society to treat women as incapable of many tasks, such as rational discourse, and women were told that humility required them to accept such declarations without challenge.  Time and time again, brilliant women would allow such humiliation to keep them from self-perfection; if they entered into social discourse, they would do so with the caveat that they are women.  Even if what they said was good, they would still qualify their thoughts, “But what do I know, being a woman?”  This is also true in many other situations.  Slavery was often kept in place through such humiliation.  Aboriginal peoples would often be humiliated by “civilized society,” being told to take their proper place behind those who conquered them. The history of humanity includes a history of humiliation, of one group or another finding a way to lord it over others through a claim of superiority. 

Humiliation works on and corrupts the virtue of humility.   It uses ideologies to promote its agenda.  If there is any challenge to the system, humiliation seeks to turn back and repress that challenge by socially disabling and humbling the transgressor. 

Humiliation often uses the rhetoric of humility, twisting it from within, taking phrases and statements of truly humble people and turning the spirit of humility into the legality of humiliation.  Humility, on the other hand, seeks self-transcendence: by accepting the limitations of oneself, one can reach out to others, to become strong together in communal society, allowing one to perfect that which one is great at and give it to the community.  Humiliation is about self-destruction, about finding a way to encourage some person or another to admit defeat and not strive to better themselves, but to be trapped by the expectations of another.  Humility relies on truths, allowing one not only to know their own limitations, but also their strengths. Humiliation twists the truth, never allowing one to know their strength, but only to see, and be trapped by, their own weaknesses.  Humility is about truth, while humiliation is about the falsification of humility: so-called false humility is the end result of humiliation.

Humility is the opposite of pride, while pride is the foundation of humiliation.  Humility seeks the integral good of the whole person, while pride only seeks the elevation of the ego.  Pride wants to create a vision of reality which cannot exist, and impose that vision upon the self (destroying it from self-transcendence) and upon others (by trying to push them down through humiliation). Humility allows for unity and love and is needed to heal the rifts which create disorder in the world.  Those who have and those who have not, those who consider themselves victors and those who consider themselves losers all have need for humility and a true and honest assessment of oneself and of others.  In this way, humility promotes finding ways to come back together and heal the rifts.  Pride works against humility, seeking to belittle and destroy the other.  If I am a “have not”, my pride wants to humiliate the “haves”; if I am the winner in a contest, my pride seeks to humiliate the losers so they will not threaten me in the future.  Humility wants what is best for all, while humiliation only wants a simulacrum of the best for the ego. 

Humility is not an easy virtue to achieve.  Humiliating oneself can create false-humility, but this drifts toward a nihilistic self-hatred.  Seeking to be humble, we often become our own worst enemies.  We let our pride create a vision for the self and then look down upon ourselves for not meeting our own requirements.  The true battle is the battle for humility within, a battle which allows us to love and be loved, to accept that there is good within.  Humility prevents us from imposing false expectations on ourselves, and so we do not get hurt even when others seek to humiliate us.  But if we have not learned humility, but practice self-humiliation, our pride is hurt even worse by the humiliation done to us by others: we take their words to heart, and turn it in upon ourselves, destroying ourselves even more even as we erroneously believe that we are being humble.  

Humility is one of the most important and yet most abused virtues.  True humility sets us free from false expectations, while false humility creates socialized inferiority leading to the humiliation of one or more people for ideological reasons or as a result of pride.  If we want to move forward as a people, if we want to make sure as a society we do not wallow in our own pain and sorrow and self-destruct, we need to embrace humility – true humility, not the false humility of humiliation which we so often confused with true humility.  If we want to know how to save ourselves as well as our society from the damage of pride and humiliation, the voice spoken to St. Anthony is as prophetic to us today as it was to him.  There is only one way: true humility.

We live in a constantly changing world.  There is little to no social stability left.  People are finding it difficult to have proper relationships with each other.  We are becoming increasingly self-centered.  We are finding ourselves in our own constructed worlds and finding it difficult to interact with the world at large.  More and more, people interact with mechanical devices, shifting hours of focus to remote and often unreal associations, away from a reality that is lost in front of them.  While we are trying to find ways to remain in contact with each other, for the most part, all the artificial connectivity is increasing our sense of loneliness, giving many a sense of detached malaise which they cannot overcome. 

Rapid changes and expansion in technology drive much of this destabilizing and focus on virtual, constructed reality.   While technology delivers much good to humankind, its immediacy blinds us to consider and study the long-term consequences of the tools we use.  Are we giving due consideration to what we are doing, and wisely pondering the dangers of our creations?   As we become increasingly accustomed to the quick, ever-changing environment we find ourselves in, we lose perspective, tossing in a sea of rapid change, with little to no anchoring, and without a center which we can hold onto if the waves throw us under.

