Dark Matter Cartoon

Yearning for the Pleroma

Notice: There is now a separate blog dedicated to the New Gnostic Gospel. You can get there by clicking here.

Other words for the Gnostic word "pleroma" include the "Fullness," the "All," the "Totalities," and "the circle of divine attributes," which gives you a pretty good idea of what pleroma means. The way wikipedia defines the term is much more challenging and kind of discouraging because of its complexity, especially the section on Gnosticism. 

Only one book of the Bible mentions the Pleroma--a letter written to the church in Colosse by the apostle Paul. In the translation of Colossians 2:9 below, Pleroma has been rendered as "the fullness."

"For in Him [Christ] dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily; and you are complete in Him, who is the head of all principality and power" (Col. 2:9).

The footnote under this verse in my edition of the New King James Version goes on to completely misinterpret the meaning of the statement in its rush to dismiss the Gnostic implications of the verse. The Nelson editors contend that "the Gnostics thought the fullness of God had been divided among a number of angelic beings, the last creating the material world. In contrast, Paul says that the fullness of God exists in Christ... This contradicts the Gnostic idea of  the inherent evil of physical bodies and the claim that Jesus is merely a spirit (p. 2014, Nelson Study Bible. 1997).

While I do agree with the opening premise that "the Gnostics thought the fullness of God had been divided among a number of ... beings," there are at least four misrepresentations I see in the Nelson explanation of the verse.

First, the idea that the fullness can't be both completely in Christ and at the same time divided into aeons. No need to say, "In contrast," since the two traits are not mutually exclusive. Let's imagine how that would work.

Did you know that you can click on any blog picture to see it larger on your computer screen?
Here are the first four phases of Gnostic Cosmology, according to the Tripartite Tractate. Upper right corner: God the Father represented as the background paper of the entire poster. Upper left corner: I've represented the Son as a diffuse cloud of will. Middle: the Pleroma/the fullness represented as the Son's cloud with distinct lines representing the aeonic traits. The pyramid at the lower right represents the individual aeons after they have named themselves and differentiated the Son's will into hierarchies of traits and powers.

We begin with the Father, since this is the ground state underlying all else. We all know that the Father is unknowable. Too big, too exalted for us mere mortals to contemplate directly. The Father is the Immortal One who never changes and without whom nothing would exist. The indisputable buck-stops-here God. This being is pure consciousness, without form or distinctions, all quiet, eternally undivided. This is the One Who Is; the Great I Am. In my drawings, the Father is represented as the paper that makes up the poster--all other manifestations arise as images upon the paper and are fully contained by the paper.

The Son is represented by the starburst cloud at the upper left, although the starburst is not really light energy, since this is before the creation of Light. This entity is also called the First Aeon, the Root, the Single Name, and The Form of the Formless. The Son contains all of the qualities of the Father, but in a circumscribed form. In today's lingo we would call the Son a holographic representation of the Father, where a small fragment perfectly emulates the larger image. You could think of the Father as the ocean, and the Son as a big bucket of ocean water. It's the same fluid. And if the bucket remains immersed in the ocean, then not only is the water within and without the bucket identical, the ocean continues to fully contain the bucket of water.

The Tripartite Tractate describes how the Son is part of the Father, and then goes on in the same verse to declare the Son as the cause of the Pleroma:

"He exists by the Father having him as a thought--that is, his thought about himself, his sensation of himself and of his eternal being... He possesses power, which is his will. For the moment, however, he holds himself back in silence, he who is the greatest, being the cause of the generation of the members of the All into eternal existence" (56).

By this one verse we can see that the Son is within the Father and he also contains the Fullness, in full agreement with Colossians 2:9.

My second problem with the Nelson notes is their description of aeons. Aeons are not the same as angels--they're more like features or capabilities. The Tripartite Tractate describes them as "the properties and qualities in which the Father and the Son exist" and equates them with the pre-existent Church (58). 

"His offspring, the ones who are, are without number and limit and at the same time indivisible. They have issued from him, the Son and the Father... The Church exists in the dispositions and properties in which the Father and the Son exist... Therefore it subsists in the procreations of innumerable aeons" (59).

While some Aeons are beings with their own self-aware personalities, other aeons are best described as traits and capabilities of the Father and Son.

"...they were unable to know the depth in which they were; nor was it possible for them to know themselves, nor for them to know anything else. That is, they were with the Father; they did not exist for themselves. Rather, they only had existence in the manner of a seed... like a fetus... not yet come into being" (60, 20-35).

