## 1. Introduction



To date, a much larger literature exists under the rubric of feminist
theology than of feminist philosophy of religion. Four main reasons
have been suggested for this (Frankenberry & Thie 1994: 2-4). First, from the
seventeenth to the nineteenth century, the perspective of white
European males dominated the formative period of philosophy of
religion to such an extent that it was hard to see how the distortions
of this long tradition might be overcome. Second, in the twentieth
century, once philosophy of religion was professionalized and
gerrymandered within Philosophy faculties at universities, it was
insulated both from the old Theology faculties and the new Religious
Studies faculties created in the 1960s and 1970s; therefore, feminists
interested in pursuing a Ph.D. had to choose between Philosophy (where
philosophy of religion was not regarded as "real"
philosophy during the ascendancy of the analytic movement) or
Religious Studies/Theology which took philosophical concerns seriously
and thus provided a more welcoming location for feminist theorizing on
religion. Third, many feminist philosophers themselves have harbored
either a suspicion of religion or an impoverished understanding of it,
and so have been slow to develop a significant body of scholarship in
this area. Fourth, the entrenched bias and resistance to feminism
within mainstream analytic philosophy of religion, combined with the
myth that its methods, norms, and content are gender-neutral, has
impeded recognition of the relevance of work appearing under the
rubric of feminist philosophy of religion. Feminist theology, on the
other hand, flourishes in an academic field that for over forty years
has been hospitable to a variety of liberation theologies,
death-of-god theologies, environmental theologies, postcolonialist
theologies, and queer
 studies.[1]




The maturing of feminist philosophy of religion as a field distinct
from feminist theology was evident at the end of the twentieth
century. It could be seen in the appearance of two book-length
studies: Pamela Anderson's *A Feminist Philosophy of Religion: The
Rationality and Myths of Religious Belief* (1998), and Grace
Jantzen's *Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of
Religion* (1999). Another measure of the vitality of this field
was the publication of such collections as *Feminist
Interpretations of Mary Daly* (Hoagland & Frye 2000), devoted
to an assessment of one of the most original authors in the field, and
*Feminist Interpretations of Soren Kierkegaard* (Leon &
Walsh 1997), containing critical analyses by feminist philosophers of
the "father of religious existentialism". In addition,
Volume 1 of Kluwer's *Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of
Religion* (Long 2000), a major reference work covering
1900-2000, concluded with a chapter on feminist philosophy of
religion as represented by Mary Daly, Sally McFague, Luce Irigaray,
Julia Kristeva, Pamela Anderson, and Grace Jantzen. Finally, an
anthology on *Feminist Philosophy of Religion: Critical
Readings* (Anderson & Clack 2004) exhibited the methodological
range of the field in terms of psychoanalytic, poststructuralist,
postmetaphysical, and epistemological frameworks, and provided
specialized treatments of such topics as divinity, embodiment,
autonomy and spirituality, and religious practice.



In the second decade of the twenty-first century, fresh collections
are appearing more frequently as essays by feminists bearing on the
philosophy of religion become available (see Anderson 2010; Alcoff
& Caputo 2011).


## 2. Feminist Critique of Traditional Philosophy of Religion



To Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1885 it was evident that "History
shows that the moral degradation of woman is due more to theological
superstitions than to all other influences together" (1885:
389). To Luce Irigaray, writing one hundred years later, the becoming
of women was premised on becoming divine, for 



> 
> 
> God alone can save us, keep us safe. The feeling or experience of a
> positive, objective, glorious existence, the feeling of subjectivity,
> is essential for us. Just like a God who helps us and leads us in the
> path of becoming, who keeps track of our limits and infinite
> possibilities--as women--who inspires our projects. (1987
> [1993b: 67]) 
> 
> 
> 



Scalding critiques like Stanton's and reconstructive reflections like
Irigaray's have marked feminist philosophy of religion with a complex
set of relations to the subject matter of religion, as well as to the
discipline of philosophy. In the wake of a worldwide wave of religious
resurgence at the beginning of the twenty-first century, many
feminists find Stanton's reasoning still persuasive: the Word of God
is the word of man, used to keep women in subjection and to hinder
their emancipation. For other feminists, especially those located
within various communities of faith and resistance, gynocentric
efforts to create a possible space for something "divine"
hold considerable appeal.



As a form of critique, feminist philosophy of religion employs the
practice described by Jeffner Allen and Iris Marion Young (1989) of showing the limits of a
mode of thinking by forging an awareness of alternative, more
liberating, ideas, symbols, and discourses. Feminist philosophy of
religion suggests ways in which gender as an analytic category and
gender studies as a body of knowledge can not only challenge but also
enrich and inform the methodological and substantive assumptions of
philosophy of religion. This does not mean that gender hierarchy
comprises a simple or exclusive category of analysis. Nor does it
necessarily invoke a distinction between gender and sex that would
allow naturalized assumptions about the sexed body to go unquestioned.
Given the interflowing streams of class, race, ethnicity, age, sexual
orientation, ability, and nationality that shape the complex
modalities of social experience, it is unlikely that gender or any
other single factor could suffice as a single or unitary focal point.
Women cannot be presumed to speak in a single voice or to share a
uniform "experience". Nevertheless, gender constitutes
perhaps the most fundamental factor creating human difference, and it
remains among the most ignored philosophically.



Gender bias as it operated in the history of the philosophy of
religion shaped the ways in which the traditional problems and
orientations of the field were constructed. Like the cultural
phenomenon of religion itself, philosophy of religion not only
originated in a male tradition of production and transmission, with a
history of excluding and devaluing women, but it was also defined by
many concepts and symbols marked as "masculine", which
stood in oppositional relation to those marked as
"feminine". Moreover, unlike the phenomenon of religion
which was embedded in multiple cultural contexts, philosophy of
religion was largely Eurocentric and Anglo-American in its
orientation, such that in addition to gender bias, ethnocentrism
constituted the second major weakness of the history of this field.
For a long time, philosophy of religion was written from a standpoint
not unlike that of Reverend Thwackum, the character in Henry
Fielding's novel *Tom Jones*, who announced: 



> 
> 
> When I mention religion, I mean the Christian religion; and not only
> the Christian religion, but the Protestant religion; and not only the
> Protestant religion, but the Church of England. (Fielding 1749: vol.
> 1, bk 3, ch. 3) 
> 
> 
> 



If not always the Church of England, it was for the most part
Protestant Christianity that was conflated with "religion"
in the modern period of philosophy of religion.



Undaunted by two such severe deficiencies--gender bias and
ethnocentrism--the dominant Anglo-American analytic school of
philosophy of religion proved surprisingly healthy in the last decades
of the twentieth century. Whereas at the mid-point of the twentieth
century philosophy of religion was virtually defined by the
assumptions and methods of logical positivism and empiricism, in
subsequent years new and technically rigorous contributions by
religiously committed philosophers began to enliven old theistic
arguments. After long decades of dormancy when logical positivism
seemed to yield only negative conclusions in the philosophy of
religion, a resurgence of interest in traditional theism occurred in
mainstream philosophy of religion. Modal logic was used to formulate a
more perspicacious version of the ontological argument, Bayesian
models of probability breathed new life into inductive justifications
of religious belief, rational choice theory ushered Pascal's wager
once again onto the philosophical stage, and language-game analysis
offered a *prima facie* justification of religious language.
Far from the days of wondering what Athens has to do with Jerusalem,
philosophy and religion appeared to have entered a period of detente
as comrades in arms. From the standpoint of feminist critique,
however, analytic philosophy of religion has failed to engage the
questions posed by feminist inquiry or to modify the androcentric
elements of the traditional theistic model. Instead, in the work of
such philosophers as Richard Swinburne, Alvin Plantinga, and William
Alston, philosophy of religion was deployed in defense of the cogency
of a standard form of western monotheism, in the service of a
conception of "God" that was patriarchal, and in the
vested interests of staunchly traditional forms of Christianity.



Feminists argue that philosophy of religion can hardly ignore
questions of gender ideology when its very subject
matter--religion--is riddled with misogyny and
androcentrism. They point out that, historically, gender bias in
religion has been neither accidental nor superficial. Elizabeth
Johnson (1993) likens it to a buried continent whose subaqueous pull
shaped all the visible landmass; androcentric bias has massively
distorted every aspect of the terrain and rendered invisible,
inconsequential, or nonexistent the experience and significance of
half the human race. For philosophers studying the intellectual
effects and belief systems of religions, the opportunity to critique
and correct sexist and patriarchal constructions in this field is as
ample as it is urgent, given the presence of gender ideology in all
known religions. Not one of the religions of the world has been
totally affirming of women's personhood. Every one of them conforms to
Heidi Hartmann's definition of patriarchy as 



> 
> 
> relations between men, which have a material base, and which, though
> hierarchical, establish or create interdependence and solidarity among
> men that enable them to dominate women. (1981: 14) 
> 
> 
> 



All sacred literatures of the world display an unvarying ambivalence
on the subject of women. For every text that places well-domesticated
womanhood on a religious pedestal, another one announces that, if
uncontrolled, women are the root of all evil. Religion has thus
comprised a primary space in which and by means of which gender
hierarchy has been culturally articulated, reinforced, and
consolidated in institutionalized form. Religion is hardly the only
such space, but it appears to have been a particularly effective way
of undergirding and sanctifying gender hierarchy in the West.



