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Lloyd G. Patterson
from Towards a New Theology of Ordination: Essays on
the Ordination of Women, pp.23-41.
Ed. by Marianne H. Micks and Charles P.Price, Virginia
Theological Seminary,
Greeno, Hadden &Company Ltd. Somerville, Mass.,
1976
Lloyd G. Patterson is W. R. Huntingdon Professor of Historical Theology at the
Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge. His special interest is in the
patristic period, and he is the author of God and History in Early christian
Thought.
A
preliminary piece of evidence
One
of the more striking of the so-called “praying figures,” orantes,
found at early Christian burial sites is a third century (?) painting on a
wall of the Priscillian catacomb at Rome.(1) In many respects, the figure
follows the conventions governing this form of early Christian art. The person
there interred is shown standing with arms upraised, as that person once stood
by virtue of baptism in the eucharistic meeting on the Lord’s Day and will
stand with the full assembly of God’s people at the Last Day. Thus it
presents that person in true Christian identity.(2)
What
gives this figure its particular grandeur is the way in which the motif of
light, locus lucis, one of the conventional features of an orans,
is introduced. In this case, the face and upstretched hands are bathed in
light, so that the figure itself reflects back to the visitor the light of
Christ beginning to be manifest in the darkness of this world.
Other
things which a modern visitor might like to know are obscure. The identity of
the person depicted, his or her sex, his or her special function in the Church,
are hard to determine. In this case, there is no inscription of the sort which
is often added to an orans. Surrounding scenes, as well as a ceremonial
scarf falling across the head to the shoulders, may identify the person as a
virgin veiled. Yet the treatment of the hair, often the only pictorial
indication of sex, seams to me at least to suggest that the person is male.
Dress is no help. The figure wears, over the usual white tunic, an overcoat of
Dalmatian cut, with sleeves, rather than one of the poncho sort, paenula,
more common in the period. Blut these garments were worn by pagans as well
as Christians, by men as well as women, of whatever calling in the Church,
throughout the period.
The
evidence suggests that it is a male figure. But it is a matter of conjecture,
precisely because the conventions governing this form of early Christian art
are concerned with other things. What these conventions do, and in this case do
admirably, is to show the true identity of the person as one whose
participation in the Christian community is a foretaste of participation in the
redeemed community of God. Other matters were, fortunately or unfortunately, of
less interest to the artist than to the modern visitor to the site.
The problem of perspectives
The
Priscillian orans may help to explain the purpose of these remarks.
It is
plainly impossible to write briefly about the place of women in the first three
or four centuries of the Christian movement. This period saw the movement
spread through and beyond Judaism into the vast reaches of the Graeco-Roman
society, witnessed its persecutions at the hands of the imperial government and
its eventual acceptance as the official cultus of the state, and its many and
various attempts to interpret itself in the light of the intellectual world of
the time. The historical panorama is extensive, Christian practice and thought
diverse, the evidence remaining scattered and difficult of generalization.
Efforts to deal with the subject are numerous. But they constitute a literature
more extensive than definitive, to which it is almost literally painful to
contemplate adding a few more pages.
The
danger of beginning with this literature itself lies in the fact that it almost
inevitably approaches early Christian evidence with modern issues in mind. This
is particularly true when it asks why women were not admitted to holy
orders—at least to the orders of presbyter and bishop—in the period.
It is also true when it goes farther afield to ask how early Christians viewed
sexuality, personal identity, and other matters on which the evidence is far
more difficult to interpret. Periodically, the attitude of the writer informs
the answers which the evidence is thought to give, with the result that the
early centuries turn out either to have established important criteria for
Christian life or to have deviated from the Gospel under the influence of
inherited social customs, the influence of pagan philosophy, or some other
misfortune, depending on where the writer stands on modern issues.(3)
The
point is that this literature, like the modern visitor to the Priscillian
orans, is sorely tempted to ask questions which the evidence will not
anwer, failing all the while to absorb what the evidence actually has to say.
This has, of course, been the difficulty with much writing on the early Church
since the age of Charlemagne, whenever pressing contemporary issues have led us
to review how things came to be as they are, whether good or bad. What seems
hardest to get at is what the early Church, let speak for itself, might have to
say in its own way about matters of contemporary interest.
The
problem is thus one of perspectives—not of discovering something new so
much as of putting what is already known in its own perspective rather than
ours. That is no easy problem to solve; but it is one that can at least be
raised, and then left to the consideration of the reader.
