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Two Feminist Views of Goddess and God

2014; Duke University Press; Volume: 29; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/08879982-2713331

2164-0041

Judith Plaskow, Carol P. Christ,

Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices

Like most feminist theologians, we have rejected the idea of God as an old white man with a long white beard who reigns over the world from a throne in heaven. The idea that a good and all-powerful God rules the world from outside it has been rendered implausible not only by the Holocaust but also by the long history of women’s oppression and the equally long history of slavery. As Nietzsche announced, and as theologians have increasingly recognized, the omnipotent and transcendent God of traditional theologies is dead.For some, this is the end of the matter, but for those of us for whom spirituality remains important, the task is to reimagine and redefine God. We suggest that the God who is not dead is in the world, not beyond it — not totally transcendent of the world but also immanent in it. The power of a God in the world is not the power over of a dominating (male) other, but rather must be understood in more relational terms as power with, power within, and power of being.With other feminist theologians, we have been arguing for many years that God cannot be understood as a dominating, totally transcendent, male other. The two of us agree that symbols matter, and we both seek alternatives to the traditional image of God as an old white man, including symbols of God She or Goddess and images of divinity drawn from nature. While, in our early work, neither of us had fully conceptualized an alternative to the traditional understanding of God, we assumed that as our views developed we would probably come to similar conclusions. To our great surprise (and it must be said, dismay), we did not.Our conversations about the nature of God intensified when one of us (Carol) began to define Goddess as “the intelligent embodied love that is the power of all being” and the other (Judith) began to recognize that, for her, God is neither personal nor loving. As we argued about our differences and clarified our own positions, we articulated two different views of divinity that we believe will have resonance among feminist theologians and others who have rejected God the Father in Heaven.For Carol, divinity is omnipresent, not omnipotent: Goddess is the love and understanding immanent in the joy and suffering of all individuals in the world, calling them to love and understand more deeply and more fully. Judith also rejects the omnipotent God of traditional theologies. For her, God is inclusive of good and evil, the power of creativity that undergirds all life processes; this God is not personal or solely good, but rather is the power undergirding everything. We suspect that many feminists and other reflective individuals who take the problem of evil seriously, yet in some sense believe in God, will gravitate toward one or the other of these views.Over the past decade neither of us has been able to persuade the other to change her view through rational argument. We have concluded that, while rational arguments have an important place in theological discussions, they must be situated in experience — both personal and historical. We are thus currently writing a book together, tentatively titled Goddess and God in Light of Feminism, in which we address the question of the nature of God and Goddess in the form of an embodied theological dialogue. In a similar spirit of dialogue, we have chosen to coauthor this contribution to Tikkun’s special issue on God, working together to present our two plausible — and for us compelling — alternatives to a traditional understanding of God.My understanding of God has changed dramatically in the course of my adult life. Throughout these changes, God’s relationship to evil has remained a central question for me. For many years, I held a traditional view of God as an omnipotent (male) person beyond and outside the world who had the power to intervene in human affairs. My stance toward this God was one of anger for what I saw as his betrayal of the Jewish people during the Holocaust and his wider failure to stop a host of other evils. When I became a feminist as a graduate student in theology at Yale, I began to question my prior notion of God and watched it gradually crumble in the face of both intellectual critique and new religious insights that came to me through feminism.My current beliefs about God can be stated very simply: I see God as the creative energy that underlies, animates, and sustains all existence. God is the Ground of Being; the source of all that is; the power of life, death, and regeneration in the universe. God’s presence fills all creation, and creation simultaneously dwells in God. In theological language, I am a panentheist: I believe in a God who is present in everything and yet at the same time is not identical with all that is. In my book Standing Again at Sinai, I used a part/whole analogy to describe the relationship between God and the world and also communities and the subgroups of which they are composed, and I still find that analogy compelling. Just as many communities are more than the sum of their parts, so God is more than the totality of creation. Indeed, God includes and unifies creation. The idea of unity or oneness is particularly central to my understanding of God. Believing in God means affirming that, despite the fractured, scattered, and conflicted nature of our experience of both the world and ourselves, there is a unity that embraces and contains our diversity and that connects all things to each other.In my concept of God, wholeness or inclusiveness carries more