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by C. S. Lewis
from his book Undeceptions
Bles 1971, pp. 192-197
“I should like Balls infinitely better,” said Caroline
Bingley, “if they were carried on in a different manner...lt would surely
be much more rational if conversation instead of dancing made the order of the
day.” “Much more rational, I dare say,” replied her brother,
“but it would not be near so much like a Ball.’’(1) We are told
that the lady was silenced: yet it could be maintained that Jane Austen has not
allowed Bingley to put forward the full strength of his position. He ought to
have replied with a distinguo. In one sense conversation is more
rational for conversation may exercise the reason alone, dancing does not. But
there is nothing irrational in exercising other powers than our reason. On
certain occasions and for certain purposes the real irrationality is with those
who will not do so. The man who would try to break a horse or write a poem or
beget a child by pure syllogizing would be an irrational man; though at the
same time syllogizing is in itself a more rational activity than the activities
demanded by these achievements. It is rational not to reason, or not to limit
oneself to reason, in the wrong place; and the more rational a man is the
better he knows this.
These remarks are not intended as a contribution to the criticism of
Pride and Prejudice. They came into my head when I heard that the Church
of England (2) was being advised to declare women capable of Priests’
Orders. I am, indeed, informed that such a proposal is very unlikely to be
seriously considered by the authorities. To take such a revolutionary step at
the present moment, to cut ourselves off from the Christian past and to widen
the divisions between ourselves and other Churches by establishing an order of
priestesses in our midst, would be an almost wanton degree of imprudence. And
the Church of England herself would be torn in shreds by the operation. My
concern with the proposal is of a more theoretical kind. The question involves
something even deeper than a revolution in order.
I have every respect for those who wish women to be priestesses. I
think they are sincere and pious and sensible people. Indeed, in a way they are
too sensible. That is where my dissent from them resembles Bingley’s
dissent from his sister. I am tempted to say that the proposed arrangement
would make us much more rational “but not near so much like a
Church.”
For at first sight all the rationality (in Caroline Bingley’s
sense) is on the side of the innovators. We are short of priests. We have
discovered in one profession after another that women can do very well all
sorts of things which were once supposed to be in the power of men alone. No
one among those who dislike the proposal is maintaining that women are less
capable than men of piety, zeal, learning and whatever else seems necessary for
the pastoral office. What, then, except prejudice begotten by tradition,
forbids us to draw on the huge reserves which could pour into the priesthood if
women were here, as in so many other professions, put on the same footing as
men? And against this flood of common sense, the opposers (many of them women)
can produce at first nothing but an inarticulate distaste, a sense of
discomfort which they themselves find it hard to analyze.
That this reaction does not spring from any contempt for women is, I
think, plain from history. The Middle Ages carried their reverence for one
Woman to a point at which the charge could be plausibly made that the Blessed
Virgin became in their eyes almost “a fourth person of the Trinity.”
But never, so far as I know, in all those ages was anything remotely resembling
a sacerdotal office attributed to her. All salvation depends on the decision
which she made in the words Ecce ancilla (3)she is united in nine months’
inconceivable intimacy with the eternal Word; she stands at the foot of the
cross (4) But she is absent both from the Last Supper (5) and from the descent
of the Spirit at Pentecost.(6)(? Editor says see Acts 1,14) Such is the record
of Scripture. Nor can you daff it aside by saying that local and temporary
conditions condemned women to silence and private life. There were female
preachers. One man had four daughters who all “prophesied,” i.e.,
preached.(7) There were prophetesses even in Old Testament times. Prophetesses,
not priestesses.
At this point the common sensible reformer is apt to ask why, if women
can preach, they cannot do all the rest of a priest’s work. This question
deepens the discomfort of my side. We begin to feel that what really divides us
from our opponents is a difference between the meaning which they and we give
to the word “priest.” The more they speak (and speak truly) about the
competence of women in administration, their tact and sympathy as advisers,
their national talent for “visiting,” the more we feel that the
central thing is being forgotten. To us a priest is primarily a representative,
a double representative, who represents us to God and God to us. Our very eyes
teach us this in church. Sometimes the priest turns his back on us and faces
the East—he speaks to God for us: sometimes he faces us and speaks to us
for God. We have no objection to a woman doing the first: the whole difficulty
is about the second. But why? Why should a woman not in this sense represent
God? Certainly not because she is necessarily, or even probably, less holy or
less charitable or stupider than a man. In that sense she may be as
“God-like” as a man; and a given woman much more so than a given man.
The sense in which she cannot represent God will perhaps be plainer if we look
at the thing the other way round.
Suppose the reformer stops saying that a good woman may be like God and
begins saying that God is like a good woman. Suppose he says that we might just
as well pray to “Our Mother which art in heaven” as to “Our
Father.” Suppose he suggests that the Incarnation might just as well have
taken a female as a male form, and the Second Person of the Trinity be as well
called the Daughter as the Son. Suppose, finally, that the mystical marriage
were reversed, that the Church were the Bridegroom and Christ the Bride. All
this, as it seems to me, is involved in the claim that a woman can represent
God as a priest does.
