Aquinas

It was almost comical reading the highly reasoned arguments of Aquinas on the topic of Genesis 2, a story so highly critiqued and called upon that reason has almost completely been removed from many of the questions asked about the text. So far, in regards to female creation, we have heard rants about imperfection, evil, and motives that must include reproduction, for if not god would have just created a man. In light of these, Aquinas tackles the basic question of whether woman should have been made from man. Three objections are given in the full argument I found online. One objection states that different sexes exist in all animals, and an order of creation was not specified for these species, so it shouldn’t have been with humankind either. Another applies kinship laws to Adam and Eve as unfit parents if they were so closely related. I was a bit disappointed that Aquinas’ reasoning relied on an etiological explanation of male superiority to support creation order. To give a natural order of male as the leader of the human race, it seems fit that he be created first, just as god existed before the heavens and the earth. Aquinas goes on to rely on a very strict interpretation of the lines “wherefore a man shall leave father and mother and shall cleave to his wife,” to reason that Adam would be more likely to join with Eve if they were made from the same material. This argument doesn’t appeal to me, as Adam and Eve could still have been created in the same fashion, both from the earth, just as all other animals that seem to have little trouble finding their sexual partners. To me, the rational objections provided before Aquinas’ answer seem more compelling than his answers. Although rational reasoning is used in Aquinas’ argument, the reasoning is applied to weak facts.
The second question Aquinas tackles in my reading regards Eve’s creation from Adam’s rib. We have seen the rib’s curvature construed as imperfection, and used to support male domination. Logical objections are made regarding Eve’s composition, and superfluity of god’s creation in that nothing not needed for life could have been created by god. Also, there is an argument that it would have been painful for god to remove a rib from Adam, even though the test clearly refers to a very peacefully anesthetic operation. Aquinas’ argument is less than satisfactory here, as he basically just gives reasons that the woman was not created from the head and feet. His reply to objection 2 is the most worthwhile in my opinion, as he reconciles the problem of superfluity in creation, by taking the rib in a general sense of human anatomy rather than a specific bone. He cites natural occurrences of body parts leaving the body, such as semen. My overall impression of this reading was that the objections had a stronger and more factual based argument that Aquinas, who often used reason out of context.