theological weight than goodness. The world as we know it has little use for human plans and aspirations. We can be stunned by the beauty of the raging waters of the sea and, an instant later, find ourselves and the things we love annihilated by them. We can be astounded by the care, altruism, and intricate interdependence found everywhere in nature and also by its predation and violence. When we look at ourselves, we find the same, often ambiguous mixture of motives and effects.Most people are capable of great kindness and also cruelty. Human beings have imagined remarkable ways to care for the most vulnerable among us and have also used our inventiveness to torture and kill. Moreover, there is not a straightforward relationship between our intentions and their outcomes. Things we mean for the good frequently have unforeseen negative consequences, just as we can mean something for ill and yet good can come from it. To deny God’s presence in all this, to see God only in the good, seems to me to leave huge aspects of reality outside God. Where then do they come from? How are they able to continue in existence? How can we not see that the same amazing inventiveness that allows us to establish systems of justice, feed the hungry, and find cures for many diseases is present when we develop new weapons or build crematoria?It is this issue of the ambiguity of God that is the clearest continuing thread that has marked my perspective from girl-hood to the present. On one hand, I can no longer accept the notion of an omnipotent God who intervenes in the world or remains aloof according to standards utterly beyond our comprehension. Aside from the incoherence of the notion that God has all the power while we have none, why would we worship such an arbitrary tyrant? On the other hand, the words of Isaiah —“I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe; I the Lord do all these things” — still resonate for me as a profound metaphor for the ambiguity of the creative energy that pulses through the whole complex web of creation and sustains us in life.I would maintain, though it may not seem so, that this notion of God provides significant grounding for ethical reflection and action. While the creative energy flowing through the world may have no moral purpose, the notion of oneness embodies a profound moral trajectory. To say that God is one, or that the divine presence that animates the universe is one, is to say that we are all bound to each other in the continual unfolding of the adventure of creation. In the human family, for all our differences, we are more alike than we are unlike. All of us are faces of the God who dwells within each of us; the same standards of justice should apply to everyone. When we harm, diminish, or oppress any one of us, we harm ourselves. And this is true not simply of human beings, but of the whole of creation.We are linked to each other in a remarkably complex, intricate web of life, the individual elements of which are thoroughly interconnected. As one of the characters in Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple says about her changing conception of God, “My first step from the old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds. Then other people. . . . One day it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all. I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed.” As creatures who have self-consciousness and who, in our better moments, are able to glimpse and appreciate our place in the larger whole, we have a deep ethical obligation to act in the interests of that whole and the individuals and human and biotic communities within it. We are just one species on a small planet in one solar system. Yet we have developed a unique capacity to overwhelm and poison the ecological system of which we are part. In the words of Deuteronomy, we are poised between life and death, blessing and curse (30:19). Our ability to “choose life” requires us to act on behalf of the flourishing of life, to participate in the unfolding of divine creativity as it manifests itself in the myriad forms of creation.Why call the energy that animates and sustains the universe God? I am aware that there are people who call themselves secular who are equally humbled by the vitality and adaptiveness of creation, and who joyously affirm the value of life and human existence. Though my sensibility may not be so far from theirs, there are several reasons that I am unwilling to relinquish the word “God” for the power that brings everything into being and supports it in life.For one thing, the feelings evoked by this power and its manifestation in a beautiful and varied world are feelings traditionally associated with being in relation to God: awe, gratitude, vulnerability, smallness, dependence, and also significance in the sense of having a place and a calling in relation to the greater whole. “I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars,” says Walt Whitman, “and the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of a wren.” The reverence before each and every aspect of creation as an expression of God’s infinite creativity, the notion that “a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels,” seems to me the quintessence of a religious attitude.Second, the experience of being part of something larger than the self — the notion that, in the midst of our ordinary lives, we can at moments glimpse a reality deeper and more fundamental than, yet not separate from, those things we concern ourselves with everyday — is common to many of the world’s religious traditions and is certainly central to Judaism.Third, the idea that Oneness has built into it an ethical imperative — that to know the world as God’s unified, ongoing creation is also to know that we are required to tend and care