Podles on masculinity and the Church, Part 5: the liturgy

The pliers for the nails, and the Sacred Wounds.

A guide to this series.
1: Leon Podles' argument about masculinity.
2: How Podles thinks the Church became feminised in the High Middle Ages
3. Doubts about Podles' historical argument.
4. The role of Rationalism and Romanticism in confirming the feminine image of the Church.
5. The liturgy, and a solution to the problem.

One of the things rather neglected by Podles is the liturgical reform. The reason is that he wants to locate the source of the problem of feminisation way, way back, in the High Middle Ages. I don't entirely disagree that some developments then had bad consequences in this regard, but it is not easy to show a clear and consistent picture of a feminised Church from then until today. The picture is complex, with counter-currents and counter-examples.

Poddles has much more to say about Protestantism in America before the 20th century than he does about Catholicism, and it is hardly surprising that the people he quotes - essentially, Evangelical preachers and those responding to them - should have had a problem with feminisation. For these preachers relied very heavily on the emotions, and the expression of emotion, and neglected the will and the intellect. This is always going to be a hard sell for men. Mgr Benson, whom I quoted a couple of posts ago, tells us that, at least in England in 1913, religious emotion was kept in check. The less fervent - including a lot of men - were reassured that belief was a matter of will and action, that is to say, the practice of the Faith. Telling such people that they ought to feel the movement of the Spirit can lead to disaster. The 18th century poet George Crabbe describes a man who wants to repent his sins, goes to a revivalist preacher, and is eventually told that the absence of such feelings is an indication that he is damned. Understandably, the poor man hangs himself.

Podles on Masculinity and the Church, Part 4: the Enlightenment

The Seamless Garment; the dice used to gamble for it.

A guide to this series.
1: Leon Podles' argument about masculinity.
2: How Podles thinks the Church became feminised in the High Middle Ages
3. Doubts about Podles' historical argument.
4. The role of Rationalism and Romanticism in confirming the feminine image of the Church.
5. The liturgy, and a solution to the problem.

Leon Podles' very useful book is lacking in its account of the Enlightenment, and he makes only a few references to Romanticism. But these movements are crucial to understanding the relationship between reason, the emotions, and the sexes, with religion. A good treatment is given by John Rao in his Black Legends.

The Enlightenment is a huge subject, but in the form in which it most affected the Catholic Church most directly it was Rationalist, and exulted Reason above the emotions. As time went on it was increasingly sceptical of religion, and in France it was associated with anti-clericalism. It took as its starting-point the Protestant separation of Faith and Reason. Since everything it didn't like was lumped together as anti-rational, the emotions and Faith became identified. The Church was associated with the feminine, and the feminine was denigrated.

Podles on masculinity and the Church, Part 3: what didn't go wrong

The mocking of Christ; Veronica's handkerchief.

A guide to this series.
1: Leon Podles' argument about masculinity.
2: How Podles thinks the Church became feminised in the High Middle Ages
3. Doubts about Podles' historical argument.
4. The role of Rationalism and Romanticism in confirming the feminine image of the Church.
5. The liturgy, and a solution to the problem.

Further to my last post, while Podles certainly identifies the origin of a feminine approach to spirituality which is certainly with us today, and influentially so, I am not convinced that it was doing the damage in the late Middle Ages on the scale we see around us in the 21st century. We need to make some distinctions.

Western spirituality took an emotional and interior turn in the High Middle Ages. This is undeniable; you can see it in the art and in the devotional manuals. Podles tells us that the interior life and the emotions are things with which women are more comfortable than men; men, he says, disclose themselves through action, women through words. That may be true, but to take one thing at a time, emotions are not the exclusive preserve of women, and an integration of the emotional life into spirituality is not a bad thing. Jesus expressed strong emotions - joy, anger, grief: there is nothing unmanly about that. They are not, from any point of view, suffocating feminine emotions. Again, the emotional religious art of the Gothic and indeed Baroque eras is not, as Podles appears to suggest, concerned exclusively with the overheated maternal instincts of cloistered nuns contemplating the Crib; the focus is actually on the Passion. (That is why I am decorating these posts with the Instruments of the Passion carved into the choir stalls of a former Anglican convent.) To use one of Podles' favourite words, the focus of this devotion is agonic (as in agonistic), and to that extent potentially appealing to men.

Podles on Masculinity and the Church, Part 2: what went wrong

Pilate washes his hands; the pillar of the flagellation.

A guide to this series.
1: Leon Podles' argument about masculinity.
2: How Podles thinks the Church became feminised in the High Middle Ages
3. Doubts about Podles' historical argument.
4. The role of Rationalism and Romanticism in confirming the feminine image of the Church.
5. The liturgy, and a solution to the problem.

In the first post of this series I presented Podles' very simple understanding of what masculinity is. Since men don't give birth, it is a biological and cultural imperative that they be stimulated to face other kinds of dangers for the good of the community, the kinds of dangers, in fact, for which their physique and psychology fits them. I think this is pretty difficult to dispute, even if some people won't like it. But it means that there is a ineradicable idea of masculinity as achieved and not as given, the importance of which means that men must in some sense distance themselves from the feminine realm. The molly-coddled male has not achieved masculinity: he hasn't made it as a man. And he is unlikely to achieve much of value for the community.

It should be noted that the masculine has a 'parabolic trajectory': having separated himself from the feminine, the man can return to it, in some sense, making connection with the feminine in romantic love and family life. But he remains distinct from it, and remains in danger of losing his masculinity if he loses this distinctness in uxoriousness.

Podles on masculinity and the Church: Part 1

Judas' payoff, and a lamp for those going to arrest Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane

A guide to this series.
1: Leon Podles' argument about masculinity.
2: How Podles thinks the Church became feminised in the High Middle Ages
3. Doubts about Podles' historical argument.
4. The role of Rationalism and Romanticism in confirming the feminine image of the Church.
5. The liturgy, and a solution to the problem.

Further to my posts on head coverings and the complementarity of the sexes, I promised to post some commentrary on Leon Podles' The Church Impotent. It is available for free on his website here; hard copies available here (Amazon) and here (second hand, Abebooks). He gives an excellent summary of his argument in a talk, available here.

I think this is an immensely important issue, so I'm going to devote a few posts to it; this one, and then some more after Christmas. In this one, I'm just going to give Podles' most basic claim, about how masculinity works. It is quite simple, fits into many obvious facts about culture, and has huge implications.

It can be expressed in three easy steps.

1. In order to attain some standing, respect or acceptance in a community, an individual needs to make some kind of contribution to it. Especially valued, obviously, are valuable contributions make at the cost of great effort, pain, and risk to life.