 Welcome, everybody, to the last session of the afternoon. Good, thank you. I have German again. That was the first lecture. Well, as you know, at least, at the latest, you know, now I am German. And that is also my warning. This is the last moment to escape from my workshop. We Germans are famous for reading out our papers. In German, you don't go to a lecture, you go to something that is called a reading out loud, for lesung. The professors just read their books in a monotonous voice and we don't have this wonderful gift as you Americans have to be entertaining speakers and preachers. I want to get there one day, but I don't yet feel comfortable enough to speak from the fullness of my heart. So bear with me, you're gonna have a German reading out loud session and I hope you still get something out of it. Let us begin with a prayer. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, amen. God of my ancestors, Lord of mercy, you have made all things by your word and in your wisdom have established humankind to rule the creatures produced by you and to govern the world in holiness and righteousness and to render judgment in integrity of heart. Give me wisdom, the concert at your throne and do not reject me from among your children, for I am your servant, the child of your mate, servant, a man weak and short lived and lacking in comprehension and judgment of laws. Indeed, though one be perfect among mortals, if wisdom who comes from you be lacking, that one will count for nothing. Lord, you have created us as your image, male and female you have created us to be a reflection of the triune God. Lord, we thank you for this incredible honor, mission, vocation. We ask pardon, Lord, for ourselves and for the society that we live in to have disfigured this image of yours. And we ask you, Lord, to look with mercy on our lack of understanding and knowledge about the greatness of our vocation. Lord, in very particular, we beg you to send down your spirit and enlighten us with respect to the vocation of woman that is so trampled with feet in these days and so denied and neglected. Help us to understand who woman is to be and who man is called to be in relation to her so that as men and women in complementarity with each other, we may reflect the glory of your wisdom on this earth. Mary, mother and seat of wisdom pray for us. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed are thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death, amen. All glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, amen. You have excelled them all. Proverbs 30, 29. Praise is, sorry, it's 31. Praise is the valiant woman. This talk is about women, but I won't neglect the men. When I was writing my doctoral dissertation, it struck me that again and again, one finds in scripture the application of a vocabulary in the description of woman that is elsewhere in scripture reserved exclusively to the description of God. For example, as the source of living water, like in song 415, of wisdom or as a savior from death. In particular, women will often be described with attributes which would otherwise be used to describe the Holy Spirit. In addition to the source of living water, I'm thinking of attributes like helper, counselor, channel of wisdom and intercessor. While some might consider this a mere coincidence of female and divine attributes or a mere happenstance, as Catholics, we believe that in the composition of the Holy Scriptures, nothing is left to chance. Rather, the deeply symbolic nature of the genders reveals something fundamental, both about the nature of the economic trinity, that is the trinity in relation to us. The relationship between Christ and his church and the vocation of man and woman within God's plan of salvation for humanity. Viewed from a New Testament perspective, it seems that woman's role in creation is closely associated to that of the Holy Spirit, whereas man's vocation is described in more Christological terms or in the words of the famous Russian Orthodox theologian Paul F. Dokimov. In the essence of its being, the masculine is predominantly Christ-bearing, the female is predominantly spirit-bearing, daring agenda theory. According to the biblical view, man has created the image of God, male and female, he created them, the text specifies famously in Genesis 127. Man and woman are to complement each other as counterparts of equal dignity. If this is so, then man and woman each have properties that the opposite sex cannot replace. This is most evident on the biological level. However, it does not halt on the biological level. Contrary to what modern gender ideology wants us to believe, most differences between man and women are not mere social constructs. They have their roots deep down in our biological sex and shape the way our psyche relates to the world. While there may be some differences between the sexes that are socially constructed and biology, unfortunately knows many variations, the bipolarity of the human nature as such cannot be denied. It is the category that most fundamentally structures the animated world and conditions the way it works. In the words of Pope Benedict XVI, the sexual difference is something that man as a biological being can never get rid of, something that marks man in the deepest center of his being. This talk, however, is not about gender ideology nor about its refutation. I assume we all agree that our biological sexes heavily influence the way we relate to the world and to God and that the difference between the biological sexes is divinely willed in view of our common office to act as God's lieutenant in ruling creation. If, however, God positively wills the diversity of the male and female sexes as the Bible reveals and Pope Francis recently affirmed, then we do well to study how the scripture describes the different roles of man and woman in creation and God's plan for its salvation. As you hopefully know from your Trinitarian theology, the Son and the Holy Spirit, as well as the Father, of course, are equally God. They are consubstantial, the theologians say, that is, of the same divine substance, essence, or nature. Fourth Lateran Council, or number 253 in your Catechism. Nonetheless, the divine persons are really distinct from one another in their relations of origin. It is the Father who generates, it's the Son who is begotten, and the Holy Spirit who proceeds. They're all equally divine, but the way they originate in the Trinity is different. Their missions in the work of salvation are thus distinct, even though they operate as one. Each divine person performs the common work according to his unique personal property. Thus, while the Son and the Holy Spirit are one in nature and in operation, they still differ in the way they perform the common work of salvation according to their unique personal property. Now, if God created man in his image as male and female, then the relations between the three persons of the Trinity are the