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Michael Novak
Published in First Things 32 (April 1993): 25-32
When Dr. George Carey, the Archbishop of Canterbury, visited Pope John
Paul II in May 1992, the two church leaders discussed the probable future
ordination of women priests in the Anglican Church. That, the Pope said,
"touched on the very nature of the sacrament of holy orders." A Vatican
spokesman said later that "the Catholic Church, for fundamental theological
reasons, does not believe it has the right to authorize such ordination."
For fundamental theological reasons. One wonders what these
reasons are. Apart from a splendid essay ("Priestesses in the Church?") by C.
S. Lewis, one scarcely ever encounters a theological argument against
the proposition that women should be ordained priests. One hears about
"tradition," and about the "example" of Jesus Christ- these are solid reasons,
but not wholly persuasive. The inquiring mind is restless until it comes to
understand the theological reasons why Jesus did as He did, and why the
tradition is as it is.
In advanced Western societies, the Catholic tradition of excluding women
from the priesthood has come (quite suddenly) to seem prima facie unjust. This
is doubtless because of the intellectual shift in our thinking from "natural
law" to "natural rights." In natural law thinking, natural differences between
males and females ("natural" both in the biological-neurological and in the
cultural-symbolic dimension) offered sufficient reason for accepting a
differentiation of functions and roles. For centuries, the prevalence of
organic, role-differentiated thinking allowed the traditional practice of
excluding women from the priesthood to seem fitting and right. In the light of
doctrines of "natural rights," by contrast, according to which equal rights
inhere in all persons qua persons, this exclusion has come to seem arbitrary,
and in the end unjust.
There is, then, much more involved in the question of whether women can
be priests than ecclesiastical practice. At stake is a profound transformation
in the Catholic intellectual tradition, nothing less than a "transvaluation of
values," a fundamentally new and different arrangement of the intellectual
field in which the concept of justice is located. In the tradition, justice is
to be found in the field specified by, among other things, love, the
sacramental order, the common good, communion, and justification by faith. In
the projected new order, it is located in the field of affirmative action.
Obviously, profound implications for religion in society follow. If the
Catholic tradition of selecting only males should be continued, the Catholic
Church will seem to be at fundamental odds with the culture in which it is now
implanted, and conversely, if women are admitted to the priesthood, the
Catholic Church will have adapted itself to the practices of contemporary
Western culture.
At certain times in history, fidelity to the true faith has required of
the Church that it become a counterculture, a scandalum, to contemporary
culture. At other times, adaptation to the existing culture has been both a
sign and an instrument of a deeper penetration into the truth of the Gospels.
Naturally such choices of direction have always carried weighty consequences.
At present, the arguments for and against ordaining women are formally
unequal. The argument for women priests is clear, logical, well-stated,
and in accord with at least certain contemporary Western sensibilities, whereas
the argument for reserving the priesthood to males is still shrouded in
tradition, accepted habits of thought, and instinct. For centuries-indeed until
the last two decades-practically everyone, females and males alike, took the
traditional position for granted, understood it preconsciously, accepted
its plausibility, felt its legitimacy in their bones. The issue did not even
arise, for example, at the Second Vatican Council (1961-65) or, barely so, in
the century of theological research and ressourcement that preceded it.
We have nevertheless to consider that this long tradition might have
been insufficiently developed and that, in the fullness of time, a true and
wholly acceptable "development of doctrine" is now rising to the surface,
revealing a dimension of Gospel truth to which our ancestors were blind. In
many other matters there can be no doubt that the fullness of Catholic truth as
it is understood and theologically articulated today goes far beyond the
propositional clarity and articulation of Christians in earlier centuries. God
does continue to lead and to guide His Church by the path of theological
debate, reflection, and intellectual inquiry. He did so regarding various
doctrines bearing on the role of one woman, the Mother of God, to name but one
example, as in the doctrines of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption.
And because the theological reasons for the reservation of the Catholic
priesthood to males have lain dormant and unarticulated over many centuries,
and those who disagree with the Church's tradition have been tempted to mock,
simple filial piety would require them precisely to marshal the best possible
argument on behalf of that tradition. They should do so in order to save the
honor and authority of the Church by showing why what they no longer accept was
for so long almost universally taken to be sensible. On the other hand, those
who accept the present tradition of the Church as normative are required by a
similar piety to give an account of their reasons for holding to so broadly
unpopular a position.