Third, the Nelson Study Bible footnote confuses Jesus, the physical incarnation of Christ on Earth, with the eternal spirit of Christ, the first Son of the Father, whose image and dwelling predates the Earthly appearance of Jesus. 

"Now the Savior in fact was a bodily image of something unitary, namely the Fullness" (116).

The Gnostic gospel I've been studying has no quibble with naming the physical person of Jesus Christ as the Lord and Savior of the entire Creation. Lest the wary Christian doubt the Gnostic's gospel, the Tripartite Tractate ends with this eulogy for Jesus Christ:

"...the praise, the power, and the glory, through Jesus Christ, the Lord, the Savior, the Redeemer of all those who are embraced by the mercy of love, and through his Holy Spirit, from now throughout all generations forever and ever. Amen" (138).

And finally, the Nelson editor contends "the fullness of God [that] exists in Christ" ... "contradicts the Gnostic idea of the inherent evil of physical bodies." The editor apparently reasons that if Gnostics claim physical bodies are evil, and Jesus incarnated as a physical body, then Gnosticism would imply that Jesus Christ was evil.

There are a couple of problems with this logic. First, my reading of Gnostic writing reveals that while material reality may have started out as "evil," the situation was quickly rectified when the Son and the Pleroma intervened to establish an "economy" that regulated good and evil inclinations through "repentance." Here's a brief description of that process:

"After conversion followed the remembrance of those who exist and the prayer on behalf of the one who had returned to himself by means of what is good" (81).... "This prayer and supplication helped to make him turn toward himself and toward the Fullness, for their remembrance of him caused him to remember the preexistent ones, and this is the remembrance that calls out from afar and brings him back" (82).

"To those who belong to the remembrance, however, he revealed the thought ... with the intention that it should draw them into a communion with the material. This was in order to provide them with a structure and a dwelling place, but also in order that by being drawn toward evil they should acquire a weak basis for their existence, so that, instead of rejoicing unduly in the glory of their own environment and thereby remaining exiled, they might rather perceive the sickness they were suffering from, and so acquire a consistent longing and seeking after the one who is able to heal them from this weakness" (98, 99).

"The first human, then, is a mixed molding and a mixed creation, and a depository of those on the left and those on the right, as well as of a spiritual Word, and his sentiments are divided between each of the two substances to which he owes his existence" (106).

"What our Savior became, out of willing compassion, is the same as that which the ones for whose sake he appeared had become because of an involuntary passion: they had become flesh and soul, and this holds them perpetually in its grip, and they perish and die... For not only did he assume their death for the ones he had in mind to save, but in addition he also assumed their smallness, to which they had descended when they were born with body and soul; for he let himself be conceived and he let himself be born as a child with body and soul" (114, 115).

Secondly, the very fact that Jesus did incarnate as a mortal man is what made salvation through Christ possible, for it was by the Savior's perfect "error correcting algorithm," superimposed upon an otherwise error-filled humanity, that salvation entered the world. 

I'll end this article with a clear gospel message straight from the Tripartite Tractate regarding exactly what one must come to believe in order to be saved, in case you're curious. 

"... there is no other baptism apart from this one alone, which is the redemption into God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, when confession is made through faith in those names, which are a single name of the gospel, when they have come to believe what has been said to them, namely that they exist. From this they have their salvation, those who have believed that they exist. This is attaining in an invisible way to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in an undoubting faith" (127, 128).

That seems to be the underlying core of the Gnostic salvation message. No other arcane rituals are needed; no gnosis other than believing that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (the Fullness) existed before you. Other ancient gnostic texts claim that this is the true essence of the gospel that Jesus preached. 

Keep in mind that these are the very texts considered so distracting by the early church Fathers that they were buried in the Egyptian desert in the 4th century AD to protect them from being burned as the work of heretics, keeping them safe until their reemergence in 1945. The cat is definitely out of the bag now.

Okay, back to the Pleroma. In case you haven't guessed, the Fullness is where we all wind up eventually. By the end of the universe, most everyone's souls will have come on board Team God, so to speak, and then the fruit of the Pleroma will have returned home to the fold, to live happily ever after amidst the unending joy and love of the Fullness, all tucked up inside the Son who lives inside the Father.

