Love & Passion Quote by Thomas Aquinas

Aquinas isn’t merely insulting women here; he’s doing medieval systems-building, slotting human bodies into an orderly universe where hierarchy reads as nature and nature reads as theology. The move is clinical: reduce sex difference to a technical “defect” in causality, then let that “defect” do moral and social work. By calling woman “misbegotten,” he borrows the prestige of Aristotelian biology - the “active” male seed aiming at a “perfect likeness” - and turns a contingent cultural preference into a metaphysical default. The rhetoric sounds like observation, but it’s really an argument for authority.

The specific intent is to rationalize inequality without sounding like a partisan. If woman is a deviation from the ideal production line, then female subordination can be framed not as an imposed arrangement but as an ontological fact. That’s the subtext: power wants to be mistaken for physics. Note the quiet absolutism in “perfect,” “active,” “defect.” Those words smuggle in value judgments while pretending to describe a neutral mechanism.

Context matters because Aquinas is writing inside a Christian tradition that insists both sexes are created by God and share a rational soul, yet he’s also inheriting a Greek scientific model that treats the male as normative. The resulting compromise is awkward but influential: spiritually equal, naturally lesser. It’s an intellectual alibi that let institutions preach universal salvation while maintaining gendered hierarchies as “common sense,” armored by the language of nature rather than the messier admission of custom and control.