What It Is To Be A Man

Men are intellectual.  This is not a comment about their IQ, or about the relative IQ of women.  It is simply a reflection of the fact that men operate in the plane of truth.  Does this mean that men cannot be good?  Certainly not – for it is the job of all people to shun evil and do good.  However, it will be seen that men work in terms of truth and only see good as it is formed by truth and not as it is in itself.

It was mentioned above that “truth of good or truth from good exists in the male and is the essence of masculinity” (CL 61, see also CL 88).  This stems from the fact that “a male is born intellect-oriented [or intellectual]” (CL 33, see also CL 90, 159) which means that he “is born with the affection for knowing, understanding and becoming wise” (CL 33).  Therefore, “the masculine form is a form of the intellect [or understanding] “ (CL 33, see also CL 55.6, 100, 187, 218, 325) and “was created to become a form of wisdom from a love of growing wise” (CL 66).  This is true even to the extent that a man’s will is intellectual (CL 165), not just his understanding.  In simple terms, men are wisdom, thought, and intellect (CL 175, see also CL 195) because “the male soul, being intellectual in nature, is therefore truth; for anything intellectual in nature is nothing else” (CL 220, see also HH 368).  It is therefore clear that men are born to be understanding for the sake of becoming wise.

The Lord has provided that  men’s thoughts can be separated from their affections (CL 169) so that they can serve the human race as the rational sight of truth – exercising wisdom and judgment from a sight a truth disconnected from their state in life.   It will be seen that this is both a strength and a weakness.

What Men Do

One of the points of contention between men and women is the matter of employment.  Equal pay for equal work is certainly a good place to start.  However, the Heavenly Doctrines point towards specific approaches to occupations that are characteristically masculine or feminine.  These approaches have implications for optimizing productivity in the workplace.  Employers should seek to understand these approaches if they wish to capitalize on the strengths of the two genders.

The male approach to employment [1] has to do with the intellect.  Therefore, most male employments “are occupational and are directed toward serving the public” because male behavior “stems from a predominance of the intellect.  Consequently, the actions of his life … are directed by reason – or if they are not, he wants them to appear so” (CL 90).  At first, this may sound paternalistic, male chauvinist, and more.  However, pause for a moment to reflect on the fact that “men cannot enter into duties appropriate to women and perform them properly, because they cannot enter into the affections of women, which are completely different from the affections of men” (CL 175).  Men are simply intellects who, if they are looking to the Lord, desire to become wise by focusing on using reason as a servant to good.  Although men receive from the Lord a love of the pursuit of knowledge, it is women who actually love knowledge itself (CL 90-91). 

Think for a moment on the reality that a man “not reunited with his beauty and grace in woman is stern, severe, dry and unattractive, and also not wise except for his own sake alone, in which case he is a dunce.  On the other hand, when a man is united with his beauty and grace of life in a wife, he becomes agreeable, pleasant, full of life and loveable, and therefore wise” (CL 56.4).  Men and women were created distinct so that they could complement each other.  Although the Lord provided that there was redundancy in the case of malfunction, when the human being is operating as it was designed, an overlap between masculine and feminine is non-existent. This is seen in the fact that as a marriage begins the couple finds themselves spending a great deal of time defining boundaries and roles.  This begins as a relatively external pursuit, dealing with matters of everyday concern such as taking out the garbage or acquiring income for the household.  As the marriage progresses, however, the need to define boundaries and roles evolves into a more internal inquiry into how the couple can provide for each other.  As a couple allows the Lord to work with them in their relationship with each other and the world, the couple discovers that mutual, reciprocal relationship in which they are more and more one because they are so specifically distinct.  Conjunction lies in the fact that not one thing is the same in a husband and wife.  Therefore they have everything that is them to give as a gift of love to their partner.  Now it should be understood that this does not mean that women would never be paid for their work, or that men would be the sole arbiters of thought.  For in that case external thinking would be predominating over internal.  Rather, the emphasis is on regarding marriage as a pursuit of a conjunction into one, in which both partners have everything to give to the other as a mutual, reciprocal individual.

What It Is To Be Wise

In common parlance wisdom has come to mean some combination of a great quantity of knowledge combined with good judgment.  This is not altogether wrong.  However, it will be seen that it lacks scope, for wisdom can be spiritual, political, or natural – which is to say, wisdom concerning the church, the civil state, and knowledge, experience and skill (CL 130.2).

Regarded in its fullness, wisdom has to do with concepts, reason and life at the same time.  Concepts come first; reason is formed by means of them, and wisdom by both concepts and reason together – and this when a person lives reasonably and rationally according to truths formed as concepts … The most ancient people … did not acknowledge any other wisdom than wisdom of life… the ancients, however, … recognized as wisdom a wisdom of reason … But today, many even call knowledge wisdom … thus has wisdom fallen from its peak to its valley. (CL 130.1; see also HH 280, 322)

This definition of wisdom brings into light the fact that wisdom is a matter not only of knowledge and good judgment, but also of life (see AC 1439, 1563, 3310).  The key to wisdom is living according to the good judgment afforded to one by their knowledge of concepts.  True wisdom, therefore, is “to refrain from evils because they are harmful to the soul, harmful to the civil state, and harmful to the body, and to do good things because they are of benefit to the soul, to the civil state, and to the body” (CL 130.4).  This is the wisdom which good women love and good men love to pursue.

Wisdom In Men

Having firmly established the nature of wisdom abstracted from gender it may now be seen how wisdom manifests itself in men. 