Feminists charge that gender bias has permeated the way philosophy of
religion has been written and has influenced how the field has been
professionalized. They protest a series of common lapses: the dearth
of female authors in the leading journals or standard textbooks; the
almost complete absence of attention to feminist philosophy on the
part of mainstream authors, male and female; the exclusively
male-authored and monochromatic complexion of the standard anthologies
of readings and editorial boards. They note that the use of inclusive
language was remarkably slow in finding its way into the scholarly
publications and conceptual patterns of this field. It is still not
unusual to find articles that discuss concepts of justice and fairness
at length, using throughout the male pronoun.



More difficult lacunae are located in the selection of the very
topics, problems, and methods that have come to define mainstream
philosophy of religion, chief among them the problem of God.


## 3. The Problem of God



Discussion of the problem of God is standard fare for all schools of
philosophy of religion. Long a lynchpin holding up other structures of
patriarchal rule, the concept of a male God has been judged by every
major feminist thinker, including Mary Daly, Rosemary Radford Ruether,
Naomi Goldenberg, Daphne Hampson, Judith Plaskow, Julia Kristeva, and
Luce Irigaray, to be both humanly oppressive and, on the part of
believers, religiously idolatrous according to the terms of their own
theologies. Feminist philosophers of religion ask why a single set of
male metaphors should be absolutized as though supremely fitting about
the subject. Critical of the literary gesture of writers who hope to
avoid sexist language by recourse to rhetorical disclaimers, feminist
authors argue that it is not persuasive simply to declare that the
concept of God transcends gender and, therefore, "he" is
not literally male, and then to presume that all can go on as before.
The problem remains that once the masculine is raised to the universal
human, beyond gender, the feminine alone bears the burden of sexual
difference.


### 3.1 Feminist Critique of Traditional Theism



Philosophers of religion have sometimes marked a distinction between
the anthropomorphic language of myth and popular piety, on the one
hand, and the conceptual and abstract categories of philosophy, on the
other hand, as though when we repair to the metalevel of analysis we
leave gender-inflected language behind. Feminist philosophy of
religion points to all the ways the signifier "God"
remains stubbornly gendered male in Western thought and subliminally
envisioned as a male personage. Whether taken as real or unreal,
inferred validly or invalidly, said to be experienced directly or only
projected illusorily, the divine identity in classical theism and
atheism is unmistakably male. This supreme, ruling, judging, and
loving male God is envisioned as a single, absolute subject, is named
Father, and is conceived as standing in a relation of hierarchical
dominion over the world. In ways both implicit and explicit, this
construct tends in turn to justify various social and political
structures of patriarchy which exalt solitary human patriarchs at the
head of pyramids of power. Drawn almost exclusively from the world of
ruling class men, traditional theistic concepts and images legitimate
social and intellectual structures that grant a theomorphic character
to men who rule and relegate women, children, and other men to
marginalized and subordinated areas. The discursive practices that
have constructed the divine as male are intimately connected to the
production of ideologies which devalue all that is not male; they have
formed a constitutive element in the oppression of women and other
"Others".



The dominance of male signifiers for deity is only part of the problem
of classical theism. Like a prism which refracts all the surrounding
light, the gendering of God has skewed the way in which other problems
in philosophy of religion have been traditionally constructed. The
problem of *religious languag*e, for example, is frequently
cast in terms of the meaning and use of metaphors and models,
involving questions of reference and truth. But the metaphors and
models employed by mainstream philosophers of religion often trade
uncritically on intrinsically hierarchical patterns of relations.
Metaphors such as father, king, lord, bridegroom, husband and
God-"He" go unmarked. If an occasional female model or
metaphor intrudes into this homosocial circle, it is immediately
re-marked upon. Introducing female pronouns for God-"she"
produces nervous laughter in most classrooms.



In the study of the so-called *divine attributes*, none has
received more discussion in the literature than
"omnipotence", defined as some version of "perfect
power". Both the conceptualization of the nature of this power
as well as descriptions of its effects embody sexism and androsexism.
In twentieth century studies, the standard definition of *perfect
power* ranged from "unilateral power to effect any
conceivable state of affairs" to the more moderate notion of
"self-limiting power". But the kind of power in question
was in principle one of domination, or power-over, as it has been
persistently associated with the characteristics of ideal masculinity.
In the eleventh century, Peter Damian could quote approvingly the
biblical passage "O Lord, King Omnipotent, all things are placed
in your power, and there is no one who is able to resist your
will", as he argued, *contra* St. Jerome, that divine
omnipotence is even able to "cause a virgin to be restored after
she has fallen" (1065 [1969: 143). Like the two favorite heroes
of modern philosophy, the Cartesian cognitive subject and the Kantian
autonomous will, an omnipotent deity reflects the mirror image of
idealized masculinist qualities, according to feminist philosophers of
religion. Among contemporary schools, only process philosophers of
religion have explicitly argued against the attribute of omnipotence
on the grounds that it is conceptually incoherent, scientifically
superfluous, and morally offensive in its association of the divine
with male controlling power (see, for example, Cobb & Griffin
1976; Suchocki 1988; Howell 1988).



Philosophical arguments on behalf of the concept of *divine
aseity* or self-sufficiency reinforce the characteristic
disparagement of reciprocal power relations found in other social and
intellectual expressions of patriarchy. Divine existence is said to be
completely self-sufficient and sovereign. It is what it is
independently of any and all creatures, and its relations to these
others are external relations only. But, according to feminist
critics, in the absence of internal or constitutive relations that
would affect or qualify the divine aseity, real relatedness to
creatures is ruled out and a one-sided glorification of impassivity
over change regulates the model of God and the world.



In a related way, the topic of *theodicy* has also been deeply
shaped by male-defined constructions of power and interest. The very
form of the question, How can an all-powerful deity permit evil?
implies a meaning of "all-powerful" that is embedded in a
discourse of domination. At the same time, the meaning of
"all-good", called into question by the power of evil, is
defended by traditional theodicies in ways that either equivocate on
the meaning of "goodness" or cast doubt on the moral
attributes of the deity. Also exemplary are the types of evil simply
overlooked in the many hypotheticals, counterexamples, and possible
worlds that are generated in discussions of theodicy by male
philosophers. Misogyny and rape rarely make the list of evils. The
whole drift of theodicy as an intellectual exercise gravitates back to
the question of God, and rarely to the world of cruelty and suffering
(Thie 1994; for exceptions, see Farley 1990, and Sands 1994).



Philosophical debates on the topic of *immortality* have also
been deeply shaped by androcentric interests--centering on
self-perpetuation and individual, rather than collective, survival.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, arguably a foremother in feminist philosophy
of religion, located an important gender difference in *His
Religion and Hers* (1923). "Death-based" religion, she
claimed, asks the question, "What is going to happen to me,
after I am dead?"--a posthumous egoism. To this she
juxtaposed a "birth-based" religion whose main question is
"What is to be done for the child who is born?"--an
immediate altruism. Many contemporary feminist philosophers of
religion would find Gilman's anthropology overly simple but her
emphasis suggestive.



A still deeper critique involves the differentiation of embedded
levels of bias and androcentrism in the crucial assumptions, methods,
and norms of traditional philosophy of religion. Rooted in an ancient
dualistic worldview whose philosophical inadequacy has been harder to
detect until recently than its social and legalistic inequities,
Western religious categories have been inextricably bound up with a
certain metaphysical exigency. The metaphysical worldview that once
supported the sacred canopy may have lost much of its cogency for the
modern mind, along with the arguments of medieval scholastics that
sailors cannot kiss their wives goodbye on Sundays, or hangmen go to
heaven, but the dualisms associated with that worldview have continued
to haunt the philosophical imagination. Beginning with Greek
philosophy's equation of the male principle with mind and reason and
act, the female principle was associated with the contrasting
identification in terms of matter, body, passion and potency. The
subsequent history of Western philosophy, despite major conceptual
shifts, displayed a characteristic logic and form. Taking the form of
hierarchical opposition, the logic of binary structuring mutually
opposed such elements as mind and body, reason and passion, object and
subject, transcendental and empirical. As argued by any number of
feminist philosophers, these hierarchical oppositions are typically
gender-coded. Body, matter, emotions, instincts, and subjectivity are
coded as feminine, while mind, reason, science, objectivity are coded
as masculine (see Bordo 1987, Harding & Hintikka 1983, Irigaray
1977 [1985], Lloyd 1985). The specific link between this metaphysics
and western conceptions of God is a complex chicken-and-egg question.
Certainly it is fair to say that the Hellenizing of Christian theology
from the second century C.E. on saddled classical theism with
problematic philosophical valences. But classical theism in turn
reinforced and sanctioned the philosophical valorization of mind,
reason, and male over and against body, passion, and female. Some
feminists would trace the cultural roots of this way of thinking to
the phenomenon of "male bodily alienation" that arose in
late classical antiquity's asceticism (see Ruether 1983).