prototype for the relations between the human sexes. Sharing in the same human nature and created for a common mission, man and woman yet differ in the way they are to perform the common work according to each one's unique personal property if you allow the Trinitarian terminology. Now, the question arises, could it be that man's creation in the image of God as male and female, as Genesis 1, 27 expressly says, implies that the complementarity of the sexes not only reflects the inner Trinitarian relations, but more concretely, the way the Son relates to the Holy Spirit? After all, we believe that it is above all the divine missions of the Son's incarnation and the Holy Spirit that show forth the properties of the divine persons. It would follow that in the same way as the Son and the Holy Spirit in that joint mission reveal the inner life of the Trinity, thus humanity was created male and female so as to be the visible image of the Son and the Spirit in creation and thereby the image of God. To my great relief, I found an attestation of this idea in Dr. Scott Hahn's book, First Comes Love. You can find it in the bookshop where he cites some important theologians and church fathers who sustain this idea. The famous Dominican father, Yves Congar for example, commented on Genesis 1, 27 saying that, I quote, there must be in God in a transcendent form something that corresponds to masculinity and something that corresponds to femininity. And in the same line, no one less than Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger affirms, because of the teaching about the Spirit, one can, as it were, practically have a pre-sentiment of the primordial type of the feminine in a mysterious, veiled manner within God himself. This idea, however, Dr. Hahn explains, does not, I quote, originate with Cardinal Congar and Ratzinger. In fact, some of the greatest of the ancient church fathers associated a quote unquote divine maternity with the person of the Holy Spirit. As Roman Catholics, we profess in the Nicene Creed that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the father and the son. Now the church fathers, St. Methodius of Olympus, saw this dual procession of the spirit from the father and the son reflected in the creation of man in the divine image. He explains, as Eve proceeded from her father, God, and from the side of the son, Adam, so the spirit proceeds from both the father and the eternal son. As the father made Eve from the rib of Adam, so the St. Methodius called the Holy Spirit the rib of the world, the uncreated principle of maternity. Now, in the same line then, Dr. Hahn quotes another church father, Anastasios of Sinai, who wrote in the seventh century, I quote, Eve, who proceeded from Adam, signifies the preceding person of the Holy Spirit. This is why God did not breathe in her the breath of life. She was already the type of the breathing and life of the Holy Spirit. So in the same way the Holy Spirit proceeds from the father and the son, Eve comes forth from the side of the son, Adam, created by the father. Unfortunately, this line of thought has, with few exceptions, not been very much further developed in the tradition. Maybe the task of doing so is left to our generation. As an exegete, I'm certainly in no position to probe the orthodoxy of these affirmations. However, unless they be condemned as pure nonsense by the Magisterium, which has not yet been done, and so unless they are condemned as pure nonsense, in which case, like Dr. Hahn before me, I would be the first to rip up this manuscript and bid you to do the same. I would like to add some observations from scripture that might confirm these Trinitarian role allocations to man and woman, particularly woman. So let me now proceed to argue from scripture what leads me to believe that the properties of the male sex are described as predominantly, in predominantly Christological terms, while the properties of the female sex are described in predominantly Pneumatological. Pneumatological is Greek for spirit, in spirit-bearing terms. As you can tell from the title of the workshop, my main focus will be on the woman. This is so for several reasons. First, the topic of this conference is Biblical wisdom that happens to be personified as a woman in the Bible. The question thus arises if that has anything to do with the female gender or its vocation. Secondly, the claim that man has a Christologic vocation is generally recognized. It needs no real demonstration because of the complementarity of the sexes, however, I will supply a brief sketch of the male vocation and then direct my main focus to the woman, the archetypes. In the Hebrew Bible, Adam and Eve are clearly the archetype of humanity's bipolar gender constitution. For the Bible, man is a king and the king is the archetypal man. Adam, the primordial man, is a royal figure. Read in the context of ancient Near Eastern cosmogonies, the two creation accounts of Genesis one and two present Adam as the prototypical king in the divine garden whom God constitutes as his lieutenant, commissioned to till and keep it or to cultivate and care for it according to the translation. The cultures of the ancient Near East shared in a common what scholars call royal etiology. I would rather call it royal theology. According to which the king was the mediator between heaven and earth, the gods in the pagan cultures and the visible world. The king was understood to be the visible image of the invisible God. The guarantor of order understood as a victory over chaos through warfare and the establishment of justice through righteous justice and the promulgation of just laws. For this, the king required wisdom, which was the unique possession of the gods but was granted to him for the sake of his priest-kingly office often through incubation, that is a dream, or the mediation of a goddess. In the Bible, we see the perfect realization of such a priest-kingly figure in Adam and primarily in the pair of the kings David and Solomon. David exemplifies the king whose task it is to recreate God's kingdom on earth by overcoming the chaotic, life-threatening forces of the enemy. Thus, his first act of salvation upon receiving the Messianic anointing is to kill the head of the enemy's army Goliath. From that moment until he descends the throne as a king of Israel, his one and only task is to liberate the country from the Philistines. Once that task is accomplished and peace and order is restored, he brings the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem where God is enthroned on Mount Zion. Only one thing is missing for the crowning of David's accomplishments. According to the canons of the ancient Near East, or the royal theology, a temple needs to be built so as to truly restore paradise on earth. As you all know, David is not permitted to do that because he has blood on his hands. Instead, it is his son Solomon who will receive the wisdom to govern God's people and build the