Sex, Gender and Symbol

From Can Women be Priests? by Paul Lakeland, pp.47-58.

Theology Today Series, General Editor: Edward Yarnold, published by The Mercier Press, Dublin & Cork.
Republished on our website with the necessary permissions.

The tyranny of statistics

Modern man and woman are the same as ever they were, yet they are better understood than their earlier counterparts. We know, for example, that despite Aristotle and Aquinas, it is not true that the female is a deficient or damaged male. The development of the male and female embryos are parallel, with the differentiation organised by the appropriate hormones. Modern biology also provides information about the specific differences between male and female; nothing is more false than to suggest that, biological function apart, the sexes are identical. Even allowing for the undoubted effects of social conditioning into role-acceptance which every child undergoes in his or her upbringing and schooling, and which has been so exhaustively documented in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, this conditioning can only take root so readily because it builds on biological variations. The brains of male and female have considerable differences, and differentiation of brain activities along sex lines has been traced almost certainly to the first few days after birth. Although we are dealing here with the results of experimentation in the most recent years, and must treat the evidence rather circumspectly, it is worth pointing out that Corinne Hutt (in Males and Females, Penguin, 1972) has suggested that the seat of brain-differentiation is traceable to the major organisational organ, the hypothalamus, and that this organ is also the one which controls the servicing of our basic biological needs - eating and drinking, motivation and emotions. The complexity of this organ makes it extremely likely that interaction takes place between its functions.

From a very early age in the life of the embryo, males are more vulnerable to accidents and deficiencies. This pattern once established continues throughout life, and in fact is mirrored in the comparative brevity of the male life-span.

Again, at birth boys are both heavier and longer than girls, and remain larger and stronger throughout life. They also have a number of structural variations (heart-rate, efficiency of protein breakdown, ability to neutralise lactic acids built up as by-products of strenuous activity) which equip them biologically for a more strenuous existence. All this having been said, by comparison with the female, the male is consistently developmentally retarded. In physical maturity the newborn girl is about four weeks in advance of her male counterpart, and this gap widens until approaching adulthood the girl is about two years ahead of the boy. Further, without going into complicated explanations, the sex-differentiation in brains means that (statistically at least) the sexes excel in different skills. Females have better hearing and sense of smell but worse eyesight than males. Males lead in spatio-visual activities, but females are more sensitive to touch and have lower pain-thresholds. Females have been measured to have better verbal intelligence-levels (vocabulary, general knowledge, and so on) while males score better on non-verbal intelligence (assembling figures, arranging blocks, substituting codes).

These statistics (with the limited value that such measurements can have), which it must be stressed are not attributable in the first place to social conditioning but to brain differences, do not offer much encouragement to those who consider that women’s complementarity to man is non-reciprocal or, in Aquinas’s terms, that she is a helpmate only in the work of procreation. One important fact about statistical evidence has to be stressed: statistics produce generalisations which are true in only a strictly limited sense, when accepted as purely statistical norms which as they stand refer accurately to no particular man or woman. Information gathered from observation and investigations is processed into statistics and a mean can be arrived at for a particular point in question. There is then an inevitable tendency for this mean (but perhaps nonexistent) male and female type to tyrannise over the human qualities and differences of the individual men and women who originally provided in their variety the data for these generalisations. Without variations there would be no need for the work of statisticians. Statistics are abstractions from the real activities and skills of individuals, and should not be allowed to escape their scientific confines and become normative for human actions. This applies even when these are distinguished by the seemingly natural division of the sexes.

Some men have better hearing than some women, and some women score higher on non-verbal intelligence-tests than many men. Some men are less than five feet tall, and some women are over six feet. Some women make good administrators, some men good nurses. In their biological identity there is no confusion, but the infinite variety of human nature is made up of interaction between this ‘given’ and the various other variable factors which go to make up the personality. It is a commonplace of modern knowledge that some males are more male than others, and that the degree of what we call femininity, which itself changes according to historical development in fashion and geographical variations in taste, is present in differing degrees in different women. It is a similarly popular piece of knowledge that the male and female affective impulses and emotions exist in a highly individual mixture in each human being. They are constituents of the affective make-up of all human beings, and a sliding-scale could be drawn along which everyone would find his or her place. Of course, most males are predominantly ‘animus’ with elements of ‘anima’, and most females the opposite, but there is a considerable area of overlap. Similarly, whatever moral attitude we may choose to take to it, it is a fact that sexual proclivities also exist along a sliding scale, and that while it may be true that the majority of men and women can only find genuine sexual fulfilment with members of the opposite sex, while only a small minority are restricted to homosexual relationships, there is a considerable zone in between where ambisexuality is, if not a way of life, at least a mode of viewing the world.

