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WOMEN’S
ORDINATION AND THE ESCHATOLOGICAL BODY:
TOWARDS
AN ORTHODOX ANTHROPOLOGY BEYOND SEXUAL DIFFERENCE
SPYRIDOULA ATHANASOPOULOU KYPRIOU
Abstract:
The
aim of my paper is to consider the construction of Christian Orthodox
anthropology beyond sexual ideology and towards the eschatological body.
Among the arguments of Roman Catholic and Orthodox
Church against the ordination of women, the sex of the incarnated God Word
appears as a fundamental one and makes the female human being unsuitable to
represent Christ. Although those who argue against the ordination of women
acknowledge a) the fact that the aim of the incarnation of Son of God was
exactly the restoration of unity of the divided human nature and b) the fact
that in Christ men and women are equal, they in fact support that sexual
difference is a structural component of human nature (and not just an external
element) and that men and women are different not because each human being is a
unique person but on the basis of their sexed body. What lies behind this
argument is a sexual ideology that assumes that human beings are distinguished
into sexes naturally. In this paper, I propose that such a view comes against
not only current understandings of the construction of sex and gender but also
the biblical witness and the Church’s tradition. My main argument is that if we
see human beings in the light of the eschatological body, no person can be
excluded from ordination.
Among the
arguments of Roman Catholic and Orthodox Church against the ordination of women,
the sex of the incarnated God Word appears as a fundamental one and makes the
female human being unsuitable to represent Christ. Although those who argue
against the ordination of women acknowledge a) the fact that the aim of the
incarnation of Son of God was precisely the restoration of unity of the divided
human nature and b) the fact that in Christ men and women are equal, they in
fact support that sexual difference is a structural component of human nature
(and not just an external element) and that men and women are different not
because each human being is a unique person but on the basis of their sexed
body. What lies behind this argument (that sexual difference is a structural
component of human nature) is a sexual ideology that assumes that human beings are
distinguished into sexes naturally. In this paper, I propose that such a view
comes against not only current philosophical understandings of the construction
of sex and gender but also the biblical witness and the Church’s tradition. My
main argument is that if we see human beings in the light of the eschatological
body, no person can be excluded from ordination on the basis of their sexed
body.
At this point, I
need to say that my intention is not to develop an Orthodox anthropology.
Rather, my attempt is simply to explore the possible relevance of the notion of
the eschatological body for the discussion of women’s ordination. I also
attempt to look at philosophically critical understandings of sex and gender in
order to initiate a fruitful dialogue between Orthodox theology and in
particular Orthodox anthropology and critical theories.
The paper is
structured as follows: First, I focus on the work of a leading post-modern
secular feminist, notably Judith Butler, in order to outline how the
naturalization of sexual difference has been challenged by contemporary
critical theorists. Then, I present Gregory of Nyssa’s eschatologically
oriented theory of gender that is based on biblical witness and argue for a
Christian anthropology that would go beyond the naturalization of sexual
difference claiming that aspects of Patristic thought are in accordance with
contemporary denaturalization of sexual difference.
I conclude with
a brief discussion on the idea that if we understand human beings in the light
of the eschatological body, no person can be excluded from ordination on the
basis of their sexed body.
Current
philosophical understandings of the construction of sex and gender: Judith
Butler
Judith Butler’s
work serves as the starting point of any contemporary discussion on issues of
gender and sexuality. She has provided an influential analysis of sex, gender,
sexuality and the body. Her work combines aspects of feminist theory and
philosophy, queer theory and psychoanalysis. Her contribution to gender theory
involves a radical critique of identity categories in which not only gender,
but also sex, sexuality and the body are conceived as cultural products. She is
an anti-essentialist feminist who argues for the death of gender stability. Her
work is appealing to groups of oppressed people because it subverts the
repressive net of sexual stereotypes and compulsory heterosexuality, and is
critical of gender essentialism. According to gender essentialism, there is a
natural essence of femininity and a natural essence of masculinity. Therefore,
human beings are first understood as men and women who have to fulfill socially
imposed gender requirements.
