Teresa Berger: Remarks
for the WATER Teleconference, July 18, 2012
1) some background
on how I came to the research done in this book
(Berger, Teresa. Gender Differences and the Making of
Liturgical History: Lifting a Veil on Liturgy’s Past. England, UK: Ashgate,
2011.)
2) a look at the
work the book itself does
3) a comment on
the short excerpt from the book (Ch. 7, pp. 157-160) that you all received, to read if you were so
inclined
1.
BACKGROUND:
My scholarly work is in a field
called Liturgical Studies, a discipline that inquires into everything having to
do with Christian worship: its history; its practices; its theological heart;
its new frontiers (for example, the contemporary development of liturgies in
Cyberspace).
I studied and trained in this field,
in quite conventional ways, in Europe.
Strong emphasis on the importance of the past, i.e., liturgical
practices in history, as these ground the present.
When I came to the United States
from Europe in the mid-80s, feminist theology and feminist liturgies had
emerged and commanded attention. We were questioning the past, of course – and
what it had meant for women’s lives. For
me, while I continued a more conventional trajectory, I also began to think with
and accompany these emerging new voices and practices.
One
highlight of that work: a book on Feminist
Liturgies in Global Context, with an essay by Diann Neu of WATER (Louisville,
KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002).
By the early 1990s, gender history
had begun to flourish, in part in response to difficulties that became visible
with earlier feminist scholarship. Two problems
in particular:
1.
“add-women-and-stir” approach (Mary E. Hunt’s
expression). What was problematic in this approach was its trust in
conventional history-writing. Simply
adding women to the traditional his-story rendered visible only a handful of
elite women. Look at elite men and add elite women (Mary Magdala, Hildegard,
Juana Ines de a Cruz, etc.)—render visible only a handful of elite women who
have left writings or other traces.
2.
A second approach prevalent in early feminist writings
focused on “women as victims,” that is, as objects of misogyny and patriarchal
oppression. Problems with this approach include the inattention to female sites
of agency and power, and to hierarchies between women. Or, to put this differently:
a “women-as-victims” approach also trusted traditional history-writing too much
in that it took for granted the marginal, dependent, and subservient status of
women in the past.
With the emergence
of gender history, gender theory, “gender differences” became crucial. What does this mean concretely? Well, one cannot invoke “women” without acknowledging
that the meaning of the word is constituted by its other, namely what women are
not, i.e., men. This traditional binary
– “women” and “men” – is a powerful but incomplete map of gendered lives. It leaves invisible, for example, the roughly
six million human beings alive today with neither clearly identifiable female
nor male chromosomes. And far from being minor and marginal, the complexity of
gender differences impacts contemporary life in a multitude of ways, from
restroom access for the gender-ambiguous, to sex determination and Y-chromosome
testing of female athletes, to Vatican deliberations on transgender surgery in
a priest.
So, the seemingly
natural category “women,” which had anchored earlier women’s history, crumbled,
while new gender scholarship emerged: for
example, the study of masculinities. Scholars
use tools of gender history to look at the first five centuries. Gender is not
synonymous with women, but includes gender differences—men/women, eunuchs,
consecrated virgins, priestly men, etc.
For my own field,
liturgical history, I found this an incredibly exciting move. It allowed me to envision essentially a new
way of writing about liturgical practices in the past without focusing on just
one sub-group (that can’t be done, in liturgical history anyways; if you want
to describe, for example, where women had their place in a church, you have to
describe where the men were at the same time).
So, my key methodological
principles: gender is not a synonym for women. In
fact, gender history can never treat “women” as if that category can stand on
its own and was not constituted by its relational other, men. An insistence on this fact is, I think, the
most marked difference between earlier work and the present Gender Differences and the Making of
Liturgical History.
Second, and following from this,
gender applies not only to masculinity and femininity, but to all gender identities
including those that subdivide one of the sides of the traditional binary, for
example virgins and widows or eunuchs, or which defy the binary as intersexed
persons do.
The result of this
thinking is that gender differences become visible and with that lens I went to
work. The veil book is what came of that.
2.
THE BOOK:
Now,
before you think this book – as a book about the past – is really irrelevant to
the here and now, let me stress that, on the contrary, the book offers a history to contemporary questions around
gender and liturgical life: our
contemporary struggles around gender issues in faith communities (be they
continuing questions about women’s ministries, issues surrounding the full
ecclesial life of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex Christians,
popular discussions of the need for a more “muscular” Christianity in an
otherwise “impotent” because “feminized” church) have a genealogy, an
ancestry. And they deserve to be seen as
part of this larger whole, namely a history of liturgical life that has never
been free of gender as both a given and also a struggle.
The core of the book
is a set of historical case studies – focused on early Christianity (i.e., the
first five centuries), that is: the formative early centuries of liturgical
history – to show how gender differences shaped liturgical life from the very
beginning.
