The
Three Widows
If
we had been visiting a church beside the Nile soon after the year 300,
what kind of a parish ministry might we have found? For an answer, let
us turn to the fragmentary document known as the Apostolic Church
Order. This begins by mentioning the bishop, who is not yet a
distant administrator but still the immediate head of the local
community, the normal celebrant at the Sunday Eucharist. He is
assisted in the parish worship by two or more presbyters, by a reader,
and by three deacons. Thus far there are no great surprises, except
that the reader seems to rank higher than the deacons. The parochial
staff is larger than is customary today; but, apart perhaps from the
bishop, most of the others are doubtless earning their own living with
ordinary jobs. The Apostolic Church Order does not stop,
however, with the deacons. After them it goes on to speak of three
widows, ‘two to persevere in prayer for all who are in temptation,
and to receive revelations when such are needed; and one to help the
women who are ill’.(1)
There
are surely several things to interest us here. First of all we observe
the size and diversity of the local parish ministry. There is no
clericalism, no concentration of responsibility exclusively in the
hands of a single full-time ‘professional’. Next we see that the
ministry includes women as well as men. The three widows are not just
elderly ladies who arrange the flowers and prepare cups of tea, but
they constitute a specific ministry or order recognized by the Church;
they are more or less equivalent—although not actually given such a
title—to the deaconesses mentioned elsewhere in early Christian
sources. While one of the three is entrusted with charitable or social
work, the other two have tasks immediately connected with prayer and
worship. It is noteworthy that the particular role assigned to them is
the ministry of intercession and prophecy. Although it is the calling
of every Christian, male as well as female, to pray for others and to
listen to God, yet woman by virtue of her gift for direct and
intuitive understanding seems especially blessed to act as intercessor
and prophet. It is no coincidence that the symbolic figure of the Orans
on the walls of the catacombs, representing the Christian soul
waiting upon the Spirit, should take the form of a woman.
But
the widows, although they intercede and receive revelations, do not
act as celebrants at the Eucharist. On this point the Apostolic
Church Order is entirely clear: ‘When the Master prayed over the
bread and the cup and blessed them, saying, “This is my Body and
Blood”, he did not allow women to stand with us.’(2) Here the Apostolic
Church Order agrees with the constant testimony of the universal
Church, Eastern and Western, from apostolic times onwards: women are
entrusted with a wide variety of ministries, but they do not
perform the consecration at the Eucharist. To quote the standard
code of Eastern church law, the Nomocanon of Photius: ‘A
woman does not become a priestess.’(3)
To
an Orthodox Christian it seems not so much ironic as tragic that, at
the very moment when Christians everywhere are praying for unity, we
should see a new chasm opening up to divide us. And in Orthodox eyes,
at any rate, it is a chasm of horrifying dimensions. ‘The ordination
of women to priesthood’, writes Fr Alexander Schmemann, ‘is
tantamount for us to a radical and irreparable mutilation of the
entire faith, the rejection of the whole Scripture, and, needless to
say, the end of all “dialogues”; and he goes on to speak about
‘the threat of an irreversible and irreparable act which, if it
becomes reality, will produce a new, and this time, I am convinced,
final division among Christians’.(4) According to another Orthodox
spokesman, Fr Thomas Hopko, the acceptance of women priests involves
‘a fundamental and radical rejection of the very substance of the
biblical and Christian understanding of God and creation . . . The
decisions taken by the Episcopal Church in America at its General
Convention in Minneapolis ... can only be considered by an Orthodox
Christian as disastrous.’(5) These are strong words. Yet Fr
Schmemann and Fr Hopko are both of them priests with a long pastoral
experience in the West, who have within their own communion the
reputation of being, in the best sense, progressive and open-minded.
Why do they and other Orthodox feel so deeply?
In
common with the recent Roman Catholic statement on ‘Women and the
Priesthood’ (Inter Insigniores, 15 October 1976), we Orthodox
are influenced chiefly by two factors: the witness of Tradition and
the ‘iconic’ character of the Christian priesthood. Beyond this we
appeal also to the ‘order of nature’, to what the Apostolic
Constitutions, when discussing the ministry of women, term the ‘akolouthia
tés physeos’.(6)
But,
when employing these three interdependent lines of argument, it is
essential to make careful distinctions:
(1)
Tradition is not to be equated with custom or social convention; there
is an important difference between ‘traditions’ and Holy Tradition
(with a capital T).
(2)
The ministerial priesthood or priesthood of order is not to be
confused with the royal priesthood exercised by all the baptized.
(3)
The order of nature does not signify fallen human nature, which is in
reality profoundly unnatural; it signifies true human nature as first
created by God, the undistorted image as it existed before the Fall.
The
Appeal to Tradition
‘We
should hold fast’, writes St Vincent of Lérins, ‘to what has been
believed everywhere, always and by everyone.’(7) If ever there was a
practice that contravened the Vincentian Canon, it is certainly the
ordination of women to the priesthood. Christ, the apostles and
ministers of the early Church, as well as their episcopal and
presbyteral successors throughout the ages, were men and not women. In
a matter of such grave importance, do we have the right to act
differently from them?
This
appeal to Tradition requires, however, to be handled with care. The
New Testament, we are sometimes told, does not encourage Christians to
think that nothing should be done for the first time. Loyalty to
Tradition must not become simply another form of fundamentalism.
Tradition is dynamic, not static and inert. It is received and lived
by each new generation in its own way, tested and enriched by the
fresh experience that the Church is continually gaining. In the words
of Vladimir Lossky, Tradition is ‘the critical spirit of the
Church’.(8) It is not simply a protective, conservative principle,
but primarily a principle of growth and regeneration. It is not merely
a collection of documents, the record of what others have said before
us, handed down automatically and repeated mechanically; but it
involves a living response to God’s voice at the present moment, a
direct and personal meeting on our part, here and now, with Christ in
the Spirit. Authentic traditionalism, then, is not a slavish imitation
of the past, but a courageous effort to discriminate between the
transitory and the essential. The true traditionalist is not the
integrist or the reactionary, but the one who discerns the ‘signs of
the times’ (Matt. 16.3)—who is prepared to discover the leaven of
the gospel at work even within such a seemingly secular movement as
‘women’s lib’.
Yet,
even when full allowance has been made for all this, it seems
altogether insufficient to justify such a drastic innovation as women
priests. If there is dynamism in Holy Tradition, there is also
continuity. ‘Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and today, and for
ever’ (Heb. 13.8). The Spirit is always active in each new
generation of the Church, yet it is the Spirit’s role to bear
witness to the Son (John 16.13-15); the Spirit brings us not a new
revelation, but the eternal and unchanging truth of Christ himself. Nove,
non nova, enjoins St Vincent of Lérins:(9) we are not to do or
say ‘new things’, for the revelation imparted by Christ is final
and complete; but, guided by the Spirit, we are ever to act and speak
‘in a new way’, with renewed mind and heart.
What
does this imply, so far as the ordination of women is concerned?