Now it is a major element of the argument of this book that role-differentiation in the Church on sex-difference lines has always been motivated by a crudely understood but rigorously drawn line between human beings on the grounds of biological function, a biological function, moreover, which was made determinative for the talents, emotions and theological significance of the individual. At the same time, the profundity of Galatians 3.28 precisely points out that in Christ certain natural classifications of humanity no longer have any meaning. It does not say that there are no men and women, but that the kind of subordinationism and exclusivism in the then contemporary view of male-female roles is unacceptable in the light of the gospel. There is neither Jew nor Greek, but some Jews and some Greeks will reject the gospel as others will accept it. They will accept or reject and play their appropriate part as individuals, not as Jews or Greeks. Similarly, supported by a scientific knowledge that enables us to say that we know better than Paul or Tertullian or Aquinas what sexual differences are, we can say that it is not as male or female that we reject or accept or fulfil our role in the gospel, but as particular men and women, as an individual man or woman in whom the characteristics of male and female have blended to make us the unique creatures that we each are. Our sex determines our biological role, and gives the general bias of the male-female characteristics which go to make up our personalities, but it does not determine our personalities. Our personalities, in other words, are the way in which we as psychological and emotional mixtures of male and female elements have come to terms with our fundamental sexual identity.

The natural follow-up question is to ask ourselves if it is as representatives of some paper statistical norm or as individual personalities that we come before the Lord, and that we play our parts in building up the body of Christ. Obviously it is our whole selves, ‘warts and all’, in our uniqueness and not in our measurable variation from a statistical norm. Such a theory has clear relevance for the debate on women priests, since the strongest arguments adduced in favour of retaining the all-male priesthood are those which point to various aspects of the priestly office which can be said to be symbolically male. These will be considered in detail later, but here we can see how the clearer understanding of the complexity of maleness and femaleness, men and women, which we have tried to arrive at here, complicates such issues. The tyranny of symbol over personality is only a sophistication of the tyranny of the statistical norm.

The theology of sexual differentiation

Even in the Christian dispensation, human beings are members as well as lords of the animal kingdom. Thus, that which is often dismissed as ‘animal’ in our make-up is just as much constitutive of human nature as any other aspect. It distinguishes human beings from hypothetical pure spirits just as clearly as the possession of a highly developed sense of identity and an ability to abstract separate us from the rest of the animal kingdom. The sexual act is one of our points of association with our fellow animals, at least to the extent that it is an act directed towards the continuance of the species. As sex for procreation, it does not derive a significance from the whole of man’s complex human nature. Just as pairing for life in humankind is not simply the mating instinct but a more complex neural activity called love, so the sexual act is not simply the end term of the mating-instinct, but, given human significance, becomes (at its best) the ceremony of the total union of human love, the transformation of an animal act into a celebration of the nature of humanity. It is in the significance of the act that humankind steps outside its animal background into that middle ground between animal and spiritual which we can designate personal, an area peopled not by spirits or by animals but by human beings. Hence, when Eve is given to Adam as ‘a helper like to himself’ she is not given him simply as a helper in the work of procreation. As she is a human being, her involvement in procreation is an involvement of her whole nature, as one aspect of the needs she has as female for the companionship (reciprocated by the male) in the one relationship open to humankind which can be at all levels, bodily and spiritually, complete. Hence, the sex relationship as function (animal) is primarily procreative, while as signification (human) it is primarily sacramental. That is to say, as sacramental it is the celebration of a reality which it both is and signifies, the bond of love which is human fulfilment. Eve is not so much a helpmate to Adam as she is a soul-mate.

As Christians, we believe that this love has its beginning in the source of all love, the Father, and its prime exemplar of total love in Christ. In other words, the process of giving human significance to sexual differentiation is revealed at the same time as a process of giving spiritual significance. Human love is a sharing in the love of the Trinity, and, as the Trinity is least misunderstood by human beings when conceived of as a system of relationships kept in being by the love which creates them and which they express, so human sharing in this love is a partaking of this being-in-relation of God. Sexual differentiation is thus a condition of mirroring the being-in-relation of the Trinity; it is a way for beings of the animal creation to share in the divine life. All this was foreshadowed, it will be remembered, in the story in Genesis 1, where differentiation into male and female was not part of being in God’s image, but was a means to sharing an expression of God’s image. There we concentrated on the aspect of dominion, but a much deeper understanding of mankind’s being made in God’s image is achieved by following up the idea that male and female are the condition for the perfect human expression of being-in-relation.

