Dinah Livingstone ponders a classic Christian doctrine.
The Bible begins with the story of the Woman, Eve, causing humanity to be thrown out of Paradise. Though the Old Testament has stories of heroic women in the history of Israel, and gorgeously erotic poetry in which the woman has a strong voice, it also has plenty of wicked women, Jezebels and faithless women like the prophet Hosea’s errant wife who becomes the type of the people of Israel. ‘The feminine’ remains a dangerous explosive force to be kept under control. In the book of Joshua Yahweh is a very male warrior God: ‘Draw near and hear the words of Yahweh your God,’ Joshua said. ‘By this you shall know that among you is the living God who without fail will drive out from before you the Canaanites, Hittites, Hivites, Perizzites, Girgasites, Amorites and Jebusites’ (Joshua 3:9). The Israelites gain most of the land because ‘Yahweh fought for Israel’ and at one point even made the sun stand still for them (Josh 10: 12-14). When the children of Israel ‘do evil in the sight of Yahweh’ and worship Baal and Astarte, (Judges 3:13; 10:6) Yahweh’s anger is kindled against them and he punishes them severely. Astarte (Ishtar) is the local great mother goddess whose cult Yahweh insists must be suppressed.
The God of the three Abrahamic religions remains very male, even though he ‘evolves’. In Judaism and Islam God is one person, in classical Christianity the one God is a Trinity of three persons, Father Son and Spirit. In John’s gospel the Son is the Word or Logos (masculine) whose antecedent in late Old Testament Wisdom literature (e.g. Proverbs 8) is the divine creative Wisdom (chokmah in Hebrew, sofia in Greek – both words are feminine). But whereas in the Old Testament, Wisdom is a created ’emanation’ or sephirah from God, in John the masculine Logos is God. In some parts of the early church (such as the Syriac church) the Spirit was thought of as feminine (Hebrew ruach and cognate Syriac meaning spirit, wind, breath is feminine) but later changed to masculine to conform with the other churches.
Jesus addressed God as ‘Father’ and in his parable of the Prodigal Son there is a loving father but no mother. We don’t know very much about Jesus’ life but in the gospels (apart from his words on the cross in John), whenever he encounters his mother he is off-hand or rude to her. However, he seems to have got on well with other women, Mary Magdalene, Mary and Martha of Bethany, the woman at the well, the Syro-Phoenician woman… Women were disciples, they preached the gospel and, it appears, presided over the Lord’s Supper in house churches. But God and, of course, Jesus himself (‘God the only-begotten Son’ – μονογενης θεος – monogenes theos – in John) remain male.
Those who presided over the Lord’s Supper were not called priests in the New Testament but as the church hierarchy became more formalised and the Eucharist itself more cultic – embracing the idea of the ceremony as a ‘sacrifice’ – women were excluded, and banned as celebrants at the Council of Nicea (325). At the same time there was a sort of much-needed ‘counter-revolution’ to the male dominance of the Divine. The feminine principle snuck back in the figure of Mary the mother of Jesus. In Luke she is the first to proclaim the gospel when she is pregnant, visits her cousin Elizabeth and sings her Magnificat:
He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He has put down the mighty from their seats: and lifted the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things: and sent the rich empty away.
In John’s gospel she stands at the foot of the cross and Jesus entrusts her to his beloved disciple. In Acts, after the departure of Jesus she is there in the Upper Room at Pentecost and receives the Holy Spirit with the apostles. Traditionally she then went to live at Ephesus with the apostle John (the beloved disciple) and it was from there she was taken up to heaven. Ephesus was the city with the magnificent temple to the great goddess Artemis. When Paul preached there the silversmiths rioted because he threatened their trade of making silver shrines for the goddess tourists (Acts 19). It was at the Council of Ephesus in 431 that Mary was declared theotokos – mother of God. Immediately after that, the basilica of St Mary Major in Rome was built under Pope Sixtus III (432-40) and her cult grew, reaching a high point in the Middle Ages, when she was Queen of Heaven. The cathedral Notre Dame de Paris was built in the twelfth century. She had an important shrine at Walsingham; the English people were so devoted to her that England was called Mary’s Dowry. They called many common flowers after her. The lady’s bonnets (columbines) were splendid this year in the patch in front of my house.