temple in a memorable dream. Solomon accomplishes everything that an ideal ancient Near Eastern king was expected to do. As his name, Shlomo, king of peace, indicates he established a kingdom of perfect peace which reached from sea to sea. That is, it reached the extension of the land as promised by God to Abraham in Genesis 1518. Now, if you read the description of Solomon's reign and one kings five to eight carefully, you will discover that he reigned like a new Adam over paradise restored. Most importantly, he restored God's presence to the Garden of Israel through the construction of a temple worthy of the presence of the Lord. For once, and it's the only time in the history of Israel, we have a king who seems to be perfectly messianic, living out the archetypal male vocation of governance by establishment of peace, ruling righteously, teaching wisdom, serving the Lord with all his mind and all his heart and having a kingdom of liturgical worship. But alas, like the first Adam, so Solomon too is seduced by women into disobedience to the divine law. His heart clings to foreign women and their gods, make a mental note of the foreign woman, I'll come back to her. They induce him into idol worship, a direct offense against the first commandment. The result is the same as once with Adam and Eve, separation supplants the divine human harmony. The United Kingdom is torn apart, you know, north and south. From now on, north and south will fight each other like Cain and Abel, the sons of Adam and Eve, bringing death and devastation upon the life of their subjects. And like the first human couple, Israel will eventually be driven out of its paradisiacal garden land towards the east, the land of captivity and death symbolized by the Babylonian captivity. Throughout the history of Israel, her kings will be characterized by this double typology of the new and old Adam. They will be classified either as types of the new Adam, Christ, like David and Solomon before the fall, or as types of the old Adam, like among many others, Saul and the late Solomon. Now what do we gather from this for the archetypal male vocation? The figure of Adam before the fall is exemplified in the figures of David and Solomon before their respective falls, renders as an image of the Christological, and that is messianic vocation of man and creation. He's to guard it as a king. That is, he is to ensure the reign of peace in his kingdom by fighting the enemies of the people of God be they spiritual, like the snake in the garden, or real, overcoming chaos by governing with real. I mean, in the Old Testament, they are incarnate in inimical peoples, but of course they are prefigurations of the real enemies of God that are spiritual demons. So he is to guard the garden. He is to fight the enemies of the people of God, overcoming chaos by governing with justice and right judgment like Psalm 72 beautifully describes and serving God with all his heart and all his mind. Now let me come to the female archetype. If the original male vocation is crystallized in the priest kingly figure of Adam, it follows quite logically that the original female vocation is presented to us in the figure of Eve, magnificently encapsulated in the account of her creation in Genesis 2, 18 to 23. There we read in the version of the RSV, then the Lord God said, "'It is not good for the man that man should be alone. "'I will make him a helper fit for him.'" So out of the ground, the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. But for the man, there was not found a helper fit for him. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man and while he slept, took one of his ribs and closed up his place, its place with flesh. And the rib which the Lord God had taken from the man, he built into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, "'This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. "'She shall be called woman because she was taking of man.'" I will not comment on man's original loneliness on which Saint John Paul II has beautiful reflections in his theology of the body. It is clear that the Bible describes here some profound loneliness, which neither God with whom Adam is still in communion, neither the animated world can relieve. Thus, the Lord himself decides to create someone who would be a helper to Adam, a helper that would be on par with him or to be his equal, which in my view is the better rendition of the original Conecto, which literally means like and before him, thus someone who's really on eye level with Adam. Maybe this expression Conecto delivers the secret why God was not able to relieve Adam's loneliness. Though in total harmony with his creation, the Lord was nonetheless infinitely transcendent of divine, not human nature, and thus precisely not on par with man, only the incarnation will reveal that it was God's eternal desire to raise man to his own eye level. But before the Lord accomplishes that in the incarnation, he finds a different way of being present to Adam. He creates for man a helper on par with him. This quote unquote helper is built from Adam's rip and therefore bone from his bone and flesh of his flesh, a Hebrew way of expressing not only the common human nature but also intimate kinship. I understood, you might not have noticed that I used the literal Hebrew says God built Eve out of the rib, like one builds a house or one builds a temple. I'll come back to that. What I want to focus on for the moment is the term, the Hebrew term ether, which is used for helper. Modern ears are very much inclined to misunderstand the meaning of that word. I don't know about English, but in German, the word helper has almost become a euphemism for the woman who was formerly simply called the cleaning woman. In order to avoid a discrimination, we have adopted the term helper. Nonetheless, the term still expresses the notion of someone working in a household and doing the dirty work that no one else in the house wants to do. So for centuries, the term helper was often misunderstood in that way. A look into a biblical concordance, however, will render a totally different meaning. There you will discover, and you might know that, that in the Bible, the term ether, helper, is, with the exception of this passage, almost always employed to designate divine help. It can refer either to the help that comes from God directly. For example, Psalm 124-8, our help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth. Or the term can be employed as a kind of a title for God as a helper himself. For example, Psalm 33, verse 20, our soul waits for the Lord. He is our help and shield. Only two texts seem to constitute an exception. Isaiah 30, verse five, and Ezekiel 12, 14. But they do in fact confirm the deeply religious sense of the word. Isaiah 30, verse five, is addressed against those who in a negative way are seeking help in the support of the worldly powers of Egypt instead of the Lord. It says in Isaiah 30, verse