Viewpoint Aquinas on women
By JOHN WIJNGAARDS
Traditionalists like to present St.
Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274 A.D.) as the bulwark of unquestioning orthodoxy. He
is the model for all theologians, able to overturn the dangerous
principles of the new order, to quote Pope Leo XIII. Was that not why
Thomas was declared patron of Catholic universities, colleges and schools?
The message is: If we could only absorb Thomas mental
discipline, we would not be caught up in the woolly thinking of our modern age,
like imagining women may one day preside over the Eucharist. But does this do
justice to Thomas the mystic, the seeker, the revolutionary champion of
truth?
Thomas studied theology at the University of Naples where the
study of the natural sciences and secular scholars was encouraged. Thomas read
Aristotle at a time when Aristotles philosophy was forbidden at most
other European universities. It is conveniently forgotten that, throughout his
life but especially when teaching in Paris, Thomas was discredited and
attacked.
This loyalty to truth is relevant when we consider how Thomas
assessed admitting women to the priesthood. Thomas held that a
theologians opinion is as valid as his arguments. Thomas offered three
reasons for stating that the female sex is an impediment to receiving holy
orders: Scripture forbids women to teach in church or exercise authority over
men. The women deacons in the early church were not sacramentally ordained. The
female sex cannot represent Christ because women are incomplete human beings.
How do his arguments hold up to scrutiny?
To prove that women may not teach, Thomas quoted 1 Corinthians
11:1-11 and 1 Timothy 2:12. However, these passages refer to restrictions
imposed on women because of specific circumstances in local communities. It is
invalid to draw general principles from them. In fact, the church acknowledges
this today. Canon law allows women to be deputed as readers, servers, cantors,
preachers, leaders of prayer services, ministers of baptism and Communion
(Canon 230.2 and 3) and so to teach in church and have authority over
men. Thus the first argument goes by the board.
As to the women deacons of the early church, Thomas dismissed them
as women who merely shared in some action of a deacon, namely performing
readings in church. If he had known, as we do now, that women deacons
were given a full sacramental ordination through the same ritual that ordained
the men, it would have stopped him in his tracks. Being the great theologian of
the sacraments he was, he would have recognized in the diaconate received by
women the full matter and form that constitute holy orders.
Like his contemporaries, St. Thomas lacked good information on the
difference between men and women. According to the Greco-Roman view that
dominated until the 18th century, there exists only one sex in two forms. A
female person is a watered down variant of the male. The act of generation is
accompanied by heat, by the vital spirit, which is the
element that causes the difference between men and women. Only men have enough
heat to produce seed that they cast into their partners womb as seed is
cast into the earth.
Fetuses develop their full potential, their maleness, if they
amass a decisive surplus of heat or vital spirit in the
early stages in the womb. Females are the result of insufficient heat being
absorbed by the fetus. What could have been a full man then turns out to be a
woman. Thomas himself says: A female is deficient and unintentionally
caused. For the active power of the semen always seeks to produce a thing
completely like itself, something male. So if a female is produced, this must
be because the semen is weak or because the material [provided by the mother]
is unsuitable, or because of the action of some external factor such as the
winds from the south, which make the atmosphere humid.
Thomas saw womans deficiency confirmed in her inferior
intellectual powers. Living in a state of subjection to man, woman is not fully
an image of God, as every man is. It is precisely for this reason, because a
woman is only an incomplete male, that Thomas believed that a woman cannot
represent Christ. For at the Eucharist the priest is a sign of Christ.
Since it is not possible in the female sex to signify eminence of degree,
it follows that she cannot receive the sacrament of holy orders.
Would St. Thomas have been able to keep to this line of argument
if he had known, as we do, that male and female lie on a level, that they are
two biologically distinct and complementary sexes, equally responsible for
procreation? Would he not have conceded that the woman, too, can signify
eminence of degree?
The texts of St. Thomas, and of the other medieval scholars whom
Rome quotes in support of its ban on women priests, have been fully published
and analyzed in www.womenpriests.org. None of them provides reasons that
hold up to scrutiny today. And St. Thomas would have been the first to admit
it. Sacred doctrine is a matter of argument, he taught, in the sense that
theology must prove what it teaches. And what about learning from biology?
Truth wherever found is ever the truth of God.
Accepting women priests would have been a big step for St. Thomas.
But does he not say in his beautiful hymn Sacris Solemniis, a hymn we
still sing on Holy Thursday: Recedant vetera, nova sint
omnia -- let what is outdated recede, let everything be
new!
John Wijngaards runs Housetop, a catechetical resources center
in London.
National Catholic Reporter, January 14,
2000
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