Technology has made many of us look at each other in an instrumental sense, through a hermeneutic which makes us consider each other as objects able to be manipulated for our own gain.  We have come to believe that we should find a way – the fastest and easiest way – to get what we want and ignore the longer term consequences of our actions.  At best, we put off the ramifications of our acts to the future, hoping we can create something to deal with the problematic consequences as they arise. 

By failing to anticipate and safeguard ourselves from natural harms, we fall apart, not only as a society, but as persons.  We lose all sense of purpose except the immediate attainment of what we want.  Without future vision and meaning, for ourselves and societal role, we lose sight of the dignity of others and, ultimately our own personal dignity.  We allow ourselves to become another thing to be manipulated, so long as we believe our immediate desire can be satisfied in the process of such manipulation.  Just as we use others as tools to construct the reality we want, we willingly become the tools of others.   

While we are not completely bound to the environment, our social climate influences us – more so when we are focused upon fulfillment of immediate desires with apathy or disregard for the adverse or negative impacts of various technologies.  

Consider today’s prevailing sexual ethic.  In some quarters, we have turned sexuality into pure technique for pleasure, seeking to create sex as a constructed reality for receiving physical pleasure while apathetic or even disdainful toward the meaning inherent in human sexuality.  Was birth control technology simply incidental to an inevitable depersonalization of human sexual relations or did the technology itself drive the shift in perspective and objective?  I would argue that it is the latter.  While society clearly views birth control devices as a positive good, reliance on this technology, as an immediate end in itself, has cultivated and driven the depersonalization of sexual relations.  The elimination of intimacy and creation of new life as inherent in sexuality has broadly reconfigured sex as a pleasure-seeking engagement, where persons can use each other as tools of pleasure – a blatant depersonalization of society impossible without birth control technology.   

Technology requires wisdom to use.  Without caution, even that which can be for good will turn on us and lead to devastating results.  The solution is not an outright rejection of all technology:  we have been given the gift of reason and the capacity for prudence.  Society is changing and changing for the worse due to our foolishness, but this does not mean we are too late. We need to examine where we are today, and to re-establish true human community, to value real interactions with each other.  We can and should continue to seek out the good in technology, but we should understand that all goods are limited and generally have unforeseen consequences which undermine and tarnish the “good” – call it the “dark” lining of a seemingly lovely, white cloud. 

For example, consider what is missed – what does not happen – when we attach ourselves to a computer screen.   Each member of a family is looking at their own individuated screen, creating their own mini-reality.  They are entirely disconnected from each other, save greetings in route to the bathroom or kitchen.  The dark impact of this disconnection is most evident upon human sexuality, as individuals seek to practice and heighten sexual pleasure through virtual experience on a computer.  Human sexuality is cut off from its full and proper good use, not by contraception, but by removal of all real, interactive contact.  Through technology, people spend hours alone, seeking to heighten the pleasures of a sexual feeling and climax, without regard to their own personal dignity being noticed and embraced.  Without such dignity, sex itself is lost.  Baudrillard predicted this outcome in Forget Foucault:

While psychoanalysis seemingly inaugurates the millennium of sex and desire, it is perhaps what orchestrates it in full view before it disappears altogether.

Technology has put sex into full view with pornography, leading to an artificial shell, a construct which is a shell of the real, perverted and rather self-destructive.  How can anyone think this is a good?   Those who promote free sex as the outcome of modern analysis do more than destroy the family: they promote the destruction of sex itself.

What kind of future will be left for humanity if we allow our innate humanity to be lost to our technology?  What kind of persons will we be?  Those who love humanity, those who believe in the dignity of the human person need to be more aware of the consequences of their actions.  The caution suggested by environmentalists, for example, might sometimes be extreme, but need not go unnoticed, however shortsighted the interests of some environmentalists.  There are good reasons to believe we can and are harming our future through negligence.  We see it in the destruction of social mores around us.  It is time to take such concerns seriously and try to embrace our humanity.  We must not let the objects of our creation get out of hand and control us.  We must have hope.  It is not too late.

“After the fall, man hides, confesses, recognizes and buries his origin and crime in the womb of woman: after the generations are accomplished, God emerges from the womb of Mary Immaculate.” — Paul Claudel

The history of humanity contains many things.  It is a history of glorious accomplishments, of wondrous achievements.  It is also a history of evil and the consequences we have had to face for the evil men and women have done.  It is the history of human desire to rise above the clouds and the history of shame, of humanity trying to displace its evil through scapegoats.

As Paul Claudel intuited, the way women have been treated by many men has been as such scapegoats.  The myth of the fall gives us an example of this.  Adam blamed both Eve and God for his sin, “You gave her to me; it’s your fault.”  Women often have taken the blame for the sins men do.  Even rapists have blamed their victims: if only they had hid themselves, if only they had covered themselves up, the rapist wouldn’t have felt it necessary to do what they did.