Although the church taught that she was not divine but ‘mother of God’, she did become a kind of goddess for many Christians. In this roundabout way the feminine aspect of the Divine reasserted itself. Mary assumed some of the attributes of the Mother Goddess Astarte/Ishtar and also of the Ephesian goddess Artemis. The Greeks had many goddesses and, as it were, split the divine feminine into personifications of various aspects of it, for example, Gaia the Earth goddess, Aphrodite goddess of sex and love, Athena goddess of wisdom, Hera, wife of Zeus and goddess of marriage, and Artemis the virgin moon goddess, also goddess of hunting and woodland. The goddess Artemis points to the fact that being a mother is not the only thing a woman can do. Artemis was a huntress; like Artemis a friend of mine has no children – she is a head-hunter. But in a way it was a pity that Mary was venerated as a virgin mother, since normal mothers aren’t virgins. This meant that although Mary was venerated as a woman, reasserting the divine feminine, she was a special case and ‘purer’ than ordinary women. (An earthier personification was Mother Nature as Dame Kind.) Nevertheless, later in Latin America Mary became identified with the indigenous Earth goddess Tonantzin as Our Lady of Guadalupe Tonantzin. Today her basilica in Mexico City is Our Lady’s most popular shrine in all the world.
At the Protestant Reformation in Europe the feminine aspect of the divine was chucked out again. Mary was no longer Queen of Heaven or mediatrix – prayers were no longer addressed to her (or to other saints). Though the Church of England continued to sing Mary’s Magnificat at Evensong, in 1562 Article 22 of its 39 Articles declared:
The Romish Doctrine concerning Purgatory, Pardons, Worshipping and Adoration, as well of Images as of Reliques, and also invocation of Saints, is a fond thing vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God.
The Reformation coincided with the thrusting rise of capitalism, originally in many ways a progressive force for individual liberty and technological advance, but today in its idolatrous (Mammon-worshipping), global form, colossal and out of control, a threat to the very survival of the Earth. In their traditions the indigenous peoples of the Americas respect and take more care of the Earth. Our Lady of Guadalupe Tonantzin as the Earth Mother goddess embodies those values. The Zapatistas in the Mexican Chiapas Jungle are mainly indigenous Mayan Indians and fighting to defend their ancestral environment. In what could be described as a Sofish attitude, Marcos, their leader (said to have been educated at the Sorbonne and probably no believer in the supernatural), welcomed the gift of a statue of her because of what she represents. Marcos relates that the Zapatistas held an assembly to decide what to do with the statue. ‘The hundred-year-old Doña Herminia thinks that the Lady of Guadalupe will want to be with her sons and daughters wherever they are… “So I ask you, madrecita [little mother], if you agree to going where we go,” she asks, addressing the image that is in front of the assembly. The Virgin doesn’t answer, her dark gaze keeps on looking down.’ A vote is taken and they decide that the statue will go with them wherever they go. ‘After the assembly there will be a dance. A marimba and the dark-skinned image will preside over the party.’
On November 21 1950 Pope Pius XII declared as an infallible dogma that Mary ‘having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory’. This story of Mary’s Assumption into heaven was an ancient tradition but now for the first time declared to be an infallible dogma. That caused massive cognitive dissonance among the faithful and incredulous derision elsewhere. Nevertheless, one thing the dogma is saying is that a woman’s body matters and can be glorified as much as a man’s. For in fact, Mary’s ‘Assumption’ was exactly what the gospels and Acts say about Jesus at his Ascension, but at that time those writers believed that heaven was up in the sky. Very few people could possibly have believed that in 1950. It should have been a wake-up call to make believers realise that, like this story of Mary, stories in the New Testament about a supernatural realm in the sky are ‘poetic tales’.
