Grace & Peace!
We were created Male and Female for a reason, not just in our bodies but also in our souls. Just as a man cannot be a mother in the physical sense, neither can he be a “mother” in a spiritual sense. Same goes for a woman, she can neither be a “father” in the physical or spiritual sense. That’s why we can’t have women priests.
I too found this reasoning somewhat incomprehensible. Contarini is a better apologist than I, but I’ll state my misgivings nonetheless.
To state that the individual soul bears a certain individual character (personhood) is one thing. I can accept that. But to say that the soul is gendered like the body is gendered is, to me, a bit materialistic.
In the classical sense, all souls are feminine in that they are meant to
receive the Divine. No soul, in relation to God who is Lover of Souls, is masculine in this sense.
One may be able to say that two basic activities of the soul at prayer are vigilence and receptivity; and one could further add that the former can be referred to as masculine, the latter as feminine. But the masculine vigilence serves the feminine receptivity, not vice versa–it guards and protects it, nurtures it, if you will. Still, the soul is not gendered as the body is gendered. Masculine and feminine here refer to the classical notions of activity and receptivity, and gender shares in these symbolic notions, not the other way around. That is, maleness is a physical expression of a principle of activity, femaleness a physical expression of a principle of receptivity.
Still, a woman is not incapable of activity, nor is a man incapable of receptivity for all of their respective sharing in the principles to which their genders correspond. Moreover, both masculinity and femininity are quite deep concepts and ultimately defy the easy (though helpful) activity-receptivity dichotomy. One need only look at mother goddess cults (such as the cult of Kali) to see how complex this principle of femininity has been understood to be. In fact, while we as a culture generally consider the feminine to be a civilizing force, the ancient Greeks understood the masculine ordering principle to be the civilizing force, taming the violent feminine (see, for instance, Aeschylus’ fantastic Oresteia trilogy and the taming of the Furies in the ironically titled “Eumenides”). But I digress.
The bottom line: the soul of a man is in need of being conditioned to receive and bear its Lord; and this quality of soul, this receptivity which characterizes the soul qua soul, is no more natural in women than in men.
In other words, we are all called to be mothers in the spiritual sense. Just as the Theotokos bore the Eternal Word, we are called to bear the Son of the Father in our souls. Further, we are called to guard and nurture the seed of the Word planted in us, insofar as God has given us the grace to do so.
To me, therefore, it is a theological absurdity to claim that the souls of men and women are distinctly and absolutely gendered. We don’t even need to get into the absurdity of sexuality in heaven (as sexuality is predicated on gender–so if the soul is gendered, there must be a sexual use to which that gender is put), nor do we need to quote St. Paul who tells us that in Christ there is no male or female.
Under the Mercy,
Mark
Deo Gratias!
