A Culture of Female Divinization

Barbara Newman has long been one of the most original and creative historians of Christianity of our (or any) generation. Her work is always a fresh look, especially when it considers an old subject. Newman takes medieval Christian theology very seriously, and understands its internal coherence and structures with precision and erudition; nevertheless, she also manages to see things no one else has noticed and to describe them in surprising, even flummoxing, ways. God and the Goddesses fully lives up to expectations. When I first read it, in manuscript for the University of Pennsylvania Press, I was surprised, perplexed, and, finally, delighted.

This work shows a maturation of Newman's thought on a subject that has occupied her since her early work on Hildegard of Bingen, what she calls "sapiential theology" of the western Middle Ages. This is not something Newman invented so much as clarified, the fact that the Goddess incarnate as Holy Wisdom, in spite of the masculinization of the Divine Logos/Word as the eternal Christ, is a continuation of Hokhma, the Hebrew personification of Wisdom in the feminine. Although this is the subject of Chapter 5 "Sapientia: The Goddess Incarnate," it is a perception that permeates the entire text. Not everyone will agree with this perception, but it is certainly one that no scholar interested in medieval Christian spirituality can ignore. Best of all, as one would expect from such an original scholar as Barbara Newman, there are twists and surprises in this book that I never could have foreseen.

The most immediately gobsmacking of these surprises is the way Newman refers to the allegorized figures she studies here, right from the very beginning of the book, as "goddesses." "The God of medieval Christendom," she says on page 1, "was father of one Son but many daughters: Sapientia, Philosophia, Ecclesia, Frau Minne, Dame Nature, Lady Reason, and the list goes on." Even though the term "goddess" appears in the title, and I was certainly expecting Newman to treat the question of the divinization of these female figures in medieval literature and culture, I must confess that I found this opening gambit somewhat shocking, even troubling. But, by the end of the first chapter, once I understood that this choice really underlined the point of the study, I was a convert.

Newman seems slightly afraid here that the reader will find this a dull bit, but I think the flamboyant figures of Prudentius, Boethius, Alan of Lille and St. Francis have almost been the action heroes of spirituality for many Christians over many centuries. She seems to know this, since she begins with Lady Poverty so beloved of St. Francis of Assisi and inspiration to so many modern Christians in the social justice movements (see the illustrations of Lady Poverty on pp. 5 and 7). An interesting example is Lady Ecclesia, the Church personified, who in the Middle Ages was represented as the beloved of much Song of Songs exegesis, represented iconographically in manuscript paintings as a beautiful queen seated on a throne at the right hand of Christ, with the unfortunate "Synagoga" sprawled at the feet of the happy couple, sometimes clutching the scapegoat, or blinded.¹ We have known and loved our goddesses in many guises and for a long time.

What Newman is out to prove in this study is the thesis that there was a culture of female divinization in the Middle Ages. There is no modern version of this, although she certainly suggests that there should be. Nor have medievalists even understood this very well. Although scholars have talked about the cult of the Virgin Mary, and the phenomenon of "Jesus as Mother," no one has ever put together a thesis quite like this.² Nor is Newman talking about "The Goddess" of feminist theology, or the psychologized "Eternal Feminine" one finds in Jungian studies and the literary world of modernity (Newman's caveat that "female" does not necessarily mean "women," as in real life women, medieval or modern, helps emphasize the fact that we are dealing with a realm of imaginative and allegorical theology).

But this caveat also points...