Contra Spiritum Mundi: Heroic Womanhood and
the Culture of Life

by David Meconi, S.J.

The early part of this century represented for Yeats a time in which purity of heart had been ravished by unprecedented dissolution and death. Heroes were lost and any sense of belonging had been foregone in the confusion.

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre/the falcon cannot hear the falconer;/Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.”1 William Butler Yeats’ The Second Coming, portrays a culture in which stability and balance are not only elusive but, perhaps, irrecoverable. The masterful voice of the falconer is lost and the majestic falcon slips slowly away, spiraling, gyrating, further and further out of sight. The early part of this century represented for Yeats a time in which purity of heart had been ravished by unprecedented dissolution and death. Heroes were lost and any sense of belonging had been foregone in the confusion. Something evil had broken into the twentieth century and Yeats sensed things could no longer be as they had once been. “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned.”

Yeats’ farsightedness has no doubt been confirmed. Something has fallen apart: this century has seen more blood spilled, more families divided, as well as the greatest shift in basic, natural morality than any other time in recorded history. The twentieth century introduced us not only to global wars but to the socially pervasive loss of humanity’s insistence upon righteousness. Is the center holding? From Stalin’s Russia to Hitler’s Germany and Pol Pot’s Cambodia to Margaret Sanger’s America, this century has witnessed history’s greatest masterminds of evil, leaders expert at instituting death. The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity. Moreover, the last-half of this century has seen a slow chipping away at basic social, familial and ecclesial structures, at an understanding of what it means to be good, and at our sensitivity toward the tenderness of human life. As the magnificent falcon does not immediately soar away but rather drifts slowly off, we have likewise been anesthetized, drip by drip, to the violence of the “blood-dimmed tide.” Anarchy is loosened and the ceremony of innocence is drowned.

To describe this erosion, John Paul II uses the term “the culture of death.” Ours is an age, argues the Holy Father, that is “characterized by the emergence of a culture which denies solidarity and in many cases takes the form of a veritable ‘culture of death.’ This culture is actively fostered by powerful, cultural, economic and political currents which encourage an idea of society excessively concerned with efficiency . . . a war of the powerful against the weak.”2 John Paul’s proposal in fighting society’s slaughter of the weak is the heroic woman. A true culture, a culture of life, is centered around heroic womanhood. For nowhere else does the Holy Father seem to use the terms “heroism” and “heroic” more often than when discussing what it means to be woman in a society that has forgotten the eternal importance of human life.3

John Paul sees in woman the natural protector of life. Woman, whose primary vocation is to be receptive and protective of the other, is the stable center of true culture. As he says in one of his weekly addresses preparing for the new millennium, “[W]omen have the task of assuring the moral dimension of culture, the dimension—namely of a culture worthy of the person—of an individual yet social life...‘It is not good for man to be alone: let us make him a helper fit for him’ (see Genesis 2:18). God entrusted the human being to woman.”4 John Paul is not plowing new ground here but only building upon what every great civilization has known: that only with woman at its center—only with woman’s gifts as a constitutive part of what is valued—is any civilized society held together.

Consider Plato’s Laws. In the Sixth Book Plato treats the foundations (archai) of the ideal city and it is here his discussion of marriage takes place. He states that in order for the home to be a true place of freedom and justice, “where the young will be born and raised, the bridegroom must separate from his father and mother and go there to make the marriage a new home and nursery for himself and the children.”5 Plato goes on to describe this departure from the man’s family and his “longing” to be joined with his wife as a sort of cement, a glue which solidifies not only the individuals involved but society as a whole.

The word Plato uses to describe this “longing,” this union, is a form of the same word used in the opening pages of Sacred Scripture: kollao, to glue or cement together. The metaphor in Genesis 2:24, reiterated by Christ in Matthew’s Gospel and echoed by Paul in his Letter to the Ephesians is especially vivid here: “That is why a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife and the two of them become one body” (Gen. 2:24; Mt. 19:5; Eph. 5:31). Why this image? Why is woman not called to cleave to man, or, perhaps more fitting, both entreated to cling to one another? A mutual clinging? Why is it that in the man’s leaving family and home, he finds in woman his true self and in turn both become whole?