In any case, insofar as Western monotheism has constructed the meaning
of "God" in relation to "world" around binary
oppositions of mind/body, reason/passion, and male/female, traditional
theism remains complicitous with the very system of gender constructs
and symbolic structures that underlie women's oppression. In the
binary opposition between "God" and "world",
the term "God" occupies the privileged space and acts as
the central principle, the One who confers identity to creatures to
whom "He" stands in hierarchical relation. Oppositional
pairing of God/world has served in turn to organize other categories,
such as heaven and earth, sacred and profane. The widespread
distinction between sacred and profane, employed by many authors, thus
comes already encoded with the hierarchical oppositions of male/female
and masculine/feminine onto which it is mapped, along with the
structurally related pairs, white/black and heterosexual/homosexual.
The first term in each pair is sacralized, while the second is
rendered profane. This set of themes can be traced in connection with
the classic work of Durkheim and Weber in their theorizations of
religion (Erickson 1993).



Contemporary feminist philosophy of religion is also aware that the
relation between symbolic structures, on the one hand, and gender
constructions, on the other hand, cannot be specified in terms of a
single explanatory model. The power of symbolic orders to invoke and
reinscribe implicit gender understandings works in varied and complex
ways, as shown in studies by Bynum (1986), Fulkerson (1994), and
Hollywood (1995, 2002). Because religious symbols are polysemic and
multivalent, they hold different meanings for different people at
different times. It is never a simple matter of sheer reflection of
the given social order. The relation between society and symbol, or
between psyche and symbol, is recognized as open-ended. Relations of
reversal or inversion of actual social structures may obtain, making
it risky for the interpreter to posit a single unidirectional
cause-effect relation between symbol and social setting. As Bynum
points out, meaning is not so much imparted as it is appropriated
"in a dialectical process whereby it becomes subjective reality
for the one who uses the symbol", allowing for the possibility
that "those with different gender experiences will appropriate
symbols in different ways" (1986: 9).



It follows that no necessary correlation can be assumed between
goddess-worshipping cultures and actual egalitarian social structures
in the lives of females and males of that culture. Similarly, the male
Father God may open up a range of different interpretative
possibilities for both women and men. In culturally specific and
historically unstable ways, religious symbols even of the male Father
God have been useful in resisting and subverting the social order, not
only reflecting and reinforcing it. In light of these considerations,
most feminist philosophers of religions regard it as risky to
generalize across cultures, religious traditions, or historical
periods with respect to the different ways in which males and females
appropriate or construct religious symbolism.


### 3.2 From Images and Symbols to Concepts and Ontology



Mainstream philosophers of religion have so far failed to take
explicit account of the gendered dynamics of religious thought, but
for forty years a variety of other scholars, including biblical
exegetes, theologians, ethicists, and feminist philosophers of
religion, have produced an extraordinary explosion of research
resulting in feminist thealogies, critical hermeneutics of suspicion,
and woman-affirming writings on spirituality. In these, the problem of
God appears as a crucial site of reconstruction.



The medieval theologian Hildegard of Bingen struggled to capture her
vision of the Spirit of God with a cascade of vivid images and a
melange of metaphors. As rendered by Elizabeth Johnson in the
following passage, Hildegard's vision encompassed many of the themes
that appear in the writing of twentieth century feminist writers. The
divine spirit, Hildegard wrote, is the very life of the life of all
creatures; the way in which everything is penetrated with
connectedness and relatedness; a burning fire who sparks, ignites,
inflames, kindles hearts; a guide in the fog; a balm for wounds; a
shining serenity; an overflowing fountain that spreads to all sides.




> 
> 
> She is life, movement, color, radiance, restorative stillness in the
> din. Her power makes all withered sticks and souls green again with
> the juice of life. She purifies, absolves, strengthens, heals, gathers
> the perplexed, seeks the lost. She pours the juice of contrition into
> hardened hearts. She plays music in the soul, being herself the melody
> of praise and joy. She awakens mighty hope, blowing everywhere the
> winds of renewal in creation. (paraphrase in Johnson 1992: 127-128) 
> 
> 
> 



This, for Hildegard in the 12th century, is the mystery of the God in
whom humans live and move and have their being.



Eight centuries later, Paula Gunn Allen wrote in similarly provocative
language of the spirit that pervades her Laguna Pueblo/Sioux peoples:




> 
> 
> There is a spirit that pervades everything, that is capable of
> powerful song and radiant movement, and that moves in and out of the
> mind. The colors of this spirit are multitudinous, a glowing, pulsing
> rainbow. Old Spider Woman is one name for this quintessential spirit,
> and Serpent Woman is another...and what they together have made
> is called Creation, Earth, creatures, plants and light. (1986: 22)
> 
> 
> 



In Ntozake Shange's well-known play, a tall black woman rose from
despair and cried out, "i found god in myself and i loved her, i
loved her fiercely" (1976: 63).



In a frequently cited passage in *The Color Purple*, Alice
Walker voiced a similar note as Shug recounted to Celie the epiphany
that came over her when she learned to get the old white man off her
eyeball:



> 
> It? I ast.
>   
> 
> Yeah, It. God ain't a he or a she, but a It.
>   
> 
> But what do it look like? I ast.
>   
> 
> Don't look like nothing, she say. It ain't a picture show. It ain't
> something you can look at apart from anything else, including
> yourself. I believe God is everything, say Shug. Everything that is or
> ever will be. And when you can feel that, and be happy to feel that,
> you've found It (1982: 177-78).
> 



In theological constructions, Rosemary Ruether (1983 [1993]) has
worked with the unpronounceable written symbol "God/ess"
to connote the "encompassing matrix of our being" that
transcends patriarchal limitations and signals redemptive experience
for women as well as for men. Modelling God for a nuclear age, Sallie
McFague (1987) has experimented with metaphors of God as Mother,
Lover, and Friend of the world, with the world conceived of as God's
own body. Correlating Paul Tillich's notion of the power of being with
the empowerment women know in freeing themselves from patriarchy, the
early Mary Daly (1973 [1985]) posited God as "Verb", a dynamic
becoming process that energizes all things. Using process philosophy's
categories, Marjorie Suchocki (1982, 1988) has given new resonance to
the meaning of Whitehead's metaphors of God as "the lure for
feeling" whose "power of persuasion" aims to effect
justice and peace. Blurring the lines between psychological, somatic,
and religious experiences, Ruether (1983 [1993]) has projected an image of
"the feminine divine" grounded in the morphology of
women's bodies in all their multiplicity and fluidity.



In all these cases, contemporary feminist articulations of a relation
between God and the world, or God and female subjectivity, depicts the
divine as continuous with the world rather than radically transcendent
ontologically or metaphysically. Divine transcendence is seen to
consist either in total immanence or else in some dialectic between
horizontal transcendence and immanence.



But images and metaphors are not philosophical concepts, and the
reference range of "the divine" as it appears in these and
other feminist writings is not always clear. While theologians are
frequently satisfied to work imaginatively with symbols, images, and
metaphors, without regard to the question what the symbols are
symbolic *of*, philosophers of religion normally seek more
precision and conceptual clarification.


## 4. Feminist Reconstructions of Transcendence


### 4.1 A Process Feminist Proposal



On the question of the meaning and reference of God-talk, two
contemporary schools of philosophy of religion stand out as apparent
resources for feminist reconstruction. Both (1) the tradition that
employs the classical ontology of being, extending from Thomas Aquinas
to Paul Tillich and the early Mary Daly, and (2) the tradition that
employs an ontology of becoming, extending from Alfred North Whitehead
to Charles Hartshorne, John Cobb, Jr., David Griffin, Marjorie
Suchocki, and Catherine Keller, afford systematic conceptual schemes
for explicating the metaphors that appear in various contemporary
writings concerning "the divine" and any of its variants,
such as "the sacred", "spirit",
"God", "transcendence", or "higher
power". Both traditions can be modified, moreover, according to
qualifications suggested in this section. They can then be understood
as converging in a single conceptual model, rendered as
"creativity" in Whitehead's system and as
"being" (*esse*) in Aquinas's. This model can be
seen as a coherent way of reconciling the Whiteheadian and the
Thomistic accounts, while also providing a conceptual alternative to
anthropomorphic images of God as Loving Father, Cosmic Monarch,
Creator and Intervener, and so forth.



