What, then, is the difference between men and women? The whole of Creation and everything that is therein contained. Men are the Sun and women are the Moon. Man is everything that is active, aggressive, and emanative; woman is everything that is passive, receptive, and emanating. As the Moon reflects the Sun and cannot fulfill her purpose without him, so woman reflects man and cannot fulfill her duty without him. And yet man without woman would be the lesser for it, for just as the night would be beggared in the absence of the Moon and the splendor of the noonday Sun diminished in the absence of her contrast, so man without woman, although he would still stand on his own even as the Sun does not depend upon the Moon for his light, would find himself void in a way that words cannot express, for, although man was made for God, woman was made for man, and, although she must stand in relationship to him and not he in relationship to her, she completes him in a way that can be expressed only in the words of the God Who walked with the first man in the Garden and yet still called Adam, who spoke with the Lord God, Creator of the Heavens and the Earth, face to face, “alone”. It would not be right to call God ‘incomplete’ without His Creation, and yet God in His nature made Creation inevitable, so also God, in His infinite wisdom and goodness, recognized that man, too, made in the image and likeness of God, and sharing in His flesh and blood with respect to the Son, would not be fully as he should be without both a Creation under him, for God placed him at the pinnacle and crowned him icon and steward, and a wife beside him, not as his competitor or equal, but as his most cherished possession, to be jealously guarded, just as God is jealous of His worship, for she is flesh of his flesh and bone of his bones, made especially and exclusively for him by the God Whose gifts are always perfect, and the very means by which man builds not only his world but the future.
It is only a madman or a fiend who would diminish or denigrate such a great gift, or reject her for being what she is not. Between man and woman with respect to their natures is an impassable chasm, but, with respect to their design and their teleology, one finds another sort of infinity — the asymptote —, for, although woman shall draw ever closer to man here in time and there in eternity, the two shall never collapse into one — he must remain the bulwark, the unchanging and unchangeable foundation, and she must draw ever closer, fulfilling her purpose and her duty. In the perfection of the relationship between man and woman, one finds the typology of man’s relationship to God, and only a particular sort of fool would attempt to disentangle type and antitype therein. Woman is not the pinnacle of Creation, for God placed man into that position, but she is the only thing He created after creating the pinnacle — she was important enough to Him, for He knew that she was essential to man, that He went with kairos instead of a sort of naked Chronos, creating her, as it were, almost out of order, as if to emphasize her position, created not in due time within the structuring of the days of Creation, but created ‘out of time’ or even ‘out of order’ as subordinate to man and intimately connected to him. What fools we are for not recognizing such a great gift, and what a fool she is for bristling at what she all too often perceives as a position of slavish subordination instead of honorable submission.