Every human being, man or woman, according to his or her nature, is called to a degree of virility – remember the strong women of the Bible- and also, in relation to God, a degree of femininity. Progress in the spiritual life leads men as well as women to a quasi-feminine attitude in the presence of the mystery. That is why the incarnation was accomplished through a woman, who is now at the heart of the communion of saints.
But when the man and the woman, enriched by God, turn to face the world, each rediscovers, transfigured, that aspect of human nature which is predominant in him or her: the one is an arouser, a combatant, the other ‘covers life with her maternal protection’. The man hurts in order to arouse, the woman heals and cures; according to Fedorov, ‘Every woman is a spice-bearer’. So there are two attitudes basic to the Christian spiritual life: vigilance, which is manly, and tenderness, which is feminine.
Beginning with Adam, humanity proceeds by way of the last Adam- Christ, human and divine- to fulfilment in a woman: the Mother of God. The Church is, in Christ, the Church of the Holy Spirit; it is based not on hierarchy but on holiness. The priesthood is ordained to serve this central principle, not to convey any essential superiority to its bearers. It is reserved to men because the priest, as celebrant, is the image of Christ, and Christ, while undoubtedly possessing human nature in its fullness, is a man, and not a woman or a hermaphrodite. But Christ came only in order that the Spirit might descend, and that there might appear, beneath the tongues of fire at Pentecost, a renewed humanity, at whose heart there is a woman.
The demand of women for priestly orders is evidence of a forgetting of the Spirit and of God’s transforming power. It is the bitter fruit of the clericalization of the Church.
We must rediscover the ministry of deaconesses, which expresses the spiritual motherhood mysteriously bound to the Spirit.
And it ought to be possible for a woman to be a priest’s wife, and exercise in her own way, which is not functional but personal, the priesthood of discretion and dedication in the Spirit.
We can now see that man and woman are complementary, not by exercising separate functions, but because their personal existence together makes up a mysterious whole.
No longer is Eros the impersonal fascination of the flesh, or the Platonic or Tantric use of the other person as a means to ecstasy; it is the looking to another person for a communion of soul and body. In the difficult dialogue of true love, so difficult because to refine and deepen it takes a lifetime of faithful marriage, in this dialogue where ‘the soul is the form of the body’ there are two persons recognizing each other little by little.
For the man, the woman is no longer woman in general, the universal female or ‘the eternal feminine’, she is that thou which the other aspect of her humanity helps him to call by name. And similarly for her with the man. All subordination is reciprocal, a giving of freedom to the other person. Each transcends the desire to possess which encloses him/her in solitude and death. The human being, no longer domineering or an object of scorn, but living in communion, appears twofold and one, in a mutual exchange of honour, celebration and tenderness.
‘We carry this treasure in earthen vessels.’ But our long journeyings through the night will never efface the memory of that first glimmer of dawn, that paschal fire of true love.
~Olivier Clement, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology
