189. Women’s punishment for the Fall
189. WOMEN’S PUNISHMENT FOR THE FALL
What’s the difference between an unfallen, innocent woman (Eve) and a fallen, sinful one?
Objection 1. It would seem that the particular punishments of our first parents are unsuitably appointed in Scripture. For that which would have occurred even without sin should not be described as a punishment for sin. (1) Now seemingly there would have been pain in child-bearing even had there been no sin, for the disposition of the female sex is such that offspring cannot be born without pain to the bearer. (2) Likewise the subjection of woman to man results from the perfection of the male and the imperfection of the female sex. (3) Again, it belongs to the nature of the earth to bring forth thorns and thistles, and this would have occurred even had there been no sin. . . .
Reply. (1) In the state of innocence child-bearing would have been painless. . . .(2) The subjection of the woman to her husband is to be understood as inflicted in punishment of the woman, not as to his headship (since even before sin the man was the head. . .) but as to her having now to obey her husband’s will even against her own. (3) If man had not sinned, the earth would have brought forth thorns and thistles to be the food of animals but not to punish man, because their growth would bring no labor of punishment for the tiller of the soil, as Augustine says. Alcuin, however, holds that before sin the earth brought forth no thorns and thistles whatever, but the former opinion is the better (II-II,164,2).
Three punishments are mentioned in Scripture that are gender—specific: (1) woman’s pain in childbirth, (2) the relation of male dominance and female subjection, and (3) man’s pain in work. All three are not natural, as they seem, but unnatural, or fallen. They are not ontologically necessary, and were not present before the Fall. Nor will they be present in “the new heavens and the new earth”.
(1) Even now some mammals bear offspring without pain. It is biologically possible. Pain is even now largely psychosomatic (hypnosis can remove it), and it could have been totally so before the Fall. This result of the Fall, then, is due to the fallen relation between soul and body: when the soul no longer conforms to the will of God, the body no longer conforms to the will of the soul. When the prince rebels against the King, the prince no longer has authority over his King-appointed servant.
(2) It is remarkable how little St. Thomas’ common sense and justice is skewered by his primitive Greek biology (“male = perfect, female = imperfect”). For him, the relation of “submission to headship” and “obedience to authority” does not mean the relation of inferiority in nature or worth, for in his Christian theology the Son submits to the Father and obeys His will in all things, yet He is equal to Him in nature and worth. The result of the Fall is the contrariety of wills (his vs. hers), not the order of headship in itself. It not authority itself that is a result of the Fall, but the kind of authority—authority that is based on power—that is now typical of the fallen world rather than the kind of authority that Christ commands among His disciples, namely authority that is based on love. See Jn 13:12-16; Mt 20:25-26.
If submission and surrender necessarily meant inferiority, then the very essence of Christianity would be false; for Christ, Who came into the world not to do His own will but to submit and surrender totally to His Father’s will, would by that token be inferior to the Father, thus falsifying the first and most fundamental of all Christian creeds, “Jesus is Lord” (1 Cor 12:3). Kyrios, the word translated “Lord”, does not mean any merely human lord, but God, as the later Nicene creed specifies, “fully God of fully God”.
In Christianity, women are ontologically equal in value to men, children to adults, and citizens to rulers. These three fundamental human relation—ships were all skewered by the Fall, yet preserved for the sake of social order, which, even in its fallen form, is better than chaos.
(3) Notice how St. Thomas, in preferring Augustine’s interpretation to Alcuin’s, instinctively chooses the interpretation that does not depend on the science of his age. A lesson for our own age. The up-to-date science of one century soon becomes the primitivism of the next.