What would be a mere aping of the life of the Trinity is transformed in the image of the Church as the body of Christ, which in its sacramental life partakes of the life of Christ. The believer’s being-in-relation to Christ is a striving, assisted by grace, to share more fully in that divine life. But the most fully human expression of this sharing in the love of the Father for the Son is in the sexual union given human/spiritual/religious significance by its placing in a context in which its sacramental nature can be demonstrated (cf. Eph 5.21-33). Beside such an exalted understanding of the religious significance of sex differences as we have striven to present here, any crudely operated system of role assignation on the basis of such variations is unacceptable. Since sexual differentiation is in the service of an uniquely reciprocal act (that of sexual union, even seen simply as being in the service of the reproduction of the species), any subordinationism based on this fact is theologically unjustifiable. But beyond all this, is there perhaps a case for saying that the differing sexual types have some symbolic significance in the assignation of role in the life of the Church, and even that such symbolic significance could be normative? Are there roles whose symbolic status as male are so incontrovertible that women cannot assume them?

God and gender

Man and Woman as powerful symbols are for the most part made up of the connotations drawn from the biological roles and emotional characteristics of the sexes. Thus Man is father, hunter, provider, organiser; Woman is mother, home, care. Man is aggressive, active, creative, powerful, while Woman is dependent, passive, preservative, and yielding. Such breakdowns of the constituent elements of symbols are inevitably banal, but the power of the symbols remains in the terms Man and Woman or Father and Mother. They have universal human significance. The difficulty, similar to the one discovered above in examining statistics, is in fitting actual flesh and blood men and women into their symbolic roles. Carried to its extremes, that activity causes us to ask who symbols are for. Romantic idealisations of woman are all very well, but a symbol is a sign and a sign must be a sign of something for or to someone. Is the symbolism of woman always a sign only for the male, and is its content one dominated by male selectivity? Symbols are at least partially a function of those who articulate them, and man articulates the symbol Woman.

Accommodating real people to their fictional symbols is not merely difficult, but frankly impossible. Symbols are not made for that purpose, and they are themselves abstractions from the characteristics of actual men and women. Whatever the basic sexual identity of the individual, he or she possesses in some degree elements of the affective make-up of the opposite sex. Thus, the Man and Woman symbols have relevance in the lives of both men and women. If, then, these symbols are extrapolations from the qualities of existent human beings, and if they each say something meaningful about the nature of each man and woman, what happens when we begin to apply male and female characteristics and language to God?

The complementarist school of thought argues that men and women have different emotional make-up and needs, and that there are different activities more suitable to each sex. They go on from there to point to the masculine language which we normally use in God-talk; for example, how the fatherhood of God is best signified in man. The association between the priesthood and the divine makes it therefore “fitting” that it should be a masculine priesthood. Much of this attitude to the masculinity of God-talk stems, of course, from the qualitative distinction drawn in some thinking between the nature of men and women, the claim that woman is not made in God’s image and likeness, and the divinely ordained subordination of women to men which some discover in Saint Paul or Genesis.

To give one example, an American Episcopalian priest writing in The Lamp (November 1973) expressed his reservations in this way:

. . .Christ taught us to pray to our Father in heaven. Isn’t it quite self-evident that if we were to pray to our Mother in heaven we should have a very different religion from the one which Christ has given us? Anybody can see the nature of that difference if he thinks about what we expect from a loving mother as distinct from a loving father.

Now to the end of time people of all ages will get their starting ideas, the first draft of their mental picture, of God from their priests and pastors. A good priest who is also a man can be the kind of human image of our Father in heaven who strengthens our faith in, and clarifies our vision of, the God whom Jesus Christ reveals. A woman priest could not do that for us.

This priest admitted that he was only talking about ‘our human image of God the Father and the inclusion of ‘Father’ seems to beg the question, but he is clearly convinced that the masculinity of God is something that we have to preserve, and that to predicate feminine attributes of God would be to say something untrue about the nature of God. That, in other words, although God is not a man, he is more like a man than a woman, or a man is more like God than a woman, which is to say once more that man was made in God’s image and likeness. But woman. . .?