five, everyone comes to shame through a people that cannot profit them, that brings neither help nor profit, but shame and disgrace. End of quote. Jerusalem is put to shame and disgrace because it has sought help in an idol. As the famous biblical scholar Jean-Louis Ska explains, it is not without interest to know that the term, l'ole itzheir, so no helper, l'ole hoheil, no profit, is often used to designate false gods or idols. Isaiah 30, 15 in fact defines the meaning of the oracle more precisely in showing where Jerusalem can find salvation in conversion and trust, which draws from the source of its faith in the Lord. Thus, Father Ska concludes, only God can offer the expected help, not Egypt. Similarly, Ezekiel 12, 14, the other passage that uses help with regard to someone non-divine is the other apparent exception. The term is, the term, I've been talking for too long. So in Ezekiel 12, 14, the term his help designates the group in whom Zedekiah, King Zedekiah, puts his confidence in order to escape the mortal danger looming upon him. Like in Isaiah, here too, Aetzer, helper, speaks of a human help that proves insufficient in saving the king from death. As, again, Father Ska cautiously proposes, maybe we have here an important indication with respect to the meaning of the term Aetzer. It seems to designate a help of a very particular kind, such as, according to the affirmation of the majority of the texts, only God can provide. So conclusion, except for Genesis 2, 18 and 20, the term Aetzer refers to God's help or in a negative way, if you seek help and idle, but presuming you're looking for it in the wrong place. Ska then proceeds to examine each occurrence of the term Aetzer as applies explicitly to the divine help. According to Father Ska, all the occurrences of the term Aetzer have several traits in common. The help that comes to man is always personalized. It's never a material help. It comes in person. And the helping intervention is indispensable for escaping from death. Summing up, he writes, I quote, the help described in these texts supposes always an intervention which happens not far from the frontier that separates life from death. It is indispensable for bringing the faithful back to the world of the living. One understands accordingly that it is almost God who enters into the scene. What are we to make of these findings? I would not dare to offer a concluding interpretation. However, here are some observations that I think we can safely make. Woman seems to be created in order to mediate divine help to man. She appears to be the way in which God had originally chosen to be present to man, to come to his rescue on the border of death, to be the locus of God's saving presence alongside man. This is mysteriously underscored by the vocabulary that is employed in the description of woman's creation from the side of Adam. The Hebrew text says that God took one of Adam's ribs and built woman. This recalls the construction of a temple. In fact, in the symbolic language of the Bible, woman is built just as one builds a temple. I will come back to this kinship between women and temples further down. For now, let us go back to the astounding observation that the term helper employed in the creation of Eve seems to apply a divine saving help which God mediates to man in the person of the woman. Now, as you know, very paradoxically and sadly, the first thing we see Eve doing in the very next scene is that she hands Adam the forbidden fruit and thereby death. While Adam failed in fending off the life-threatening snake from intruding into the garden and tucking his wife, Eve fails in her vocation to be his helper at this frontier between life and death. Instead, she succumbs to the threefold temptation and hands her husband this death-bringing fruit. The mother of life has become the source of death. As was the case with Adam, scripture will from now on work with two female archetypes, the old and the new Eve. After the fall, woman is that not only described as a divine-like source of life, but also sometimes as a source of death. These two possible actualizations of the female potentialities are well personified in the book of Proverbs, where Lady Wisdom and Lady Folly stand as counterparts and foils to each other, Proverbs eight and nine. While one is the embodiment of the tree of life, Proverbs 318, she, Lady Wisdom, is a tree of life to those who lay hold of her, those who hold fast are called happy, the other, that is Lady Folly. Lady Folly's guests are in the depths of Sheol, Proverbs 9, 18. These two types of women, the old and the new Eve, are in turn symbolized in the pair of the foreign woman and the valiant woman, Proverbs 31, who embody the abstract personifications of folly and wisdom in concrete circumstances of life. So in the book of Proverbs, in the first nine chapters, you have this Lady Wisdom description and then she gets embodied in chapter 31, the famous valiant woman that we often hear in the literature for saints like Mother Monica or other, we just had it recently, abridged I guess. It is here that we recount, re-encounter the foreign woman who had seduced, so in the book of Proverbs, we re-encounter the foreign woman who had seduced Solomon and thereby caused his fall. This foreign woman, Nochria, who features so prominently in the book of Proverbs is not simply the woman who seduces to marital infidelity. Rather, the marital infidelity is in itself symbolic of yet another danger that is of infidelity to the Torah. The foreign woman symbolizes the danger that emanates from the pagan cults and their respective teachings, which seduce the Israelite to infidelity to the Lord, which in Biblical symbolic language is understood as adultery against the covenant, as you all know. She is another variation of the old Eve motif. The valiant woman of Proverbs 31, on the other hand, is the incarnation of Lady Wisdom, her symbolic concretization. She's the ideal companion for man. Everything that's being said of her is said elsewhere in the wisdom literature in praise of wisdom personified. Obviously, there is a great affinity between the valiant woman and wisdom, in particular. She opens her mouth and wisdom. A teaching of mercy is on her lips. She watches over her household. In Hebrew, she watches over her household. The verb is Sophia, which to someone who knows Greek, which the people knew, sounds like Sophia. It's an intended pun on this Lady Wisdom, watching over her household, Sophia. She's Lady Wisdom, Sophia. So this pun on Sophia is meant to underscore that what we see in Proverbs 31 is the incarnation of wisdom in an ideal woman. One might object to this stereotyping and yet it expresses something profound about the two fundamental potentialities of women. The two poles are anchored between the old Eve, who hands the fruit of death, and the new Eve, who bears the fruit of life. The contrasting figures of Lady Folly and Lady Wisdom, then research in