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by Tina Beattie (see credits)
Chapter Four in God’s Mother, Eve’s
Advocate. A Gynocentric Refiguration of Marian Symbolism in Engagement with
Luce Irigaray, Centre for Comparative Studies in Religion and Gender,
University of Bristol 1999, pp. 56 - 66; here republished with permission of
the author.
Essentialising masculinity - the sacramental priesthood and the maleness of
Christ
The
twentieth century development of a theology which seeks to define a positive
role for women in the church has arisen to a large extent out of the need to
provide a theological justification for the exclusion of women from the
sacramental priesthood, in the face of the challenge posed by the women’s
movement. In the past, this exclusion was based on the claim that women were
inferior to men by virtue of the fact that their rational souls were housed in
female bodies rather than male ones, and they were therefore incapable of
symbolising Christ as the embodiment of perfect humanity. Faced with the need
to affirm the equality of women and the goodness of the body, both of which
have been significant developments in twentieth century Catholic doctrine, the
Catholic church has resorted to an ontology of sexual difference which risks
excluding women from the symbols of salvation and therefore from the story of
redemption in Christ. Women are no longer denied access to the sacramental
priesthood because we are inferior to men but because we are by nature
incapable of representing Christ, because we are not male and the masculinity
of Christ is essential to his identification with God. Whereas once the saving
significance of the incarnation lay in the fact that Christ took human flesh in
its most perfect form - that of the male - today it lies in the fact that
Christ was a male body which is essentially different from being a female body,
and this explicitly excludes the possibility of female Christ-likeness. This
is, to quote Janet Martin Soskice, “more than just a moral infelicity from
the point of its critics - [it] is a blow at the heart of orthodox
Christology.”’ (1)
This
shift from a non-essentialist to an essentialist understanding of the nature of
sexual difference has been justified through an appeal to scientific
developments since the late eighteenth century which have ostensibly confirmed
that sexual difference operates at the microcosmic level of the human organism.
Biological beliefs about sexual difference have of course always influenced
theology. The idea of the active generativity of God the father and the passive
receptivity of the maternal flesh was based on the Aristotelian belief that the
inseminating father is the source of life and the soul, while the mother is the
incubator who provides the matter for the body. However, with the scientific
discovery of ovulation and the recognition that both sexes are biologically
active in the transmission of life, Catholic theology needed a new biological
foundation to justify its paternal hierarchy of generation, and it found this
through an appeal to a scientific theory which endorses a theological argument
that there is a fundamental and insurmountable difference between the sexes
which encompasses the whole person. So, for instance, von Balthasar claims that
“The male body is male throughout, right down to each cell of which it
consists, and the female body is utterly female, and this is also true of their
whole empirical experience and ego-consciousness.”(2)
This
means that the metaphorical possibilities of the language of fatherhood and
motherhood and masculinity and femininity as concepts which to some extent were
capable of transcending the sexed body have become invested with a new
literalism, at least as far as the male body is concerned. As I shall show, the
idea of an essentially female ego-consciousness does not prove an obstacle to
men’s mimesis of Marian femininity as a sign of their creatureliness
before God.
Thomas Laqueur has demonstrated that the scientific discovery of essential
differences between the sexes can be traced back to the late eighteenth
century, when the quest for biological differences was motivated primarily by
cultural changes in the understanding of the relationship between the sexes.
Before the seventeenth century, Laqueur argues that sex “was still a
sociological and not an ontological category.” (3) In adopting
post-Enlightenment, quasi-scientific arguments to defend the essential maleness
of the priesthood and the essential orientation towards motherhood of the
female body, modern theologians have surrendered the traditional Catholic
understanding of sexuality as primarily concerned with the right ordering of
society and with the metaphorical representation of relationships between
humanity and God, to a biological model which Laqueur demonstrates can be
linked to sweeping changes in the social organisation of sexual relationships.
This has introduced a new literalism to Catholic theology which threatens to
undermine the whole symbolic function of theological language. To explore the
foundations for this criticism, I am going to begin by considering recent
doctrinal arguments regarding the image of God and the exclusion of women from
the sacramental priesthood.
The
1976 Declaration on the Admission of Women to the Ministerial Priesthood,
Inter Insigniores, argues that
The
whole sacramental economy is in fact based upon natural signs, on symbols
imprinted upon the human psychology. “Sacramental signs”, says Saint
Thomas, “represent what they signify by natural resemblance”. The
same natural resemblance is required for persons as for things: when
Christ’s role in the Eucharist is to be expressed sacramentally, there
would not be this “natural resemblance” which must exist between
Christ and his minister if the role of Christ were not taken by a man: in such
a case it would be diffficult to see in the minister the image of Christ. For
Christ himself was and remains a man. (4)
The
problem with this argument is that it implies that it is not the human image of
Christ but the male image of Christ that is “imprinted upon the human
psychology,” so that we relate to Christ’s masculinity before we
relate to his humanity. But if this is the case, then a question arises with
regard to the salvation of the female body, because if our sexuality takes
precedence over our humanity, then where does the woman look for symbols which
affirm the uniqueness of the female body in the story of salvation?