The school of thought known as process philosophy rewrites philosophy
of religion in a radically revisionist mode that accents evolution,
organismic connectedness, and the primacy of becoming. Its theism is
termed "panentheism", or all-in-god. Process philosophers
of religion were preeminent among those who labored in the twentieth
century to construct a coherent philosophy of God that would also be
consistent with scientific cosmology and evolutionary theory. They
produced, in addition, a model relatively free of sexism and
androcentrism. The underlying values of the process worldview are
organic, relational, dynamic, and embodied. Whitehead's elaboration of
the idea that "it is as true to say that God creates the World,
as that the World creates God" (1929 [1978: 348]) anticipated
the themes of interrelatedness and mutual conditioning that feminist
philosophy has developed in multiple ways in recent decades.



In the process paradigm everything comes into being by grasping or
"prehending" antecedently actualized things to integrate
them into a new actualized thing, its own self. Supplanting substance
philosophy's idea that it takes an agent to act, process philosophy
proposes a model whereby agents are the results of acts and subjects
are constituted out of relations. Throughout the entire universe, at
both macrocosmic and microcosmic levels, quantum units of becoming
achieve momentary unity out of a given multiplicity in a never-ending
rhythm of creative process whereby "the many become one and are
increased by one" (1929 [1978: 21]).



Creativity within each occasion is spontaneous, the mark of actuality,
and free, within the limits determined by its antecedent causes.
Creativity unifies any many and is creative of a new unifying
perspective which then becomes one among the many. In a process
ontology, creativity is ultimate reality not in the sense of something
more ultimate behind, above, or beyond reality, but in the sense of
something ultimately descriptive of all reality, or what the biologist
Charles Birch and the theologian John B. Cobb, Jr. have called
"the Life Process" (1982). As a category, creativity is the "ultimate of
ultimates" in Whitehead's words, but as such it is an
abstraction, the formal character of any actual occasion. Creativity
as concrete, however, signifies a dynamism which is the very actuality
of things, their act of being there at all. Everything exists in
virtue of creativity, but creativity is not any *thing*,
according to process feminist philosophers of religion.



The idea that the category of the divine or transcendence can be
correlated with the category of creativity in Whitehead's philosophy
marks a departure from Whitehead's own notion of God as an actual
entity in process of becoming at the same time that it joins with the
Thomistic tradition that has employed the language of being, rather
than becoming, to explicate the meaning of the divine. In its
classical medieval synthesis in Aquinas, this tradition conceptualized
the divine as *esse ipsum*, and held that in God essence and
existence are one; that is, God's very nature is *esse*, to be.
Everything that exists was thought to do so through participation in
divine being, or being itself. For Aquinas and classical thinkers,
being was already concretized in a single source that was supremely
actual. It is this crucial assumption, Frankenberry has argued, that
undergoes modification in the shift from a substance metaphysics to
one in which processive-relational categories are taken as ultimate
(1993). The result is radical. De-substantialized and freed from
static fixity in neo-scholastic metaphysics, being signifies the
source and power of all that exists. Dynamized and pluralized
according to the process paradigm, being does not repose in an
originary source antecedent to every event; rather, it constitutes the
very act of be-ing, of liv-ing, of ex-isting in the present moment as
a new one emergent from an antecedent many. As such, being or
creativity is inherently relational and processive. It is immanent
within each momentary event as its spontaneous power; and it is also
transcendent to that event of becoming in the sense that it is never
exhausted by the forms in which it is found, but is always potentially
a "more" that is "not yet" actualized. As long
as being, like creativity, is not construed as something a being
*has* but rather as what it means to *be* at all, the
long identification of God with being in Western thought can be
understood to point to sheer livingness or that which energizes all
things to exist. Although no-thing particular in its own right, being
is the very actuality of things, their act of being there at all.
Nevertheless, Being-itself should not be construed as a particular
being, thus ruling out pictorial theism's anthropomorphism. Neither is
it the sum of all beings, thus ruling out simple aggregation or
totality. It is not a property of things nor an accidental quality,
not a substance, and not a class of things. Instead, the religious
symbol "God" can be understood to pertain to the creative
ground of all that is--that which energizes all
things--conceived as dynamic, immanent, and plural.



The philosophical concepts of creativity (as explicated by Whitehead)
and of *esse* (as explicated dynamically) are useful for any
feminist philosophy of religion that seeks to interpret the meaning of
"divine reality", "holy mystery",
"empowering spirit", and a variety of other metaphors and
symbols that abound in feminist theology. The concept of God as
*esse* refers to the utter actuality of things, an act common
to all things. Dynamic and living, be-ing is yet elusive. It signifies
the moment to moment reality in virtue of which everything exists, a
process that Whitehead's category of creativity describes as the many
becoming one, and as increased by one. Be-ing is no more real or
unitary than beings, just as creativity in process philosophy is only
actual in virtue of its accidents. As a model for feminist work, this
notion of transcendence is dialectically related to immanence, neither
dissolved into it as identical, nor divorced from it as wholly
other.


### 4.2 Projecting a Feminine Divine



A distinct alternative to the above appears in the feminist
philosophies of religion of Luce Irigaray and Mary Daly. Both seek to
project a "female divine" that would be fully immanental
in and for the female Self (capitalized by Daly) and would provide
what Irigaray calls a "sensible transcendental". The
different rhetorical strategies and cultural contexts of these two
gynocentric philosophers sometimes conceal the similarity of their
philosophies of religion. Both argue that the Father God is an
idealized projection of masculine identity and that the process of
women's becoming divine is imperative. For Daly, the "divine
spark" within the female Self is the ontological ballast needed
by the feminist movement; similarly for Irigaray, the creation of a
"female divine" is a condition of female subjectivity.
Both Daly and Irigaray urge nothing less than an overturning of the
symbolic order and of language itself. Both are first and foremost
philosophers of the passions, seeking to encompass the elements of
earth, air, fire, and water within their visions. Each in her own way
has helped to forge a radical feminist consensus that spirituality is
to be exalted above doctrine, and that patriarchal conceptions of God
as any kind of objective reality must be deconstructed so that female
subjectivity might become more expansive and free. Both reject
reformist moves in the philosophy of religion as remaining inscribed
within a phallocentric economy that evokes a god whose self-giving
love is only accessible through fathers and sons and their
representatives. In theorizing religion, both adopt a projection
theory, classically rooted in Feuerbach's claim that "theology
is anthropology" and "God" a projection made in the
image of "man". However, far from relegating religion to
the category of illusion, each issues an invitation to "make
believe".


#### 4.2.1 In the American Context



The early Daly carved out a philosophy of religion largely consonant
with the position cited in 4.1 above, as found in her *Beyond God
the Father: Towards a Philosophy of Women's Liberation* (1973
[1985]). Ultimate reality is conceptualized not only as Verb,
expressed in the present participle "Be-ing", but as an
"intransitive Verb" in which all being participates (Daly
1973 [1985]: 34; 1978: 23; 1984: 423). In these terms, Daly provides an
ontological analysis of the urge toward transcendence, or
participation in be-ing. Here the urge to transcendence is raised to
the cosmic scale, and the vision of peace, justice, and ecological
harmony that Daly projects bears a close resemblance to prophetic
biblical texts. "Quintessence" expresses another metaphor
for the be-ing in which we live, love, create, are. Daly says that
Quintessence 



> 
> 
> is that which has been drawn on in my writing and searching. The quest
> for Quintessence is the most Desperate response I know to the call of
> the Wild. It means throwing one's life as far as it will go. (1998: 4)
> 
> 
> 
> 



She analyzes Quintessence as the highest essence, above the four
elements of fire, air, water, and earth; it is what permeates all
nature, the Spirit that gives life and vitality to the whole universe.
Although it can be blocked or partly destroyed by violence and
pornography, poverty, racism, medical and scientific exploitation, and
the threat of ecological and nuclear destruction, its apparent
invincibility imparts an important measure of transcendence.



The later Daly's trilogy developed a modified, more immanent, theory
of the divine, beginning with *Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of
Radical Feminism* (1978), and continuing through *Pure Lust:
Elemental Feminist Philosophy* (1984) and most of
*Quintessence--Realizing the Archaic Future* (1998). Here
the dialectic shifts subtly from the earlier balance maintained
between immanence and transcendence, and tips in favor of a divine
that is purely immanent within the female Self. Rather than being the
divine milieu within which the self lives, the divine is only alive
within the self. In *GynEcology* the emphasis is on the power
"to spin" meaning out of women's own divine orbs and to
find the power of being within one's self. By the time of *Pure
Lust*, Daly has further modified the "power of being"
to the pluralized "Powers of Be-ing", a move that resolves
the problem of the one and the many in favor of the many. Given Daly's
separatist ideology, the "divine" in question can only be
wholly incarnate in the "many" female divine Selves. The
gynocentric emphasis of Daly's later writings will open her to the
same critical questions posed about Irigaray's woman-centered
writings. Can they do justice to differences that figure in
discussions of race, class, ethnic origins, and so forth? Do they
reinstall sexual difference with old stereotypes left intact, trapping
women once more within the parameters of their sexuality and
physicality? Have they romanticized difference rather than theorizing
it?