No one clings to that which is unsettled. It is absurd to admonish someone to cleave to that which is unstable or weak. Movement towards the feminine suggests that she and her innate capacities are the center of culture toward which man must move. She secures and solidifies all that is good—sustaining, nourishing, cherishing the best of what it means to be human. Ancient civilizations were humanized in proportion to the degree they respected woman precisely as woman: nurturer, educator, and protector of human life.6 Great cultures—Greek, Hebrew, and Christian—have always seen the feminine as that upon which a free society is centered. The protector of any society’s innocence, the guardian of order and ceremony, is the feminine: she who is naturally ordered to the reception and nurturing of society’s unique immortal good, human life. Therefore, if this center is not holding, as Yeats depicts, let us turn our reflections toward woman as center to find the remedy.

Edith Stein, the Jewish philosopher turned Carmelite nun and mystic, sees in the human person two primal vocations: that of ruler and that of nurturer. Stein argues that in the man, the vocation to rule is prior to his nurturing capacity and in woman the converse is true: her first instinct is to nurture, and secondly to master. “The complementary relationship of man and woman appears clearly in the original order of nature,” writes Stein, “man’s primary vocation appears to be that of ruler and the paternal vocation secondary… woman’s primary vocation is maternal: her role as ruler is secondary and included in a certain way in her maternal vocation.”7 Therefore, according to Stein, whereas man’s essence is to provide and impart order, woman’s essence is to protect and nurture.

On June 7, 1990 in Testimony given to the Louisiana State Legislature, Professor Jerome Lejeune, a French geneticist, attested to this natural distinction between men and women even at the molecular level. At conception, the DNA from the sperm activates—or “reads” —the DNA from the ovum as the beginning of a magnificent story. Lejeune says: “Now the discovery is that the underlining of the male message tells the first cell how to build the membrane which will protect the baby and how to build the placenta which will take the supplies from the blood of the mother; so that, in effect, the man has in the first cell, transmitted to the baby the masculine duty to gather the food and to build the shelter, to build the hut and go hunting. On the contrary, the female message is to teach how to make the different parts which must be assembled to make a baby. It’s very extraordinary to see that the division of labor which we find among grown-ups is already written in the miniaturized language of genetics in the first cell a millimeter-and-a-half wide, which is the epitome, the summary, the reduction to the smallest expression of the human person.”8

Man is inceptive and naturally outside the process of human growth, whereas woman is receptive and the primary locus of human life’s unfolding. She is the one to whom God has entrusted human life. Accordingly, when a society no longer values nurturing and refuses to reward the fostering of human life, when a society holds up competition, rule, and material production as the only qualities worthy of emulation, woman is forced to forgo her particular value and distinction. She is now told that there is a horrible weakness in her femininity and she looks elsewhere for definition.
How does our society value the things traditionally associated with the feminine: tenderness, nurturing, compassion, wisdom and patience? Someone is valued today only insofar as one is able to manufacture, calculate and con. Modern society implicitly communicates that there is something wrong with woman’s vocation to nurture, that there is something weak in thinking about another. But it is not only woman who loses in being forced to surrender her primary quality of care giver and adjust how she sees her self, the man also forgoes great stability and identity. In denying the goodness of the difference of the sexes, modernity simultaneously denies the essential interdependence between the sexes, and both sexes have lost. The Church on the other hand has over and over repeated that there is a natural unity between the sexes which we disregard at our own peril.

