The Nemesis Hex

Abstract

Feminist philosopher and theologian Mary Daly describes her overarching theological methodology—despite her disdain for methodologies as “methodologicide”—as “Piracy.” Among all of those influential on her thought—Aquinas, Jacques Maritain, Simone de Beauvoir, Nelle Morton, Susan Griffin, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Nietzsche, and the death of God theologians—it is Paul Tillich who has the most enduring and significant impact on Daly.¹ As a “Pirate” and “Alchemist,” Daly gives these figures some credit but acknowledges that she often appropriates and misappropriates their ideas for her own playful usage. A “Call to Piracy” for Daly is to poach and “accumulate” such intellectual “treasures of knowledge that had been hidden from my Tribe.” Although Daly simultaneously exhibits a disdain and respect for Tillich, she engages no other thinker so directly throughout her writing. She refers to Tillich in both Outercourse and Quintessence as a thinker “used” as a “spring-board.”² In doing so, Laurel Schneider suggests, Daly has initiated “a profound and invaluable critique of the limitations and distortions embedded in his thinking.”³