Daly's intent was to create a trans-cultural, i.e., metapatriarchal,
myth, but her thinking was deeply indebted to one particular strain in
the Western intellectual tradition. Using the words of the Marxist
Ernst Bloch, one could call this strain "revolutionary
Prometheanism" (Block 1956-1959 [1986] *passim*). It
goes back at least as far as the Stoic *logos spermatikos*, the
"seed" that links every person with the divine reason. It
is closely connected with the medieval mystic's talk of a
"*scintilla animae*", the "spark of the
soul", frequently echoed in Daly's books (e.g., 1978: 183:
"the divine spark of be-ing in women"). Meister Eckhart
could write: 



> 
> 
> I have said that at times there is a power in the soul which alone is
> free.... It is free from all names, and altogether unimpeded,
> untrammelled, and free from all modes, as God is free and untrammelled
> in Himself. (c. 1300 [1957: 137 as quoted in Pietsch 1979]) 
> 
> 
> 



For the radical medieval mystic like Eckhart the knowledge revealed in
the experience of this divine spark is utterly self-authenticating.
Therefore, it need not be subjected to the judgment of an
institutional church. So too Daly writes: "she knows that only
she can judge her self" (1978: 378). Also important in this
strain of thought is the theme of the dispossession/repossession of
the true, divine self. It is a powerful theme in Hegel (who was
influenced by medieval mysticism) and in Feuerbach, and it also
pervades Daly's philosophy of religion. Hegel decries human beings who
let themselves be "robbed of freedom, their spirit, their
eternal and absolute element" (1795 [1948: 162]) and who then
take "flight to deity" (1795 [1948: 163]). He insists that
now (ca. 1800) is the time for persons to "repossess the
treasures formerly squandered on heaven" (1795 [1948: 159]).
Feuerbach takes up this same motif and makes it the dominant theme of
his whole critique of religion. Daly refers to "Stolen female
energy" (1978: 367), to "our stolen original
divinity" (1978: 41) and urges repossession. She does not say
what this leaves for men, who have been living off women, the
"generators of energy" (1978: 319). Finally, along with
Feuerbach, Daly says simply "we are divinity".



Daly's philosophy of religion was plugged into the Promethean myth,
but she also added an original contribution. She explicitly expanded
it to include women. Then she performed a reversal, and restricted it
to women--although this reversal, too, has deep roots in the
Western tradition, specifically, Iranian and biblical apocalypticism.
Daly conveys the impression that only a few women are able to
undertake the "Journey" (1978) or to achieve
"Quintessence" (1998). This is not because she was
pessimistic about the female Self, which has "immeasurable
unique potentialities" (1978: 382), but because she was acutely
sensitive to the power of evil, that is, to the power of the male
patriarchy to successfully co-opt women. At the same time, Daly could
be rapturously optimistic about those women who do escape male power
and begin to search and spin. These will find the "real
source", the "deep Background", the "power of
the self's be-ing", "the Wild Self", and spin into a
"new time/space", a "new creation", and will
glimpse a "Paradise that is beyond the boundaries of patriarchal
paradise" (1978: 13, 24, 49, 283, 423).


#### 4.2.2 In the Continental Context



More than Daly, Luce Irigaray's writings have proved to be a
provocative stimulus for a number of feminist philosophers of religion
(Anderson 1998; Deutscher 1994, 1997; Hollywood 1994, 1998; Jantzen 1999). Both a philosopher
and a psychoanalyst, Irigaray aims to recuperate the repressed
feminine. Her chief themes are (1) the "sensible
transcendental", which performs a similar function as Derrida's
"finite infinite", (2) sexual difference as paradigmatic
of difference in itself, and (3) divinity and spirituality as
significant feminist requirements to ground female subjectivity.
Irigaray conceptualises the female divine as a "sensible
transcendental" that is both flesh and word (Irigaray 1984
[1993a: 115, 129]). Reversing traditional incarnational doctrine, she
speaks of flesh made word instead of word made flesh. 



> 
> 
> But if the Word was made flesh in this way, and to this extent, it can
> only have been to make me (become) God in my jouissance, which can at
> last be recognized. (1977 [1985: 199-200])
> 
> 
> 



Perhaps the best way to read Irigaray's notion of the "sensible
transcendental" is in terms of Mary Daly's description of her
own project: "The philosophy here unfolded", Daly
explained, "is material/physical as well as spiritual,
mending/transcending this deceptive dichotomy" (1984: 7).
Imagining both sexual difference and divine otherness, Irigaray coins
the sensible transcendental to overcome the split between
transcendence (mind or spirit) and sensibility (body). Unlike Daly,
however, Irigaray argues that a spiritual relationship between women
and men, understood as progressive energy transmission, can enable a
harmonization of the human and divine dimensions separated under
patriarchal distortions. A love that welcomes difference will be
capable of recognizing the other as transcendent to the self. Each
partner will be allowed access to her or his own divinization.



In "Divine Women" (1993b [first published 1987]) and
"Belief Itself" (1993b [first presented 1980]) Irigaray's
approach to the topic of divinity is profoundly immanentalizing,
compared to traditional theology and philosophy of religion, even as
her interest appears concentrated on the meaning of (women's)
transcendence. Her reconstruction requires two dialectical movements.
First, she must nullify the radical alterity of the Wholly Other God,
arguing that this is a god produced by and for the masculine imaginary
and therefore not suitable to women's becoming. Second, she must
elevate "woman" to the status of the divine, negating
Simone de Beauvoir's view that woman remains always within the
dimension of immanence, incapable of transcendence. Mediated by a
"god of her sex", woman's becoming (divine) is thus
possible, and in turn makes possible for the first time an ethics that
defines a genuine relationship between two subjects, male and female,
who do not simply differ, but differ differently. In the final
analysis, by "the divine" Irigaray means "sexual
difference" itself, that is, a new form of ethical relationship
that can exist between women and men, or, by extension, between women
and any others, once women have attained their own subjectivity.



Shorn of his anthropocentrism, Irigaray's philosophy of religion
recalls the twofold ambition of Feuerbach's philosophy of religion in
1841: to elevate "man" to the level of "God"
in order to display the true essence of the species-being; and to
dissolve "God" into the human essence more unequivocally
than Hegel, who did not fully anthropologize the divine. Her relation
to Feuerbach (and Hegel) is apparent in her account of the sensible
transcendental as marking the fundamental materiality of spirit.
Debates concerning Irigaray's possible "essentialism" and
"utopianism" also recall Marx's critique of Feuerbach's
"species-being", and repeated charges of the utopian
quality of Marx's own idea of unalienated humanity. Some feminists
rebut the utopian charge by finding in Irigaray's reflections on the
element of air in the work of Heidegger a tangible example of
materiality that transcends the limitations of embodiment without
being any less material (Armour 2003). Others read Irigaray's notion
of a sensible transcendental as relying too heavily on western models
of autonomy and self-determination (M. Keller 2003). Recently,
Irigaray's explorations of the meaning of spirit/breath as the
elemental force of life have put her in touch with eastern religious
traditions such as Hinduism (Irigaray 1999 [2002]).



A major question some feminists have raised about the "feminine
divine" is whether the language of transcendence can be retained
plausibly as a poetic probe when the object of belief is assumed to be
unreal. Amy Hollywood's analysis discloses why acceptance of a
Feuerbachian projection theory of religion, in which God is the
projection of human wishes, attributes, and desires, complicates any
effort to construct a new "feminine divine". Belief works,
Hollywood says, only as long as the underlying dynamics that fund it
remain hidden. 



