40 Chapter 3
PLATO AND ARISTOTLE
The classic pessimism is evident here: either an unbridgeable gap,
even active antagonism, between Man and Woman -- or the
subsumption of Woman into Man. The paradigm under discussion here
is thus fundamentally pessimistic about marriage.
Man
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Woman
There are two modern representations, one that 'in justice' subsumes
both Man and Woman into some more appealing One:
[ Insert your favorite more reasonable category here ]
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"Man" and "Woman" are 'really' just implications of it.
Ironically, this does not defeat the old
paradigm. All that is changed is that
now, both "Man" and "Woman" are
'woman' with regards to some even
more 'Manly' category.
or the other, in which both Man and Woman are Ones in free motion.
This 'resolution,' while giving each of them 'freedom,' now
immediately causes the questions inherent in all such 'resolutions':
Woman
Man
Why would any joining between them be necessary at all?
Wouldn't the meaning of all 'associations' between them be arbitrary?
So -- just for instance -- what now prevents Ben from Ben'ing Ann, or
Ann from Ann'ing Ben, except power?
The "philosophical" representations of the paradigm originally
seem to have come from the sexual/liturgical representations of it.
Nowadays it almost seems as if the sexual/liturgical representations of
it come from the "philosophical" ones.
Remember though, that for Fr. Keefe, there is something very alike
in all the representations of the paradigm, both ancient and modern,
both sexual and philosophical. For him, they really are Man's efforts to
draw different pictures of the same basic thing. Thus the Catholic
sacrament of Matrimony could not be a starker rejection of the entire
paradigm in either its classical or its modern variants, a fact that could
not be more relevant to a book called Covenantal -- which is to say,
nuptial, marital -- Theology.
- - End of Digression
The 'digression' above was therefore not a real digression, for it
does highlight some of the problems with the paradigm. Once Man
starts drawing pictures of this paradigm, they're all different pictures of
the same thing. If, for example, Man draws a picture of an
N.B. This is an html-ized copy of a page from the pdf file, The Knucklehead's Guide to Covenantal Theology.