In last week’s posting I made a startling statement – that Protestantism began ‘the destruction of womanhood as a metaphysical reality,’ and that modern feminism only finished what Protestantism began.

I threw it out partly as a gamble, partly as a challenge, and I am pleased to note that a young gentleman friend, who was received into the Catholic Church on the same occasion that I was, has responded as follows:

"I'm interested to hear more about how Protestantism began the "destruction of womanhood as a metaphysical reality", which was completed by feminism. I certainly see how it has been accomplished by the feminists, but some of my Protestant friends would deny, I'm sure, that they are complicit. Does it have to do with their rejection of almost all forms of Marian devotion? With their neglect of certain corporeal realities of Christianity? It seems to me -- from my limited masculine perspective -- that the mere reality of womanhood, of existing as a feminine being, must give one a greater capacity for understanding the reality of the Incarnation, one that no masculine being could ever have in the same way. Though I certainly feel that I understand the Incarnation much better after having become a Catholic -- in large part due to my increasing devotion to the Virgin Mary. But it seems also that the whole Catholic understanding of grace, as communicated through physical things, puts greater emphasis upon the corporeality of human beings -- we are all physically receptive with respect to God and so in a certain way feminine. Anyways, a few thoughts, and I'd be interested to hear more."

The first thing to note about Protestantism is that it seems to have been profoundly anti-metaphysical from the beginning. Chesterton, in his book on St. Thomas Aquinas, tells the story of Martin Luther, who "cried out with a new and mighty voice for an elemental and emotional religion, and for the destruction of all philosophies. It had one theory that was the destruction of all theories; in fact it had its own theology which was itself the death of theology. Man could say nothing to God, nothing from God, nothing about God, except an almost inarticulate cry for mercy and the supernatural help of Christ… " Later he notes that "it is said that the great Reformer publicly burned the Summa Theologica and the works of Aquinas."

I think of that bonfire – the holocaust of Scholastic reason, the love of fact, of nature and grace, of balance in judgment -- all that coherence and co-inherence of will and intellect and limit and definition and virtue… all of that to go up in smoke. I think that wherever there is an anti-civilizational impulse, there is the tendency to subtract, to take away from, to reduce, reject, eliminate, simplify. Civilization, on the other hand, is an action of generosity: to add, affirm, supplement, stabilize, commemorate and nurture.

Now obviously the positive and negative tendency exists in all of us. But for the civilizing tendency to win out over the anti-civilizing one, it is necessary for the reasoning powers in man to be in harness. In order for life to flow, life must be directed. Our language reflects this knowledge on a deep level when it uses the term ‘husband’ to signify the man in a life-giving relationship of marriage to a woman. Yet this knowledge, of the husbanding of life and of resources, and its application to the world of thought, has fairly slipped below consciousness today. Our mental world is promiscuous. But that is a subject for another day.

What is the female partner in this life-giving marriage? The wife, mother, companion, friend, helpmeet. These characteristics are particularly Western, for it is in fact largely – perhaps exclusively – true that in Western history marriage took a monogamous form.

I quote what my brother wrote, in "Urbino: An essay on the Vital Manners of the West," posted at this site:

http://mysite.verizon.net/vze495qq/urbino/index.html,

EURO MANNERS

All people have manners, but European manners are unique.

No, sorry, wrong tense.

European manners were unique.

The past tense is best used in recognition of a sad truth. The system of manners unique to European peoples has practically disappeared, although echoes and hints and fragments of it survive everywhere and very likely, even though vastly decayed, manners unique to Europe still have an importance that remains unrecognized. What made the manners of Europe unique is a matter of some considerable importance: they were (and to some extent, implicitly at least, still are) grounded in courtship and war rather than male hierarchy.

The reason why such is the case can only be the subject of speculation. My guess is that (as always) biology is involved. A Cunning Nature touched Euro peoples and made them different by giving them a gentle nudge in a particular direction --- that direction being towards monogamy (probably for the same reason as always, the long sojourn of Euro peoples in sparse and difficult terrain of the north meant that men had to stick around if their children were to survive the winter).

Manners coming out of courtship were the special strength and glory of Europe. They led to a man being attuned to a woman in a different way, as personality rather than resource (and of course the system of manners reflected the different attitude of a man to a women caused by a subtly different evolutionary strategy). In any case, however it happened, the change of perspective brought on by and reflected in European manners allowed the special genius of woman (and her special danger, too) to enter the world of men, and radiate an influence that spread out in ever-widening circles. Wars still took place (as they always do and always will), but came to be conducted within a set of rules. Clashes of interest in the sphere of economics took place (as they always do and always will), but at least in some places the competition took place within a code of manners that made possible high levels of trust (hence high levels of coordination, hence high levels of wealth creation).