Church in early Christianity
The
first subject to be considered is our orans itself. The figure, standing
with upraised arms, reflecting back light to the visitor, identifies the person
interred there as a member of the Church, ecclesia, the
“assembling” of a redeemed humanity which God has begun to make
through the death and resurrection of Christ.
No
aspect of early Christianity—liturgical, ethical, or theological—can
be seriously studied where this fundamental sense of what it means to be a
Christian is left out of account. It is assumed more often than spelled out in
references to the baptismal and eucharistic meetings, or when the style of life
required of those who take the name Christian is discussed, or where the
proclamation of God’s work in Christ is interpreted in the light of
contemporary thought.(4)
But
Church always stands opposed to World, cosmos, in early Christianity. To
be part of redeemed humanity-to-come is to be such in the midst of presently
unredeemed humanity. To be part of “the age to come” is to be that in
the midst of “the present age”, to live in an alien environment, to
expect opposition from the powers which, however fruitlessly, seek to thwart
the power of God. It is to live now, literally or figuratively, a life of
“martyrdom”, of witness to belief that the new life in Christ will be
triumphant over the old life of the world.
In
its tendency to oppose church and world, early Christianity was the inheritor
of many strands of later Jewish thought, which from the Maccabean period onward
were given concrete form in the notion of an inevitable conflict between the
people of God and the political powers which opposed them. Eventually, of
course, the Roman imperium, with its slowly evolving policy of
opposition to the Christian movement, came to be regarded as the final
manifestation of these powers. Indeed, even after the persecutions ceased and
the imperial and other high offices were occupied by Christians, a sense of
hostility between the church and the world represented in the imperium
remained a conscious factor in Christian thinking. It was only when that
situation had in some psychological sense become “past”, perhaps not
until the age of Charlemagne, that a vision of a Christian Empire could arise
to the imagination as a heritage to be recovered rather than an anomaly to be
lived with.
We
cannot expect early Christians, thinking in this way, to approach any aspect of
the problem of “liberation” in quite the way we do. Neither can we
expect them to associate self-fulfillment with the given social structures in
anything like the the way Christians have come to do because of the experience
of the church’s actual involvement with those structures in the so-called
era of Christendom and its aftermath. By our standards their perceptions seem
severely limited when they exhort one another to avoid sexual license,
elaborate clothing, the luxuries of the baths, or the excitements and the pagan
associations of the spectacles, the theater, and the literary classics. And the
same is true of the modest efforts at the betterment of the human condition
undertaken by those in positions of leadership in the period after the
persecutions. From their own perspective, however, what was chiefly at stake
was the integrity of the new life they were called to live in the midst of the
old. Theirs was a very positive—a positively negative—attitude toward
a number of aspects of the old life, what we would class as social conventions
or even legal prescriptions. They thought these conventions and prescriptions
were in the process of being abrogated by a power greater than the powers
responsible for them.
It is
in this light that we must read Paul’s much discussed statement that in
Christ there is “neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor
female” (Gal 3:28) . Paul is not here enunciating an ideal to be achieved
in the church—much less in the world—but saying something about the
manifestation of the new life in the midst of the old in the congregations with
which he is familiar. Plainly, he is also talking about what we might assume,
from our perspective, to be an alternative to the conventions and prescriptions
of paganism and Judaism. But in fact he is speaking from a perspective so
different from ours that it is better to withhold judgment until we have said
something about what he—and his successors—quite concretely meant by
such statements.
Women in the church in early Christianity
We
can use our orans once again to introduce the question of what the
abrogation of “male and female” meant in early Christianity. The
question of the sex of the person interred would not arise if we did not know
from any number of sources that women as well as men underwent baptism and took
part in the eucharistic meetings on the Lord’s Day. Centuries of
familiarity with the practice, as well as loss of touch with the meaning
attached to the “assembling” of the people of God for what we now
tend to undervalue as mere liturgical events, may lead us to think of it as
less significant than it is. Set in contrast to the synagogue, where an
assembly capable of giving thanks to God is defined by the presence of
circumcised males, the church is a visual proof that the distinction of
“male and female” is abrogated in Christ. It may seem to us merely a
matter of who could “go to Church”, but the early Christians did not
regard it so. It is a question of perspectives again.
Other
evidence, scattered and spotty though it may be, helps to fill out the picture.