Babylon and Jerusalem, the witch of Endor, who causes the death of Saul, and the wise widow of Techoa, or Abigail, on the other hand. Luckily, the depiction of women who prefigure the coming of a new Eve clearly prevails over those who take after our first mother. So let us now leave the theory aside and see if we can find it confirmed in some incarnate women of Israel. I divide them according to three topoi. First, women who are depicted as helpers of men coming to their rescue on the border between life and death, Aetzir. Secondly, women who are channels of wisdom, counseling men and interceding for their life. And third, women as temples. First, women who rescue from death. If the particular connotation to save from death of the term Aetzir applies also to woman's role as a helper to man and not only to God, must be verified by concrete women in the Bible. If the divine author intended woman to be so closely associated with God's saving help, he would certainly give some examples of women saving men from death in revelation. And in fact, we do not need to search for wrong. A host of women come to our mind. I leave aside the many women in Genesis. In the book of Exodus, we encounter the mysterious story about Tsipura, who saves Moses from death through the Lord. There we read that on the journey back to Egypt, the Lord came upon Moses in the middle of the night and sought to put him to death. But Tsipura took a piece of flint and caught off her son's foreskin and touching Moses' feet, she said, "'Surely you are a spouse of blood to me.'" The incident continues to perplex commentators. And unfortunately, we cannot go into the different explanations of this enigmatic account. What counts for the present investigation is the fact that Tsipura's intervention is salvific, both for Moses and his son, and that it is so probably in a quasi-sacramental way because circumcision was the sacrament of the Old Covenant which incorporated men and with them their families into the people of God. So you already have a prefiguration of what happens through Mother Church. Rahab, at the beginning of the next corpus of books, the so-called former prophets in the Jewish tradition, we find another pagan woman who saves men from death. It is Rahab the prostitute in Joshua 2. Rahab is actually an adjective meaning wide, broad, extensive. This name is certainly a pun on her profession as a prostitute and yet proclaims the deeper truth that by having made the doors of her house wide for the spies, she becomes not only the entry gate to the promised land, image of the church, gate to heaven, but also a gate of salvation. She is the door through which the Israelites enter the promised land and her house is the place where they find mercy, so the Bible says, and refuge from their deathly persecutors. Rahab, the wide woman, is thus another example of a woman through whom God sends help to Israelite men in a situation on the frontier to death. Not only did she save them, but she also became the entry door to life. Deborah and Yael, next Deborah and Yael come to mind. Deborah incites Barak to do what he is supposed to do, namely to go and to deliver the country from the enemy. She herself would deliver Cicera, the general of the enemy's army, into Barak's power. Barak refuses to go into battle unless Deborah comes with him. I will certainly come with you, Deborah replies, but you will not gain glory from this expedition on which you are setting out, for it's into a woman's power that the Lord is going to sell Cicera. Barak's warfare relies entirely on Deborah's counsel and instruction. However, the true victory, which is the death of the enemy army's general, comes through a woman named Yael. She lures Cicera into her tent, covers him with a rug, opens a skin, gives him milk to drink for his thirst, and while he is fast asleep, she takes a tent peg and drives it through his temple down into the ground and he dies. Thus, Barak and all Israel were saved on that day through the wise counsel of an Israelite woman, Deborah, which in English means the bee, whose honey is precisely her wisdom, and the courage of a pagan woman who killed the enemy with two symbolic instruments. Milk is of course the symbol of maternity par excellence. She puts him to sleep by this maternal drink, making him feel as safe as a baby on its mother's breast. The tent, similarly, is a maternal symbol. It's the prolongation of the woman's body into the world. While Cicera considers himself safe in her maternal care, it is by the peg of this very tent that she has killed. Here again you can see a prefiguration of Christ's humanity that is this church in which the devil finds its death. Judith, a figure similar to that of Yael that is found in Judith, this female, David, who beheads another Goliath, resurged in hollow fairness, the ranking general of the Assyrian forces, threatening to wipe out Israel. In the face of the seemingly inescapable victory of the Assyrians and their consequential death, the people of Israel are murmuring against their leaders as they had long ago when faced with death by starvation during the Exodus and the wilderness. We heard that last night in the homily. Now, just as then, the leaders yield to the people's lament and decide to put an ultimatum to God's life-saving intervention. When the God-fearing and shameless widow, Judith, hears about all this, she severely admonishes the rulers of Israel. You can think of St. Catherine of Siena, who had a similar mission in the church, admonishing the rulers, reprimanding them for having put themselves in a place of God and human affairs in a remarkable speech that analyzes the situation from the eyes of faith. Now, the text says, Judith displays her wisdom, it's a Greek text, Sophia, understanding that is the faculty of comprehension, intelligent, acuteness, and drudeness, and that, the text says, all that is formed by her heart or the image of her heart is good. That's the characterization of Judith, again, an embodiment of wisdom. This very heart forms the plan to use all her feminine splendor to dazzle the enemy to the effect of his death. Risking her own life, she enters into the heart of the enemy's camp and in its, his very own tent, kills the head of their army. The Uzair, the ruler of Israel will praise her, you risk your life when our people were being oppressed and you averted our disaster, walking in the straight path before our God. Again, we have a woman who saved Israel from certain death upon her victorious, who saved Israel from certain death. Second, I come to wise women, living examples of the valiant woman. The praise of Judith's wisdom, Sophia, and understanding brings us to this next kind of women who through their wise words and counsel help the men to become the God-fearing kings they are called to be, preventing them from shedding innocent blood and thereby from failing in their task as God's faithful lieutenants on earth. Scripture here presents us