“It is the mark of all movements, however well-intentioned, that their pioneers tend, by much lashing of themselves into excitement, to lose sight of the obvious,” observed Dorothy Sayers. In 1938, the medieval scholar, detective novelist, and translator of Dante had been invited to speak to a women’s society about the feminist movement. With delightful wit and classic British pragmatism, she tackles many feminist questions of the day in her lecture entitled “Are Women Human?”—but only after first noting her own admittedly “irritable” response to the invitation, explaining:
In reaction against the age-old slogan, ‘woman is the weaker vessel,’ or the still more offensive, “woman is a divine creature,” we have, I think, allowed ourselves to drift into asserting that ‘a woman is as good as a man,’ without always pausing to think what exactly we mean by that.
What do we mean by that? In my last article, I detailed some of the many reasons I’m worried about the girls of this generation, who are more prone to anxiety, depression, and self-harm than any generation of girls on record. Not only are their teen years haunted by online bullying, pressure to mutilate and/or sell their bodies, and the normalization of “branding” themselves on social media, but they’re also offered very little vision of what healthy adult womanhood looks like. Instead, women are arguing about careers vs. tradwifery; the political “right” to end their own child’s life; and whether or not a woman, in principle, belongs in a significant political seat.
All of these practical questions rest, however, on the single, more fundamental one with which Sayers chose to title her essay: Are women human? This is the lynchpin; none of our cultural debates and conversations can be fruitful without a return to foundational questions. A vision of what healthy adult womanhood looks like rests upon a true understanding of who woman is. Let us turn now to that simple, crucial question—lest we, like Sayers’ well-intentioned pioneers, lose sight of the obvious.
Thankfully, the Church in her centuries of lived experience and prayerful belief can offer a robust understanding of woman, starting with a resounding yes to the query “Are women human?” Women are, indeed, human persons—just as men are. From the Creator’s point of view, “A woman is as good as a man.” We read in Genesis 1:31 that, having created the human person male and female, God saw that it was not only good but “very good.”
The age-old sayings “woman is the weaker vessel” or “woman is a divine creature” fail to account for a woman’s full humanity, which must underlie any discussion of sexual difference.
To be a human person is, first and foremost, to be a creature created in the image and likeness of the Creator. Genesis 1:27 reads, “So God created humankind in his own image, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them.” The Hebrew text alternates between using the word ’āḏām—which can roughly be translated as “human person” or “humankind” or even one particular person—and the words zā·ḵār and nə·qê·ḇāh which indicate male and female. Biblical scholar Francis Martin explains, “This oscillation and the insistence that male and female are made in the image of God and together receive the name ’āḏām force us to say that the sacred text is teaching that ’āḏām as the image of God exists as male and female.”
Our being created in the image and likeness of God is the foundation of our understanding of what it means to be a woman and, indeed, what it means to be a man—what it means to be a human person.
What does this biblical expression signify? Martin points out that in the ancient Near East the “image” was thought to carry the power of what was imaged, so that a king would multiply his authority throughout the kingdom with images of himself. “The basic notion mediated by the declaration of the divine intention in Genesis 1:26 is that ’āḏām is to be God’s vice-regent, the embodiment of his authority here on earth.” This embodied representation is unique to the human person in all of creation. Moreover, “male and female are different realizations of the one reality of image as royal representatives.” They alone are “capable of being addressed by God, and of imitating and worshiping him.” This ability to image God on earth and to enter into relationship with him is not limited to one sex or the other: It belongs to each of us by virtue of our humanity.
The theological tradition understands the human person’s being made in the image and likeness of God to be lived out through having an immortal soul that is both rational and free. “Rational” does not mean “robotic” or “calculating,” but rather encompasses the ability to perceive, know, and wonder. It is the capacity in us that allows us to write poetry, design cathedrals, and practice compassion. Our freedom is not absolute, but rather a capacity that allows us to make moral choices: My dog may have a limited sense that it is “bad” to eat the hamburger, but he cannot freely forgo it so that it may be given to someone who is hungrier. These capacities of rationality and freedom come to us by virtue of our humanity, whether or not we are able or choose to exercise them. Someone in a coma, or infancy, or sleep is just as human—just as rational and free—as we are.
That is not to say, though, that sex (being male or female) is irrelevant. Each human person is both rational and free by virtue of having an immortal soul, but we are not merely souls that have been poured into earthen vessels. Each person is a body-soul unity. Such a unity, in fact, that to separate body and soul results in death. And why is this unity so significant? Precisely because our bodies, like other animal bodies, are sexed: They are male or female. But our sexed bodies, unlike other animal bodies, are joined to immortal souls. This unity means that being male or being female is not an irrelevant add-on or afterthought to personhood. If one aspect of being a human person is to be a body-soul unity, and women are indeed human persons, then their womanhood is a key aspect of their personhood, just as a man’s manhood is a key aspect of his personhood.
