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by Kallistos Ware
from Man, Woman, and Priesthood, pp. 68-90,
edited by Peter Moore, SPCK London, 1978.
Republished on our website with
the necessary permissions.
KALLISTOS WARE (b. 1934) studied at Magdalen College, Oxford, and is a
member of the Monastic Brotherhood of St John the Theologian, Patmos, Greece.
Since 1966 he has been priest in charge of the Greek Orthodox parish in Oxford
and Spalding Lecturer in Eastern Orthodox Studies in the University of Oxford,
and from 1970 Fellow of Pembroke College. He is joint secretary of the
Anglican-Orthodox Joint Doctrinal Commission. Author of The Orthodox Church
(1963) and various related studies.
The Three Widows
If we
had been visiting a church beside the Nile soon after the year 300, what kind
of a parish ministry might we have found? For an answer, let us turn to the
fragmentary document known as the Apostolic Church Order. This begins by
mentioning the bishop, who is not yet a distant administrator but still the
immediate head of the local community, the normal celebrant at the Sunday
Eucharist. He is assisted in the parish worship by two or more presbyters, by a
reader, and by three deacons. Thus far there are no great surprises, except
that the reader seems to rank higher than the deacons. The parochial staff is
larger than is customary today; but, apart perhaps from the bishop, most of the
others are doubtless earning their own living with ordinary jobs. The
Apostolic Church Order does not stop, however, with the deacons. After
them it goes on to speak of three widows, ‘two to persevere in prayer for
all who are in temptation, and to receive revelations when such are needed; and
one to help the women who are ill’.(1)
There
are surely several things to interest us here. First of all we observe the size
and diversity of the local parish ministry. There is no clericalism, no
concentration of responsibility exclusively in the hands of a single full-time
‘professional’. Next we see that the ministry includes women as well
as men. The three widows are not just elderly ladies who arrange the flowers
and prepare cups of tea, but they constitute a specific ministry or order
recognized by the Church; they are more or less equivalent—although not
actually given such a title—to the deaconesses mentioned elsewhere in
early Christian sources. While one of the three is entrusted with charitable or
social work, the other two have tasks immediately connected with prayer and
worship. It is noteworthy that the particular role assigned to them is the
ministry of intercession and prophecy. Although it is the calling of every
Christian, male as well as female, to pray for others and to listen to God, yet
woman by virtue of her gift for direct and intuitive understanding seems
especially blessed to act as intercessor and prophet. It is no coincidence that
the symbolic figure of the Orans on the walls of the catacombs,
representing the Christian soul waiting upon the Spirit, should take the form
of a woman.
But
the widows, although they intercede and receive revelations, do not act as
celebrants at the Eucharist. On this point the Apostolic Church Order is
entirely clear: ‘When the Master prayed over the bread and the cup and
blessed them, saying, “This is my Body and Blood”, he did not allow
women to stand with us.’(2) Here the Apostolic Church Order agrees
with the constant testimony of the universal Church, Eastern and Western, from
apostolic times onwards: women are entrusted with a wide variety of ministries,
but they do not perform the consecration at the Eucharist. To quote the
standard code of Eastern church law, the Nomocanon of Photius: ‘A
woman does not become a priestess.’(3)
To an
Orthodox Christian it seems not so much ironic as tragic that, at the very
moment when Christians everywhere are praying for unity, we should see a new
chasm opening up to divide us. And in Orthodox eyes, at any rate, it is a chasm
of horrifying dimensions. ‘The ordination of women to priesthood’,
writes Fr Alexander Schmemann, ‘is tantamount for us to a radical and
irreparable mutilation of the entire faith, the rejection of the whole
Scripture, and, needless to say, the end of all “dialogues”; and he
goes on to speak about ‘the threat of an irreversible and irreparable act
which, if it becomes reality, will produce a new, and this time, I am
convinced, final division among Christians’.(4) According to another
Orthodox spokesman, Fr Thomas Hopko, the acceptance of women priests involves
‘a fundamental and radical rejection of the very substance of the biblical
and Christian understanding of God and creation . . . The decisions taken by
the Episcopal Church in America at its General Convention in Minneapolis ...
can only be considered by an Orthodox Christian as disastrous.’(5) These
are strong words. Yet Fr Schmemann and Fr Hopko are both of them priests with a
long pastoral experience in the West, who have within their own communion the
reputation of being, in the best sense, progressive and open-minded. Why do
they and other Orthodox feel so deeply?
In
common with the recent Roman Catholic statement on ‘Women and the
Priesthood’ (Inter Insigniores, 15 October 1976), we Orthodox are
influenced chiefly by two factors: the witness of Tradition and the
‘iconic’ character of the Christian priesthood. Beyond this we appeal
also to the ‘order of nature’, to what the Apostolic
Constitutions, when discussing the ministry of women, term the
‘akolouthia tés physeos’.(6)
But,
when employing these three interdependent lines of argument, it is essential to
make careful distinctions:
(1)
Tradition is not to be equated with custom or social convention; there is an
important difference between ‘traditions’ and Holy Tradition (with a
capital T).
(2)
The ministerial priesthood or priesthood of order is not to be confused with
the royal priesthood exercised by all the baptized.
(3)
The order of nature does not signify fallen human nature, which is in reality
profoundly unnatural; it signifies true human nature as first created by God,
the undistorted image as it existed before the Fall.
The Appeal to Tradition
‘We should hold fast’, writes St Vincent of Lérins, ‘to
what has been believed everywhere, always and by everyone.’(7) If ever
there was a practice that contravened the Vincentian Canon, it is certainly the
ordination of women to the priesthood. Christ, the apostles and ministers of
the early Church, as well as their episcopal and presbyteral successors
throughout the ages, were men and not women. In a matter of such grave
importance, do we have the right to act differently from them?
This
appeal to Tradition requires, however, to be handled with care. The New
Testament, we are sometimes told, does not encourage Christians to think that
nothing should be done for the first time. Loyalty to Tradition must not become
simply another form of fundamentalism. Tradition is dynamic, not static and
inert. It is received and lived by each new generation in its own way, tested
and enriched by the fresh experience that the Church is continually gaining. In
the words of Vladimir Lossky, Tradition is ‘the critical spirit of the
Church’.(8) It is not simply a protective, conservative principle, but
primarily a principle of growth and regeneration. It is not merely a collection
of documents, the record of what others have said before us, handed down
automatically and repeated mechanically; but it involves a living response to
God’s voice at the present moment, a direct and personal meeting on our
part, here and now, with Christ in the Spirit. Authentic traditionalism, then,
is not a slavish imitation of the past, but a courageous effort to discriminate
between the transitory and the essential. The true traditionalist is not the
integrist or the reactionary, but the one who discerns the ‘signs of the
times’ (Matt. 16.3)—who is prepared to discover the leaven of the
gospel at work even within such a seemingly secular movement as
‘women’s lib’.