From the Laws of Manu to early Christian apologists like Tertullian to the Buddhist thinker Santideva, men thought the way to control their own desires was to place blame on women – even calling women evil – and hide them from society.  Women were confined to home, to protect themselves and society as a whole.

Control by blame and repression works better in theory than practice. Unconscious desires find a way of creating more problems and generating more repressive attitudes.  Some Christian leaders abandoned all private contact with women, even members of their own family – to avoid temptation. While critics point out the ways Muslim cultures hide women and treat them as second class citizens (all for their own good, of course), it is often forgotten many Christian societies did so as well and that these sentiments – to cover women and protect men from temptation – are still expressed within some Christian circles today.

Just as many Christians have considered the influence of cultural mores on theology and moved beyond restrictive practices, so many Muslims (despite what people think) have rejected such treatment of women, distinguishing Islam from such cultural norms.  A prime example of this movement within Islam is the work of Badshah Khan, a Muslim, a friend and co-worker of Gandhi, and a peace activist, who promoted the liberation of women from unjust discrimination in his own society.  Not only did he criticize the stereotypical veil, he promoted the education and voice of women, seeing their liberation as running parallel to the liberation of his people from British rule.

The problem of unjust “placing of blame” upon all women – on using women as scapegoats – is one which finds not correction, but reversal, in radical feminism.  Men, instead of women, became the “placing of blame” scapegoat.  Men are coaxed, bullied and intimidated into hiding their masculinity from themselves and from the world.  Radical feminism blames men for both history’s and the world’s wrongs and injustices and demands apologies, reparations and withdrawal of male needs and viewpoints from the public forum.   If all men and all the ways of men are suspect, then what we have done is create a new hierarchy, not a new way of dealing with the world.

The evil of such scapegoating, though, remains an evil.

When women or men (or any gender group) are blamed and labeled as scapegoats for social problems and woes, the evil ferments and grows and multiplies repression.  The solution is to reject scapegoating and to refuse to blame the “other” for our own faults and ills within society.  This path becomes possible only by mutual recognition of the strengths and weaknesses of each other and forging forward-moving relations so that men and women can work together, complementing each other in unity instead of competing with each other in a vocal and harmful power contest of blaming.

Complementariness not competition is the proper paradigm to escape the evils and restrictions of blaming and blame shifting.   Paul Claudel uses the problems of the past to illustrate how Christian theology attempts to resolve and move beyond:   God became man through a woman.  God reveals himself through the revelation of the dignity of women, not apart from it.  This is the essence of complementarity – it does not abide scapegoating.

Dawa has become a patron for women within the Buddhist traditions, helping to promote the good of women:  among her titles is “mother of liberation” showing the positive value of motherhood, similar to the way the Christian tradition looks at Mary’s motherhood as vindication of motherhood. 

While the Buddha eventually opened up the possibility for women to form monastic communities officially sanctioned by him, the way they were treated indicated that women were still inferiors in society. The rules put a Buddhist monk, even a newly-established monk, as outranking any nun.

Was the Buddha’s solution one which really gave value to women?

One can argue that he gave what he thought he could give for the society of his town and that he sowed the seeds for something greater to come  of it. From the Buddha himself, Buddhism has a way of negating conventions, even Buddhist conventions. Though some solutions are of greater significance than others, Buddhist conventions are often seen as pragmatic, with room for development and change in differing circumstances. Everything is impermanent, and so no social construct should be seen as holding lasting value.

Such pragmatism can be troubling. Did it mean that the difference between men and women should ultimately be overlooked, seen as a mental construct, like so many other constructs in the world?  One might think this would be the answer which would eventually develop; and there is room for this in Buddhist discussion,  For most, though, especially those following Mahayana Buddhist thought, this would be seen as failing to appreciate conventional truths, truths revealed by experience – even if not ultimate truth. What a thing is in the world must be seen as something, not nothing.

Buddhism is not nihilism, however nihilistic it might appear to the outside observer. A mountain is really a mountain, a river really is a river, a man is really a man and a woman really is a woman. There is something which comes out of being a woman which differs from being a man. Even if one might, through one’s lives, be a man sometimes and a woman at other times, the differences in gender must reflect conventional truths and are not to be radically eliminated by the elimination of the idea of gender.

In Mahayana Buddhism, where there is the emphasis not only of salvation for oneself, but the bodhisattva ideal where one works to save many others by becoming a Buddha, the question of gender re-emerged – and took a rather interesting turn which actually helped promote the value of the feminine. This can be seen in stories of the bodhisattva Tārā, stories which developed around the 6^th century CE (and possibly with Hindu influences). There was a princess, Yeshe Dawa, whose devotion to many Buddhas was said to extend for eons, and through them, she became a highly-developed spiritual personage. Eventually attaining great merit, Dawa was told by some monks that should she seek to become greater, and that meant she should seek to become a male in her next life.

