DUAL SEX EUCHARIST

...The figure of Eleanor of Aquitaine towered over the entire twelfth-century, he notes...

...It countered nature in its emphasis on peace, gentleness, sweetness and grace...

...Why, then, did God choose to assume the form of a man...

...Speculate for a moment...

...There are several different ritual forms which this more full and perfect liturgy could take...

...It was this point that Marxists in Italy and Spain have cast against the church in recent times: that it was a church for "women," that its priests were dressed in "skirts," that it absented itself from the (masculine) struggle to change history, that it had been "womanized...

...Thirdly, the most intimate symbol of the union between Christ and his Church is the imagery of husband and wife: man and woman joined in love, two-in-one, principle of all human fruitfulness...

...The pedagogical rebuke to the culture of their time, however, and perhaps of every century until (and for the vast majority of people perhaps including) our own, is more clearly manifest in the humbling of the male...

...But there are many ways of avoiding this vulgarization...

...He was expected to become, as it were, androgynous-to make his own the virtues of the feminine ideal...

...In Mary the Mother of Jesus, God did make a perfect vessel of grace...

...The incarnation-the invisible God making himself visible in the flesh of actual history -is the paradigm case of meaning revealed in historical, public drama...

...In most circumstances today, that consideration would not apply...

...It would call women to represent by their bodily presence, and the symbolism thereof, the church Christ so loved...

...It is not exclusively intended for males, nor for females...

...It may well be that in the fullness of time, as symbols ripen and as relationships shift, new possibilities are available to God's revelation that were not available at the time at which God chose to enter history...

...This is my blood which shall be shed for you...

...In becoming fully human, God could take on the form of a woman or the form of a man...

...Had God assumed the form of a woman of that time and place, and tried to show forth in a woman the Christian transvaluation, the symbolic resources available would have been quite different...

...It is not out of keeping with the central mystery of Christianity: that those who are last will be first...

...There is an erotic component in the symbolism of the union of spouses, the union of lovers, that if vulgarized could easily distort the spiritual meaning intended...

...What is not yet part of the tradition is a more vivid dramatization of this truth through a more visible and active participation by women liturgical leaders...

...The sym-bolization of this truth through the joint celebration of the Eucharist by men and woman gathered around the table is thoroughly traditional...

...But there can be no doubt at all that a woman is the appropriate cultural and bodily symbol for the church...

...It its weakest form, perhaps a woman should always stand before the congregation, with the priest, as a symbol of the church as he, the priest, is a symbol of Christ...

...God could not become "neuter...

...It would provide a more realistic and symbolically accurate witness both to the meaning of God's revelation and to the union-in-duality of humankind...

...Almost, as it were, out of nothing, in a miracle repeated again and again down the ages, women bring forth new life...

...What is reality, as revealed by God...

...It requires a special way of looking at the "symbolic forms" that underlie public functions...

...In the many forms of "the black mass," indeed, this erotic element becomes a means of mocking Christianity...

...ous acts of God: on the sacred events, persons, objects and deeds that simultaneously reveal and also enclose God's Word...

...It was necessary, in the more ancient words of Aeschylus, "to tame the savage breasts...

...It is a way of approaching human reality that is not unknown to contemporary anthropologists and sociologists...

...For example, the role of women college presidents, directresses of hospitals and orphanages, major superiors and others might be administratively strengthened...

...What is proper, or even possible, in one age may not be proper or possible in another...

...In the past, in a way jarring to the underlying sexual symbolism, it was decreed that this presence be represented by a male, an acolyte, as representative of the church...

...The expression, a "male-dominated" church, usually carries with it in emotional tone that what is wrong in the church is the maleness, rather than that what is wrong is the domination...

...For certain, it is no mark of authentic Christianity that Christians should compete for the high places, or insist upon power in the terms of this world...

...Some of the texts, in the voice of the Christus, could be voiced by the priest...

...Particularly, the image of Mary captivated their imagination...

...The Scripture itself is laden with the imagery of the "spouse," the "lover," and because God chose to become incarnate in the male, the most appropriate symbol for the people to whom Christ united himself is a woman...

...Masculine priest and feminine celebrant would together mirror more accurately than in previous centuries the union of Christ and his church...

...is chosen by God...

...is united to God through grace...

...The ancient creeds were called symbola fidei...

...There is no reason why the symbolic role of the priest at the Eucharist, of the alter Christus, should not with an ever greater vividness be that of the servant...

...Reality is revealed through symbols...

...In the Catholic tradition, one answers this question by meditation on, and silent contemplation of, the mysterimichael Novak next month becomes Ledden-Watson Distinguished Professor of Religion at Syracuse University...

...In the Christian Eucharist, both must be represented-both the symbol of Christ and the symbol of his church...

...We do not at present have sufficiently powerful liturgical representation of this part of our inheritance...

