May 25, 2009

Ordaining women

The Christian tradition of a male priesthood would seem to be well established.  In the cases of the Catholic and Eastern churches, this is now orthodox practice.  Among the Western Protestant churches, a wide variety of stances toward women clergy have been adopted.  (Sadly, one need not search hard to find ill-informed preachers eager to blog wildly complex theories of Scriptural translation that, cleared of the fog of incoherence, present despotic fantasies of the husband as autocrat with rod close at hand.)

With some controversy, Gary Macy, a professor of theology with a named at Santa Clara University (a Jesuit university where Frederick Copleston once taught), has apparently been for some time been presenting what he claims is historical evidence of a well-established tradition of ordaining women in the Medieval Church.  He begins his recent book, The Hidden History of Women’s Ordination (published by Oxford University Press) with the following provocative introduction:

In 1997, I gave an address at the Catholic Theological Society of America that suggested that women in the Middle Ages had presided over ceremonies during which they distributed the bread and wine consecrated during the communion ritual.  It wasn’t a very radical suggestion but seemed to touch a nerve with some people.  My talk, along with the addresses of my colleagues John Baldovin and Mary Collins, earned the disapproval of Cardinal Avery Dulles in an issue of the Catholic journal, Commonweal.  There was a bit of a kerfuffle that seemed to be fading when a colleague of mine, Evelyn Kirkely, stopped me in the hallway and remarked, “I heard you proved that a woman had been in ordained in the Middle Ages.”  I was perplexed and a little annoyed.  No, I protested, I had proved no such thing, and further, women never had been ordained in the Middle Ages.

Kirkley, not being Catholic, had not followed closely the minor uproar over papers given at the CTSA.  She was suggesting, nevertheless, a possible conclusion that could be drawn from the examples I had given.  She was herself an ordained minister and an accomplished scholar.  She doesn’t voice opinions lightly.  On the short trip back to my office, I reconsidered my hasty response.  I had never checked the evidence.  Maybe women were ordained.  Maybe, as Kirkley intimated, women distributed communion because they were ordained to do so.

There is no point in rehearsing the fascinating hunt that followed.  As so often happens in scholarship, one small clue led to another and yet another.  Slowly, a pattern emerged.  There was no shortage of evidence about ordained women and of secondary studies analyzing this evidence.  But the sources were dismissed as anomalies, and the studies that argued that women had been ordained were attacked or marginalized.  Mostly, though, both were ignored.  Few historians questioned, as I had not, the assumption that women had not, and could not have been, ordained in the Middle Ages.  The memory of ordained women has been nearly erased, and where it survived, it was dismissed as illusion or, worse, delusion.  This was no accident of history.  This is a history that has been deliberately forgotten, intentionally marginalized, and, not infrequently, creatively explained away. 

Macy further explains his historical discoveries in a May 11th lecture he recently gave at Vanderbilt.  (Here is the referring page.)  This lecture is currently the most popular on Vanderbilt’s site.  (No wonder Macy’s book is back-ordered from Amazon; I have ordered it, but see that Amazon says 2 to 4 weeks are required for delivery.)

Now this topic is far, far away from my own expertise, and I must confess that Macy’s tone seems more than a bit politicized to me; still, I did think his lecture was interesting I am find myself looking forward to reading his book. If I have something intelligent to say after I have read his book, I may post it here.

Why do we uplift the reader of Dante and put stumbling stones in the way of the reader of Scripture

If you want to read Dante’s Divine Comedy in English translation, you have it good.  There are any number of outstanding translations to choose among.  You can expect, as a standard feature that most volumes you will choose among will present the text bilingually in the original Italian (although they sometimes republished as single omnibus volumes without the Italian, e.g., Ciardi, Mandelbaum).  All translations contain a running commentary (which in some cases is simply outstanding, e.g., Singleton’s commentary (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso), and in some cases highly accessible to a novice reader, e.g., Robert Hollander’s commentary to his joint translation with Jean Hollander (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso).  Editions almost always include diagrams and sometimes illustrations, in some cases by brilliant artists such as Barry Moser, William Blake (see also here), Gustave Dore, Botticelli, Salvador Dali (see also here and here), Giovanni di Paolo, and Sandow Birk.  And most important, editions are usually made by single translators or a team of two translators rather than a ecclesiastical committee with little ability to write English.  In many cases, translators are poets, with an interest in reproducing Dante’s effects in English:  e.g., Robert Pinsky, John Ciardi, Jean Hollander (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso), Longfellow, Laurence Binyon, or even omnibus volumes that show the different styles of many different translators; as well as literal text translations; e.g., Singleton (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso).

In contrast, unless you are reading a (the best of) scholarly or a Jewish translation or commentary of Scripture, you are probably reading work by a committee, diglots are the exception rather than the rule, and illustrations (if they are to be found at all) are insipid.

But even more wonderful is the tradition of Lectura Dantis.  This tradition dates back to 1373, when the Commune of Florence asked Giovanni Boccaccio to give public lectures on the Divina Commedia – each one an exposition of a single one of Dante’s 100 cantos.  Since then, we have been graced with many outstanding Lectura Dantis series, and in modern times we have been seen Lectura Dantis Newberriana, Lectura Dantis Romana, Lectura Dantis Scaligera, Lectura Dantis Turicensis, Lectura Dantis Neapolitana, and Lectura Dantis Virginiana.  One fascinating example of this series is the wonderful Lectura Dantis CaliforniaInferno and Purgatorio.  (We eagerly await Paradiso.)  The strength here is the collection of studies by individual scholars – each quite different in approach.  Not only do we learn something about Dante in the process, but we see the entire range of modern approaches to text.

Why do we have so many works and translations that take Dante seriously, while so much of contemporary Biblical scholarship and translation is mediocre?  I suspect it has to do with simple fact of audience:  in the effort to make the Bible as accessible as possible, we have tolerated scholarship designed to reach out to those without education; and a glance at the demographic figures for different denominations indicates that those denominations most eager to make a large show of studying Scripture are often the weakest in educational achievement; while perhaps most of those reading Dante have a strong taste for serious study of literature.  Our Bibles bear a curse:  being divine, they are treated as often as not with intellectual disdain; while the Divine Comedy, being merely great literature, can receive serious treatment.

May 22, 2009

Download horrors

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Original sources:  Jack Zaientz, Jewishsoftware.com

Download delights

Three wonderful albums offered free under Creative Commons by SHSK’H; see these insightful comments on the site by Elliot Cole.

May 13, 2009

Television 1: Firing Line

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