C.S. Lewis on Neutered Drones

Fr Longenecker examines how the way we view God is influenced by the male/female dichotomy. One quibble! Nouns have a gender, humans have a sex!

From The Imaginative Conservatism

By Fr Dwight Longenecker

The liturgical imagery of the priest connects directly to our concepts and language about God. It does so because our concepts and language about God are necessarily personal. We are called to be in a person to person relationship with God—a relationship of intentional love, and as human beings we can only relate personally through gender.

It was 1989, and the debate over the ordination of women to the priesthood in the Church of England was in crescendo and reaching a climax. At the time I was an Anglican priest serving as a chaplain at Cambridge, and I happened to fall into a discussion on the issue with a female theological student. The conversation did not remain cordial as she eventually screamed at me in frustration, “Are you saying the only reason I can’t be a priest is because I don’t have [male genitalia]?”

I nodded and replied, “You wish to reduce the whole issue to what’s below the belt. Yes. You don’t have [male genitalia], so you can’t be a priest.”

Of course the issue of gender identity and roles is much more complex, and has more to do with what is between the ears as what is between the legs, but the woman was not prepared to discuss the larger issues.

C.S. Lewis was, however, prepared to consider the more important questions. In 1945 he published a prescient essay entitled, “Priestesses in the Church,” entering what was then a newly emerging debate. In the essay Lewis addresses some of the obvious points of discussion— the pragmatic argument: “There’s a priest shortage besides, women can do the job just as well as men.” The sentimental argument: “Sally is such a nice, spiritual person! Why are you being so mean to her? She feels called!” The political argument: “This is about equal rights and justice! Ordain women now!”

These three types of argument continue to be made by proponents of women’s ordination—and they are now echoing into the Catholic Church. Putting on one side these mundane arguments, Lewis, as a wordsmith and professor of English, asks more probing questions about language and our relationship to God:

Sometimes the priest turns his back on us and faces the East – he speaks to God for us: sometimes he faces us and speaks to us for God. We have no objection to a woman doing the first: the whole difficulty is about the second. But why? Why should a woman not in this sense represent God? Certainly not because she is necessarily, or even probably, less holy or less charitable or stupider than a man. In that sense she may be as “God-like” as a man; and a given women much more so than a given man. The sense in which she cannot represent God will perhaps be plainer if we look at the thing the other way round.

Suppose the reformer stops saying that a good woman may be like God and begins saying that God is like a good woman. Suppose he says that we might just as well pray to “Our Mother which art in heaven” as to “Our Father”. Suppose he suggests that the Incarnation might just as well have taken a female as a male form, and the Second Person of the Trinity be as well called the Daughter as the Son. Suppose, finally, that the mystical marriage were reversed, that the Church were the Bridegroom and Christ the Bride. All this, as it seems to me, is involved in the claim that a woman can represent God as a priest does.

Now it is surely the case that if all these supposals were ever carried into effect we should be embarked on a different religion.

But Christians think that God Himself has taught us how to speak of Him. To say that it does not matter is to say either that all the masculine imagery is not inspired, is merely human in origin, or else that, though inspired, it is quite arbitrary and unessential. And this is surely intolerable: or, if tolerable, it is an argument not in favour of Christian priestesses but against Christianity. It is also surely based on a shallow view of imagery. Without drawing upon religion, we know from our poetical experience that image and apprehension cleave closer together than common sense is here prepared to admit; that a child who has been taught to pray to a Mother in Heaven would have a religious life radically different from that of a Christian child. And as image and apprehension are in an organic unity, so, for a Christian, are human body and human soul.

So the liturgical imagery of the priest connects directly to our concepts and language about God. It does so because our concepts and language about God are necessarily personal. If we try to imagine God as a “pure Spirit” for example, we end up thinking of a bottle of vodka or, in Lewis memorable image, “as a great tapioca pudding in the sky”. It is necessary to think of God in personal terms because God takes action. He does things and to do something requires intentionality and intention requires will and a will demands a mind and a mind demands, in some way, personhood, and as persons we can only relate to God as person.

We are called to be in a person to person relationship with God—a relationship of intentional love, and as human beings we can only relate personally through gender. I relate to other human beings as male to male or male to female. I can accept a neuter but I cannot relate to or love a neuter. By the way, when I speak here of love I am not referring only to eros, but also (and more importantly) to the other three loves—storge (affection) philia, (friendship) and agape (charity).

Love and gender transcends eros, and in an essay for Touchstone Magazine, Wayne Martindale, professor of English at Wheaton College, refers to Perelandra to expound further on Lewis’ views on language and gender.

In Lewis’s view, gender is more than just male and female, and much more than sexuality. He gives his view through both the narrator and Ransom, the chief character in Perelandra. As Ransom relates his having seen the Oyarsa or ruling angels of Malacandra (Mars) and Perelandra (Venus), the language becomes rhapsodic in describing Masculine and Feminine as the larger reality of which male and female sexuality are a small part.

What Ransom saw at that moment was the real meaning of gender. Everyone must sometimes have wondered why in nearly all tongues certain inanimate objects are masculine and others feminine. What is masculine about a mountain or feminine about certain trees? Ransom has cured me of believing that this is a purely morphological phenomenon, depending on the form of the word. Still less is gender an imaginative extension of sex. Our ancestors did not make mountains masculine because they projected male characteristics into them. The real process is the reverse. Gender is a reality, and a more fundamental reality than sex. Sex is, in fact, merely the organic adaptation to organic life of a fundamental polarity which divides all created beings. Female sex is simply one of the things that have feminine gender; there are many others, and Masculine and Feminine meet us on planes of reality where male and female would be simply meaningless. Masculine is not attenuated male, nor feminine attenuated female. On the contrary, the male and female of organic creatures are rather faint and blurred reflections of masculine and feminine. Their reproductive functions, their differences in strength and size, partly exhibit, but partly also confuse and misrepresent, the real polarity. (Perelandra, p.200)

Gender, therefore, is woven into the very fabric of creation at the fundamental level and human sexuality is merely a physical expression of an underlying component of reality.

The campaign for women’s ordination is part of a plan to deny the reality of gender—which will result in a neutered humanity. That this is part of the feminist agenda is clear from a concept put forward by a leading advocate for the ordination of women in the Catholic Church. Phyllis Zagano has written numerous articles and books promoting women’s ordination, and in her book Holy Saturday she argues for a “single nature anthropology”. In other words, we should put to one side the historic understanding of “he created them male and female” and focus instead simply on the humanity of Christ—a humanity shared by both men and women.

C.S. Lewis would see this as part of the neutering of humanity, and in his 1945 essay he drops a thought that he does not expand on—the need of the secular state for neutered drones:

The innovators are really implying that sex is something superficial, irrelevant to the spiritual life. To say that men and women are equally eligible for a certain profession is to say that for the purposes of that profession their sex is irrelevant. We are, within that context, treating both as neuters.

As the State grows more like a hive or an ant-hill it needs an increasing number of workers who can be treated as neuters.

In a society that has now moved on from celebrating feminism and homosexualism to celebrating the chemical and surgical neutering of transgendered individuals, Lewis’ warning about women’s ordination and neutered drones seems prophetic.

Lewis concludes, “This may be inevitable for our secular life. But in our Christian life we must return to reality.“