Inter Insigniores defends its emphasis on the masculinity of the
sacramental priesthood by appealing to the nuptial symbolisation of the
relationship between Christ and the church, which requires that a man
represents Christ as “the author of the Covenant, the Bridegroom and Head
of the Church.” (5) The document acknowledges that one could argue that
the priest also represents the church, and in this sense the priestly role
could be performed by a woman in a way that is symbolically coherent. However,
it refutes this argument by insisting that if the priest represents the church
which is the Body of Christ, “it is precisely because he first represents
Christ himself, who is the Head and Shepherd of the Church.” (6) In other
words, the male body can represent the female body because it has priority, but
the female body cannot represent the male because she derives her identity and
her significance from him. Von Balthasar picturesquely describes the female
church without the male Christ as “an acephalous torso.” (7)
This
means that the male body uniquely has universal human significance, and the
symbols of salvation require only one female body - that of the Virgin Mary -
because there is no role which must necessarily be performed by a woman in the
symbolic life of the redeemed community, apart from the single example of
Mary’s virginal motherhood of Christ. Insofar as this finds symbolic
representation in the bridal, maternal church, it is not exclusive to women and
therefore it does not serve as an affirmahon of the value of the female body in
the symbols of salvation. Mary Aquin O’Neill describes the following
exchange during a talk she gave to a parish group on the role of women in the
church:
I
asked the audience, “Can you think of a single role in the church that
cannot be filled by a man?” One woman shot back, “Yes. The Mother of
God.” Undaunted, I pressed ahead. “And how is that role symbolized in
the official life of the church?” “It isn’t,” she replied,
clearly pondering the import of what she had been led to say.(8)
So
far, however, it could be argued that none of this is new. The female flesh has
always symbolised carnal weakness and non-godliness for both sexes, and for
both sexes the attainment of holiness has to a certain extent been sought
through the subjugation of the flesh with its womanly associations. What has
changed is that there is no longer any way in which a woman can transcend her
own flesh even through the acquisition of manliness, because while the
symbolism of womanliness remains inclusive, the symbolism of manliness has been
rendered exclusive. So while it is still the case that masculinity symbolises
God and femininity symbolises the creature, women are now inescapably confined
to the realm of the creaturely and denied any possible access to the
symbolisation of their own unique relationship to God as creatures made in the
image of God, even : through the mimesis of manliness.
Inter insigniores ends by saying that “The Church desires that
Christian women should become fully aware of the greatness of their
mission.”(9) This begs the question: what role is available to women in
such a way as to reflect “the greatness of their mission” and offer
reciprocity with the masculinity of the priesthood? In Mulieris Dignitatem,
John Paul II makes an earnest attempt to answer this question.
Symbolic femininity and the female body
Mulieris Dignitatem is an apostolic letter on the dignity and vocation
of women which affirms the significance of women in the Christian story.(10) It
defends the equality of men and women, rejecting any idea of wifely
subordination and describing male domination as a consequence of the fall. It
dwells at length on Jesus’ positive attitude towards women in the Gospels,
and recognises the need to involve women in the life and structures of the
church. It reflects on Mary’s central role in the incarnation and
describes her as “the most complete expression”(11) of the dignity
and vocation of every human being. She is “the authentic subject of
that union with God which was realized in the mystery of the Incarnation of the
Word,”(12) and she represents “a return to that ‘beginning’
in which one finds the ‘woman’ as she was intended to be in
creation, and therefore in the eternal mind of God: in the bosom of the
Most Holy Trinity. Mary is ‘the new beginning’ of the dignity and
vocation of women, of each and every woman.”(13)
Perhaps most significantly in terms of my argument, Mulieris Dignitatem
points out that whereas in the Old Testament, God’s covenant with
humanity is addressed only to men, the new covenant begins with a woman as a
sign that “In Christ the mutual opposition between man and woman - which
is the inheritance of original sin - is essentially overcome.”(14) This is
an insight which has exciting implications with regard to the significance of
the incarnation for women. It suggests that the encounter between God and Mary
in the annunciation is a unique and decisive moment for women in salvation
history, when the mediation of God’s covenant through patriarchal
genealogies is ended, and woman becomes the medium of the new covenant.
However, in the Catholic understanding of this event, is the woman restored to
the integrity of her own person as a female body created in the image of God,
or is this a covenant with the persona of woman which excludes the body as
woman?