Manners with a root in courtship spread even to the realm of self-identity, and produced a man unique to Europe, the knight and then later essentially the same man, the gentleman. This man, as knight, as gentleman, was unique. He attained emotional states associated with the word "confidence" even though he was not at the top of the social hierarchy. This extension of confidence down the social ladder meant also an extension of independence down the ladder as well. Since this man (as knight and later as gentleman) set the standard of conduct, his independence of spirit spread even further within European society, and brought about probably Europe’s greatest accomplishment: an independence of spirit that managed at times and in places to work its way down almost all the way to the bottom, so that a yeoman farmer, for example, though accepting and respectful of social stratification, was not servile.

The confluence of two antithetical activities, war and courtship, with its expansion of the sphere of confidence and therefore of independence, was surely a result of the fact that in Europe a man could take a woman as his wife rather than see her become real or de facto property in the seraglio of a sheik, patriarch, war lord, mandarin or shogun. Out of the European system of manners came men who --- at their best --- brought to their dealings, including dealings with themselves, a set of emotional responses wherein untruthfulness became associated with servility. As warriors, philosophers, statesmen, scientists, writers, entrepreneurs, believers, artists and patrons of the arts, these men created what was best about European civilization. These men WERE European civilization.

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I would like to say that the manners of Europe – the manners of the West – were, until recently, the special province of the women. One of the striking things about our age is the abdication of women from tending to manners. And this, too, is related to the decline of the metaphysical. Physics, that is, Nature, will inform you when a woman has entered the room; but metaphysics tells you whether she is a lady. The foreshortening of the metaphysical dimension in thinking meant the beginning of the end of such metaphysical cues in social life. The Protestant revolt against metaphysics thus carried unintended consequences in the world of manners. All of us today, it seems, have become horrifyingly and in the most humdrum manner merely physical. We no longer mean – which is to say, our male or female humanity no longer symbolizes anything.

It was interesting for me to read somewhere that the difference between comedy and tragedy in Shakespeare are the women. It is impossible to read the speeches of Portia, for example, in The Merchant of Venice – even though in her most famous speech she was disguised as a man – about the ‘quality of mercy is never strained,’ without realizing that Portia was wholly and affirmatively metaphysically Woman. Precisely because she was tending to manners in the most essential womanly way she could carry on the pretense of being the young male lawyer. But who can read Lady Macbeth’s speeches, on the other hand, without a shudder? Lady Macbeth no longer symbolizes and therefore no longer tends. The roots have been torn up. All that remains is the will-to-power.

It is also interesting in this regard to ponder Shakespeare’s Catholic roots. Shakespeare was the universal genius given to the English-speaking world as a sort of spiritual compensation for the uprooting of Catholicism in the English nation.

For manners, in essence, are about thanking, – which, etymologically, is related to thinking. And to think is to symbolize – for words are symbols of things. Susanne K. Langer writes in Philosophy in a New Key that "The sign is something to act upon, or a means to command action; the symbol is an instrument of thought." Elsewhere she says:

"Symbols are not proxy for their objects, but are vehicles for the conception of objects. To conceive a thing or a situation is not the same thing as to ‘react toward it’ overtly or to be aware of its presence. In talking about things, we have conceptions of them, not the things themselves; and it is the conceptions, not the things, that symbols directly ‘mean.’ "

But most curious is a footnote occurring in her discussion: "If a symbol could be said to ‘signify’ anything, its object would be the occurrence of an act of conception. But such a function of a symbol is casual, and crosses with its use as a symbol. In the latter function it is not the act of conception, but what is conceived, that enters into the meaning-pattern. We shall avoid much confusion and quibbling by recognizing that signification does not figure in symbolization at all."

This seems to be a case of a footnote leading to a quagmire rather than to a vista. I think that, on the contrary, much of the rewards that can be derived from the practice of poetry come from that experience in which conception, symbolization and signification mysteriously merge in one of those sudden and unexpected leaps of meaning.