Although Jesus never said anything about this, either for or
against, his actions speak for themselves. In the words of a
French Calvinist. Jean-Jacques von Allmen:
The
New Testament, in spite of the chance of total renewal which it
provides for women as well as for men, never testifies that a woman
could be, in a public and authorized way, representative of Christ.
To no woman does Jesus say, ‘He who hears you, hears me.’ To no
woman does he make the promise to ratify in heaven what she has
bound or loosed on earth. To no woman does he entrust the ministry
of public preaching. To no woman does he give the command to baptize
or to preside at the communion of his Body and Blood. To no woman
does he commit his flock.(10)
We
are confronted here by the question of our obedience to Christ:
are we as Christians to remain faithful to his example or not? Do we
accept the ‘givenness’ and finality of the revelation in Jesus
Christ, and do we believe in the apostolic character of the
Church? Do we wish to belong to the same Church as that which Christ
founded? In the words of a leading Orthodox theologian, Fr John
Meyendorff:
The
Church today claims to be ‘apostolic’. This means that its faith
is based upon the testimony of Christ’s eyewitnesses, that its
ministry is Christ’s and that it is defined in terms of the
unique, unrepeatable act of God, accomplished in Christ once . .
. No new revelation can complete or replace what Jesus Christ
did ‘when the fullness of the time was come’ (Gal. 4.4). The
Gospel of Christ cannot be written anew because ‘the fullness of
time’ came then and not at any other time. There is a sense in
which all Christians must become Christ’s contemporaries.
Therefore, the very ‘historical conditioning’ which
characterizes the Gospel of Christ is, in a sense, normative for
us. The twentieth century is not an absolute norm; the apostolic
age is.(11)
Here,
then, is the first and fundamental argument that the Orthodox Church
employs. Faced by the unanimous and unvarying practice of Christ’s
Church from apostolic times up to our own, we in the twentieth century
have no authority to alter the basic patterns of Christian faith and
life.
Our
appeal as Orthodox is not to Scripture alone nor to Tradition alone,
but to both at once.(l2) We do not appeal simply to the fact that
Christ chose only men to be apostles, but to the fact that for more
than nineteen centuries Christ’s Body the Church has never ordained
any except men to the priesthood and episcopate. Our appeal is to the
total life of the Church over two thousand years—and not only to
what was said but to what was done. It is of course true that the
apostles whom Christ chose were not only males but circumcised Jews.
Almost at once, however, in the lifetime of virtually all the chief
eyewitnesses of the Word, of all those who were qualified in a unique
sense to share ‘the mind of Christ’ (1 Cor. 2.16), the Church
decreed circumcision and the other requirements of the Jewish law to
be no longer binding (Acts 15.23-9). All ministries were henceforward
open to Jews and Gentiles equally. But neither the apostles themselves
nor their successors have admitted women to the priesthood. The
difference between the two cases is immediately apparent, and it is
enormous.
Our
arguments against the ordination of women, then, are not based solely
upon certain statements in the Pauline Epistles, taken in isolation,
such as 1 Corinthians 14.34-5 or 1 Timothy 2.11-12, important though
these texts undoubtedly are. We appeal rather to the manner in which
the scriptural revelation as a whole has been interpreted, applied,
and lived. Scripture and Tradition, here as always, are inseparable
and ‘correlative’, to use the language of the Anglican-Orthodox
Agreed Statement signed at Moscow in 1976.(13) Tradition is nothing
else than the internal continuity that exists between the New
Testament and the subsequent thought and life of the Church. The
ordination of women as priests is excluded precisely because it
confiicts with this living continuity.
But,
if this appeal to Tradition is to be properly understood, three
underlying presuppositions need to be rendered explicit.
(1)
Jesus Christ is not only complete man but true and perfect God. He is
within history, but also above history. We do not see in him merely a
human teacher, bound by the conventions of his age; he is the Word of
God, from whose lips we hear not private opinions soon to grow
outdated, but the eternal truth. Indeed, far from being subservient to
contemporary customs, Christ often showed a striking independence. He
told his disciples, ‘You have heard what was said by the men of old;
but I say to you . . .’ (Matt. 5.21-2); he claimed to be master of
the Sabbath, openly breaking the accepted regulations; he ate with
tax-collectors and sinners; to the astonishment of his followers he
spoke with the Samaritan woman, and in general ignored rules normally
observed by a Jewish rabbi of the time in his dealings with the female
sex. Thus if the Son of God had wanted to appoint women as apostles,
he would have done so, whatever the existing conventions within
Judaism or elsewhere in the ancient world. And the fact that he did not
choose them as apostles must remain decisive for us today. Are we
to assert that the incarnate Word and Wisdom of God was mistaken, and
that we at the end of the twentieth century understand the truth
better than he did?
(2)
The second point is a corollary of the first. As Christ’s Body, as
‘pillar and ground of the truth’ (1 Tim. 3. 15), the Church is
more than a fallible human association. Christ has promised, ‘The
Spirit of truth will guide you into all truth’ (John 16.13): errors
may arise among members of the Church but they never finally prevail,
for we have Christ’s assurance that the truth will prove in the long
run invincible. Are we to believe that this promise of Christ has
failed? Are we to say that, in excluding women from the priesthood,
the Church has erred for nearly two thousand years, unjustly denying
to half the human race its legitimate rights? But, so it is argued,
the Church made precisely such a mistake in regard to slavery. If it
took the Church eighteen centuries to recognize the evils of slavery,
why should it not have taken the Church one century more to end the
unjustifiable subservience of women? On closer investigation, however,
the parallel proves far from exact. The distinction between male and
female is part of the order of nature; that between free men and
slaves is not. As St Basil (d. 379) remarks, ‘No man is a slave by
nature’: (14)slavery only came into existence subsequent to the
Fall. The distinction between male and female, by contrast, existed
prior to the Fall and is inherent in human nature as originally
created by God (Gen. 1.27). Furthermore, several Fathers, most notably
St Gregory of Nyssa (d. c. 395), inveighed vehemently against slavery
as an evil—a necessary evil, perhaps, yet an evil none the less.(15)
But not a single Father ever spoke of the limitation of the priesthood
to men as a necessary evil. As Fr John Saward rightly concludes,
‘The . . . argument from the example of slavery will not stand up to
close examination.’(16)
(3)
On many minor details of church life, so it might be argued, our Lord
perhaps gave no specific instructions, leaving later generations free
to resolve these matters as they might think best. But—and this is
our third presupposition—the admission of women to the priesthood is
not a minor detail. It vitally affects our understanding both of
priesthood and of human nature. If women can and should be priests,
then their exclusion for two millennia is a grave injustice, a tragic
error. Are we to attribute a mistake of this magnitude to the Fathers
and the ecumenical councils, to the apostles and the Son of God?
An
Argument from Silence?
Sometimes
it is claimed that the appeal to Tradition is nothing more that an
argument from absence or silence, and therefore lacking in cogency. It
is true, so the argument runs, that there is nothing in Scripture and
Tradition that explicitly enjoins the ordination of women to the
priesthood; yet equally there is nothing which explicitly forbids it.
