Woman could accumulate intellectual values, but such values provide no joy. The excessively intellectualized woman, man’s equal and constructress of the world, will find herself despoiled of her essence, for what woman is meant to contribute to culture is femininity as an irreplaceable mode of being and way of living. Man creates science, art, philosophy, and even theology as systems, but all these lead to a frightening objectification of the truth. Woman, fortunately, is present; she is predestined to become the bearer of the values obscured by this objectification, the place where they become flesh and live. On the world’s summit, in the very heart of the spiritual, is found the handmaid of God, a manifestation of the human being re-established in its original truth. This is woman’s vocation: to protect the world of humans as mother, and to save it as a virgin, by giving to this world a soul, her soul.
-page 185
The fearsome antagonism of the sexes is not resolved by radical monasticism alone; it can be transcended only by a mutual spiritual conversion. Its metaphysically conjugal and consubstantial elements culminate in the One in whom there is neither male nor female, for in Christ, the vitiated fragmentation of humanity is overcome in the pleroma (fulness) of the “convergence of opposites.”
– page 250
The modern, profoundly masculine world, where the feminine charism plays no role whatsoever, is more and more a world without God, for it has no mother and God cannot be born in it. It is typical that in such an atmosphere, homosexuality asserts itself openly. This disease of psychic splitting – a failure in the integration of the soul’s male and female elements – reveals a male who resides either entirely in his subconscious, in the feminine part of his soul, which leads him to the masculine, or entirely on the surface, where he is polygamous – the infinitely vitiated Don Juan mentality. Such are the most symptomatic signs of a psychic state that has lost all its sensitivity toward the archetypical feminine value: that of the Virgin-Mother. A too-masculine world disregards its eternal origins; the clear fountain of virginal purity, and the maternal womb that receives the Word, and brings it forth to make of men His servants.
– page 251-252
Woman has an intuitive, “visceral” understanding of the importance of the Holy Spirit. By nature, woman is endowed with a religious sense. Tertullian’s words about “the soul that is naturally Christian” (anima naturaliter christiana) apply above all to women. The Marxists sensed this. The emancipation of women and the equality of the sexes are their foremost concerns. the masculinization of women has as its goal to modify their anthropological type, to make them inwardly, in their soul, identical to men by nature. This levelling conceals the most virulent struggle against the law of God; it is an attempt to annihilate woman’s charismatic state. But the testimony today is unanimous. In Soviet Russia, the faith is safeguarded by the Russian woman. The religious renewal, as well as the continuity of the tradition, are in the domain of the wife and mother. Most of the time, in the very face of the Soviet “progressive movement,” women and young Russian girls desire in the most striking manner to live and interiorize the truth they read in the icons of the Theotokos. The clearsightedness and the efforts of the startsy have not been in vain. It is the Russian woman who safeguards the internal values from within, through her carisms.
-page 267
Woman and the Salvation of the World, Paul Evdokimov
Connect the Knots 