November 12, 2003
Awakened Woman's Circle is working for peace
Philosophy and the Goddess:
Looking for a reason to believe?
By Stephanie Hiller
When I was ensconced for four years in the ivory halls of Vassar College, still an all-women's institution which legally sat in loco parentis over our personal lives, I studied philosophy, history and literature. And what I learned was this: truth if it existed can not be known; knowledge of human events can never be certain; and history can never be proven because interpretation changes our view of the facts. On that path toward solipsism, where the only reality was subjective, literature was the one remaining doorway. Strange that I, an opinionated young woman from New York City, could emerge from college without a single conviction.
So it's a bit of a puzzle to me why Carol P. Christ should find it so important to establish a philosophical basis for her experience of the Goddess. And though she states her reasons clearly, I have to wonder why she is looking for confirmation for her own understanding that will meet with the approval of scientific, Western (read: male) authorities. Perhaps, in view of repeated attacks on feminist thealogy by male scholars (and some women), a rational justification of this sort may be warranted.
But I should give you her explanation first:
If thinking about the meaning of life is something we all do,
then what can more disciplined philosophical reflection add
to feminist thinking? My answer is that philosophical conceptions are involved in all feminist constructions and reconstructions of religion.
As I will show, we are implicitly making philosophical judgments or assuming philosophical positions all the time. Since we are doing so anyway, I believe it is better that we do so consciously. Otherwise there is a great danger that we will revert to traditional ways of thinking about divine power… (7)
It is in this context that Christ offers her interpretation of "process philosophy" as described by Alfred North Whitehead and, especially, Charles Hartshorne.
Christ is one of the foremothers of the feminist spirituality movement. Recognizing in the 1960s, while a graduate student in theology at Yale, that all the major religions rely on the subordination of women, she embarked on a lifelong exploration of the ancient goddess traditions which she has described in her many books; and she is the founder of the Ariadne Institute in Crete, where she leads pilgrimmages to the Goddess. In Charles Hartshorne, who died at the end of the last century, she has found a male philosopher who objects to the idea of a "tyrant God" and is pro-feminist. His philosophy offers a coherent framework that supports her belief in the divine as an eternal presence deeply embedded in the web of life, embodied in our physical existence as men and women yet ultimately beyond gender.
While not specifically of the goddess, Hartshorne's philosophy addresses the fallacies inherent in the view of god as omnipotent, omniscient, and separate from creation. Christ tracks each of five "theological errors" that accompany that traditional view,and she shows how all are resolved by understanding the divine person -- whom she calls Goddess/God -- as a compassionate being who resides in creation without holding power over it.
Problem is, philosophy is fairly colorless. By trying to adhere to its own terms of what is essentially a form of reductionist thinking (all men are egotists, Socrates is a man, therefore…), philosophy struggles to produce a chain of logical rationale for what it posits. And inevitably, another philosopher comes along to find the one or two places where the chain links break down.
I am not that philosopher, so adherents to what Christ has named "feminist process philosophy" needn't worry. Neither am I a thealogist. I am a woman who has spent some years in recovery from intellectual analysis by finding the love of the mother and discovering that she resides at the core of my being. And what I love most about the experience of finding my goddess-self is that She is inclusive of all the paradoxes and contradictions that riddle all forms of thought. She represents all the marvelous maya of our attempts to order reality according to our preferences, all the stories of our intertwining lives, all the enigmas. And at the root of it all, She is the Mystery we adore.
Christ has a PhD in traditional theology so it makes sense that she has taken her feminist spirituality into that context for validation. The idea that we creatures are all collaborators with Goddess/God, exercising our creative freedom to make choices about our lives, is a view that I embrace, although in my view our choice is limited to how we respond to the guidance that is given us. That She is an abiding presence welcoming us into her loving embrace is how I have found her on my walks in the hills, or perched on a rock by the banks of a stream, in the roar of the ocean, or within the belly of my own female body as I sit in meditation. As our eternal companion, she is an infinitely reassuring embodiment of our deepest selves. Yes.
Like Rumi's beloved, perhaps, Christ's Goddess/God is our friend and companion. But unlike Rumi, Christ does not wrap her perceptions in the passion of lyric poetry. This is philosophy, after all. Goddess/God is an abiding compassion, a relation of sympathy with each and all of her creatures, human and other. She is the origin of life, and she is its end. Since we are within her, she cannot separate from us. Hence she does not know what the future will bring. Nor does she offer the promise of immortality except as a re-mix and transformation of our various elements into something new. Reincarnation of an immortal soul isn't possible. Nor is Truth. We each have our own truths, based on our own experience, but again, no supreme undivided truth can be known. We risk being drawn back into the old isolation of solipsism.
What's missing here is an image for the awesome power beyond human control. Although in aggregate what happens may fail to conform to an individual's preferences, Christ rejects the notion of a supreme being in control of fate, one who may destroy lives in the maelstrom of her self-creation. For Christ, such an attribution of omnipotence would lead to the familiar Problem of Evil, for how can an omnipotent Goddess/God, who is Good, be responsible for the presence of evil in the world? Christ's Goddess/God cannot create such a one as Hitler, or the Taliban, or Saddam Hussein. All so-called evil is created by humans.
