Patriarchy in Paradise

Why Christian feminism is impossible

In the lecture I was fired for, I explained that the idea of a matriarchy is a feminist fantasy. As Professor Richard Wrangham explains, ‘patriarchy is worldwide and history-wide.’¹ That’s the canonical position of evolutionary anthropology, and it’s not controversial. Gerda Lerner put the point bluntly: ‘no matriarchal society has ever existed.’²

Yet even Christians who acknowledge the reality of patriarchy often claim that it didn’t exist before the Fall. Surely, they imagine, Eden was egalitarian: Eve wasn’t subject to Adam, and submission was mutual.

No. This is just another feminist fantasy. In fact, given that patriarchy is natural law and grace builds on nature, Paradise was the pinnacle of patriarchy. Eden was a place of hierarchy, not equality.

Naming, for example, is a form of dominion. That’s why parents name their children and why God named Adam. It’s also why Adam named all the animals — and Eve. By naming her, he exercised his authority over her. And this authority was rooted in their marriage. When God gave Eve to Adam to be his companion and pronounced His blessing on them, He instituted marriage. And the husband is the head of the wife.

Especially in Eden, or it wouldn’t be Paradise. It’d be the beginnings of hell on earth. That’s why Satan seduced Eve into subverting the hierarchy. Eve disobeys Adam, and then he becomes her follower instead of her leader. The Fall happens when they become the first feminist couple.

As Scripture says, “Man is the glory of God, and woman is the glory of man.” The metaphysics of this are rarely taught today, but older moral theology manuals dared to address the topic. With ecclesiastical approval, Wilhelm and Scannel's Manual of Catholic Theology, for example, states that, although man and woman both possess the same human nature,

‘of man alone Scripture says, directly and formally, that he is made to the likeness of God. Hence St. Paul teaches: “The man indeed ought not to cover his head, because he is the image and glory of God; but the woman is the glory of the man. For the man is not of the woman, but the woman of the man. For the man was not created for the woman, but the woman for the man” (1 Cor. xi.7-9). Woman, then, having received human nature only mediately through man, and to be a helpmate to man, is not an image of God in the same full sense as man. Woman, considered as a wife — that is, in a position of subjection and dependence — is in no wise an image of God, but rather a type of the relation which the creature bears to the Creator and Lord.’

Because a wife is subject to her husband, Eve was subject to Adam. Paradise was patriarchal. Indeed, Christianity is patriarchy.

And until the Church can once again teach this plainly, Christianity will remain enfeebled. As Pope Leo XIII wrote in his St. Michael Prayer, the devil and his demons

have filled and inebriated with gall and bitterness the Church, the Spouse of the Immaculate Lamb, and have laid impious hands on her most sacred possessions. In the Holy Place itself, where has been set up the See of the most holy Peter and the Chair of Truth for the light of the world, they have raised the throne of their abominable impiety, with the iniquitous design that when the Pastor has been struck, the sheep may be scattered.

That ‘abominable impiety’ is feminism, which Gertrud von Le Fort aptly called ‘the true expression of modern godlessness.’

Rather than glorifying man, the woman glories in herself. The exhibitionism that secular liberalism encourages among women is actually self-worship. She isn't really interested in male attention. In fact, she hates it. Instead, she is getting pleasure from the act of exposure itself. She’s her own idol.

The man, meanwhile, rather than glorifying God, seeks to be the glory of the woman. Intriguingly, Revelation only tells us that Eve ate first then persuaded Adam to eat afterwards. It gives no explanation of how he was induced to eat.

Nevertheless, John Milton’s Paradise Lost imagines Adam trying to explain his actions to God:

This Woman whom thou mad'st to be my help,
And gav'st me as thy perfet gift, so good,
So fit, so acceptable, so Divine,
That from her hand I could suspect no ill,
And what she did, whatever in it self,
Her doing seem'd to justifie the deed;
Shee gave me of the Tree, and I did eate.

Beguiled by Eve’s beauty, he followed her lead because ‘her doing seem'd to justifie the deed.’ And this is exactly how young women were weaponised as a honeytrap during the Sexual Revolution. As Don Colacho said, the leftist motto is ‘revolution and pussy.’

God then replies with antifeminist orthodoxy:

Was shee thy God, that her thou didst obey
Before his voice, or was shee made thy guide,
Superior, or but equal, that to her
Thou did'st resigne thy Manhood, and the Place
Wherein God set thee above her made of thee,
And for thee, whose perfection farr excell'd
Hers in all real dignitie: Adornd
She was indeed, and lovely to attract
Thy Love, not thy Subjection, and her Gifts
Were such as under Government well seem'd,
Unseemly to beare rule, which was thy part
And person, hadst thou known thy self aright.

In other words, a man resigns his manhood when he puts his wife above God. He was supposed to rule, but instead he became enslaved. So if modern man is to know himself ‘aright’ again, he must ‘Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is all man’ (Ecclesiastes 12:13). And for a man to ‘love his wife as himself,’ as Ephesians 5:33 says he must, involves instilling the fear of God in her as well, which is why Scripture adds, ‘let the wife fear her husband.’

1. Demonic Males (Bloomsbury, 1996), p.125

2. The Creation of Patriarchy (OUP, 1986), p.31