THROUGH UNTRUE
Fr. Rolando V. dela Rosa, O.P.
The Bible tells us that God made man after His image. For ages, people took the word "man" in that biblical passage as "male." Literature, philosophy, and the arts have glorified the masculine gender to the point of divinizing it. Greek philosophers said: “Man is the measure of all things.” Greek sculptures took masculine physical proportions as ideal. Women were considered beautiful if their bodies approximated the male physique.
For centuries, virtue, honor, common sense, and intelligence were man-based, man-oriented, and man-regulated. Excellence in sports was gauged by the extent of man’s reach, height, speed, endurance, and stride. You have to be man-sized to be admired.
The word “mankind” is itself indicative that the human race was primarily thought of in terms of men. History is biased for men. Men, not women, fought the great wars, built empires, established world religions, built splendid churches and architecture, composed timeless opera and symphonies. They colonized people, enslaved and sold them, and gave countless women a terrible time.
Heroism in literature had been a masculine domain, too. In countless plays, theater, and literary works, the main protagonists were always male. Who could forget the Greek dramas featuring the exploits of male tragic heroes? The world also delighted in Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, El Cid, Faust, Dostoevsky’s Ivan, Verdi’s Don Carlos, Tolstoy’s Vronsky, and Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago. They are potent arguments for masculine superiority.
Of course, there were also Helen of Troy, Clytemnestra, Cassandra, Cleopatra, Anna Karenina, and Joan of Arc, but they survive in our memories more as martyrs or victims of men, than heroic individuals.
Even among us, Filipinos, many still consider women as “anak ni Eba” with the connotation of being, like the biblical Eve, a temptress evoking the song’s refrain: “O tukso, layuan mo ako.”
Providentially, a woman named Mary has changed all that. If we could only appreciate what the Blessed Virgin Mary had done to transform our idea of the female and the feminine, we would accord her greater praise and veneration than what we do now. Many televangelists don’t even mention her for fear of alienating their protestant audience.
Mary has deconstructed history into “herstory.” Consider this: It is a woman, not a man, whom God chose to bring forth His physical presence in this world. Only Mary, a woman, can say of Jesus: “This is my body, this is my blood” in a way that no other person can say of Him. It was from her that Jesus literally got His body and blood.
By God’s will and her wholehearted cooperation, Mary is at the heart of the salvific events in the life of Jesus. In a very real sense, Mary is the answer to our deep human need for a feminine mediation of the divine, and to our need to see God as totally transcending gender differences.
Mary has inaugurated a new era that ushered in our post-masculine age. She has definitively consigned the saying “It’s a man’s world” to the dustbin. Contemporary times help her in this. Don't you notice, after believing for centuries that he was made after God’s image, man now seems to embrace Darwin’s theory that the human species has descended from the apes? Indeed, man seems preoccupied with proving his close affinity to his simian ancestors. Look at how men in high places engage in monkey business.
But humble as she is, Mary would be the first to object to being treated like a goddess or as a pawn in the raging gender war. Mary has taught us through her sublime example that our personality is not defined by our maleness or femaleness, by femininity or masculinity, but by our unconditional obedience and surrender to God after whose image we were created.