The New Asceticism by Sarah Coakley

Author:Sarah Coakley [Coakley, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781441162243
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-11-05T05:00:00+00:00

Conclusions

Let me now sum up what I have, and have not, been arguing in this chapter. I set out to explore the classic gender associations of the nuptial metaphor for the eucharist, and argued that rather than repressing and rejecting this ‘erotic’ theological zone, we would do well to explore its fullest implications. In the course of an interrogation of Mary Douglas’s and Hans Urs von Balthasar’s reasons for the rejection of women priests, I argued that their own very insights pointed to an internal critique: the logic of the nuptial metaphor’s outworking leads to a priestly destabilization of normative gender binaries rather than the opposite. However, the ‘fixing’ or ‘freezing’ back of such binaries, which has classically attended the liturgical play in destabilizing them, becomes, I argued, impossible once a real-life woman is at the altar; in that sense, we must indeed conclude that her presence represents a cosmological disturbance, in the original terms of the debate. It is not just that she is a woman dressing up as a man dressing up as a woman (though sartorial details are certainly significant in this ‘play’), but rather that the gender fluidity that the male priest has always enjoyed qua liturgically liminal can no longer be a means of ‘leaving everything else as it is’. Offensive as this logic must inevitably be to conservatives, whether Roman Catholic, Anglo-Catholic or Orthodox, it has the merit of meeting such opponents in their own chosen zone of nuptial reflection and working relentlessly through to the end that that theology suggests. If I am right, then the sort of perpetual destabilization of gender binaries that Nyssen glimpsed in his last writings is what that spiritual ‘end’ may be.

Finally, it should be noted that this argument presumes nothing about the sexual orientation of the priest who may become newly aware of this liturgical logic – though I have to admit that in my experience gay, lesbian or transgendered people are inclined to have a quicker understanding and sympathy for the form of logic I have unfolded here than are others. But I want to make it clear that this argument is not in any way an incitement to accentuate one’s own sexual identity as a priest in the course of the liturgy (whether as gay or straight: such advertised self-reference would be a distraction); but nor is it a demand to erase gender. Rather, it is a matter of a subtly kenotic dispossession, a rendering of oneself prayerfully diaphanous to the fluidity of the proto-erotic dimensions of the divine nuptial enactment that one is ‘re-presenting’.41 That is why this proposal is not at all the same as that of an old-style liberal ‘androgyny’, in which stereotypical ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ were simply conjoined without critique (‘like John Wayne and Brigitte Bardot scotch-taped together’, as Mary Daly once caustically put it42); but nor is it the invitation to an explicit priestly ‘acting out’ of a queer protest against gender stability, such as Judith Butler would enjoin.43 It

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