In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the creation of the human person as male and female comes through a purposeful act on the part of the Creator and is considered “very good” in a world without sin. In other creation accounts, creation itself and the existence of maleness and femaleness are believed to be the result of violence or accident. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church summarizes, “‘Being man’ or ‘being woman’ is a reality which is good and willed by God: man and woman possess an inalienable dignity which comes to them immediately from God their Creator. . . . In their ‘being-man’ and ‘being-woman’, they reflect the Creator’s wisdom and goodness.”
This is the noble and dignified view of woman as a human person that the Church offers. A woman is made in the image and likeness of God, with an immortal soul containing the capacities of rationality and moral freedom in union with a body that is female, making her a female human person: All of this is good and willed by God. The same is true for men as male human persons.
The Catechism quotes Doctor of the Church Catherine of Siena (1347–1380) marveling at God’s generosity in creation: “What made you establish man in so great a dignity? Certainly the incalculable love by which you have looked on your creature in yourself! You are taken with love for her; for by love indeed you created her, by love you have given her a being capable of tasting your eternal Good.”
The tradition has always upheld the goodness of the human person, even in the face of virulent theological protest. John Calvin (1509–1564) famously interpreted Scripture passages like Romans 3:10—“None is righteous, no not one”—to describe the “depravity” of human nature: “There is no part in which it is not perverted and corrupted.” The tradition reads Scripture as a whole, so that verses like the above are understood alongside others such as “For by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned” (Matt. 12:37) and “He who does right is righteous, as he is righteous” (1 John 3:7). The Council of Trent declared that “free will, though weakened and unsteady, was by no means destroyed.”
Calvin was far from the first to reject belief in the goodness of the human person. In 561, the Council of Braga condemned certain erroneous beliefs, including “the procreation of children is something detestable,” “the formation of the human body is the devil’s work and that conception in the womb of the mother is caused by the devil,” and “the creation of all flesh is not the work of God but of evil spirits.” In 1329, the theologically inaccurate statement of Meister Eckhart, “All creatures are an absolute nothing; I do not say that they are a small thing or that they are anything but that they are an absolute nothing,” was condemned.
She is both created good by God and affected by sin, therefore in need of Christ’s redeeming work.
While rejecting the extreme notion of total depravity, the Church also recognizes the human person’s sinfulness, rejecting the opposing extreme represented by Pelagian and Semi-pelagian notions that man does not need God’s grace for salvation; that only the body was subjected to corruption after the fall; and that original sin is not inherited. In 418, the Sixteenth Council of Carthage declared:
Whoever thinks St. John the Apostle’s statement—‘If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and truth is not in us’ (1 John 1:8)—is to be taken in the sense that he is saying we have sin because humility demands us to say so, not because we actually do have sin: let him be anathema. For the apostle continues: ‘If we acknowledge our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all iniquity’ (1 John 1:9). Hence it is quite clear that this is said not only from humility but truthfully. For the apostle could have said: ‘If we say we have no sin we exalt ourselves, and humility is not in us.’ But since he says: ‘We deceive ourselves, and truth is not in us,’ he clearly shows that the person who says he has no sin is not speaking the truth.
While there remains legitimate theological debate regarding the depths of sin’s effects on the human person, throughout the centuries the Church has maintained a belief both in a person’s fallenness and in his or her inherent dignity. This vision of the human person is coupled with a belief in the need for redemption, made possible through God’s gracious act of becoming man, born of a woman. In the Incarnation, Christ joined himself to a fallen but not destroyed humanity, offering us the possibility of redemption which has already been achieved once for all (1 Pet. 3:18), and is still being worked out in the members of his body, the Church (Col. 1:24).
This, then, is the basis for the whole of the Church’s vision of woman: that a woman is a human person. A woman (like a man) is a creature made in the image and likeness of a loving Creator, designed to be God’s royal representative in creation. She does this by means of being a body-soul unity: her immortal soul has the capacities for rationality and moral freedom. She is both created good by God and affected by sin, therefore in need of Christ’s redeeming work. She shares all of this with her fellow human persons, both female and male.
As Dorothy Sayers reminded her audience, the age-old sayings “woman is the weaker vessel” or “woman is a divine creature” fail to account for a woman’s full humanity, which must underlie any discussion of sexual difference. Questions of women’s roles in political and domestic spheres, their relationship to children, and their contributions to the economy and workforce cannot be addressed without reference to the differences between men and women, but they also cannot be answered without acknowledgement of woman’s full humanity.
In my next article, I will apply principle to practice, looking at what the Church’s robust vision of woman as a fully human person has to say to the girls of today and the particular cultural challenges that they face.