In such a dehumanizing society the man is given license to forget his paternal vocation and is too easily excused when he counts only his ability to master and rule as all important. Not naturally geared toward the other, not biologically and spiritually turned toward the life of the other, man is innately more self-centered, thus potentially more selfish. John Paul has once again seen this dynamic: “Man himself—husband and father—can be helped to overcome forms of absenteeism and of periodic presence as well as a partial fulfillment of parental responsibilities—indeed, he can be involved in new and significant relations of interpersonal communion—precisely as the result of the intelligent, loving, and decisive intervention of woman.”9 Instead of insisting on this order, modernity has let man’s fallen nature slide even further from the center. Removing any insistence on serving a woman’s distinct virtue, the latter-half of this century has created a playground for lascivious men. One cultural critique recently put it this way: “Imagine that you are a selfish young man of twenty-one and it’s 1960. How could the country be fixed up to make you happier? We could set things up so your girlfriend won’t give you such a hard time when you want her to sleep with you. (We’ll just arrange for the schools, churches and community to take it for granted that she wants to.) If you get her pregnant, why not abortion-on-whim? But let’s say we abolish shotgun weddings also, just to be on the safe side. Once you’re married, we’ll get rid of all this business about supporting your wife. She can bloody well support herself. And as for kids, they’re adaptable—we’ll raise up a professional childcare establishment to murmur reassuringly about daycare and motherless afternoons at home being just what the doctor ordered—great for your kids and great fun, too. Kids or not, a man wants to move on, so divorce will be made easy and alimony will be gone. A perversity of historic proportions: Feminists have helped create a utopia for loutish males.”10 In removing the feminine from the center of culture, it is not only she who loses, but man and the whole of society are cheated as well. Edith Stein again: “[W]oman’s natural gifts and their best possible development are no longer considered; rather, man uses her as a means to achieve his own ends in the exercise of his work or in pacifying his own lust. However, it can easily happen that the despot becomes a slave to his own lust and thereby is a slave of the slave who must satisfy him.”11 When a woman is not appreciated for that which makes her particularly woman, society as a whole suffers: she undergoes a shift in the understanding of what makes her valuable and man becomes a self-aggrandizing slave to the ephemeral.

Of course the most mundane example of this is how a woman “straightens up” a man; how she can make a man “clean up,” as it were.12 Woman naturally domesticates man but in a society where the importance of the domus is under attack woman’s vocation is devalued and man’s truest self is neglected. Perhaps an unfair request, but does society not look to a woman to correct a man’s rumpled ways? Is the woman not seen as the sponsor of ideals? While walking down the street have you ever been frightened by a strange male approaching you? If so, you were probably even less frightened if that same male had been walking with a woman, even less had they been walking hand-in-hand, arm-in-arm; and even less frightened, and in fact, delighted, if the two were together in tow with children. How scared can you be of a man carrying diaper wipes? The marital covenant brings the lone man out of the category of potential predator, isolated stranger, into the realm of covenant: one who has foregone his natural instinct to rule, now clinging to the feminine.

That is why when a man fully does give his life over to his wife, St. Paul asks this woman to be in awe. Marriage demands that man surrender his primary instinct to rule and dominate for the sake of the union and his vocation to imitate Christ and lay his life down for his bride. Only in covenant is man’s innate self-centeredness transformed into service of the other. “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ loved the church and handed himself over for her… each one of you should love his wife as himself; but the woman should stand in awe of her husband” (Eph 5:25, 33). A woman stands in awe of the man who lays his life down in her service, not out of fear or dread, but “awe” here means to be so taken by what just happened—man’s dying to his natural self-centeredness—that woman is in amazement of this man who has entered freely into covenant with another. Awe here is akin to that reaction we have when someone admits a problem and, defeating the odds, seeks out the needed help. Men are not naturally oriented toward the other and when they die to their primary instinct of self, one should be in awe. Ironically, however, it is this section from Ephesians that many churchmen today fight to revise or ignore altogether; we live in a society that values only rule.

Surely some revelation is at hand;/Surely the Second Coming is at hand./The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out/ When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi/ Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert/ A shape with lion body and the head of a man,/A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,/Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it/ Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The falcon which opened Yeats’ vision in spiral perfection has slowly degenerated into some vulture, an indignant desert bird whose presence announces a troubling advent. The spiritus mundi slowly approaches: some hideous, indistinguishable monster, a freak of nature whose recognition is not easily discernible. It is neither recognizably leonine nor particularly human: a curious monster whose blank stare elicits fear and whose presence announces the end of an age.