Moreover, both those who accept and those who are led to reject the
traditional teaching would surely benefit from weighing a fully articulated
theological argument that puts into words what our predecessors in the faith
found true in that teaching. It is after all essential for one who rejects to
understand clearly what he is rejecting, with its whole range of intellectual
consequences. For the Catholic faith is (even if its moral teaching is not) a
"seamless garment." To grasp clearly the consequences of tearing a piece out of
it is crucial for any who cherish its integrity. "Tradition is the democracy of
the dead," Chesterton once wrote. We owe it to the faith of those who have
handed it on to us to treat it justly, even though today we grope for
contemporary words to express what our ancestors felt in their bones.
I
To begin with, one thing needs to be stipulated as certain: women have
been great preachers of the Word; doctors of the Church; ministers to the poor,
the sick, and the needy; high ecclesial authorities such as abbesses,
foundresses, and leaders of worldwide institutions; and exemplars of a
Christlike way of life. In them, Christ has lived and moved and had his being.
If the question is, "Can women be exemplary and saintly ministers of the
Gospel?" the answer is unambiguously yes. We each know many women who can
perform all the purely ministerial functions of the Gospel and the church
community as well as, in many cases better than, males. Within the Catholic
tradition itself, one thinks of St. Catherine of Siena, St. Teresa of Avila,
and many others, preeminently the Mother of God herself, "Mediatrix of all
Graces" as Catholics have long called her.
Outside the Catholic tradition, among those Christian communities that
reject "priestcraft" and the liturgical, representative, mediating role of the
Catholic priesthood, the question of women ministers has been, on the whole,
easy to answer. No theological reason impeded them (or at least many of
them) from including women as full-fledged ministers, although longstanding
custom, habit, and tradition (in that sense) may have for a time led to
hesitation. If such reasons of custom, habit, and "tradition" were for
Catholics the only considerations, the question would be ultimately reducible
to one of "the courage to change."
Again, since many contemporary peoples outside the advanced Western
societies have in fact expressed serious cultural reasons for resisting such
change, Catholic authority might for reasons of universal good order accede to
their sensibilities rather than to those of the advanced Western cultures. But
these also would ultimately be reasons of prudence, rather than of fundamental
theology.
With C. S. Lewis, we must freely concede that God could have done things
quite differently. We modern Westerners might surely have done things
differently, and in a more "just" fashion than the tradition we are privileged
to inherit. Certain reasons might even be adduced as to why we should from now
on. The most extreme feminists have argued, for example, that the entire
tradition of Christianity is patriarchal, and needs to be reformulated. The
less extreme have merely argued that the Catholic tradition, like all things
human, is flawed, and needs to be reformed so as to bring it closer to being
the Kingdom of God on earth.
But this is precisely what is at issue: would the selection of women
priests be a true-or false-development of doctrine? Moreover, the feminist
argument here can be turned back on its makers, as Fr. Walter Ong, S.J., makes
clear in his study of the masculine and feminine connotations of language,
Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness. There are
profound "feminizing" tendencies in Christianity, he reminds us, so efficacious
that in some cultures males are driven away from participation. The
counterbalance to these feminizing tendencies is, Ong argues, a robust
masculine symbolism at certain crucial points. This counterbalance is essential
both to Christian truth and to psychic equilibrium.
Some feminists further claim that they are made to "feel left out" by
what they claim is the tradition's "noninclusive language." But as Paul
Mankowski, S.J., has pointed out in the December 1992 issue of Crisis,
that claim is based on an elemental linguistic error. That certain words have
more than one sense, covering varying ranges of cases, is true of all languages
and of the nature of language itself, if not, indeed, of the workings of the
human mind. The Latin word homo may be used of a male alone (as in "Ecce
homo") or by contrast in a way that includes vir (male), mulier
(woman), infans (infant), puer (boy), and puella (girl).
Intelligent people ought to be able to follow basic laws of language without
artificial crutches, and to judge from context how broad a range of
applications is intended, without turning linguistic somersaults.
Again, some who favor women's ordination do so on grounds of merit.
Women, they rightly say, are at least as capable as, and many women are
superior to, males in the qualities required of good priests. But it is simply
bad theology to hold that the priesthood, a gift of God, is to be won by
merit.