The question has not been seriously posed until our own day, and thus
remains open.
To
this it must be answered, first, that we need to listen not only to
the words but to the silence of Scripture and Tradition. Not
everything is outwardly defined. Certain doctrines, never formally
defined, are yet held by the Church with an unmistakable inner
conviction, an unruffled unanimity, which is just as binding as an
explicit proclamation.
Secondly,
it is not in fact correct to say that until our own day the matter was
passed over in silence. On the contrary, it was often discussed in the
early Church. The Apostolic Church Order, as we have seen,
states directly that women are not to officiate at the Eucharist. A
hundred years earlier, Tertullian (d. c. 225) was equally definite:
‘It is not permitted for a woman to speak in church, nor yet to
teach, nor to anoint, nor to make the offering, nor to claim for
herself any office performed by men or any priestly ministry.’(17)
The Apostolic Constitutions (late fourth century) discuss the
ministry of women in some detail, and in the same terms as Tertullian.
Women are not to preach nor to baptize, and a fortiori it is
implied that they do not celebrate the Eucharist. The reason given is
specifically faithfulness to Christ’s example— he never entrusted
such tasks to women, although he could easily have done so; thus the
Church has no power to commission women for work of this kind.(18)
Nor
did the question of women priests remain merely hypothetical in the
early history of the Church. Various schismatic groups in the second
and fourth centuries had women as priests and bishops: the Gnostic
Marcosians, for example,(l9) and the Montanists,(20) and the
Collyridians.(21) When referring to these last, St Epiphanius (d. 403)
examines at length the possibility of women priests. ‘Since the
beginning of time’, he states, ‘a woman has never served God as
priest.’ (He means, of course, in the Old Testament; he knew that
there were priestesses in the pagan fertility cults.) In the New
Testament, although we find female prophets (Luke 2.36; Acts 21.9), no
woman is ever an apostle, bishop, or presbyter. Christ had many women
among his immediate followers—Mary his mother, Salome and others
from Galilee, Martha and Mary the sisters of Lazarus—yet on none of
them did he confer the apostolate or priesthood. 'That there exists in
the Church an order of deaconesses is undisputed; but they are not
allowed to perform any priestly functions.' Besides deaconesses, the
Church has also orders of widows and old women; but we never find
‘female presbyters or priestesses’. ‘After so many
generations’ Christians cannot now start ordaining priestesses for
the first time. Such, then, is Epiphanius' conclusion concerning women
and the ministerial priesthood: ‘God never appointed to this
ministry a single woman upon earth.’(22)
Most Orthodox today would find Epiphanius' treatment of the subject
both convincing and sufficient. The ordination of women to the
priesthood is an innovation, without any sound basis whatever in Holy
Tradition. The evidence is explicit and unanimous, and there is
nothing further to be said. It has to be admitted, however, that this
argument from Tradition will seem inadequate to the majority of
Christians in the West, even to many who are themselves opposed to the
ordination of women priests. It is not enough for them to be told that
it is not in Tradition; they wish to know why it is not. In the words
of an Orthodox woman theologian, Mme Elisabeth Behr-Sigel: ‘To those
who ask from us the bread of understanding, it is not enough to offer
only the stones of certainties hardened by negation.’(23) We need in
fact to advance beyond an appeal to the external facts of Tradition
and to inquire into its inner content. This will oblige us to consider
the delicate subject of priesthood in its relation to sexuality—a
theme which most Orthodox theologians prefer to avoid, for here it is
dangerous to say too much. But then it is also dangerous to say too
little.
Royal Priesthood and Ministerial Priesthood
There are three interdependent truths which need to be kept in
balance:
(1) One, and one alone, is priest.
(2) All are priests.
(3) Only some are priests.
One, and one alone, is priest; Jesus Christ, the unique high
priest of the New Covenant, ‘the one mediator between God and men’
(1 Tim. 2.5), is the sole true celebrant in every sacramental act. All
are priests: by virtue of our creation in God's image and
likeness, and also by virtue of the renewal of that image through
baptism and anointing with chrism (Western ‘confirmation’), we are
all of us, clergy and laity together, ‘a royal priesthood, a holy
nation’ (1 Pet. 2.9), set apart for God's service. Only some are
priests: certain members of the Church are set apart in a more
specific way, through prayer and the laying-on of hands, to serve God
in the ministerial priesthood.
It is vitally important to preserve a proper balance and
distinction between the second and the third forms of priesthood,
between the royal priesthood of sanctity and the ministerial
priesthood of order. In many of the arguments used to support
women priests, so it seems to the Orthodox, these two levels of
priesthood are unhappily confused. For instance, St Paul's words in
Galatians 3.28, ‘There is neither male nor female, for you are all
one in Christ Jesus’, are often cited out of context in favour of
women priests. But in fact, as the preceding sentence shows, Paul is
thinking here of baptism, not ordination; this text refers to the
royal priesthood of the whole People of God, not to the ministerial
priesthood of order.
Women, to an equal degree with men, are created in God's image; to
an equal degree with men, they are recreated in baptism and endued
with the charismata of the Holy Spirit in post-baptismal
anointing. As regards the second level of priesthood, therefore, they
are in every respect as much ‘kings and priests’ (Rev. 1.6) as any
man can ever be. This royal priesthood consists above all in the power
possessed by each human person, made according to the divine image, to
act as a creator after the likeness of God the Creator; each is able
to mould and fashion the world, revealing fresh patterns and a new
meaning in created things, making each material object articulate and
spiritual. The royal priesthood is expressed likewise in the fact that
each human person is a ‘eucharistic animal’, capable of praising
and glorifying God for the gift of the world, and so of turning each
thing into a sacrament and means of communion with him. Each is
capable of offering the world back to its Maker in thanksgiving, of
presenting his or her own self, body and soul together, as a ‘living
sacrifice’ to the Holy Trinity (Rom. 12.1).
‘Thine own from thine own we offer to thee, in all and for all’
(Liturgy of St John Chrysostom): such is the essence of the universal
priesthood inherent in all human nature. In terms of this hieratic
self-offering, both man and woman equally are priests of the created
universe, by virtue of the common humanity that they share. At the
same time each exercises this priesthood in a distinct way, for the
differences of sexuality extend deep into our human nature and are by
no means restricted to the act of procreation.
The human person who expresses most perfectly this royal and
universal priesthood is not in fact a man but a woman—the Blessed
Virgin Mary. She is the supreme example not just of female sanctity
but of human sanctity as such: in the words of G. K. Chesterton,
‘Men are men, but Man is a woman.’ ‘Behold, the handmaid of the
Lord’ (Luke 1.38): at the annunciation, as throughout her life, the
Mother of God exemplifies that priestly act of self-offering which is
the true vocation of all of us. This point has been well emphasized by
the head of the Greek Orthodox Church in Britain, Archbishop
Athenagoras of Thyateira: ‘God in his love sent his Son to be a man,
whilst in return humanity offered Saint Mary the Virgin to be the
cleansed and perfected vessel in which humanity and divinity meet in
the God-manhood of Christ.’(24)
It is significant that the movement for the ordination of women
should first have emerged in those Christian communities that tend to
neglect the Holy Virgin's place in Christ's redemptive work. ‘There
is no doubt in my mind’, says Fr John Meyendorff, ‘that the
Protestant rejection of the veneration of Mary and its various
consequences (such as, for example, the really
"male-dominated" Protestant worship, deprived of sentiment,
poetry and intuitive mystery-perception) is one of the
psychological reasons which explains the recent emergence of
institutional feminism.’(25)
The example of the Mother of God shows us how important it is to
differentiate between the second level of priesthood and the third.