Paul sends greetings to women as well as men in his letters. Women as well as
men were celebrated for their martyrdom, the passio of Perpetua and her
companions being perhaps the best known of many accounts in circulation. The
Christian women of Rome stand out in successive generations, not merely the
martyrs in considerable number, but such persons as the Flora whom Ptolemy
sought to convert to Valentian Gnosis, as those who befriended Athanasius
during his exile, and as the household with which Jerome corresponded regarding
the superiority of eastern ascetic practices. Then, too, in Asia Minor there is
the community of ascetic women for which Methodius wrote his Symposium,
his most elaborate exposition of the place of the ascetic life in the plan
of salvation. And one must at least mention the theological insights attributed
to Macrina by her brother Gregory of Nyssa, and to Monica by her son Augustine
of Hippo.(5)
It is
easy to notice the contradictory evidence that the social conventions which
assigned to women a subordinate place in the family and in public life
continued to be reflected in the life of the church, and are supported by
theological argument. Leaving aside for the moment the problem of women in the
“ministry”, we should note that women are said to be subject to their
husbands and to leave the running of affairs to men because of their
weaknesses, their creation from the rib of Adam (Gn 2:21), and the guilt which
falls on them as descendants of Eve. Moreover, on any statistical view of the
evidence, women do not appear in great numbers among the notable figures of the
period. doubtless because of the influence of inherited custom if not of the
theological arguments made in support of it.(6)
And
then, again, looking; at the period from a modern point of view, it may well
seem that the attitude toward marriage is such that the sexuality of the female
in particular is regarded as a liability to her being truly human. In fact the
women celebrated in the early Christian evidence—leaving the martyrs on
one side—are ascetics.
Here,
however, we confront a much more complicated aspect of early Christianity,
which is the fact that it owed much to its origin among those movements within
Judaism which not only expected hostility from the world but sought to
demonstrate their freedom from it by embracing continence (encrateia).
That many primitive Christian communities were committed to continence in
this sense, at least in principle, is clear from the Pauline letters and other
writings from the gentile wing of the movement no less than from the newly
appreciated Jewish-Christian and proto-gnostic writings.(7) Such an attitude,
of course, does not involve the judgment that sexuality is evil; but the
defense of marriage mounted by the Alexandrian and Cappadocian theologians
against a developed Gnosticism convinced of the evil character of the physical
creation and against pagan philosophical tradition unconvinced of the
desirability of embodied existence altogether, goes no further than saying that
it is a controlled way by means of which the increase of humanity to its
perfection is to be achieved by procreation. The encratitic ideal
continued even in non-gnostic circles. It underlies the concern of the early
Christian communities for the support of virgins and widows (persons most
likely to be forced to marry in the prevailing circumstances), and forms the
basis of the great fascination with the ascetic life which followed the end of
the persecutions.
The
early Christians adopted the attitude toward women which it inherited, and even
defended it, as among the characteristics of fallen humanity. But at the same
time, they acknowledged that this attitude was transformed in Christ. There is
certainly a good deal of tension to be found in the evidence on this point. But
the fact is that women are not celebrated as Christians because they fall
easily into special roles set aside for women, as in the pagan cults or in the
Jewish family, but because they do the things which every Christian may be
celebrated for doing. In the context of that time this fact looms much larger
than it does in ours.
On
the subject of the encratitic tendency of early Christianity we are in a
much more complicated area. It is obvious from the evidence that sexuality is
simply not regarded as so closely related to personal identity as we take it to
be as a result of a series of developments from the early Middle Ages to the
work of Freud and his successors. Rightly or wrongly, the abandonment of
marriage is seen as a means of transcending the social restrictions and of
avoiding the passionate aspect of procreation —or rather of witnessing to
the fact that they are transcended in Christ—in a way that is foreign to
our thinking. But it remains to be shown that the full range of attributes
which make up what we describe as “selfhood” is not taken into
account.
Perhaps it can be said that the evidence most easily falls together if we say
that for early Christians the abrogation of the distinction of “male and
female” in Christ is most clearly manifest, apart from the liturgical
meetings themselves, in the ways in which men and women act “beyond”
the social structures of the fallen world. This will be highly unsatisfactory
both to the proponents of a liberation theology and to those who think that the
social patterns of the early Christian period are applicable to the
circumstances of the present. It is, however, a matter of a perspective so
different from ours that it is hard to render an immediate judgment upon it.
Women in the “ministry” of the church in early Christianity
We
come, now, to the place of women as deacons, presbyters and bishops, or in what
we now call the “ministry” of the church, the subject of considerable
contemporary interest and of no little confusion and controversy at that time.
There
is no question that women functioned with men as deacons throughout the period,
caring for needy members of the congregations, helping candidates during the
baptismal liturgy, and certainly in many places reading scriptures and
administering the communion at the eucharist. There is, however, a good deal of
evidence of conscious opposition, within the “Catholic” communities
from the latter part of the second century on, to women functioning among the
presbyters on whom the administration of the affairs of the congregations fell.