In a similar vein, others hold that it is unjust to bar women
from ordination. Usually, those who offer this objection lay the blame for the
injustice at the feet of "the male hierarchy" of the Church, particularly in
"the all-male Vatican," rather than at the feet of God. But this is something
of a screen. The question is whether the Church has the authority, the right,
to break the pattern established by Christ, who called as His apostles neither
the greatest and most capable of all Christians in the qualities necessary for
the work of the priesthood, nor His Mother, nor any other of the wholly
admirable saints and models among the women who accepted Him as their Lord and
Savior.
One might, to be sure, initially sympathize with a woman for whom the
constant reiteration of language about God only in masculine forms comes to
seem a bit annoying, even distancing-especially in view of the way that
everyday language, even in secular contexts, tends to lean on masculine forms
when feminine forms would be at least as legitimate. This point gains further
force from the observation that, after all, being Spirit, God has no gender and
is properly spoken of neither as male nor as female. So why, it might be
argued, when we have begun to be far more careful in secular language, should
religious language about God be persistently masculine?
Two observations tell against this line of reasoning. First, the
language of Scripture and Tradition (in the full, authoritative sense, as
expressed for example in the canonical creeds) is quite pronounced in its
selection of masculine forms for God. This suggests that God's self- revelation
in history has been deliberate and remains significant. Second, there is an
anomaly here. On the one hand, feminists wish to assert that whether a priest
is male or female makes no difference; gender is simply irrelevant. But if this
is so, then no one should be bothered by the fact that priests are male; what
matters is the priesthood, not the gender. Yet what is really determinative in
the complaint about the tradition of male priests is that gender does
make a difference, and that respect for the principle of equality demands
both female and male priests. In logic, the principle of equality is
inherently expansive: the demand for it cannot be met until the number of
female priests is proportionate to the number of females in the believing
community.
Yet these two principles-the interchangeability of gender in the
priestly role and equal representation of the sexes-have no standing either in
Scripture or in the Catholic tradition. There is no evidence that in His
dealings with humans God acts by an egalitarian principle. Among all humans, He
singled out the people of Israel. In every generation, He "elects" His own.
God's choice has never been transparently based upon equal merit (or any merit
at all). On the contrary, it induces to wonder and even fear; its workings are
mysterious. If this is true of our salvation, why should it be surprising
regarding the priesthood?
Again, one hears that Jesus chose only men as His Apostles in order not
to shock the people of his time. Since He did not hesitate to shock them in
many other matters-calling the bread of the last supper His body, for
example-this explanation sounds more bourgeois than biblical. Jesus never
shrank from shocking the conventional wisdom, priestly classes, customs,
traditions, or even common sense of His time. If today it shocks our own
generation of "enlightened" Westerners that Jesus did not choose women
to become priests, why would He have been afraid to shock His generation
by choosing women priests?
Nonetheless, a former U.S. Congressman, a wise leader and devout
Catholic, said to me as he listened to my views, "Even if you are correct, what
you say will not be credible. In a day when women fill every position held
formerly by men, no one will accept the claim that women can't be priests. It's
just not credible." The heart of the matter, then, is that the "advanced"
culture of our age thinks of itself as normative.
The pressure of today's culture is immense, since many persons do not
wish to sit still for theological argument. Nonetheless, the only serious
question concerns fundamental theology, not the pressures of contemporary
culture. Those who really believe that the Catholic tradition is not credible
will find many available alternatives close at hand. If the Catholic Church
abandons its tradition because of social pressure, and without sound
theological reasons, why should it be credible at all? Would it not then simply
show itself to be yet another human institution subject to human power and
passively conforming to the spirit of the age?
II
Thus there is no escaping the need for solid theological reasons; and so
the first question that must be faced is the theology of the Catholic
priesthood. To what extent is the Catholic priest more than a minister
of the Gospel, a preacher of the Word, a minister to the poor and the weak and
the vulnerable, and a leader of the local community at prayer?
The answer to this question has three parts. First, the Catholic priest
has, in addition to these ministerial duties, a representative, liturgical
role. In Catholic worship, the priest stands as a representative of Jesus
Christ, head of the community and bridegroom of His bride, the Church. He
stands as a representative figure in the ancient order of priests descending
from Melchizedek. His being is ontologically marked with the priesthood
forever. To be a priest is to be marked-chosen, gifted, indelibly altered-by
God. This is the way in which the Catholic priesthood has been understood from
the beginning.
By contrast, most of the other world religions, in Christ's time as in
ours, have orders of the priesthood that include priestesses. Until now the
Catholic Church, like Orthodox Judaism, has not. Why not? The fact is clear:
the selected representative of the community for the worship- prayer of the
people has been unmistakeably and deliberately differentiated by gender. And
the ground of this selection has been canonically and with all due solemnity
codified as a gift given solely to (relatively few) males.
