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    • Michael Martin
      • Jun 6, 2021
      • 5 min read

    THE DIVINE FEMININE: LEADING US EVER ONWARD


    “The Death of Arthur” by Julia Margaret Cameron

    What follows is my introduction to Jesus the Imagination, Volume 5: The Divine Feminine, published last month by Angelico Presss.

    “Let a body finally venture out of its shelter, expose itself in meaning beneath a veil of words. WORD FLESH. From one to the other, eternally, fragmented visions, metaphors of the invisible.” ~ Julia Kristeva [1]

    I have never felt comfortable with Simone de Beauvoir’s bristling in The Second Sex in regards to Goethe’s concluding lines of Faust: “the Eternal Feminine leads us ever onward.” De Beauvoir extends this complaint to allegorical representations of principles (like Liberty or the Church, for example) as female, to Dante’s Beatrice, to divine figures such as the Virgin Mary and the Sophia of Gnosticism. De Beauvoir seems to operate under the assumption (note the term) that only feminine figures are idealized in Western culture, and that such are incommensurate with the actual reality of women. Idealization, however, is a universally human interpretive gesture; and that it is often personified can hardly be evidence of a conspiracy theory of male oppression, as if any man could live up to the model of Jesus, the Buddha, Odin All-Father, or even Pa Ingalls. Figuration leads us ever onward, Simone.


    Julia Kristeva, much more generous of spirit and, as a result, much more human, acknowledges the West’s—and particularly Christianity’s—psychic relationship to the feminine, especially as regards the image of the Mother. “The question is,” she writes, “whether this was simply an appropriation of the Maternal by men and therefore, according to our working hypothesis, just a fantasy hiding the primary narcissism from view, or was it perhaps also a mechanism of enigmatic sublimation? This may have been masculine sublimation, assuming that for Freud imagining Leonardo—and even for Leonardo himself—taming the Maternal—or primary narcissistic—economy is a necessary precondition of artistic or literary achievement.” [2] This notion can be applied, with some qualifications of course, to Goethe’s pronouncement.


    Goethe the poet, who was Goethe the scientist as well, however, was also giving utterance to a metaphysical principle. Inspired by his reading of Boehme and the example of Novalis, an incipient Sophiology haunts the conclusion to Goethe’s Faust. Many feminist commentators, like de Beauvoir, have chastised Goethe for not having Faust justly punished for his mistreatment of Gretchen—and the fact that Gretchen even prays for Faust’s redemption from the heavenly realm during his apotheosis in the play’s conclusion further offends them. But such a disposition profoundly misreads Goethe—and Christianity, for that matter. Faust’s denouement is a picture of apocatastasis, the redemption of all, an idea that profoundly colors Sophiology.


    What political discourses routinely miss when projecting their biases onto works of literature and metaphysics—to say nothing religion, science, or nature—is that not only the natural world, but the world of the spirit is also gendered. Try as we might, through whatever optics or interventions, we cannot ultimately avoid this reality. It is a matter of primal ontology.

    Often sterilized in mistaken conceptions of neutrality, a gendered one-sidedness, as both Alison Milbank and Therese Schroeder-Sheker argue in this volume, is detrimental to everyone, regardless of gender. We act as though this is a reality we are only just now discovering—since the advent of feminism and ideas of gender equity—but this is not at all the case. It is my claim that the Western psyche has been clamoring for a regenerated imagination of the ontological reality of gender for at least a thousand years—and, as Margaret Barker discusses in my interview with her here—the same Western psyche has been in search of a holistic and healthy imagination of gender from at least the time of Lady Wisdom’s expulsion from worship in First Temple Judaism under the reforms of King Josiah.


    During the Middle Ages, the Christian psyche was on the way to rectifying this situation. Beguine mysticism, with its holy feminine eroticism, Franciscan spirituality, with its deep relationship to Nature, and the lays of the Troubadours and their adoration of the Lady all rendered witness to the need of the re-entrance of the Divine Feminine into culture. That reformation was not to be fully realized, alas, though the dream lived on. Its palimpsest bleeds through Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, in which the hero’s development depends upon the counsel and examples of both women and men, even though he often misinterprets things at first. As we all do.


