Abstract
This paper deals with the possibility of an incarnation in the feminine in our age. In the first part, we discuss sexual genealogies in ancient Israel and address the problem of the extreme vulnerability of feminine life in the midst of an ancient sacrificial crisis. The second part opens with an analysis of Feuerbach’s interpretation of the Trinity. The triadic logic, as found within various religious contexts, is also affirmed. Based on our analyses from the first and the second part, in the third part, we address the problems of feminine vulnerability and fragility on one hand, and triadic thinking on the other hand, and relate them to an original proposal for the future matrixial theology of incarnation.
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Notes
On the meaning of cultural trans-modernity see Enrique Dussel in his excellent study ‘Transmodernity and Interculturality’ Poligrafi 11, no. 41/42 (2006): 16.
I have borrowed the word ‘matrixial’ from Ettinger as this term is introduced and discussed in her essay ‘From Proto-Ethical Compassion to Responsibility: Besideness and the Three Primal Mother-Phantasies of Not-enoughness, Devouring and Abandonment,’ Athena 2 (2007): 101. For Ettinger, as a Levinasian, the term matrixial (womb-matrix) is related to the compassionate emotion of the maternal womb (from the Hebrew ‘wombs’ as raḥamîm; cf. p. 101). Cf. on the etymological possibilities of the term ‘matrix’ Jean-Paul Martinon’s work After “Rwanda” (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2013), 36: ‘Maternity–Matrix–Material–Maturity–Matrimony–Matter–Materiel. The root “mat-“ has two origins: the immaterial Latin mater, something from which something develops or takes form and the materiel Sanskrit: mât, to make by hand, to build.’ In his explication, Martinon is following Lyotard and his exhibition Les Immateriaux in the Pompidou Centre in 1985 (see Reesa Greenberg et al., eds., Thinking about Exhibitions (London: Routledge, 1997), 159–73). See also n. 79 in Martinon’s book, and especially pp. 37 ff. on the African ethics of ubuntu, which will be highly relevant in my further explications on relationality later in this paper.
Irigaray, Il mistero di Maria (Roma: Paoline, 2010), 58.
Laurel C. Schneider, Beyond Monotheism: a Theology of Multiplicity (London: Westminster Press, 1963), 1ff., 159ff.
On a problem of 'single divine incarnation in a human being of a male sex' see Emily A. Holmes’s Flesh Made Word: Medieval Women Mystics, Writing, and the Incarnation (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2013), 2 (and Introduction on pp. 1–25 on incarnation in various Christologies). In the first chapter of her book, Holmes proceeds towards critique of ‘dualistic (sic!) and essentialist metaphysics and thinking’ of the incarnation towards a more inclusive (feminist) interpretation since Grace Jantzen’s Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion from 1999 (see on this pp. 32ff.). For Holmes, the inclusive Christology lies in an understanding of incarnation as ‘the embodiment of God more generally’—that is in a way ‘that God is present in the world.’ (45)
E. Pennington, Feminist Eschatology: Embodied futures (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), p. 12f.
Ibid., 13. Pennington offers an excellent overview of scholarship on embodiment and feminist eschatologies in Chapter 1 of her book. Here she posits and analyses various problems as outlined by feminist theologians, such as that eschatology was omnipotently realized by God alone (and Carol Christ’s interrogation of this claim), or of eschatology as realized by God through Jesus (and, among others, Rosemary Radford Ruether echoing Mary Daly’s argument that ‘when God is male, the male is God,’ 36), and finally, claims of divine power that is more intimate as well as that redemption flows through community.
See on this Luce Irigaray, In the Beginning, She Was (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 136.
See, for example, the article on conflict rape in South Sudan in the Time magazine: Aryn Baker , ‘The Secret War Crime,’ Time, March 21, 2015, http://time.com/war-and-rape/. See on this issue also Jean-Paul Martinon, After “Rwanda”: In Search for a New Ethics.
See the chapter ‘The Redemption of Women,’ in Luce Irigaray, Key Writings (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), 152.
