July 14, 2023
Recently, in an address to the General Synod of the Church of England, the Archbishop of York recognized that the first two words of the Lord’s Prayer are problematic for some Anglicans. We say that God is a spirit and thus beyond gender, but if that is so, why address him as “Our Father”? Behind the Archbishop’s remark is the fact that the Church of England has been considering whether to adopt gender-neutral language in referring to God. And yet, the Lord’s Prayer, the most important of all Christian prayers because it was instituted by Jesus himself, opens by clearly referring to God as a male. Nor is this the only time that Jesus refers to God as the Father. This is an intractable problem because it is not interpretive, not a product of later institutional decisions and decrees: Jesus himself seems to declare that God is male. Not only that, but Jesus himself is male, and declared that “I and the Father are one.” The understanding of Christ as a Son “consubstantial”—of one substance with—the Father is in part based on, or at least backed up by, Psalm 2: “the Lord hath said unto me, Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee” (v.7). Milton’s God the Father echoes this passage when he reveals the Son to the angels in Paradise Lost, thus provoking the rebellion of Satan. In its original Jewish context, the king being referred to who is God’s begotten Son is the future Messiah who will restore Israel, but Christian interpretation has long viewed it as a prefiguration of Christ, the true Messiah who not only rules on behalf of the Father but is the Father.
Both readings, however, result in a problematic image of God, at least for some people. It may be argued that referring to God as Father merely emphasizes his loving paternal care for his people, but the connotations of fatherhood are complex. A father traditionally is a symbol of power and domination more often than he is of loving care, and in Psalm 2 his royal begotten Son is a fierce figure. God warns the heathen, “Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and ye perish from the way” (v.12). Thus God, whether Father or Son, is “king of kings and lord of lords,” a phrase that occurs throughout both Jewish Scripture and the New Testament. The Son shall break the heathen with a rod of iron and dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel (v. 9). This is God as the Christian nationalists presently view him, and their literalizing view of these metaphors cannot just be set aside. Rather, it has to be confronted and, to use my lingo, decreated. The attempt to do so would begin by pointing out that Jesus repudiated the role of Messianic warrior-king that so many, both in his time and ours, want to trap him in. Those who preached Crusades, burned heretics, waged wars of Christian against Christian for the entire 17th century, those who would do such things again in our time if they could get away with it—Jesus repudiates them all. He said love your enemies, turn the other cheek. He said that those who lived by the sword shall perish by the sword. When he said God was a Father, he meant something else, and we are too crazed by sexual politics at the moment to understand what it is. But we should try.
We may do so by a circuitous route, for the question of why God should be a male raises the larger question of why we should conceive of God in a human image at all. Yes, Genesis 1:27 says that God created humanity in his own image, but is this anthropomorphism really a kind of narcissism? In the larger context of the history of religions, the humanizing of God or the gods is invariably a later development. In The Idea of the Holy (1917), Rudolf Otto speculated that religion began, not with divine beings, but with an experience of what he called the holy, which has nothing to do with piety and moral goodness but rather with the numinous, a power that is not only not human but is “wholly other,” evoking emotions that range from awe to terror. The Yahweh of the Book of Genesis, before the era of kings and kingship, is a numinous power who never appears in human form. He appeared to Moses as a burning bush; to the prophets, he was a voice that spoke from within. Indeed, he makes clear that his invisibility is a mark of his superiority. He is transcendent, beyond all images. It is the heathen who worship idols, visible images of their gods, as if deity could reside in carved wood or stone, like children playing with dolls that they treat as real. In the Ark of the Covenant, a tent carried by the nomadic Israelites across the desert, the presence of God was represented by a throne flanked by two cherubim. The throne was empty. But the Ark was charged with such spiritual power that, during the ritual ceremony in which David triumphantly brought it into Jerusalem, one of the carriers stumbled, whereupon a man reached out to steady the Ark, and was struck dead as if he had touched a high-voltage line. Islam to this day forbids images not only of Allah but of his Prophet, because, as Shelley says in Prometheus Unbound, “the deep truth is imageless.” We may note in passing that the same is true of the demonic. H.P. Lovecraft is sometimes criticized because he does not describe his evil presences, insisting that they are “unspeakable,” but his artistic instinct was correct. He is always more effective when he avoids direct description and works instead to evoke the mood of inhuman and malevolent strangeness that possesses human beings with terror to the brink of madness.