> 
> 
> What Irigaray appears to forget is Feuerbach's central claim (and the
> grounds for his hope that the hold of religion might be broken): for
> religious projection to function, its mechanism must be hidden so that
> its object might inspire belief. (Hollywood 1994: 175) 
> 
> 
> 



Irigaray recognizes that the "exposure" of this mechanism
has not destroyed religion for many, and hence asserts the importance
of adequate projections. But how is such projection possible or
meaningful for those, like Irigaray herself, who assume that the
object of belief is unreal? If Irigaray maintains a Feuerbachian human
referent for her own projection of religious discourse in terms of
female representations of the divine, the feminine divine, too, would
seem to facilitate its own destruction. What possibilities does this
leave for female transcendence? Can belief be simultaneously posited
*and* deconstructed? Can the strong female subjectivity created
in and by a mystic such as Teresa of Avila become available to women
*without* Teresa's acceptance of a transcendent Other who is
the divine (Hollywood 1994: 176)? Because transcendence for Irigaray
is associated with the "male" and a sacrificial economy,
it is not clear how women are expected to claim the new subjectivity
that she thinks religion, reconstituted, can offer. It may be the case
that Irigaray herself is ambivalent about belief and transcendence,
and this leads her "immediately to deconstruct the very deities
she invokes" (1994: 176). It may further be the case that the
gynocentric project in philosophy of religion creates distinctive
tensions, leading even sympathetic critics to inquire 



> 
> 
> how far the immanent can be re-inscribed as the site of transcendence
> without returning to the logic of sacrifice and bodily suffering
> seemingly endemic to the incarnational theologies of Christianity.
> (Hollywood 1994: 177) 
> 
> 
> 



There is also the related question as to "whether belief can be
mimed without re-inscribing women into a logic of the same such as
that which Irigaray sees underlying Christianity" (Hollywood
1994: 177).



Irigaray can be interpreted as striving to create a religious language
that leads neither to theism nor to atheism but rather to a dialectic
of immanence and transcendence that does not in any way assume an
"object of belief" along hierarchical lines of verticality
(see Hollywood 2002: chap. 7). In comparison to traditional
theological accounts of such a dialectic, however, the emphasis of
Irigaray's philosophy of religion is oriented to affirming immanence,
rather than to escaping finitude, embodiment, and materiality. The
divine is to be found in the space between two (human) beings who
encounter each other face to face in the recognition of sexual
difference. Transcendence for women hinges on the possibility of this
radical, and relational, immanentizing of the meaning of divinity.


## 5. Immanental Themes and Methods



While revisionist, de-patriarchalized philosophies of God/ess continue
to engage some feminist philosophers of religion, others are willing
to see even that topic cease to be center stage. As new waves of
historicism and anti-essentialism register among the generation of
post-analytic philosophers of religion, dissatisfaction has begun to
develop with the traditional topics. Traditionally, for nonfeminist
philosophers, the tendency to assimilate questions about religion to
questions about "belief in the existence of God" has led
down a slippery slope that transformed philosophical reflection about
religion into reflection on the existence of God, the rationality of
belief, the validity of the proofs, and the coherence of the divine
attributes. This slide was historically understandable in terms of the
influence of natural theology on philosophy of religion in the West,
but the real issue, as noted by Michael McGhee, "is whether such
preoccupations should remain central to the philosophy of religion,
and, if not, what should replace them" (1992: 1). This section
samples several emerging directions that signal the new preoccupations
of feminist philosophers of religion.


### 5.1 Feminist Standpoint Epistemology



Epistemological questions constitute an important part of the agenda
for feminist philosophies of religion. What has the status of
knowledge in various religious traditions? What gets valorized as
worth knowing? What are the criteria evoked? Who has the authority to
establish religious meaning? Is religious meaning something distinct
from or independent of ordinary linguistic meanings of words? Who is
the presumed subject of religious belief? How does the social position
of the subject affect the content of religious belief? What is the
impact upon religious life of the subject's sexed body? What do we
learn by examining the relations between power, on the one hand, and
what counts as evidence, foundations, modes of discourse, forms of
apprehension and transmission, on the other? In view of the intimate
connection of power/knowledge, how do we handle the inevitable
occlusion that attends all knowledge production? What particular
processes constitute the normative cultural subject as masculine in
its philosophical and religious dimensions?



The work of feminist philosopher of religion Pamela Sue Anderson
offers a good example of the feminist standpoint theory approach to
religion and gender, unadulterated by any loyalty to Christianity. In
the first book-length study to be entitled *A Feminist Philosophy
of Religion* (1998) Anderson set out to revise and reform
philosophy of religion by using feminist standpoint epistemology as
developed by Sandra Harding in philosophy of science. A feminist
standpoint is not the same as a woman's experiences, situation, or
perspective but is rather an achievement of an epistemically informed
perspective resulting from struggle by or on behalf of women and men
who have been dominated, exploited, or oppressed. Applied to
philosophy of religion, feminist standpoint epistemology involves
thinking from the perspective of women who have been oppressed by
specific monotheistic religious beliefs. Anderson challenges both the
privileged model of God as a disembodied person and the related model
of reason as neutral, objective, and free of bias and desire. Spinning
new myths or devising new conceptions of a divine reality are not part
of this agenda. There is only the double imperative: "to think
from the lives of others" and "to reinvent ourselves as
other".



However, adequate understanding of the religious beliefs of embodied
persons, according to Anderson, requires a deeper analysis of the
multiple intertwinings between reason and desire than philosophy of
religion normally shows.



But how are feminists to talk about the material content of female
desire? At just this point feminist standpoint epistemology yields to
poststructuralist insights and Anderson finds in the work of Irigaray,
Kristeva, and bell hooks themes that are missing in mainstream
epistemology and some feminist epistemology. She articulates her
philosophy of religion around "yearning" as a cognitive
act of a creative and just memory. As used by bell hooks (1990),
yearning is a positive act that motivates struggle in the search for
personal and communal justice. It shapes a spirituality. According to
Anderson, yearning is the vital reality of human life which gives rise
to religious belief. Therefore, philosophical analysis of and feminist
concern with reason combined with desire, as found in expressions of
yearning for truth whether epistemological, ethical (justice), or
aesthetic (love or beauty), need to supplement standard approaches to
philosophy of religion.



One must be careful, Anderson says, not to conflate yearning with only
a disguised form of the philosophical aspiration *to be*
infinite. Her analysis of the concept of the infinite reveals a
corrupt striving to become infinite or "all there is" at
work in both masculinist and feminist philosophy of religion. In place
of this Anderson calls for an approach that would allow instantiating
the regulative ideals of truth, love, goodness, and justice as
conditions for any incorrupt craving for infinitude. Humans can yearn
for truth or crave infinitude while at the same time acknowledging
self-consciously held and embodied locations (Anderson 2001). This
means that, as other philosophers have pointed out, there is no
"God's eye view", no actual infinite (Aquinas's
"actus purus"); the notion of infinity pertains only to
abstract potentiality, whereas concrete actuality is incurably
finite.



Questions of the justifiability of religious belief have previously
been center stage in philosophy of religion. Anderson does not
consider this question *per se*, but instead analyzes the prior
question of the rational construction of belief and the production of
knowledge. She considers the ways in which an exclusive focus on
justification of dominant beliefs excluded women's beliefs and women's
role in reasoning by assuming that only certain privileged beliefs
should be assessed for their truth. At the same time she argues
against any swift dismissal of justificatory questions, as well as
against a strict focus on the justification of *theistic*
beliefs. The myths of Mirabai, the legendary Hindu poetess-saint, and
Antigone, the mythical figure of insurgence in Greek tragedy, are
useful in understanding the notion of yearning as a rational passion
linked to bodily experiences (1998: chap. 5). Anderson finds the
disruptive mimings of these myths helpful for challenging the narrow
parameters of empirical realist forms of theism.


### 5.2 Further Psychoanalytic Perspectives on the Female Symbolic



Grace Jantzen issues a radical challenge to other feminist
philosophers who would make epistemology, rather than psychoanalytic
theory, their point of departure in studying religion and its
repressed underside. (Jantzen 1999, 2004). She argues that questions
about truth and the justification of religious belief can be dismissed
as categories of the masculine symbolic. Going beyond Luce Irigaray,
Jantzen's body of work at the time of her death in 2006 proposed
nothing less than a new imaginary of religion, a feminist symbolic of
"natality and flourishing" as an alternative to the
category of mortality, verging on necrophilia/necrophobia, with which
the western tradition has been saturated. Influenced by Hannah
Arendt's work on natality and Adriana Cavarero's feminist reading of
Plato, Jantzen believed that a preoccupation with death and violence
subtends the masculinist imaginary. If feminist philosophy of religion
is ever to transform the symbolic order which inscribes this
imaginary, it is necessary to change the imaginary. For this purpose,
a model of transformative change drawn from psychoanalysis and
Continental philosophy of religion is more useful than a model drawn
from Anglo-American adversarial modes of argumentation (Jantzen 1999:
78).



To demonstrate the extent to which the Western symbolic is saturated
with violence and death, epitomized in the crucified Christ, Jantzen
situated her philosophy of religion in relation to the psychoanalytic
theory of both Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. Their account offers
a theory of one of the most important features of any religion:
sacrifice. Sacrificial codes involve a forgetting/erasure of the
complex role of the maternal, amounting to a "matricide"
(Kristeva) at the foundation of religious practice. According to
Irigaray in "Belief Itself", the central figure of the
western cultural imaginary is the unmourned and unacknowledged
sacrifice of the (m)other's body that Christianity masks under the
Eucharistic sacrifice of the son. According to Kristeva (1977 [1987])
in "Stabat Mater", the real symbolic association is not
between women and birth, but between women and death, setting up men
as cultural masters over and above mortality and its intimations in
the bodies of women.



