PRIESTESSES IN THE CHURCH?

by C. S. Lewis

I SHOULD LIKE BALLS INFINITELY BETTER', SAID CAROLINE Bingley, 'if they were
carried on in a different manner. It would surely be much more rational if
conversation instead of dancing made the order of the day.' 'Much more
rational, I dare say,' replied her brother, 'but it would not be near so
much like a Ball.' (1) We are told that the lady was silenced: yet it could
be maintained that Jane Austen has not allowed Bingley to put forward the
full strength of his position. He ought to have replied with a distinguo. In
one sense conversation is more rational for conversation may exercise the
reason alone, dancing does not. But there is nothing irrational in
exercising other powers than our reason. On certain occasions and for
certain purposes the real irrationality is with those who will not do so.
The man who would try to break a horse or write a poem or beget a child by
pure syllogizing would be an irrational man; though at the same time
syllogizing is in itself a more rational activity than the activities
demanded by these achievements. It is rational not to reason, or not to
limit oneself to reason, in the wrong place; and the more rational a man is
the better he knows this.

These remarks are not intended as a contribution to the criticism of Pride
and Prejudice. They came into my head when I heard that the Church of
England (2) was being advised to declare women capable of Priests' Orders. I
am, indeed, informed that such a proposal is very unlikely to be seriously
considered by the authorities. To take such a revolutionary step at the
present moment, to cut ourselves off from the Christian past and to widen
the divisions between ourselves and other Churches by establishing an order
of priestesses in our midst, would be an almost wanton degree of imprudence.
And the Church of England herself would be torn in shreds by the operation.
My concern with the proposal is of a more theoretical kind. The question
involves something even deeper than a revolution in order.

I have every respect for those who wish women to be priestesses. I think
they are sincere and pious and sensible people. Indeed, in a way they are
too sensible. That is where my dissent from them resembles Bingley's dissent
from his sister. I am tempted to say that the proposed arrangement would
make us much more rational 'but not near so much like a Church'.

For at first sight all the rationality (in Caroline Bingley's sense) 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. No one among those
who dislike the proposal is maintaining that women are less capable than men
of piety, zeal, learning and whatever else seems necessary for the pastoral
office. What, then, except prejudice begotten by tradition, forbids us to
draw on the huge reserves which could pour into the priesthood if women were
here, as in so many other professions, put on the same footing as men? 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 analyze.

That this reaction does not spring from any contempt for women is, I think,
plain from history. The Middle Ages carried their reverence for one Woman to
a point at which the charge could be plausibly made that the Blessed Virgin
became in their eyes almost 'a fourth Person of the Trinity'. But never, so
fat 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; (3) she is united in nine months'
inconceivable intimacy with the eternal Word; she stands at the foot of the
cross. (4) But she is absent both from the Last Supper (5) and from the
descent of the Spirit at Pentecost. (6) 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. (7) There
were prophetesses even in Old Testament times. Prophetesses, not
priestesses.

At this point 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. We begin to feel that what really divides
us from our opponents is a difference between the meaning which they and we
give to the word 'priest'. The more they speak (and speak truly) about the
competence of women in administration, their tact and sympathy as advisers,
their national talent for 'visiting', the more we feel that the central
thing is being forgotten. To us a priest is primarily a representative, a
double representative, who represents us to God and God to us. Our very eyes
teach us this in church. 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. In that sense she may be as
'God-like' as a man; and a given women much more so than a given 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 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 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. Common sense,
disregarding the discomfort, or even the horror, which the idea of turning
all our theological language into the feminine gender arouses in most
Christians, will ask '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?'

But 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.
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.

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. We are, within that context, treating
both as neuters.

