Why Feminists Are Wrong About Eve
God announces two things, once he three things, four things. Once he creates man, he says man is to tend the garden; that's his purpose. Why a garden? It's a walled garden, actually, because that's what Paradise means: walled garden.
Why a walled garden? Well, a garden is a place of nature, obviously, and walls are a place of culture. A walled garden is a place of nature encapsulated in a manageable manner by the walls of culture. That's what your backyard is; it's a yard. It's nature has walls. The walls are culture. The walls, you could think of as physical entities, as objects. But your lawn has borders. If you don't have a fence, your neighbors know where the borders are.
And where are the borders? Well, they're in the imagination of your neighbors. I’m dead serious about that. The walls—it's so funny 'cause you'll see people in the border between Canada and the United States say they'll get out and they'll step across the border. It's like as if it's an object, as if it's an entity that's there on the ground. People know that that's magic in some sense because the grass in Canada is only slightly less healthy than the grass in the United States, let's say.
Um, it's easy to concretize that, but the idea of a walled-off space in a communal society is a social agreement. You have your domain: your house, your garden, your backyard; that's enough cosmos for you to set right. And perhaps, if you're competent enough to do more, you'll expand your garden so that you have more to tend. But you start with a walled garden of some size, and if you tend it properly, then the promise is that as your competence grows, so will your dominion.
Man is sent to tend the garden and to name everything that's in it. This is Adam. What does it mean? Well, it's the logos again; it's a re-representation of the creative spirit of God that makes itself manifest when time begins and when new things come into being. Our ability to name, our ability to speak, is that in a microcosmic manner—this is what we're capable of doing. That's what the patriarchal spirit does: it names and orders the world.
God brings everything to Adam to see what he'll name them, and that's a reflection of the idea that we have a created order. But man has a place in it, and the place is to organize it and to put everything in its proper place and to assign it its identity. And that's no different than the prioritization of attention; that's part of the story. Name things in relationship to their function. Put things in place in relationship to their significance in the hierarchy of being. Orient them; orient all named things in an upward sequence. Constrain, organize, and order the manifestation of the patriarchal spirit.
What does God decide? That's not good enough. Man lacks a helper. Man needs a helper; woman is created as a consequence. Because the order that men produce, because of their limitations, is insufficient, and something has to be introduced to speak for that which is not included. That's the role of woman; that's the biblical role of the woman; it's the biological role of the mother.
You know this in your own household: women bring the concerns of the marginalized to the center. You can think about that politically; it's useful to think about it politically. All established human orders exclude. The exclusion causes pain; the pain of exclusion requires a voice—this is the voice of the Eternal Mother.
That's where Genesis 1 ends. Genesis 2 begins, containing the story of Adam and Eve. It's another creation story; it's commensurate with the first one. It's a variation on a theme. God creates Adam out of matter—Earth—and breath, Spirit. Why? Because that's what human beings are. We're material creatures that are animated; "Ana" means Spirit.
What's the spirit? The spirit is the living organizing principle of the material. Human beings are an amalgam of the living organizing principle and the material, and that's what's portrayed in the creation of Adam: the combination of matter and spirit, the combination of material and conscious. You could think about it that way if you're more secular-minded.
We're conscious matter. What's up with that? No one understands that. No materialist understands that. We understand nothing about consciousness. It's as mysterious now as it's been throughout the entire course of our existence. It's never been reduced to a material phenomenon. We have no idea what that would even mean, and if we did reduce it to the material, all that would mean was that we inadvertently elevated the material.
We treat each other like we're conscious. We presume from first principles that we're conscious. We can't even distinguish between being itself and being conscious. So that's a perfectly reasonable representation of man. Woman is taken from man, from a rib, from the side, as an equal.
There's a critique of the patriarchal Judeo-Christian narrative from the resentful feminist side that makes the claim that the biblical narrative is, for example, radically patriarchal in its orientation—dooming women to subjugation. Um, that's a Preposterous claim, by the way. It's not only false; it's false in a very particular way.
There are falsehoods that are approximations of the truth. There are falsehoods so deep that they're the exact opposite of the truth. And the truth of the matter is that right from the first words, the biblical library is miraculous in its insistence that women, like men, are made in the image of God—that emerges in the first chapter—and that Eve is the equal of Adam in every manner, although complimentary and not identical.
And our society is riven by conflict so deep that we now doubt both of those propositions. There's no form of confusion more profound than that. Sexually reproducing creatures without nervous systems can tell the difference between male and female. I’m dead serious about that. If you can get people to swallow the lie that there's no difference between men and women, there is no lie they won't swallow. Right?