ANN BARNHARDT has some incisive lines on this subject:

Should wives be subject to their husbands, as St. Paul exhorts? You’re damn right they should. All day, every day. The fact that this question even has to be asked is, by itself, evidence of how far gone our culture is. I truly believe that most people in Western Civilization go through their entire lives without ever actually experiencing love. They experience lust, and they experience various forms of attachment, but most people never actually love. To love IS TO SUBMIT. To love is to make oneself SUBJECT TO ANOTHER. To love is to freely choose to put another above yourself, to literally live for another. Within the context of marriage this dynamic of total self-gift obviously meant to flow in BOTH DIRECTIONS (as the love between God the Father and God the Son, and between Christ and the Church) and is equally expected of men vis-a-vis their wives.

The reason St. Paul went out of his way to specifically admonish wives to remember to submit to their husbands is because women have the greater tendency to slip into self-absorbed nagging shrewishness and take for granted the fruits of their husbands’ labors because those labors are usually done away from the home, and are thus invisible to the wife. A man married to a woman on a reality show about shrewish, materialistic wives (Real Housewives of Beverly Hills) just committed suicide because he was run into massive debt by his wife’s ostentatious and utterly avaricious lifestyle demands, and was also having his character assassinated on national television BY HIS WIFE. This woman didn’t love her husband or submit herself to him, she rode him, never sparing the whip, until she literally killed him. This is the opposite of love. This is evil. It isn’t a victory for the so-called liberation of womankind. It is a scathing indictment of our demonically perverted feminist culture.

Well said — with characteristic Barnhardtian directness and capitalized words. However, the Theology of Body concept of “total self-gift” is problematic. It is, in fact, a feminist concept in which submission isn’t really submission because husband and wife are ONE. In reality, marriage is not fusion or self-obliteration. Man and wife remain separate beings.

Another quibble: I disagree with Barnhardt’s definition of a feminist earlier in the piece. She writes that feminists are “angry, bitter, jealous, narcissistic, prideful, self-absorbed women who hate men and deeply resent their own femininity.” Sure, the most ardent feminists are this way, but feminism, which I also once embraced and most women today embrace, is pervasive and most feminists are not man-haters or continually angry or bitter people. It is actually moderate feminism that is more influential, as it appears harmless and yet lacks the power to affirm the moral order that even moderate feminists want.

— Comments —

Ann Barnhardt writes:

Can you expand on your self-gift/TOB reference in the piece you quoted me in today? I have read TOB and TOB commentaries, and I realize something is wrong if only by the creepy people that seem to flock to the TOB party, but no one in Traddyland will articulate any of the critiques to me. I understand that marriage does not in any way annihilate the individuals, any more than the Three Persons are annihilated, but there is obviously some kind of special surrender or unification, perhaps as Christ surrendered to and embraced the Cross. Anyway, I’m happy to hear a mature, orthodox explanation, as this is obviously an extremely important subject.

Laura writes:

I recommend Randy Engel’s book  “John Paul II and the ‘Theology of the Body’ –A Study in Modernism.” It is an excellent analysis and summary.

On the subject of wifely submission, John Paul says that this concept is an outdated teaching. Instead, husband and wife are “reciprocally subject” to one another. (The Church has always taught, in keeping with St. Paul, that a man is obligated to love his wife. At the same time, the man is “head of the wife.”) In this series of talks on marriage and sexuality, John Paul analyzes St. Paul’s statement in Ephesians, “Wives be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord:”

5. The author of Ephesians is not afraid to accept concepts that were characteristic of the mentality and customs of that time; he is not afraid of speaking about submission of the wife to the husband; he is, in addition, not afraid … of recommending to the wife “to have reverence toward her husband” (Eph 5:33). In fact, it is certain that, when husband and wife are subject to one another “in fear of Christ,” everything will find a just balance, that is, such as to correspond to their Christian vocation in mystery.

6. Certainly, our contemporary sensibility is different, mentality and customs are different. Nevertheless, the underlying parenetic principle that we find in Ephesians remains the same and bears the same fruits. Reciprocal submission “in fear of Christ” — a submission born on the foundation of Christian pietas —- always forms the deep and firm supporting structure of the community of spouses, in which the true “communion” of persons is realized. (Theology of Body, Pauline Books and Media), p. 474. [Emphases mine.] 