And there is no evidence from the episcopal lists of the same communities that
they functioned as bishops, those on whom by that time the main burden of
teaching and of presiding at the baptismal and eucharistic meetings had fallen.
In
the writings of the time it can be noticed that no real rationale is offered
for any of these offices—it is left to the common assumptions of the
time—except in the case of the defense of the episcopacy as the guarantee
of the continuity of the apostolic preaching and of the unity of the church.(8)
And to this can be added the more or less obvious point that inherited
convention more or less dictated who would occupy them. Thus women no less than
men might be expected to function as deacons in this peculiarly Christian
office, since there were women as well as men who needed its ministrations.
Again, the the office of presbyter stood in such obvious continuity with that
of the elder in the Jewish synagogue that its occupancy by men would seem a
foregone conclusion. And yet again, the same may be the case with the office of
bishop, though its emergence into prominence is coincidental with the exclusion
of the “heresies” in which women held prominent positions to such an
extent that it is not possible to proceed without reference to this particular
phenomenon.
It is
in connection with the “heresies”, with the New Prophecy of Montanus
as well as with Marcionism and the many gnostic sects, that much of the
opposition to the functioning of women first appears. But it is hard to know
what to make of the opposition. Much of the writing of the time, from the
catholic side, had to do simply with the refutation of the claims of the
“heresies” to represent the Gospel. Yet where the functioning of
women in the “heresies” is concerned, it tends most frequently to
take the form of reference to their brashness or weakness rather than to the
relation of their functioning to the theological issues at stake. Indeed,
except for the women prophets of Montanism, we are left with considerable
uncertainty as to precisely what was the role of women in the
“heresies”, and whether and in what ways it reflected earlier
practices or novel departures.(9) It is a fair guess that the controversies of
the second century reinforced the inherited social customs of the catholic
communities. But beyond such a guess it is very hard to go.
At a
later stage, these customs are further reinforced by new circumstances. The
bishops of the period after the persecutions accepted a status equivalent to
that of civil magistrates. This new status would have reinforced the exclusion
of women, for example. Thus the backlog of custom, supported by scriptural
interpretations, led to positive assertions that women were excluded from the
episcopacy, many of whose functions were now exercised by the presbyters as
well. And a growing awe surrounding the eucharistic species may well have been
in part responsible for the attacks in this period on the custom of
women’s administering the communion, though even here the continuation of
the custom among Nestorian and Monophysite Christians may have the same kind of
unacknowledged influence as the fear of the “heresies” did earlier.
The
outcome of any review of this evidence must be unsatisfactory to all sides in
the current issue. Women are practically, if not on principle, excluded from
the offices of presbyter and bishop. But the arguments, such as they are, are
repetitions of those having to do with continuance of the fallen life rather
than with the implications of redemption. On the other hand, we are
still—as we must shortly make clear in some detail—very far from a
time when the president of the eucharistic assembly was regarded as an alter
christus, standing in some fashion in the place of Christ, rather than as
the offerer of the prayer of the community. Social customs, combined with the
convolutions of theological debates and their non-theological impact on the
life of the church are the most obvious determiners of the practices of the
time. Plain answers to questions which we might like to ask, from whatever
position we take with respect to the issues of our time, simply do not come.
When
we have come this far, however, we are still in the position of asking the
evidence our own questions without fully appreciating what the evidence
has to say to us—and this is probably truer of the evidence regarding the
place of women in this aspect of the life of the church than in any other.
In
fact, it is hard for us not to approach early Christian references to deacons,
presbtyers, and bishops with the assumption that they are references to a
clergy as distinct from laity—a “ministry” as distinct,
presumably, from a non-ministry—of the sort with which we have become
familiar through our medieval and reformation heritage. But what the evidence
actually tells us—what even our much overworked orans, which may
well picture a veiled virgin, or a bishop, or simply a Christian man or woman
held in high esteem tells us—is that there simply was no such thing as a
clergy or a “ministry” of the sort that we know. Certainly by the end
of our period these persons had become figures of civil as well as religious
prominence. As certainly, they were all along regarded as exercising important
functions in the life of the community. Yet they still did not constitute a
special hierarchy. The fact that the episcopacy was most frequently, though not
always, occupied by people who had been presbyters or deacons is chiefly a
tribute to their visibility and popularity.(l0) Nor were they yet regarded as
having any real identity as Christians other than that which they shared with
other baptised members of the eucharistic assembly.
