| Augustine's Thought On Society
Aristotle endorses the scriptural
view, of women, that God crated humans "male and female---in other words, two sexes
manifestly distinct" for purposes of reproduction. He holds that women are as surely
God's creatures as are men, but that "her creation from man" indicates woman's
natural union with the male. He even considers whether the resurrected bodies of women
will be male rather than female, since "the sex of woman is not a vice, but
nature." Augustine writes that man was made in God's "image and likeness"
due to man's "power of reason and understanding" fit to dominate all brute
animals, but that "woman has been created corporeally for man: for though she has
indeed a nature like that of man in her mind and rational intelligence, yet by her bodily
sex she is subjected to the sex of her husband." This androcentric view of women
tends to regard them as naturally subordinate to men, rather than as independent and
autonomous. |