Second, the maleness of the priesthood is consistent with the metaphors
of gender through which, predominantly, God has chosen to reveal Himself both
in the Scriptures and in the long tradition of theological reflection. With
respect to the doctrine of the Trinity, Jesus Christ spoke of Himself as the
Son of God and taught us to pray "Our Father." He said that He was "sent by the
Father," Who would afterwards send also "the Holy Spirit." Gender
differentiation seems essential to the metaphor of the "generation" of the
Persons of the Trinity. Poor as human metaphors must be when used of God,
gender differentiation is clearly signaled in such frequently employed terms as
"Father" and "Son." Are we to hold that such symbols have no significance in
revealing the nature of God? That they are required merely for transient
reasons?
Similarly, gender differentiation seems crucial to the Christmas story
that reveals the mystery of God's becoming flesh, the Incarnation. One cannot
easily imagine in the Christmas narrative the First Person of the Trinity being
represented as "God the Mother," inseminated by a human male. It is mystery
enough that a human female, Mary, "conceived of the Holy Spirit," one with the
Father, should bear a human-divine Son. But in this case the humanness of the
Son is given concrete meaning. The Son of God is born from the womb of a human
mother, nursed by her, brought up by her as other sons are brought up by their
mothers. In this respect, the Catholic priest, male as he has always been, is
an effortlessly symbolic representative of "the Son of God," bringing before
His Father His bride, the Catholic people. Gender differentiation is essential
to such a role, and the gender of the priest is symbolically consistent with
that differentiation.
This is no conclusive argument, only an argument from what is "fitting."
It does bring to light, though, why previous ages found the selection of the
male so effortlessly plausible.
Finally, one can easily imagine that God in becoming "man" (in the
gender-neutral term represented in the Nicene Creed's "et homo factus
est") could have been sent as "the Only-begotten Daughter." But there seem
also to have been weighty reasons why the Incarnation was not realized through
a female Messiah but through a male. In becoming flesh, God could not simply
appear as "a person." He had to accept the limits imposed by gender
differentiation. He could have come in female flesh, as Daughter, but He did
not; He chose to come in male flesh, as Son. To be sure, mystery surrounds this
choice, as it does all human conceptions of and language about God's actions in
history. This mystery offers fertile, and no doubt fruitful, grounds for
wonder, awe, and meditation. But there can be no doubt about the fact.
Christian faith was by God's deliberate will expressed in the language of
gender differentiation and, specifically, in the self-revelation of God as
Father and God as Son. Together with the Holy Spirit, these two are
three-in-one, a communion of three distinct Persons.
The underlying point is that the selection of males for the priesthood
underlines the importance God assigned in His self-revelation to gender
differentiation, the rules of concrete flesh, and the conditions of human
history. God, we are told, "humbled Himself, becoming man." He accepted the
conditions of this, His concrete and much-loved creation. He could have
come as Spirit, as an Angel summoning legions of angels to His side. He could
have overawed humanity by coming in irresistible power, splendor, and majesty.
Instead, He "became one of us." This entailed assuming human flesh, with all
its differentiation and limits-in short, it entailed a choice between becoming
male or female. There was no halfway position.
In sum, the Catholic priest is a representative figure selected
according to the conditions of embodied, enfleshed persons in concrete human
history. The choice was made from all eternity. The selection of males alone as
Catholic priests is a sign (a sacrament, bearing grace) of several important
revelations about God: about the Trinity, about the Incarnation, about the
relation of Christ and His people, and about the importance of gender
differentiation.
"If men were angels," James Madison once wrote, "no government would be
necessary." If men were angels, priests would not need to be (even could not
be) males. But under the conditions of human flesh and actual history, it is a
more accurate sign of the interior life of the Trinity, of the Incarnation, and
of the relation of Christ to His people if the priest is clearly differentiated
and selected as a male rather than as a female. Matter is the principle of
individuation, and an emphasis on flesh safeguards respect for human
individuality, even as it differentiates humans from angels. The priest is male
because gender differentiation is significant to the self-revelation of God in
history.
III
In order for us to come to know God, we must go by the path of our own
being and knowing. We do not see God. Our knowledge of Him is dark and
indirect, even when we accept His Word in Christ. It is knowledge by faith, not
by direct vision. Thus, we have to grope our way toward things we cannot see,
aware that we see "as in a glass darkly."
