If Revelation contained only reports of the creation of the first pair of humans, this would be enough to indicate its divine origin. It is necessary to return there, in the confusion of today’s practice in marriage and feminism, for saving light and reliable directives.
Woman was created so that man would not be alone. If she was not equal to him, then his solitude would not be filled. The man welcomed her as a piece of himself: Behold, bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh. He could only understand an equal being that way.
She was to be his “socia”, companion, “adjutorium simile”, a helper similar to him and with him similar to the image of God. The help and support of a physically weaker being could consist primarily of her advice.
All this presupposes a brave, mentally strong woman. For the sake of order, the Creator silently left the primacy of the pair to the one whom he created first, after which he blessed himself as an equal and harmonious, complementary pair and forbade the separation of what he himself had joined. He put a woman under the power of a man only as a punishment for abusing her advice to a man.
The praise of a brave woman is sung by the Holy Spirit in Proverbs 31, 10-31. Her qualities should relate to a threefold role: being a companion, helper or support and therefore also an adviser.
Her strength as an equal and yet subordinate companion is in her tenderness, gentleness, sweetness, kindness and patience; he rewards a man with good and not with evil all the days of his life; he opens his hand to the needy and extends his palms to the poor; even at death he smiles and can smile even on the last day; the law of grace is on her tongue.
She is a man’s helper and support: a man’s heart trusts in her; he works according to the skill of his hands; he does not eat bread hastily; he also gets up at night when the house requires it; he buys and sells independently, considering whether the work is good and thus by his own doing increases the well-being of the family; he distributes food and procures clothes for the family, he also dresses himself sensibly; independently disposes of the work of his hands. But she is also a counsellor: she must gird her loins with strength when it is necessary to advise against a man’s will, she extends her hand to important matters, she publicly raises her warning voice in important matters, even if her hand holds the spindle. Honorable is the man in her gates, and he sits among the stewards of the earth, the man of her who opens her mouth to wisdom. For this, the man praises her; he finds that such a woman is above wealth; that grace is deceitful and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord will be praised.
Of all ways of companionship, support and help, advice is the most valuable; it leaves us our dignity, it helps in secret: it sharpens our intelligence, it moves our will.
A woman should advise, a man should decide.
The first woman betrayed the mission for which she was created. She betrayed her role as an inspirer, a counselor: through her body, she put herself under the control of an evil spirit, and by advising men to do evil, she put humanity in danger of damnation.
From that time until the Virgin Mary, women all over the world, and with only partial exceptions that typify or confirm the rule, lose their threefold dignity and influence as a wife. A man, debasing his companion to an object of pleasure, surrounds himself with the pride of solitude; condemning woman to ignorance, he is without a helper and alone in the field of thought and work; he decides on his own, without her advice and against her, and thus also commits the condemnation of God (Pilate)
Mary is coming, the Return of our salvation.
Maria – wife? … She seems to be at a loss for words, looking at the pure Joseph at her feet and not at her side… And yet – She has to say everything and says it in such a way that we are speechless.
The opposite of Eve, freed from the law of nature, from the bonds of carnality, escapes the power of the evil spirit in a supreme, sovereign way: She becomes betrothed to the Holy Spirit. The wonder, the mystery. Let’s kneel!
Wife of the Holy Spirit… How on earth will this girl fill God’s solitude?
And yet it seems as if God, who could save the world in a thousand other ways, would be too alone for this work, as if He needed Her.
Mary understands his idea of Redemption, accepts it as her own, supports it with the highest suffering and sacrifice of which a person is capable, the pain of motherhood. The Holy Trinity accepts her participation in the greatest idea that has ever been, God’s idea of Love.
Mary is the companion of God, she is the support of the child Jesus and his help even to the cross and the grave; she is a sweet inspiration to the Wonder Maker.
It is in the role of councilor that she has her own reward. This dignity of hers is extended to the whole world. He is the Seat of Wisdom for men, the immortal model of women. Her advice is the whisper of the Holy Spirit. His wife, she rules His possessions, holds all His graces in her hands; it becomes Heaven’s Gate.
The wife of the Holy Spirit is the most perfect model of a wife.
A Christian wife can stand no higher than when she is the bride of a man’s thought. Christian thought, Christian man: to realize the kingdom of God on earth.
Every other idea eventually results in how to make deadly bombs; but then women give birth to children in vain. A woman who is united to a man by an idea other than practical Christianity is senseless, perverted and uprooted. It leads to death and throws the family and the whole human society there.
Marriage according to the flesh has two purposes.
The first is the family, the continuation of the human race, which, redeemed by Christ, is to form the Kingdom of God on earth, preparation for the Kingdom of Heaven. The Christian wife is to serve this goal generously, humbly, devotedly, and bravely. The great sanctifying idea of the kingdom of God in the souls of children will bring her closer to Mary, and only in this way will her children be born less from the will of men and from the will of blood and more from the Holy Spirit.
The secondary purpose of carnal marriage is the gratification of lust. That is, a medicine, not a stimulus. What would a Christian wife want with flirtatious fashion? How will she help a man in the fight with the body? How will she be able to be his counselor, his conscience, if her own conscience is dull?
And yet she should bring her husband “good and not evil all the days of her life”: Declina de malo et fac bonum… She should also gird herself with strength and in time of need thunder with the prophet: Woe to those who call good evil and evil good!
This is the task of all women, from the wife of a worker to the wife of a minister.