...The liturgy from the beginning was conceived as a dramatic re-enactment of the history of sacred events in the life of a concrete people...

...In these accusations of her enemies, exaggerated and given to caricature, there is a grain of truth...

...In an important way, the woman is a better image of the Creator than is the male...

...On the other hand, sauce for the goose is sauce (so to speak) for the gander...

...The Church would follow and respect the symbolism of the human body, as God did in humbly assuming the concrete, limited human form of the male...

...In the ideal order, men were held to the ideal of the Virgin...

...Henry Adams in Mont-Saint Michel and Chartres provides powerful evidence about how, particularly in France, the woman was regarded as superior in hardheadedness, in power, in business sense and in effect...

...In his magisterial book, The Mind and Heart of Love, Martin D'Arcy has traced the power of animus and anima in the growing Catholic understanding of the fullness of caritas and agape...

...That Jesus, who was called "King" and even "Warrior," should enter Jerusalem on a burro, should be silent and gentle, should go as a lamb to the slaughter-this was shocking, different, dramatic...

...The paradigm in human experience for an understanding of creativity is the bringing forth of a child...

...The priest is ordained to be an alter Christus...

...There is a danger, of course, in making the inner symbolism both of the Eucharistic act and of its accompanying Scriptural and traditional texts too explicit...

...Those texts from Scripture most explicit about this symbolism could be brought into the canon...

...The Caesars, and indeed the Maccabees and David, were such male models...

...Each human person, beginning indeed with Eve and the New Eve, with Adam and the New Adam, receives God's call...

...It would be primarily a liturgical office...

...WOMEN IN THE CHURCH DUAL-SEX EUCHARIST MICHAEL NOVAK A proposal for a new form of ministry I would like to propose the development of a new role within the Catholic Eucharistic liturgy, in order to bring to higher perfection its inherent symbolism...

...The Germanic knights of the barbaric peoples of Northern Europe encountered in Christianity a contradiction to immemorial attitudes and practices...

...As in the duality of animus and anima in love, so also in the duality of incarnate Mediator and Mediatrix, masculine and feminine are complementary poles of the full symbolism of the works of grace...

...But it could also be developed canonically, administratively, so as to have certain juridical functions as well...

...both the bridegroom and the bride...

...No doubt, down through the ages and in many circumstances a law prescribing the presence of a woman might have created scandal...

...In the outline here presented, it would not be necessary to distort the symbolic link between the incarnation of Christ in masculine form, and the symbolism of the priest as alter Christus...

...Grace has come through a woman...

...Secondly, in the Incarnation, a woman is once the more basic human image of mediation: the Mediator came through the Mediatrix...

...In order to show that God's ways were not man's ways, that the Christian revelation was a new and radical departure, it was important to "humble" his governing social symbol...

...The inner dynamic of the Eucharist cries out for masculine-feminine representation, as a sign of healing and of union...

...Males were so entrapped in rituals of honor, war and romantic quest that women ran the economic order, provided the stable base of society and commonly prevailed...

...He sought to lower himself, indeed to empty himself...

...Laymen are no more potent in the liturgy, or in the authoritative church, than are women...

...We speak naturally of "mother church...

...For myself, I envisage a time, perhaps generations from now (for symbols sometimes come to express reality fully only in the slow ways of organic life), when the Eucharist will commonly be celebrated by two central figures, equal in symbolic power although different in their relation one to another, one vicar of Christ and the other representing the church, both together celebrating the oneness of Christ with his Church...

...The symbolic role of the representative of the church would then be dramatized as that of the poor and the oppressed, and of the wealthy and the powerful, too, who are also suppliants...

...For it is one of the limits of the human world that flesh is particular and concrete, not general and abstract...

...Indeed, in the ancient world, the preeminent masculine model was that of the warrior-king, the emperorsoldier...

...This thousand-year period of our culture deserves to be studied in greater detail, before the ideology of contemporary tastes is allowed to guide our judgments...

...Mediatrix of all graces...

...Symbolically, a woman embodies this paradigm as no man does...

...a representative of the church ought always to be there...

...The symbolic power of the masculine and of the feminine, in short, is far more complex and culturally rich than we in the highly industrialized, technological, suburban cultures of the twentieth century are likely to imagine...

...These powerful streams in our culture deserve to be carefully untangled...

...It derives from Catholic intellectual traditions, both in the Greek and in the Latin church...

...To become a Christian was to modify the warrior codes and the warrior virtues-to modify them with "Courtesie," "sweet charity," "gentleness," and "mildness...

...Its source lies in what David Tracy has described as the distinctively Catholic contribution to intellectual life on this planet, "the analogical imagination...

...From these, one interprets the sense of reality, the horizon, the narrative of historical struggle (in relationship to time and eternity), and the perceptual and metaphoric role of actors and objects in the drama of human life, as these appear in different cultures...

...In the real order of daily life-both in its economic, and in its emotional transactions-women were not "the second sex...