with women who embody the otherwise abstract personifications of so-called lady wisdom. If you want to know who is a good king in Israel, you have to look which women he is associated with. A good king like David is surrounded by women, even if he falls at time, but he is guided by women as we will see, whereas Saul only has two women in his life. The first one is the mother of Jonathan. We never find out about her, except that he says to Jonathan, you son of a bitch. That's how he thinks about Jonathan's mother. And the other woman he encounters in his life is the witch of Ender. And what is Saul a failure? David, on the other hand, is surrounded by wise women whose counsel he takes. And the first such woman is Abigail in 1 Samuel 25. Abigail, wife of Nabal, which literally means the fool, is presented as being of good understanding and beautiful in appearance. Her name meaning my father's joy or my father is joy. From the outset of the story, the role allocation is clear. The husband is harsh, bad mannered foolish, while Abigail belongs to the sphere of wisdom. As the story will reveal, however, it's not only a story about a foolish man and a wise woman, but also about a short-tempered future king who is prevented from burdening his conscience with the shedding of innocent blood, and thereby maybe thwarting his future as sent to the throne through the intervention of this wise and beautiful woman. Nabal foolishly offends David by refusing to let him and his men share in the festival meal, even though David had protected Nabal's men day and night during their stay out in the open. Now, when David hears that Nabal is refusing to let him have his share, he's enraged and swears to exterminate all of Nabal's men by the next morning. A young man belonging to Nabal's people goes and reports all this to Abigail and requests that she intervene. Abigail immediately steps into action. Like the wise woman in Proverbs 31, she has stored up enough food to feed an entire army of 400 men. She loads the provision on donkeys and goes out to meet David. When she sees him, she quickly dismounts from her donkey and greets him according to the Oriental ritual by falling at his feet, taking all the blame of Nabal's behavior entirely upon herself. If I, she says, your maid servant did not see the young man whom my Lord sent. It is I, she said, who did not see the young man. But now, by sending me, she applies. I quote the scriptures. The Lord has kept you from shedding blood and avenging yourself. First Samuel 25, verse 26. She continues, please forgive the offense of your maid servant. She utters and then gives voice to a most remarkable prophecy. For the Lord shall certainly establish a lasting house for my Lord, because my Lord fights the battles of the Lord. Let no evil be found in you your whole life long. Mind you, this is the first time that David receives the prophecy of a lasting dynasty long before Nathan will confirm it. It is for that reason that he must be kept from shedding blood and avenging himself. How Abigail knew, we do not know, except that David acknowledges her being a messenger of the Lord and praises her for having been this very instrument in the hands of the Lord. When she says, blessed is the Lord, the God of Israel, who sent you, sorry, he says, David says, blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, who sent you, Abigail, to meet me today. Blessed is your good judgment and blessed are you yourself. Today, you have prevented me from shedding blood and rescuing myself with my own hand. Otherwise, as the Lord, the God of Israel, lives, who has kept me from harming you, if you had not come so promptly to meet me, by dawn, Nabal would not have had so much as one male left alive. Here you see the true realization of an aether, a helper, and a man's life. It's thanks to her that David becomes a success. It is David himself who acknowledges that God's saving intervention has come to him in the person of this wise and beautiful woman whose good judgment has kept him from shedding blood and rescuing himself two sins that would have made him unfit for kingship, at least for the king he was supposed to become. The fact that Nabal immediately suffers a stroke upon hearing the news and dies 10 days later is the first discharge of Abigail's prophecy that God would hurl out the lives of his enemies as from the hollow of a sling. When David then bids her to become his wife, the prophecy of his dynastic future is confirmed as the possession of a harem was an exclusively royal privilege. As the German scholar Imtrod Fischer observes, Abigail succeeds Samuel as a prophet who has only just died in the previous chapter. On the one hand, Abigail takes over the guidance of the anointed one. He is a woman guiding the anointed one, David the Messiah of the Lord, and prevents him from doing evil. And on the other hand, she continues Samuel's prophetic function and announces David the establishment of a lasting dynasty. Abigail is thus presented as Samuel's successor and Nathan's predecessor. The narration stands in the tradition of two threads of Old Testament traditions, that of wisdom and that of prophecy, which both intervene decisively here into the political interests of Israel. A good wife who can find, she's far more than a precious jewel. The heart of her husband trusts in her and she will have no lack of gain. She does him good and no harm all the days of her life. Proverbs 31. Abigail is just such an exemplary woman, a valiant woman as the book of Proverbs describes her in chapter 31. In all her actions, she appears as the embodiment of wisdom. She is head over an industrious household like the ships of the merchants. She brings her food from afar. Proverbs 31 verse 14, she guides her loins with strength and makes her arms strong. She opens her mouth with wisdom and the teaching of kindnesses on her tongue. Obviously, David has found such a wife in Abigail, who has cared both for his physical needs as well as his moral integrity in order to make him a respected king. As again, this scholar, Iumtrat Fisher, rightly observes, when prophesying him a lasting dynasty, she's aiming at an ambitious goal, the man who listens to the voice of this wise woman will be king. In Abigail with us encounter, once again, a woman who succeeds in living out her call to be an azer, a helper to man and exactly the help that God is sending to the man. She saves a host of innocent people from death and, in a way, even saves David from aborting his call to become the king of Israel he is meant to be. Listening to her wise counsel, David is prevented from shedding blood and rescuing himself with his own hand. She has thus truly acted as God's mediating presence to David who, as he himself avows, has kept him from doing harm through her intervention. She has become what woman is called to be a prophet and a channel of God's wisdom. Another such woman is the widow of Tekoa, the wise woman of Tekoa who is