She, in whose person we see perfectly expressed the royal priesthood
of the Christian believer, was never a priest in the ministerial
sense. Speaking on the level of the royal priesthood of self-offering,
the Apostolic Constitutions are able to affirm, ‘Let the
widow realize that she is the altar of God’;(26) but the very same
passage excludes the possibility that the widows, or any other women,
could act as ministerial priests.
Two points about the ministerial priesthood need to be underlined.
First, the ministry is not to be envisaged in ‘professional’
terms, as a ‘job’ which woman can carry out as competently as man,
and which she has an equal ‘right’ to perform. Still less is the
ministry to be conceived in terms of power and domination, as a
‘privilege’ from which woman is being unjustly excluded. ‘It
shall not be so among you’ (Matt. 20.26). The Church is not a power
structure or a business enterprise, but the Body of Christ; the
ministerial priesthood is not a human invention devised for the
purposes of efficiency, but a gift of God's grace. So far from being a
‘right’ or ‘privilege’, the ministry is a call to service, and
this call comes from God. In the Church, all is gift, all is grace.
When a man is called to the ministerial priesthood, this is invariably
a gift of grace from God, never a ‘right’.
Secondly, the ministerial priest is not to be seen in secular and
pseudo-democratic terms, as a deputy or representative, who is merely
exercising by delegation the royal priesthood that belongs to the
Christian people as a whole. No: the ministerial priest derives his
priesthood not by delegation from the people, but immediately from
Christ. As Justin Martyr (d. c. 165) affirms, ‘The twelve apostles
depend upon the power of Christ the eternal priest’;(27) and the
same is true of their successors the bishops. The royal priesthood and
the ministerial priesthood are both ways of sharing directly in the
priesthood of Christ, and neither is derived by devolution through the
other.
The Priest as Icon
But why, we ask, should the ministerial priesthood be limited to
men, whereas the royal priesthood is conferred on all alike? Why
should God not call women to be priests? The answer lies in the
‘iconic’ character of the ministerial priesthood. In the prayer
before the Great Entrance (the offertory procession) at the Divine
Liturgy, the priest addresses these words to Christ: ‘Thou art he
who offers and he who is offered.’ It is Christ himself who makes
the eucharistic offering: as the deacon states at the very beginning
of the service, ‘It is time for the Lord to act.’ ‘Our Lord and
God Jesus Christ’, says St Cyprian of Carthage (d. 258), ‘is
himself the high priest of God the Father; he offered himself as a
sacrifice to the Father and commanded that this should be done in
memory of him; thus the priest truly acts in the place of Christ (vice
Christi).’(28) ‘It is the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit who
perform everything, teaches St John Chrysostom (d. 407); ‘but the
priest lends his tongue and supplies his hand.(29) ... It is not man
who causes the bread and wine to become Christ's Body and Blood: this
is done by Christ himself, crucified for our sakes. The priest stands
before us, doing what Christ did and speaking the words that he spoke;
but the power and grace are from God.’(30)
The priesthood, then, is always Christ's and not ours. The priest
in church is not ‘another’ priest alongside Christ, and the
sacrifice that he offers, in union with the people, is not
‘another’ sacrifice but always Christ's own. The ministerial
priest, as priest, possesses no identity of his own: his priesthood
exists solely in order to make Christ present. This understanding of
the ministerial priesthood is clearly affirmed by St Paul: ‘We come
therefore as Christ's ambassadors; it is as if God were appealing to
you through us’ (2 Cor. 5.20); ‘you welcomed me as an angel of
God, even as Christ Jesus’ (Gal. 4,14). St Ignatius of Antioch (d.
c. 107) speaks similarly: ‘The bishop presides as the image of
God.’(31) In the words of Antiochus the Monk (seventh century):
‘The priests should be imitators of their high priest [i.e. the
bishop], and he in his turn should be imitator of Christ the high
priest.’(32) In the consecration service of an Orthodox bishop, the
chief officiant prays: ‘O Christ our God ... who hast appointed for
us teachers to occupy thy throne ... make this man to be an imitator
of thee the true Shepherd.’
The bishop or priest is therefore an imitator, image, or sign of
Christ the one mediator and high priest. In short, the ministerial
priest is an icon. ‘Standing between God and men,’ writes St
Theodore the Studite (d. 826), ‘the priest in the priestly
invocations is an imitation of Christ. For the apostle says:
"There is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man
Christ Jesus" (1 Tim. 2.5). Thus the priest is an icon of
Christ.’(33) This notion of the priest as an icon has far-reaching
implications:
First, there can be no question of any identification between the
priest and Christ, for an icon is in no sense identical with that
which it depicts.(34)
Secondly, an icon is not the same as a photograph or a realistic
portrait; and so, when the priest is considered as an icon, this is
not to be understood grossly in a literal or naturalistic sense. The
priest is not an actor on the stage, ‘made up’ to look like
Christ.
Thirdly, according to the principle enunciated by St Basil and used
in the Iconoclast Controversy, ‘The honour shown to the icon is
referred to the prototype.’(35) When we venerate the icon of the
Saviour, we do not honour wood and paint, but through wood and paint
we honour Christ himself. The same is true of the priest as an icon.
He is not honoured in and for himself; all the honour is referred to
Christ. In terming the priest an icon, we do not thereby attribute to
him any special kind of intrinsic personal sanctity; we do not set him
as a human being on a higher level than others. The greatest in the
kingdom of heaven are not the clergy but the saints. Here as always, a
careful distinction must be made between royal priesthood and
ministerial priesthood, between the personal priesthood of sanctity
and the iconic priesthood of order.
Fourthly, it is the function of an icon to make present a spiritual
reality that surpasses it, but of which it acts as the sign. As an
icon of Christ, therefore, the priest is not just a deputy or legal
delegate of the people; but neither is he the vicar or surrogate of an
absent Christ. It is the purpose of an icon not to remind us of
someone who is absent, but to render that person present. Christ and
his saints are present as active participants in the Liturgy through
their icons in the church; and Christ is likewise present in the
Liturgy through his icon the priest.