Dawa’s response was simple: no. She made a vow to seek enlightenment as a Buddha and to do so as a woman, to perpetually be born as a woman until she attained her goal and demonstrated that it was only the “weak-minded” who frowned upon womanhood. She would promote the good abilities and achievements of women, and indeed, promote their welfare and salvation.  Women, though different, did not have to see their difference as hindering them in their spiritual quest.

Dawa has become a patron for women within the Buddhist traditions, helping to promote the good of women, such as motherhood; among her titles is “mother of liberation” showing the positive value of motherhood, similar to the way the Christian tradition looks at Mary’s motherhood as vindication of motherhood.

Human traditions contain much which is true. When we explore traditions, be it our own or those of others, we must be careful and critical, recognizing their social contexts and ideas which might need to be rejected as mere accidents that are not essential to our understanding of the truth.  By looking at how people from a tradition or culture other than our own have wrestled with questions which we face today, we can get a better sense of the prudence needed to find solutions for today. We don’t have to accept what they believed, or the answers they provided, but we can appreciate that these questions are universal and are worth investigating time and time again, never to be seen as fully answered.

Inter-religious dialogue tells us something about gender:  it can show us how different cultures have dealt with the questions that New Feminists ask today.

Dialogue is an important part of the human experience.  Our existence as persons comes to us through our relations with others.  To establish good, healthy relationships, we need to be able to speak, to learn from each other. Through dialogue, we get to hear the views of others.  We get to understand them and who they are: we find a way to respect them as a person even if we do not agree with their views or actions. 

The dignity of the human person requires an openness to the other, to let the other make themselves known. It also expects reciprocity.  When we come together to dialogue we want to be heard.  We must come willing to share who we are, what we believe.  Especially important in dialogue is the need to be honest about oneself, one’s experiences in life, one’s beliefs and practices.  We shouldn’t hide from someone that which we think they don’t want to hear.  We must be able to reveal to the other; that is, we must become vulnerable to them.  We can’t hide what appears to be a point of contention with someone else.  If we do so, we are being dishonest.  We are giving them a false sense of who we are and they will come out of the discussion not really understanding us.  This is what I have learned through my exploration of inter-religious dialogue.  It is a truth not just for inter-religious dialogue, but for all dialogue when we come across someone who is different from us.  It shows us how and why we can learn from people from all kinds of faiths. 

Inter-religious dialogue also can tell us something about gender. It can show us how different cultures have dealt with the questions that New Feminists ask today. We can learn about the difficulties people have faced as a result of their gender, difficulties which might raise questions as to what different religious traditions believe about gender even today.  Since New Feminism is concerned about the human experience, about the real-world lived experiences of people from all faiths and backgrounds, I want to bring up two interesting examples from Buddhism where the question of gender had been raised.  Through them, we can see the questions which come to us today are not new ones, not ones exclusive to the Western tradition: they are universal questions which can be examined time and time again, always reforming our thought. 

The first example comes from the beginning of Buddhism.  Siddartha (the Buddha) was a man of his time.  Though he questioned the structures of society and ontologically overturned them, he also saw that cultural traditions were not something one can entirely repudiate and expect people to listen.  His way was a middle way, where he accepted the relative value of one’s culture while working to transform society from within.  He criticized the absolute nature of the Hindu caste system, but he saw one could use it as a relative structure for morality, emphasizing that the true “brahmin” was not one who was born a brahmin, but one who earned it through deeds. 

Because he relativized the caste system, one might think Siddartha would have dealt with the place of women in society.  In reality, it took the action of his friend, Ananda, to raise the question.  Siddartha had been teaching men how to become monks, but he had nothing similar for women.  Siddartha’s aunt, Mahapajapati, wanted to become a nun.  Ananda asked the question:  are women incapable of entering Nirvana?  Siddhartha said no, they could also attain Nirvana.   

That being the case, Ananda asked why the Buddha had been hesitant in allowing women to form their own monastic communities?  Siddartha said that if women were willing to follow eight conditions he set forth, he would allow the creation of a female order within the Buddhist community (the Sangha).  In this way, Siddartha was to establish a rule for women, to allow them to become nuns, separate from, different from men, but nonetheless, capable of Buddhist practice and attaining Nirvana.  The ramifications of this would be questioned time and again. 

In my next post, I will explore them as I address one of the most important  and interesting ways the question of gender was re-addressed in Buddhism, one in which cultural biases were further negated.  The response allowed a positive value of the feminine gender while denying the prejudices against it from times past (unlike the Buddha’s).