In her two very
influential books, Gender Trouble
(1990) and Bodies that Matter (1993), she challenges the naturalization of
sex, gender, the body and heterosexuality. She reveals the ways in which sex
and gender are produced within a binary framework that is conditioned by
heterosexuality, rather than the other way round. Thus, it is not that sex and
gender produce heterosexuality, but that heterosexuality produces sex and
gender in a binary form.[1] In Gender Trouble, she attempts to move
beyond the sex/gender distinction that had become central to feminist theory
during the 1970s and early 1980s. This distinction allowed feminists to avoid
biological determinism and to examine the cultural production of gender. This
distinction seems to understand gender as some sort of cultural overlay on a
basic biological category that is taken as given[2]. (Sex is
given and gender is a cultural overlay on sex). Yet, for Butler the category of
sex is itself a gendered category. For Butler, ‘Gender’ is not ‘natural’ but
repetitively ‘performed’. Moreover, as she puts it: ‘There is no gender
identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively
constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results.’[3] She
writes that sex is ‘no longer believable as an interior “truth” of dispositions
and identity’, but is rather a ‘performatively enacted signification…, one
that, released from its naturalized interiority and surface, can occasion the
parodic proliferation and subversive play of gendered meaning.’[4]
Thus, Butler’s whole project is about the denaturalization of gender and the
fluidity of gender, and its creation through repeated practices. But this is
not to say that gender can be constituted at will.[5] For
Butler, ‘to enter into the repetitive practices of this terrain of
signification is not a choice, for the “I” that might enter is always already
inside: there is no possibility of agency or reality outside of the discursive
practices that give those terms the intelligibility that they have.’[6]
Butler’s
analysis on the performative production of sexed identity was criticized
because it appeared to neglect the materiality of the body. In Bodies that Matter, she attempts to
respond to accusations that she neglects the materiality of the body[7] and
that she reduces physical bodylines to mere forms of verbal instantiation.[8] She,
therefore, develops her account of performativity by reworking speech act
theory to focus on the ways in which bodies are materialized as sexed.[9] In
other words, for Butler language does not create bodies. Rather she thinks that
there is no access to bodies that is not already a gendered access (bodies are
understood through culture, culturally determined, we make sense of bodies
through cultural distinctions). By adapting speech act theory, she links the
materialization of the body to the performativity of gender and, in so doing,
rethinks the materiality of the sex/gendered body in non-essential terms.
Moreover, she
argues that identity involves multiple and co-existing identifications and that
gender identifications are ‘phantasmatic.’[10] As such,
for Butler, these identifications are not something, which is given in biology,
or some sort of essential self. An important aspect of her critique of identity
is that the categories through which embodied subjects come into being are
never fully determining.[11]
This allows for the possibility of resistance (and of gender fluidity). One
would say that celibacy is a form of resistance. Somehow, it is the prospect of gender liberation (not just sex
liberation) and of an escape from stereotype and of an elusive personal
transformation beyond normal human restrictions that are appealing
to the late-twentieth century mind.[12]
What is
important to keep in mind is that for critical theories the category of sex is
itself a gendered category
Gregory of Nyssa’s eschatologically
oriented theory of gender that is based on biblical witness
Butler’s
thematization of gender fluidity and of subversive personal agency all echo
older theistically oriented traditions.[13] The denaturalization of sex and gender is a
theme shared with an older tradition of ascetical transformation.[14]
Interestingly, western feminist theologians like Sarah Coakley and Tina
Beattie, as well Orthodox theologians,[15] argue for
the relevance of the Eastern Orthodox tradition to contemporary issues of
gender and sexuality. It seems that many feminist theologians revisit the
eastern tradition, particularly the works of Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the
Confessor, in order to find liberating resources. What these feminist
theologians try to do is to explore the different ways in which tradition might
be interpreted in response to contemporary questions about sex and gender and sexuality.[16]
Tina Beattie
points out that there are significant differences between eastern and western
Christianity on the topic of gender and sexuality.[17] Orthodox
Christianity is influenced by the encratite theology of early Christian
thinkers, such as Origen, Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor, in which
the virginal body most perfectly symbolizes the redeemed asexual human being.
In this way, Orthodox Christianity puts forward the idea that sexuality does
not have ontological significance. On the other hand, Western Catholic
Christianity adopts an Augustinian perspective, according to which sexual
difference is to some extent ontological. Western Christianity follows
Augustine’s understanding of a single creative act in which the will of God
finds material expression in creation so that the sexual human body is part of
the original and ultimate intention of God.[18] So, for
Augustine, in the resurrection there shall be redeemed sexual bodies.
Orthodox
Christianity has followed a different route in its doctrine of creation.