for that creation — coheres with and can make sense of the notion of commandedness that is central to Judaism and that finds expression both in specific ethical injunctions and in the sanctification of daily life. There is no commander who issues orders from outside the web of creation, but there are obligations inherent in the interconnectedness of things that link our own self-interest to the preservation and prospering of all life.Fourth, as an engaged Jew, when I think of God as the ever-flowing wellspring of life, I am able to say what I mean when I pray, describing who or what I see myself as addressing. Indeed, imagining God in this way enables me to pray. To what else shall I speak other than to the reality that brought me and everything else into existence, that is an ever-renewing source of strength when I am troubled or downcast, and that challenges me to bear witness to the oneness of all things in the way I act in the world?My theology is rooted in the transformative power of images and symbols of Goddess in a culture that has been dominated by male images of God. I agree with Mary Daly that when God is (exclusively) male, the male is God. The symbol of Goddess is an affirmation of women’s power, bodies, will, and relationships with each other: it has the metaphoric power to transform the hold of male images of God in the mind. Further, the image of God as female has the power to transform classical dualism’s separation of mind and body, thought and feeling, spirit and nature, and male and female, challenging the absolute categorical distinctions between God, humanity, and nature. Images and symbols of Goddess remind us that the earth is sacred, that the earth is our true home, that we must embrace a finite life that includes death, and that all beings are connected in the web of life. I speak of the divine power as Goddess, as I believe this word has great power, while recognizing that this deity can also be called God. I believe male symbols of God are important too but insist that symbols of God as a dominating male other must be transformed. My view is inclusive monotheism, in which a plurality of symbols — female, male, and those drawn from nature — point to a single divine power.While experiencing the power of Goddess symbols and rituals, I was unsure whether Goddess is a personal power who cares about the lives of human beings and all other individuals in the world or simply the name for the powers of birth, death, and regeneration found in nature and in all creative processes. The fact that Goddess is addressed in ritual and prayer suggests the former, while images of Goddess as earth, air, fire, and water may suggest the latter. Many in the Goddess movement have felt no need to resolve this question, but I did. The experience I had when my mother died was a turning point.As my mother died, I felt the room fill with an immense power of love. This did not feel like my mother’s love for me or mine for her; rather it seemed to me to be a great power of love that included us both and everything else. Since that moment I have felt this power of love in everything while going about my daily life. Sometimes I feel it more intensely, and sometimes I need to remind myself of it; nonetheless, from the moment of my mother’s death, I have never doubted that a great matrix of love supports and sustains the world. It makes me a happier and more joyful person to feel that love surrounds me and everything else in the world. I define Goddess in terms of this experience.In my book Rebirth of the Goddess, I wrote that Goddess is “the intelligent embodied love that is the ground of all being” and asserted that the world is the body of Goddess. When I defined Goddess as embodied love, I felt it important to add “intelligent” in order to affirm that love is by no means an irrational feeling. Goddess not only loves the world but understands it as well. Her understanding is like that of a compassionate and intelligent therapist or friend who sees us as we are and inspires us to become who we can become. I took the phrase “the ground of being” (to which I added “all”) from theologian Paul Tillich. While Tillich had been referring to God or Being as the metaphysical whole out of which individual beings arise, I have always heard the English translation of his German words in a physical sense as well — as referring to the ground beneath our feet, the earth that supports us. I agree with Mary Daly that both Be- ing and be- ings are not static, as Tillich may have thought, but changing.The notion that the world is the body of the Goddess stems from the ancient and modern idea of Goddess as earth. Process philosopher Charles Hart shorne develops the idea of the world as the body of God, philosophically using the model of the human body. In Hart shorne’s model, the individual cells of a body are independent “individuals”— not under the full control of the mind, yet connected as parts of a single body and influenced by the mind. So, too, individuals in the world — human and other than human — are independent, yet connected in the body of God, influenced by and capable of being inspired by the divine wisdom. In this view, God’s body is the earth-body, but also the body of our universe and all other universes. Hartshorne’s model of the world as the divine body affirms the close connection of Goddess with the world while not collapsing Goddess into traditional definitions of immanence.Does the idea that Goddess is intelligent embodied love reintroduce the problem of evil, the question of how a loving Goddess could create and rule a world that includes so much evil and suffering? This problem arises only if we assume that Goddess is omnipotent and rules the world from outside it. But this is a view I reject. In a relational world, the power of