This past Saturday I was honored to speak at the second annual meeting of the Orthodox Canon Law Society of North America (OCLSNA) on the campus of Hellenic College near Boston, Massachusetts. I was scheduled to give the same talk at the society’s first annual meeting last October, but, alas, that was the week my dear wife Joanna fell asleep in the Lord.

My wife and I spent our wedding night in Boston and returned there once for an anniversary. We had intended to go again for our 40^th anniversary, but by then she was too sick to travel. My trip to Boston this year was therefore somewhat sad but also somewhat encouraging, as an opportunity to remember our wonderful life together.

My talk attracted a lot of attention and comment afterwards and was very well received by many who heard it, including many seminarians and a surprising number of women in attendance. I focused on the problem of understanding the Orthodox Church’s canons pertaining to women without a sound understanding of what it means to be male or female.

I offered a theological understanding of male and female based on self-giving and thanksgiving, the two fundamental modes of love demonstrated by the Father and the Son. Men and women are also meant to relate in this way, as are clergy and laity, with clergy taking the Christlike “archic” role of the “good shepherd” who “giveth his life for the sheep.” And this is why women cannot be clergy, because the woman is ordained to take the Christlike “eucharistic” role toward the man. (The full text of my talk with footnotes is available here on my Articles page.)

In the Q&A, a young man asked, what if a woman spends her life in “self-giving” for the parish? Why can she not be honored as a member of the clergy?

I must admit to being caught off guard by the question, momentarily confused by the question’s inherent confusion. The question ignored all that I had just said in explaining the “archic” self-giving of the Father to the Son, of Christ to us, of husbands to wives, and of priests to their people. In each of those relationships, the self-giving is done by the person acting as the “head.” The Greek word kephalē meaning “head” (as in 1 Cor 11) is often a synonym for archē meaning “beginning, source, or origin.” The Septuagint, in fact, uses both words to translate the Hebrew word rōsh as in Rōsh Hashanah, the “head of the year.” It even uses archē in Isaiah 9:15 to explain kephalē in Isaiah 9:14.

I didn’t mention the Septuagint in my talk or my answer, but I did explain archē and kephalē in my talk, and in my answer to the question I did get around to explaining that not all self-giving is archic, some is instead eucharistic, being a grateful response to the archic self-giving of others and therefore better seen as service than self-giving.

But something still bothered me about the question. Could I be clearer in explaining the difference? Yes, of course, I could, with a little more thought.

Archic self-giving is not just doing things for other people; it is sharing who you are with them—your own sense of meaning, purpose, and direction. In military terms, it is the difference between leading and commanding. A commander gives orders expecting to be obeyed; a leader inspires others with the desire to do what the leader directs, sharing the leader’s sense of meaning and purpose.

This point is made in my book (and doctoral dissertation) Origen’s Revenge: The Greek and Hebrew Roots of Christian Thinking on Male and Female (Pickwick, 2021). In the last chapter, in offering a scripturally and patristically based understanding of male and female, I write:

Ideally, we would imitate Christ in all our dealings with others, taking either the archic or the eucharistic role so as to be one the way God is one, sharing the same life, the same will, and the same interests equally. The Fall, however, has destroyed our original unity and set us at odds with each other over unequal conditions, differing interests, and conflicting wills, making unity all but impossible without subordinating some people to others—by force, by law, or by inequality, on the basis of which we may distinguish three forms of subordination. [211–212]

The three forms of subordination are:

• Hierarchy, based on inequalities of nature, condition, or circumstance.
• Subjection, based on a customary or lawful order obliging equals to submit one to another for the good of all.
• Subjugation, based on the use of force, whereby some people impose their will on others.

I also distinguished three distinct forms of submission to one’s subordination:

• Obedience, when one does what one is told to do by another in authority.
• Deference, when one person graciously defers to another person out of kindness, as when saying, “You choose” or “You go first.”
• Condescension, when a person of rank accedes to the wish of someone below him, as when Abraham condescended to beget a child by Hagar to please Sarah, and when Our Lord condescended to turn water into wine to please His Mother.

I then write that, on account of the Fall, most organizations function as hierarchies, subjections, or subjugations, but ideally they would function as “archical unions more or less mirroring the relationship of the Father and the Son,” in which there is no inequality, no difference of will, and no imposition of will by one person upon another person, providing the following example:   

Even military units are ideally archical within themselves. They function best when this is all they are. They become hierarchical only when inequalities of competence must be accommodated. They become subjections only when men disagree and leaders are obliged to “pull rank.” They become subjugations only when force must be used to restrain bad behavior. Not all units become thus degraded. Some small, elite units can function merely archically, with no inequality of competence and no need to pull rank or use force. But take away their archical arrangement and they cease to be “units.” To function as one, they must have one of their number to begin things, to give direction, to lead the way, and to commit himself to responsibility for the whole and give his life for it if necessary. That is the essence of archē. [212]

This is the role that God has assigned to men toward women and not women toward men. Unfortunately, too many men, deprived of their God-given headship by our feminized world, love their wives only by enabling them to live as they please, more like a house boy than a husband. In doing so, they deprive their wives of the best part of themselves, the part that is most manly.

So a very pious, Christlike woman may live her life in the service of others, giving of herself archicly toward children but only eucharisticly toward men, not taking the man’s place but allowing and even enabling men to live up their own calling as the archic “head” of the woman—the one responsible for inspiring, directing, and leading.

For more on how male and female relates to the image of God and to ordination, read my remarks in Boston.

For much more on the general subject, read Origen’s Revenge. You’ll be surprised, as many reviewers were, by how much is in it. In the words of one reviewer, the last chapter alone is “worth the price of admission.”