    But perhaps the most accurate depiction of the phenomenon of which I speak in medieval literature is Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur. The great medieval historian Jan Huizinga describes the late-medieval period in which Malory wrote as a time when “somber melancholy weighs on men’s souls,” [3] and nowhere is this more evident than in Malory. Malory’s Arthurian realm doesn’t end in cataclysm so much as in dissipation and self-sabotage. As with Wolfram, women also figure in this story, but they also contribute to the ruin of the land and of chivalry. The knights who survive the Battle of Camlann, even the great Lancelot, end their lives as monks, priests, or hermits. Queen Guinevere herself dies in the cloister. A tremendous ennui taxed with apocalyptic sterility burdens both Malory’s text and its readers. In the nineteenth century, Malory’s melancholia reappeared in that of Tennyson, nowhere so strongly as in his Idylls of the King, a melancholic tableau brought to beautiful realization in the photography of Julia Margaret Cameron.


    Malory is not entirely without hope (though what hope he offers is as delicate as frost), as Arthur does not die in the text. Malory tells us that in a mysterious bark “resceyved hym three ladyes with grete mournyng. And so they sette hem downe, and in one of their lappis kyng Arthure layd hys hede.” [4] and ferried him to the Isle of Avalon to be healed of his grievous wounds with the promise to one day return in parousaic triumph. Avalon is an island of women; it is only there where Arthur can find healing.


    I have often thought, over this past, most melancholic of years, that Malory’s tale is precisely the homeopathic medicine required for our particular moment. The West, and especially the Christian West, suffers from a grievous wound and it is only the Divine Feminine which can bring it healing. What was lost must be restored. In our end is our beginning. For the Divine Feminine leads us ever onward.



    Toss that Freudian symbol back to the unconscious, my mans!

    Michael’s latest books are an edition of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz and Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Divine Feminine.

    1. Julia Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Poetics Today 6, no. 1/2 The Female Body in Western Culture: Semiotic Perspective (1985); 133-52, at 134.

    2. Ibid., 135.

    3. J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages: A Study in the Forms of Life, Thought and Art in France and the Netherlands in the XIVth and XVth Centuries (St. Martin’s Press, 1924), 22.

    4. Thomas Malory, Works, ed. Eugene Vinaver, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 1971), 716.

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    • Jesus the Imagination
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    • Michael Martin
      • Jun 2, 2021
      • 4 min read

    When You’re a Feminist Theologian Like Me


    Me, when I looked more like a feminist theologian

    I never really considered myself a feminist theologian. In fact, I never really considered myself a theologian at all—that is, until I read John Milbank’s jacket endorsement for The Submerged Reality when it was published six years ago:

    “In The Submerged Reality, Michael Martin suggests why a radicalized orthodoxy in the future will need more to ‘walk on the wild side’ and appropriate what is best in the esoteric, occult, and even gnostic traditions. He intimates that the past failure to do this is linked to a one-sidedly masculine theology, downgrading the sacrality of life, immanence, fertility, and the ‘active receptivity’ of the feminine. The consequence of this has been the perverse liberal attempt to distill ‘order out of disorder,’ or the denial of real essences, relations, gender difference, and the objective existence of all things as beautiful. Finally, Martin argues that such a genuinely feminist theology would also be concerned with a space between the openly empirical observation of nature on the one hand, and the reflective exposition of divine historical revelation on the other. In this space, continuously new poetic realities are shaped and emerge under the guidance of holy inspiring wisdom.”

    Most of the feminist theology I had read until that time had been of the “Airing of Grievances” variety or that which might have belonged to what the late Harold Bloom once called in literary studies “The Schools of Resentment.” I just can’t get into it. As readers of my books and this blog will no doubt know, I have never liked political agendas posing as philosophy or theology (let alone art and science), so I have for most of my career forged my own, admittedly idiosyncratic, path through the dull and thoughtless morass of postmodern culture. And most feminist theology is of such a political variety. As such, it doesn’t interest me.

    Nevertheless, after John contributed his endorsement, I started to think that maybe he was onto something and that maybe I am doing a sort of feminist theology, though in a very Derridean way: I am doing feminist theology without feminist theology.


    Me, when somebody gets up in my grill about Sophiology

    Some people like this, from what I can tell; and some people despise it. But I am no longer at a stage of life where this concerns me overmuch. I remember reading an interview with Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange and other works. The interviewer asked Burgess what readership he had in mind while crafting his novels. The author replied (I’m paraphrasing): “I write for lapsed Catholics, who grew up in Manchester, and who are my age. That is, I write for myself.” This is pretty much my disposition.