In the Book of Job, Job claims at one point that he has seen God. But what God says in his long speech to Job is, “I am beyond your comprehension.” The speech is magnificent poetry, but shows not a trace of compassion for Job’s terrible suffering. The God who restores Job’s fortunes at the end comes from another source, a prose folktale that ends happily ever after. In the Middle Ages, what was called negative theology went a step further, saying that God cannot be described even by words, for words, like images, reduce God to a single form, and God is irreducible. Even to say “God is good” is a step towards idolatry, worshipping one conception of God as if it were final. We can only say what God is not. We are a long way at this point from complaint about male pronouns. Negative theology may seem radical, turning the source of hope and salvation into a deus absconditus that can hardly be spoken of at all, but there are advantages to iconoclasm. Milton’s portrait of God the Father sitting on his throne in Book 3 of Paradise Lost, pompously condemning the human race before it has even done anything, is by common agreement one of the weakest parts of the poem. Dante is much more successful, precisely because he avoids personifying God. In the final cantos of the Divine Comedy, God appears only in stylized symbolic form: three circles that are yet one circle, with a cross shape in their center that is the image of a man who is somehow identical to one of the circles. Then the poem ends. Jung said of the Self, which is the God-image in the human psyche, that it is a borderline concept that cannot be described or fully understood, only evoked by a series of paradoxes. At this point, we are not only beyond arguments about God’s pronoun but beyond the tedious squabble between science and religion. The idea that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of by fundamentalist literalism or scientific positivism—in other words, by reductionist religion and reductionist science—is quite congenial to certain visionary science fiction writers, including Olaf Stapledon and Arthur C. Clarke.
When the numinous is personified, the image is not beautiful but sublime. We think of the Greek gods in terms of the noble, perfect sculptures of the Classical period, in which the god Apollo became the epitome of male beauty. But sculptures of Apollo evolved out of the sculptures of kouros figures in the Archaic period, the word kouros meaning “male youth.” Archaic kouros figures are intensely stylized and otherworldly, with staring eyes and an aloof detachment. Some of them will make the hair on the back of your neck prickle. Rilke’s first Duino Elegy says that every angel is terrifying. So is every kouros figure. In her great book Themis (1912), Jane Ellen Harrison traces the image of Zeus from his Classical, humanized form as the patriarchal god on the throne back to an enigmatic figure she calls the eniautos daimon, the spirit of cyclical time. The eniautos daimon is what is sometimes called a dying god figure, as studied in the most famous work of comparative mythology, Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1913), but Themis is far profounder than Frazer’s Victorian rationalism. By the time of Homer, the Olympian gods had become so humanized that their violent and immoral behavior became something of a scandal. Harrison saw that these trivialized projections of a spoiled and decadent aristocracy had evolved out of something darker and more mysterious. As she says,
I saw in a word that Dionysos, with every other mystery-god, was an instinctive attempt to express what Professor [Henri] Bergson calls durée, that life which is one, indivisible and yet ceaselessly changing. I saw on the other hand that the Olympians, amid all their atmosphere of romance and all their redeeming vices, were really creations of what Professor William James called “monarchical deism.” Such deities are not an instinctive expression, but a late and conscious representation, a work of analysis, of reflection and intelligence. (xii)
Harrison’s eniautos daimon is thus another intuition of the numinous, of an energy that is imageless because it is “ceaselessly changing.” The theory that the first phase of religion, before mythology had concretized into a pantheon of deities, was “animism,” which saw everything in the world as potentially animated and sentient, is a kindred intuition.
Medieval sculpture followed a trajectory similar to the Classical, its movement from Romanesque to high medieval to Renaissance characterized by increasing humanistic realism. Like the Greek Archaic, Romanesque sculpture is highly stylized, not because it is “crude” but because it is possessed by the numinous. The greatest example of this, one of my favorite works of visual art since I was 20, is the sculpture of Isaiah at Souillac, dated around 1120-1135 (Isaiah of Souillac). The commentator on the website calls it “a miracle of movement and ecstasy,” and shares my fascination with it. The movement represents the energy of the spirit, as in a dance. Isaiah became a prophet through a vision, in which he saw the Lord sitting on a throne, flanked by two six-winged seraphim, one of whom touched Isaiah’s lips with a burning coal (Isaiah 6), yet another image of the numinous. Contrastingly, four centuries later, intensely influenced by the Classical phase of Greek art, Michelangelo depicted David as if he were a Hebraic Apollo, a triumph of Renaissance humanism. In his old age, however, the spiritually tormented Michelangelo returned to some of the stylization of medieval sculpture. But after him the movement towards realism progressed. with the result that God became increasingly more “relatable,” and also more sentimentalized, in popular form becoming the Buddy Christ satirized by Kevin Smith in Dogma. the Jesus you want to go and have a beer with. Dogma is a silly, rowdy, fun movie, especially if you grew up Roman Catholic, but it makes its contribution to Christian gender equality by having God portrayed by Alanis Morrisette, whose numinosity consists of having a voice so powerful it can blow people’s heads off.
The relevance of all this to the discussion of the Lord’s Prayer is that the Archbishop of York is quite right. God is not just a Father—that is one metaphor, and others are possible, because God is a transcendent mystery. But even God the Father can be re-visioned. He does not have to be modeled on the parent who tyrannized you when you were young. And, despite what conservative theologians would have us believe, the alternative ways of conceiving the Father are just as traditional as the old guy with a beard on a throne. The latter is in fact what Northrop Frye would call an ideological kidnapping of the mythological image, even if the kidnapping takes place in the later parts of the Bible itself. One version of Trinitarian theology, influenced by Neoplatonism, sees God the Father as representing the transcendent aspect of deity, the Holy Spirit representing its immanent or indwelling aspect, and Christ as representing the intersection, ultimately the union, of the divine and the human. In this tradition, from which negative theology derived, the Father represents the mystery of the divine beyond all human conception, so much so that he can accurately only be referred to as the One. Northrop Frye does not much like this version of God, dismissing it as a rarefied abstraction alien to the Biblical text. But in The Double Vision, he admits that the Biblical God, in the form of the Yahweh of the Old Testament, is a scandal:
And while many aspects of Jehovah rank with the highest possible conceptions of God, such as the shepherd of the Twenty-Third Psalm and the suffering servant of second Isaiah, the God of the Old Testament is on the whole not presented as a theologian’s model or perfect being but as an intensely humanized figure, as violent and unpredictable as King Lear. | What, for example, are we to do with a God who drowns the world in a fit of anger and repeoples it in a fit of remorse, promising never to do it again (Genesis 9:11); a God who curses the ground Adam is forced to cultivate after his fall, but removes the curse after Noah makes a tremendous holocaust of animals, the smell of their burning being grateful to his nose (Genesis 8:21); a god who rejects Saul as king after he spares his enemy Agag out of human decency (because he should have been offered to God as a sacrifice and inspires Samuel to hew Agag in pieces and tell Saul that he has committed an unforgiveable sin (I Samuel 15); a God who observes children mocking the prophet Elisha and sends beats out to eat up the children (II Kings 2:23), and so on….Some of the most horrendous of his capers, such as the sacrifice of Isaac, are tests or trials of faith, implying a lack of knowledge of what is already in Abraham’s mind and will. (226-27)
Frye contrasts the aloof and distant Neoplatonic One with this Biblical God who is involved with his people. The Covenant between God and his people, later widened beyond the Israelites to include all people, is always portrayed as a marriage. God has to punish his people because metaphorically they are the “harlot” who is repeatedly “unfaithful.” That makes it worse: God is then the abusive spouse who says I have to punish you, baby, because I love you so much, and don’t you dare even think of leaving me.
There are two ways of dealing with these inconvenient Biblical truths. One is rationalization and blind faith: yes, all this makes God look bad, but his ways are not our ways and he has a plan that justifies all of it. That is the utterly wrong way. You can justify absolutely anything by that method, and people have, all down through history. The other method is to admit the obvious: God’s behavior in these episodes is indefensible, which means they must be images of a false God, of a false way of conceiving God, even if some, like the sacrifice of Isaac, have been defended as evidence of God’s cleverness. Frye knows this, because he learned it from Blake. Blake will have nothing to do with God the Father as the cranky old King Lear on the throne. He parodies that God as Nobodaddy—nobody’s daddy, who always says no. In Blake’s own invented mythology, this false God who thinks he is the one, true God is the frozen old control freak Urizen. Shelley’s Jupiter in Prometheus Unbound is exactly the same kind of tyrannical patriarch. But, unlike Shelley, Blake does not believe in “the necessity of atheism.” Blake agrees with the Gnostics, who believe that once we get the false tyrant-God, whom some Gnostic scriptures called Ialdabaoth, out of the way, we would begin to discern the true God. The Gnostics were a motley crew who can’t really be systematized, but at least some of them believed that in the truly spiritual realm beyond the fallen world ruled by Ialdabaoth, the true spiritual state is androgyny, and there are references to beings called Father-Mother. In Blake’s famous illustrations to the Book of Job, God and Job end up having the same face, implying that the heartless God who allows Satan to torment Job unjustly in order to win a bet is a projection of Job’s own mind.