John
Paul II has developed a rich theology of the body in Original Unity of Man
and Woman, in which he claims that “Through the fact that the Word of
God became flesh, the body entered theology ... through the main
door.”(15) He refers to masculinity and femininity as being based on
“two different ‘incarnations,’ that is, on two ways of
‘being a body’ of the same human being, created ‘in the image of
God’ (Gn. 1:27).”(16) This suggests a theology which recognises both
the revelatory potential of the human body as male and female, and the need for
an understanding of the ways in which man and woman together and individually
bear the image of God in their sexed bodies. My question is to what extent this
insight is actually developed in the Pope’s theology, in a way which
allows women a symbolic narrative within which to explore what it means to be a
female incarnation of the image of God.
In
Mulieris Dignitatem, John Paul II describes the relationship between the
sexes as follows:
The
fact that man “created as man and woman” is the image of God means
not only that each of them individually is like God, as a rational and free
being. It also means that man and woman, created as a “unity of the
two” in their common humanity, are called to live in a commumion of love,
and in this way to mirror in the world the communion of love that is in God,
through which the Three Persons love each other in the intimate mystery of the
one divine life.(17)
If
one considers carefully what is implied in this, it is as a “rational and
free being” and in communion with man that woman images God. However,
rationality and freedom are not, in traditional Catholic thought, sexually
determined characteristics - they indicate the dimension of human existence
which is theoretically not marked by sexual difference. This leads me to
ask if John Paul II implicitly perpetuates Augustine’s belief that woman
images God alone insofar as she is rational (and therefore not woman), but as
woman only in relation to man? If so, is this reciprocal, or is it still true
that only the male has the capacity to image God in his sexual body as well as
his rational (and theoretically asexual) soul, because the male body alone
bears the image of God?
Mulieris Dignitatem repeats the argument of Inter Insignores,
that in choosing only men as apostles, Christ intended the eucharist
“to express the relationship between man and woman, between what is
‘feminine’ and what is masculine”.(18) It identifies motherhood
and virginity as the “two dimensions of the female
vocation”,(19) symbolised by Mary in whom motherhood and virginity
co-exist in such a way that “they do not mutually exclude each other or
place limits on each other.”(20) Both of these dimensions allow the woman
to discover her own particular vocation to be a gift of self to the other
through the vocation of marriage and motherhood, which also describes the
spousal relationship between the virgin and Christ expressed in the spiritual
motherhood of the religious life.
Referring to the analogy between Christ as bridegroom and the church as bride
in Ephesians 5:21-33, John Paul II suggests that it reveals the meaning of the
woman’s creation in Genesis 2: 18, namely, that “the dignity of
women is measured by the order of love, which is essentially the order of
justice and charity.”(21) This order of love is nuptial because it reveals
that “The Bridegroom is the one who loves. The Bride is loved: it is
she who receives love, in order to love in return”.(22) This feminine
capacity to receive love in order to give love finds expression not only in
marriage but in all interpersonal relationships, since “Woman can only
find herself by giving love to others."(23) The fact that love is the
special vocation of women is confirmed because “the human being is
entrusted by God to women in a particular way,”(24) so that from the
beginning to the end of history, from the Book of Genesis to the Book of
Revelation, the woman is situated in the forefront of the struggle with evil.
This leads John Paul II to ask, “Is not the Bible trying to tell us that
it is precisely in the ‘woman’ - Eve-Mary - that history witnesses a
dramatic struggle for every human being, the struggle for his or her
fundamental ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to God and God’s etemal plan
for humanity?”(25)
All
this appears to be a positive statement of women’s centrality to the story
of salvation, but on closer examination, what is really being said? A close
reading of Mulieris Dignitatem reveals the fact that “woman”
bears no necessary relationship to the female body but is a metaphor for
humanity’s relationship to God, insofar as everything that is said to
apply to the special dignity and vocation of women includes men, with the
exception of biological motherhood Even the celibate priesthood is analogous to
the spousal love of the virgin woman for Christ.(26) In other words,
masculinity and femininity still function as they have always done in Catholic
theology, with masculinity defining godliness and femininity defining
creatureliness, the only difference being that women are now excluded in a more
decisive way than before from masculine godliness.
It is
obvious that the vocation to love cannot be particular to women in any literal
sense, since this would make a nonsense of the whole Christian life. Indeed,
John Paul II repeatedly recognises that what he attributes in a special way to
women is true for all:
all
human beings - both women and men - are called through the Church, to be the
“Bride” of Christ, the Redeemer of the world. In this way “being
the bride”, and thus the “feminine” element, becomes a symbol of
all that is “human”, according to the words of Paul: “There is
neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal
3:28).(27)
This
complex symbolisation of sexual difference to describe relationships between
God and humankind is not reducible to a binary model of sexual opposites, as
Deutscher makes clear in her study of Augustine. Femininity is equated with
humanity, with the implicit suggestion that masculinity is equated with
divinity, but in a way that requires a proliferation of sexual identities.
