The Misbegotten Objection

A reading room, late. Edith has two books open and a third closed under her hand. The two men have been there for some time, as if they had always been there. One is slight, thin-legged, well dressed, with rings on his fingers, and cannot keep still; he gets up and walks when he thinks. The other is very large and very still, and looks at the table while he listens, and when he speaks he speaks slowly, as a man does who is used to dictating to three secretaries at once. Neither of them has the look of someone who has seen God. They have the look of men who are prepared to argue.

Edith. I should say first that I love you both. I want that on the record before I say the rest, because the rest is going to sound like an indictment, and it is one.

Aristotle. Then begin with the indictment. One begins with what is said by the many and the wise, and you are both. The affection can come after, if anything is left of it.

Edith. Very well. Generation of Animals, book two. The female is, as it were, a mutilated male. πεπηρωμένον. The female contributes the matter and the male the form; the male is the active principle and the female the passive; and when generation goes well it produces a male, and when something interferes, a female. Politics, book one: the male is by nature superior, the female inferior, the one rules and the other is ruled, and this holds of all mankind. And then the sentence I have had on the wall above my desk for three years, because I cannot get past it. The deliberative faculty is present in the woman, but it is ἄκυρον. Without authority. She can reason, but her reasoning does not get to count.

Aristotle. You have quoted me correctly. Go on.

Edith. Brother Thomas. Summa, first part, question ninety-two. Woman is defective and misbegotten. Deficiens et occasionatum. The active power in the male seed tends to produce a perfect likeness of itself, which is male, and the production of a woman comes from a defect in that power, or from an indisposition of the matter, or from some external influence, such as a south wind, which is moist. And then, in the next question, the image of God is in both, but, you add, in a secondary way the image is found in man and not in woman, because man is the beginning and end of woman as God is the beginning and end of creation. And in the Supplement, on orders: since it is not possible in the female sex to signify eminence of degree, for a woman is in a state of subjection, she cannot receive the sacrament. And in the second part, on whether a woman may teach publicly: no, because of her subjection, and lest men’s minds be enticed to lust.

Thomas. Also correctly quoted. Though you have left out the sentences that come after each of them, and I think you know that.

Edith. I do know that, and I am coming to them, because they are the heart of my thesis. Here is the indictment. It is not that you were sexists. Everyone in Athens and everyone in Paris believed what you believed about women, and most of them believed it more crudely. It is that you were the two most systematic minds in the history of the West, and you took a piece of bad biology and built it into the foundations of a metaphysics, a politics, and a theology, so carefully and so well that when the biology collapsed, the building stood. That is the harm. Not the error. The architecture. The premise was refuted; Harvey in the seventeenth century, the ovum in the nineteenth, the chromosomes in the twentieth, and it turned out that the woman contributes exactly as much form as the man and that there is no passive principle anywhere in the business. And nothing that had been built on the premise fell down. The conclusions had been so beautifully fitted to the rest of the system that they found new reasons to go on standing. In the Church above all. The Church kept your conclusions and quietly replaced your arguments, and no one was ever asked to say out loud that the old arguments had been false.

Aristotle. Stop there. Let us take the biology first, because it is mine, and because the order of inquiry is to begin from what is better known to us. I cut open more animals than any man before me. I looked at hens’ eggs on each day of the twenty-one and wrote down what I saw, and I said where I had not seen and was guessing, which is more than most of those who quote me do. On the female contribution I was wrong. I thought the catamenia were the matter and that the semen set it, as rennet sets milk; a craftsman’s analogy, and the craftsman was wrong. If you had shown me the ovum under your glass I would have thrown out the chapter and begun again from the appearances, and gladly, because the chapter was never the point. The method was the point. Set down what appears. Collect what the reputable say. Save as many of the appearances as can be saved. And when the appearances change, change. Anything else is Plato.

Edith. But you did not say “the appearances suggest.” You said “by nature.” Nature is the strongest word you have.

Aristotle. “Nature” is said in many ways, and in this way it means what happens always or for the most part, and I inferred it from what I observed. If what you observe is otherwise, then nature is otherwise, and the word stays and the content goes. Now I will say a thing plainly, because you have earned it and because it would be absurd to defend a sentence against the evidence of the person it is about. The sentence on the deliberative faculty was not a deduction. It was an observation of Athenian women, who were kept indoors, denied letters, married at fourteen to men of thirty, and never once asked to deliberate on anything that would be acted upon. I observed that their deliberation lacked authority. It did. I made the error an observer makes when he mistakes the condition of the thing for its nature; as if a doctor who had only ever seen the sick should write that man is by nature bedridden. I have now observed you for an hour. Your deliberation has authority. Either my sentence was false or you are not a woman, and I know which.