Today’s contraceptive mentality has ushered in a new, unrecognizable type of being, some third gender, neither apparently female nor indisputably male, neither inceptive nor receptive of human life. Once considered an affliction, infertility is now promoted as the cure for a society that does not value life, for a society that belittles not only woman’s nurturing instinct but the complementarily and interdependence of the sexes. By choosing to contracept, woman takes the essential determining factor of her womanhood and turns it into an unwanted intrusion; in contracepting, man solipsistically refuses to be associated with the other, refuses to “cling” to and thus assist his helpmeet. What once was thought of as a terrible curse, sterility—however temporary—is now held up as a right and a means of social advancement. King Lear’s curse upon his daughter Gonerill for her lack of filial devotion, today sounds eerily akin to an ad for Planned Parenthood or the motto for some secular sex-ed curriculum: “Hear, Nature, hear! Dear goddess, hear/Suspend thy purpose if thou didst intend/ To make this creature fruitful. Into her womb convey sterility/Dry up in her the organs of increase (I.4.272 ff.). Our culture of death has its roots in a culture of sterility.

No society has ever entertained euthanasia laws (e.g., Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act; 1996) which had not first passed abortion laws (e.g., Roe v. Wade; 1973) which had not first passed laws securing the right to artificial birth control (e.g., Griswold v. Connecticut; 1965). For when we begin to tell God when life will begin, it does not take us long to begin to tell Him when it will end. Death alone can thrive in a culture of sterility.

As Yeats concludes, our thoughts are once again brought back to that cradle in Bethlehem. The darkness drops again; but now I know/ That twenty centuries of stony sleep/ Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,/ And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,/ slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? The rocking cradle is where we look: motherhood and nurturing of life is our surest and most primal defense against the slouching beast who is intent on destroying newborn hope. The evil one knows where to attack: the woman and her cradle; and it seems that this is precisely where it slouches after twenty centuries of slumber. For Yeats, the end of Christian culture is marked by attack on the young and on her to whom the young have been entrusted. The woman and the dragon of Revelation 12 are captured in a paradigmatic struggle between maternal protection and worldly destruction.

But perhaps Yeats underestimated the God-given strength of the maternal hand rocking the cradle. As the Bride of the Holy Spirit, the Mother of God, and as the first and most faithful disciple, Mary is our surest guide back to a culture of life. In Mary do we find a woman, the woman, once again at the center: at the center of history, at the center of salvation: “When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman” (Gal 4:4). Redemption depends on a woman: she who gave her entire self for the other—for the entire world. As Mary is our surest guide, Christ is our only goal.

It is here—in the God made flesh—we embrace the fruit of God’s love for His people: His Incarnation. The Eucharist is thus understood to be the sacrament of the Bridegroom and the Bride: the result of Christ’s spousal love for His people; His Pledge to be with us until the end of time. As John Paul reiterated in his letter On the Dignity and Vocation of Women, the Eucharist is the focal point of the spousal love between God and creation: “The Eucharist is the Sacrament of our Redemption. It is the Sacrament of the Bridegroom and of the Bride. The Eucharist makes present and realizes anew in a sacramental manner the redemptive Christ, who ‘creates’ the Church, his body. Christ is united with this ‘body’ as the bridegroom with the bride….The perennial ‘unity of the two’ that exists between man and woman from the very ‘beginning’ is introduced into this ‘great mystery’ of Christ and of the Church.”13

The solution is to restore the heroic woman to her intended place: the center of a free culture. She needs to see her inherent worth and dignity precisely as woman; to see she is made for something more than what Planned Parenthood and Jack Kevorkian offer. Why is it that for every one man Kevorkian helped kill, there were two women?14 Why is communist China the only country where women commit suicide at a higher rate than men every year? In fact, in one city recently, Lutou, 43 out of the 48 attempted suicides treated in the emergency room were women.15 Once a culture devalues life and the family where this life takes root, woman is the first to be devalued; the first to believe she has nothing to offer. As the primary center of humanity’s goodness, when that center fails to hold, woman is the first to suffer.

