medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Jo Ann McNamara wrote:
> Angels may have transcended sex but my impression is that they remain
> gendered male. In early Christianity, ascetics often tried to transcend
> both sex and gender claiming that they could live and even sleep
> together without arousal but more conservative opinion always frowned
> upon making the test and ultimately forbade it. Men who attempt to
> avoid the test by making themselves literal eunuchs are prohibited from
> ordination. The exclusion of women from the priesthood as well as the
> present debate on gay priests underline the idea that priests are still
> gendered male and expected to be fully sexed as well.
From a 2005 point of view, I have to wonder if the supposition that
angels "remain gendered male" reflects a mindset: namely that "perfect"
(perhaps one might better say "complete") beings are inherently male?
The same kind of supposition seems to me to underlie attitudes about sex
and gender in relation to priesthood.
However, if I have understood and remembered properly what I was told 20
or 30 years ago, when one looks at prenatal development and
physiological characteristics, the female body is the less complicated
construction: male elements are additional to the basic, female-pattern
physiology.
As for castration, isn't it correct that any man who had suffered
amputation, even after ordination, had to obtain a dispensation in order
continue to officiate at Mass or other services as a priest? In the age
of motor vehicle accidents and medical miracles, that sort of thing
isn't as uncommon as it used to be.
If I were to continue these thoughts in present-day terms, it wouldn't
be a historical argument (I think every age has to encounter its
problems in its own terms). So instead, looking back into early
Christianity, and attempting to exert historical imagination, I wonder:
whether ascetics are better understood as part of the mainstream of
Christian experience, or (perhaps like John the Baptist in his time) as
a distinctively different but prophetic phenomenon -- i.e. showing us
things we don't want to notice but need to hear?
Hal Cain
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