Because Goddess/God is embedded in the creation, she cannot be said to reside in a realm beyond or outside our experience. That means there are no simultaneously existing levels of reality where magical powers rule or where knowing ancestors preside over our terrestrial journeys. We can't invoke their assistance, then, and the shamanic framework of a holographic universe in which we can ascend or descend to get more information is denied. The future cannot be "divined" except to the extent that its seeds already exist in the present moment. Spells and other magical charms won't work either. Though Christ doesn't discuss synchronicity, one can assume that serendipitous confirmation of our intuitive quests can also not be interpreted as signals of support from "the universe".
Is it me, or is the universe beginning to seem a little too dry?
Christ acknowledges that we do need symbols to give a little color to our contemplative life, and in her best and final chapter she talks about our freedom to select certain goddesses as symbolic manifestations of the reality embraced by our process thinking. She gives us free rein to select the ones we like from the international pantheon, approving heartily of Kuan Yin who hears the cries of the world, but eschewing as patriarchal the image of Kali wiping out demons with her sword.
I do have a problem with these preferences. To begin with, I feel we all suffer a little for the liberties we take in adopting traditions not our own. It's wonderful that in this remarkable time we have all the gods and goddesses from all the mythologies to choose from, but I'm not sure the liberty to choose some deities over others is appropriate. Taking deities out of their cultural context has aroused some criticism, and rightly so. Our lack of regard for our specific genetic lineage deprives us of some of the richness of our individual legacies. Choosing our goddesses according to our philosophical preference seems to grant us too many liberties to set the parameters of what spiritual reality may be.
Kali, for example, is an ancient goddess whose worship precedes the Indo European Hindu tradition which described her in Sanksrit texts as one brandishing weapons on a field of battle against wave after wave of dangerous demons. As the wild-eyed black mother of all, Kali represents the uncompromising primal power of the female to dispel ignorance. Even in the subsequent Hindu tradition, her weapons and the string of skulls adorning her neck, are symbolic of the power of truth to vanquish egos. We wouldn't want to eliminate such a powerful image as this one from our process pantheon.
Christ is so wary of "power over" that she also censures the use of the words "queen" and "lady" to describe the deity. This phobia about hierarchy as antithetical to equality, which pervades feminist spirituality and much New Age thinking, raises some serious questions about the nature of power and how it is to be exercised. Though we may all be equal in the eyes of Goddess/God, we are certainly not the same. Some of us are avatars of great wisdom, teachers whose words are medicine for the soul. Others are leaders of great power; without them, we can never hope to see an effective women's movement that has definition and shape beyond the unorganized multiplicity of numerical majorities such as the democratic process has become. We are going to need leaders to get out of this morass, and although we certainly do not want leaders who dominate and oppress us, we may find it useful to accept hierarchies where power declares itself in formations for greater effectiveness. Such hierarchies can still be based on the partnership model of relationship, as Riane Eisler suggests in the Power of Partnership, and they may be shifting alignments resembling constellations, in which certain stars will appear to be brighter at various intervals.
Still and all, I do agree with Christ's consistent feminism, with her emphatic recognition that rejection of the female body lies at the root of patriarchal obsessions with transcendence, and with her fervent belief that Goddess/God has created life to be enjoyed. Perhaps most important is her view that the divine essence is always embodied. She is in the world, and of the world, and the universe is Her body. Christ has not forgotten the importance of female images of the divine: "Precisely because femaleness has been identified with the body, nature, and relationship, female images of divinity have the metaphoric power to break the hold on the human imagination of traditional images of God as a dominant male living in a heaven separate from this earth." (228)`
Philosophy student that I have been, I read She Who Changes carefully, and as you see, it prompted much deep thought about what my own beliefs are. Inasmuch as there are not very many works of thoughtful feminist thealogy that so examine and challenge our inherited beliefs about transcendent divinities , Christ's work is a distinctive contribution to the body of feminist work, one that certainly stimulates the reader to examine her own beliefs and really begin to figure out wherein her assumptions lie. And in the end, it must give us hope, because if we are the ones who have created all these problems, we must have the power to solve them.
For process philosophy, the reason for hope is the creative process
of the universe itself. This process is supported and sustained by
Goddess/God. Yet in asserting that the freedom to co-create (and
perhaps co-destroy) the conditions of life on this planet is partly
in the hands of individuals other than Goddess/God, process
philosophy, more than many other theologies and religious
philosophies, recognizes the creative (and destructive) power of i
ndividuals other than Goddess/God . . . What human beings do with
our creative freedom in the twenty-first century will have enormous
consequences for the future of life on earth not only for human beings
but for all other species, and not only for the living but for the
generations to come. This is an awesome challenge and responsibility. (174)
Definitely. Even though the end of the fourth sun and the arrival of the fifth in the Mayan cosmology may have been preordained, it is ultimately up to us to act positively to preserve the world. And in that sense, giving up the notion that the outcome is in "God's hands" will serve us well.
Stephanie Hiller is the editor of Awakened
Woman.