It
may well seem that we are merely laboring an obvious point, since we are now
quite accustomed to talk about the primary importance of one’s calling as
a member of the church. But inherited notions about a clergy or a ministry are
difficult to avoid, as witness the curiously back-handed way in which we now
speak of a “ministry of the laity”. It is hard for us to grasp what
the early Christian evidence has to tell us of a church highly articulated with
respect to the various functions of its members and yet clear that these
functions are exercised by people whose fundamental status is that of members
of the church. What we have is evidence of a period in which there is nothing
but a number of “ministries of the laity”, the laos or people
of God. It is a question of perspectives once again. But it may be one which
helps us understand why the functioning of women in a “ministry” of
the sort with which we are familiar was not likely to arise as a general issue
in this period.
Women and “Priesthood” in the church in early Christianity
We
must, finally, address the question of whether women did not occupy the offices
of bishop and presbyter in the early church because these offices were thought
to be means by which a “priesthood of Christ” was exercised in some
special way which would have made it impossible for women to occupy them. This
is a frequent assumption in current debate both on the part of those who think
the practice right and those who think it wrong. Our position is that the early
Christian evidence simply does not contain the sort of notion of a
“priesthood of Christ” which would make it possible for the subject
to arise.
The
earliest Christian writings preserved in the New Testament speak of Christ as
priest and the church as a priestly body. Nevertheless, neither the title
priest nor priestly imagery of any kind is used to describe the work of any
particular official in the church. Moreover it is worth noting that there are
far fewer references to the church as a priestly body than this generalization
would suggest.(1l) The real difficulty with this way of putting the matter,
however, is that it does not necessarily make clear what the use of priestly
and sacrificial imagery is really all about.
It is
better to begin by saying that the earliest Christian use of terminology drawn
from the Jewish sacrificial cultus and its functionaries is
“typological” in character, and belongs to the effort to find in the
Jewish scriptures foreshadowings of the final action of God now beginning to be
manifest in the work of Christ. Looked at in this way, the scriptures could be
seen to contain various materials—the Servant figure, the atonement motif,
and the sacrificial imagery itself—which foreshadow the self-giving of
Christ as fulfilling and transcending the Jewish cultus and as opening
the way for those in Christ to offer thanksgiving, service, and their own lives
to God in concert with him. The result of this approach is the application to
Christ and the church of a variety of scriptural references far more extensive
than any narrow study of the use of the terms priest and priesthood
(hiereus, hierosune) would suggest.(l2) It is not surprising, however,
that there is no notion here of a “priesthood of Christ” exercised by
anyone but himself, as the one in association with whom it is possible for
Christians to offer themelves to God.
This
same “typological” approach governs the elaborations of the priestly
and sacrificial imagery which appear in the evidence of the following
centuries, and which do include eucharistic references to those who preside at
the eucharistic meetings of the church. As liturgical scholars are well aware,
these meetings at which bread and wine are offered and partaken are regarded,
among other things, as occasions on which the church offers the bloodless
sacrifice of the final inbreaking age and holds communion with the coming
Christ. Thus Justin Martyr can describe the work of Christ as involving, among
other things, teaching us how to offer sacrifices to God; and Irenaeus can
enlarge on this point by observing that it is through material things, bread
and wine, that we have communion with Christ. It is even conceivable that
Justin and Irenaeus could have referred to the “president” of the
eucharistic assembly (by Irenaeus’ time normally the bishop), in priestly
terms. However, it is first of all in Hippolytus’ model prayers for the
consecration of a bishop and its attendant eucharistic offering that such
terminology appears.
It is
also conceivable that the bishop could be referred to as a priest, though to my
knowledge—leaving aside the peculiar use of the term in Clement of
Rome—it is only Cyprian who seems easily to refer to the episcopal figure
as “bishop and priest”. But it is a fair guess that disinclination to
follow Jewish or pagan precedents, and in the case of the Alexandrians, Clement
and Origen, a highly spiritualized view of the Christian life combined with an
exceptionally critical attitude toward the Jewish sacrificial cultus,
account for the omission of the term. However this may be, such a case of
the term would imply no more than that the one who offered the bread and wine
in the name and presence of the congregation did precisely that. Aside from the
curiously and richly complicated imagery by which Christ’s offering and
that of those in Christ are interrelated, there is no way in which a
“priesthood of Christ” different from that of the whole church would
make any sense at all.