Let us, then, by a leap of imagination, put ourselves in the place of
God before He had created humans. He did not have to make us sexed. God
has no sex. Neither, as we said, do angels. Us He made into two distinct sexes.
In this sense, God knew "in advance" that He would send His Son to redeem us,
as one of us, embodied in male flesh. God had sexual differentiation in His
mind at the very foundation of the history of salvation. "Male and female He
made them," it says right at the head of the Book. To redeem us, He would send
His only-begotten Son, born of a woman, Mary, and this Son would teach humans
to pray "Our Father." Thus sex differentiation is not simply a trivial detail,
to be discarded or altered without concern for consequences; it is essential to
the story of human salvation. Fundamental. Foundational.
Moreover, the two sexes cannot be reversed without entirely altering the
story of salvation. The conception of the Savior could not have happened by the
instrumentality of a divine mother. To grasp that much requires no special gift
for narrative. One cannot picture a human father (Joseph) conceiving the
Man-God by a divine mother. Does the infant just suddenly appear in the straw?
In what way is it human? In the story of Bethlehem, the humanity of Jesus is
vitiated if Joseph is imagined to be the generator and God the mother.
(Besides, Christianity without Mary would have had an impoverished history, so
much so that apart from her its narrative is virtually inconceivable.)
Hypothetically, of course, one can easily imagine that in sending us a
Savior, God could have had Mary bear a daughter. The Messiah could have been a
woman. Why not? Joan of Arc captured the imagination not only of France but of
the world. But then, sed contra, a woman Messiah preaching meekness and
peaceableness would have sounded no new note. The long vulnerability of woman
in pregnancy and childbearing, as well as a neurological difference in hormonal
aggression, would have made such a claim seem but ordinary, self-serving, and
typical of women. Thus, such a Messiah would not have launched any
"transvaluation of values." Such a Messiah would have demanded, in effect, that
in order to become Christians, males had to become like females.
By contrast, it was, and is, far more startling for a male Messiah to
challenge the warrior-male and to insinuate such ideas as gentleness,
compassion, and peace into the cultural patrimony of males. Males today would
behave quite differently had they not been tutored for nineteen centuries by
the image of the gentle, suffering Man-God. A religion whose Messiah was female
would have nourished a culture far different from that of the Christian
cultures we have known. That it would have been a better culture, with a more
powerful impact on males, is, to say the least, not obvious.
Some might object that a culture whose God taught humans to pray the
"Our Mother," and whose Messiah appeared as a daughter rather than as a son,
would be a kinder, gentler religion than Christianity has been. Maybe. But it
is at least odd that some of the feminists who make that case at the same time
have recourse to the imaginary history of a matriarchal era during which women
were warriors, fiercer than males. Others wish to hold the contradictory
proposition that to ascribe characteristics such as "warlike" or "gentle" to
either sex is without foundation. However one wishes to describe the demeanor
of women in the realm of history and culture, it is futile to deny that since
time immemorial males prided themselves on being warriors and conquerors. Among
almost all the peoples that Christianity first reached, women were treated as
handmaidens, servants, and even, in some cases, slaves.
The impact of Christian belief and sacramental practice on such peoples,
working slowly like yeast in dough, was both to ennoble the female to equal
status before God and to gentle the male. For just such reasons, some
anti-Christians slandered Christianity as "a religion for slaves,"
"effeminate," and "emasculating." Later writers as diverse as "the genealogist"
Friedrich Nietzsche and the devout Catholic Alessandro Manzoni wrote that the
effect of Christianity on the Roman legionaries was to "feminize" them. Benito
Mussolini proscribed the second-person feminine usage lei, which he
interpreted as an anti-fascist sign of effeminacy, and insisted on voi
as the fascist, manly usage. (Thus the simple locution lei became an act
of political protest.) Moreover, the culture of fascism explicitly mocked the
"effeminacy" of the West, which it attributed to Christian influence. It aimed
to restore the hard, pitiless, and willful "masculine" spirit of the
pre-Christian warrior peoples of Europe. In fascism, the world saw a return to
the ideal of the male without the gentleness taught by Jesus Christ.
Such reflections give one pause before the story of sex differentiation
in the unfolding of modernity. The role of the God-Man, the male Messiah, is
pivotal in that transvaluation. Henry Adams in The Virgin and the Dynamo
explores this process by means of sustained reflection on the impact of Mary,
the Mother of God, on the Western imagination-Catholic as distinct from
Protestant. Denis de Rougement in Love in the Western World and C. S.