The way to deal with such a God is to wake up and realize he is an illusion. Yes, this would involve a radical reinterpretation of the Bible, one that turns the traditional one inside out, not to mention upside down. But that is not at all the same as throwing the Bible away and declaring that we are all atheistic rationalists. The stories and images of the Bible are themselves expressions of the numinous: they have gripped much of the human race with an intensity that goes far beyond superstition. There is a reason that Frye titled his second book on the Bible and literature Words with Power. The Bible is not the only sacred book, and Christianity is not the only source of revelation, but the idea that we can just declare both of them, despite their appalling imperfections, outmoded and walk away from them is intellectually naive. Their symbolism is that of the collective unconscious, and we ignore its grip on us at our peril. What is repressed and denied returns as nightmare, and our present nightmare is a fascistic Christian nationalism that is the demonic shadow that Christianity has never dealt with. This does not mean that everyone has to read the Bible or become a Christian, but the modern world is not done with the Bible because the Bible is not done with it. The situation is exactly the same as that of the traditional “great works” that we now see are riddled with so much racism, sexism, homophobia, white supremacy, and imperialism that a fair number of good people want nothing to do with them. Understandable, but unwise, because it depends on denying that there is a deeper level of power and revelation beneath their corrupt ideological surface. Trying to pretend that the “classics” are nothing but their racism, sexism, imperialism, etc.—and we see this attempt with some frequency—is a defense mechanism doomed to fail in the long run. We need to learn to read both sacred and secular works with what Frye called a “double vision,” where the higher, imaginative vision is the lower, reductive vision decreated and recreated, to use my lingo, not denied but transvalued and transfigured.
Because this discussion began with the image of God the Father, it has been so far concerned with God as a power. But traditionally God has three attributes, power, wisdom, and love, symbolized by the three persons of the Trinity. Considered in terms of wisdom, God is the order that pervades the universe: indeed, God created by imposing order upon chaos. That order is visible everywhere, in both nature and human nature, and it is in this sense that we are created in God’s image, not in the rather silly sense that God resembles a white male. One symbol of that universal order is the mandala, most commonly a circle containing a cross, symbolizing a wholeness comprised of a union of opposites. The name “mandala” is taken from Tibetan Buddhism, but the image shows up everywhere, even in Dante’s Paradiso and the poetry of Dylan Thomas, not to mention the work of C.G. Jung. Much of Mircea Eliade’s writing on the “sacred,” his version of Otto’s “holy,” is taken up with images of cosmic order. That order is the source of our sense of beauty, as Keats recognized when he (or his Grecian urn) said that beauty is truth, truth beauty. The word “cosmos” in Greek had connotations of a beautifully intricate pattern, like a jewelry ornament. The debate between religion and science has been dominated by reductive thinking on both sides, mostly by second-rate thinkers and ideologues, but the great scientists are often open to the idea that the order of nature, especially as expressed by mathematics, is both beautiful and sacred. Something of the sort is what Einstein meant by his religion, which was entirely non-theistic. Wisdom in this sense differs from the practical wisdom of something like the Book of Proverbs, which confines itself to self-help advice: the fool does this, but the wise man does this, so don’t be a fool. However, suddenly, inexplicably, in the 8th chapter of Proverbs, wisdom speaks as a female spirit who is, if not co-eternal with God, at least older than the Creation, which she witnessed:
The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. When there were no depths, I was brought forth; when there were no fountains abounding with water. (v. 22-24, Authorized Version)
When he prepared the heavens, I was there: when he set a compass upon the face of the depth… Then I was by him, as one brought up with him, and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him… (v. 27, 30)
She does not describe herself as wife or consort but as companion. She describes herself, not as divine, but as redemptive nonetheless: “For whoso findeth me findeth life” (v. 35), and bluntly warns that “all they that hate me love death” (v. 36).