    Recently, I have experienced a little pushback about the latest installment of the journal I founded and edit, Jesus the Imagination. Our latest issue is themed “The Divine Feminine” and it includes a breathtaking essay by Rev. Alison Milbank, a mother, professor, and Anglican priest (though I think she would be okay with the term “priestess”) who also happens to be married to John Milbank. In addition, it includes, among other fine contributions, a critique of clericalism by Therese Schroeder-Sheker along with her luminous reminder of traditional Christian communities that were far more whole, and my interview with Methodist preacher and biblical scholar Margaret Barker on the position of the Divine Feminine in First Temple Judaism and beyond. I always expect pushback (Come on—the first sentence of The Submerged Reality is “Let us start a war.”) and I’m not afraid of controversy. So there.

    Some are offended (as I interpret it) that I would include work by a woman priest in Jesus the Imagination, as if I were somehow endorsing a female priesthood. Good Lord. I am against the idea of women priests—if having women priests somehow includes the emasculation of the male priesthood and results in a hermaphroditic gender-neutral priesthood (which is why I prefer the term “priestess”). To appropriate Flannery O’Connor, “If that’s what a priesthood is, then to hell with it.”

    What I love about Alison’s essay is that it speaks to the charisms of a feminine priesthood (which is what brought me to tears on first reading it) and doesn’t indulge in another dreadful take on the “We can do it!” meme so prevalent on the doors of feminist professors. (Feminist theologian that I am, I don’t have one). But I am all for a female priesthood that preserves the integrity of biblical gendered typology. The last thing we need is to eradicate the sacredness of gender (“Let us create man in our image...male and female created he them.”) and the thought of starting the holiest of prayers with “Our Parent, who art in heaven...” makes me nauseous.

    If Sophiology has anything to contribute to this debate, it is that Sophiology encourages (“demands” is probably a better word) that, in the quest for a female priesthood, we preserve the integrity of the biblical gendered typology so endangered in our technocratric universe. Talk about timely and radical. Otherwise, it’s just another boring poster, another slogan on a coffee mug.


    Michael’s latest books are an edition of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz and Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Divine Feminine.




    • John Milbank
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    • Michael Martin
      • May 10, 2021
      • 2 min read

    Jesus the Imagination, Vol 5: The Divine Feminine


    Cover art: "The Empress" by Catrin Welz-Stein

    —and a Call for Submissions for Volume 6


    One of the great maxims of Waldorf education is that the ideal lesson is one in which the students come to both tears and laughter, the idea being that the emotional panorama of human experience is essential for education to be a truly human endeavor. Editing volume five of Jesus the Imagination on the theme of “The Divine Feminine” was precisely such an experience for me.

    Alison Milbank’s beautiful essay “Oiling the Wheels of the Heavenly Chariot: Female Priesthood and the Divine Feminine” brought tears to my eyes as I read through it the first time. I was astonished by its grace and how it (and Alison herself) is suffused with a genuine charism of the divine femininity. It brings a center of healing in the middle of a chaotic realm of gendered confusion.

    On the polarity of laughter, I laughed often in my interview (“The Lady in the Temple”) with biblical scholar Margaret Barker—and I laughed all over again as I was editing and proofing it! Margaret offers much wisdom and insight in her words (and in her work), but it was an absolute delight to discover her warm and often puckish sense of humor in our conversation.


    back cover art: "Erupting Space" by Stephane Gaulin-Brown

    In addition, the essays by Therese Schroeder-Sheker and Michael J. Sauter straddle the line between rejoicing and correction as they interrogate institutional structures too long buried by the detritus of tradition and habit and seek to return us to wholeness in their invocation to a Sophiology both practical and mystical. Likewise, offerings by Sam Guzman, Andrew Kuiper, and Madonna Sophia Compton ask us to consider the sophiological from the perspectives of psychoanalysis, philosophy, and theology. Add to these Miguel Escobar Torres’s exquisite search into the Sophiology of Hildegard of Bingen and James Wetmore’s translation from Valentine Tomberg on the Fourth Commandment, “Honor thy father and mother,” and we have a rich landscape for meditation.

    The poetry of John Milbank, Thomas Whittier, Tyler DeLong, Paul Hunter, William Trusiewicz, and Daniel Nicholas, a stunning work of experimental fiction by Max Leyf, a review by Kent Anhari, Lucinda M. Varney’s gentle prayer, “Divine Feminine Spirit” as coda, complete what may very well be the finest volume of Jesus the Imagination to date. You can get one here.

    The theme of Jesus the Imagination, Volume 6 will be “Flesh and Spirit,” and we are now inviting submissions of poetry, essays, photography, and artwork. We are also interested in translations! Send no more than 3-5 poems, one essay, or 2-3 works of art (in a file, of course). The deadline is 1 January 2022.



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    • Jesus the Imagination
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    The Center for Sophiological Studies

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