“Wisdom cannot take form in a person except through a love of growing wise.  If this love is removed, a person is completely incapable of becoming wise.  Wisdom resulting from this love is what is meant by good’s truth or truth resulting from good [which is masculine]” (CL 88.1).  The implication is that wisdom would not exist in the human race if men did not pursue it because men are that love of growing wise which facilitates wisdom’s formation.

“Wisdom in men is twofold, intellectual and moral, and their intellectual wisdom has to do with their understanding alone, while their moral wisdom has to do with both their understanding and at the same time their life” (CL 163, see also CL 195).  It is the intellectual wisdom which is the internal of a wife (see above in “A Necessary Distinction”), and the moral wisdom which forms their shared external. 

Intellectual wisdom has to do with:

knowledge, intelligence and wisdom.  In particular, however, [intellectual wisdom has to do with] rationality, judgment, genius, learning, sagacity … To intellectual wisdom belong also all the fields of study to which adolescents are introduced in schools, and through which they are afterward led into intelligence … such as philosophy, physics, geometry, mechanics, chemistry, astronomy, law, political science, ethics, history, and many more. (CL 163)

Moral wisdom is formed of such virtues as:

temperance, sobriety, integrity, kindliness, friendliness, modesty, honesty, helpfulness, courteousness; also diligence, industriousness, skillfulness, alacrity, generosity, liberality, magnanimity, energy, courage, prudence – not to mention many others. (CL 164, see also AC 2915)

Moral wisdom, being the wisdom of life, also extends to spiritual virtues such as:

love of religion, charity, truthfulness, faith, conscience, innocence, as well as many more.  These virtues, both moral and spiritual, can be attributed in general to a man's love and zeal for religion, for the public good, for his country, for his fellow citizens, for his parents, for his wife, and for his children.  In all of these justice and judgment prevail.  Justice has to do with moral wisdom, and judgment has to do with intellectual wisdom. (CL 164, see also AC 5114; HH 529

The intellectual and moral wisdom of men forms the foundation upon which a marriage rests.  It will be seen that a wife has a moral wisdom that is conjoined to her husband’s moral wisdom and that a wife is conjoined inwardly with her husband’s intellectual wisdom.  The latter is an internal conjunction because “this wisdom is characteristic of the intellect of men, and it ascends into a light in which women are not” (CL 165, see also CL 188).

Wisdom is formed in men by truth received from “a constant union of love and wisdom [that] flows from the Lord …and to it the Lord joins goodness of love according to his reception.” It is the male disposition “to know, understand, and be wise” because “the male is by nature or temperament inclined to develop his understanding, consequently … he is born to become intellect-oriented.  But because this cannot happen apart from love, therefore the Lord attaches love to him according to his reception, that is, according to the spirit in him that wills to become wise” (CL 90, see also AR 949; AC 2069, 5986, 6472, 7343).  The love of growing wise, which defines masculinity, is present with a man to the degree that he uses what he knows to make decisions in pursuit of wisdom in life.  A man becomes more masculine, in the degree that the Lord is able to attach a love of growing wise to the knowledge that he has acquired.  This process appears to be bootstrapping.  However, upon reflection it is evident that all people are simply vessels having no life of their own (AC 3318).  From this it becomes clear that, seeing as it is the decision which defines an individual, a man becomes more masculine to the extent that he makes choices receptive of life and wisdom from the Lord.  Therefore, by making decisions that pursue the wisdom of life a man causes himself to become a better vessel for receiving wisdom from the Lord, and so he becomes more able to see his way clear to make those good decisions.

There are two applications of masculine wisdom that are of particular note. 

The first application of masculine wisdom is reading the Word. 

When a person reads the Word and draws truths from it, the Lord attaches good.  For the person does not see the states of good affecting him, because he uses his intellect to read the Word, and the intellect takes in from the Word only what is proper to it, namely, truths.  The intellect does have a sense that the Lord joins good to these truths, from the delight that flows in when it is in a state of enlightenment, but this takes place inwardly only in the case of people who read the Word for the purpose of gaining wisdom, and those have this purpose who are trying to learn genuine truths from it and thereby form the church in themselves.  In contrast, people who read the Word only for the glory of being learned, and people who suppose that simply the reading or hearing of the Word inspires faith and leads to salvation – such people do not receive any good from the Lord. (CL 128, see also AC 6222, 7503, 8694)

The intellect is said to be what is used when reading the Word.  Truths, therefore, are acquired in reading the Word, but goods are merely sensed.  Does this mean that only men should read the Word?  Absolutely not.  However, as this passage describes it, the process of drawing truths from the Word explicitly and goods only by proxy, may very well be describing the case of a man reading the Word (as it is not characteristic of the feminine to receive good only indirectly).

The second application is reception of conjugial love.

When the inner faculties of the rational mind have been opened, the person becomes an image of wisdom, and this wisdom is the receptacle of truly conjugial love.  The wisdom which … receives this love is rational and at the same time moral wisdom.  Rational wisdom views the truths and good virtues that inwardly appear in a person not as qualities belonging to him but as qualities flowing in from the Lord.  And moral wisdom shuns evils and falsities as contagious diseases – especially lascivious ones which contaminate his conjugial love. (CL 102)

This description of wisdom as the receptacle of truly conjugial love is striking on account of the fact that women are the vehicle for conjugial love entering the human race (see below).  What is uncovered in this passage, as in other places, is the fact that although conjugial love is received into the human race by the agency of women, it does not exist in the human race unless it is received by men.  This is the complement to the fact that the church is received into the human race by the agency of men, but it does not exist in the human race unless it is received by women.  More will be seen concerning these truths later.

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