Gregory of Nyssa reads the creation stories in Gen 1 and Gen 2 in terms of a
double creation.[19] As
Andrew Louth explains: ‘This doctrine of double creation makes a distinction
within creation between the first creation of spiritual beings in the image of
God, and the creation of human beings, embodied and marked by sexual
differentiation.’[20] In
other words, the first account of the human made in the image of God refers to
a creation in which the human is a form of pre-sexual, angelic being. Sexual
embodiment is a feature of a secondary, material creation in which God’s
foreknowledge of the fall makes sexuality contingent upon the coming of death
into creation and does not refer to the image of God in the human.[21]
Therefore, at the resurrection we shall be restored to our original, pre-sexual
condition in the image of God. ‘To discover one’s ending in one’s beginning
with Gregory is to go before and beyond sexual difference, to a creation and an
eschaton in which humankind is sexless.’[22]
Gregory’s
eschatologically oriented gender theory is not captive to a sexual ideology,
which allows him more linguistic freedom in terms of analogy and symbolism. In
his Commentary on the Song of Songs he
represents the relationship between the soul and God, and between Christ and
the Church through nuptial imagery. But Gregory’s ‘bride’ is not woman, nor is
she ‘feminine.’ Beattie points out: ‘For Gregory, sexual difference has no
ontological significance, and therefore his use of nuptial symbolism needs to
be interpreted as a form of mystical language that transcends the body’s sexual
particularity.’[23]
Gregory’s gendered analogies do not constantly come into conflict with his
sexual ontologies. ‘The gendering of Gregory’s theology does not become a form
of ontotheology in which sexual relationships are projected into the being of
God.’[24]
Gregory’s understanding of the soul as bride needs to be understood in the context
of ‘a profound apophatic sensibility about the divine essence’[25] by
way of which the nuptial union goes beyond any difference that can be named or
conceptualized.[26]
For Eastern
Christianity, it is God (creator), rather than creation, that becomes normative
for humanity. So Orthodox Christianity does not understand the male (created)
human being as the normative human.[27] Human
beings are created in the image of God but human differentiation as male and
female is not in itself a reflection of who and what God is intrinsically. In
fact humanity is called to transcend, through the grace of God, the various
divisions which exist within creation. Maximus delineates divisions, which
include the division between the created and the uncreated and that between the
perceptible and spiritual worlds, or even the distinction between male and
female within humanity. The transcendence of distinctions through human
mediation does not mean the obliteration of differences; ‘rather it is the interrelational
unifying of things which are by nature different.’[28] Except
for the division of male and female in humanity, we are called to transcend the
various levels of division, not by obliterating one for the other, but by
uniting them all in ourselves as part of who we are existentially.[29] The
division, however, between the created and uncreated must be overcome by
someone who personally incorporates both created and uncreated natures, namely
Jesus Christ, who is the ultimate mediator, the only one capable of reconciling
this division. Thus, the incarnation is not contingent on humanity’s fall. ‘It
is part of God’s eternal plan as the culmination of humanity’s mediatorial role
in creation.’[30]
To sum up:
Orthodox writers, like Gregory of Nyssa and especially Maximus the Confessor, seem
to understand sexual differentiation as a human characteristic outside the
image of God, as irrelevant to our function as mediator and not a necessary
component of eschatological human nature. Besides, if ‘there were any
ontological significance to sexual differentiation, then it necessarily would
limit how we act and exist, and in so doing would interfere with our freedom to
act ultimately and fundamentally as human beings.’[31]
The
eschatological body: Constructing Orthodox anthropology beyond biological
essentialism
Before I
conclude, I would like to stress the importance of Butler’s thought for
theology. The idea that both gender and the biological category of sex are
culturally determined is very instructive theologically. It is theologically
precarious to accept as God-given something that seems to be historically and
culturally determined. I think that what Butler challenges is biological
essentialism; so does the Eastern Christian thought when it argues that our
current biological body (male, female or otherwise) is meant to be transformed
into another mode of existence.
Thus, in terms
of an eschatological oriented theory of gender, ‘there is no sexual
difference’, as Graham Ward puts it in the title of one of his articles. There
is however ontological significance to the body. But which body is significant
for theology? Is it the disembodied body or the essentially sexual body?
Neither. It is in fact the ‘sacramental body, which discovers its meaning
through its incorporation into the performative narration of the Christian
story in liturgy, worship, prayer and everyday life.’[32]
Attempting to construct a metaphysics of the body in a Christian context, Ward
says: ‘The transcendent body of Christ redefines the human body from a more
exalted, in fact glorified position- so that the properties of co-aboding in
Christ’s body are communicated to the human body…. Baptism “by (en) the one Spirit’ marks an ontological
shift from being in the world to being en
Christo….the use of en suggests
rather another level of ontological intensity available in this world but not
concurrent with it. There is an incorporation effected by baptism and this
incorporate does not leave the human body as such unchanged….class notions of
embodiment, ethnic notions, sexual notions …incorporated en pneumatic and en
Christo a new social order is announced. The Christocentric body politic
constitutes this order…The human body participating in the risen,
eschatological body politic of Christ lives in a transposition state…It lives
physically in this world and equally as physical in the world to come…in the
incorporation into Christ’s body otherness and difference remain…the difference
and materiality of somati are
guaranteed by the one transcendent soma.’[33]
I think that a
Christocentric or rather an eschato-Christocentric understanding of the body
can contribute to the debates on women’s ordination by introducing the
following perspectives to the discussion:
1.
