Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion (review)

Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion. By Grace M. Jantzen. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.

Philosophy of religion in Great Britain used to be synonymous with John Hick's books and business-as-usual out of Oxbridge. Then Daphne Hampson (University of Aberdeen) appeared, becoming the feminist thorn in the flesh of the establishment, first with Theology and Feminism (1990), and again with After Christianity (1996). Hampson's brand of bracing literalism, based on a realist epistemology, indicted the Christian religion for being "untrue" as well as "immoral." Next, Pamela Anderson (University of Sunderland) published the first book-length feminist philosophy of religion, A Feminist Philosophy of Religion: The Rationality and Myths of Religious Belief (1998), challenging the received tradition, making excellent use of feminist standpoint epistemology as developed by Sandra Harding and others, and skillfully integrating continental philosophy with Anglo-American sources. Now in Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion (1999) Grace Jantzen (University of Manchester) offers a third rendering of what a philosophy of religion from a feminist standpoint looks like.

Jantzen, whose previous books have explored theological topics (God's body; mysticism), comes to philosophy of religion primarily from the Anglo-American side. Under the influence of recent French psychoanalytic poststructuralist writings, she leans in this book towards continental philosophy and the view that a model of transformative change drawn from psychoanalysis is more useful than a model drawn from adversarial argument (Jantzen 1999, 78). Philosophy of religion's typical fixation on beliefs, truth-claims, and epistemic justification is regarded as a product of the masculinist imaginary, part of a quest for mastery. Opposing this, Jantzen joins with Luce Irigaray's project. "I am trying," Irigaray wrote in 1977, " . . . to go back through the masculine imaginary, to interpret the way it has reduced us to silence[,] . . . and I am attempting, from that starting point and at the same time, to (re)discover a possible space for the feminine imaginary" (Irigaray 1985, 164). Bordering on the utopian, such a grand project, Irigaray knew, was not simply an individual but a collective aim. If the horizon of self-perfecting is to be opened up to women, so that we may engage in a process of "becoming divine," as Irigaray calls it, nothing less than a radical overhauling of the very grammar of western culture is required. A new symbolic order that recognizes sexual difference will have to be generated, and religion, long the lynchpin of the western symbolic, will never be the same. In the meantime, the tenacious logic and economy of "the Same" (Irigaray 1985, 69) preempts the field and hinders the projection of a new divine horizon.

The aim of a feminist philosophy of religion, according to Jantzen, is to understand and facilitate the task of becoming divine, and this involves the deliberate projection of a female divine horizon and the development of a new feminist symbolic. In that vein, Jantzen's constructive proposals are cast not as a set of truth-claims but as "suggestions for the imagination" (102) in the therapeutic sense. Chief among her suggestions is the reconfiguring of topics in the philosophy of religion around the category of "natality," the repressed other of the western tradition's preoccupation with mortality. The book as a whole is a plea for "a creative intervention in the western symbolic by developing a feminist imaginary of natality" (Jantzen 1999, 57). Although Jantzen unpacks "natality" with the help of Hannah Arendt rather than Mary Daly, the notion brings to mind Daly's "biophilia," or love of life, contrasted with the "necrophilia" of most "academic cemeteries." Indeed, Daly's 1973 account of "God the Verb" in Beyond God the Father also presaged Irigaray's "becoming divine."

This is a rich and dense book. Jantzen draws upon and explicates a wide array of complex authors: Arendt, Levinas, Kristeva, Derrida, Lacan, Freud, Foucault, and Irigaray. In addition, she offers trenchant critiques of many of the standard authors and texts in...