Consider, for example, the constructs of sex and gender that are operating in
this one brief text: there are two sexes implied in the words “both women
and men;” there is the feminine “Bride” which is in some sense a
third gender since it denotes a collective made up of both sexes; there is the
“Redeemer” who is by implication the bridegroom, but in a
relationship which either excludes sexuality or includes homosexuality, since
the redeemer is bridegroom in relahon to both men and women in the bridal
church; there is a “‘feminine’ element” - yet another
gender perhaps? - which is a symbol of “all that is human.” And
finally, there is the denial of significance to male and female, who are one in
Christ Jesus in a way that either transcends gender differences, or absolutises
masculinity because Christ is male.
But
this means that the woman described by John Paul II is ultimately the universal
human being understood as feminine in relation to God, in a symbolics which
renders the male body essential and the female body inessential in the symbols
of salvation. Any body can stand in the place of woman but the converse is not
true. Only the male body can stand in the place of man, because only the man
can represent Christ who is God and therefore necessarily male. The bride
incorporates both men and women because she is human, but the bridegroom is
essentially male because he symbolises God: “The Bridegroom - the Son
consubstantial with the Father as God became the son of Mary; he became the
‘son of man’, true man, a male. The symbol of the Bridegroom is
masculine.”(28)
The
shift to an essentialist understanding of man in the defence of the masculine
priesthood has absolutised the theological tendency towards androcentrism. It
is still true that gender functions metaphorically and analogically in
theological language, as the above quotation shows. This is particularly
apparent in the complex sexual metaphysics of von Balthasar’s theology.
However, rather than gender being a variable which is mapped onto the bodies of
both sexes through the mimesis of masculinity and femininity, the female body
has now been rendered redundant in the symbols of salvation in a more explicit
way than before. Only one sex - the male - is necessary for the performance of
the story of Christ with al1 its masculine and feminine personae. This is
achieved through an asymmetrical essentialism which on the one hand detaches
femininity and motherhood from any necessary relationship to the female body
because all the church’s maternal and feminine roles can be performed by
men, while at the same time insisting that the female body precludes women from
performing any role associated with the essential masculinity of Christ. So
maternal femininity now refers to the natural, unmediated functions of the
female body when it relates to women, and to the mediated, symbolic functions
of the female body when it relates to men. This reduces the woman as female
body to her biological function of reproduction which she shares with every
other female creature, and that which makes the human animal not like all other
creatures - namely, godlikeness - is denied her. If this represents “two
ways of ‘being a body’,” then the contrast between the sexes
lies in the fact that man is the human body made in the image of God, and woman
is the human body in its natural state of animality. The difference between
this and past interpretations is that now, there is no escape for women because
the doors of symbolic masculinity have been locked and the female body is on
the outside.
This
is the problem at the heart of John Paul II’s theology of woman, and it is
hard to overestimate its ethical implications with regard to the control of
women’s bodies by men. He insists that motherhood cannot be reduced to its
physical aspects but involves the whole person of the woman. Nevertheless, if
all the qualities associated with the woman’s bridal and maternal vocation
to love also include men, all that remains exclusive to women is reproduction.
So the imperative to produce children becomes bound up with the identity and
vocation of women in such a way that the woman who seeks to explore the meaning
of her own life through some career other than motherhood is denying the very
purpose of her body’s existence, and for a pope who places such a premium
on the body, this is unthinkable. Therefore biological motherhood is exalted to
a level of the highest significance, so that the fertile female body and the
denial of ordination to women have become pivotal issues in the modern church.
Only by the celebration of biological motherhood can men avoid acknowledging
the extremism of their theological position with regard to the essential
masculinity of Christ. By focusing such attention on the maternal body, the men
who control the church can hide even from themselves the fact that they have
effectively written the female body out of the story of salvation.
Frida
Kahlo’s disturbing depletion of childbirth in a work entitled My
Birth (1932) expresses some of this sense of the abandonment of the
maternal body to silenced animality, while the Virgin raises her eyes to heaven
in robed indifference to the mother’s plight. The picture is a stark
representation of the three dimensions of suffering which a woman might
experience as a mother and a daughter. It depicts the artist’s own birth,
but it also evokes a miscarriage she suffered shortly before beginning the
work, and the draped head of the mother signifies the fact that Kahlo’s
own mother died while she was in the process of painting the picture.