Yet,
even when full allowance has been made for all this, it seems altogether
insufficient to justify such a drastic innovation as women priests. If there is
dynamism in Holy Tradition, there is also continuity. ‘Jesus Christ the
same yesterday, and today, and for ever’ (Heb. 13.8). The Spirit is always
active in each new generation of the Church, yet it is the Spirit’s role
to bear witness to the Son (John 16.13-15); the Spirit brings us not a new
revelation, but the eternal and unchanging truth of Christ himself. Nove,
non nova, enjoins St Vincent of Lérins:(9) we are not to do or say
‘new things’, for the revelation imparted by Christ is final and
complete; but, guided by the Spirit, we are ever to act and speak ‘in a
new way’, with renewed mind and heart.
What
does this imply, so far as the ordination of women is concerned? Although Jesus
never said anything about this, either for or against, his actions
speak for themselves. In the words of a French Calvinist. Jean-Jacques von
Allmen:
The
New Testament, in spite of the chance of total renewal which it provides for
women as well as for men, never testifies that a woman could be, in a public
and authorized way, representative of Christ. To no woman does Jesus say,
‘He who hears you, hears me.’ To no woman does he make the promise to
ratify in heaven what she has bound or loosed on earth. To no woman does he
entrust the ministry of public preaching. To no woman does he give the command
to baptize or to preside at the communion of his Body and Blood. To no woman
does he commit his flock.(10)
We
are confronted here by the question of our obedience to Christ: are we
as Christians to remain faithful to his example or not? Do we accept the
‘givenness’ and finality of the revelation in Jesus Christ, and do we
believe in the apostolic character of the Church? Do we wish to belong
to the same Church as that which Christ founded? In the words of a leading
Orthodox theologian, Fr John Meyendorff:
The
Church today claims to be ‘apostolic’. This means that its faith is
based upon the testimony of Christ’s eyewitnesses, that its ministry is
Christ’s and that it is defined in terms of the unique,
unrepeatable act of God, accomplished in Christ once . . . No new
revelation can complete or replace what Jesus Christ did ‘when the
fullness of the time was come’ (Gal. 4.4). The Gospel of Christ cannot be
written anew because ‘the fullness of time’ came then and not at any
other time. There is a sense in which all Christians must become Christ’s
contemporaries. Therefore, the very ‘historical conditioning’ which
characterizes the Gospel of Christ is, in a sense, normative for us. The
twentieth century is not an absolute norm; the apostolic age is.(11)
Here,
then, is the first and fundamental argument that the Orthodox Church employs.
Faced by the unanimous and unvarying practice of Christ’s Church from
apostolic times up to our own, we in the twentieth century have no authority to
alter the basic patterns of Christian faith and life.
Our
appeal as Orthodox is not to Scripture alone nor to Tradition alone, but to
both at once.(l2) We do not appeal simply to the fact that Christ chose only
men to be apostles, but to the fact that for more than nineteen centuries
Christ’s Body the Church has never ordained any except men to the
priesthood and episcopate. Our appeal is to the total life of the Church over
two thousand years—and not only to what was said but to what was done. It
is of course true that the apostles whom Christ chose were not only males but
circumcised Jews. Almost at once, however, in the lifetime of virtually all the
chief eyewitnesses of the Word, of all those who were qualified in a unique
sense to share ‘the mind of Christ’ (1 Cor. 2.16), the Church decreed
circumcision and the other requirements of the Jewish law to be no longer
binding (Acts 15.23-9). All ministries were henceforward open to Jews and
Gentiles equally. But neither the apostles themselves nor their successors have
admitted women to the priesthood. The difference between the two cases is
immediately apparent, and it is enormous.
Our
arguments against the ordination of women, then, are not based solely upon
certain statements in the Pauline Epistles, taken in isolation, such as 1
Corinthians 14.34-5 or 1 Timothy 2.11-12, important though these texts
undoubtedly are. We appeal rather to the manner in which the scriptural
revelation as a whole has been interpreted, applied, and lived. Scripture and
Tradition, here as always, are inseparable and ‘correlative’, to use
the language of the Anglican-Orthodox Agreed Statement signed at Moscow in
1976.(13) Tradition is nothing else than the internal continuity that
exists between the New Testament and the subsequent thought and life of the
Church. The ordination of women as priests is excluded precisely because it
confiicts with this living continuity.
But,
if this appeal to Tradition is to be properly understood, three underlying
presuppositions need to be rendered explicit.
(1)
Jesus Christ is not only complete man but true and perfect God. He is within
history, but also above history. We do not see in him merely a human teacher,
bound by the conventions of his age; he is the Word of God, from whose lips we
hear not private opinions soon to grow outdated, but the eternal truth. Indeed,
far from being subservient to contemporary customs, Christ often showed a
striking independence. He told his disciples, ‘You have heard what was
said by the men of old; but I say to you . . .’ (Matt. 5.21-2); he claimed
to be master of the Sabbath, openly breaking the accepted regulations; he ate
with tax-collectors and sinners; to the astonishment of his followers he spoke
with the Samaritan woman, and in general ignored rules normally observed by a
Jewish rabbi of the time in his dealings with the female sex. Thus if the Son
of God had wanted to appoint women as apostles, he would have done so, whatever
the existing conventions within Judaism or elsewhere in the ancient world. And
the fact that he did not choose them as apostles must remain decisive
for us today. Are we to assert that the incarnate Word and Wisdom of God was
mistaken, and that we at the end of the twentieth century understand the truth
better than he did?
(2)
The second point is a corollary of the first. As Christ’s Body, as
‘pillar and ground of the truth’ (1 Tim. 3. 15), the Church is more
than a fallible human association. Christ has promised, ‘The Spirit of
truth will guide you into all truth’ (John 16.13): errors may arise among
members of the Church but they never finally prevail, for we have Christ’s
assurance that the truth will prove in the long run invincible. Are we to
believe that this promise of Christ has failed? Are we to say that, in
excluding women from the priesthood, the Church has erred for nearly two
thousand years, unjustly denying to half the human race its legitimate rights?
But, so it is argued, the Church made precisely such a mistake in regard to
slavery. If it took the Church eighteen centuries to recognize the evils of
slavery, why should it not have taken the Church one century more to end the
unjustifiable subservience of women? On closer investigation, however, the
parallel proves far from exact. The distinction between male and female is part
of the order of nature; that between free men and slaves is not. As St Basil
(d. 379) remarks, ‘No man is a slave by nature’: (14)slavery only
came into existence subsequent to the Fall. The distinction between male and
female, by contrast, existed prior to the Fall and is inherent in human nature
as originally created by God (Gen. 1.27). Furthermore, several Fathers, most
notably St Gregory of Nyssa (d. c. 395), inveighed vehemently against slavery
as an evil—a necessary evil, perhaps, yet an evil none the less.(15) But
not a single Father ever spoke of the limitation of the priesthood to men as a
necessary evil. As Fr John Saward rightly concludes, ‘The . . . argument
from the example of slavery will not stand up to close examination.’(16)
(3)
On many minor details of church life, so it might be argued, our Lord perhaps
gave no specific instructions, leaving later generations free to resolve these
matters as they might think best. But—and this is our third
presupposition—the admission of women to the priesthood is not a minor
detail. It vitally affects our understanding both of priesthood and of human
nature. If women can and should be priests, then their exclusion for two
millennia is a grave injustice, a tragic error. Are we to attribute a mistake
of this magnitude to the Fathers and the ecumenical councils, to the apostles
and the Son of God?