Now it is surely the case that if all these supposals were ever carried
into effect we should be embarked on a different religion. Goddesses have, of
course, been worshipped: many religions have had priestesses. But they are
religions quite different in character from Christianity. Common sense,
disregarding the discomfort, or even the horror, which the idea of turning all
our theological language into the feminine gender arouses in most Christians,
will ask “Why not? Since God is in fact not a biological being and has
no sex, what can it matter whether we say He or She, Father
or Mother, Son or Daughter?”
But Christians think that God himself has taught us how to speak of
him. To say that it does not matter is to say either that all the masculine
imagery is not inspired, is merely human in origin, or else that, though
inspired, it is quite arbitrary and unessential. And this is surely
intolerable: or, if tolerable, it is an argument not in favour of Christian
priestesses but against Christianity. It is also surely based on a shallow view
of imagery. Without drawing upon religion, we know from our poetical experience
that image and apprehension cleave closer together than common sense is here
prepared to admit; that a child who has been taught to pray to a Mother in
Heaven would have a religious life radically different from that of a Christian
child. And as image and apprehension are in an organic unity, so, for a
Christian, are human body and human soul.
The innovators are really implying that sex is something superficial,
irrelevant to the spiritual life. To say that men and women are equally
eligible for a certain profession is to say that for the purposes of that
profession their sex is irrelevant. We are, within that context, treating both
as neuters. 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. There we are not homogeneous units, but different and complementary
organs of a mystical body. Lady Nunburnholme has claimed that the equality of
men and women is a Christian principle. (8) I do not remember the text in
scripture nor the Fathers, nor Hooker, nor the Prayer Book which asserts it;
but that is not here my point. The point is that unless “equal” means
“interchangeable,” equality makes nothing for the priesthood of
women. And the kind of equality which implies that the equals are
interchangeable (like counters or identical machines) is, among humans, a legal
fiction. It may be useful legal fiction. But in church we turn our back on
fictions. One of the ends for which sex was created was to symbolize to us the
hidden things of God. One of the functions of human marriage is to express the
nature of the union between Christ and the Church. We have no authority to take
the living and semitive figures which God has painted on the canvas of our
nature and shift them about as if they were mere geometrical figures.
This is what common sense will call “mystical.” Exactly. The
Church claims to be the bearer of a revelation. If that claim is false then we
want not to make priestesses but to abolish priests. If it is true, then we
should expect to find in the Church an element which unbelievers will call
irrational and which believers will call supra-rational. There ought to be
something in it opaque to our reason though not contrary to it—as the
facts of sex and sense on the natural level are opaque. And that is the real
issue. The Church of England can remain a church only if she retains this
opaque element. If we abandon that, if we retain only what can be justified by
standards of prudence and convenience at the bar of enlightened common sense,
then we exchange revelation for that old wraith Natural Religion.
It is painful, being a man, to have to assert the privilege, or the
burden, which Christianity lays upon my own sex. I am crushingly aware how
inadequate most of us are, in our actual and historical individualities, to
fill the place prepared for us. But it is an old saying in the army that you
salute the uniform not the wearer. Only one wearing the masculine uniform
can (provisionally, and till the Parousia) (9) represent the Lord to the
Church: for we are all, corporately and individually, feminine to him. We men
may often make very bad priests. That is because we are insufficiently
masculine. It is no cure to call in those who are not masculine at all. A given
man may make a very bad husband; you cannot mend matters by trying to reverse
the roles. He may make a bad male partner in a dance. The cure for that is that
men should more diligently attend dancing classes; not that the ballroom should
henceforward ignore distinctions of sex and treat all dancers as neuter. That
would, of course, be eminently sensible, civilized, and enlightened, but, once
more, “not near so much like a Ball.”
And this parallel between the Church and the Ball is not so fanciful as
some would think. The Church ought to be more like a Ball than it is like a
factory or a political party. Or, to speak more strictly, they are at the
circumference and the Church at the Centre and the Ball comes in between. The
factory and the political party are artificial creations—"a breath can
make them as a breath has made." In them we are not dealing with human beings
in their concrete entirety—only with “hands” or voters. I am not
of course using “artificial” in any derogatory sense. Such
artifices are necessary: but because they are our artifices we are free to
shuffle, scrap and experiment as we please. But the Ball exists to stylize
something which is natural and which concerns human beings in their
entirety—namely, courtship. We cannot shuffle or tamper so much. With the
Church, we are farther in: for there we are dealing with male and female not
merely as facts of nature but as the live and awful shadows of realities
utterly beyond our control and largely beyond our direct knowledge. Or rather,
we are not dealing with them but (as we shall soon learn if we meddle) they are
dealing with us.
Footnotes
1 Pride and Prejudice, ch. I1.
2 Called the Episcopal Church in the United States
3 After being told by the angel Gabriel that she has found favor with
God and that she should bear the Christ Child, the Virgin exclaims “Behold
the handmaid of the Lord” (Luke 1:38). The Magnificat follows in
verses 46-55.
4 Matthew 27:55-ó; Mark 15:40-1; Luke 23:49; John 19:25.
5 Matthew 26:26; Mark 14:22; Luke 22:19.
6 Acts 2:1 et seq. ‘Acts 21:9.
8 Lady Marjorie Nunburnholme, “A Petition to the Lambeth
Conference,” Time and Tide (lOJuly 1948) v. 29,
9 The future return of Christ in glory to judge the living and the
dead.
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