It is
when we come to the Constantinian Peace of the Church that it becomes fairly
common—though certainly not universal—for the bishop and those
associated in his work to be referred to as priests, and their function as that
of priesthood. Reasons for this development scem fairly obvious. Despite
continued rejection of the notion that Christianity contained any precise
equivalent of the Levitical priesthood, there was no reason not to employ
priestly terminology to describe the functions of those who offered sacrifices
to God. Anyone familiar with the situation of the church in this period, its
new willingness to adopt terminology heretofore suspect, will find it easy to
understand the increasing use of this terminology. It is, in any case, in this
period that we encounter the great works on the responsibilities of the
Christian leadership, the works of Gregory of Nazianzus and John Chrysostom, of
Ambrose and Gregory the Great. One might presumably turn to these works to
discover what significance this period attaches to the use of the terms priest
and priesthood.
It is
just here, however, in the period immediately prior to that in which later
views of the Christian priesthood took shape and in works assiduously read by
the formulators of those views, that we most clearly discern the fact that
early Christian uses of priest and priesthood arise from a perspective very
different from those we have inherited. In fact, the writings in question do
not seem to us to discuss what we have come to regard as the substantial issue
about priest and priesthood. Rather, they deal with the awesome
responsibilities which fall on the persons engaged in the work and offer advice
as to how it is possible to shoulder them.
The
first piece of this literature, Gregory of Nazianzus’ oration “On
[his] flight” from the responsibilities he finally assumed as associate of
his father in that see, does not deal specifically with the functions of the
bishop or use priestly terminology, but employs a wealth of illustrations from
the history of Israel and the church to show what an impossible thing it is for
any one to serve as a teacher, preacher, and pastor of a congregation of
diverse people without the development of inner resources virtually beyond
imagining.
Chrysostom’s “On the priesthood”, written while the author was
still a presbyter but directed, as the title suggests, to the full range of
episcopal functions, begins by referring to the terrifying prospect of being
one through whose actions and words Christians are born at Baptism and the
Lord’s body made present at the Eucharist. But as the work unfolds, it is
the line taken by Nazianzus restated with considerable detail regarding the
work of the preacher and pastor.
Ambrose’ “On the duties of ministers,” is actually the work of a
bishop, but stands in a curious relation to the rest of this literature. We
have other works of his which represent his preaching and catechizing, and
unfold his views of Baptism and Eucharist. This work is, except for an initial
reference to his extraordinary election to the “priesthood”, an
attempt to draw on Cicero’s “On the duties” of public officials
for counsel in the virtues required of Christian leaders.
Finally, Gregory the Great’s “Pastoral Rule”, stands more in the
line of Nazianzen and Chrysostom, and is an effort to make their considerations
available for Latin readers as part of the famous pope’s interest in
instilling a sense of responsibility in the Italian episcopate in the difficult
time in which he occupied the Roman see. The interest of all of these works
lies more in the style of piety or view of the Christian life in general which
they bring to bear on the work of the bishop rather than on any precise
relationship between sacramental theology and views of the priesthood—the
relationship which now seems so natural to us.
This
is not to say that these works lack interest. They are extremely interesting
for anyone who reads them from their own perspective. They reveal the pressing
need for those who were bishops—or, as in the case of Nazianzen and
Chrysostom when they wrote, associates of bishops who already had an important
share of their work—for help in dealing with the problems of functioning
in the new circumstances which the popularity of the Christian movement and the
confusions of the times had forced upon them. They attempt to fill this need by
applying the insights of Christian spirituality, the techniques of rhetoric,
and a great deal of common sense to these problems. In the case of Chrysostom
in particular, it is possible to discern the great aura of mystery which now
surrounds the baptismal and eucharistic rites, and which at least for him makes
the office of bishop even more awesome to contemplate.
The
difficulty with these works, from our perspective, is that they do not address
the subject of “priesthood” in the way we assume it should be
addressed, and certainly not in the way they were made to address it when many
of their references to the inner life and external responsibilities of the
bishops were applied to those who were thought to stand in the place of Christ
in the dramatic sacrifice of the mass as it came to be viewed in the medieval
period. They do not contain a view of the bishops and their associates as
exercising a special “priesthood of Christ” which virtually make the
eucharistic celebrant an alter Christus. Insofar as they treat, directly
or by allusion, the liturgical functions of those now described as
“priests”, they are most easily read as continuing the view of the
preceding centuries rather than as anticipating those of the centuries to come.