In the abyss of souls there is a call for a woman – a companion, a helper, a support, an adviser; it vibrates with the desire for the marriage of souls, which can be alive and life-giving only among Christians. The world, which has been derailed to its destruction by the proud, rebellious, God-rejecting man’s reason, will have to be set on the way to salvation by the help of woman; not by her working beside man and instead of man and according to man, but by working with and through man’s soul. As a man’s helper, so that he does not leave him alone at work, if he is a builder, she does not need to study architecture in order for her intuition to tell her whether a man is building the house of God or the Tower of Babel. In the first case, her warm interest will give him unsuspected inspirations for the whole and the detail, in the second, it will be his restless, restless and painful conscience.
And so all her companionship and help and support will be in her inspiration and advice, which she will draw from the Holy Spirit with intact intuition and Christian effort.
A woman suffering
Today’s woman has a rebellious trait in common with the fallen angel; as he refused to serve, so she refuses to suffer. He rebels against his own, God-willed, destiny.
The curse was pronounced in Paradise for punishment. Both the woman and the man were to suffer the punishment; but in the case of the woman, God especially emphasized the suffering.
All over the world until the coming of Christ (as well as Mary), the woman suffered the suffering that was pronounced in the curse: enslavement under the power of the man; servitude in the service of his body, motherhood without the right to a child.
The modern woman is the antipode of the pre-Christian woman: she is emancipated from the domination of men even in marriage; with her body, she does not serve the man or the preservation of the family, on the contrary: serving her passions, she enslaves the man, she allows motherhood only as long as she promises good from him, or rather she rejects him. Because it rejects suffering.
There is a whole world between these two women: the Christian woman.
Christ took the punishment from God, the despair of the curse, and transformed the tasks of punishment into means of salvation. From the curse of hard work for men and suffering for women, he redeemed mankind by both work and suffering; but with suffering he crowned the work of salvation. And if the price of his work consisted in obedience to the Father, in whose face man threw the temptation of the fallen angel and from his instruction said his Non serviam (I will not serve) – so obedience is essentially a female element; the Old Testament man and the man until the coming of Christ throughout the world, whether Jew or Gentile, was a hard master; and if he was a slave, then his wife was a slave’s slave.
Even after the immense reversal of the view of women in Christianity, which restored her equality with men, freed her from the services of the flesh, exalted motherhood through the cult of the Virgin Mother of God, the role of women remains the same as in the Old Testament, because the New Testament is only the fulfillment of the Old. What was a curse became a blessing. However, the woman’s will is not violated. A woman turns suffering into a blessing if she accepts it willingly, out of love for God. And that’s the only way he fulfills his destiny. Only in this way is he a living member of the Church, in which the work of salvation is accomplished.
The primal reaction of human nature to all pain, the movement to reject suffering, is too natural, it is animalistic. But then Christ comes and lifts us from the natural to the supernatural with the words: Take up your cross and follow me!
Accepting suffering is necessary; whoever rejects him rejects life. A man can only throw away his own, but a woman has demonic possibilities to hinder the Creator in his work and plans.
By accepting suffering, it has endless possibilities for creative help. Christianity teaches her to win over him, even to desire him.
Her nature helps her in this. He has a special capacity for suffering. Physically and mentally weaker and gentler suffer even when the man is not yet suffering. For this, he has the gift of greater patience and endurance. She gives in to suffering in such a way that it kneads, shapes, and chisels her, she does not give in to it in such a way that it breaks her. Melted in the fire of pain, she receives the deep frieze of the image of the Sufferer; moreover, it meets him from within with the feminine capacity for compassion, it is a living metal that works alone together with the grace of God on its formation. So many women have already had stigmata, but only one saint is stigmatized. (The text was written before the canonization of P. Pius note.) God’s response to the woman’s compassion was the image of the face of the Suffering in Veronica’s scarf.
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By how the woman of a nation rejects suffering, chasing after pleasures of all kinds from the intellectual to the animal, we can measure to what extent that nation is turning away from Christianity and thus from life, and is tending to fall.
He rejects suffering! However, she does not escape him, but despairs of him, curses him. She who uses the name “love” in the language of poets does not understand God, who is Love. That God wants suffering from us, rather from a woman. Love presupposes suffering. The essence of Christianity is love. It is his main commandment: You shall love … both God and your neighbor. There is no greater love than to sacrifice one’s life. To sacrifice life in a moment, or to sacrifice it after days, that means suffering.
The modern woman does not give life, does not give to life; takes from life, greedily, takes and steals. Mark of the vampire, not the giver. The soul is stunted and barren by pleasures, even permitted and justified ones; only through suffering it grows to infinity.
God wants a woman to be a giver. She should be a mother first and foremost. The meaning of the mother lies in the fact (according to St. Thomas) that she populates heaven. Woe to the barren! Only virginity is sterile. Virginity is a higher kind of motherhood (St. Ambrosius, De virginibus) Even a virgin populates heaven with her sacrifice. Motherhood, like love, presupposes suffering.
A woman who does not want to suffer depopulates the world. An empty cradle, a child – a mannequin with a threaded head, a man – a degenerate eagle, crouched on the ground next to her like a hen, powerlessly beating the dust with stunted wings – this is her work. And finally, he looks back at the destruction he leaves behind with a grin of tears and a spit of curses. She didn’t avoid it. After all, he suffers, but – without blessing.
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