Fifthly and finally, as an icon of the unique high priest Christ,
the ministerial priest must be male. In the words of Fr Alexander
Schmemann, ‘if the bearer, the icon and the fulfiller of that unique
priesthood, is man and not woman, it is because Christ is man and not
woman.’(36) ‘For the Eastern Orthodox,’ writes Fr Maximos
Aghiorgoussis, ‘it is imperative to preserve the symbolic
correspondence between Christ as a male and the ordained priest... The
ordination of women to the Holy Priesthood is untenable since it would
disregard the symbolic and iconic value of male priesthood, both as
representing Christ's malehood and the fatherly role of the Father in
the Trinity, by allowing female persons to interchange with male
persons a role which cannot be interchanged.’(37)
There are two points implicit in these words of Fr Maximos. First,
he speaks not only of Christ's ‘manhood’ but of his
‘male-hood’. At his human birth Christ did not only become man in
the sense of becoming human [anthropos, homo], but he also became man
in the sense of becoming male [aner, vir}. Certainly Christ is the
Saviour of all humankind, of men and women equally; at his incarnation
he took up into himself and healed our common humanity. But at the
same time we should keep in view the particularity of the incarnation.
Christ was born at a specific time and place, from a specific mother.
He did not just become human in an abstract or generalized sense, but
he became a particular human being; as such he could not be both a
male and a female at once, and he was in fact a male.
Secondly, men and women are not interchangeable, like counters, or
identical machines. The difference between them, as we have already
insisted, extends far more deeply than the physical act of
procreation. The sexuality of human beings is not an accident, but
affects them in their very identity and in their deepest mystery.
Unlike the differentiation between Jew and Greek or between slave and
free—which reflect man's fallen state and are due to social
convention, not to nature—the differentiation between male and
female is an aspect of humanity's natural state before the Fall. The
life of grace in the Church is not bound by social conventions or the
conditions produced by the Fall; but it does conform to the order of
nature, in the sense of unfallen nature as created by God. Thus the
distinction between male and female is not abolished in the Church.
We are not saved from our masculinity and femininity, but in them;
to say otherwise is to be Gnostic or Marcionite. We cannot repent of
being male and female, but only of the way in which we are these
things. Grace co-operates with nature and builds upon it; the Church's
task is to sanctify the natural order, not to repudiate it. In the
Church we are male and female, not sexless. Dedicated virginity within
the church community is not the rejection of sex, but a way of
consecrating it. In the words of Fr John Meyendorff, ‘The Christian
faith, as held by the Church, is not a negation of nature but its
salvation. The "new creation" does not suppress the
"old", but renews and transfigures it.’(38) He goes on to
quote the words of an Orthodox statement at an Anglican-Orthodox
consultation held in America in 1974: ‘God created men as "male
and female", establishing a diversity of functions and gifts;
these functions and gifts are complementary but not at all
interchangeable ... There is every reason for Christians to oppose the
current trends which tend to make men and women interchangeable in
their functions and roles, and thus lead to the dehumanization of
life.’ C. S. Lewis saw this danger many years ago: ‘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.’(39)
Such, then, is the Orthodox understanding of the ministerial
priesthood. The priest is an icon of Christ; and since the incarnate
Christ became not only man but a male—since, furthermore, in the
order of nature the roles of male and female are not
interchangeable—it is necessary that the priest should be male.
Those Western Christians who do not in fact regard the priest as an
icon of Christ are of course free to ordain women as ministers; they
are not, however, creating women priests but dispensing with
priesthood altogether.
The Value of Symbols
Some will remain unconvinced by this argument from the iconic
character of the priesthood, because it involves an appeal to
symbolism. ‘Do not offer us symbols,’ they will object, ‘but
give us a proof, based on logical reasoning.’ It must in answer be
at once admitted that the rightness of our symbols is not something
that can be logically demonstrated. A symbol can be verified, lived,
prayed—but not ‘proved’. Church life, however, is not to be
reduced to Euclidean geometry; while our reasoning powers should be
employed to the full, we cannot grasp spiritual truth exclusively
through syllogisms. Symbols and archetypes provide a vital key for the
comprehension of literature and art; and they are no less important in
religious faith and prayer. A symbol has the advantage of being far
easier to understand than a verbal explanation, while at the same time
conveying truths too profound to be formulated in words. In worship,
as in family life, there is a ‘deep symbolism of actions and
things’,(40) reaching down to the hidden roots of our being. If this
symbolism is ignored or outraged, our relationship alike with God and
with other humans will be fatally impoverished.
In our subconscious there are certain symbols and archetypes which
are not invented but given. The same is true of the symbols revealed
in Holy Scripture and used in Christian worship. We ‘prove’ these
symbols; all we know is that God has set his (83) seal upon certain
images and not upon others. We have been taught to say ‘Our Father
who art in heaven’, and not ‘Our Mother who art in heaven’; the
second person of the Holy Trinity is God the Son, not God the
Daughter; Christ is the New Adam, not the New Eve; he is the
Bridegroom and the Church is his Bride—the relationship cannot be
reversed. These symbols are ‘given’, and they are absolutely
fundamental.
Needless to say, our symbolic theology must be balanced by the use
of apophatic or negative theology. God in himself is neither masculine
nor feminine, since he infinitely transcends any such categories. Yet
it does not therefore follow that we are free to apply to him whatever
symbols we please. On the contrary, if we were to substitute a Mother
Goddess for God the Father, we would not simply be altering a piece of
incidental imagery, but we would be replacing Christianity with a new
kind of religion.(41) The male character of the Christian priesthood
forms an integral element in this pattern of revealed, God-given
symbolism which is not to be tampered with. Christ is the Bridegroom
and the Church is his Bride: how can the living icon of the Bridegroom
be other than a man?
Diversities of Gifts
If our conclusion thus far has a negative appearance, this is
because the wrong question was posed in the first place. Rather than
ask, ‘Can women be priests?’, we ought to be asking, ‘What are
the distinctive gifts conferred by God on women, and how can these
gifts be expressed in the Church's ministry?’ Instead of trying to
ordain women as priests, Christians today need to explore and develop
the special forms of service in the Church that women are best able to
perform. The question is not ‘Do women have a role of leadership in
the Church?’, but ‘What is the nature of that role?’
It is one of the chief glories of human nature that men and women,
although equal, are not interchangeable. Together they exercise a
common ministry which neither could exercise alone; for within that
shared ministry each has a particular role. There exists between them
a certain order or hierarchy, with man as the ‘head’ and woman as
the partner or ‘helper’ (Gen. 2.18); yet this differentiation does
not imply any fundamental inequality between them. Within the Trinity,
God the Father is the source and ‘head’ of Christ (1 Cor. 11.3),
and yet the three persons are essentially equal; and the same is true
of the relationship of man and woman. The Greek Fathers, although
often negative in their opinion of the female sex, were on the whole
absolutely clear about the basic human equality of man and woman. Both
alike are created in God's image; the subordination of woman to man
and her exploitation reflect not the order of nature created by God,
but the contra-natural conditions resulting from original sin.(42)
Equal yet different according to the order of nature, man and woman
complete each other through their free co-operation; and this
complementarity is to be respected on every level—when at home in
the circle of the family, when out at work, and not least in the life
of the Church, which blesses and transforms the natural order but does
not obliterate it.
