Mere Priestesses

Controversy surrounds the disinvitation of Fr. Calvin Robinson from the closing panel of the Mere Anglicanism conference held in Charleston, South Carolina, in January. Asked to lecture on the topic “Critical Theories Are Antithetical to the Gospel,” Robinson argued during the main session that the spread of critical theory in the church was inevitable given the church’s acceptance of feminism, with women’s ordination being a decisive concession: Confuse men’s and women’s roles, and it’s hard to resist liberalism tout court. The sponsoring bishop and conference organizers found Robinson’s presentation “inexcusably provocative, and completely lacking in charity,” especially toward the female clergy in attendance, and so barred him from the closing panel discussion.

The conference’s title, a nod to C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, implies that participants hold in common the essentials of Anglican belief. The conference is advertised as a venue in which difficult topics facing the Church can be thoughtfully engaged. Accordingly, Robinson was candid: “The priestess issue is directly related to the trans issue. If a man can become a woman, and a woman can become a man, why can’t a woman become a priest and a man become a mother?” Though this question may strike supporters of women’s ordination as unnecessarily provocative, the same type of argument was made by the conference’s patron saint more than seventy-five years ago. Robinson and Lewis both articulate the position of mere Christianity against the fashionable theologies of their times. They state what was the consensus position of the Great Tradition, East and West, before critical theory infected Protestantism.

Decades before the practice of ordaining women to the priesthood was introduced in the Anglican Communion (and the traditional position became grounds for cancellation), Lewis pondered what such an innovation might mean in his 1948 essay “Priestesses in the Church.” Even the term “priestesses” in his title and body will strike some proponents of women’s ordination as offensive. Lewis, however, does not intend to offend (“I have every respect for those who wish women to be priestesses”), but rather to offer a serious challenge to a revolutionary proposal that would represent “an almost wanton degree of imprudence,” not to mention a divisive break with universal tradition. To admit women to the priesthood, Lewis intuited, would involve “something even deeper” than a change in church order. Today, with women’s ordination normalized in the Anglican Communion, have Lewis’s concerns about that “something even deeper” been vindicated?

Lewis concedes that the push for women’s ordination follows a certain logic: Women are just as capable as men in many professions and in the sort of piety often held to be required of a pastor. Would it not simply be prejudice and stubborn traditionalism to keep women from the priestly office? Much of the case for women’s ordination assumes that misogyny is the only impediment. Lewis writes that “the opposers . . . can produce at first nothing but an inarticulate distaste . . . which they themselves find it hard to analyse.” For these detractors, the sight of a woman in clericals would trigger the same visceral reaction as the sight of a man dressed as a woman. This gut response might be mere bigotry, or it might betray a proper intuition.

What if the innovation of ordaining women to the priesthood changes not just a practice of church order but the nature of the Church itself? Lewis imagines the would-be reformer continuing his project to make the Church thoroughly gender-neutral, praying not the Our Father but the Our Mother (though today it must surely be the Our Parent), or insisting that Christ’s masculinity and the gendered symbolism of Christ and his Church are not theologically significant. The same sort of gender-bending, Lewis contends, would be involved in the claim that men and women are interchangeable in the priesthood. Recent developments bear him out. At a time when one-third of active clergy and the majority of ordinands in the Church of England are women, the Archbishop of York worries that the opening of the Our Father is problematic, and the Church of England considers alternatives to masculine pronouns for God.

Lewis’s argument would have been more powerful had he observed that the priest represents not God in general but the Incarnate Son, the Bridegroom, the Head of the Church. Pope Paul VI later made similar arguments concerning the symbolic significance of sexual difference, in the course of which he explained that the priest operates in persona Christi capitis (in the person of Christ, the head). What Lewis grasped intuitively, and Paul VI articulated explicitly, is that masculine imagery is not a thing indifferent when it comes to the priesthood and its sacramental representation.

Lewis, eager to bolster the imagination in a disenchanted world, believed that a gender-neutral movement in the Church would be “based on a shallow view of imagery.” Though the being of God is not male, God has chosen to reveal himself with masculine imagery: He did not become a generic human, but took up humanity as a male. To deny the significance of this fact is to embrace another religion:

Without drawing upon religion, we know from our poetical experience that image and apprehension cleave closer together than common sense is here prepared to admit; that a child who has been taught to pray to a Mother in Heaven would have a religious life radically different from that of a Christian child. And as image and apprehension are in an organic unity, so, for a Christian, are human body and human soul.

Image and apprehension work on a precognitive level, do not depend on logical argumentation, and yet are equally important in our spiritual and moral formation.

If language conveys “image and apprehension,” then surely sexed human bodies do so as well. If God has seen fit to instruct us to pray to him as Father, then that masculine and symbolic language is fundamental to how we understand him; if God has seen fit to become a male human being, then it matters that Jesus is male; if Christ saw fit to choose only men to represent him in apostolic ministry, then the masculine nature of ordained ministry carries a necessary meaning.

For Lewis, we live in a sacramental universe, and the mysteries of male and female are signs of something more, and “symbolize to us the hidden things of God.” Gender neutrality in the priesthood and marriage changes the story those vocations tell. And who are we to change this story? Neutering humanity goes hand in hand with an attempt to desacralize the world God made, to impose our own meaning upon it. It rejects the givenness of God’s symbolic world, in which sexual difference tells a divine story of bride and groom. It is this cosmic story, Lewis insists, that God has written in revelation, revealed in nature, and inscribed in our sexually differentiated bodies. Women and men may be interchangeable in various domains for the accomplishment of certain tasks, but in the Church (as in marriage) we are on sacred ground, where sexual difference is divinely meaningful, “not merely as facts of nature but as the live and awful shadows of realities utterly beyond our control.” To embrace this order of reality is to join the “great dance” God has orchestrated. This great dance is expressed through sexual difference, not least when the priest by his maleness represents Christ the Groom at the altar in the nuptial feast of Holy Communion.

The image of a great dance frames Lewis’s essay on priestesses. He opens with a line from Pride and Prejudice, in which Caroline Bingley expresses distaste for balls and suggests that they would be “more rational if conversation instead of dancing made the order of the day.” Her brother replies, “Much more rational, my dear Caroline, I dare say . . . but it would not be near so much like a ball.” Lewis’s essay is an accidental prophecy of a church that has become much more rational but less like a great dance. Calvin Robinson has taken up Lewis’s case to address an Anglicanism that welcomes what Lewis feared. Elevating, not erasing, the sacramental nature of the priesthood and the theological meaning of sexual difference will enable us to dance in better sequence with Christ and his Church.

Blake Johnson is rector of Church of the Holy Cross in Crozet, Virginia.

Image by Pavel Danilyuk, public domain. Image cropped.