The Dark Filter of Tradition

Through a glass darkly? That glass is sometimes very dark. The sacred writings of an age invariably reflect the powerful biases that then prevail and render those biases in a context suggesting that they carry divine approval. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, which has no female figure of the deity, it is possible to encounter such things as the following:

Simon Peter said to him, “Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life.”

Jesus said, “I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.”

This comes from the Gospel of Thomas, discovered in 1945 as part of the Nag Hammadi find in Egypt.  It contains purported sayings of Jesus, and this is one; indeed it is the last one in the document. I am showing the Lambdin translation, from the Coptic. It is conformant to all other translations, including a linear word-for-word rendering. The meaning is clearly what is stated above. The document dates to the period 130-250 AD.

I found this interesting because I’d chanced across it on the same day I’d listened to a television broadcast; there was no link between those two activities. The broadcast carried a conference session where assembled leaders discussed religious rights under current public policy. One strong thrust of the presentations was bemoaning the government’s support of feminist advocacy. The problem, of course, for organized religions, is that dark filter of tradition. There was evidently a time when men reflexively viewed women as in some way less than human. This same view is also echoed in some Shi’ite religious writings. Alas.

My view of revelation (developed elsewhere here) is that it comes from “above” but, after it ends up on paper, it carries an interpretation that echoes its own times. I reached this view by noting that, in successive revelations, the then prevailing culture always leaves “its Mark.”

Fortunately for those participating in the conference I viewed, such gospels as Thomas’ and many other writings, were scrubbed from the canon, beginning with St. Athanasius, the Bishop of Alexandria (died 373). Can you imagine the attendees’ problems if such verses as the above had to be defended as the word of God?

The Wider Feminine Dimension

If and when we marry, we gain a second mother. In secular language the added phrase, “in law,” signals that we live in an Age of the Contract in which the state, enforcing the secular nature of its culture, demands the right to permit us to marry. But in the greater realm, thinking now of Genesis (2:24), marriage makes man and woman “one flesh.” (I note here that that phrase is retained in all but two versions of every Bible I own; the Jerusalem Bible renders it as “one body,” which is equivalent; the Living Bible shifts the ground into the abstract and says “one person.”)  If we are one flesh, however, doesn’t the spouse’s mother also become our own?

This somewhat cumbersome beginning, however, is not really my subject. I’m just a tracing how I got to my theme. A post on Ghulf Genes and some commentary on it brought the Sibyls of old to the fore, again, and every time that happens, I always think of my second mother, as it were. Now this wondrous lady, long since departed, was as modern as any, a practicing dentist, married to an eminent economics consultant, an enterprising person who, in the chaos that followed World War II formed a business to make a living for her family. She came from the high middle class, with real wealth in her background. And yet… And yet she was also a strange sort of person with peculiar gifts, so much so that, ever since I got to know her—and the occasions were few because she lived in the then barricaded East Germany and we rarely saw her—I always thought of her as sibylline, oracular, chtonic, and original.

Now today my memories of Mom Elvira—and of the Sibyl of Cumae and her predecessors and her followers, of whom I view St. Hildegard of Bingen (the “Sibyl of the Rhine”) as one—reminded me of my (these days) entirely incorrect conviction that women and men are different. Not under “law,” mind you, not in the sphere of contracts. But in reality. And particularly in the religious realm, the feminine perception is altogether more encompassing, holistic—but largely influential above and below the huge but narrowly mechanical noise produced by the masculine approach—heavy on intellect, law, rules, dogmas, sin, trial-judgement-punishment-reward, heresies, fatwas, and all the bloody rest.

With the rise of the Age of Contract, the feminine dimension came under attack—so that the Reformation dethroned and banned the Virgin Mary—as also it got rid of images, colors, decorations in the churches and the temples—a basic expression of the feminine soul. It was Robert Graves, I think, who said that first the success, and then the endurance, of Catholicism had everything to do with Mary’s superintending presence over the Church. Women hold things together, men are ever at war—so that the Reformation produced an endless scattering differentiation until the Whole was thus no more. (Yes. The root of that word, catholic, is the Greek kata, meaning “about,” and holos, meaning whole. It is. It is about the Whole.) Yet, of course, the feminine is always inclusive. And in that process of inclusion, conflicting details need to be harmonized; and where the conflicts are particularly gritty, they must be transcended by love—even if that demands that intellectual precision is sacrificed to the greater cause of Unity.

Now the religious urge in us is really, fundamentally, about love. And when religion comes to mean conflict, be sure that the masculine drive to power has hi-jacked something and, the moment that drive succeeded, the holy changed into something else.

Among the males the poets know this. They have been blessed with souls in which something of the nature of their mothers has managed to rise enough to celebrate the Goddess.