Jantzen corrected the matricidal assertion of Kristevan theory; she
argued against thinking that the child's need to separate from the
mother in order to become an individual is what initiates a logic of
sacrifice and violence in the western symbolic. There is no imperative
to sacrifice the mother in order to commence formation of the self in
the cultural realm. However important separation and individuation are
in subject formation, they are not proportional to death and violence.
If we were to attend to natality instead, Jantzen wrote, we would be
better able to create a new imaginary based on birth, life, and
potentiality (Jantzen 2003). Feminist philosophy of religion should
try to follow the path of desire to/for the divine, and forego the
preoccupation with the rational justification of beliefs and the
evaluation of truth-claims. Feminist philosophy of religion can attend
better to the symbolic impact of birth rather than death as a strategy
for creating a new imaginary construct that emphasizes flourishing of
life rather than sacrifice of it. The norms of moral or political
adequacy replace those of epistemic adequacy (Jantzen 2004).



If one asks what the ontological status of the divine is for Jantzen,
one could say that it is pantheistic (see Jantzen 1999, chap. 11). As
the horizon of human becoming, the divine is transcendent in the sense
of the other of the world, non-reducible to statements about the
world's physical characteristics. As immanent, the divine is
*this* world; there is no other. What previously had been seen
as a set of polarities now opens out into a play of diversities,
bringing the divine to life through us.



*Foundations of Violence*, Jantzen's final publication,
synthesizes her analysis of the psychoanalytic, religious, and
philosophical dimensions of death and violence in Western culture,
culminating in a constructive alternative (a feminine symbolic) that
celebrates beauty, desire, and the creative impulse.
*Thanatos*, a death drive, far from being a universal of human
nature, as Freud believed, is a gendered construction of Western
modernity, according to Jantzen, with precursors in Christendom and
classical antiquity. Homer, Sophocles, Plato and Aristotle provide the
genealogy of violence in Western thought that Jantzen critiques here,
while Plotinus stands in for all those other-worldly seekers who
gesture toward release in another world. What was to be a six-volumed
study on *Death and the Displacement of Beauty* in the western
tradition can be comprehended in incipient form in Jantzen 1999.



Pushing with and against Lacanian and Freudian theories, Jantzen
(2002), Armour (2002), and Hollywood (2002, 2004) offer three
important readings of Irigaray's essay "Belief Itself"
(1980 [1993b]). These feminist readings rely on critical
appropriations of psychoanalysis and Derridean reading practices to
re-assess a topic that stands at the center of much modern philosophy
of religion. Belief and its formation, they show, is implicated in the
formation of the subject and sexual difference, as well as related
issues of embodiment and presence and absence. The argument is not
only the familiar feminist one that the object of belief is
male-defined, but the more radical claim that the structure and
discourse of belief itself is masculinist and in need of
deconstruction. That is to say that the constitution of the normative
(Western, bourgeois) subject of religion and philosophy depends on the
association of the body with the mother and femininity and an always
incomplete and ambivalent mastering, concealment, or denial of the
mother's body. Freud's own account of the *fort/da* game
("gone"-"there") played by his grandson,
Ernst, exposes the relationship between belief and the little boy's
mastery of the mother's presence and absence, concealedness and
unconcealedness. Despite her apparent absence, she is there, the boy
comes to believe, and in so believing he experiences his own power.
For Irigaray (1993b), God, as the Father and the source of meaning,
emerges as the object of a belief first articulated in the (male
child's) attempt to master the mother's absence; the dismantling of
the subject as master, then, implies a concomitant deconstruction of
the object of belief. For Armour (2002), the implications of this
reading on the other side of ontotheology entail a challenge to any
narrow definition of ontotheology or too-easy hope that it might swing
free of logocentrism and phallocentrism. The wound at the heart of
normative masculine subjectivity, evident in Derrida's display of his
dying mother's body in his essay "Circumfession", is an
effect of the current sacrificial economy on the mother/son
relationship. As Armour suggests, 



> 
> 
> working from the recognition of a primordial maternal sacrifice
> (rather than belief in a transcendent Father God) requires
> confrontation with pain and loss, not compensation for them. (Armour
> 2002: 223) 
> 
> 
> 



For Hollywood, a further implication concerns the renewed attention to
the place of ritual and practice in religion. Not only do religious
rituals, bodily practices, and discursive performatives construct
gender but they also construct the very objects of religious belief.
Her proposal that, as constituted, gender and the objects of religious
belief have a similar ontological status re-opens a crucial question
that many feminist philosophers of religion have finessed. The
ontological status of objects of belief, especially deliberately
projected ones, cannot be fully understood without bringing back into
the picture the body, emotion, and desire as shaped by ritual
practices (Hollywood, 2004).


### 5.3 Corporeal Subjectivity



The body, a recurrent theme in a variety of recent interdisciplinary
studies, figures as the material or symbolic basis for much feminist
philosophy of religion, in contrast to the fiction of disembodied
subjectivity that marks mainstream modern epistemology.



One such body-based study, Howard Eilberg-Schwartz's work, *God's
Phallus and Other Problems for Men and Monotheism* (1994), is
indicative of a new alliance of philosophy of religion with gender
studies and social theory, rather than with natural theology and
speculative metaphysics. Dozens of feminist studies have explored the
way in which male deities authorize male domination and undermine
female experience in the social order. Left unconsidered was the
question whether a male divinity generates certain dilemmas and
tensions for the conception of masculinity, rendering its meaning
unstable. Pursuing this question, Eilberg-Schwartz overturns the
conventional assumption that Jewish monotheism centered on an
invisible, disembodied deity. His analysis of numerous myths shows
that ancient Israel did image God in human form, while at the same
time veiling the divine phallus.



Two consequences in particular arise for masculinity in a religious
system that imagines a male deity with a phallus. First, the dilemma
of homoerotic desire is posed when men worship a male God in a culture
based on heterosexual complementarity. Although the expression of
divine-human intimacy is couched in the language of male-female
complementarity, it is males, not females, who enter into the
covenantal marriage with the deity. Collectively, Israelite men were
constituted discursively as "she", and said to be
"whoring" when they strayed from monotheism (monogamy)
into idolatry (adultery). Suppression of the homoerotic impulse in the
divine-human relationship, however, could take several forms: hiding
and veiling the body of God through prohibitions against depicting
God; feminizing Israelite males so that they could assume the role of
God's wife; and exaggerating the way in which women are
"other" so as to minimize the ways in which men are made
into others of God.



The solution of imagining Israel as a metaphorical woman, in an
exclusive relation to the divine maleness, may have solved the first
dilemma of homoerotic desire only by generating another. The second
major dilemma for masculinity, according to Eilberg-Schwartz, is posed
by being made in the image of a sexless Father God in a culture
defined by patrilineal descent. The sexlessness of a Creator Father
God sets up major tensions for men who must pro-create. In contrast to
the Christian religion, whose different logic of a God fathering a Son
could render a human father irrelevant, Hebrew logic placed great
importance on the human father, generating tension around a Father God
who was thought to be sexless and therefore without a son. When the
dilemma of homoerotic desire is posed later for Christian men in
relation to a male Christ's body, it, too, is avoided by speaking
collectively of the Christian community as a woman.



Feminist philosophy of religion has yet to explore fully the question
of how a male God is problematic for men's conceptions of self,
according to Eilberg-Schwartz. It has also left unthought the
difference between God as male and God as Father. Strict focus on the
ways in which a masculine image of God undermines female experience
tends to conflate human and divine masculinities into one
undifferentiated symbol. Eilberg-Schwartz differentiates between
images of male deities and images of father deities, contending that
the maleness of God may have different implications than the
fatherliness of God. Fatherly images of God can and should be used, he
argues, "but only if equally powerful female images are also
celebrated" (1994: 239). Repudiating the incorporeal, distant
God that helped to generate the hierarchical associations of
masculinity and femininity, he favors an image of "a tender
loving Father who faces and embraces the child", in the apparent
expectation that a loving and embodied God may support a different
kind of masculinity, one more capable of intimacy and tenderness
(1994: 240).


