The gendering of angels?

C.S. Lewis wrote the Chronicles of Narnia. Most people very likely knows this. But, I wonder how many know about his science-fiction (or, as Freeman Dyson suggests, his theo-fiction) works? There were three: Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength.

In the middle book, C.S. Lewis reflects on the gender of angels. I raise this because he describes them as lacking sexual differentiation. Most of us, even the most sophisticated, still subtly conflate sex and gender in our daily thinking.

Yet, Lewis does something interesting. He suggests that sexual differentiation does not realistically represent true gender distinctions. There is some correlation. But, starting with sexual distinction is more likely to lead to muddled thinking, rather than adequate modeling.

At this point, Lewis is swimming against the main current of thought which holds that gender is fundamentally a social construction. Lewis rejects this. He would suggest that social construction has what might be termed an objective founding. There is a cornerstone to all human construing that is reasonable and steadfastly resists our attempts to refashion.

Additionally, Lewis wants to maintain what many would call a binary opposition between the genders. But, he does so in order to afford the possibility of a complimentary collaboration in which neither gender is greater nor lesser than the other. There is a true distinction, but this does not justify any fundamental disassociation or denigration.

What has this got to do with angels? Well, it is an interesting thought experiment. While angels are considered to be sexless, that does not necessarily mean that they are not be gendered. In Wiemar Germany, the Jewish-Catholic phenomenologist, Edith Stein, explored similar territory somewhat earlier than Lewis.

Many today would find Stein’s essentialist orientation unacceptable. But, she was arguing that there was no domain from which women should be excluded simply because they were women. In fact, she maintained that women would bring a unique dimension to each vocation that was complementary to what men might bring.

Neither one gender nor the other was ‘better’. But, each gender is different. While sexual differentiation is an aspect of this for humans, it is not what is distinctive. It makes you wonder what might be engendered in our societies if we could maintain a distinction without discrimination in terms of justice and equity.

The scholastic thinkers were not wasting their time when they considered the question of how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. This was merely a means of asking questions about time and space, spirit and matter, cause and effect. The question did, and still does, matter in terms of making proper distinctions. So does gender.

Has Lewis offered a means of engaging in a quality conversation about this often contested and controversial area of our lives? Perhaps. Perhaps not; but, it is worth asking a few questions.