"Once the redemption had been proclaimed, the perfect human [the Savior] immediately  received knowledge so as to return swiftly to his unity, to the place from which he came. Joyfully he returned back to the place from which he had originated, the place from which he had flowed forth. His limbs, however, needed a school... until all the limbs of the body of the Church would be united in one place and would attain the restoration together... so that the Fullness obtains its redemption" (123, 124).

Could Dark Matter Be the Gnostic "Imitation"?

Notice: There is now a separate blog dedicated to the New Gnostic Gospel. You can get there by clicking here.

Last week it occurred to me that the way scientists describe dark matter and what the Tripartite Tractate calls "The Deficiency" sound very much alike. It looks as though a case can be made that an ancient religious document is describing a process that has only recently been scientifically hypothesized. 

Let me try to explain: 

Dark Matter is invisible, but we can see a projection of its assumed location in this false-color representation of light-blue clouds at the center of Galaxy Cluster Abell 1689. 
Image credit: NASA, ESA, D. Coe (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology, and Space Telescope Science Institute), N. Benitez (Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia, Spain), T. Broadhurst (University of the Basque Country, Spain), and H. Ford (Johns Hopkins University)
More about this NASA Hubble Space Telescope image here. 

Scientists now believe that our universe is filled with an invisible type of matter that far outweighs ordinary matter by a ratio of over five to one. According to the European Space Agency's Planck spacecraft census of the composition of the universe, ordinary matter only makes up 4.9 percent of the total, while dark matter makes up 26.8 percent. (The other 68.3 percent is made up of formless energy.) As explained in the Simple Explanation's Dark Matter blog article, dark matter was first hypothesized in the 1930s, but it wasn't until the 1990s that astronomers were able to observe what they take to be dark matter.

Not much is actually known about dark matter, since its presence can only be inferred by its gravitational effect on the light travelling from distant stars and galaxies. Recently, some astronomers have proposed that dark matter may be the source of mysterious gamma rays emanating from a ring around our galactic center. 

According to a 2013 article in Discover Magazine, here is what scientists generally believe about dark matter: it is "the glue that holds together the universe and all its rich diversity," and most dark matter tends to "gather in giant, diffuse clouds." Dark Matter particles could also be lurking in a gigantic, invisible disk near the center of our galaxy, "smashing into each other" creating a "strange type of [gamma] radiation" that is "60 billion times as potent as ordinary yellow light." 

NASA continues to process data that maps dark matter's distribution throughout the universe. The image below shows that dark matter is randomly distributed thoughout the cosmos.

This map shows the oldest light in our universe, as detected with the greatest precision yet by the Planck mission. The ancient light, called the cosmic microwave background, was imprinted on the sky when the universe was 370,000 years old. It shows tiny temperature fluctuations that correspond to regions of slightly different densities, representing the seeds of all future structure: the stars and galaxies of today. By analyzing the light patterns in this map, scientists are fine-tuning what we know about the universe, including its origins, fate and basic components. Image courtesy of ESA and the Planck Collaboration.

Lastly, from wikipedia: "The most widely accepted explanation for these phenomena is that dark matter exists and that it is most probably composed of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) that interact only through gravity and the weak force. Alternative explanations have been proposed, and there is not yet sufficient experimental evidence to determine whether any of them are correct."

That's all that is known about dark matter. Now let's switch hats from cosmologist to philosopher to consider The Imitation.

Last month's Gnostic Cosmology blog article explained that our universe was created as the result of a Fall from a state of non-physical spirituality to an initially dark, material state. Below are three illustrations out of the Simple Explanation of Gnostic Cosmology relevant to this discussion. The first poster presents the overall Gnostic Cosmology. The second and third illustrations pertain to the events leading up to the Fall and its consequences:

Gnostic Cosmology according to the Tripartite Tractate, by Cyd Ropp.  Beginning with the Originating Consciousness known as The Father, this diagram starts at the upper left and proceeds clockwise to The Son, then The All, then to the hierarchical arrangement of The All, then to The Fall of the Presumptuous Thought down into the Dark Chaos known as The Imitation. (The remainder of the poster is dealt with in the Gnostic Cosmology article.)

This stage in creation is known as the First Order of Powers. Everyone and everything knows its place and is happy.  The final Aeon to arrive at the top of the pyramid, known in the Tripartite Tractate as "Presumptuous Thought," looks down at the hierarchy and sees them all arranged underneath him. This gives that Aeon the mistaken idea that he is in charge of the pyramid. He reaches upward to reinsert the pyramid into the Metaverse. This is done without authorization, resulting in The Fall.