A lot of the suspicion voiced about the ordination of women stems from a mental connection between the two ideas of women priests and a female deity. Apart from the total misreading of the nature of the Christian priesthood underlying such a suspicion, this vision seems to see vague suggestions of temple prostitutes and the aura of female cults surrounding the very idea of a woman priest. Ignoring the slurs cast upon modern Christian womanhood by such a picture, we might reasonably respond ‘So what?’ to the statement that women priests means in effect a female God. What is wrong with a female deity that is not wrong with a male deity? God is no more man than woman. The gut-reaction to that statement (that God is more man than woman) is so obviously not an intellectually respectable position that the argument takes the form of saying that the language we use about God has traditionally been masculine terminology. (In any case, if language surrounding the ‘father’ image is inevitably masculine, there is a long tradition, particularly in the Eastern Church, which represents the Holy Spirit as decidedly feminine.) Of course, the argument continues, this is not literally accurate, but then we are speaking analogously, and analogy is the only weapon that humankind has in its armoury for talking about the divine. We have no words for that of which we have no complete experience, and that which by definition we cannot fully comprehend. However, there is some truth in the language we use, if only that the negation would seem even less true. God is not father in the fully human sense, but some of the effects of God which we experience and can comprehend are similar to the activities of fatherhood in humankind. The extent to which such use of language can remain incomplete is prodigious, for the openings for making God in our own image and likeness are countless, and men are imagemakers.

According to our argument, however, masculine language predicated of God refers only to that male symbolism which is a crude extrapolation from human activity. But if we talk about God as a man because our language is limited and we have to talk of ‘him’ as something, then it is difficult to see how what stems originally from our linguistic and conceptual poverty can be said to describe, still less define, God. Is it right that individual men and women should be at the mercy of a concept of the Godhead the limitations of which are a product of their own imperfect understandings? If we have a male God, then, only because we have always talked about God as man, why should the male symbolism we now extract from God be used as an argument for the retention of an exclusively male priesthood? We could, in fact, remake our image of God as female, by taking different aspects of the effect of God in the world. We should no more be saying that ‘he’ is female than we were saying that ‘she’ is male, but simply extending the principle that both male and female are ways of making God in our own image.

In our examination of chapter one of Genesis we noted that God made all mankind in his image, without distinction of sexes. Both the sexes together in a union of love are the most perfect human expression of being in the image of God. As God gives to his creation out of his perfection, so he is the origin of all human perfection. Hence he is the source of motherhood as completely as he is the source of fatherhood. Jung’s complaint that there is no feminine archetype in God is not strictly accurate; it would be better to say that it is latent. Yet there have been writers who have adverted to this femininity in God; Clement of Alexandria, for example (in Quis Dives Salvetur?):

God is himself love, and it is because of his love that we pursue him. In his ineffable majesty he is our Father, but in the comfort he extends to us he has become our mother. Yes, the Father in his love becomes a woman, and the Son whom he brought forth from himself is strong proof of this.

Julian of Norwich also has some startling expressions of similar ideas, as if to prove that such ‘extravagance’ is open also to the Anglo-Saxon mind:

In our making, God, almighty, is our kindly Father; and God, all-Wisdom, our kindly Mother; with the Love and the Goodness of the Holy Ghost: which is all one God, one Lord.

Now if this is the true nature of God, that we can say little about it that we can claim is exact, but that what we can say is that God is both the origin of sexual differentiation and yet neither male nor female himself, then what of those words of the Episcopalian priest we quoted above? Christ certainly taught us to pray to our Father in heaven, and it may be that this is emotionally and symbolically the most satisfactory category under which to think of God. Our concern here, however, is to discover if there is anything in the nature of God so irrevocably non-feminine that it would be incongruous and meaningless for his priests to be drawn from both sexes. Here we are in the realm of theological understanding, asking the ultimate Pauline question - will it help to build up the body of Christ? If it tends to distort our understanding of the nature of God or his priesthood then it will not. Yet Christ’s prayer of the Our Father was uttered in the context of a Jewish society very different from our own in knowledge and assumptions; different, in other words, in one whole category of the tools for doing theology. This is not to say that we should begin tomorrow to pray to our Mother in heaven. It should be sufficient simply to remember that the fatherhood of God, whatever it really is beyond our human language, is not something which prevents women as well as men being made in his image. Insofar as praying the Our Father reinforces anyone in his prejudices about the masculinity of God, he should perhaps alternate praying the prayer with a little reading from Julian of Norwich, or with a prayer to Our Lady that our concept of God should never become so one-sidedly masculine that we feel we have to divinise her. Further, a ‘good priest’ can only be the human image of our Father in heaven as long as we think of God as an old man (celibate, of course) with a white beard or, perhaps, of a golf-playing God with a taste for whisky and a flair for collecting money. If only, in other words, we caricature God as firmly as we caricature the parish priest. The priest is not the representative of God in this crudely physical sense at all. He is representative in office and function, not by sex, and the specific example he should give of forgiveness and love and care and concern is not the prerogative of the male sex.

Please, credit this document
as published by www.ministryforwomen.org!