Dear Martini,
It’s once again time for us to resume our conversation. And I must admit I’m a little sorry the editors have seen fit to make me go first every time; it makes me feel like a nag. Perhaps they’ve fallen victim to some banal cliche about philosophers specializing in the formulation of questions they don’t know the answers to and pastors always having the right answer. Fortunately, in your previous letters, you demonstrate how complicated and agonized a pastor’s reflections can be, thus disappointing those who might be expecting you to perform the function of oracle.
Before posing a question for which I have no answer, I’d like to put forth some premises. When a religious authority of any persuasion pronounces upon principles of natural ethics, the layman should recognize that while he can agree or not, he has no reason to challenge the authority’s right to make such a pronouncement — even if it is a criticism of the way the nonbeliever lives. Laymen have the right to challenge the position expressed by the religious authority only when it tends to force nonbelievers (or believers of another faith) to behave in a way forbidden by the laws of their state or religion, or prevents them from behaving in a way the laws of their state or their religion do allow.
I don’t claim that the inverse right exists. A secular man does not have the right to criticize how a believer lives — except, again, if it runs counter to the laws of the state (the refusal to allow one’s children to have a blood transfusion, for example) or limits the rights of those of a different faith. A religious perspective always proposes an ideal way of life, while a secular person sees an ideal life as the product of free choice, as long as that choice doesn’t impinge on the free choice of others.
I believe no one has the right to judge the obligations different creeds impose on their followers. I have no right to object to the fact that Islam prohibits the consumption of alcohol; if I don’t agree with this, I will not become Muslim. I can’t see why secular people are scandalized by the Catholic Church’s condemnation of divorce. If you want to be Catholic, don’t get a divorce. If you want a divorce, become Protestant. You only have the right to protest if you are not Catholic and the Church wants to keep you from getting a divorce. I confess that homosexuals who want to be recognized by the Church and priests who want to get married exasperate me. I take off my shoes when I enter a mosque, and when I’m in Jerusalem I accept that in some buildings, on Saturday, the elevators run on automatic and stop at every floor. If I want to keep my shoes on or control the elevator, I go somewhere else. There are receptions (very secular affairs) for which a tuxedo is required, and it is up to me to decide if my reason for wanting to attend the event is compelling enough to warrant my stuffing myself into that irritating costume. I may decide to assert my freedom of choice by staying at home.
Now, if priests were to start a movement asserting that, on nondoctrinal issues such as ecclesiastic celibacy, authority resides not with the Pope but with the community of followers in their own diocese, and if this movement attracted practitioners, I myself would refuse to sign a petition on their behalf. Not because I don’t care about the issues, but because I am not part of their community and I have no right to stick my nose in concerns so exclusively ecclesiastic.
This said, it is a very different thing when a concerned secular person tries to understand why the Church approves or disapproves of certain things. If I invite an Orthodox Jew to dinner (there are many among my American colleagues who teach the philosophy of language) I take care (for reasons of courtesy) to ask in advance what he is willing to eat. But that doesn’t stop me from questioning him on kosher cooking, in order to understand why they have to avoid foods that at first blush I would have thought even a rabbi could eat. So it seems legitimate for a layman to ask the Pope why the Church is against birth control, against abortion, against homosexuality. The Pope’s reply to me, at least from the perspective of a strict interpretation of the precept crescite et multiplicamini [go forth and multiply], I admit makes sense. I could write an essay proposing an alternative hermeneutics, but until the Church agrees with my interpretation, it has the upper hand — the one with the scholiast’s stylus in it.
And this is where my question comes in. I still have not managed to find persuasive reasons in Church doctrine for excluding women from the priesthood. I must repeat — I respect your autonomy regarding such delicate issues. If I were a woman who wanted to become a priest at all costs, I’d join the cult of Isis, and not try to force the hand of the Pope. But as an intellectual, as a (longtime) reader of the Scriptures, I harbor doubts on this question that I would like to dispel.
I see no scriptural rationale. From my reading of not only Leviticus but Exodus 29 and 30, I gather that the priesthood was entrusted to Aaron and his sons, not to their wives (we could even add, as Paul does in Hebrews, it was entrusted not to the order of Aaron but to that of Melchizedek — who apart from everything else enjoys historical and scriptural precedence; see Genesis 14 — though none of this affects our discussion).