Lewis in The Allegory of Love have described the cultural transformation
evoked in the West by the myth of romantic love and the change in male-female
relations that it wrought-compared to which, Lewis writes, the Protestant
Reformation was as a ripple in the ocean.
The cultural significance of sexual differentiation is vastly deeper
than our present generation of feminists has yet to imagine. One tampers with
matters of such profundity at civilization's peril. If someone had predicted,
for example, that following the advent of feminist practices and standards in
American society, violence, especially among males, would by no means decrease,
that person would have been correct.
Indeed, to bring theological reflection to bear on the role of sex
differentiation in transforming pagan into Christian cultures (and back again)
would require an immense work now barely begun. One would have to examine
rigorously and in detail the mythology of male and female implicit in radical
feminist writers. The widely accepted notion today that any position of
responsibility or field of action open to males is also by right and justice to
be open to females might at first seem highly plausible. And yet such a notion
ultimately rests on rejecting the transvaluation effected by the Christian
faith.
For it was Christian faith that first taught the male warrior a code of
courtesy, compassion, and charity, whose first expression was Christian
chivalry, whose later expression was the ideal of the Christian gentleman, and
whose underlying ideal has been the equality of women and men in baptism, in
faith, and in the promises of God. The Christian ideal of equality before God
not only did not erase sexual differentiation, but, on the contrary, rested
upon that reality as its foundation.
Before God, there is neither male nor female, yet male and female for
His inscrutable and unchangeable purposes He made them. And through this
separation of the sexes He parted the veils of mystery that necessarily mask
His essence, in order to offer us such insight into His inner life as He
thought would best serve us: that we should pray to Him as "Our Father," and
receive His Son into our mouths and hearts and minds, and worship Him as
"Father, Son, and Holy Spirit," three-in-one.
Made in His image as we are, it is through our complementarity as male
and female that we piece together such fragments of His reality as we are
vouchsafed to come to know. Christian marriage itself, mirrored in the
liturgical worship of His people, gives witness to the intimate and profound
role of sexual differentiation in our knowledge of, and union with, God. A male
and a female, united through the sacrament of marriage with the Triune God,
embody a human communion of persons mirroring the divine.
One cannot, in short, yank the thread of sexual differentiation from the
Christian faith without unraveling the whole. A weakening of the integrity of
the mysteries of the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Church, Christian marriage
and family life, and much else besides, must inevitably follow.
IV
Theologically, one of the most difficult of insights necessary for those
aspiring to be Christians concerns the difference between Christianity and
spiritual religion. Converted at first from the worldly experience of carnal
pleasures and material interests, the newly aspiring Christian faces an almost
insuperable temptation to imagine that to be a Christian is to reject both the
things of this world and the temptations of the flesh in order to flee to the
things of the spirit. Here the aspiring Christian is on treacherous ground.
For to be converted from this world and the flesh is not yet to find
God; there remains a third temptation, that of the "pride of spirit." Indeed,
the angels themselves, being neither of this world nor of the flesh, are
according to the Scriptures submitted to this formidable third test-as are all
the saints. Being "beyond" the flesh and the attractions of this world, the
person to be tried in this way imagines himself, or herself, to be standing in
a purer realm. Being neither male nor female, he or she rejoices in the potency
of unencumbered intellect and will, the power of being pure spirit. Here there
are no embodied, sexually differentiated persons, only agents of pure
understanding and pure willing. All is calm. All is serene. One has only to
will and it is done. Here there is no recalcitrance of history, no hazard of
contingency or accident, no weakness of the flesh nor torpor of the body. She
(or he) gains self-esteem by defining her being by her willing. "I will,
therefore I am." Here many of the mighty fall.
Humans too are susceptible to this temptation of the spirit. A common
name for it, noted above, is "pride of spirit," but the underlying form of the
disease, among humans, has sometimes been called "angelism" by theologians, and
"gnosticism" by historians. The essence of angelism is to shuck off from one's
self-understanding the reality of embodiment in the flesh, so as to imagine
oneself a pure spirit, neither male nor female, without carnal appendages,
desires, or limitations. "What the will desires, the will desires," Woody Allen
would have said, had Woody Allen been an angel without a carnal heart. Unmoved
by temptations of the flesh, such a strong spirit would rejoice in the power of
the pure will. In addition, angelism entails pride in a raised consciousness,
beyond the mere habits, customs, and common sense of the less sophisticated.