The Fall tumbles the harmonious arrangement of Aeons into Chaos. They Fall into confusion. They are dispersed and alone for the first time, cut off from each other and the All. This is now called the Deficiency, and the Imitation. Logos panics and abandons the Imitation and retreats back to the All. God the Father also retreats in horror from the Deficiency, which throws up a Boundary containing the Imitation. 

Prior to The Fall, there was no material, only mind. Beginning with undifferentiated consciousness (The Father), mind first became aware (The Son). The Son then differentiated its thoughts and qualities into ALL potential thoughts and ALL potential qualities (The ALL, aka The Fullness, aka The Pleroma). The Fullnesses then named themselves, which automatically sorted them into hierarchical relationships. From this hierarchy of The ALL came the final expression of the Fullness--the final cherry on top of the stack--known in the Tripartite Tractate as "Presumptuous Thought." Presumptuous Thought was a singular entity that combined all the other Fullnesses' qualities into one mind. It was Presumptuous Thought that initiated the Fall from the immaterial plane when it mistook itself for The ALL and acted unilaterally rather than harmoniously.

Now, listen to these descriptions out of the Tripartite Tractate concerning the consequences of "The Fall" of Presumptuous Thought that led to the Creation of our Universe:

"Those who belong to the arrogant thought and those of the likeness are called ... "the Dark Ones"... (98, 15).

"The things he had wished to grasp and reach, however, he produced as shadows, phantoms, and imitations, for he could not bear to look at the light but looked at the depths, and he faltered. Because of this, he suffered a division and a turning away" (77, 11).

"Those who came into being from the presumptuous thought resemble in fact the Fullnesses of whom they are imitations, though they are phantoms, shadows, and illusions, deprived of reason and light, belonging to this empty thought, being nobody's offspring" (78, 28).

"The Word, then, was the cause of these things coming into being, and he became increasingly desperate. He was dumbfounded. Instead of perfection he saw deficiency; instead of unity he saw division; instead of stability he saw disturbance; instead of rest, upheaval" (80, 11).

"Those who had come into being did not know themselves, nor did they know the Fullness from which they had originated, nor did they know him who had become the cause of their existence. For since the Word was in such an unstable condition, he no longer attempted to bring forth offspring in the form of emissions...of glory.... Instead, what he brought forth were feeble and small creatures, infected with the same sicknesses with which he himself had been infected" (80, 15) .

"The imitation that had taken place solitarily in this state was what had been the cause of the things that do not exist of their own from the beginning. In this state he continued to produce such deficient beings, until he began to condemn the irrational things he had produced" (81,2).

Perhaps the production of the "Dark Ones" of the Imitation was the initial cosmological event that kicked off the Big Bang. These Dark Ones, these "shadows," had "no reason," no "light." Instead of the perfection of the hierarchical arrangements, these Dark Ones came "into being" in a state of "chaos." Rather than acting in unity, these Dark Ones manifest "division," "disturbance," "upheaval." These Dark Ones did not resemble the "glory" of the Fullness, but were feeble and small. 

This is the initial state of Creation according to Gnostic cosmology. No light, chaotic, no life, no rules. Filled with feeble, small things, isolated from one another and alone. You could easily call them WIMPS (weakly interacting massive particles). These Dark Ones/WIMPS did not lack the information inherent in ordinary matter, but they were unable to organize themselves the way normal matter does, because they did not possess the spirit of cooperation, coming into being as they did out of a solitary act. 

The Tripartite Tractate goes on to describe how this was only step one in creation, with a quick adjustment that halted production of the Dark Ones until a more "reasonable" form of matter could be produced that combined light with matter, leading to the eventual redemption of matter by mind and spirit...  But that's another article for another day....

Lastly, by borrowing information from the unlikely source of an ancient wisdom book that lay buried under Egyptian sand for almost 2,000 years, we can generate a scientific prediction that will prove or disprove a measureable hypothesis. This Gnostic creation story claims that the first material objects in our universe were dark matter. Light and ordinary matter followed some time later and began a never-ending dance with dark matter. The Simple Explanation predicts that scientists will be able to prove that dark matter was the initial material product of the early universe. You heard it here first.