### 5.4 The Webbed Relations of Language, Experience, Power, and Discourse



Poststructuralist criticism as it studies the webbed relations of
language, experience, power, and discourse still leaves some open and
untheorized space in the links among these terms. Mary McClintock
Fulkerson's *Changing the Subject: Women's Discourses and Feminist
Theology* (1994), fills those gaps and challenges three inadequate
notions of language, gender, and power: (1) the idea that linguistic
signs re-present the thing; (2) the Cartesian assumption of the
subjective consciousness as the origin of meaning; and (3) the
understanding of power only in terms of external, unidirectional, and
negative oppression. Poststructuralist method also critiques the
liberal logic of inclusion that appeals to "women's
experience" or "women's religious experience" as
though it is an unproblematic or uncoded content of some kind. All
such strategies and methods, Fulkerson shows, fail to recognize and
account for the multiplicity of differences among myriad subject
positions. In contrast to the liberal humanist goal of accommodating
as many "different voices" as possible, discourse analysis
seeks a more radical reading of the ways "voice" itself is
produced and knowledge is power. Taking into account the inextricable
and multiplicative character of the link between knowledge and the
social relations out of which knowledge emerges changes the question,
as well as the subject, according to Fulkerson. The question is not,
for example, whether a given religious belief system is oppressive or
liberating to women. Such generic and wholesale frames need to be
replaced by more complex appreciation of the construction of multiple
identities according to different locations in the social formation of
patriarchal capitalism.



Fleshing out the multiple orderings that create differences in women's
positions should result in a clarification of what is at stake in
appeals to "women's experience", often taken as a
"source" and/or "norm" for feminist thought in
an earlier generation of texts. Rather than as a "content"
that is representative of a natural realm of women's consciousness,
religious or otherwise, "women's experience" should be
understood as constructed from "converging discourses, their
constitution by differential networks, and their production of certain
pleasures and subjugations" (Fulkerson, 115) Experience is not
the origin of (feminist) philosophy of religion in the sense of
offering evidence for its claims, but the very reality that needs to
be explained. Similarly, in theorizing the link, for example, between
the maleness of divine imagery and the legitimation of male dominance,
what needs to be explained is how the maleness of divine imagery gets
distributed and interrelated with material realities, and how the
discourse itself carries out the oppression of women.



Once the false universal of "women's experience" or
"human experience" is replaced with an "analytic of
women's discourses", feminist philosophers of religion can begin
to consider the specific productions of positions for women, asking
such questions as: 



> 
> 
> What discourses construct the middle-class white churchwoman's
> positions? The poor Pentecostal woman preacher's? The liberal academic
> liberation feminist's? 
> 
> 
> 



In her investigations of Appalachian Pentecostal women preachers'
discourse and of the discourse of Presbyterian women's groups,
Fulkerson sees two very diverse women's subject positions wrestling
with a religious tradition in ways both liberating and constraining.
Approaching the world of faith as a system of discourses, rather than
as representational interpretations or cognitive belief claims, she
displays how women's faith positions can be constitutive of their
emancipatory practices. The call stories and worship performances of
poor Pentecostal women ministers, accompanied by ecstatic and bodily
displays of joy, produce particular forms of resistance to patriarchal
constraints, just as the faith practices of middle class Presbyterian
housewives produce other possibilities for transgression, pleasure,
and desire.



One merit of this methodology for feminist philosophy of religion is
its exposure of the complexity of gender discourse, the constraints
and resistances found in faith practices, and the social conditions of
signification. It creates space in which it is possible to ask what
philosophy of religion has occluded from its angle of vision by virtue
of the abstract and distanced discourse that has characterized it.



One drawback of poststructuralist accounts of discourse, according to
some feminists, is that it rules out the possibility that claims can
be validated outside of particular communities and their languages.
Fulkerson appeals to nonfoundationalism, the position that eschews the
search for justifying beliefs or experiences that can in turn support
other beliefs derived from them. She says that she does not find it
necessary to offer reasoned arguments for the faith claims she
invokes. The pertinent discursive practices she analyzes are those of
resistance, survival, agape, and hope--practices, she freely
admits, that assume the existence of God rather than problematize it.
What remains an open question for this avenue of feminist philosophy
of religion is how far discourse analysis can go toward ever
subverting the belief structures of Pentecostal women ministers or
Presbyterian housewives, indeed, how it could even be theoretically
possible for it to do so.


### 5.5 Pragmatizing Feminist Philosophy of Religion



In the North American context, a convergence of feminist and
pragmatist agendas has emerged, with important implications for
feminist philosophy of religion. Indebted to the pioneering work of
Charlene Haddock Seigfried (1996), and recent studies by McKenna
(2001) and Sullivan (2001), pragmatist-feminist philosophy of religion
is distinguished by several features. First, on its philosophical
side, both pragmatist philosophy and feminism share a strong critique
of scientistic positivism; resistance to fact-value dichotomies;
reclamation of the experiential and epistemic import of aesthetics;
analyses of dominant discourses in light of forms of social
domination; linkage of theory and practice; interest in the
theoretical primacy of concrete experience; repudiation of the
spectator stance of philosophical indifference; and an interrogation
of the social-political effects of the social sciences. Second, on its
religious side, the pragmatist tradition offers untapped resources for
feminist reconstruction, ranging from the explicit philosophies of
religion in the classical writings of Peirce, James, Dewey, Santayana,
and Mead, to the implicit ones in the current revival of pragmatism on
both sides of the Atlantic. The religious import of American
pragmatism in its first millennium is best understood as a
naturalization of traditional notions of transcendence and
spirituality rather than, as its critics charge, an abdication of any
hopes of transcendence at all. According to one interpreter (Stuhr
2003), pragmatism has relocated traditional notions of transcendence
within immanence, relocated spirit within nature, relocated absolutes
within inquiry, relocated affirmation within negation, and relocated
salvation within community, a description that applies equally to the
relocation effort performed in feminist philosophies of religion. The
end result of these combined naturalization processes should yield
something new to philosophy of religion: 



> 
> 
> truth without the problems of certainty; justification without the
> problems of foundations; nature and access to it without the problems
> of supernaturalism or solipsism; values without the problems of
> absolutism or arbitrariness; and distinctively religious or spiritual
> experience without idealism, dualism, or institutional religion.
> (Stuhr 2003: 194)
> 
> 
> 


## 6. Conclusion



Feminist scholarship in general has had a hard time with religion. And
mainstream philosophy of religion until recently has had a hard time
with feminist scholarship.



Going forward in the twenty-first century, three particular questions
stand out. The most significant question on the agenda for future
reflection concerns religious pluralism and the need to overcome the
extreme ethnocentrism of Anglo-American philosophy of religion.
Insofar as the field faces the challenge of encounter with traditions
expressing practices and beliefs that are not predominantly associated
with European, white, or male modes of understanding, it will be
required to elaborate new models of interpretation, a broader theory
of evidence, a cross-culturally adequate conception of human
rationality, and a more complex appraisal of the norms applicable to
cases of divergent, rival religious claims and disagreements. Insofar
as feminist philosophy of religion studies the strictly intellectual
interpretations of any religious tradition, it will encounter beliefs,
symbols, and ideas that are embedded in specific socio-cultural power
relations. New work is now needed that reflects on the dynamics of
power relations, analyzes inherited oppressions, searches for
alternative wisdom and suppressed symbolism, and risks new accounts of
the tricky truth and justification questions in light of religious
pluralism.



Taking seriously the striking plurality of human forms of religious
life leads to a second significant question. What theorizations of
religion are most adequate for feminists to work with? Before this
question can be addressed with all the philosophical rigor its
complexity demands, feminists must face up to the fact that religion
is a potent dimension of the lives and desires of contemporary women
around the world; therefore, philosophizing it away as superstition,
reactionary ideology, false consciousness, irrational belief, or
premodern, outmoded hangover simply calls into question, not the
phenomenon of religion, but the grasp of feminist philosophy itself on
its subject matter. In our time, the elementary forms of religious
life cannot be critiqued along the same old lines that Western secular
modernity has taken for granted. In the past, Marxians and Freudians
could provide theoretical fuel for the critique of religion for
generations of readers, but their general theory of religion as a
function of projection (of class interests or of the father-image) is
severely outdated. Since we cannot divide reality into what is
"really there" and what is "humanly
projected", and since there is no clear distinction to be drawn
between the properties things have "in themselves" and the
properties that are "in us", projection theories of
religion (or of anything else) rest on a purely suppositional basis.
They lack explanatory value.



Finally, theorization of the meaning of "religion" in
feminist philosophy of religion in a pluralistic age leads to a third
area of unploughed feminist ground. In addition to thinking about the
philosophy in religion, feminists need to think more deeply about the
religion in philosophy. What is the significance to feminists of the
"return to religion" found, for example, in Emmanuel
Levinas or Gianni Vattimo? Theological conceptions abound also in the
work of Martin Heidegger, Iris Murdoch, Stanley Cavell, Charles
Taylor, and Martha Nussbaum. The deconstructionist writings of Jacques
Derrida offer another instance of secular writing in a religious key
whose feminist relevance needs to be assessed. Although some
outstanding and suggestive work has been done by Fergus Kerr (1997),
John Caputo (1997), and Hent de Vries (1999) on the religion in recent
philosophy, the feminist corner of the triangle
religion-philosophy-feminism remains to be more completely
configured.