See on this article by David Z. Moster, ‘Levite of Judges 19–21,’ JBL 134, no. 4 (2015); and chapter 2, titled ‘Patriarchs and their women, some inaugural intertexts of hospitality: the Odyssey, Abraham, Lot and the Levite of Ephraim,’ from Judith Still, Derrida and Hospitality (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 51–92. See also Lauren A. S. Monroe’s paper on child and female sacrifice in the Hebrew Bible ‘Disembodied Women: Sacrificial Language and the Deaths of Bat-Jephthah, Cozbi, and the Bethlehemite Concubine,’ Catholic Biblical Quaterly 75 (2013): 32–52. (All citations from the Bible are from the NSRV 1990).
Cf. 1 Sam 11.7
Ettinger, ‘From Proto-Ethical Compassion to Responsibility,’ 127. Ettinger here explains Hebrew ‘Good full of mercy’ (El Maleh Rakhamim) as ‘God full of wombs.’
Judith Still (2010) argues that we are actually dealing with two sexual taboos: firstly, the anus should not be penetrated at all, and in both stories (of Lot and of Levite) we are dealing with the even more powerful taboo of wanting to penetrate the priest’s anus; secondly, ‘the hymen-protected vagina’ may be entered and penetrated only upon a paternal invitation and this marks the above mentioned substitution of one sexual taboo for the other, Still, Derrida and Hospitality, 74).
Ibid., 77.
Judg 21.10–11.
Phyllis Trible, Texts of Terror: Literary Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1994), ch. 3 ('An Unnamed Woman: The Extravagance of Violence'). For citations see pp. 79 and 65.
By ‘matrixial identity’ I understand the ontologico-ethical core of the feminine sexual identity, in a way of a respect for sexuate (and not sexual or sexualized) differentiation, as proposed by Irigaray. In her In the Beginning, She Was, Irigaray writes: ‘Between sister and brother, genealogy becomes the generation of two different horizontal identities: appearance of the transcendence of sexuate identity with respect to the body.’ (133) In this sense, matrixial (i.e., bodily) identity supplies us with a possibility of a different understanding of trinitarian relationality, as this topic is discussed later in our essay. If, in Levinasian terms, the other necessarily is the son, the transcendence of the other, for Irigaray, is only possible from within two different horizontal (and thus not hierarchical) identities, with sister(s) and brother(s) being the paradigms of such a transcendence in relationality (cf. her reading of the Antigone in ch. 5 of In the Beginning, She Was).
Trible, Texts of Terror, 87.
Monroe, ‘Disembodied Women,’ 41.
Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. Martin Evans (London: John Chapman, 1854), 71.
Feuerbach, ibid., 71.
See Plato’s Timaeus, 52a, in Plato, Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 1997).
Ettinger, ‘From Proto-Ethical Compassion to Responsibility,’ 101.
Ibid., 100. On Moses and motherhood see Lisa Guenther, ‘“Like a Maternal Body”: Emmanuel Levinas and the Motherhood of Moses,’ Hypatia 21:1 (2006), 119–136. Guether interprets Moses’ maternity as follows: ‘Moses is not literary a mother, but he was born to a woman and borne by several other women who substituted for him “like a maternal body,” even though they had “neither conceived nor given birth” to him.’ (124)
Cf. Monroe, ‘Disembodied Women,’ 32ff.
Emily A. Holmes, Flesh Made Word: Medieval Women Mystics, Writing, and the Incarnation (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2013). Cf. among others Rosemary Radford Ruether’s seminal book Goddesses and the Divine Feminine: A Western Religious History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005).
Irigaray, Il mistero di Maria, 20.
Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity, 71.
Ibid., 69–70.
In semiotics, the first account on triadic logic is to be found in Peirce’s philosophical writings, beginning with his early writings on categories from 1867, followed by ‘Nomenclature and Divisions of Triadic Relations as Far as They are Determined’ from his Syllabus (1903), and his essay on three categories from ‘The Principles of Phenomenology’ (part 2—‘The Categories: Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness,’ where he states: ‘My view is that there are three modes of being’ (Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. by J. Buchler, New York: Dover, 1955, 75–78). On Peirce’s triadic theory of semiotics (sign–object–interpretant, or also interpreter–interpretant–interpretee) see Hermann Deuser’s Religionsphilosophie (Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, Deuser, 2008, §10, especially see Deuser’s original table on semiotic triads and trichotomies on p. 268).