The alter Christus theme, frequently mentioned in current debate, comes
from a different environment altogether, from a time when it was necessary to
interpret the visual motions of the celebrant as an allegory of the life of
Christ and when it was common to take the saying of mass to be part of the
celebrant’s personal growth in the life of Christ.(13)
We
began this section on the question of whether women were excluded from the
office of bishop and presbyter because these offices were thought to be the
means by which the “priesthood of Christ” was exercised in a way
which virtually excluded them from consideration. What we have tried to suggest
is that the use of priestly and sacrificial imagery in the early Christian
evidence is such that there is no place for a “priesthood of Christ”
of the sort assumed by the question. Indeed, by the time that the great works
just mentioned were written, the occupancy by men of the offices in question
was already a matter which had been decided by inherited tradition and social
convention rather than on theological grounds.
To
put the matter in this way will please neither those who want the early
Christian evidence to speak against the inclusion of women in the office of
bishop or presbyter nor those who want it to speak in its favor. To my mind,
the evidence shows clearly that priestly and sacrificial imagery could and was
used of the life of the church in ways which apply equally to women and men.
Even so, that imagery is not used in a way which allows it to be applied
directly to the current issues. And we must, after all, deal with the evidence
in its own right. The truth of the matter would seem to be that, once again, it
must be looked at from a perspective very different from our own.
Some reflections
It
might seem that it has been our purpose to render the evidence of early
Christianity irrelevant to the issues of the present. It is truer to say that
it has been part of our purpose to suggest that too great an involvement with
the issues of the present can make this evidence unintelligible and hence
irrelevant to us.
But
what is its relevance? We do not live in the early Christian era, face its
problems, or attempt to deal with them with its assumptions and insights. We
live in our own time, face our own problems, and have to deal with them with
our own assumptions and insights. It has been a recurrent danger in western
Christianity to expect help of the wrong sort from the past, and then either to
be critical of the past or to force it to be different from what it was. On the
whole the critics are the more impressive, since they at least grasp that there
is some problem involved. But they are not necessarily any more correct.
In
the present instance, it seems to me that the early Christian conviction that
the distinction of “male and female” was abrogated in Christ looms
much larger when set within the context of that time than we are likely to
appreciate when we look at the evidence from our point of view. The way in
which this conviction was reflected in the life of the church, in its
liturgical meetings, in its celebration of women martyrs and ascetics, and so
forth, was of much greater significance than we are likely to realize.
Certainly assumptions and conventions inherited from both paganism and Judaism
are evident in the way in which the life of the church was constructed. But we
ought to be able to take them for what they were—assumptions and
conventions of that time rather than ours. In particular, this seems to me the
case with the functioning of women in what we now call the “ministry”
of the church. The appearance of women as deacons but not as presbyters or
bishops is certainly largely a reflection of the circumtances of the time.
Efforts to make it more than this are inconclusive as efforts to discover
serious reasons for the exclusion of women from certain of the offices. It is
now commonly said that there are no “theological objections” to the
functioning of women as presbyters and bishops, and I should judge that the
early Christian evidence—if left to speak for itself—can be cited in
support of this dictum.
But
to me there is a far larger issue for us to ponder. The principal claim of the
early church was to be a manifestation of the inbreaking power of God in the
midst of the powers governing the life of the world. What was said and done
about the abrogation of the distinction of “male and female” in
Christ was said in relation to this claim. This claim naturally made little
sense during the time when the church’s attention was directed toward the
building of a Christian society in the aftermath of the collapse of the Roman
imperium. It is beginning to make a good deal more sense in our time, in
which the vestigial remains of Christendom—including the distinction of
clergy and laity—survive in yet another, and far more confusing set of
circumstances.
To
ponder what it might mean in our own time to be church in the early Christian
sense, is the first priority for modern Christians. Indeed, concern with the
place of women in the church is most evident where this problem is being
pondered. One result of such pondering may well be, as I think it will, the
admission of women to the orders of presbyter and bishop, since the conventions
of our time no longer impede it. But other results of such pondering may well
be far more surprising than that.
NOTES
1. It
is easy to see the orans in question through the reproductions, in color
in G. Gassiot-Talabot, Roman and Palaeo-Christian Painting (New York:
Funk and Wagnalls, 1965), p. 74 (commentary p. 187), and in black and white in
W. Lowrie, Art in the Early Church (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965),
plate 16. Neither reproduction makes clear that the white portions surrounding
the head are the results of damage to the wall.
2.
The orantes have been interpreted in many ways. We take Lowrie's view
(Art in the Early Church, pp. 45ff.) that those which represent
Christians buried at the particular sites show them alive at prayer. But there
is surely more to the matter. The praying position is used in the depiction of
figures from Israel’s history as well as from the early Church. It is
quite clearly a means of identifying those who belong to the people of God
which is being assembled in anticipation of the Kingdom.