But if I were a Protestant fundamentalist reading the Bible, I’d have to say with Leviticus that priests “shall shave neither head nor beard.” I would then be utterly perplexed when I read Ezekiel 44:20, according to which priests must keep their hair short. What’s more, according to both texts, no priest should go near dead bodies. And as a good fundamentalist I would expect a priest (even a Catholic priest) to follow either Leviticus, according to which priests can take wives, or Ezekiel, according to which they can marry only a virgin or the widow of another priest.
Even a believer will admit that the biblical authors adapted both chronicled events and disputes so they could be understood according to the customs and habits of the culture addressed. So if Joshua had pronounced “Halt O Earth!” or “Let the Newtonian law of universal gravity be suspended!” he’d have been thought insane. Jesus deemed it necessary to pay tribute to Caesar, given the political situation in the Mediterranean. This does not mean, however, that a European today should pay his taxes to the last descendent of the Hapsburgs, and if that taxpayer tried to deduct such a tribute from what he owed to his country, any savvy priest would (I hope) tell him he’d go to hell. The ninth commandment prohibits coveting another mans woman, but the Church has never questioned that, by synecdoche [“man” meaning “all people”], women likewise should not covet another woman’s man.
It is obvious even to a believer that as God decided to incarnate the second figure of the Holy Trinity in Palestine in the epoch that he did, he was forced to incarnate that figure as a man, or else his word would not have carried any authority. I suspect you wouldn’t disagree that if, by some inscrutable divine plan, Christ had been incarnated in Japan, he would have consecrated rice and saki, and the mystery of the Eucharist would still be what it is. If Christ had been incarnated some centuries later, when mountain prophetesses like Priscilla and Maximilla enjoyed popularity, he might have been incarnated in female form, maybe in the Roman civilization that held the vestal virgins in high regard. To deny this would mean affirming that woman is an impure being, which some societies in some periods have done, but surely not the current pontiff.
One could also apply symbolic reasoning: The priest is the image of Christ, who was the ultimate priest, and Christ was male. The priesthood should thus be the prerogative of the male in order to preserve the potency of this symbol. But should Redemption follow the laws of iconography or of iconology?
Seeing as Christ beyond doubt sacrificed himself for men and women and, flouting custom, conferred the highest privileges upon his followers of the female gender, and seeing as the only human creature born without original sin was a woman, and seeing as it was before women and not men that Christ first appeared after his resurrection, are these not clear indications that — challenging the laws of his time, to the degree he could reasonably violate them — he wanted to demonstrate the equality of the sexes, if not before the law and historical usage at least in respect to Redemption? Mind you, I don’t dare even venture into the vexed question of whether the word Elohim, which appears at the beginning of Genesis, is singular or plural, and might show grammatically that God has a gender (just as I’ll take John Paul is affirmation of God as a Mother to be only a figure of speech).
The symbolic argument doesn’t satisfy me. And I am likewise unconvinced by the archaic assertion that a woman secretes impurities at certain moments in her life (even if that view was held in the past — as if a menstruating woman or a woman giving birth is somehow more impure than a priest with AIDS).
When I find myself lost like this in matters of doctrine, I turn to the only person I trust, Thomas Aquinas. More than being doctor angelicas, Thomas was a man of extraordinarily good sense, who more than once confronted the question of whether the priesthood was an exclusively male prerogative. Limiting our discussion to the Summa Theologica, he sets forth this very question in II, 11, 2, where he wrangles with Paul’s assertion (not even saints are perfect) that in the ecclesiastic assembly women should keep quiet and not be allowed to teach. But in Proverbs, Thomas finds “Unigenitus fui coram matrem meam, ea docebat me” [I was the sole joy of my mother; she taught me]. How does he get out of that? In accordance with the culture of his time (and how could he reject that?), the female sex should submit to the male sex, and women are not perfect in their wisdom.
In III, 31, 4, Thomas wonders if the substance of the body of Christ could have been taken from a female body (as you know, the Gnostic theories that were in circulation held that Christ passed through the body of Mary like water through a pipe, as if incidentally channeled, not touched by her body, not polluted by any of the immunditia that goes along with the physiology of childbirth). Thomas reminds us that if Christ had to be human, con-venientissimum tamen fuit ut de foemina carnem acciperet [it was, however, most suitable that he took flesh from woman] because, as Augustine attested, “man’s liberation must extend to both sexes.” And yet he can’t manage to divorce himself from his cultural context, and so allows that Christ had to be a man because the male sex is more noble.