An
Argument from Silence?
Sometimes it is claimed that the appeal to Tradition is nothing more that an
argument from absence or silence, and therefore lacking in cogency. It is true,
so the argument runs, that there is nothing in Scripture and Tradition that
explicitly enjoins the ordination of women to the priesthood; yet equally there
is nothing which explicitly forbids it. The question has not been seriously
posed until our own day, and thus remains open.
To
this it must be answered, first, that we need to listen not only to the words
but to the silence of Scripture and Tradition. Not everything is outwardly
defined. Certain doctrines, never formally defined, are yet held by the Church
with an unmistakable inner conviction, an unruffled unanimity, which is just as
binding as an explicit proclamation.
Secondly, it is not in fact correct to say that until our own day the matter
was passed over in silence. On the contrary, it was often discussed in the
early Church. The Apostolic Church Order, as we have seen, states
directly that women are not to officiate at the Eucharist. A hundred years
earlier, Tertullian (d. c. 225) was equally definite: ‘It is not permitted
for a woman to speak in church, nor yet to teach, nor to anoint, nor to make
the offering, nor to claim for herself any office performed by men or any
priestly ministry.’(17) The Apostolic Constitutions (late fourth
century) discuss the ministry of women in some detail, and in the same terms as
Tertullian. Women are not to preach nor to baptize, and a fortiori it is
implied that they do not celebrate the Eucharist. The reason given is
specifically faithfulness to Christ’s example— he never entrusted
such tasks to women, although he could easily have done so; thus the Church has
no power to commission women for work of this kind.(18)
Nor
did the question of women priests remain merely hypothetical in the early
history of the Church. Various schismatic groups in the second and fourth
centuries had women as priests and bishops: the Gnostic Marcosians, for
example,(l9) and the Montanists,(20) and the Collyridians.(21) When referring
to these last, St Epiphanius (d. 403) examines at length the possibility of
women priests. ‘Since the beginning of time’, he states, ‘a
woman has never served God as priest.’ (He means, of course, in the Old
Testament; he knew that there were priestesses in the pagan fertility cults.)
In the New Testament, although we find female prophets (Luke 2.36; Acts 21.9),
no woman is ever an apostle, bishop, or presbyter. Christ had many women among
his immediate followers—Mary his mother, Salome and others from Galilee,
Martha and Mary the sisters of Lazarus—yet on none of them did he confer
the apostolate or priesthood. 'That there exists in the Church an order of
deaconesses is undisputed; but they are not allowed to perform any priestly
functions.' Besides deaconesses, the Church has also orders of widows and old
women; but we never find ‘female presbyters or priestesses’.
‘After so many generations’ Christians cannot now start ordaining
priestesses for the first time. Such, then, is Epiphanius' conclusion
concerning women and the ministerial priesthood: ‘God never appointed to
this ministry a single woman upon earth.’(22)
Most Orthodox today would find Epiphanius' treatment of the subject both
convincing and sufficient. The ordination of women to the priesthood is an
innovation, without any sound basis whatever in Holy Tradition. The evidence is
explicit and unanimous, and there is nothing further to be said. It has to be
admitted, however, that this argument from Tradition will seem inadequate to
the majority of Christians in the West, even to many who are themselves opposed
to the ordination of women priests. It is not enough for them to be told that
it is not in Tradition; they wish to know why it is not. In the words of an
Orthodox woman theologian, Mme Elisabeth Behr-Sigel: ‘To those who ask
from us the bread of understanding, it is not enough to offer only the stones
of certainties hardened by negation.’(23) We need in fact to advance
beyond an appeal to the external facts of Tradition and to inquire into its
inner content. This will oblige us to consider the delicate subject of
priesthood in its relation to sexuality—a theme which most Orthodox
theologians prefer to avoid, for here it is dangerous to say too much. But then
it is also dangerous to say too little.
Royal Priesthood and Ministerial Priesthood
There are three interdependent truths which need to be kept in
balance:
(1) One, and one alone, is priest.
(2) All are priests.
(3) Only
some are priests.
One, and one alone, is priest; Jesus Christ, the unique high
priest of the New Covenant, ‘the one mediator between God and men’ (1
Tim. 2.5), is the sole true celebrant in every sacramental act. All are
priests: by virtue of our creation in God's image and likeness, and also by
virtue of the renewal of that image through baptism and anointing with chrism
(Western ‘confirmation’), we are all of us, clergy and laity
together, ‘a royal priesthood, a holy nation’ (1 Pet. 2.9), set apart
for God's service. Only some are priests: certain members of the Church
are set apart in a more specific way, through prayer and the laying-on of
hands, to serve God in the ministerial priesthood.
It is vitally important to preserve a proper balance and distinction
between the second and the third forms of priesthood, between the royal
priesthood of sanctity and the ministerial priesthood of order.
In many of the arguments used to support women priests, so it seems to the
Orthodox, these two levels of priesthood are unhappily confused. For instance,
St Paul's words in Galatians 3.28, ‘There is neither male nor female, for
you are all one in Christ Jesus’, are often cited out of context in favour
of women priests. But in fact, as the preceding sentence shows, Paul is
thinking here of baptism, not ordination; this text refers to the royal
priesthood of the whole People of God, not to the ministerial priesthood of
order.
Women, to an equal degree with men, are created in God's image; to an
equal degree with men, they are recreated in baptism and endued with the
charismata of the Holy Spirit in post-baptismal anointing. As regards
the second level of priesthood, therefore, they are in every respect as much
‘kings and priests’ (Rev. 1.6) as any man can ever be. This royal
priesthood consists above all in the power possessed by each human person, made
according to the divine image, to act as a creator after the likeness of God
the Creator; each is able to mould and fashion the world, revealing fresh
patterns and a new meaning in created things, making each material object
articulate and spiritual. The royal priesthood is expressed likewise in the
fact that each human person is a ‘eucharistic animal’, capable of
praising and glorifying God for the gift of the world, and so of turning each
thing into a sacrament and means of communion with him. Each is capable of
offering the world back to its Maker in thanksgiving, of presenting his or her
own self, body and soul together, as a ‘living sacrifice’ to the Holy
Trinity (Rom. 12.1).
‘Thine own from thine own we offer to thee, in all and for
all’ (Liturgy of St John Chrysostom): such is the essence of the universal
priesthood inherent in all human nature. In terms of this hieratic
self-offering, both man and woman equally are priests of the created universe,
by virtue of the common humanity that they share. At the same time each
exercises this priesthood in a distinct way, for the differences of sexuality
extend deep into our human nature and are by no means restricted to the act of
procreation.