Much current propaganda for the ordination of women priests seems
to envisage the priesthood as virtually the only possible form of
ministry in the Church. It is assumed that, because women are not
allowed to be priests, they are in consequence being left with no
proper role to play in church life. The diversity of ministries, such
as we find for example in the Apostolic Church Order, is all too often
overlooked. The present campaign for women priests may thus be seen as
‘the bitter fruit of the clericalization of the Church’,(43) ‘a
typically western and medieval form of clericalism’.(44) Women are
being wrongly led to seek priestly ordination, because other forms of
ecclesial service have been neglected. But this point has a relevance
for men as well: often men assume that, if they ‘have a vocation’,
it must be to the priesthood, because they do not think in terms of
any other type of ministry. We need to recover the full Pauline vision
of the Church as unity in diversity.
Among the Orthodox thinkers who in the recent past have written
about the distinctive gifts and ministry of women are Nicolas Berdyaev,(45)
Fr Lev Gillet,(460 Olivier Clement,(47) and above all Paul Evdokimov.(48)
Their views are carefully summarized in a recent article by Mme Behr-Sigel,
who wisely warns against the danger of thinking in terms of
‘cultural stereotypes’.(49) Certainly the whole subject requires
much more thorough investigation on the Orthodox part. We need to hear
the voice not merely of the male theologians but of the Orthodox women
themselves. An encouraging start—but no more than a start—was made
by the Consultation of Orthodox Women, held at Agapia, Romania, on
11-17 September 1976.
Brief mention may be made of four among the ministries that
Orthodox women are or could be fulfilling:
(1) Although in the New Testament no woman was chosen to be an
apostle, the Orthodox Church recognizes a number of women as
isapostolos, ‘equal to the apostles’: for instance, St Mary
Magdalene, the Martyr Thekla, St Helena, mother of the Emperor
Constantine, and St Nina, the missionary who converted Georgia.
(2) Women ‘equal to the apostles’, acting as preachers and
missionaries, have never been common in the past; but there is a more
hidden form of ministry which Orthodox women have never ceased to
perform—that of the priest's wife. Within Orthodoxy the parish
priest is in principle always a married man; when for special reasons
a parish is put in charge of a monk or a celibate priest—there are
in fact extremely few unmarried clergy who are not in monastic
vows—this is definitely to be regarded as an exception to the
standard rule. The fact that the parish priest has a wife is not to be
seen as merely accidental or peripheral to his pastoral work; nor
should the priest's wife merely be someone who happens to have married
a fixture clergyman. Her status in the parish is indicated by her
title: in the Greek Church the priest is called presbyteros or pappass
and his wife presbytera or pappadia; in the Russian Church the priest
is ‘little father’, batushka, and his wife is ‘little mother’,
matushka. If the woman in the home acts as giver and protector of
life, the priest's wife is called to do this throughout the parish.
Just as the priest is father not to his own children solely but to the
entire community, so the priest's wife is called to be mother alike in
her own family and in the parochial family as a whole. Yet she is not
ordained for this task, but is simply realizing in a particular manner
the royal priesthood that is the common inheritance of all. Her
maternal vocation has to be exercised with the utmost discretion, not
so much through anything she says or does, as through
what she is.
(3) There is, however, one form of the ordained ministry to which
women are certainly called, and that is the ministry of deaconesses.
The members of the Agapia Consultation pleaded for a
‘reactivation’ of this ancient order, which in the Orthodox Church
has fallen into disuse since the twelfth century.(50) They spoke of
the ministry of the deaconess as a ‘life-time commitment to full
vocational service in the Church ... an extension of the sacramental
life of the Church into the life of society’.(51) Already, in the
Russian Church before the Revolution, there were several schemes for a
full restoration of the order of deaconesses, although in the end
nothing was done.(52) Since 1952 the Church of Greece has had a School
for Deaconesses—the present building was opened in 1957—but the
members are not actually ordained. I am told, however, that ordained
deaconesses exist within the Coptic Church of Egypt.
There is a difference of opinion among contemporary Orthodox as to
the exact status of deaconesses in the early Church. Some regard them
as essentially a ‘lay’ and not an ‘ordained’ ministry.(53) But
others point out that the liturgical rite for the laying-on of hands
received by deaconesses is exactly parallel to that for deacons: this
implies that deaconesses receive, as deacons do, a genuine sacramental
ordination—not just a cheirothesia but a cheirotonia.(54) All
Orthodox are agreed, however, that there is a sharp distinction
between the diaconate and the priesthood. The deacon, and a fortiori
the deaconess, cannot perform the consecration at the Eucharist,
cannot bless the people, and in general does not act as a liturgical
icon of Christ. There is a special funeral office for priests, but
when a deacon dies the burial service is the same as for a layman. The
existence of deaconesses within the Church is thus in no sense a
justification for women priests. As the Agapia Consultation insisted,
‘The office of deaconess is distinct and not new, nor can it be
considered as a "first step" to the ordained
priesthood.’(55)
In the Teaching of the Apostles, a Syriac work of the early
third century, it is suggested that the deacon has a special link with
the second person of the Holy Trinity, and the deaconess with the
third person: ‘The deacon stands in the place of Christ; and do you
love him. And the deaconess shall be honoured by you in the place of
the Holy Spirit.’(56) The implications of this idea have been
developed, in a fascinating but somewhat speculative manner, by Paul
Evdokimov;(57) a similar line of thought can be found in an article by
Fr Thomas Hopko.(58) While it would be unwise to base too much on this
one passage from the Teaching of the Apostles, taken in
isolation, here certainly is a theme to be explored more fully when
considering the charismata of woman. In early Syriac sources,
and very occasionally in the Greek tradition, the Holy Spirit is
pictured in feminine symbolism: the Syriac author Aphrahat (early
fourth century), for example, speaks of the Christian's relationship
with ‘God his Father and the Holy Spirit his Mother’.(59) If man
serves in a special way as an icon of the Saviour, has not woman a
distinctive role as an icon of the Paraclete?
(4) Much has been said in recent years about the importance in the
Orthodox tradition of the spiritual father, of the charismatic
‘abba’ or ‘elder’, styled geron by the Greeks and starets
by the Russians. But is there not a place also for spiritual
motherhood? The role of spiritual guide is closely linked to the gifts
of intercession and prophecy; and these, as we noted at the outset,
are in a special sense the charismata of woman.
Not that the idea of spiritual motherhood is new. In the Gerontikon
or ‘Sayings of the Desert Fathers’, alongside some 127 spiritual
fathers there are three ‘ammas’ or spiritual mothers, Theodora,
Sarah, and Synkletika; and these ‘ammas’, although in a minority,
are set upon an equal footing with the great ‘abbas’ such as
Antony, Arsenios, or Poemen. The monk Isaias, around the year 1200,
even compiled a Meterikon or collection of the ‘Sayings of
the Mothers’, parallel to the Paterikon or ‘Sayings of the
Fathers’; as yet unpublished in Greek, this Meterikon was
translated into Russian by Bishop Theophan the Recluse and published
in at least three editions.(60)
There is no lack of material for such a work. Indeed, in the
history of monasticism it was the women who acted as pioneers rather
than the men. It is customary to treat St Antony of Egypt as the
father of Christian monasticism. Yet we read that, when he first
decided to give up his possessions and to embrace the ascetic way, he
entrusted his younger sister to the care of a parthenon, a
‘convent’ of virgins.(61) Long before Antony had settled in the
desert as a hermit, or his younger contemporary Pachomius had
established the first coenobitic monasteries for men, fully organized
communities for women were already in existence.