...and the same with being a female...

...Possibly, in symbol, the form of woman is not, and was not, low enough-would not have carried the message God intended...

...Others, in the voice of his spouse, could be voiced by a woman consecrated for the role...

...The truth is that Christ and his church are one...

...The Christian man was expected to be unlike the pagan man...

...Symbolic realism" is a method for interpreting reality, through careful cultivation of the human capacity to perceive and to interpret symbols with accuracy and full penetration...

...Paul does tell us that God sought the lowest form...

...We reflect upon God's acts, not in confidence that we understand them, but quietly, in order to interpret as best we can what God may have tried to show us...

...There were, in the Latin world, two words for "soul," or aspects of the soul, which capitalized on the quite different symbolic realism of the human body and its cultural roles: animus and anima...

...It was this point that Nietzsche had in mind when he averred that the net impact of Christianity on the Greek, Hebrew and European world was to have "feminized" the warrior peoples...

...A woman might be consecrated as an altera Ecclesia...

...The judgments of God are inscrutable...

...become masculine or feminine...

...That would be a clear sign of a less than Christian inspiration...

...A dual-sex liturgy would symbolically unite, in a way hardly possible in previous centuries, Christ with his church, the masculine with the feminine...

...The theological perspective within which this logic unfolds is called "symbolic realism...

...Christianity, it seemed, ran counter to nature...

...The fullness of Catholic tradition depends on both...

...The woman celebrant would represent those who are being served by the Christ, for whom the Christ-figure lays down his life...

...The role as a servant is, in itself, an affront to the contemporary preoccupation with power...

...The reason for incarnation in the form of the male cannot have been exclusionary...

...Not that women in the medieval period were solely "feminine...

...To give a witness in history to "humble charity"-to meekness, gentleness, humility, charity, peace, patience, benignity and the other fruits of the Holy Spirit-it was, perhaps, pedagogically indispensable that God should assume the form of the masculine, and reveal in and through the masculine the radical "transvaluation of values" it was the point of Christianity to introduce...

...It countered nature in its emphasis on chastity and even on celibacy...

...that it is the master who serves...

...Christianity was a rebuke to the masculine warrior culture...

...One might imagine both the administrative and the liturgical offices of the church reformulated so as to allow greater participation by women...

...and the union between them...

...In some ways, a woman is a better symbol of the Creator, and a bettor symbol of mediation, than a man...

...Mary, in her witness to the fullness of grace, was not entirely a contradiction to the symbolic structure of her time...

...Suffice it to say here that there are certain symbolic capacities in the experience of women that are more likely to give us an accurate image of God than are the corresponding capacities of the male...

...The purpose of this article is not to present that logic in full, but to call attention to its several key elements...

...This role involves the active participation of a mature woman, duly consecrated for the task...

...If a male can stand as an alter Christus, a symbolic representatve of the One Mediator, Christ, so also a female can stand as a Mediatrix...

...Yet the holiness and graciousness of Mary, while lovely and attractive to all, did not have the power to shock the consciousness of the masculine or the feminine world of that time as did the witness of Jesus...

...In canon law, indeed, as in theological, symbolic necessity, it has been decreed that the priest ought never to celebrate the Eucharist in solitariness...

...A certain dignity, a certain formality, a certain emphasis on the unity of the spirit, and even the tradition of celibacy itself, offer many and profound protections...

...Three of these capacities, in particular, bear upon the Eucharist...

...Let us pause for a moment...

...Symbolic forms have an authentic and interrelated history of their own...

...God enters the world through a woman...

...Grace can come, symbolically and in public representation, through women...

...The consecration of women for this role might offer a second form of priesthood, a role of service of, ministry to, and presidency over the Christian community gathered in prayer and thanksgiving...

...She might, in effect, function as in a solemn mass the deacons, or the master of ceremonies, and the acolytes now, function...

...No wonder the image of the Virgin Mary was so powerful...

...The point is that one of the basic and most important levels in the symbolism of the Eucharist is not now being exemplified...

...When God decided to enter human history by taking on human form, God had to make a choice...

...her magnificat and his...

...Clericalism will be no less clerical when it is a female as well as a male clericalism...

...It seems obvious that God's revelation is intended for all...

...To come now, more immediately, to our subject...

...This new form of ministry might be developed from past traditions concerning the consecration of deaconesses and abbesses...

...Even the imagery of Genesis suggests that God "brooded over" the chaos, perhaps bird-like or even womblike, until the universe "was born...

...The logic behind this development is complex and detailed...

...Insofar as the Eucharist dramatizes the union of Christ with his church-and the communion of all is at the heart of the mystery-then the representation of male with female, of Christ-figure with Church-figure, is perfectly apt for dramatizing this union...

...Mary and Jesus cohere in the same witness: her fiat and his fiat...

...To be a male is to have a body of a certain sort, and to be part of a long symbolic and cultural history...