Cooey
writes of this painting that
The
bleakness of the room, the suppression of the mother’s face, the
stretching of the vaginaal opening by the infant’s head, and the image of
the Virgin’s head (with us at birth and at death) work together with
verbal silence to communicate a fragmentation and wounding of female bodies not
nominally associated with the “naturalness” attributed to childbirth
and the nobility consigned to motherhood in much of Western culture, especially
in the context of the miscarriage of a chosen pregnancy. The painting is
gruesome, depicting life-and-death struggle not verbalized by the participants
and, therefore, unrelieved.(29)
The
juxtaposition of the idealised Virgin who has a head and no body, and the
labouring body of the woman whose head is covered as if in death, serves as a
powerful visual protest against the kind of maternal politics which inform
contemporary Catholic doctrine, with the romanticisation of motherhood being
used as a strategy intended to silence and exclude women from positions of
ecclesial and theological influence. Kahlo’s maternal body with its
covered head might lead a Catholic woman to ask if this is perhaps what is
meant by the likening of the maternal church to “an acephalous
torso.”(30)
The
significance which attaches to birth has changed along with the significance
which attaches to the priesthood in modern theology. Although Christianity has
always been culturally distinctive in its valuing of life from conception to
death, turning its face against the abortive and infanticidal practices of the
ancient world as much as of the modem world,(31) it has not in the past placed
a particularly high premium on procreation per se, which is why it has
always valued virginity more highly than marriage. Augustine sees no
justification for sex in marriage beyond procreation, but he also suggests that
even procreation is of dubious value since it prolongs humanity’s
suffering and defers the coming of God’s Kingdom.(32) In the past, it was
not physical childbirth that was significant, but baptismal rebirth as the sign
of eternal life in Christ, so the symbolic significance of birth lay not in its
actual physical reality, but in the sacrament of baptism. Similarly, the
nurturing function of the individual female body was not in itself accorded any
special significance, but it acquired sacramental significance when it became a
symbol of the eucharist and of God’s compassion for humankind.
Mary
Daly argues that this amounts to the appropriation of motherhood by men, who
have created a “sacred House of Mirrors”(33) with a sacramental
system which spiritualises motherhood, raising it to an elevated status so that
its functions can now only be performed by “anointed Male Mothers, who
naturally are called Fathers.”(34) While I agree with Daly in practice, in
theory I think it is important to have a collective symbol of motherhood which
recognises that there is a gap between the body and language, so that the
individual human body does not become invested with excessive symbolic
significance. Rather than denying the theological and liturgical significance
of the maternal body, it seems desirable that either sex should be able to
perform the maternal role in the administration of the sacraments, with the
proviso that language thereby seeks to express rather than repress the
body’s significance. The problem with the church’s maternal identity
is not the symbolisation of motherhood in a way which makes it cultural rather
than natural, but the exclusion of women from the enactment of this cultural
symbolism.
However, the symbolic significance of the maternal body has also undergone a
shift in emphasis which has had a subtle but profound effect on the life of the
church, particularly insofar as the Mass is concemed. Prior to Vatican II, and
especially in the symbolism of the early church, the church herself was the
symbolic mother of the Christian community.(35) Since Vatican II there has been
a significant loss of maternal symbolism through the emergence of a new image
of the church as the people of God. In an article entitled “Whatever
Happened to Holy Mother Church?” Derek Worlock writes:
There was no doubt that the model of the Church had changed with Lumen
Gentium. It was then that we stopped referring to the Church as
“She”. Had the substitution of the People of God for many scriptural
paradigms been at the expense of the holiness of the Church and her maternal
nature?(36)
This
shift in symbolism has created anxiety in a conservative Catholic hierarchy
which finds itself presiding over a church which is deprived of its maternal
self-image. The recovery of this maternal symbolism has been sought partly
through the reaffirmation of Mary’s centrality to the life of the church,
especially in the writings of John Paul II and von Balthasar,(37) but it has
also found expression in the idealisation of the individual mother as the locus
of all the frustrated ideals and lost opportunities of a church which has in
effect failed in its maternal duty to the world. Both von Balthasar and John
Paul II see a world increasingly controlled by technological forces and
masculine values of aggression, competition and power, and both of them see the
restoration of maternal feminine values to culture as an urgent imperative to
halt the decline into violence and exploitation which marks the extreme
masculinisation of culture. In John Paul II’s letter to women written in
July 1995, he refers to the necessary involvement of women in society, since
“it will force systems to be redesigned in a way which favours the
processes of humanisation which mark the ‘civilisation of
love’.”(38) He also refers to “a kind of affective, cultural and
spiritual motherhood which has inestimable value for the development of
individuals and the future of society.”(39) But at the same time, the
Catholic hierarchy is resolutely committed to the exclusion of women from
positions of visibility and influence in the church, which is arguably unique
in its potential to act as a maternal culture which is opposed to what John
Paul II has referred to elsewhere as the “culture of death” (40) of
contemporary society. Catholicism has within its resources a symbolics of
motherhood which might well constitute a collective space in which women could
come together to mount a maternal counter-offensive against male power while at
the same time rejuvenating the traditional understanding of the church as
mother, but the very men who seem to recommend such a move insist that women
cannot occupy this symbolic space.
The phallus, the priesthood and the symbolic
transformation of the Mass
The
loss of the maternal potency of the preconciliar church has meant that the
sacraments are not invested with the same intimate relationship to the maternal
body that they once had. Instead, the essentialisation of the male priesthood
has led to another change which, from an Irigarayan perspective, is the
inevitable corollary to the devaluation of the mother’s role, and that is
the increased emphasis on the symbolic significance of the phallus.