As the State grows more like a hive or an ant-hill it needs an increasing
number of workers who can be treated as neuters. This may be inevitable for
our secular life. But in our Christian life we must return to reality. There
we are not homogeneous units, but different and complementary organs of a
mystical body. Lady Nunburnholme has claimed that the equality of men and
women is a Christian pnnciple. I do not remember the text in scripture nor
the Fathers, nor Hooker, nor the Prayer Book which asserts it; but that is
not here my point. The point is that unless 'equal' means 'interchangeable',
equality makes nothing for the priesthood of women. And the kind of equality
which implies that the equals are interchangeable (like counters or
identical machines) is, among humans, a legal fiction. It may be a useful
legal fiction. But in church we turn our back on fictions. One of the ends
for which sex was created was to symbolize 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 on the canvas of our nature and
shift them about as if they were mere geometrical figures.

This is what common sense will call 'mystical'. Exactly. The Church claims
to be the bearer of a revelation. If that claim is false then we want not to
make priestesses but to abolish priests. If it is true, then we should
expect to find in the Church an element which unbelievers will call
irrational and which believers will call supra-rational. There ought to be
something in it opaque to our reason though not contrary to it - as the
facts of sex and sense on the natural level are opaque. And that is the real
issue. The Church of England can remain a church only if she retains this
opaque element. If we abandon that, if we retain only what can be justified
by standards of prudence and convenience at the bar of enlightened common
sense, then we exchange revelation for that old wraith Natural Religion.

It is painful, being a man, to have to assert the privilege, or the burden,
which Christianity lays upon my own sex. I am crushingly aware how
inadequate most of us are, in our actual and historical individualities, to
fill the place prepared for us. But it is an old saying in the army that you
salute the uniform not the wearer. Only one wearing the masculine uniform
can (provisionally, and till the Parousia) (9) represent the Lord to the
Church: for we are all, corporately and individually, feminine to Him. We
men may often make very bad priests. That is because we are insufficiently
masculine. It is no cure to call in those who are not masculine at all. A
given man may make a very bad husband; you cannot mend matters by trying to
reverse the roles. He may make a bad male partner in a dance. The cure for
that is that men should more diligently attend dancing classes; not that the
ballroom should henceforward ignore distinctions of sex and treat all
dancers as neuter. That would, of course, be eminently sensible, civilized,
and enlightened, but, once more, 'not near so much like a Ball'.

And this parallel between the Church and the Ball is not so fanciful as some
would think. The Church ought to be more like a Ball than it is like a
factory or a political party. Or, to speak more strictly, they are at the
circumference and the Church at the Centre and the Ball comes in between.
The factory and the political party are artificial creations - 'a breath can
make them as a breath has made'. In them we are not dealing with human
beings in their concrete entirety -only with 'hands' or voters. I am not of
course using 'artificial' in any derogatory sense. Such artifices are
necessary:

but because they are our artifices we are free to shuffle, scrap and
experiment as we please. But the Ball exists to stylize something which is
natural and which concerns human beings in their entirety - namely,
courtship. We cannot shuffle or tamper so much. With the Church, we are
farther in: for there we are dealing with male and female not merely as
facts of nature but as the live and 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.

Footnotes:

1. Pride and Prejudice, ch. xi.

2. Called the Episcopal Church in the United States.

3. After being told by the angel Gabriel that she has found favour with God
and that she should bear the Christ Child, the Virgin exclaims "Behold the
handmaid of the Lord" (Luke I 38). The Magnificat follows in verses 46-55.

4. Matthew xxvii. 55-6; Mark xv. 40-I; Luke xxiii. 49; John xix. 25.

5. Matthew xxvi. 26; Mark xiv. 22; Luke xxii. 19.

6. Acts ii. 1 et seq.

7 Acts xxi. 9.

8. Lady Marjorie Nunburnholme, "A Petition to the Lambeth Conference', Time
and Tide, vol. XXIX, No. 28 (10 July 1948), p.720.

9 The future return of Christ in glory to judge the living and the dead.

(by C. S. Lewis, August 1948. Available in print in the book God in the
Dock,Wm. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, MI. 1970)