3.
The problem is an instance of “anachronism”, that bane of all
historians, which is admittedly the easiest charge to bring against those who
take a different view from your own. The slow effort to place early
Christianity in its contemporary setting has still not done much to overcome
the influence of the divergent 19th century views which saw early Christianity
either as a departure from the original Gospel as a result of philosophical or
institutional concerns, or as in some sense still the touch-stone of Christian
life and thought it had long been taken to be.
4. Of
the number of works reflecting the recent recovery of the centrality of the
liturgical meetings for all aspects of early Christian life, the comprehensive
work of A. Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology (London:
Faith, 1966) should be noted. In many places (e.g. pp. 60ff., 78ff.) it touches
on the importance of the liturgical meetings as defining the nature of the
Church as a manifestation of the eschatological people of God in the sense
assumed in these remarks.
5.
For the passio of Perpetua see volume 3 of the Ante-Nicene
Fathers, pp. 697 ff. Ptolemy’s letter to Flora can be found in J.
Stevenson’s New Eusebius (London: SPCK: 1957), extract 69. See also
Jerome’s Letters, especially 22, and Methodius’ De cibis
1.1-2, and De sanguisuga. For a picture of Macrina and Monica see
Gregory’s De anima et resurrectione or Augustine’s De beata
vita.
6. H.
van der Meer, Women Priests in the Catholic Church (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1973) offers the most readily available collection of
references, though the focus of the work is the priesthood.
7.
For an introduction to the close relation of martyrdom and asceticism and their
appeal to the contemporary world, see W. H. C. Frend: Martyrdom and
Persecution in the Early Church (Dover: 1967) and E. R. Dodds: Pagan and
Christian in an Age of Anxiety (Cambridge University Press, 1965).
8.
Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses 3.1ff.
9.
Cf. H. van der Meer (see note 6) for a comprehensive catalogue of the evidence.
Women clearly functioned not merely as Montanist prophets but in various
capacities in Marcionite and Gnostic communities, and it seems clear that it
was in reaction to this that the arguments supposed to show the subordinate
place of women in the life of the Church were given prominence.
10.
It is true that the canons of the synod of Serdica A.D. 342 suggest that those
in important positions should be elected from those who have proved themselves
in less important ones, and that these canons can seem, on a later reading, to
suggest a hierarchy of offices. In fact it is the intention of these canons to
secure a local ministry free from external pressures of the sort common at the
time. In any case, they were not commonly adhered to, and were treated, as were
other early Christian canons, as sage advice rather than as legislation. At a
later time, however, they did provide precedent for the elaboration of a much
more structured hierarchy of orders than they themselves envisage.
11.
The most familiar reference to the Church as a priestly body is in I Pt 2:5.
Another is in 5:10. See also Jn 17:17 - 19. The Pauline corpus speaks of
the sacrifice of Christians in Rom 12:11 and Phil 4:18, though of course the
whole motif of baptismal death and resurrection (Rom 6.3ff., Gal 3.27ff.) is
replete with sacrificial features. It is, of course, important to sort these
references out into strands of interpretation, as well as to take a«ount
of the related references of a “priestly” character. It remains true,
however, that there are fewer references to the priestly character of the
Church than later generalizations would suggest.
12.
To illustrate our point, by and large the Synoptic materials conflate the
Servant and the atonement themes, as in Mk 10:33ff., esp. 45; Mt 16:21, 20:28
(leaving aside the special emphasis of Lk 18:31 on the death of the prophets as
foreshadowing that of Christ). The same conflation is already present in the
Pauline stress on Christ’s death for others, as in Rom 5:10ff., Eph 5:2,
cf. 1 Cor 11:26. The Johannine theme is that of Christ’s making himself
holy, as in the famous Jn 17:1ff., esp. 17:19. See also Ap 5:6ff. The most
extended use of priestly and sacrificial imagery, of course, is that in Heb
2:17ff., 4:14ff., 5:20ff., 8:1ff., 9:11ff., in which Christ’s
self-offering is interpreted as a fulfillment of the promise contained in the
figure of Melchizedek. However, a very great number of references having to do
with offering, thanksgiving, righteousness, and death take onpriestly and
sacrificial overtones in the contexts in which they occur.
13.
See J. Jungmann, Mass of the Roman Rite (New York: Benziger, 1951), vol.
1, pp. 233ff., and more generally T. Klauser, A Short History of the Western
Liturgy (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), esp. pp. 49ff., 109ff. It
is not hard to see how this different environment would allow the writings of
the earlier period to be read in a very different fashion from that intended.
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