Goddess should not be understood as the sole power that determines everything — nor as the power to dominate others. The power of Goddess must be understood not as power over but as power with and power within. The world is not controlled by a single individual we call Goddess.If the world truly is relational and interdependent, then no one individual, not even the divine individual, can control everything. The notion that the world is relational and that God must be understood through the power of relationship is expressed in Martin Buber’s I and Thou and developed philosophically in Hartshorne’s The Divine Relativity. For Hartshorne, God is the most relational of all relational beings and the most sympathetic of all sympathetic individuals. (Sympathy is the ability to feel the feelings of others and to respond with love, understanding, empathy, and insight.) Goddess feels the feelings of the world, suffering when the world suffers, rejoicing when the world rejoices, and inspiring individuals to love and understand more deeply and widely. The power of Goddess is omnipresence, not omnipotence.Hartshorne explains the nature of divine power using the concept of panentheism, which means that Goddess is in the world yet more than the world. In contrast to traditional theism, panentheism understands Goddess to be in the world, not beyond or outside it. In contrast to traditional understandings of pantheism, Goddess is not identified with or swallowed up by the world. In contrast to monism, the world is not identified with or swallowed up in Goddess. Goddess and the individuals in the world are real. Individuals — including human beings, animals, cells, atoms, and the particles of atoms — have the power to affect each other and Goddess. The world is a relational world, and what happens in the world is the result of a multiplicity of wills.I believe that Goddess is transcendent of the world in one and only one respect: Goddess is the one individual who is always loving and understanding. Why do I assert this? At the most fundamental level, this is my experience, shared by many others, though clearly not by all. I am convinced that this view is not irrational by Hartshorne’s version of the ontological argument, which states that “the highest being imaginable” is a relational being that cares about the world. However, the power of Goddess in a relational world is persuasive rather than coercive. The divine power is always a power of love and understanding, but this power is the power to persuade or inspire, not the power to control.The evil and suffering in the world are not “caused” by Goddess. Some suffering is an inevitable result of a world in which more than one individual exists and in which all individuals other than Goddess are finite. Death, disease, and natural phenomena such as earthquakes, volcanoes, and floods (excluding those caused by human intervention) are part of life in a relational world on our planet. However, a great proportion of the “evil” in the world is not the result of inevitable conflicts in a world in which more than one individual exists. Much of what we know as evil in our world has been created by human beings who fail to respect other individuals and the interdependence of life. Understanding the power of Goddess as power with, not power over, places the responsibility to change the world firmly in human hands. We can choose to repair the world or to continue to destroy it. At the same time, Goddess is always with us, encouraging and inspiring us to love and understand each other and the world more fully. This for me makes all the difference.Despite the differences in our views of Goddess and God, there are many theological convictions that the two of us share. We reject the transcendent God of traditional theologies who exists apart from the world and whose power is defined as omnipotence. Both of us affirm that Goddess or God is in the world, not beyond it. Both of us have rejected the classical dualisms that separate divinity from nature, mind from body, and male from female. For both of us bodies matter, including the body of God or Goddess. We have both used panentheism to describe our understanding that God is in the world. We both believe that we need new images for divinity and divine power that can supplement, transform, or replace traditional images of God as a dominating male other. We agree that some of these images must be female, while others will be drawn from nature. We have found — though this is a subject for another discussion — that our differing views of Goddess and God lead to similar ethical conclusions.Our views diverge on the question of whether Goddess or God is a personal power of love and understanding that is good, or whether God or Goddess is an impersonal power that is inclusive of good and evil. We continue to debate these questions. Is love more fundamental than hate? Is it mistaking fantasy for reality to think it is? Does the notion that Goddess is love provide a firmer foundation for an ethics of care than the notion that God includes both good and evil? Or is the inclusive whole the place to ground ethical decision-making?Though we continue to argue, we also recognize that each of our views is shared by others and that both personal and impersonal understandings of God and Goddess are found within many of the world’s religious traditions. While we have learned to accept our differences, we remain convinced that images and understandings of Goddess or God do matter. Traditional images of God as a transcendent and dominating male other have harmed women and the world. We hope that the two alternatives that we have offered here will help others make sense of this world and find a language to affirm the interdependence of life and our responsibility to ensure its flourishing.