But Thomas can move beyond his inescapable context. He doesn’t deny that men are superior, and better adapted for wisdom than women, but he makes repeated efforts to figure out why women were accorded the gift of prophecy, and why abbesses were entrusted with the guidance and instruction of the soul — and he comes up with hairsplitting that is both elegant and reasonable. Yet he still doesn’t seem convinced, and with his customary astuteness asks (pretending not to remember that he had already addressed this in I, 99, 2) if the male gender is the better, why, in that primordial state before original sin, did God also create woman? His answer is that it was right for both men and women to appear in the primordial state — not to guarantee the propagation of the species, since men were immortal and two sexes were not yet a necessary condition of survival, but because “Gender does not exist in the soul” (see Supplementum 39, 1, to which Thomas refers elsewhere, though the text was not by him). Indeed, for Thomas, gender was an accident produced during the last stages of gestation. It was right and necessary to create two sexes (and this becomes clearer in III, 4, in the respondeo) because mankind’s origination comes out of an exceptional combination: the first man was conceived without man or woman, Eve was born of the man without the aid of a woman, and Christ was born of a woman without the participation of a man. But all other humans are born of a man and a woman. Apart from those three remarkable exceptions, this is the rule, and this is the divine plan.
In III, 67, 4, Thomas wonders if a woman can baptize, and easily dismisses the objections raised by tradition. It is Christ who performs baptism, but since (as Thomas gets from Paul in Colossians 3:11, although in fact it is stated more clearly in Galatians 3:28) “in Christo non est masculus neque foemina” [in Christ there is neither male nor female], if a man can perform a baptism, so can a woman. He then adds (the power of current opinion!) that “caput mulieris est vir” [the head (leader) of woman is man], so if there are men present a woman must not perform the baptism. But in his ad primum Thomas makes clear distinctions between what a woman is “not permitted” (according to custom) and that which she nonetheless “can” do (in terms of her rights). And in ad tertium he clarifies that if, on the carnal level, woman is fundamentally the passive principle and man the active, on the spiritual level this hierarchical distinction is no longer valid, because both men and women act through Christ.
Nonetheless, in Supplementum 39, 1 (which, I recall, he didn’t write himself) Thomas poses outright the question of whether a woman can enter the priesthood. To answer, he returns to the symbolic argument. The sacrament is also a sign, and its validity depends not only on the “thing” itself but also on the “sign of the thing.” Inasmuch as no eminence attaches to the female gender, since women live in a state of subjugation, orders cannot be conferred upon a woman.
In answer to a question I can’t remember the specifics of, Thomas also uses the propter libidinem [because of lust] argument: in other words, if a priest were female, her followers (male!) would be aroused by her. But a priest’s followers are also women, so what of the young girls who might be excited at the sight of a handsome priest? (Think of the passage in Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma devoted to the phenomenon of unbridled passion stirred by Fabrizio del Dongo’s sermons.) And the history of the University of Bologna includes the story of a certain Novella d’Andrea, who held a chair in the fourteenth century and was obliged to teach from behind a veil so as not to distract her students with her beauty. I choose to believe that Novella was not a vamp, but rather that her students tended toward a certain sophomoric lack of discipline. Therefore the story concerns the education of students, or followers, not the exclusion of women from the gratia sermonis.
In sum, it is my impression that not even Thomas knew why exactly the priesthood should be the exclusive prerogative of men, unless he assumed (as he did, and he couldn’t have done otherwise, given the notions of his time) that men were of superior intelligence and dignity. But so far as I know this is not the Church’s current position. Such a position would more closely reflect Chinese society, which, as we have recently learned to our horror, sanctions eliminating newborn girls in favor of male children.
Hence my confusion. What doctrinal reasons keep women out of the priesthood? If the reasoning is simply historical, based on incidental symbolism, because followers are accustomed to a male priest, then there is no reason to hurry the Church, which takes a long-term approach (though a date sometime before the Resurrection of the Body would be nice).
Clearly this is not a personal issue for me. I am simply curious. There are perhaps those in the “other half of Heaven” (as the Chinese say) who are genuinely eager to learn why
Umberto Eco