The human person who expresses most perfectly this royal and universal
priesthood is not in fact a man but a woman—the Blessed Virgin Mary. She
is the supreme example not just of female sanctity but of human sanctity as
such: in the words of G. K. Chesterton, ‘Men are men, but Man is a
woman.’ ‘Behold, the handmaid of the Lord’ (Luke 1.38): at the
annunciation, as throughout her life, the Mother of God exemplifies that
priestly act of self-offering which is the true vocation of all of us. This
point has been well emphasized by the head of the Greek Orthodox Church in
Britain, Archbishop Athenagoras of Thyateira: ‘God in his love sent his
Son to be a man, whilst in return humanity offered Saint Mary the Virgin to be
the cleansed and perfected vessel in which humanity and divinity meet in the
God-manhood of Christ.’(24)
It is significant that the movement for the ordination of women should
first have emerged in those Christian communities that tend to neglect the Holy
Virgin's place in Christ's redemptive work. ‘There is no doubt in my
mind’, says Fr John Meyendorff, ‘that the Protestant rejection of the
veneration of Mary and its various consequences (such as, for example, the
really "male-dominated" Protestant worship, deprived of sentiment, poetry and
intuitive mystery-perception) is one of the psychological reasons which
explains the recent emergence of institutional feminism.’(25)
The example of the Mother of God shows us how important it is to
differentiate between the second level of priesthood and the third. She, in
whose person we see perfectly expressed the royal priesthood of the Christian
believer, was never a priest in the ministerial sense. Speaking on the level of
the royal priesthood of self-offering, the Apostolic Constitutions are
able to affirm, ‘Let the widow realize that she is the altar of
God’;(26) but the very same passage excludes the possibility that the
widows, or any other women, could act as ministerial priests.
Two points about the ministerial priesthood need to be underlined.
First, the ministry is not to be envisaged in ‘professional’ terms,
as a ‘job’ which woman can carry out as competently as man, and which
she has an equal ‘right’ to perform. Still less is the ministry to be
conceived in terms of power and domination, as a ‘privilege’ from
which woman is being unjustly excluded. ‘It shall not be so among
you’ (Matt. 20.26). The Church is not a power structure or a business
enterprise, but the Body of Christ; the ministerial priesthood is not a human
invention devised for the purposes of efficiency, but a gift of God's grace. So
far from being a ‘right’ or ‘privilege’, the ministry is a
call to service, and this call comes from God. In the Church, all is gift, all
is grace. When a man is called to the ministerial priesthood, this is
invariably a gift of grace from God, never a ‘right’.
Secondly, the ministerial priest is not to be seen in secular and
pseudo-democratic terms, as a deputy or representative, who is merely
exercising by delegation the royal priesthood that belongs to the Christian
people as a whole. No: the ministerial priest derives his priesthood not by
delegation from the people, but immediately from Christ. As Justin Martyr (d.
c. 165) affirms, ‘The twelve apostles depend upon the power of Christ the
eternal priest’;(27) and the same is true of their successors the bishops.
The royal priesthood and the ministerial priesthood are both ways of sharing
directly in the priesthood of Christ, and neither is derived by devolution
through the other.
The Priest as Icon
But why, we ask, should the ministerial priesthood be limited to men,
whereas the royal priesthood is conferred on all alike? Why should God not call
women to be priests? The answer lies in the ‘iconic’ character of the
ministerial priesthood. In the prayer before the Great Entrance (the offertory
procession) at the Divine Liturgy, the priest addresses these words to Christ:
‘Thou art he who offers and he who is offered.’ It is Christ himself
who makes the eucharistic offering: as the deacon states at the very beginning
of the service, ‘It is time for the Lord to act.’ ‘Our Lord and
God Jesus Christ’, says St Cyprian of Carthage (d. 258), ‘is himself
the high priest of God the Father; he offered himself as a sacrifice to the
Father and commanded that this should be done in memory of him; thus the priest
truly acts in the place of Christ (vice Christi).’(28) ‘It is the
Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit who perform everything, teaches St John
Chrysostom (d. 407); ‘but the priest lends his tongue and supplies his
hand.(29) ... It is not man who causes the bread and wine to become Christ's
Body and Blood: this is done by Christ himself, crucified for our sakes. The
priest stands before us, doing what Christ did and speaking the words that he
spoke; but the power and grace are from God.’(30)
The priesthood, then, is always Christ's and not ours. The priest in
church is not ‘another’ priest alongside Christ, and the sacrifice
that he offers, in union with the people, is not ‘another’ sacrifice
but always Christ's own. The ministerial priest, as priest, possesses no
identity of his own: his priesthood exists solely in order to make Christ
present. This understanding of the ministerial priesthood is clearly affirmed
by St Paul: ‘We come therefore as Christ's ambassadors; it is as if God
were appealing to you through us’ (2 Cor. 5.20); ‘you welcomed me as
an angel of God, even as Christ Jesus’ (Gal. 4,14). St Ignatius of Antioch
(d. c. 107) speaks similarly: ‘The bishop presides as the image of
God.’(31) In the words of Antiochus the Monk (seventh century): ‘The
priests should be imitators of their high priest [i.e. the bishop], and he in
his turn should be imitator of Christ the high priest.’(32) In the
consecration service of an Orthodox bishop, the chief officiant prays: ‘O
Christ our God ... who hast appointed for us teachers to occupy thy throne ...
make this man to be an imitator of thee the true Shepherd.’
The bishop or priest is therefore an imitator, image, or sign of Christ
the one mediator and high priest. In short, the ministerial priest is an icon.
‘Standing between God and men,’ writes St Theodore the Studite (d.
826), ‘the priest in the priestly invocations is an imitation of Christ.
For the apostle says: "There is one God, and one mediator between God and men,
the man Christ Jesus" (1 Tim. 2.5). Thus the priest is an icon of
Christ.’(33) This notion of the priest as an icon has far-reaching
implications:
First, there can be no question of any identification between the priest
and Christ, for an icon is in no sense identical with that which it
depicts.(34)
Secondly, an icon is not the same as a photograph or a realistic
portrait; and so, when the priest is considered as an icon, this is not to be
understood grossly in a literal or naturalistic sense. The priest is not an
actor on the stage, ‘made up’ to look like Christ.
Thirdly, according to the principle enunciated by St Basil and used in
the Iconoclast Controversy, ‘The honour shown to the icon is referred to
the prototype.’(35) When we venerate the icon of the Saviour, we do not
honour wood and paint, but through wood and paint we honour Christ himself. The
same is true of the priest as an icon. He is not honoured in and for himself;
all the honour is referred to Christ. In terming the priest an icon, we do not
thereby attribute to him any special kind of intrinsic personal sanctity; we do
not set him as a human being on a higher level than others. The greatest in the
kingdom of heaven are not the clergy but the saints. Here as always, a careful
distinction must be made between royal priesthood and ministerial priesthood,
between the personal priesthood of sanctity and the iconic priesthood of
order.
Fourthly, it is the function of an icon to make present a spiritual
reality that surpasses it, but of which it acts as the sign. As an icon of
Christ, therefore, the priest is not just a deputy or legal delegate of the
people; but neither is he the vicar or surrogate of an absent Christ. It is the
purpose of an icon not to remind us of someone who is absent, but to render
that person present. Christ and his saints are present as active participants
in the Liturgy through their icons in the church; and Christ is likewise
present in the Liturgy through his icon the priest.