sent to David in order to make him act as a king according to God's heart is supposed to act. That is, she is to move him to forgive his rebellious son, Absalom, who had tried to usurp, is that how you say it in English? Usurp the throne. Interestingly, just as in the case of Nabal, the possible victim of bloodshed is guilty and yet wisdom intercedes even for the life of the guilty one. It is the wise woman of Tekoa's intercession, it's the wise widow of Tekoa's intercession that restores Absalom to grace, causes the king to act as he is supposed to be as the visible image of the invisible God who does devise, now this is quotation, God who does devise means, so as not to banish anyone from him. This is an interesting statement because God had indeed banished the fratricide kind from the ground. Kind had been banished, whereas through the intercession of the widow of Tekoa, the fratricide Absalom is not banished. Here God reveals through this woman that he wishes the king of Israel to reflect his mercy. Another example of this woman who comes as a helper is the queen Aster, and because time is running out, I'm shortening this, you might know that in the book of Deuteronomy we hear that one day God is going to hide his face, and it's going to be a time when Israel will be in dire straits, and in Hebrew, this term God will hide his face sounds like Ash-Tira, and for the Jewish interpretation, that is prefiguring Aster. She is the woman who comes on the scene in the time when God seems to be hiding his face, but actually is not hiding his face. He is intervening in the salvation of Israel in this woman of Aster, who again is wife to a king. To a king was about to do a horrible bloodshed, and it's her intercession and her not regarding her own life and risking her life, interceding with the king, who saves both her people and the king from becoming the opposite of what he's meant to be in God's eyes. So again, Aster is a fabulous realization of Genesis 2.18, and thanks to her, Ahashwarosh can fulfill his truly crystallological mission in ruling finally with justice and righteousness. Women is temples. Finally, we come to the, what scholars call woman temple homology, so this kinship between women and temple. You remember, I had pointed out that God built Eve from Adam's rib, just as a king would build a temple. On the physical level, women are indeed like little houses in which a nascent human being can dwell for nine months. But this biological fact is only the exterior expression of a much deeper spiritual affinity between women and temples. Unfortunately, we don't have so much time to deepen the subject, but I want to at least offer a tentative sketch. In the Old Testament, this mysterious kinship between women and temples is hinted at, for example, in a powerful way in the prophet Ezekiel. Ezekiel, who was commanded not to mourn upon the death of his wife, the, quote unquote, delight of his eyes. His dying wife is to be a living symbol of the temple of Jerusalem, the delight of Israel's eyes. The destruction of which they will have no time to mourn. Thus, Ezekiel's wife, the delight of his eyes, as Ezekiel's wife, the delight of his eyes, so the temple is to the people of Israel, the delight of their eyes and the locus of God's presence. Then there is the salient feature that all the patriarchs of Israel meet their future wives next to a well. These wells, sources of living water, are a powerful symbol for the women themselves as they will become the source of life that is progeny for the husbands. The source of life par excellence, however, is the temple in Jerusalem, which was the spatial icon of paradise restored and perfect prefiguration of the church. Now this, again, is powerfully expressed in the poetic language of the song of songs. In song 415, the female beloved is described as a source of gardens, a well of living water, flowing from Lebanon. In context, that garden is identified with the beloved herself and described as being a paradise of pomegranates with all sorts of spices that are used in the fabrication of the holy, anointing oils used in the temple. This results in the superposition of several images. She, the beloved, is equated with the original Paradise Garden of Genesis 2, which the lover has rediscovered in her person. So the beloved is in woman, man as it were, gets a pretaste of paradise lost and therefore a pretaste of what waits for us in heaven. At the same time, the enumeration of the different spices like lard and cinnamon, incense, aloe, mir, balsam, et cetera, we've heard them in the talk this morning, insinuate that this paradise is none other than Solomon's temple, which in the symbolic language of the Bible was understood to be paradise restored, the place where God had once again taken his dwelling among his people in the city of the great King Jerusalem. Here in Jerusalem, Adam the king and Eve, the people of Israel, lived and walked once again in God's presence. The Gihon spring, that is the source of Jerusalem's temple, was metaphorically equated to the garden source of Genesis 2, 10 to 14, whence the waters flowed to water the garden itself and departed to the four corners of the world. In a way, the description of the beloved in song 4, 12 to 15, your garden closed source of living water, presents us with a poetic image of the ideal eschatological temple, which we also know from Ezekiel's vision. Remember the water coming forth on the temple and everything that it touches becomes life and then we have it again in Revelation 22. The living water that gushes forth from its source transforms the entire world into a new paradise. The difference is however that in the song of songs, the vision is symbolized by a woman who according to the Jewish interpretation is the people of Israel and in the Christian interpretation is accordingly the church. How is it possible that she would be presented as something that elsewhere in scriptures is only predicated of God? You may remember Jeremiah 2, 13, famous admonishment. My people have committed a two-fold crime, two evils, they have forsaken me, the fountain of living water and two doubt systems for themselves, broken systems that cannot hold water. Nobody but God is a source of living water that is a source of life. Then how can this be predicated of a creature? We find the answer in the New Testament. In this conversation with the Samaritan woman, Jesus famously promises, the water that I will give will become in them, that is in those who believe, the spring of water gushing up to eternal life. The meaning of these words then become crystal clear in John 37, 38, where Jesus proclaims, if anyone thirsts, let him come and drink from me, come to me and drink. He who believes in me, as the scriptures said, out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water. And John comments, now this he said about the spirit, which those who believed in him were to receive. In other words, the Holy Spirit