I
argued in chapter 3 that sexual difference in pre-modern theology was used to
situate people in relation to one another and to God, in complex ways which are
not reducible to two sexes in fixed relationships to one another. This means
that, although the analogy of marriage has always been applied to the
relationship between Christ and the church, and since the Middle Ages to the
relationship between Christ and Mary, this is not primarily concerned with the
physical sexual relationship between man and woman. It is clear in Ephesians 5
that the author is not referring to the biological dynamics of sexual
intercourse, but to the lifelong principle of self-giving love which makes
marriage analogous to the love of Christ for the church. However, with the new
nuptial symbolism of the male bridegroom and the female bride which is used to
defend the masculinity of the priesthood, there is an explicitly sexual
function attached to the priesthood which means that the symbolism of the Mass
has gone from being a celebration of death and rebirth focused to a large
extent on the maternal body, to being a celebration of sexual intercourse which
is primarily focused on male sexuality. To argue that Christ’s eucharistic
gift of self is the action of the bridegroom in such a way that its performance
requires a male body, is to make it an act of coitus and not of selfgiving in
death. The symbolic function of the priesthood is therefore no longer primarily
concemed with death but with sex, since male and female bodies both die and
therefore either sex could represent the death of Christ.
In
the early Middle Ages, the focus of the Mass was not just the sacrificial death
of Christ but the incamation as a whole, in the late Middle Ages, it came to be
understood more explicitly as a sacrifice; today it has become an act of
(homo)sexual intercourse. Previously, women could not represent Christ on the
altar, not because Christ’s death had sexual connotations, but because it
was the death of a perfect human being who is only imaged in the man, since the
female body is an incomplete or defective version of the same thing. In our own
age however, the female body is recognised as equal but different and is still
incapable of representing Christ, because Christ’s kenotic self-giving has
become implicitly associated with the male orgasm, with all the pagan overtones
that this implies.
Consider, for example, the imagery evoked in von Balthasar’s question,
“What else is his eucharist but, at a higher level, an endless act of
fruitful outpouring of his whole flesh, such as a man can only achieve for a
moment with a limited organ of his body?”(41) The “what else ...
but” implies that it is nothing else. This is the eucharist understood not
primarily as Christ’s identification with the universal human tragedy of
death, but rather as the identification of Christ’s death with the
uniquely male experience of penile ejaculation. Sarah Coakley points to
“the symbolic connection between male sexual release and death.”(42)
I am not advocating a reductive symbolics which would refuse to permit such
associations, for freedom of interpretation is surely the essence of a rich and
prolific symbolic life and to some extent there has always been an implicit
sexuality to Catholic symbolism. I am however pointing out that the
justification given for the essentialisation of the male priesthood has reduced
the symbolic richness of the Mass so that it is indeed nothing but a cosmic
male orgasm, as von Balthasar suggests. The female body, lacking the
“limited organ” which allows for this expenence, cannot represent
Christ in the eucharist. Ultimately this means that women have become
bystanders in the metaphysical consummation of homosexual love, a marriage
between men and God in which the male body is both the masculine bridegroom and
the feminine bride, the masculine God and the feminine creature, the masculine
Christ and the feminine church.
This
makes Catholic theology more explicitly phallocentric than has been the case in
the past, since the phallus has become the defining symbol of Christ’s
giving of self in the Mass. The Catholic church has always been a patriarchal
institution, based on descending hierarchies of male power starting with God
the father, but this was seen in metaphors of relationality rather than
metaphors of genitality. Now, however, it is not the patriarchal structure but
the phallus itself which holds the symbolic system in place, and from a
feminist psycholinguistic perspective this affects the functioning of language,
creating a more structured form of discourse with a more rigid logic and
dualistic imagery. For example, if the phallus is the marker of sexual
difference, all sexual identities are defined in terms of possession or lack,
presence or absence, and this diminishes the possibility of employing a
proliferation of sexual identities to explore the rich complexity of
relationships between God, Christ, the church and the sexed human body. Poetry
and analogy yield to systematicity and literalism, and from there it is a small
step to believing that the words we use to describe God actually define God.
So,
for example, whereas the word “father” might allow for several
imaginative possibilities in terms of personal relationships,(43) fatherhood,
maleness and masculinity have now been identified with God in such a way that
it is very hard to see how the unknowability and otherness of God can be
affirmed when confronted with masculinity as a non-negotiable feature of
God’s fatherhood. Von Balthasar claims that “However the One who
comes forth from the Father is designated, as a human being he must be a man if
his mission is to represent the Origin, the Father, in the world.”(44)
This equation between God as the origin of life, fatherhood, and the maleness
of Christ, couched in the language of necessity (Christ “must be a
man,”) comes precariously close to an idolatry of masculinity.