Josiah Royce, War as Insurance: An Address (New York: Macmillan Company, 1914). See part two of this essay, titled ‘The Neighbor: Love and Hate’ where Royce – based upon Peirce’s theory of semiotics—beautifully describes the very essence of triadic logic: ‘[D]yadic, the dual, the bilateral relations of man and man, of each man to his neighbor, are relations fraught with social danger. A pair of men is what I may call an essentially dangerous relation.’ (30) Finally, for Royce, the third element (a community or an international system of insurance) is needed to intervene between dyadically established relations and thus to mediate among hostile parties.
J. Rutherford, ‘The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha’. In: Identity, Community, Culture, Difference, edited by J. Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 211.
Jay Johnston, Angels of Desire: Esoteric Bodies, Aesthetics and Ethics (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 51 (for ternary structure) and 92 (for the citation).
On an interval in ethics as a third space see my essay, 'An Interval of Grace: The Time of Ethics,' SpazioFilosofico 17:2 (2016), 211-224, available at http://www.spaziofilosofico.it/numero-17/6239/an-interval-of-grace-the-time-of-ethics/: <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__protect-2Dau.mimecast.com_s_kuf-2DC6X1PysD5Nn5s6W-5FHg-3Fdomain-3Dspaziofilosofico.it&d=DwMDaQ&c=vh6FgFnduejNhPPD0fl_yRaSfZy8CWbWnIf4XJhSqx8&r=1EBRQ08rVWCmJoVV_6rNcszbuUlOOuP4f6BevF5yccY&m=SrZLvq3fJBxHm-kKUZ11kAur4xPmHKn6TDY_LDGMd8Q&s=L8LBPGsVTHk89Dbuuml7J3y8Tyeu8k9c3QJo7srNwh0&e=>
Laurel C. Schneider. Beyond Monotheism: A Theology of Multiplicity (London: Routledge, 2008), 4.
Ibid.
See Plotinus’ The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna (London: Penguin, 1991), xxxv. On triangels and their cosmic role see Plato’s Timaeus, 53d, in Plato, Complete Works.
On various trinitarian theologies in the non-Western world see Peter C. Phan 2011, ed., The Trinity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), chs. 16–20. In these chapters, we can see the rich variety of triadic thinking in Confucianism (Heaven, Earth, and Humanity) and Taoism (i.e., the dynamics and relationality within Dao—as One, producing Two (yin-yang), and having their offspring as Three), and, of course, within both Hinduism as well as Buddhism (triguna, tridosha, trikāya…).
Schneider, Beyond Monotheism, 32.
A. Okechukwu Ogbonnaya, An African Interpretation of the Trinity (New York: Paragon House, 1994).
Ibid., 8.
Timaeus, 49a and 52a, in Plato, Complete Works.
According to Plato’s Timaeus: ‘The new starting point in my account of the universe needs to be more complex than the earlier one. Then we distinguished two kinds, but now we must specify a third, one of a different sort. The earlier two sufficed for our previous account: one was proposed as a model, intelligible and always changeless, a second as an imitation of the model, something that possesses becoming and is visible. We did not distinguish a third kind at the time, because we thought that we could make do with the two of them. Now, however, it appears that our account compels us to attempt to illuminate in words a kind that is difficult and vague. What must we suppose it do to and to be? This above all: it is a receptacle of all becoming—its wetnurse, as it were.’ Timaeus 49a, in Plato, Complete Works, 1251.
Kuang-Ming Wu, On Chinese Bodily Thinking: A Cultural Hermeneutics (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 140–142. My emphasis above in the citation. Wu refers to Dao de jing, chapter 6: ‘The spirit of the valley never dies./It is called the subtle and profound female./The gate of the subtle and profound female/is the root of Heaven and Earth./It is continuous, and seems to be always existing./Use it and you will never wear it out.’ Ibid., 139f.
Ibid., 141.
Yvonne Sherwood and Kevin Hart, eds., Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments (New York: Routledge, 2005), 298.
Jürgen Moltmann, Trinität und Reich Gottes (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1994), 164–165; see on this Phan, The Trinity, 229.
Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 69–70. In German: ‘Die Maria paßt veilmehr ganz in die Kategorie der Dreieinigkeitsverhältnisse weil sie ohne männliche Befruchtung den Sohn gebar, wie Gott Vater ohne weiblichen Schoß den Sohn erzeugte, so daß also die Maria eine notwendige, innerlich herausgeforderte, ergänzende Antithese zum Vater im Schoße der Dreieinigkeit bildet.’ Ludwig Feuerbach, Das Wesen des Christentums (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976), 83. English translation is not accurate here: it does not translate the most important word in this sentence—namely: we read in German ‘wie Gott Vater ohne weiblichen Schoß den Sohn erzeugte’ (my emphasis; cf. Engl. tr.: ‘On the contrary, the Virgin Mary fits in perfectly with the relations of the Trinity, since she conceives without man the Son whom the Father begets without woman; so that thus the Holy Virgin is a necessary, inherently requisite antithesis to the Father in the bosom of the Trinity.’ Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 69–70.)
Ibid., 69. See on this topic also teachings about Mother in Heaven by various Mormon theologians and thinkers. Since 1854 revelation of Sister Eliza R. Snow about Mother in Heaven in 'O My Father' hymn, this topic developed into an (un)official doctrine of the LDS. On this, and related dogmatic controversies over the decades see David L. Paulsen and Martin Pulido, ‘»A Mother There«: A Survey of Historical Teachings about Mother in Heaven,’ BYU Studies 50, no. 1 (2011), 71–97 and an excellent study written by Taylor G. Petrey ‘Rethinking Mormonism’s Heavenly Mother’ in Harvard Theological Review 109:3 (2016), 315–341. Petrey’s essay is especially important for its comparison with Irigaray’s teachings on divine women. In his concluding remarks, Petrey cherishes the capacity of Mormonism to highlight ‘the benefits of a pluralistic heaven such as what Mormonism can offer,’ including ‘making space for a plurality of gendered performances’ (340)—beyond divine or human dichotomies, based on heteronormativity. Interestingly enough, it is precisely the Mormon thought that in its current pluriformity can ‘reveal the fluid and plural nature of sexual difference’ as well as ‘be useful in the analysis of race, ability, and other morphological, social, and historical categories.’ (341)
Irigaray, Key Writings, 163.
Epiphanius of Salamis, for example, even thinks that chapter 12 of Revelation could already testify to this; Stephen J. Shoemaker, ed., Ancient Traditions of the Virgin Mary’s Dormition and Assumption (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 12.
Taken from Antoine Wenger’s L’Assomption de la T. S. Vierge dans la tradition byzantine du VIe au Xe siècle and two other editions of this earliest Greek dormition narrative; cf. Ibid., 351 n.1.
Ibid., 365.
Ibid., 38.
Moltmann, Trinität und Reich Gottes, 179. The paragraph we refer to is titled ‘Die immanente Trinität.’
Ibid., 181.
Ibid., 164–165.
This citation from the Eleventh Council of Toledo is from online collection, available at https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/halsall/source/toledo.txt (accessed December 10, 2017; the section reference for this citation is 309; originally this collection comes from J. Neuner and J. Dupuis; The Christian Faith in the Doctrinal Documents of the Catholic Church, New York: Alba House, 1982, 102–106). Cf. on this “gynecology of God” in Moltmann, Trinität und Reich Gottes, 181 n. 67. For Moltmann this undoubtedly marks the radical digression from the old patriarchal thinking on God.
Radford Ruether, Goddesses and the Divine Feminine, 155.
Wilhelm Schneemelcher, ed., New Testament Apocrypha (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1963).
Irigaray, Key Writings, 175.
Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 69–70.
Wu, On Chinese Bodily Thinking.
‘[A] woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. She was pregnant and was crying out in birthpangs, in the agony of giving birth.’ (Rev 12:2)
Sherwood and Hart, Derrida and Religion, 93.
Phyllis Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (London: SCM Press, 1992), 34.
Ibid., 36.
Irigaray, Il mistero di Maria, 21–25 (ch. »La verginità di Maria«).
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Dedicated to girls and women—victims of war rape.
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Škof, L. God, Incarnation in the Feminine, and the Third Presence. SOPHIA 59, 95–112 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-018-0646-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-018-0646-9