Fifthly and finally, as an icon of the unique high priest Christ, the
ministerial priest must be male. In the words of Fr Alexander Schmemann,
‘if the bearer, the icon and the fulfiller of that unique priesthood, is
man and not woman, it is because Christ is man and not woman.’(36)
‘For the Eastern Orthodox,’ writes Fr Maximos Aghiorgoussis, ‘it
is imperative to preserve the symbolic correspondence between Christ as a male
and the ordained priest... The ordination of women to the Holy Priesthood is
untenable since it would disregard the symbolic and iconic value of male
priesthood, both as representing Christ's malehood and the fatherly role of the
Father in the Trinity, by allowing female persons to interchange with male
persons a role which cannot be interchanged.’(37)
There are two points implicit in these words of Fr Maximos. First, he
speaks not only of Christ's ‘manhood’ but of his
‘male-hood’. At his human birth Christ did not only become man in the
sense of becoming human [anthropos, homo], but he also became man in the sense
of becoming male [aner, vir}. Certainly Christ is the Saviour of all humankind,
of men and women equally; at his incarnation he took up into himself and healed
our common humanity. But at the same time we should keep in view the
particularity of the incarnation. Christ was born at a specific time and place,
from a specific mother. He did not just become human in an abstract or
generalized sense, but he became a particular human being; as such he could not
be both a male and a female at once, and he was in fact a male.
Secondly, men and women are not interchangeable, like counters, or
identical machines. The difference between them, as we have already insisted,
extends far more deeply than the physical act of procreation. The sexuality of
human beings is not an accident, but affects them in their very identity and in
their deepest mystery. Unlike the differentiation between Jew and Greek or
between slave and free—which reflect man's fallen state and are due to
social convention, not to nature—the differentiation between male and
female is an aspect of humanity's natural state before the Fall. The life of
grace in the Church is not bound by social conventions or the conditions
produced by the Fall; but it does conform to the order of nature, in the sense
of unfallen nature as created by God. Thus the distinction between male and
female is not abolished in the Church.
We are not saved from our masculinity and femininity, but in them; to
say otherwise is to be Gnostic or Marcionite. We cannot repent of being male
and female, but only of the way in which we are these things. Grace co-operates
with nature and builds upon it; the Church's task is to sanctify the natural
order, not to repudiate it. In the Church we are male and female, not sexless.
Dedicated virginity within the church community is not the rejection of sex,
but a way of consecrating it. In the words of Fr John Meyendorff, ‘The
Christian faith, as held by the Church, is not a negation of nature but its
salvation. The "new creation" does not suppress the "old", but renews and
transfigures it.’(38) He goes on to quote the words of an Orthodox
statement at an Anglican-Orthodox consultation held in America in 1974:
‘God created men as "male and female", establishing a diversity of
functions and gifts; these functions and gifts are complementary but not at all
interchangeable ... There is every reason for Christians to oppose the current
trends which tend to make men and women interchangeable in their functions and
roles, and thus lead to the dehumanization of life.’ C. S. Lewis saw this
danger many years ago: ‘As the State grows more like a hive or an ant-hill
it needs an increasing number of workers who can be treated as neuters. This
may be inevitable for our secular life. But in our Christian life we must
return to reality.’(39)
Such, then, is the Orthodox understanding of the ministerial priesthood.
The priest is an icon of Christ; and since the incarnate Christ became not only
man but a male—since, furthermore, in the order of nature the roles of
male and female are not interchangeable—it is necessary that the priest
should be male. Those Western Christians who do not in fact regard the priest
as an icon of Christ are of course free to ordain women as ministers; they are
not, however, creating women priests but dispensing with priesthood
altogether.
The Value of Symbols
Some will remain unconvinced by this argument from the iconic character
of the priesthood, because it involves an appeal to symbolism. ‘Do not
offer us symbols,’ they will object, ‘but give us a proof, based on
logical reasoning.’ It must in answer be at once admitted that the
rightness of our symbols is not something that can be logically demonstrated. A
symbol can be verified, lived, prayed—but not ‘proved’. Church
life, however, is not to be reduced to Euclidean geometry; while our reasoning
powers should be employed to the full, we cannot grasp spiritual truth
exclusively through syllogisms. Symbols and archetypes provide a vital key for
the comprehension of literature and art; and they are no less important in
religious faith and prayer. A symbol has the advantage of being far easier to
understand than a verbal explanation, while at the same time conveying truths
too profound to be formulated in words. In worship, as in family life, there is
a ‘deep symbolism of actions and things’,(40) reaching down to the
hidden roots of our being. If this symbolism is ignored or outraged, our
relationship alike with God and with other humans will be fatally
impoverished.
In our subconscious there are certain symbols and archetypes which are
not invented but given. The same is true of the symbols revealed in Holy
Scripture and used in Christian worship. We ‘prove’ these symbols;
all we know is that God has set his (83) seal upon certain images and not upon
others. We have been taught to say ‘Our Father who art in heaven’,
and not ‘Our Mother who art in heaven’; the second person of the Holy
Trinity is God the Son, not God the Daughter; Christ is the New Adam, not the
New Eve; he is the Bridegroom and the Church is his Bride—the relationship
cannot be reversed. These symbols are ‘given’, and they are
absolutely fundamental.
Needless to say, our symbolic theology must be balanced by the use of
apophatic or negative theology. God in himself is neither masculine nor
feminine, since he infinitely transcends any such categories. Yet it does not
therefore follow that we are free to apply to him whatever symbols we please.
On the contrary, if we were to substitute a Mother Goddess for God the Father,
we would not simply be altering a piece of incidental imagery, but we would be
replacing Christianity with a new kind of religion.(41) The male character of
the Christian priesthood forms an integral element in this pattern of revealed,
God-given symbolism which is not to be tampered with. Christ is the Bridegroom
and the Church is his Bride: how can the living icon of the Bridegroom be other
than a man?
Diversities of Gifts
If our conclusion thus far has a negative appearance, this is because
the wrong question was posed in the first place. Rather than ask, ‘Can
women be priests?’, we ought to be asking, ‘What are the distinctive
gifts conferred by God on women, and how can these gifts be expressed in the
Church's ministry?’ Instead of trying to ordain women as priests,
Christians today need to explore and develop the special forms of service in
the Church that women are best able to perform. The question is not ‘Do
women have a role of leadership in the Church?’, but ‘What is the
nature of that role?’
It is one of the chief glories of human nature that men and women,
although equal, are not interchangeable. Together they exercise a common
ministry which neither could exercise alone; for within that shared ministry
each has a particular role. There exists between them a certain order or
hierarchy, with man as the ‘head’ and woman as the partner or
‘helper’ (Gen. 2.18); yet this differentiation does not imply any
fundamental inequality between them. Within the Trinity, God the Father is the
source and ‘head’ of Christ (1 Cor. 11.3), and yet the three persons
are essentially equal; and the same is true of the relationship of man and
woman. The Greek Fathers, although often negative in their opinion of the
female sex, were on the whole absolutely clear about the basic human equality
of man and woman. Both alike are created in God's image; the subordination of
woman to man and her exploitation reflect not the order of nature created by
God, but the contra-natural conditions resulting from original sin.(42) Equal
yet different according to the order of nature, man and woman complete each
other through their free co-operation; and this complementarity is to be
respected on every level—when at home in the circle of the family, when
out at work, and not least in the life of the Church, which blesses and
transforms the natural order but does not obliterate it.