Woman need to be restored as our heroes of the everyday: martyrs of the mundane who die to modernity in order to live for that which is true. The kernel of this daily heroism, argues John Paul II, is “the silent but effective and eloquent witness of those ‘brave mothers who devote themselves to their own family without reserve, who suffer in giving birth to their children and who are ready to make any effort, to face any sacrifice, in order to pass on to them the best of themselves’.”16 As the new millennium approaches, women are rightly demanding greater appreciation and greater dignity. Those intent on building a culture of life do well to remind all that women will not find their dignity, our dignity, in technology, political intrigue, or in a culture of death: true womanhood consists in heroism and covenantal love.


David Meconi, S.J. is a Jesuit priest in his fourth year regency at Xavier University, Cincinnati, Ohio.

1    William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming,”no. 200 in The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, ed., Richard Finneran (New York: Scriberner Paperback Poetry, 1996) 187. For more on the background of this poem, see John Unterecker, A Reader’s Guide to William Butler Yeats, (Syracuse University Press [1959], 1996) 164-67.
2    Evangelium Vitae [EV], 1995, paragraph 12.
3    E.g., EV, 86.
4    Celebrate 2000! Reflections on God the Father: Weekly Readings for 1999, ed., Paul Thigpen (Ann Arbor: Servant Publications, 1998), p. 82.
5    776a in The Laws of Plato, ed., Thomas Pangle (University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 164. This accords well with Republic 449d where it is assumed that “as far as society is concerned, a great deal—no everything—hinges on whether or not [the raising of children and the sharing of wives] happens in the right way”; trans., Robin Waterfield (Oxford, 1993), p. 160.
6    To say that a culture was civilized insofar as the woman was respected as woman, is of course not to say that any ancient civilizations fulfilled this. Even the mythical Amazon tribe would fail to respect woman qua woman in that women were forced to become like men to be considered valuable. The popular etymology of “Amazon” is of course the Greek meaning “without a breast,” denoting the fact that Amazons were said to remove a young girl’s right breast so as to allow for more proficiency in drawing back the bow while on horseback. Thus even a civilization, however fictitious, ruled by women can fail to respect women precisely as such, forcing her into a masculine definition of self.
7    ”The Separate Vocations of Man and Woman According to Nature and Grace,” p. 74 in Woman, volume II of The Collected Works of Edith Stein (Washington, D.C.: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1996).
8    This talk can be found on the Internet at: www.ewtn. com/library/prolife/geneslif/txt.
9    Celebrate 2000!., op. cit., 82.
10    David Gelernter, Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber (New York: The Free Press, 1997), p. 92.
11    Stein, op.cit., p. 72.
12    The following insight from Fulton Sheen is particularly germane here: “The oft-repeated suggestion that woman is more religious than man has some basis in truth, but only in the sense that her nature is more readily disposed toward the ideal...When there is descent into an equal degree of vice, there is always a greater scandal caused by a woman than by a man. Nothing seems more a profanation of the sacred than a drunken woman. The so-called double standard which does not exist and which has no ethical foundation, is actually based on the unconscious impulse of man to regard woman as the preserver of ideals, even when he fails to live up to them.” The World’s First Love: Mary, Mother of God (San Francisco: Ignatius Press [1953], 1996), p. 148.
13    Mulieris Dignitatem (1988), paragraph 26.
14    See James Keenan, “The Case for Physician-Assisted Suicide?”, America (Nov. 14, 1998), 15.
15    New York Times, Sunday, January 24, 1999; A1 and 8.
16    EV, 86; this quote is from John Paul II’s Homily for the Beatification of Isidore Bakanja, Elisabetta Canori Mora and Gianna Beretta Molla, April 24th, 1994. See L’Osservatore Romano, April 27, 1994 (English edition). This is a theme close to the Holy Father’s heart. See his World Day of Peace Address: “Women: Teachers of Peace,” Jan. 1, 1995.

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