The eschatologically oriented gender
theory of Eastern Christianity subverts both gender essentialism and the
culturally repressive web of sexual stereotypes.
2.
En
Christo,
the act of resistance to stereotypes and compulsory sexualities, the goal of
liberation and personal authenticity are not doomed to failure. En Christo the cultural and historical
conditions of sexual oppression are not challenged; rather they are abolished.[34]
3.
In terms of an eschatologically oriented
gender theory, the denaturalization of sexual difference is invested with
ontological validity. In other words, within a Christocentric (and sacramental)
epistemological framework, the ontological claim ‘there is no sexual
difference’ is valid. But if en Christo
there is no sexual difference[35]
then nobody can be excluded from ordination on the basis of their sex.
[1] Jagger, Gill, Judith Butler: Sexual Politics, Social Change and the Power
of the Performative, Oxon 2008, 1.
[2]
Jagger 2008: 2.
[3]
Butler Judith, Bodies that Matter,
London 1993, 33.
[4]
Butler 1993: 44.
[5]
Coakley, Sarah, Powers and Submissions:
Spirituality, Philosophy and Gender, Oxford, 2002, 158.
[6]
Butler 1993: 189.
[7]
Jagger, Gill, Judith Butler: Sexual
Politics, Social Change and the Power of the Performative, Oxon 2008, 4.
[8]
Coakley Powers and Submissions:
Spirituality, Philosophy and Gender, Oxford, 2002, 160.
[9]
Jagger 2008: 4.
[10]
Jagger 2008: 5.
[11]
Jagger 2008: 7.
[12]
Coakley, Sarah, Powers and Submissions:
Spirituality, Philosophy and Gender, Oxford 2002, 161.
[13]
Coakley, 2002: 157.
[14]
Coakley Powers and Submissions:
Spirituality, Philosophy and Gender, Oxford, 2002, 159.
[15]Karras
Valerie, 2002; Harrison Verna, “Male and Female in Cappadocian Theology,” Journal of Theological Studies 41 (1990):
465–71 1990 and 1996; Agoras Konsantinos, “Παρεμβάσεις εκκλησιαστικής
ανθρωπολογίας στη συνάφεια
της
προβληματικής για τα
φύλα
και
τις
σχέσεις τους,” in Φύλο και Θρησκεία: Η Θέση της Γυναίκας στην Εκκλησία, ed by
P. Kalaintzidis & Ν. Dodos, 67-86, Athens 2004.
[16]
Beattie Tina, New Catholic Feminism:
Theology and Theory, London and New York 2006, 117.
[17]
Beattie 2006: 117.
[18]
Beattie 2006:118; Louth Andrew, “The Body in Western Catholic Christianity,” in Religion and the Body, ed by Sarah
Coakley, Cambridge 1997, 111-130.
[19]
Beattie 2006:118; Louth, 1997:115.
[20]
Louth, 1997: 115.
[21]
Beattie 2006: 118; Burrus “Queer Father: Gregory of Nyssa and the Subversion of
Identity.” in Queer Theology: Rethinking
the Western Body, ed. by Gerard Louglin, 147-162, Oxford 2007.
[22]
Beattie 2006: 118.
[23]
Beattie 2006: 117.
[25] Coakley 2002: 124.
[26] Beattie 2006: 118.
[27] Karras 2002: 252.
[28] Karras Karras, Valerie, “Eschatology.” in The Cambridge Companion to Feminist
Theology, ed. by Susan Parsons,
Cambridge 2002, 243-260, 253.
[33] Ward “The
Metaphysics of the Body,” in Grace Jantzen:
Redeeming the Present, ed. by Elaine Graham, Surrey 2009: 175-179.
[34] However
a more cynical reading of Butler’s works would suggest that her theory of
resistance is merely reinstating the conditions of sexual oppression against
which she argues. Coakley 2002:159; c.f. Jagger 2008: 35-49.
[35] C.f. Yocarinis, The Gender or Genderless of the Incarnate
Christ, Athens, 2011 (in Greek). Ware, Kallistos, “‘My Helper and my
Enemy’: The Body in Greek Christianity,” in Religion
and the Body, ed by Sarah Coakley, Cambridge 1997, 90-110.
