A Moment for Mary Daly

Mark D. Given

Missouri State University

            For anyone who knows anything at all about Mary Daly, seeing a male on this panel is bound to raise eyebrows.  Certainly nothing about Daly's philosophy would justify male tokenism!  Actually what happened was this.  Julie Ingersoll-- the other female member of the Religious Studies department besides Kathy Pulley--was asked if she would be interested in serving on this panel.  She was not for a number of reasons, not least of which being that she sees Daly's type of feminism as not very helpful and a bit revolting--not in Daly's positive sense of that term.  But since she knew I have a somewhat bizarre range of interests for a historian of early Christianity, she asked me if I'd be interested.   I certainly was.  Beyond God the Father was one the most important books in my intellectual development.  Why that is the case is the first thing I want to tell you about.  (And by the way, Julie stopped by my office earlier today to tell me that she's teaching a class this hour, but that she wanted be here for moral support; she was going shout out slogans like "Some guys are OK!")

            Sometimes, as Daly might say, a Moment can be Momentous.  And the Moment of my reading of Beyond God the Father was just that.  Imagine this.  The year was 1988.  I was reading Beyond God the Father and other feminist theological works under the guidance of Elizabeth Barnes, the only female theologian on the faculty of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.  [She later taught at Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond.]  And her presence on the faculty was one of the reasons we found ourselves in the midst of a Fundamentalist-led hostile takeover of that seminary.  (Daly would no doubt suspect it was surely not just one of the reasons, but the reason.)  After all, the Fundamentalist leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention--all male of course--would later succeed in passing a resolution at the denomination's national convention against the ordination of women, so how could they tolerate the even greater sin of allowing a woman to train future pastors, to teach theology to men?  But that is hardly all that made this Moment Momentous for me.  You see, I was not the one attending seminary with the goal of seeking ordination.  My goal at that time was to become a professor.  It was my wife Janet who was preparing to become an ordained Baptist minister.  And now she and several other women enrolled there were being told in no uncertain terms that what they were doing was wrong and something was being done about it.  That message was made especially clear by a group of Fundamentalist students who would force female students off campus sidewalks and tell them that they didn't  belong there.  Such was the context in which I read Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation.  The patriarchalism in Roman Catholicism and Christianity more generally that Daly had written about over fifteen years earlier was alive, well, and, in fact, growing in the SBC.  I know what Daly would have told us to do at that time.  We should have staged an Exodus like she did when she became the first woman to be asked to preach at the Harvard Memorial Church, an event that occurred not long before writing Beyond God the Father.  We did, in fact, leave the SBC and vowed never to have our names associated with a denomination that officially subordinates women.  We were not ready, however, to follow Daly into the promised land envisioned in Beyond God the Father.

            Since I assume that most of you have never read Beyond God the Father, I suppose I should give you a taste of what Daly does in it.  As one woman reviewer put it:

In Beyond God the Father (1973), Daly articulate[s] a post-Christian critique of traditional theology in contrast to the position of mainstream Christian feminism, which seeks to shore up women's position in the church. In this book, the core of Christian belief--a trinitarian godhead made up of a procession of Father, Son and Holy Spirit--[is] interpreted as fatally male in conception; and the core of Christian worship--the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as ritually re-enacted in the Eucharist--is seen as deathloving, necrophiliac. (Add ref.)

Clearly something happened between The Church and the Second Sex and Beyond God the Father.  Daly gave up entirely on the Roman Catholic Church and, indeed, on Christianity and all other man-made religions.  She realized that they are all really manifestations of the one all too pervasive religion: patriarchy.  As she put it so memorably, if God is male, then the male is God.  At that time, Daly's cure for the disease of patriarchal religion was not atheism, divine androgyny, or Goddess spiritualism.  Divine androgyny obtained by appending "and Mother" to God the Father didn't seem promising to one for whom the concept of human androgyny suggested the image of John Travolta and Olivia Newton John scotch-taped together.  And, for reasons different from those of Rosemary Radford Reuther who argued that simply transexualizing God into a Goddess would only reverse the sexism, Daly also rejected Goddess language.  For Daly, the problem with the concept of God or Goddess was reification, turning God into a static thing.  Daly's solution was to speak of God as a Verb, not a Noun.  She writes,

Why indeed must "God" be a noun?  Why not a verb--the most active and dynamic of all?  Hasn't the naming of "God" as a noun been an act of murdering that dynamic Verb?  And isn't the Verb infinitely more personal than a mere static noun?  The anthropomorphic symbols for God may be intended to convey personality, but they fail to convey that God is Be-ing.  Women now who are experiencing the shock of nonbeing and the surge of self-affirmation against this are inclined to perceive transcendence as the Verb in which we participate--live, move, and have our being.

Those who are familiar with the history of philosophical theology will realize from this passage that several aspects of Daly's concept of God are not entirely Original, and she is the first to admit this.  "Live, move, and have our being" re-calls Paul in Athens who is himself re-calling the classical Greek philosopher-poet Epimenides.  So going Beyond God the Father does not entail leaving everything behind.  Some things must be taken back, re-turned to the women to whom they originally belonged.  Daly is already a Pirate in this book, a Revolting role she will later revel in.  So going Beyond God the Father is also going beyond Thomas Aquinas and Paul Tillich, taking the good parts of their ontologies and forsaking the rest, using them in gyn-ecological ways, or what she will later call "biophilic" ways.

            Well, there is no way that in ten minutes I can summarize Beyond God the Father, and I trust you realize I have not been trying.  To do so would be to totalize it, and I by no means want to do that.  Instead, I hope I've given you enough of a taste of it till you'll want to read it for yourself.  In her own words it marks "the turning around of her soul" and I would argue that it is the Gynesis of Daly's revelatory philosophy.  And now she has given us an Apocalypse, the 1998 book Quintessence . . . Realizing the Archaic Future: A Radical Elemental Feminist Manifesto.  Perhaps Daly would find it insulting to hear her thread of books from Beyond God the Father to Quintessence likened to a sort of radical feminist scripture, but it is a powerful can(n)on, quite capable of blasting Patriarchy into oblivion if women and women-identified men would only let themselves be A-mazed and Be-Dazzled by it.

            Does that mean I strongly affirm her radical separatist vision?  No.  For one thing, I love my wife and don't want her to leave me!  (-:  At the time I was reading Daly I was also reading Reuther, whose ideas were very similar to Daly's in Beyond God the Father,  but who chose to stay within organizations like churches and attempt to subvert patriarchy from within.  Today my wife is co-pastor of a Disciples of Christ church where the hymnal uses inclusive language, and God is far more often referred to as Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer than Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; a congregation where through the use of such language, a significant number of members really do understand, consciously or unconsciously, that this usage implies that all such language is metaphorical, that God truly is beyond God the Father, God the Mother, and all other descriptions.  So do I think Daly was "wrong" to abandon Christianity altogether and then to go beyond Beyond God the Father into some variety of Pagan spiritualism.  No.  Men and women are "conscientized" through the efforts of both the Reuthers and Dalys of this world.  After that, they might be free to make their own minds.