Edith. That is more than I expected from you.

Aristotle. It is less than you should expect from anyone who says he begins from what appears. And I will add one appearance you may not have in your file, since it is in my will and not in my works. I asked that wherever they buried me the bones of Pythias my wife be laid beside me, as she herself had instructed. She instructed; I obeyed; and I provided for Herpyllis because she was good to me. Enter that as an observation against my own sentence. A man’s will is written when he has stopped lecturing.

Thomas. May I take mine? I answer that I accept the charge, but in a form you have not quite stated, and I want to state it exactly, since you will be examined on it. The words “deficiens et occasionatum” are mine. They stand in my reply, not in the objection. The article asks whether woman should have been made in the first production of things, and the first objection says no, because the Philosopher says the female is a misbegotten male, and nothing misbegotten belongs in the first creation. And in my reply I grant it of the particular nature, in those words, and deny it of the universal: woman is not misbegotten but intended, by nature and by God, for the work of generation. The woman is not a mistake. She is willed. I was contradicting the Philosopher in the only register I had, which was his own, and I conceded him the register in order to do it.

Edith. You were contradicting him by conceding him. You let the biology stand in the individual case and overruled it only at the level of God’s intention. That is precisely the architecture I mean. You saved the woman as a species and left her defective as a person.

Thomas. It must be said that this is just. Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses, and the senses I had were his. I accepted the natural philosophy of my time because it was the best there was, and I built on it, as I built on his physics and his heavens, and his physics and his heavens are gone too. No one holds me to the crystalline spheres. But you are right that they hold me to this, and you are right about why. The spheres touched no one’s standing. This did. And I will say what you want me to say, because it is true and because I would have said it in Paris if anyone had brought me the ovum. An argument from a false premise proves nothing. Where I argued from the Philosopher’s account of generation, the argument is void, and whatever rests on it alone must be examined again from the beginning. I wrote, in another place, that to defend a truth of faith by reasons that are not cogent gives unbelievers occasion to laugh, and harms the truth. I did not think I was doing it. I was.

Edith. Then do the examination. Here. The ordination argument.

Thomas. I answer that the argument I gave in the commentary on the Sentences, which the Supplement copied after my death, rests on signification: a sacrament signifies, and orders signifies eminence, and a woman in a state of subjection cannot signify eminence. Two premises. That orders signifies eminence I would still hold. That woman is in a state of subjection, by nature, I took from the Philosopher, and from a reading of Genesis that leaned on the Philosopher. If subjection by nature falls, that argument falls with it. It has fallen. I notice that the Church, when she spoke to this question in your century, did not use my argument. In 1976 she argued from what Christ did and from what she has always done, and said she did not consider herself authorised to do otherwise; and she added a consideration from the sign, that the minister who acts in the person of Christ should bear a natural resemblance to him, and she was careful to call that a fittingness and not a demonstration. It is not my argument. Mine ran through subjection; hers runs through resemblance to Christ, and whatever it is worth, it does not need the Philosopher. In 1994 the Pope rested on Christ’s choice and the Church’s constant practice and said the judgment was to be held definitively. Whether those arguments are good is not what you asked me. You asked me whether mine was. It was not, and the Church was right to set it down.

Edith. And she should have said why.

Thomas. She did, once, in 1976, in a subordinate clause: that the scholastic doctors often present arguments on this point which modern thought would have difficulty admitting or would even rightly reject. I am the scholastic doctor. That clause is my burial notice, and it has never been read aloud. A subordinate clause is not a burial.

Edith. That is my thesis in a sentence.

Thomas. Then I will give you the next one, and I will give it in the form I know. A conclusion can be true when an argument for it is bad; the sed contra may stand when the body of the article has rotted. But a conclusion that keeps its bad argument in the cellar, unexamined, becomes a prejudice, and prejudice is the form a dead argument takes when no one has buried it. If the Church holds a thing on Christ’s authority she should say so and stop borrowing from my biology. If she holds a thing on my biology, she should let it go, because the biology is gone.

Aristotle. I object to Thomas, since no one else here will, and since it would be absurd for a dialogue to have only one side. You have given up too much. You have said subjection by nature falls. Very well; but you have said nothing of what stands in its place, and I will not have the question settled by a wave of the hand; that is how the Forms were settled. If the woman and the man each contribute form, then in that respect they are equals; and among equals, I said, rule is by turns, as among citizens, and not by nature. That is a political consequence and it is mine and I will own it. But it does not follow that every difference has vanished, and your century seems to me to have replaced one dogma with its opposite, which is not inquiry but mood. Tell me what you observe.

Edith. I observe that women deliberate with authority when they are permitted to, and that in every field where the permission was granted the results followed within a generation, and that this has now been tried on every continent, and that the institution which keeps your books in its curriculum has run it last, and slowest, and in the fewest rooms.