Much current propaganda for the ordination of women priests seems to
envisage the priesthood as virtually the only possible form of ministry in the
Church. It is assumed that, because women are not allowed to be priests, they
are in consequence being left with no proper role to play in church life. The
diversity of ministries, such as we find for example in the Apostolic Church
Order, is all too often overlooked. The present campaign for women priests may
thus be seen as ‘the bitter fruit of the clericalization of the
Church’,(43) ‘a typically western and medieval form of
clericalism’.(44) Women are being wrongly led to seek priestly ordination,
because other forms of ecclesial service have been neglected. But this point
has a relevance for men as well: often men assume that, if they ‘have a
vocation’, it must be to the priesthood, because they do not think in
terms of any other type of ministry. We need to recover the full Pauline vision
of the Church as unity in diversity.
Among the Orthodox thinkers who in the recent past have written about
the distinctive gifts and ministry of women are Nicolas Berdyaev,(45) Fr Lev
Gillet,(460 Olivier Clement,(47) and above all Paul Evdokimov.(48) Their views
are carefully summarized in a recent article by Mme Behr-Sigel, who wisely
warns against the danger of thinking in terms of ‘cultural
stereotypes’.(49) Certainly the whole subject requires much more thorough
investigation on the Orthodox part. We need to hear the voice not merely of the
male theologians but of the Orthodox women themselves. An encouraging
start—but no more than a start—was made by the Consultation of
Orthodox Women, held at Agapia, Romania, on 11-17 September 1976.
Brief mention may be made of four among the ministries that Orthodox
women are or could be fulfilling:
(1) Although in the New Testament no woman was chosen to be an apostle,
the Orthodox Church recognizes a number of women as isapostolos,
‘equal to the apostles’: for instance, St Mary Magdalene, the Martyr
Thekla, St Helena, mother of the Emperor Constantine, and St Nina, the
missionary who converted Georgia.
(2) Women ‘equal to the apostles’, acting as preachers and
missionaries, have never been common in the past; but there is a more hidden
form of ministry which Orthodox women have never ceased to perform—that of
the priest's wife. Within Orthodoxy the parish priest is in principle always a
married man; when for special reasons a parish is put in charge of a monk or a
celibate priest—there are in fact extremely few unmarried clergy who are
not in monastic vows—this is definitely to be regarded as an exception to
the standard rule. The fact that the parish priest has a wife is not to be seen
as merely accidental or peripheral to his pastoral work; nor should the
priest's wife merely be someone who happens to have married a fixture
clergyman. Her status in the parish is indicated by her title: in the Greek
Church the priest is called presbyteros or pappass and his wife presbytera or
pappadia; in the Russian Church the priest is ‘little father’,
batushka, and his wife is ‘little mother’, matushka. If the woman in
the home acts as giver and protector of life, the priest's wife is called to do
this throughout the parish. Just as the priest is father not to his own
children solely but to the entire community, so the priest's wife is called to
be mother alike in her own family and in the parochial family as a whole. Yet
she is not ordained for this task, but is simply realizing in a particular
manner the royal priesthood that is the common inheritance of all. Her maternal
vocation has to be exercised with the utmost discretion, not so much through
anything she says or does, as through what she is.
(3) There is, however, one form of the ordained ministry to which women
are certainly called, and that is the ministry of deaconesses. The members of
the Agapia Consultation pleaded for a ‘reactivation’ of this ancient
order, which in the Orthodox Church has fallen into disuse since the twelfth
century.(50) They spoke of the ministry of the deaconess as a ‘life-time
commitment to full vocational service in the Church ... an extension of the
sacramental life of the Church into the life of society’.(51) Already, in
the Russian Church before the Revolution, there were several schemes for a full
restoration of the order of deaconesses, although in the end nothing was
done.(52) Since 1952 the Church of Greece has had a School for
Deaconesses—the present building was opened in 1957—but the members
are not actually ordained. I am told, however, that ordained deaconesses exist
within the Coptic Church of Egypt.
There is a difference of opinion among contemporary Orthodox as to the
exact status of deaconesses in the early Church. Some regard them as
essentially a ‘lay’ and not an ‘ordained’ ministry.(53) But
others point out that the liturgical rite for the laying-on of hands received
by deaconesses is exactly parallel to that for deacons: this implies that
deaconesses receive, as deacons do, a genuine sacramental ordination—not
just a cheirothesia but a cheirotonia.(54) All Orthodox are agreed, however,
that there is a sharp distinction between the diaconate and the priesthood. The
deacon, and a fortiori the deaconess, cannot perform the consecration at the
Eucharist, cannot bless the people, and in general does not act as a liturgical
icon of Christ. There is a special funeral office for priests, but when a
deacon dies the burial service is the same as for a layman. The existence of
deaconesses within the Church is thus in no sense a justification for women
priests. As the Agapia Consultation insisted, ‘The office of deaconess is
distinct and not new, nor can it be considered as a "first step" to the
ordained priesthood.’(55)
In the Teaching of the Apostles, a Syriac work of the early third
century, it is suggested that the deacon has a special link with the second
person of the Holy Trinity, and the deaconess with the third person: ‘The
deacon stands in the place of Christ; and do you love him. And the deaconess
shall be honoured by you in the place of the Holy Spirit.’(56) The
implications of this idea have been developed, in a fascinating but somewhat
speculative manner, by Paul Evdokimov;(57) a similar line of thought can be
found in an article by Fr Thomas Hopko.(58) While it would be unwise to base
too much on this one passage from the Teaching of the Apostles, taken in
isolation, here certainly is a theme to be explored more fully when considering
the charismata of woman. In early Syriac sources, and very occasionally
in the Greek tradition, the Holy Spirit is pictured in feminine symbolism: the
Syriac author Aphrahat (early fourth century), for example, speaks of the
Christian's relationship with ‘God his Father and the Holy Spirit his
Mother’.(59) If man serves in a special way as an icon of the Saviour, has
not woman a distinctive role as an icon of the Paraclete?
(4) Much has been said in recent years about the importance in the
Orthodox tradition of the spiritual father, of the charismatic ‘abba’
or ‘elder’, styled geron by the Greeks and starets by
the Russians. But is there not a place also for spiritual motherhood? The role
of spiritual guide is closely linked to the gifts of intercession and prophecy;
and these, as we noted at the outset, are in a special sense the
charismata of woman.
Not that the idea of spiritual motherhood is new. In the
Gerontikon or ‘Sayings of the Desert Fathers’, alongside some
127 spiritual fathers there are three ‘ammas’ or spiritual mothers,
Theodora, Sarah, and Synkletika; and these ‘ammas’, although in a
minority, are set upon an equal footing with the great ‘abbas’ such
as Antony, Arsenios, or Poemen. The monk Isaias, around the year 1200, even
compiled a Meterikon or collection of the ‘Sayings of the
Mothers’, parallel to the Paterikon or ‘Sayings of the
Fathers’; as yet unpublished in Greek, this Meterikon was
translated into Russian by Bishop Theophan the Recluse and published in at
least three editions.(60)
There is no lack of material for such a work. Indeed, in the history of
monasticism it was the women who acted as pioneers rather than the men. It is
customary to treat St Antony of Egypt as the father of Christian monasticism.