Note that a “community of spouses” is not hierarchical.

This is one example in which John Paul talks of “mutual submission.” Note also that he speaks of St. Paul being “not afraid,” which seems to be an admission that men may indeed be subject to women and that men today, including possibly himself, are afraid to affirm this teaching.

Sage McLaughlin writes:

I was heartened to see this statement from you: “However, the Theology of Body concept of ‘total self-gift’ is problematic.”  It comes as little surprise that you find the phenomenology of Karol Wojtyła problematic, but I am always glad when I find common cause on such a difficult subject.

I have had a problem with precisely this element of the TOB program since I first heard of it.  I have a few objections, the first of course being that we should give ourselves over totally to God, not to our spouses, but let’s leave that to one side.  The bigger problem I have is that there is a persistent strain of feminist levelling that runs throughout Wojtyla’s theorizing.  Always eager to assert that the Church was liberal before liberalism was cool, Wojtyla attempted to re-conceptualize male headship as a kind of mirror image of wifely submission, which it simply is not, and cannot be if there is to be true complimentarity of the sexes.  TOB promoters like Christopher West have gone as far as to say that, rather than being a part of God’s plan for mankind and a clear reflection of the cosmic order, “Male domination [which is how he refers to ordinary male headship] is a consequence of the Fall!”

Again, I don’t have time to deconstruct the subversive consequences of this idea, but it hardly seems necessary anyway—it’s pretty obvious that embracing it will make male headship into a vague and confusing concept that is too difficult to live out in practice.  I’d like to say more about TOB on another occasion, and am always eager to hear more from you.

Mary writes:

Wifely submission has been misunderstood for ages, most egregiously by TOB proponents.

Pope Pius XI’s Encyclical on Christian Marriage, Casti Connubii [Of Chaste Wedlock], is lengthy but worth reading. In the first few paragraphs he mourns – and this in 1930 – that “…a great number of men, forgetful of that divine work of redemption, either entirely ignore or shamelessly deny the great sanctity of Christian wedlock, or relying on the false principles of a new and utterly perverse morality, too often trample it under foot…these most pernicious errors and depraved morals have begun to spread even amongst the faithful and are gradually gaining ground…”. If he could see us now – alas! Some pertinent excerpts:

26. …This order includes both the primacy of the husband with regard to the wife and children, the ready subjection of the wife and her willing obedience…

27. This subjection, however, does not deny or take away the liberty which fully belongs to the woman both in view of her dignity as a human person, and in view of her most noble office as wife and mother and companion; nor does it bid her obey her husband’s every request if not in harmony with right reason or with the dignity due to wife; nor, in fine, does it imply that the wife should be put on a level with those persons who in law are called minors, to whom it is not customary to allow free exercise of their rights on account of their lack of mature judgment, or of their ignorance of human affairs. But it forbids that exaggerated liberty which cares not for the good of the family; it forbids that in this body which is the family, the heart be separated from the head to the great detriment of the whole body and the proximate danger of ruin. For if the man is the head, the woman is the heart, and as he occupies the chief place in ruling, so she may and ought to claim for herself the chief place in love.

***

29. With great wisdom Our predecessor Leo XIII, of happy memory, in the Encyclical on Christian marriage which We have already mentioned, speaking of this order to be maintained between man and wife, teaches: “The man is the ruler of the family, and the head of the woman; but because she is flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone, let her be subject and obedient to the man, not as a servant but as a companion, so that nothing be lacking of honor or of dignity in the obedience which she pays. Let divine charity be the constant guide of their mutual relations, both in him who rules and in her who obeys, since each bears the image, the one of Christ, the other of the Church.”[30]

30. These, then, are the elements which compose the blessing of conjugal faith: unity, chastity, charity, honorable noble obedience, which are at the same time an enumeration of the benefits which are bestowed on husband and wife in their married state, benefits by which the peace, the dignity and the happiness of matrimony are securely preserved and fostered. Wherefore it is not surprising that this conjugal faith has always been counted amongst the most priceless and special blessings of matrimony.

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