A Simple Explanation of Dark Matter

Up until recently, it was thought that there was only one kind of matter in the universe. Sure, it came in many forms (liquid, solid, gaseous, and plasma), but everyone agreed that matter consisted of atoms that behaved in predictable ways. For instance, when you shine a light on matter, you can see it.

Then Dark Matter was discovered. Dark Matter doesn't interact with ordinary matter or light. It can't be seen directly. Its presence is inferred by its visible gravitational influences across a very large scale (light bends to go around a gigantic, invisible, heavy, object). 

It turns out that ordinary matter only makes up 4.9 percent of the total matter in the universe. Scientists now believe that Dark Matter accounts for 26.8 percent of the total. In other words, there is about five times as much invisible, Dark Matter around us as ordinary matter.

The existence of Dark Matter was hypothesized back in the 1930s to answer the question: given the speed that galaxies rotate, why don't their stars go flying off into space? What holds galaxies together? The calculated mass of the galaxies' stars was nowhere near heavy enough to hold a galaxy together. Something extremely heavy--massive--had to be sitting right in the middle of every galaxy, using its gravity to hold the rotating stars in place.

Here's what NASA says about the image above:

ABOUT THIS IMAGE:

This Hubble Space Telescope composite image shows a ghostly "ring" of dark matter in the galaxy cluster Cl 0024+17.

The ring-like structure is evident in the blue map of the cluster's dark matter distribution. The map is superimposed on a Hubble image of the cluster. The ring is one of the strongest pieces of evidence to date for the existence of dark matter, an unknown substance that pervades the universe.

The map was derived from Hubble observations of how the gravity of the cluster Cl 0024+17 distorts the light of more distant galaxies, an optical illusion called gravitational lensing. Although astronomers cannot see dark matter, they can infer its existence by mapping the distorted shapes of the background galaxies. The mapping also shows how dark matter is distributed in the cluster.

Astronomers suggest that the dark-matter ring was produced from a collision between two gigantic clusters.

Dark matter makes up the bulk of the universe's material and is believed to make up the underlying structure of the cosmos.

The Hubble observations were taken in November 2004 by the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). Thanks to the exquisite resolution of the ACS, astronomers saw the detailed cobweb tracery of gravitational lensing in the cluster.

Object Names: CL0024+17, ZwCl 0024+1652

Image Type: Astronomical

Credit: NASA, ESA, M.J. Jee and H. Ford (Johns Hopkins University)

************************

Readers of the Simple Explanation blog no doubt recognize the lovely torus shape assumed by the Dark Matter "ring." The Simple Explanation's cosmology predicts there will be a ring shape associated with every galaxy's center, as well as a ring shape around just about every other object in the universe. The Simple Explanation suggests that the torus shapes predate and are the cause of the galaxies' formation, not vice versa as most astronomers theorize.

Midwifery, Prudence, and Protocols

Cyd Ropp, Ph.D.

As part of the naturalized ideological superstructure of Western thought, rationalism is held to be the ideal standard of reason.  Both the law and Western medicine strongly identify with the values of science and the larger philosophical agenda of rationalism.  Fortunately, midwives were never admitted to the academy in the first place, and so midwifery has remained insulated as an exclusively female prudential endeavor.  As English midwife Jane Sharp penned in 1671:

It is not hard words that perform the work, as if none understood the Art that cannot understand Greek.  Words are but the shell. . . . It is commendable for men to employ their spare time in some things of deeper Speculation than is required of the female sex; but the art of Midwifery chiefly concerns us.  (Donegan 28)

            The privileging of obstetric protocols and normative standards over midwifery's responsiveness to the particular case can be seen as a variation of the two thousand-year-old struggle between prudential reasoning and Aristotelian philosophy's penchant for rationalistic systemization.  Midwifery may thus be counted alongside the ancient philosophy of sophism as one of the prudential arts displaced by rule-based rationalism.    The art of traditional midwifery stems from an ancient worldview that privileges practical wisdom and intuitive knowledge over scientific methodology and technology-based authoritative knowledge.  Because traditional midwifery makes no attempt to demarcate itself as a medical or scientific profession, midwives are free to speak to the laboring woman's emotional, social, and spiritual needs in addition to her physical needs.    Traditional midwifery is an ancient art that not only predates Western scientism, it has been excluded and therefore insulated from Western scientism throughout history.  Because of its insular existence as an exclusively female endeavor, midwifery continues to actively employ the ancient form of reasoning known as prudence.  To seek acceptance within the conventional academic community by adopting their standards of thought and reason is to admit the superiority of patriarchal scientism over traditional female ways.