Yet we read that, when he first decided to give up his possessions and to
embrace the ascetic way, he entrusted his younger sister to the care of a
parthenon, a ‘convent’ of virgins.(61) Long before Antony had
settled in the desert as a hermit, or his younger contemporary Pachomius had
established the first coenobitic monasteries for men, fully organized
communities for women were already in existence.
The starets or spiritual father in the Christian East, while
commonly a priest-monk, is not always in priestly orders: the great Antony
himself, like most of the early Desert Fathers, was never ordained. From this
it is clear that the ministry of spiritual direction, although linked closely
to the ministerial priesthood of order, is basically an expression of the royal
priesthood of sanctity. It is therefore a calling that can be exercised by lay
men; and if by lay men, then equally—yet in a different way—by lay
women. In the Anglican Church Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941) forms a notable
instance of a lay woman invested with this ministry.(62) If the order of
deaconesses were revived in Orthodoxy, no doubt many of them would act as
spiritual mothers; but the role of motherhood in Christ should not be limited
to them or to any other specific form of the ordained ministry.
Throughout the contemporary Christian world there is a thirst for
spiritual guidance, and at the same time a severe dearth of persons blessed by
the Holy Spirit to serve as guides. It is disappointing that in such a
situation very little thought is being given to the cultivation of spiritual
motherhood. The unhappy controversy about women priests is distracting our
thought from the real questions.
Here, then, are four ways in which the ministry of women exists or might
be further developed in the Orthodox Church today. Many more examples could of
course be given; but enough has, I hope, been said to indicate how rich are the
possibilities. In conclusion let us end with two pictures, the first from
Greece and the second from Russia. Often in his writings Alexander
Papadiamantis (1851-1911) describes the characteristic festivals held in remote
chapels in the Greek countryside. Without the participation of the women, these
festivals could scarcely be held. It is they who ‘prepare and constitute
the physical flesh for the cosmic liturgy’:(63) they have baked the loaves
for the Eucharist, they bring with them the wine and oil, the incense and the
candles, they decorate the church and do the singing at the service. Without
them the celebration could not take place, just as it could not take place
without the priest. Here, in the offering of the Eucharist, man and woman are
to be seen cooperating together, and the role of each is essential.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn speaks likewise of the role of women in his piece
‘The Easter Procession’. Surrounded by hostile, jeering crowds, the
Paschal procession makes its way round the outside of the Patriarchal cathedral
in Moscow at Easter midnight. First come two laymen, clearing the way; then
follows the churchwarden, carrying a lantern on a pole, ‘glancing from
side to side with apprehension’, and after him come two other men with a
banner, also ‘huddling together from fear’. At the end of the little
procession come the priests and deacons; and they too, in their fear, are
‘bunched together, walking out of step’, hurrying by as quickly as
they can. But between the banner and the clergy come the women, ten of them,
walking in pairs, holding thick lighted candles. They have a tranquillity that
the men lack:
. .. elderly women with faces set in an unworldly gaze, prepared for
death if they are attacked. Two out of the ten are young girls, with pure,
bright faces... The ten women, walking in close formation, are singing and
looking as solemn as though the people round them were crossing themselves,
praying and falling on their knees in repentance. They do not breathe the
cigarette smoke; their ears are deaf to the vile language; the soles of their
feet do not feel how the churchyard has been turned into a
dance-floor.(64)
These ten, walking in the Easter procession, exemplify the women of
Russia who, far more than the men, have through their courage kept alive the
faith during sixty years of persecution, They prove to us that woman in God's
Church is called to be passive, not subordinate, but resolute and creative, as
the Virgin Mary was at the annunciation.
Footnotes
1. A.
Harnack, Die Quellen der sogenannten apostolischen Kirchenordnung (Texte und
Untersuchungen ii,5: Leipzig 1886), pp. 22-4; Eng. tr. by J. Owen,
Sources of the Apostolic Canons (London 1895), pp. 19-21.
2. A.
Harnack, op. cit., p. 28; Eng. tr., p. 25.
3.
Nomocanon i, 37 (ed. G. A. Rallis and M. Potlis, Syntagma i, 81:
priestess is in Greek presbytera).
4.
‘Concerning Women’s Ordination: Letter to an Episcopal Friend’,
in H. Karl Lutge (ed.), Sexuality—Theology—Priesthood (San
Gabriel, n.d.), pp. 12-13.
5. In
the periodical of the Orthodox Church in America, The Orthodox Church,
November 1976, p. 5.
6.
Ap. Const. III, ix, 4 (ed. Funk, p. 201).
7.
Commonitorium Primum ii (3) (P.L. 50, 640).
8.
In the Image and Likeness of God (Crestwood 1974), p. 156.
9.
Commonitorium Primum xxii (27) (P.L. 50, 667).
10.
‘Is the Ordination of Women to the Pastoral Ministry Justifiable?’,
in Lutge, Sexuality—Theology—Priesthood, p. 35.
11.
The Orthodox Church, September 1975, p. 4.
12.
Compare the official commentary of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of
the Faith on its decree Inter insigniores: ‘This brings us to a
fundamental observation: we must not expect the New Testament on its own
to resolve in a clear fashion the question of the possibility of women
acceding to the priesthood’ (The Ordination of Women, CTS Do 494,
p. 8).
13.
See K. Ware and C. Davey, Anglican-Orthodox Dialogue (London 1977), p.
84.
14.
On the Holy Spirit xx (51) (P.G. 32, 160D). Cf John Chrysostom,
Homily xxii, I on Ephesians (P.G. 62, 155).
15.
Homily iv on Ecclesiastes (P.G. 44, 664C-668A; ed. Jaeger-Alexander, pp.
334-8).
16.
The Case against the Ordination of Women (Church Literature Association,
London 1975), p. 6.
17.
On the veiling of virgins ix, 1 (C.C. ii, 1218-19).
18.
Ap. Const. III, vi, 1-2 and III, ix, 4 (ed. Funk, pp. 191, 2(11). Cf.
VIII, xxviii, 6 (p. 530).
19.
Irenaeus, Against the Heresies I, xiii, 2 (ed.-Harvey, i, 116-17). Cf.
Tertullian, De praescr. haer. xli, 5 (C.C. i, 221).
20.
Epiphanius, Panarion XLIX, ii, 2; ii, 5; iii, 2 (ed. Holl, pp. 243-4).
21.
Ibid., LXXIX, i, 7 (ed. Holl, p. 476). Cf. LXXVIII, xxiii, 4 (p. 473), on the
Antidikomariamitae.
22.
Ibid., LXXIX, ii, 3-vii, 4 (pp. 477-82).
23.
‘La femme dans l’Eglise orthodoxe. Vision céleste et
histoire’, in Contacts xxix, 4 (1977), p. 318.
24.