Aristotle. Then that is a datum, and the institution should look at it with the eyes it uses for everything else. I did not say women should not be observed. I said I had observed them, and I had observed them in a cage, and a man who reports on caged birds should say so in the title.

Thomas. And I would add the thing that was mine to add, and that I did say, and that you are entitled to throw at me because I did not follow it far enough. In one way the image of God is in the mind, and the mind has no sex; in another way there is an order of origin, and of that order I spoke in the secondary sense you quoted. I should have seen that the secondary sense would be read as the primary by every man who wished it so, and that a sentence about origin would be used to keep the image from counting. The Apostle says there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus; I had that text, and I placed it where it would be admired and not where it would be obeyed. It is a kind of negligence to write a true thing so that it will be used for a false one.

Edith. You also said, in the same part, that the woman was not made from the man’s head, to rule him, nor from his feet, to be trodden on, but from his side, as a companion. I have always loved that. And I have always noticed that it did not stop you writing the Supplement.

Thomas. No. It did not. I held a true thing and a false thing in the same mind, and the false thing was in the law, where it did the damage, and the true thing was in the commentary, where it was admired. I will not hide behind the other thing, the thing I said to Reginald at the end, that all I had written seemed to me like straw. You asked for arguments, and a man who answers an argument with a vision has left the disputation. The straw stays in the barn.

Edith. Then what is to be done? I do not mean what should be felt. I mean what is to be done, by the people who still read you, in the institution that still reads you.

Aristotle. I will go first, because mine is shorter, and because the beginning is more than half the whole. Finish the inquiry I began and could not finish. Take every sentence in which I said “by nature” of women and ask whether it was a deduction or an observation, and if it was an observation, ask whether the thing observed was a nature or a condition. Most of them will turn out to be the condition. Publish the list. Do not apologise for me and do not excuse me; I asked for neither and I would despise both. Correct me, which is what I asked of everyone, and which almost no one did for two thousand years, because it was easier to quote me. A shoemaker who is never corrected makes the same bad shoe forever.

Thomas. Mine is longer, because I made the mess longer. I answer that four things are to be done.

To the first: tell the truth about the texts. Do not smooth them. The Church has spent a century explaining that I did not quite mean the sentences I wrote, and this has protected me and injured her. Read the objection and the reply and say which is which, and say that the reply leaned on the objection’s biology, and say that the biology is false. The faithful can bear it. I could.

To the second: make the distinction I failed to make in practice, between what rests on revelation and what rests on nature as I knew it. Everything in the second category is open, and must be derived again from the nature you now know, by my own method, which is to begin from the truth and not from the custom. Do not keep a conclusion because it is old. Keep it if it is true, and know why.

To the third: where the Church has kept a conclusion and changed its reason, make her say the new reason aloud, and if the new reason is Christ’s will, let her say that it is Christ’s will and not the south wind. A people cannot assent to an argument they are not shown. And if she can give no reason beyond “it has always been so,” she must at least know that “it has always been so” was, for most of that time, my biology wearing a cassock, and must decide, honestly, whether anything else is underneath.

To the fourth, which is the one I care about, because it is justice, and justice is the rendering to each of what is due: that is a habit, not an opinion, and it is practised in rooms. Who sits in the tribunal. Who is asked. Whose deliberation is allowed authority over a thing that will be acted on. The Philosopher’s word was ἄκυρον, without authority. The cure for ἄκυρον is not a document. It is to give the authority, in the actual room, and see what happens, which is what your century did everywhere but one place.

Edith. And the one place?

Thomas. Is the place where I did the most damage, and so the place where I would most like to be corrected. I cannot tell you what Christ wills about the altar. I can tell you that I never knew either, and that I wrote as if I did, from premises that were not his.

Edith. You know what my examiners will say. That I have put words in your mouths.

Aristotle. You have put arguments in our mouths. That is what we were for. A man who leaves behind a method has given everyone after him the right to use it against him, and those who use it are his students, and those who only quote him are not.

Thomas. And you have done what I asked on the first page of the Summa, which is to be the beginner for whom the thing was written, and to ask the question as if it had not been answered. It has not been answered. Ask it. And go by the streams, not into the sea at once; I wrote that to a young brother who wanted to know everything in a week, and you remind me of him.

Edith. I did say I loved you both.

Thomas. You said it before the indictment. Say it after.

Edith. After. More, if anything. It is easier to love a man who has been wrong in the open than one who has been right behind a door.

Aristotle. Then write it down. That was an observation, and observations are where we begin.

She opens the third book. It is blank. They are gone, or they were never there, and the question is still on the table, which is where it belongs.