Though the Church of England does not teach the doctrine of the Assumption, in its current Calendar of Holy Days it celebrates the Blessed Virgin Mary on August 15 (the feast of the Assumption in the Catholic Church), as well as the Annunciation on March 25 and her Visit to Elizabeth on May 31. The Church of England is a broad church. At its ‘higher’ end Mary has come back in to a greater or lesser extent, but she is still excluded from the ‘lower’ end of the C of E and other Protestant churches, where the Divine remains strictly male; in the words of Luther’s great battle hymn of the Reformation, Ein feste Burg: ‘A mighty stronghold is our God, a trusty shield and weapon.’ In an interesting paradox it is the ‘high’ church, which may now include prayers to Mary, that is most strongly opposed to women ministers – priests or bishops, whom the Roman Catholic Church also bans. The ‘low’ church and other Protestant churches, who dismiss Mary as a ‘Romish doctrine’, welcome women ministers and some have done so for many years. Are these two complementary forms of nervousness of the feminine Divine? I have seen a Protestant cringe with embarrassment if you call March 25 Lady Day. They may even shudder with horror with a stern ‘Fear not Master Ridley’ face, as if Queen Bloody Mary was back. And I have actually heard a man of the ‘high-church’ tendency say that women can’t celebrate the Eucharist because they bleed and their menstrual blood might contaminate the blood of Christ in the cup.
If we think of theology as a sister art to poetry and supernatural stories as poetic visions concerning our own world and ourselves, then we can see that in our tradition the feminine aspect of the Divine has had a somewhat chequered career. In her article in this issue Katy Jennison notes ways in which she appears as the Goddess in contemporary Paganism.
The two most urgent matters for ‘the feminine’ in our society today are the position of women and the care of the Earth. Women have never been ‘granted’ liberation and inclusion in society but have had to fight for it. They were not even automatically included in working class struggles. For example, one of the Chartist demands in 1848 was for ‘universal manhood suffrage’ – not womanhood. Suffragettes had to fight for the vote and working women to fight for better conditions, as in the Bryant and May match girls’ strike of 1888 and many other battles since then. Further demands for women’s rights and recognition were made in ‘the second feminist wave’ of the 1960s-1970s with its watchword ‘the personal is political’ and media outlets such as Spare Rib magazine and Virago publishers. Gains have been got but the struggle continues to this day, with women still on average earning less than men and with lower or no occupational pensions, more open to abuse in zero hours contracts and less visible in top jobs. They suffer far worse in Islamic countries.
The demand for women to have an equal place in society with men is not because women are ‘nicer’ than men – witness the extreme bitchiness of one of the women contenders in the recent Tory leadership contest – but because they are equally human, and a society that excludes half the human race is both unrepresentative and vitally impoverished. Likewise women have had to fight for their position in the church and here too it is not only a question of women having the right to make their voices heard and to occupy leadership positions, but the church itself is impoverished if it excludes half of humanity in this way.
With the dire warnings of climate change it is increasingly vital to respect and take care of the Earth. We can learn from indigenous cultures which honour the Earth as our mother and have even adopted aspects of ‘the divine feminine’ from Christianity, such as Our Lady of Guadalupe Tonantzin. Triumphalist mega-capitalism dismisses a cult like this as ‘backward, primitive folk culture’ but could learn from its wisdom (and, incidentally mestizaje, that is mixing and holding fast to what is good from different cultures).
Some writers on ecology call the Earth Gaia, the Greek primal mother goddess. In his book Coming Back to Earth: From Gods, to God to Gaia Lloyd Geering bravely introduces a goddess into a low-church tradition but (perhaps because she is unfamiliar?) he slips up with the howler that Gaia was Zeus’s wife. In fact, Gaia was his granny, a much older goddess, anarchic and very promiscuous, having children by parthenogenesis and by numerous lovers, including her grandson Zeus. She personifies the Earth and Nature as superabundant and careless. As Tennyson puts it in his In Memoriam:
So careful of the type?' but no. From scarpéd cliff and quarried stone She cries, 'A thousand types are gone…
For humanity to take care of the Earth and survive, it must summon all its feminine and masculine potential (individual men and women possess both in varying degrees). We need good sense, awareness, care and strong political action.
Another feminine figure in the New Testament, the bride of Christ (who is the church in Ephesians and other epistles), remains rather shadowy as a personification. (In the sublime love poetry of a mystic like John of the Cross, in which the woman is the main speaker, the bride is not the church but the individual soul.) It is only in the book of Revelation that the bride of the Lamb appears in a dazzling poetic vision, dressed for her wedding day (uniting the male and female human form divine), coming down to Earth as the beautiful city, the New Jerusalem, the Reign of Kindness. We will say more about this in our next and final reflection in this series, to be published in Advent with the provisional title ‘O Come.’