But my subject is Woman, specifically metaphysical womanhood, and not poetry. It is surely not such a leap to read this, from Isak Dinesen’s story, "The Old Chevalier":

"… Nothing is mysterious until it symbolizes something… The women of those days were more than a collection of individuals. They symbolized, or represented, Woman. I understand that the word itself, in that sense, has gone out of the language. Where we talked of woman… you talk of women, and all the difference lies there…

"… You could follow the development of this idea in a little girl, as she was growing up and was gradually, no doubt, in accordance with very ancient rules, inaugurated into the rites of the cult, and finally ordained. Slowly the center of gravity of her being shifted from individuality to symbol, and you would be met with that particular pride and modesty characteristic of the representative of great powers – such as you may find again in a really great artist. Indeed, the haughtiness of the pretty young girl, or the old ladies’ majesty, existed no more on account of personal vanity, or on any personal account whatever…"

Protestantism did not set out to destroy womanhood. But in overthrowing the metaphysics of symbolism it fostered an unharnessed individualism – one that, today, chafes, roils and complains as though its unfettered state were worse than any chains. For it cannot find the symbolism it needs if its triumph of individualism is to mean anything.

 Womanhood, being the chief guardian of the cult of symbolism, was a major hurdle to the individualizing impulse in Protestantism. Woman was already decomposing into 'women.' It was already happening in the "march of history" in all Western societies until feminism hit the scene and knocked women off their pedestal – of individualism. Feminism re-submerged women in an anti-narrative, an anti-history, an anti-life saga, from which thousands, if not millions of women, have yet to recover. Just when women entered history in massive individualized numbers, Feminism came preaching that history – that is, Western history - was of no worth. Feminism reduced women to the status of moral infantilism, not seeing that their own preachments were a parody of the very history they condemned. Feminism arrested the moral development of the female sex by a century at least.

But all of Western society is reeling under the blow. The loss of Woman has devastated the male sex as well, not to mention families and children. As in a vacuum, when the energies of symbolic growth are arrested, the dark gods march out of their lair to claim the spoils. It is Lady Macbeth’s game all over again – only, unfortunately, it takes place in an era of nuclear weapons rather than daggers.

If there is an irony here, it is an irony of individualism. As Roger Scruton writes in Sexual Desire: A Moral Philosophy of the Erotic, "… in epochs of high civilization, the effort of gender construction is enhanced…in the intuitive recognition that the nervous energy of society … is dependent upon the excitement created between the sexes in their coming together." But in fact it is erotic love, or "gender construction," that stimulates individualism, or more precisely, stimulates the individual to reach his or her highest notes. Ortega y Gasset seizes upon this ‘individualizing’ aspect of the erotic encounter in his book, On Love: Aspects of a Single Theme, where he says:

"Actually, a woman does not reveal her second aspect, her true, personal aspect, except to the man who individualizes himself before her, who ceases being merely a man in general, a passer-by, an ‘anyone.’ In this, as in everything, the woman’s psychology is the opposite of the male’s. The masculine soul, by contrast to the woman’s, preferably projects its life toward collective works: science, art, politics, business. This provides us men with a somewhat theatrical disposition: we give the best, most personal and individual side of ourselves to the public…"

"The woman, on the other hand, has a more regal attitude toward existence. She does not allow her happiness to depend upon the benevolence of the public, nor does she submit what is most important in her life to its acceptance or rejection. On the contrary, she adopts, in fact, a public attitude, by which she appears to be the one who approves or disapproves of the approaching man, the one who selects and chooses him from among many others. The effect of this is that the man, upon seeing that he is the one who is preferred, feels rewarded. It is curious that this conception of  the woman, as man’s prize, appears in the most ancient societies. The Iliad, for example, unfolds its sonorous multitude of hexameters in order to recount the anger of Achilles, who was infuriated because the gentle slave Briseis, a prize for his deeds, was snatched away from him. subsequently, the value of the prize increases until it is not granted by the authorities or a tribunal, but is left to the prize herself to decide who the prizewinner shall be."

The loss of metaphysical womanhood has meant that women, now, play at being men: they put their energy into the ‘public.’ Thus they sacrifice the ‘inner sanctum’ for the worldly prize. The result is an impoverishment of individualism for everyone. The spark of higher development is true ‘Eros’ and seems hardly to glow anywhere today.

Will we recover? I think that the civilization of the future – if there is to be civilization in the future – will depend upon those women who still may retain a hint of the older, symbolic womanhood but who have the mental and philosophical ability to see the new outlines of metaphysical womanhood. This, I can hope, they will begin to live, to dramatize, and to individualize. It will be more cognitive and thus more conscious than the old version of symbolic womanhood, but it will still pack the old punch. For these civilizing women will have begun to listen to Mother Nature – not only physically but also metaphysically. Its object will be to lead us out of willful idealism and Protestant subjectivism to a new Realism – affirming the integrity of things as they are.