My studies have found that the midwifery model encourages the use of prudential reasoning, while the medical model encourages reliance on rationalism.  By rationalism, I refer to the employment of formal logical proofs, rules of objective evidence, and normative standards of care. 

The midwifery model relies far less upon formalistic standards and in many instances seems to violate rationalism.  For example, midwifery's reliance upon subjective intuition as a source of knowledge, as well as the midwife's holistic integration of mind/body and mother/fetus, violates rationalist principles of objectivity.  Irrationality, as I use the term, refers to using non-rational means to discern the demands of an exigency.  Using intuition, emotion, and body-knowledge to discern information, as well as acting-without-thinking--or its opposite, patiently-watching-and-waiting --are examples of non-rational modalities at work. 

  By the standards of conventional medicine, the irrationalism of the midwifery model amounts to an "anything goes" model of care, entirely without standards.  Midwifery’s counter to this charge is that, far from "anything goes," midwifery provides the most appropriate care by responding to the particular case. 

            Undiluted irrationalism, then, is not to be confused with prudential reasoning.  The midwifery model traditionally employs prudence in the management of birth.  Prudence does not confine midwifery's critical process to the irrational polarity of rationality.  Rather, prudential wisdom is the ability to range freely between rationality and irrationality in the pursuit of the best course of action to resolve the exigency at hand.  The midwifery model tends to develop and encourage irrational modalities of experience in pursuit of this goal, while the medical model tends to discount them.  It is possible that, in practice, the medical model actually employs both irrationality and prudential wisdom to a greater degree than they care to admit.

Rules and normative standards on the one hand, emerging exigency and timely resolution on the other.  Prudence involves shuttling back and forth between these positions in pursuit of the best response to the particular case.  A prudent person, therefore, lets the emerging exigency drive the application of appropriate rational norms.  The prudent person knows, usually by benefit of experience, if/when/and to what extent rationality applies to the situation.  An exclusively rational person, on the other hand, upholds normative standards and formalistic rules as the highest standard of care, and will apply those standards irrespective the suitability of their application to the particularities of the exigency. 

            The ability to employ both modes of thought, when required, is the hallmark of prudence.  In Court, juries may be instructed to hold the midwife to the "reasonable person" standard.  For the prosecution, that reasonable person standard is rationalism.  For the midwife, that reasonable person standard should be recognized as prudence.  Whereas conventional medicine claims there are no standards in the absence of rationalism, midwives actually employ an alternative standard to rationalism: prudence.

            In addition, the medical model and midwifery model radically differ in their approaches to the issue of standard protocols of care.  Medical experts are able to authoritatively declare, and usually quantify, which events shall be considered normal and which are considered abnormal at every stage of labor and delivery. 

This practice of holding patients to predetermined time standards ensures that physicians only deal with standardized norms; deviations from the norm are simply not allowed, which serves to further reinforce the artificially-mandated "norms" of the medical model.  By this reasoning, labor that progresses more rapidly or slowly than average comes to be regarded, under the medical model, as abnormal and therefore pathological.  This manner of defining pathology as any deviation from normative standards reflects what feminist Nona Lyons has identified as a more typically masculine orientation to caring--one that invokes impartial rules, standards, and principles. 

There are no hard and fast normative standards under the traditional midwifery model.  The midwifery model reflects Lyons' identification of a more typically feminine approach to caring that promotes the welfare of others on their own terms rather than through application of impartial universal standards of care.  Hospital-based midwifery care uses medical guidelines and time frames because of malpractice issues that require midwives to quite tightly follow medical protocols. In the homebirth arena, care is based on emerging exigencies rather than a predetermined "laundry list." 

While CNMs are allowed to attend homebirths, the standardized protocols they are legally required to uphold place primary agency with the absent physician and allow the midwife to operate as a secondary agent in his stead.  If the homebirth RN violates the Board of Nursing's standards by ceding agency to the birthmother rather than the absent supervising physician, her nursing license could be subject to revocation.  RNs who practice traditional, non-medicalized midwifery, in other words, necessarily lose their legal sanction to practice. California has recently loosened the supervising physician stricture for midwives, due to unavailability of backup obstetricians.