After
two introductory, methodological chapters, Part II of the book presents four
case studies to demonstrate what a gender-attentive liturgical historiography
entails. The first chapter is dedicated
to liturgical space (ch. 3), the next chapter to early Eucharistic practice,
especially the image of the Eucharist as God nursing us with breast milk as a
mother nurses her child (ch. 4). So far,
these are quite conventional topics of liturgical history. The following two case studies move beyond conventional
topics to imagine alternative ways of studying liturgy’s past; based on
foregrounding questions of gender in worship.
The first of these chapters inquires into gender differences as they
shaped liturgical presence and participation:
highlights liturgical impediments based on bodily flows, especially menstruation
and nocturnal emissions, and sexual relations, and childbirth (ch. 5) all of
which had sustained weight in terms of who could participate in liturgical
assembly. The subsequent chapter traces
the emerging link between liturgical presiding and priestly masculinity. It also takes into account liturgical
leadership by other gender identities, among them women, eunuchs, and
“in-continent,” not sexually abstinent men (ch. 6).
One particularity
of the book, important to mention because of the excerpt you were sent: at the beginning of every chapter, I tell a
story from the past that introduces the subject matter of the chapter. This storytelling is quite intentional. I am convinced that history at heart is “a
set of stories we tell,” as Rowan Williams has put it…. The stories that open each chapter allow me
to offer fleeting glimpses of periods in liturgical history that are not otherwise
highlighted in the book.
This brings me to
the short reading:
3.
THE SHORT READING (Ch. 7, pp. 157-160):
I
chose this short excerpt in part because the feast day of St. Mary Magdalene is
just around the corner, July 22. The
excerpt is the historical story I chose to tell, for the closing chapter of the
book. The chapter is titled “The Lasting Presence of Liturgy’s Past.” The chapter
and its intro text illustrate well how the historical work done in this book has
consequences for today: for example, consequences
for liturgical historiography of the findings of the previous chapters. And, contemporary discussions around gender
and liturgy: what happens to the many ways in which liturgy continues to be
shaped by gender when these are seen as having a history – that is, when
contemporary realities come to be seen as part of a long history of Christian
worship that has never been devoid of gender as basic, potent, and troubling ingredients
of all liturgical life.
___________________________________________________________________
Questions
and Discussion with the Audience
1. What about priestly masculinity?
What does it mean?
The images from
the past have been inadequate to tell the whole story. The struggle has not simply
been female vs. male bodies that can preside. In the 4th century,
the question was what kinds of eunuchs can/cannot be ordained. In the 6th
century the question was what kind of sexual abstinence marked priestly presiders.
Some were married but abstinent. According to Gary Macy, there was ordination
of women until 12th century, though ordination meant something else
then.
2. The questioner assigned this
book as a textbook in feminist worship class. She found it useful that it went
beyond gender male/female, dipping more broadly and more specifically into
those areas but also expanding the categories.
Teresa Berger
described using the book in a class with a trans student, and
to go beyond matters of women not
allowed to do anything, rather to look at liturgies from the past with a
thicker description of the shape of gender differences.
3. What about gender differences
that don’t have physical aspects?
One approach is to
think about early Cistercian monks who were told to bring the Word to full
term, not to abort the Word. There are reports of men pregnant as Mothers of
the Word with spiritual procreation considered valuable/true procreation. There
are also men penetrating the side of Christ, which raises issues with regard to
sexuality. The point here is not to multiply genders but to see a more complex
set of distinctions. The Vatican has a seeming fixation on such matters which
is weird given the gender fluidity of the past but understandable as a reaction
to gender systems breaking apart
4. Eucharistic practices include bread
and wine; milk and honey cups are consecrated.
God nurses with
God’s body and blood.
5. With regard to next steps, Dr.
Berger has no immediate follow up to this book planned. She is interested in liturgies
in cyber space; liturgies related to planetary emergencies; how liturgy deals
with time in contemporary society while time is a scarce resource.
6. A questioner asked about women
who were forgotten along the way.
Teresa Berger
observed that by the 10th century, Christianity was largely rural.
Such communities left little written trace, few buildings or monuments; much of
that church is completely invisible in liturgical history. There is no way to unearth
or recreate those voices. Some traces of people remain but the dominant
experience is that vast numbers of people in the past are no longer visible to
scholars.
7. What about similar gendered work
in Islam or in Jewish liturgical history?
There is some
being done with this complicated understanding of gender in studies of early
Judaism.
8. A
questioner wondered how to make liturgical history in the future; does this
arise in the book?
Professor
Berger’s response was that the past in this case is not a map for the future. Gender
differences will continue to accompany and trouble liturgical practices but how
it is not easy to speculate what will emerge.
WATER is deeply grateful to
Professor Teresa Berger for her time and talent. We wish her well with this
book and look forward to sharing her work in the future.
There will be no WATER
teleconference in August.
Please join is on Wednesday,
September 12, 2012, for our next gathering with Dr. Judith Plaskow who will
address the topic of “God After Feminism.”
Happy summer vacation!