himself will become in the one who receives him a spring of water welling up to eternal life. What Jesus aspires essence, a spring of living water, he gives to us his believers to become by grace. This is most obvious in the mystery of the church. Through the gift of the sacraments has become the source of living water for humanity. Yet, the church as you know, is not an anonymous institution. It consists of each one of us, and first and foremost, the Immaculate Virgin Mary and Mother of Jesus is the church as a person and in person as Pope Benedict likes to say. In the description of the Paradisiacal Garden of song four, 12 to 15, we see then a perfect prefiguration of the church and of Mary, her mother and archetype. According to this poetic language, she has become a well of living water for a plurality of gardens. The water flowing from her well, however, has its source in a place that lies much higher up. It is flowing from Lebanon. Now, Lebanon in the cryptic language of the second temple literature that is Judaism during its last centuries is a code word for the temple in Jerusalem, which was built from woods of Lebanon and imagined to be a reconstruction of Mount Lebanon, the mythical abode of the gods. So the idea was in all those ancient Eastern cultures, the gods live on Mount Lebanon because that's high up and full of cedars and it's their idea of paradise. If you live in a desert, then a wooded place is an idea of paradise. And by reconstructing Mount Lebanon in the temple, then even for the pagans, the idea was what the gods would descend. And of course, Israel adopts that language, it makes it Orthodox. And so Lebanon becomes the idea of the paradise restored in the temple of Jerusalem. That's a deep truth as we expressed in this poetic imagery. The living water, which is the Holy Spirit, has its source in God alone. However, it has made the beloved of the song that is Mary, the church as a person and in a person, it's well when it flows into creation. In other words, Jesus has united himself so perfectly with his bride, the church, that he has given to her to become by grace, what he is by essence, the well of living water, which is the Holy Spirit. The ultimate source of that living water, however, is God, which is expressed in the metaphor and flowing from Lebanon. In this example, Efdochemov's dictum, the Orthodox I cited in the beginning, the woman is Pneumatophore, the woman is spirit-bearing, is powerfully verified. In the beloved of the Song of Songs, we see a prototype of the redeemed people of Israel, restored to its original vocation of being in relation to the Messiah King, what Eve is to Adam, a helper in the salvation of humanity. And thus, she's also the perfect prefiguration of the new Eve, who is Mary, the Virgin Mother, the church in person and as a person. In Mary, motherhood and temple being coincide in the most extraordinary manner. She remains forever the archetype of a temple, expressed in John's unsurpassed typologically vision of Mary as the Ark of the Covenant in Revelation 1119, Temple of the Holy Spirit. Conclusion. I had started off by quoting Paul Efdochemov, who claims that the masculine in its essence is predominantly Christ-bearing, whereas the female is predominantly spirit-bearing. While the Christological vocation of man is generally recognized and even affirmed by the authority of Saint Paul, who calls men to love their wives as Christ loves the church in Ephesians 5, the Pneumatological vocation of women, that is her spirit-bearing essence, is less commonly known. The purpose of this workshop has thus been to probe the scriptures with regard to the particular affinity of women's attributes with those of the Holy Spirit. Of him, of the Holy Spirit, we confess in the creed that he is the giver of life. He's furthermore characterized in his operations as our advocate, our consolar, the one who guides us into all the truth, because he does not speak on his own, but speaks whatever he hears and declares to us the things that are to come, glorifying Jesus because he will take what is his, Jesus, and declare it to us. All of these properties we find perfectly incarnated in the Virgin Mary. In Mary, everything that the scripture has to say about the female vocation is accomplished. As the new Eve, the mother of the living, she is advocate, that is helper, consolatrix, consolar, seat of wisdom, source of life, the everlasting temple of the Lord and our most powerful intercessor. She's the mediator of all grace, the one who teaches us to do whatever Jesus tells us, just like the Holy Spirit, never speaking from her own, but only what she hears Jesus say, testifying to the work of her son and glorifying Jesus in all that she does. In the words of Maximilian Kolbe, the Immaculata is the quasi-underlined incarnation of the Holy Spirit. Mary, however, is neither a goddess nor a remote ideal out of reach and incomparable to the rest of her species. Rather, as Pope Benedict has beautifully put it, from the heights of his royal throne, the cross, the archetypal man Christ reveals Mary to be the archetypal woman when entrusting the disciple to Mary with the words woman behold your son. According to Pope Benedict, Mary is here being raised to the level of a universal sign. This scene, the Pope explains, defines the role of womanhood, the feminine dimension of the church and the specific vocation of women in the church, which, as I would add, is predominantly pneumatologically. Mary, at the end of this conference, we thank the Lord for any light we have received. We beg for the wisdom to deepen these insights because we sense that we've only scratched the surface and need a deeper insight into the true vocation of woman who, in complementarity to the man, is called to help him in governing creation and being God's lieutenant together with man. As you were co-redemptrix and the new Eve at the side of the new Adam, you have called us women to embrace our femininity and through it become a source of life to this world. We ask your intercession, our heavenly mother, especially for all those women in the world who are confused in their gender identity, who seek to accomplish masculine properties, denying their own vocation. We ask for your powerful intercession for anybody in the entire world who's suffering gender identity problems, and we ask also to intervene to the sending of the Holy Spirit to our politicians that laws may be made that allow each one of us to develop the talents that God has given us to realize our vocation and to become ever more the man and woman we're supposed to be in order to be together, man and women in their joint mission and yet different properties. The beautiful reflection of God's love to this world. Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord with the blessed I, you among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour for our death. Amen. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Thank you.