Midwives’ descriptions of the artistic aspect of traditional midwifery emphasize the manner by which a midwife intuitively responds to the unique exigencies of the particular case--by deviating from textbook recommendations through a process of "non-linear," non-rational thought.  This ability is developed through "experience" and "practice," and often results in unexpected-but-efficacious responses.  This is an excellent definition of the process of prudential wisdom.

The medical model equates the absence of fixed universal standards to having "no real standard" at all.  There is no room for the "fluid," "amorphous" response to the particular case typical of prudential rather than rationalistic reasoning.  Traditional midwifery's detractors reason that the absence of fixed standards is merely a camouflage for incompetence. 

Faith Gibson, speaking in Court in 1998 as an expert witness on behalf of the traditional midwifery model, countered the charge of camouflage by insisting that, "Births vary from situation to situation.  And what's appropriate is to respond to the specific situation." Gibson equated fixed standards with an inability to respond to exigencies on a case-by-case basis.  Gibson clearly believes that the enforcement of universal standards leaves no room for prudential wisdom--the ability to judge the best course of action for the given case at hand (Ropp).    

Conclusion

This whole-hearted recognition of midwifery's reliance upon prudence provides a contemporary site for practical reasoning and counters the prevailing belief that irrationalism and anarchistic behavior are what remain when the rationalism and protocols of medicine are not necessarily followed.  It is no accident that midwifery relies upon prudential reasoning, for historically women were excluded from formal academic training, and the entire field of midwifery, as an exclusively female endeavor, was cut off from the revolution that advanced the field of obstetrics as a medical science.  To reduce midwifery at this late date to a systematic, instrumental approach and conventional educational structure in the name of recognition and respectability not only diminishes the scope of the art of the midwife, it creates a kind of instrumental monster devoid of the capacity for prudence.  Capitulating to the dominant culture’s educational standards and methods is not the way to promote traditional midwifery and other feminine arts. Is it?

End Table:

Foundational Philosophical Distinctions

_____________________________________________________

Aristotelian, philosophic, tendency.....Isocratean, oratorical, tendency             

tame and bloodless phraseology.....powerful, elegant language

scientific rule.....opinion and likelihood

systematized medical skills.....a midwife who can acutely divine the birthmother’s thoughts,feelings,and hopes

medical mastery grounded in science.....deep midwifery

systematic, rule-based preparation..... here-and-now invention

generic pedagogy.....paradigmatic/imitative pedagogy

instrumental view of medicine.....childbirth as empowered feminine

rational, logical.....emotional, empathic

literal exactitude.....colorful, tropological speech, including humor

rule-based procedure.....prudential wisdom-based procedure

discrete disciplinary classifications.....holistic approach to knowledge

evidentiary proofs.....evidence via elegant, copious speech

abstracted topical premises.....culturally embedded; situationally responsive

fixed, precise standards of judgment.....judged by peer review

Works Cited

Cicero.  On Oratory and Orators, J. S. Watson (ed.).  Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970.

Donegan, Jane B.  Women and Men Midwives: Medicine, Morality, and Misogyny in Early America.  Westport: Greenwood, 1978.

Garver, Eugene.  Aristotle's Rhetoric: An Art of Character.  Chicago: Chicago UP, 1994.

Lay, Mary M.  The Rhetoric of Midwifery: Gender, Knowledge, and Power.  New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2000.

Leff, Michael.  "Cicero's Pro Murena and the Strong Case for Rhetoric."  Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 1: 1 (1998), 61-88.

Leff, Michael.  "Genre and Paradigm in the Second Book of De Oratore."  The Southern Speech Communication Journal, 51 (Summer, 1986), 308-325.

Lyons, Nona Plessner.  "Two Perspectives: On Self, Relationships, and Morality."  Harvard Educational Review, 53 (1983): 125-145.

Ropp, Cyd C. The Rhetoric of Childbirth. Dissertation: U of Memphis, 2001.

Turkel, Kathleen Douherty.  "Midwifery and the Medical Model."  Women's Studies in Transition: The Pursuit of Interdisciplinarity.  Eds:  Kate Conway-Turner et al.  Newark: U of Delaware P, 1998.  218-235.

Warren, Virginia L.  "Feminist Directions in Medical Ethics."  Feminist Perspectives in Medical Ethics.  Eds. Helen Bequaert Holmes and Laura M. Purdy.  Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992.  32-45.

p.s. what does learning to type up a Works Cited page have to do with learning to facilitate births?