The Interiority of Masculinity

Even before birth, each of us is created into a web of relationships as a gendered person, in order to image the Trinity precisely in relationality. Our destiny is to share, eternally, in that Absolute Relationality of Love, God. Gender is an image of and pathway to God. It is creation’s primary icon. It is the first and fundamental “sacrament” (“physical sign, instituted by Christ, to give grace”) of the human personality. Gender is oriented to generativity in that it always gives out of its abundance (Being) or elicits, by its poverty, the generosity of the other. Virility, like its complement, femininity, has four distinct, but mutually interpenetrating forms: filiality, fraternity, spousality, and paternity. My every relationship as a man combines these four dimensions. Virility, like relationality, constitutes my identity. A non-virile or un-gendered relationship, decision, action or aspiration is not possible for a masculine person. A human person cannot be neuter: “Male and female He created them.”

Filiality is the first, last, foundational and essential form of masculinity. Prior even to birth, I am a son. I am son of a specific mother and father, of a distinctive family, tribe and nation. At a deeper ontological level, I am son of my heavenly Father. At baptism I am restored to intimacy with my Father through immersion into our Mother the Church. As a creature, I am first, always and already received. That I exist at all and every aspect of my being is gift. Before I am conscious, decisive or active I am received…with an utterly unique DNA, physique, historical and familial and cultural circumstance. As I grow into consciousness and action and decision my foundational and primal movement must be humility, gratitude, loyalty, reception and obedience. Filiality entirely dominates the early stage of life, before we are capable of spousality or paternity, and the last years of decline, if we live that long. It is the basis for, indeed the interiority of, the later stages of masculinity. Because I am a son I can become a father, emulating my own father (or father surrogates) who love me and model masculinity for me.

Fraternity is the bond of loyalty to sister/brother and friend. In contrast to the deep asymmetry of the parent/child union, this bond is rooted in similarity and equality but entails a symphony of difference, hierarchy (big sister), complimentarity, and conflict. Fraternity is already informed by a shared filiality: you are my sister because we share a mother and a father. I recognize the stranger, the foreigner and even the enemy as my brother to the extent that I sense his filiality in my own creator Father. Genuine spousality as well as paternity is rooted in fraternity. My ability to surrender myself into nuptial union depends upon the depth and strength of my prior fraternal bonds, with women and men.

Spousality infuses shared filiality and fraternity/sorority with the energies of erotic longing, the depth of self-gift and the permanence of promise. It arises from a synergistic explosion of intensified need (eros) and fullness (affection, friendship, charity.) If not rooted in genuine filiality and friendship it degrades itself quickly into lust, use, dominance and deception. If properly rooted in the prior and foundational loves, it moves spontaneously and exuberantly beyond itself into paternity and maternity.

Paternity is the goal and purpose of virility: the engendering of life and love. As originator I most closely emulate and participate with God in the creation of an eternal (bodily and en-spirited) person; in our desperate dependency upon the feminine and maternal we recall our creaturely, needy, beggarly nature. The thrill of paternity is in the surprising newness and startling difference of the child who carries on one’s blood line and cultural inheritance but in an excess of novelty, abundance and alterity.

Masculinity is open to, inclusive of, and defined by femininity. As the Father lives in the Son, so my masculinity is interiorly constituted by the feminine. The human person is bi-polar by virtue of gender: my virility is a limitless longing for, dependency upon, fascination with, and gift to the feminine. My masculinity is mature and fruitful to the extent that it accepts, cherishes, admires and self-donates to the feminine. As male, I am reception of, hunger for, and goodness towards the feminine. Prior to birth, as a fetus and embryo, I am enclosed within, nurtured, protected, and cherished by my mother. Ontologically and ultimately I am always son of my heavenly Father; but within the created realm I am primarily son of my mother and only secondarily of my father. In created filiality, the maternal is primary; we see this even in Jesus who has a real human mother but a only foster father in Joseph. Creaturely paternity is representative but maternity (which is only creaturely) is substantial. So my masculine filiality is first constituted in relation to the feminine, the maternal, the Marian. Fraternally, my male identity depends primarily upon peer friendships with other young men; but fraternal love for my blood sisters and female friends is also constitutes my masculinity which is always directed to the feminine. A man without (non-erotic) female friends would become a cipher, a caricature, a cartoon monster. In the spousal embrace, I the groom receive my bride into myself: physically, emotionally, spiritually and every which way. I “take” my wife…she comes to dwell within me and I in her. One cannot encounter me without encountering her. And finally, the paternal is always a partnership with, a compliment to the maternal.

In my masculine poverty, especially the desperate longing for the feminine, I know my creaturely humility; in my virile magnanimity, I image the goodness and greatness of God.