In
Mulieris Dignitatem, John Paul II is at pains to emphasise that
“’fatherhood ‘in God is completely divine and free of the
‘masculine’ bodily characteristics proper to human
fatherhood.”(45) But if this is the case, then there can be no necessary
link between the fatherhood of God and the maleness of Christ and the
sacramental priesthood. One could equally argue that the female body as priest
serves to emphasise the fact that the fatherhood of God is not like
human fatherhood.
The
Mass constitutes the most intimate expression of the relationship between God
and humankind in the Catholic faith, and contains within itself the whole story
of Christ and the church. It symbolises consummation and birth, dying and
rising, nourishment and love. Its meaning is rich enough to accommodate many
variations on its themes, many possible ways of understanding its symbolic
significance. Yet in what way is the female body a necessary part of this story
of divine incarnation? Like an Elizabethan drama, it is a masked performance of
changing identities, with all the parts being played by men. An all-female
community cannot celebrate Mass since a priest is necessary, but the converse
is not true. In an all-male community, the male congregation represents the
feminine, bridal church, while the male priest represents the bridegroom. A
statue or a picture of the Virgin Mary serves to remind men that once upon a
time, a woman’s body was necessary for the story to begin, but her fertile
creatureliness has no further part to play once the man has been born into
eternal life beyond the cycle of sex and death.
So
through a complex process of symbolic transformation, the patriarchal
structures of the church have solidified around a phallocentric theology which
makes it almost impossible for a woman to find herself as a symbolic presence
in the church’s life. She is more truly than ever before absence, negation
and non-being, a body surrendered to animality with no access to the symbols of
theological personhood. Yet this is a move which does violence to the very
heart of the Gospel and that is why I believe that it is an act of fidelity to
the church to resist it and to expose it for what it is, not through an appeal
to extraneous resources but through a deepened appreciation of the potential
significance of sexual difference for theological symbolism.
Footnotes:
1.
Soskice, “Blood and Defilement,” unpublished version of paper given
to the Society for the Study of Theology Conference, Oxford, April 1994, 3. For
published versions, see Soskice, “Blood and Defilement” in ET:
Journal of the European Society for Catholic Theology (Tübingen: Heft
2, 1994), abridged in Bulletin of Harvard Divinity School (January
1995).
2.
Von Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, Volume 2: The
Dramatis Personae: Man in God, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco, 1990
[1976]), 365. For other examples of such quasi-scientific theological
arguments, see Mulieris Dignitatem, n.18, 68; Miller, Sexuality and
Authority, 171-82. See also Loughlin’s critique of von
Balthasar’s “body theology” in Loughlin, “Erotica:
God’s Sex” in Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Ward, Radical
Orthodoxy: A New Theology (London and New York: Routledge,
1999-forthcoming): 143-62.
3.
Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud
(Cambridge MA and London UK: Harvard University Press, 1992), 8.
4.
Inter Insigniores: Declaration on the Admission of Women to the Ministerial
Priesthood, 15 October, 1976 in Austin Flannery, O.P. (general editor),
Vatican Council II, Volume 2, More Postconciliar Documents,
(Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1982): 331-45, 339, quoting Saint Thomas,
In IV Sent., dist. 25, q.. quaestiuncula 1& ad 4. Ruether pointedly
observes that “bread and wine do not ‘look like’ a male human
being, but have always been understood to represent Christ.” Ruether,
“Catholicism, Women, Body and Sexuality: A Response” in Jeanne Becher
(ed.), Women, Religion and Sexuality. Studies on the Impact Religious
Teachings on Women (Geneva: WCC Publications, 1990): 221-32, 224.
5.
Inter Insigniores, 340
6.
Ibid, 341.
7.
Von Balthasar, Spouse of the Word - Explorations in Theology II (San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 199 [1961]), 19.
8.
Mary Aquin O’Neill, “The Mystery of Being Human Together” in
LaCugna (ed.), Freeing Theology 139-60, 157.
9.
Inter Insigniores, 343.
10.
Mulieris Dignitatem is written as a sequel to Redemptoris Mater,
John Paul II’s encyclical letter on Mary’s place in the church. Both
were written to mark the occasion of the Marian year in 1987~8. See John Paul
II, Redemptoris Mater, 25 March, 1987 (London: Catholic Truth Society)
and Mulieris Dignitatem, l August, 1988 (London: Catholic Truth
Society). I focus on Mulieris Dignitatem rather than Redemptoris
Mater, because at this stage my concern is with the general theological
understanding of the female body rather than with Marian theology in
particular, and Mulieris Dignitatem is a more useful resource from this
point of view since it incorporates both Marian perspectives and more universal
propositions about the nature and role of women.
11. Mulieries Dignitatem, n.5, 17.
12.
Ibid, n.4, 15.
13.
Ibid, n. 11, 45.
14.
Ibid, n. 11, 43.
15.
John Paul II, Original Unity, 175.
16.
Ibid, 62.
17.
Mulieris Dignitatem, n.7, 22-3.
18.
Ibid, n.26, 98.
19.
Ibid, n.l7, 64.