Angelism, or gnosticism, is the realm of the disembodied person of raised
consciousness and unresisted will.
For human beings, of course, angelism is a realm only of pretense and
self-delusion. Moreover, those "angelists" (or "personists") who imagine that
the stage of consciousness in which they dwell is higher, more enlightened,
more just and more spiritual than that of historical Christianity, which in
their view has some catching up to do, have not yet grasped one fundamental
premise of Christianity. To put the point another way: they have not yet
overcome one stumbling block, one scandalum. They do not see that
Christianity is a sacramental religion, that is, a religion of the flesh.
Immemorially, it is true, Christian pastors have spoken of "the
salvation of souls," but that was only shorthand for saying that they are
working sub specie aeternitatis, in the light of eternity, and not by
the standards of this world. And in the light of eternity, Christianity
promises the resurrection of the body. (In this sense, there will be, in
the Kingdom of Heaven, male and female, fired alike by the love and light of
God.) Each of the Christian sacraments addresses the body as much as the soul:
cool water on the head of the baptized; oils for the ill; the appearances of
bread and wine in the eating and drinking of the Eucharist; human words and
signs of absolution in penance; chrism and (once upon a time) a slap on the
cheek at confirmation; the laying on of hands at ordination; and both stated
vows and the consummated union of lovemaking in holy matrimony. Christianity is
a religion neither for angels nor for disembodied persons. It is a religion for
males and for females, for embodied persons, for creatures of body and spirit,
for waist-expanding and graying (or balding) seekers after truth and love and
God, such as we.
The Christian sacraments, for example, are not valid unless both
form and matter are present as prescribed. The tendency to spiritualize
Christianity is nonetheless pervasive-to make it like so many other religions,
to attune it to the angelism that in every generation attracts so many of the
most intelligent and sensitive souls. In opposition to those who would wish a
purely spiritual religion, G. K. Chesterton once defined Catholicism in
shocking terms resonant with the sacramental sense of God's presence in His
creation: Catholicism, the very fleshly G. K. said, is a thick steak, a glass
of stout, and a good cigar.
A religion committed to the flesh is at least as lowly as a smoked
cigar. It is for commoners as much as (even more than) aristocrats and is also,
alas, irremediably vulgar. Catholicism sometimes seems positively weighted down
by the flesh, as on a too-hot day, beneath the droning of a too-poor sermon, in
a too-crowded church filled with listless, distracted, bored fellow
participants. Weary with having tried to make things constantly better,
experienced Catholics have learned to employ such experiences as epiphanies of
grace, like the sacraments themselves, reflecting that here too Christ is
present, emptying himself, making himself disponible, redeeming our heavy
humanity. At the heart of Christianity lie the sinner and the humdrum
mediocrity of daily life. The neighbor we are called upon to love is not the
rosy abstraction, humankind, but exactly those neighbors who get on our
nerves-and indeed precisely when they do so. Christianity is not a religion of
escape. It commands the acceptance of the banal, the boring, and the
repetitive-on the grounds that these especially are vehicles of grace, even
though often disdained and contemned as was the Messiah in Isaiah 53. These
especially are as surely the bearers of the life of grace as are, for the human
body, the repetitive beating of the human heart and the steady circulation of
the blood. Such boring realities are always undervalued until their rhythms
threaten to come to a halt-when suddenly we glimpse how precious they are, and
how miraculous each strong, steady beat of the weakening heart actually is.
Because it is a religion of the flesh, Catholicism sees signs of the
Creator in all the things He has created. Like a lover, one sees bursts of His
glory in the morning sun and the crisp air, in the bellowing fury of a storm
and in a caterpillar hunching himself on his slow course up the length of a
bending leaf. Each angle and idiosyncrasy of concrete things is like a mystery
to be read and wondered at. Why are there caterpillars? Why so many species of
indescribably poignant roses? Why is there anything at all?
It is in this same sacramental vein that the experienced Catholic
contemplates the mystery of the priesthood. If you do not see the priesthood as
a mystery, you do not understand. The most wonderful miracle in the world
occurs at the priest's canonical bidding: The Son of Man, who already did a
wondrous deed in assuming male flesh, now becomes again male flesh and blood
under the appearances of bread and wine. The humility of God, and His love for
our presence, surpasses understanding. That is the true mystery, of which the
role of the priest is but an instrumental and sacramental part. To the extent
that we hunger for the Eucharist, food for the soul as for body, we honor the
priest as its bearer. Vessel of clay, yet vessel carrying God to us.