Jung’s brilliant and bold book Answer to Job, one of the few to confront the inadequacy of the Biblical God honestly, says that Job’s God suffers from a disorder, one of whose symptoms is that he has repressed his knowledge of what Jung would call his anima, the feminine side of the heterosexual male psyche, and Jung specifically identifies that feminine aspect of God with the wisdom of Proverbs and other scriptural texts. Literalists will of course say that this is making stuff up: this is not “in the text.” A conservative critic of the Archbishop of York complained that he is taking his cues from culture, not from Scripture. But the idea that Scripture is non-interpretive, and has one clear narrative with one clear message, is the religious Big Lie, and has been responsible for 2000 years of religious wars, persecutions of “heresy,” and other forms of hysteria. Actual Christian tradition has developed myriad ways of symbolizing the divine, all of them with a basis in the Biblical text. In the Eucharist, Christ is literally the consecrated bread and wine, at least in Catholic theology. Christ is also the sacrificial Lamb—as well as the Good Shepherd of that lamb. Christ is the Philosopher’s Stone of alchemy, which is the stone that the builders rejected, the “living stone” of the Book of Revelation. The divine is immanent in all things natural and human—which, predictably, conservative theologians reject as another heresy, pantheism. Finally, as Jung dared to say, Christ is the deepest human self—not the natural self or ego but something far profounder: “I, yet not I, but Christ in me,” in the words of Paul.
Worship of gods or God begins in human need. Frazer’s “dying god” figures were vegetation deities who guaranteed the food supply; deities of “higher civilization” have guaranteed the social and moral order. But I wonder how often divinities are figures of love. Most of them seem utterly detached from human suffering and the pathos of the human condition. Jesus preached a love that the New Testament calls agape, a love that takes the form of a compassion for all things, exemplified in the greatest of his parables, that of the Good Samaritan. He came down from eternity and took on flesh, and all the agonies of the flesh, in order to preach this kind of compassion, and was crucified as a consequence. There is a parallel with the Buddhist Boddhisattva figures who achieve enlightenment and bliss, but return to this realm of illusion out of compassion in order to enlighten others. Jesus was crucified, and is crucified in every age, by those demonically possessed by hate. Nor does this imply anti-Semitism, which is an example of exactly the kind of scapegoating that tries to shift responsibility. In our time, millions of people calling themselves Christians define their religious crusade in terms of their hatred of people of other races, other religions, other gender identifications. Christ surrounded himself with the socially marginalized and forgave everyone—and so does his Father, in whose house are many mansions. He is the Father who takes his prodigal son into his arms and back into his home without a word of accusation.
As I tried to show in The Productions of Time, the Bible views history as a progressive recreation and clarification of vision. We are not given the Truth once and for all, clear and definitive, and tasked with defending that Truth against revisionist “heresies.” We keep trying to clarify and deepen our understanding, abandoning forms of thought and social organization that were once taken for granted as normal but which we now see were partly blind. It is the same progressive struggle that has caused the United States to amend its Constitution, outlawing slavery, granting full rights to women, and to revise American history to recognize the wrongs done both to Indigenous people and to the land and its creatures. It is an attitude deeply akin to the philosophy of science, which understands all truth as tentative and potentially revisable in the face of fresh evidence. It is anything but a wishy-washy relativism, for what guides the progressive recreation of vision in time, the expanding of our eyes, is a spirit of what Ephesians 3:19 calls the love that surpasses understanding. To enter into this spirit is to enter into what Ephesians wonderfully calls “the fellowship of the mystery” (3:9). This mystery “from the beginning of the world hath been hid in God.” It is our purpose in this life to understand this mystery more fully, “for whatsoever doth make manifest is light. Wherefore, he saith, Arise, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead…See then that ye walk circumspectly not as fools but as wise, Redeeming the time, because the days are evil” (v. 13-16). It is sad but utterly typical of the Bible that the chapter falls from this height immediately into the same old ideological blindness, telling wives to submit to their husbands. But Blake said that whenever someone embraces truth and casts out error, the Last Judgment takes place in that person’s mind. King Lear, that ultimate bad father, learned the hard way to cast out error, hatred, and selfishness. He did so through the agency of a daughter who loved him unconditionally, refusing to give up on him even as she refused to enable his bad behavior. King Lear is set in pre-Christian times, a kind of British Dark Ages. But we can be progressives and have hope for a better future even as we also recognize that the end of time can be in any moment, and that what will bring it about is love. That is part of the mystery to which our fellowship is dedicated.
References
Frye, Northrop. The Double Vision: Language and Meaning in Religion. In Northrop Frye on Religion, edited by Alvin A. Lee and Jean O’Grady. Volume 4 in The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press, 2000.
Harrison, Jane Ellen. Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion. Meridian, 1962. First published 1912.