20.
Ibid, n l7, 65
21.
Ibid, n.29, 107.
22.
Ibid, n.29, 106.
23.
Ibid, n.30, 109.
24.
Ibid, n.30, 112.
25.
Ibid, n.30, 110.
26.
See ibid, n.20, 78.
27.
Ibid, n.25, 94
28.
Ibid, n.25, 95.
29.
Cooey, Religious Imagination, 105.
30.
Reproduced from Andrea Kettenmann, Frida Kahlo (1907-1954): Pain and
Passion, trans. Karen Williams (Köln: Benedikt Taschen Verlag GmbH,
1993), 38.
31.
See J.T. Noonan Jr., “An Almost Absolute Value in History” in Noonan
(ed.), The Morality of Abortion - Legal and Historical Perspectives
(Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1970): 1-59. See also
Ranke-Heinemann, Eunuchs for Heaven, 51-61. It should however be noted
that until the late nineteenth century, Catholic doctrine regarded early
abortion as a venial sin which was not considered to be amnact of homicide. See
the discussion in L.H. Tribe, Abortion - The Clash of Absolutes (New
York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1990),31.
32.
See Augustine, “On the Good of Marriage,” 285-6.
33.
Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Towards a Philosophy of Women’s
Liberation (London: The Women’s Press, 1986 [1973]), 195.
34.
Ibid, 196.
35.
See the studies by Henri de Lubac, The Motherhood of the Church, followed by
Particular Churches in the Universal Church and an interview conducted by
Gwendoline Jarcyk, trans. Sr. Sergia Englund, O.C.D. (San Fnmcisco:
Ignatius Press, 1982 [1971]), and Joseph C. Plumpe, Mater Ecclesia: An
Inquiry into the Concept of the Church as Mother in Early Christianity
(Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1943).
36.
Derek Worlock, “Whatever Happened to Holy Mother Church?” in
Priests & People, Vol. 9, Nos. 8, 9, August-September, 1995: 301-5,
301. This change in the church’s image is well-illustrated by considering
the opening paragraphs of two Vatican documents on the church’s role in
the world. Pope John XXIII’s encyclical, Mater et Magistra, was
written just prior to the Council in 1961, and it opens with the lines,
“Mother and teacher of all nations - such is the Catholic Church in the
mind of her founder, Jesus Christ; ... To her was entrusted by her holy founder
the twofold task of giving life to her children and of teaching them and
guiding them - both as individuals and as nations - with maternal care.”
John XXIII, Mater et Magistra in Michael Walsh and Brian Davies (eds.),
Proclaiming Justice and Peace: Documents from John XXIII to John Paul II
(London: CAFOD amd Collins, 1984): 1-44, n.l, 4. The Vatican II Pastoral
Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes, written
in 1965, opens with the words, “The joy and hope, the grief and anguish of
the people of our time, especially of those who are poor or afflicted in any
way, are the joy and hope, the grief and anguish of the followers of Christ as
well. Nothing that is genuinely human fails to find an echo in their hearts.
For theirs is a community composed of people, of people who, united in Christ
and guided by the holy Spirit, press onwards towards the kingdom of the Father
and are bearers of a message of salvation intended for all people.”
Gaudium et Spes in Austin Flannery O.P. (ed.), Vatican Council II:
The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents (Dublin: Dominican Publications;
New Town NSW: E.J. Dwya Pty. Ltd., 1992): 903-1001, n. l, 903. The ethos
expressed in both documents is not fundamentally different, but there has been
a transformation in the language and imagery which describes the church’s
vocation of care for the world.
37.
See especially von Balthasar’s essay, “Women priests?” See also
the essays in Moll, Helmut (ed.), The Church and Women.
38.
John Paul II, “A Letter to Women” in The Tablet, 15 July 1995:
917-9, 918.
39.
Ibid.
40.
John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, 25 March, 1995 (London: Catholic Truth
Society): n.12, 22.
41.
Von Balthasar, Elucidations, trans. John Riches (London: SPCK, 1975
[1971]), 150, quoted in Coakley “Creaturehood before God,” 349.
42.
Coakley, ibid, 349.
43.
Cf. the discussion in Soskice, “Trinity and the ‘Feminine
Other”’ in New Blackfriars (January 1993 2-17), in which she
discusses the potential of using the language of fatherhood as relational,
rather than a literally referring to the inseminating male. See also Diana
Neale, “Out of the Uterus of the Father: A Study in Patriarchy and the
Symbolization of Christian Theology” in Feminist Theology, No. 13
(September 1996 8-30; Jürgen Moltmann, “The Inviting Unity of the
Triune God” in Claude Geffré and Jean-Pièrre Jossu (eds.)"
Monotheism, Concilium 177 ( Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1985): 50-58.
44.
Von Balthasar, Theo-Drama Vol. 3, 284.
45.
John Paul II, Mulieris Dignitatem, n.8, 29.
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