The Difference of the Sexes

from Women Priests?

By E. L. Mascall
Published by The Church Literature Association
London , 1972. pp. 11-17

Supporters of the ordination of women frequently point to the alleged injustice of the exclusion of one half of the human race from the status and functions of priesthood. There will be something can be possessed as a right, but it may be relevant to remark that there is already a status and function from which one half of the human race is constitutionally and incurably excluded, namely that of motherhood. And if it is true that the order of redemption is not isolated from the order of creation and that grace does not ignore or destroy nature but presupposes and perfects it, it would be very strange if the differentiation of function on the level of nature was not paralleled by a not less marked differentiation of function on the level of grace. One of the results of the modern tendency to emphasise the idea of equality rather than that of differentiation is the type of feminism which by demanding the same functions for women as for men implicitly assumes the superiority of male status. If women want to be as like men as possible, this can only mean that manhood is essentially superior to womanhood. This is not a view that any Christian should accept; its basic absurdity is seen in the recent demand by a member of the Women’s Liberation Movement that women should refuse to bear babies any more and that scientists should immediately perfect the technique of growing babies in test-tubes.

The chapter in Women and Holy Orders from which I have previously quoted makes this point clearly and with restraint

(e) The assertion that the ordination of women is the logical outcome of a steadily growing recognition of woman’s full humanity is fallacious. A philosophy of social evolution making for this kind of equivalence of women with men has no backing in historical, philosophical, biological or religious theory.

(f) Western civilisation has witnessed a hypertrophy, a morbid enlargement, of its masculine aptitudes, and the feminist movement, by bringing women into the characteristic masculine way of handling life, has aggravated the disease. The characteristics of the two sexes must be regarded as complementary. In the concrete, for the art of living, there are male and female aptitudes. A refusal to recognise this polarity of the sexes tends to create not satisfaction, but further and more deepseated restlessness.

(g) The view that sex is irrelevant in deciding who should or should not be ordained to the priesthood has been based on a belief that there is a sexless human nature common to men and women underlying their sex differences. This view is no longer tenable. There is in fact a masculine and a feminine human nature with some complication from the shadow of the opposite sex in each.

Like other advocates of female emancipation, the proponents of the ordination of women are not always consistent in their arguments, which oscillate between at least three positions. The first is that women are in all the essential features identical with men and so have just as much right to ordination as men have. The second is that women are so different from men that an exclusively male priesthood cannot be fully representative of humanity. The third is that men have certain female characteristics and women have certain male ones, so that there is really only a difference of degree between the two; this is sometimes accompanied by the assertion that there is a maternal component in the fatherhood of God. The third argument has been advanced a good deal in recent years, but it would seem to lead to the opposite conclusion than that intended. For if it is true that the essential features of each sex are to be found in the other, then a male priest will be able to manifest in his pastoral relationships not only the male features but the female as well. The truth seems to be that there are many characteristics that are common to both sexes simply because they are both human, and many other characteristics that are proper only to one; but if we start by saying that female characteristics are to be found in men and male characteristics in women, we shall probably end up in a state of verbal confusion in which we shall find it difficult to maintain the distinction between male and female characteristics at all. It will be well to turn now to considerations of a more definitely theological kind.

THEOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS

As we have already seen, the Lambeth Conference of 1968 “affirm[ed] its opinion that the theological arguments as at present presented for and against the ordination of women to the priesthood are inconclusive” (Resolution 34). One might have thought that, if the arguments were as evenly balanced as that, there was, to say the least, insufficient justification for rejecting the agelong tradition of the Church; there would seem to be at least a prima facie case against making any drastic change. This was not, however, the Conference’s conclusion. It is pertinent to ask, though there is little prospect of finding an answer, what the Conference supposed a conclusive theological argument would be. In common with most argumentation outside the purely abstract realm, theological arguments very rarely take the form of simple Aristotelian syllogisms. In the present case we have a consistent tradition of the Church going back to the very earliest times, and certain truths of faith which are closely coherent with that tradition and throw considerable light upon it. Though the Lambeth resolution did not mention these, the sub-committee did, though once again it combined verbal reverence with practical dismissal:

The element of sexuality in the Godhead and its implication for the sex of the priesthood are complex and debatable matters. We acknowledge God as father and we worship the incarnate Lord as man. No theologian has ever understood this to mean that God is male. There is great significance in the ancient imagery of the bishop or priest as father to his family or as representing Christ the bridegroom to the Church his bride. This is an image of unquestionable value, a profound pointer to the truth. But the truth to which it points has been expressed with equal power by St. Paul in referring to his own relation to the Galatian church as that of a mother again in travail with her children

And the sub-commission asks the question, obviously expecting the answer No: “In view of the above considerations, are we to conclude that it nevertheless inheres in the very nature of the Gospel that women are intrinsically incapable of receiving ordination to the priesthood?”