The starets or spiritual father in the Christian East, while
commonly a priest-monk, is not always in priestly orders: the great
Antony himself, like most of the early Desert Fathers, was never
ordained. From this it is clear that the ministry of spiritual
direction, although linked closely to the ministerial priesthood of
order, is basically an expression of the royal priesthood of sanctity.
It is therefore a calling that can be exercised by lay men; and if by
lay men, then equally—yet in a different way—by lay women. In the
Anglican Church Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941) forms a notable instance
of a lay woman invested with this ministry.(62) If the order of
deaconesses were revived in Orthodoxy, no doubt many of them would act
as spiritual mothers; but the role of motherhood in Christ should not
be limited to them or to any other specific form of the ordained
ministry.
Throughout the contemporary Christian world there is a thirst for
spiritual guidance, and at the same time a severe dearth of persons
blessed by the Holy Spirit to serve as guides. It is disappointing
that in such a situation very little thought is being given to the
cultivation of spiritual motherhood. The unhappy controversy about
women priests is distracting our thought from the real questions.
Here, then, are four ways in which the ministry of women exists or
might be further developed in the Orthodox Church today. Many more
examples could of course be given; but enough has, I hope, been said
to indicate how rich are the possibilities. In conclusion let us end
with two pictures, the first from Greece and the second from Russia.
Often in his writings Alexander Papadiamantis (1851-1911) describes
the characteristic festivals held in remote chapels in the Greek
countryside. Without the participation of the women, these festivals
could scarcely be held. It is they who ‘prepare and constitute the
physical flesh for the cosmic liturgy’:(63) they have baked the
loaves for the Eucharist, they bring with them the wine and oil, the
incense and the candles, they decorate the church and do the singing
at the service. Without them the celebration could not take place,
just as it could not take place without the priest. Here, in the
offering of the Eucharist, man and woman are to be seen cooperating
together, and the role of each is essential.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn speaks likewise of the role of women in his
piece ‘The Easter Procession’. Surrounded by hostile, jeering
crowds, the Paschal procession makes its way round the outside of the
Patriarchal cathedral in Moscow at Easter midnight. First come two
laymen, clearing the way; then follows the churchwarden, carrying a
lantern on a pole, ‘glancing from side to side with apprehension’,
and after him come two other men with a banner, also ‘huddling
together from fear’. At the end of the little procession come the
priests and deacons; and they too, in their fear, are ‘bunched
together, walking out of step’, hurrying by as quickly as they can.
But between the banner and the clergy come the women, ten of them,
walking in pairs, holding thick lighted candles. They have a
tranquillity that the men lack:
. .. elderly women with faces set in an unworldly gaze, prepared
for death if they are attacked. Two out of the ten are young girls,
with pure, bright faces... The ten women, walking in close
formation, are singing and looking as solemn as though the people
round them were crossing themselves, praying and falling on their
knees in repentance. They do not breathe the cigarette smoke; their
ears are deaf to the vile language; the soles of their feet do not
feel how the churchyard has been turned into a dance-floor.(64)
These ten, walking in the Easter procession, exemplify the women of
Russia who, far more than the men, have through their courage kept
alive the faith during sixty years of persecution, They prove to us
that woman in God's Church is called to be passive, not subordinate,
but resolute and creative, as the Virgin Mary was at the annunciation.
Footnotes
1.
A. Harnack, Die Quellen der sogenannten apostolischen
Kirchenordnung (Texte und Untersuchungen ii,5: Leipzig 1886), pp.
22-4; Eng. tr. by J. Owen, Sources of the Apostolic Canons (London
1895), pp. 19-21.
2.
A. Harnack, op. cit., p. 28; Eng. tr., p. 25.
3.
Nomocanon i, 37 (ed. G. A. Rallis and M. Potlis, Syntagma i,
81: priestess is in Greek presbytera).
4.
‘Concerning Women’s Ordination: Letter to an Episcopal Friend’,
in H. Karl Lutge (ed.), Sexuality—Theology—Priesthood (San
Gabriel, n.d.), pp. 12-13.
5.
In the periodical of the Orthodox Church in America, The Orthodox
Church, November 1976, p. 5.
6.
Ap. Const. III, ix, 4 (ed. Funk, p. 201).
7.
Commonitorium Primum ii (3) (P.L. 50, 640).
8.
In the Image and Likeness of God (Crestwood 1974), p. 156.
9.
Commonitorium Primum xxii (27) (P.L. 50, 667).
10.
‘Is the Ordination of Women to the Pastoral Ministry
Justifiable?’, in Lutge, Sexuality—Theology—Priesthood,
p. 35.
11.
The Orthodox Church, September 1975, p. 4.
12.
Compare the official commentary of the Sacred Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith on its decree Inter insigniores: ‘This
brings us to a fundamental observation: we must not expect the New
Testament on its own to resolve in a clear fashion the question
of the possibility of women acceding to the priesthood’ (The
Ordination of Women, CTS Do 494, p. 8).
13.
See K. Ware and C. Davey, Anglican-Orthodox Dialogue (London
1977), p. 84.
14.
On the Holy Spirit xx (51) (P.G. 32, 160D). Cf John
Chrysostom, Homily xxii, I on Ephesians (P.G. 62, 155).
15.
Homily iv on Ecclesiastes (P.G. 44, 664C-668A; ed.
Jaeger-Alexander, pp. 334-8).
16.
The Case against the Ordination of Women (Church Literature
Association, London 1975), p. 6.
17.
On the veiling of virgins ix, 1 (C.C. ii, 1218-19).
18.
Ap. Const. III, vi, 1-2 and III, ix, 4 (ed. Funk, pp. 191,
2(11). Cf. VIII, xxviii, 6 (p. 530).
19.
Irenaeus, Against the Heresies I, xiii, 2 (ed.-Harvey, i,
116-17). Cf. Tertullian, De praescr. haer. xli, 5 (C.C. i,
221).
20.
Epiphanius, Panarion XLIX, ii, 2; ii, 5; iii, 2 (ed. Holl, pp.
243-4).
21.
Ibid., LXXIX, i, 7 (ed. Holl, p. 476). Cf. LXXVIII, xxiii, 4 (p. 473),
on the Antidikomariamitae.
22.
Ibid., LXXIX, ii, 3-vii, 4 (pp. 477-82).
23.
‘La femme dans l’Eglise orthodoxe. Vision céleste et histoire’,
in Contacts xxix, 4 (1977), p. 318.
24.
‘The Question of the Ordination of Women’, in The Orthodox
Herald, no. 125-6 (May-June 1975), p. 14.
