Toward a More Inclusive Monotheism

I am most grateful to Spiritus and my three respondents—a fellow medievalist, a constructive theologian, and a poet—for this symposium on God and the Goddesses. Since their extreme generosity presents me with scarcely a hint of critique to provoke debate, I will use this space to reflect on some prospects that my study of medieval texts might open for theology and spirituality today.

If anyone were so quixotic as to offer a prize for the most frequently misquoted title, God and the Goddesses would be a serious contender. Even before the book was published, I began to notice how often my correspondents would cite it as Gods and Goddesses, and amazingly, this phenomenon continues among those who have actually read it. As of June 2005, typing God and the Goddesses on an amazon.com search screen leads to a range of titles on ancient Greek, Egyptian, Chinese, Hindu, and Neopagan deities, but not to my book, while a Google search turns up a few online reviews intermingled with sites on Celtic, Roman, and Inca religion. The implications are clear: either we belong to a polytheistic world where deities come in both sexes, or a monotheistic world where God is masculine and one. God and the Goddesses defies that dichotomy, which is so deeply ingrained in our collective psyche that even people who have seen or heard the title literally fail to register it.

All three respondents note that my choice of the word "goddesses" for such medieval figures as Eternal Wisdom and Dame Amour is "provocative," as Philip Sheldrake puts it—and some have indeed "howled," as Kathleen Norris warned that they might. The provocation was deliberate, though I've wondered more than once whether it was worth all the fuss. Why not just call them "allegorical figures" or "female personifications," as medievalists have always done before? E. Ann Matter finds allegory exciting, as I do. But for most readers, what Sheldrake calls "the strange habit (in modern eyes) of personifying abstract values and universal virtues" is just a quirk that requires decoding. Much as we learn to cope with the patronymics in Dostoevsky, figuring out after a while that Alexey Fyodorovitch is really the same person as Alyosha Karamazov, we discover that Eternal Wisdom is "really" a figure of Christ, and that's the end of that. Once we know what Henry Suso "really meant," we need pay no further attention to his figura. But the figura—the "goddess of all beauty"—is there for a reason. She awakens the disciple's yearning, harnesses the power of erotic desire and the thirst for secret knowledge, and yokes them both in the service of a demanding, nay overwhelming, Christian commitment.¹ Readers today do not, to say the least, respond with the same intensity to female embodiments of Wisdom, Love, Poverty, or (least of all!) the Church in capital letters. Yet anyone with the slightest interest in religion still reacts emotionally to "goddesses," if not always favorably. In the hope of evoking, even restoring, the vibrancy of medieval response to such figures, I chose the term that touches the deepest nerve.

Yet if God and the Goddesses has any contribution to offer spirituality today, it is not simply to endorse the return of feminine God-talk or give it a historical pedigree. That pedigree is by now well known to medievalists, even if it is still a secret to the ordinary person in the pews. I would like rather to explore the implications of two concepts I develop in my final chapter: inclusive monotheism and imaginative theology.

Not long ago I was leading a retreat on medieval women and the Trinity for a group of Methodists. Near the end of it, the pastor who had invited me decided to play devil's advocate and asked why Christians still needed to talk about the Trinity at all: "don't we live in an essentially monotheistic culture?" With the troubling election of 2004 just past, I found myself saying, to my surprise, that unmitigated monotheism leads all too quickly to a theology of "the only Superpower in heaven," with...