“Great significance”, “of unquestionable value”, “profound pointer to the truth”-these are strong phrases indeed. They are nevertheless followed by the assertion, for which no further support is advanced than one sentence from St. Paul, the metaphorical sense of which is obvious, that in all relevant respects fatherhood and motherhood are identical. Once more we see doctrinal considerations treated as Plato in the Republic wished to treat the poet: “we shall do obeisance to him as to a sacred, wonderful and agreeable person,... and we shall anoint him with myrrh and crown him with a wreath of sacred wool and send him off to another city”, for “we shall say that we have no such man in our city”. I should like at this point to draw attention to a paper entitled “Priestesses in the Church?” by the late C. S. Lewis, which is included in the posthumously published volume Undeceptions.

Lewis begins by admitting that at first sight all the rationality 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 .... 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 analyse.” However, “that this reaction does not spring from any contempt for women”, Lewis significantly goes on to point out,

is, I think, plain from history. The Middle Ages carried their veneration for one Woman to a point at which the charge could plausibly be 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; she is united in nine months’ inconceivable intimacy with the eternal Word; she stands at the foot of the cross. But she is absent both from the Last Supper and from the descent of the Spirit at Pentecost. 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. There were prophetesses even in Old Testament times. Prophetesses, not priestesses.

“At this point”, Lewis continues, “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.” But “the more they speak (and speak truly) about the competence of women in administration, their tact and sympathy as advisers, their national [sic, qu. natural?] talent for visiting, the more we feel that the central thing is being forgotten.” That thing is priesthood.

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 .... 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 by 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”, Lewis concludes, “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.”

There is only one place in which I would question Lewis’s argument, but to strengthen rather than to weaken it. I am not sure that the priest speaks only to man from God and not also to God from man. It might, however, be replied that speaking to God from man, while it is a priestly function, is proper to the whole Church as the priestly body of Christ the great High Priest, even if its public and liturgical expression must be made through the ordained minister. Whatever may be true about this, the speaking to man of the reconciling word of God is an inherently personal and ministerial act. All Christian priesthood is the priesthood of Christ, whether exercised directly in his earthly life or mediately through his ordained ministers; and ministerial priesthood, as Moberley made clear in his great work bearing that name, is án essentially personal activity.

No doubt God in his omnipotence might have redeemed us by a sheer exercise of his infinite power and, so to speak, have wrenched us back into the shape which he wishes us to have. Nevertheless, God is personal-three Persons, united in one divine life-and we are persons; and he deals with us in accordance with his nature and ours. So the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, God the Son, took our human nature, so that he might live among us, a Person among persons, living, as one of us, that personal life of obedience and love to God the Father which culminated in a perfect human death and led through that death to a transformed and glorified, but still human and personal, life; teaching, healing, forgiving, consoling, strengthening those who came into contact with him, and always as a Person dealing with persons. God made man, the Son of God living a human life as a Person, living among persons and ministering to them as persons, this is the method that God chose to redeem the world; and the price of that method is shown by the Cross.

And when, after his Ascension, the Redeemer was no longer to be seen, heard and handled by our physical senses, he had already made provision that the ministry which he had exercised as a Person to persons should continue to be exercised by him through persons to persons. So he called and trained and commissioned and equipped twelve men whom he named apostles-persons sentnot just to be persons who would act instead of him but persons through whom he himself would act. So the sacramental and pastoral ministry of the Church through the ages, just because it is the ministry of the Person Jesus to persons for whom he gave his life, is exercised through persons, and through persons who are not just his representatives, not even just his agents, but the very organs through whom he himself acts. If there is this essential identity between the ministry which Jesus exercised in his earthly life and that which he now exercises in his Church, it is, to say the least, highly congruous that the manhood through which he acts should be male as he is male, whatever may be metaphysically possible to the sheer potentia absoluta of infinite Deity. But now to return to C. S. Lewis, after this lengthy but not irrelevant digression.

To the assertion that, if the masculine terms of religion, Father, Son and Bridegroom, were changed into the feminine terms, Mother, Daughter and Bride, we should have a different religion Lewis imagines “common sense” objecting “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?” Lewis’s reply to this is that the Christian religion is in fact based on what God has said and done:

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 . . . a child who had been taught to pray to a Mother in Heaven would have a religious life radically different from that of a Christian child.

Thus, Lewis continues, “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.” To raise questions about the “equality” of the sexes is really pointless. “Unless ‘equal’ means ‘interchangeable’, equality makes nothing for the priesthood of women .... One of the ends for which sex was created was to symbolise 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 sensitive figures which God has painted in the canvas of our nature and shift them about as if they were mere geometrical figures.”

Lewis’s discussion is all the more impressive coming as it does from a writer who was very little concerned with bloodless abstractions and was highly sensitive to the mysteries and depths of human nature as God has created and redeemed it. And to him there was something superficial and undiscriminating in the concept of humanity, even on the natural level, that lay behind demands for the ordination of women to the priesthood. “With the Church” he wrote, “we are farther in: for we are dealing with male and female not merely as facts of nature but as the liveand 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.”

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