25.
The Orthodox Church, September 1975, p. 4.
26.
Ap. Const. III, vi, 3 (ed. Funk, p. 191).
27.
Dialogue with Trypho xlii, 1 (ed. Otto, p. 140).
28.
Letter lxiii,14 (ed. Hartel, p. 713).
29.
Homily (xxvii, 4 on John (P.G. 59, 472).
30.
On the treachery of Judas i, 6 (P.G. 49, 380). Cf. Commentary
on Galatians. 4.28 (P.G 61, 663), on the sacrament of
baptism: the words of God are spoken through the priest’ (not
by him).
31.
To the Magnesians vi, 1; cf To the Trallians iii, 1; To
the Smyrnaeans viii, 1.
32.
Homily 123 (P.G. 89, 1817C).
33.
Seven Chapters against the Iconoclasts 4 (P.G. 99,
493C). Cf. Theodore, Letters i, 11 (P.G. 99, 945C).
34.
Cf. Ware and Davey, Anglican-Orthodox Dialogue, p. 74.
35.
On the Holy Spirit xviii (45) (P.G. 32, 149C). Basil is
speaking here about Trinitarian relationships, not about iconography;
but in the disputes of the eighth to ninth centuries his words were
applied to the holy icons (see John of Damascus, On the Holy Icons i,
21: ed. Kotter, p. 108).
36.
‘Concerning Women’s Ordination’, in Lutge, Sexuality—Theology—
Priesthood, pp. 14-15.
37.
‘Women Priests?’ (Holy Cross Orthodox Press, Brookline 1976), pp.
3, 5.
38.
The Orthodox Church, September 1975, p. 4.
39.
‘Priestesses in the Church?’, from God in the Dock, ed. W.
Hooper (Michigan 1970), p. 238 (from an article originally published
in 1948).
40.
I take this phrase from the decree Inter insigniores (CTS Do
493, p. 11).
41.
Very occasionally in the Christian tradition, feminine imagery has
been applied to the deity, in particular to the Holy Spirit (see
below, note 59). But this is the exception; all the main symbols
‘given’ to us are masculine.
42.
See, for example, Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis iv, 8 (ed.
Staehlin, p. 275, 21ff.); John Chrysostom, Sermon ii, 2 and iv,
l on Genesis (P.G. 54, 589, 593); Homily xxvi, 2 on 1
Corinthians (P.G. 61, 214-15); Ps.-Gregory of Nyssa, On the
Creation of Man (P.G. 44, 276A: ed. Hörner, p. 34, 8ff.); Basil
of Seleucia, Oration 2 (P.G. 85, 44A); Procopius of
Gaza, On Genesis 2.18 (P.G. 87 (i), 172A).
43.O.
Clément, Questions sur l’homme (Paris 1972), p. 119.
44.
Fr John Meyendorff, in The Orthodox Church, September 1975, p.
4. 45. See ‘The New Middle Ages’, in The End of Our Time (London
1933), pp. 117-18.
46.
See ‘Un Moine de l’Eglise d’Orient’, Amour sans limites (Chevetogne
1971), p. 96.
47.
See Questions sur l’homme, pp. 114-21 (brief, but highly
perceptive).
48.
See his important study La femme et le salut du monde. Etude
d’anthropologie chrétienne sur les charismes du femme (Tournai/Paris
1958) not yet (alas) translated into English, and long since
unobtainable in the French original.
49.
‘La femme dans l’Eglise orthodoxe’, in Contacts xxix, 4
(1977), pp. 303-9.
50.
See the report Orthodox Women: Their Role and Participation in the
Orthodox Church, published by the World Council of Churches:
Sub-Unit on Women in Church and Society (Geneva 1977).
51.
Orthodox Women, p. 50.
52.
See Fr Sergei Hackel, ‘Mother Maria Skobtsova: Deaconess Manquée?’,
in Eastern Churches Review i (1967), pp. 264-6.
53.
This is the view of the Romanian theologian Prof. Nicolae Chitescu:
see his article in the World Council of Churches pamphlet Concerning
the Ordination of Women (Geneva 1964).
54.
See the article by Prof Evangelos Theodorou of Athens University,
‘The Ministry of Deaconesses in the Greek Orthodox Church’, in Orthodox
Women, pp. 37-43; also Militsa Zernov,’Women’s Ministry in the
Church’, in Eastern Churches Review vii (1975), pp. 34-9.
Prof
Panagiotis Trempelas considers that deaconesses in the early Church
‘received, not just a laying-on of hands (cheirothesia) but a
real ordination (cheirotomia), being placed on a level somewhat
lower than the deacon, but higher than the subdeacon’ (Dogmatiki
tis Orthodoxou Katholikis Ekklisias, vol. iii [Athens 1961], pp.
291-2; Fr. tr. by P. Dumont, Dogmatique de l’Eglise orthodoxe
catholique, vol. iii [Chevetogne 1968], p. 309).
55.
Orthodox Women, p.50.
56.
Didascalia Apostolorum, ed. R. H. Connolly (Oxford 1929), xxv
(p. 88); cf. Ap. Const. II, xxvi, 5-6 (ed. Funk, p. 105).
57.
‘Les charismes de la femme’, in La nouveauté de l’Esprit (Spiritualité
Orientale, no. 20: Bellefontaine 1977), pp. 245-8. Cf. La femme
et le salut du monde, pp.16, 211.
58.
‘On the Male Character of Christian Priesthood’, in St
Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly xix (1975), pp. 155-6.
59.
On Virginity against the Jews xviii, 10 (ed. Parisot, col.
839). Cf. also The Gospel according to the Hebrews, in M. R.
James, The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford 1924), p. 2; The
Acts of Thomas 7, 27, 39, 50 (James, op. cit., pp. 368, 376, 384,
388); Gregory of Nyssa, Commentary on the Song of Songs, Sermons 6
and 15 (ed. Langerbeck, pp. 183, 468); Macarius, Homily xxviii,
4 (ed. Dörries, p. 233), etc. In the West, ‘Mother language’ is
applied to God by Julian of Norwich. These passages should not be
over-emphasized. In Syria after the middle of the fourth century,
references to the Spirit as Mother become very rare; in the Greek
tradition, such references are always exceptional.
60.
See I. Hausherr, Direction spirituelle en Orient autrefois (Orientalia
Christiana Analecta 144: Rome 1955), p. 267.
61.
Athanasius, Life of Antomy 3. In terming Antony ‘father of
monasticism’, one should not forget Syria!
62.
Incidentally she did not favour giving the priesthood to women. See
her essay ‘The Ideals of the Ministry of Women’, in Mixed
Pastures (London 1933); cited by V. A. Demant, Why the
Christian Priesthood is Male (2nd edn, Church Literature
Association, London 1977), pp. 20-1.
63.
I borrow this phrase from Prof. Christos Yannaras, to whom I owe the
ideas in this paragraph.
64.
Matryona’s House and Other Stories, tr. by M. Glenny (Penguin
Books, Harmondsworth 1975), pp. 106-7.
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