Why is the priest male? It figures. It fits. The priest's maleness is a
reminder of the central role played in our salvation by the sacramentality of
human flesh-not flesh-in-general, but male flesh. "This is my body," he says in
the place of Christ, the male Christ. "This is my blood." It is not an angel we
eat and drink, not spirit, not a (disembodied) person: but the male Christ,
body and soul, human and divine person.
The priest's maleness reminds us with Nicea: "Credo in unum Deum,
PATREM omnipotentem.. . ." We believe in the Father almighty, and in Jesus
Christ His only Son, who was conceived of the Holy Spirit by the Virgin Mary,
"et homo factus est." The Word was made flesh, caro (John
1:14)-not "person," not hermaphrodite, and not female, but male. But, a
feminist might object, "By the same logic, Jesus was a carpenter and a Jew, and
that does not mean that all priests must be carpenters and Jews." Except, of
course, that it is not the same logic. For an embodied person, being
either male or female is of the essence of being human; whereas to be Jewish or
Irish, carpenter or professor of logic, is only an accident of culture and
circumstance. That the priest be male is fitting to the essence of Jesus, a
divine Person embodied as a male, a fully human male. One can "see Christ" in
every human being, male or female, but a female cannot represent the male
Christ before the community. Not, at least, without jangling symbols beyond
their meaning, without communicating something essentially different.
In order to believe that Catholic priests may also be female, one has to
believe that sexual differentiation does not illuminate the self- revelation of
God in the doctrines of the Trinity; the Incarnation; the shocking
transvaluation of sex roles in the moral teaching of Jesus; the spousal
relation between Christ and his people; the precisely detailed emphasis of
Christianity on the real flesh (including the resurrection of the flesh); its
opposition to angelism under all its forms; and the exact complementarity (not
interchangeability) of male and female in the mystery of God's self-communion
in matrimony.
The institution of female priestesses would reverberate off-key through
most of the major symbols of God's self-revelation. The beautifully wrought
sexual differentiation of the narrative of Christian faith will have buckled.
And its collapse will have cracked every arch in its theological architecture.
In order to believe that Catholic priests may also be female, one has to
believe, further, that the traditional hierarchy of the Church is not now a
sacramental sign of God's commitment to this people until the last day but,
rather, an unfaithful bearer of errant patriarchy, sexism, and injustice. One
has to believe in some ideal Church of the future, separate from the
"oppressive" Church against which feminists rage. One has to reject the real,
concrete Church of today as sacrament, and to cast it aside as a source of
injustice and alienation, an obstacle to God's grace and an abomination. One
has to see in the Vicar of Christ, stubbornly insisting on fidelity to God's
word, not the presence of Christ but the disfigurement of Christ. Indeed, one
has to see in his claim that maleness is essential to the validity of orders an
impediment to the true sacrament. One has to believe that in the matter
of the sacrament of orders, maleness in the subject signifies nothing of
essential importance, and femaleness in the subject alters no sign essential to
the faith.
One also has to believe that in the authentic form of the
sacrament the intention of Christ, of the orthodox tradition, and of the Church
is now to select females as well as males, and that this selection will have no
bearing on the cultural significance of any other Christian teaching.
It is entirely possible that there might somewhere be a lovely, haunting
religion worshipping a Goddess, cherishing a female messiah, and liturgically
represented by priestesses. But whatever such a religion might be, it will not
be Christianity.
V
To be sure, Christianity is a many-splendored robe. As of November 1992,
twelve of the twenty-eight churches in the Anglican communion have begun
ordaining women priests and, in some cases, consecrating women bishops. The
cultural logic of this choice has not yet been played out. Its full symbolic
implications for key symbols of the faith might take four or five generations
to reveal themselves completely. For a century or two, the church as a whole
might wisely elect to watch and see, and to judge the new practice by its
fruits.
Individuals, of course, have no such horizon. Since each life is short,
we must each entrust our eternal salvation to one choice or the other, without
being able to see the end of the tale. Down one path, orthodox teachings seem
coherent, down the other, a great deal seems up for grabs. That things will go
worse in the feminist churches is a wager, I think, with odds higher than
Pascal's.
Michael Novak, a member of the Editorial Board of First Things,
is Editor-in-Chief of Crisis: A Journal of Lay Catholic Opinion.
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