‘The Question of the Ordination of Women’, in The Orthodox Herald,
no. 125-6 (May-June 1975), p. 14.
25.
The Orthodox Church, September 1975, p. 4.
26.
Ap. Const. III, vi, 3 (ed. Funk, p. 191).
27.
Dialogue with Trypho xlii, 1 (ed. Otto, p. 140).
28.
Letter lxiii,14 (ed. Hartel, p. 713).
29.
Homily (xxvii, 4 on John (P.G. 59, 472).
30.
On the treachery of Judas i, 6 (P.G. 49, 380). Cf. Commentary on
Galatians. 4.28 (P.G 61, 663), on the sacrament of baptism: the
words of God are spoken through the priest’ (not by him).
31.
To the Magnesians vi, 1; cf To the Trallians iii, 1; To the
Smyrnaeans viii, 1.
32.
Homily 123 (P.G. 89, 1817C).
33.
Seven Chapters against the Iconoclasts 4 (P.G. 99, 493C). Cf.
Theodore, Letters i, 11 (P.G. 99, 945C).
34.
Cf. Ware and Davey, Anglican-Orthodox Dialogue, p. 74.
35.
On the Holy Spirit xviii (45) (P.G. 32, 149C). Basil is speaking
here about Trinitarian relationships, not about iconography; but in the
disputes of the eighth to ninth centuries his words were applied to the holy
icons (see John of Damascus, On the Holy Icons i, 21: ed. Kotter, p.
108).
36.
‘Concerning Women’s Ordination’, in Lutge,
Sexuality—Theology— Priesthood, pp. 14-15.
37.
‘Women Priests?’ (Holy Cross Orthodox Press, Brookline 1976), pp. 3,
5.
38.
The Orthodox Church, September 1975, p. 4.
39.
‘Priestesses in the Church?’, from God in the Dock, ed. W.
Hooper (Michigan 1970), p. 238 (from an article originally published in 1948).
40. I
take this phrase from the decree Inter insigniores (CTS Do 493, p. 11).
41.
Very occasionally in the Christian tradition, feminine imagery has been applied
to the deity, in particular to the Holy Spirit (see below, note 59). But this
is the exception; all the main symbols ‘given’ to us are masculine.
42.
See, for example, Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis iv, 8 (ed. Staehlin,
p. 275, 21ff.); John Chrysostom, Sermon ii, 2 and iv, l on Genesis
(P.G. 54, 589, 593); Homily xxvi, 2 on 1 Corinthians (P.G.
61, 214-15); Ps.-Gregory of Nyssa, On the Creation of Man (P.G. 44,
276A: ed. Hörner, p. 34, 8ff.); Basil of Seleucia, Oration 2
(P.G. 85, 44A); Procopius of Gaza, On Genesis 2.18 (P.G. 87 (i),
172A).
43.O.
Clément, Questions sur l’homme (Paris 1972), p. 119.
44.
Fr John Meyendorff, in The Orthodox Church, September 1975, p. 4. 45.
See ‘The New Middle Ages’, in The End of Our Time (London
1933), pp. 117-18.
46.
See ‘Un Moine de l’Eglise d’Orient’, Amour sans limites
(Chevetogne 1971), p. 96.
47.
See Questions sur l’homme, pp. 114-21 (brief, but highly
perceptive).
48.
See his important study La femme et le salut du monde. Etude
d’anthropologie chrétienne sur les charismes du femme
(Tournai/Paris 1958) not yet (alas) translated into English, and long since
unobtainable in the French original.
49.
‘La femme dans l’Eglise orthodoxe’, in Contacts xxix, 4
(1977), pp. 303-9.
50.
See the report Orthodox Women: Their Role and Participation in the Orthodox
Church, published by the World Council of Churches: Sub-Unit on Women in
Church and Society (Geneva 1977).
51.
Orthodox Women, p. 50.
52.
See Fr Sergei Hackel, ‘Mother Maria Skobtsova: Deaconess
Manquée?’, in Eastern Churches Review i (1967), pp. 264-6.
53.
This is the view of the Romanian theologian Prof. Nicolae Chitescu: see his
article in the World Council of Churches pamphlet Concerning the Ordination
of Women (Geneva 1964).
54.
See the article by Prof Evangelos Theodorou of Athens University, ‘The
Ministry of Deaconesses in the Greek Orthodox Church’, in Orthodox
Women, pp. 37-43; also Militsa Zernov,’Women’s Ministry in the
Church’, in Eastern Churches Review vii (1975), pp. 34-9.
Prof
Panagiotis Trempelas considers that deaconesses in the early Church
‘received, not just a laying-on of hands (cheirothesia) but a real
ordination (cheirotomia), being placed on a level somewhat lower than
the deacon, but higher than the subdeacon’ (Dogmatiki tis Orthodoxou
Katholikis Ekklisias, vol. iii [Athens 1961], pp. 291-2; Fr. tr. by P.
Dumont, Dogmatique de l’Eglise orthodoxe catholique, vol. iii
[Chevetogne 1968], p. 309).
55.
Orthodox Women, p.50.
56.
Didascalia Apostolorum, ed. R. H. Connolly (Oxford 1929), xxv (p. 88);
cf. Ap. Const. II, xxvi, 5-6 (ed. Funk, p. 105).
57.
‘Les charismes de la femme’, in La nouveauté de
l’Esprit (Spiritualité Orientale, no. 20: Bellefontaine 1977),
pp. 245-8. Cf. La femme et le salut du monde, pp.16, 211.
58.
‘On the Male Character of Christian Priesthood’, in St
Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly xix (1975), pp. 155-6.
59.
On Virginity against the Jews xviii, 10 (ed. Parisot, col. 839). Cf.
also The Gospel according to the Hebrews, in M. R. James, The
Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford 1924), p. 2; The Acts of Thomas 7,
27, 39, 50 (James, op. cit., pp. 368, 376, 384, 388); Gregory of Nyssa,
Commentary on the Song of Songs, Sermons 6 and 15 (ed. Langerbeck, pp.
183, 468); Macarius, Homily xxviii, 4 (ed. Dörries, p. 233), etc.
In the West, ‘Mother language’ is applied to God by Julian of
Norwich. These passages should not be over-emphasized. In Syria after the
middle of the fourth century, references to the Spirit as Mother become very
rare; in the Greek tradition, such references are always exceptional.
60.
See I. Hausherr, Direction spirituelle en Orient autrefois (Orientalia
Christiana Analecta 144: Rome 1955), p. 267.
61.
Athanasius, Life of Antomy 3. In terming Antony ‘father of
monasticism’, one should not forget Syria!
62.
Incidentally she did not favour giving the priesthood to women. See her essay
‘The Ideals of the Ministry of Women’, in Mixed Pastures
(London 1933); cited by V. A. Demant, Why the Christian Priesthood is
Male (2nd edn, Church Literature Association, London 1977), pp. 20-1.
63. I
borrow this phrase from Prof. Christos Yannaras, to whom I owe the ideas in
this paragraph.
64.
Matryona’s House and Other Stories, tr. by M. Glenny (Penguin
Books, Harmondsworth 1975), pp. 106-7.
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