What Has Divinity to Do with Democracy?: Metaphysics, Transcendence, and Critical The*logy of Liberation

Luce Irigaray has treated Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza's critical the*logy of liberation as collapsing discourse on divinity into sociology and sexual difference into neuter equality. False dichotomies between divinity and sociology, difference and equality, and ontology and liberation hinder the greater incorporation of Schüssler Fiorenza's critical paradigm into feminist the*logies and philosophies of religion. While Schüssler Fiorenza does reject the discourse of metaphysics and transcendence as inseparable from the politics of empire, it is a misperception that she reduces the*logy to social analysis and spirituality to politics. Rather, she has intertranslated Christian mystical discourse and critical theory to ensure that all talk about divinity is fully accountable for its effects upon the world, though G*d is beyond any one image, idea, or temporal agenda. Miller argues that we must not jettison the discourses of metaphysics and transcendence, which would impoverish our prospects for encounter with the divine as well as our tools for critically and creatively engaging the world's religious traditions, but must subject them to a hermeneutic of suspicion and reconstruction.

In her 1994 essay, "Equal to Whom?" Luce Irigaray opposes the category of "the social" to that of "the divine," and pointedly remarks, with respect to Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza's In Memory of Her (1983), "sociology quickly bores me when I'm expecting the divine."¹ While both Irigaray and Schüssler Fiorenza have in many ways moved on from that moment, a tension in feminist the*logy and philosophy has persisted between ontological discourse on divinity and discourse on liberation. In this essay, I want to examine what sociology does in fact have to do with, and must have to do with, divinity. At the same time, I share the concern of Irigaray and other feminist philosophers of religion to maintain an excess of discourse on divinity to sociopolitical discourse, and a distinction between the quest for transcendence and the quest for justice, even though these inevitably intersect in our embodied lives. In fact, Irigaray, Grace Jantzen, and others misperceive Schüssler Fiorenza herself to conflate these things, as she has gone on in her work after In Memory of Her, and with renewed force in her recent Power of the Word (2007), to insist that the divine exceeds all discourse, including that of liberation and radical democracy, and that the divine excess invites a proliferation of symbols.² However, because Schüssler Fiorenza has avoided using the categories of metaphysics and transcendence, regarding them as inseparable from a dualistic and imperialist politics and the conservative personalist spiritualities that support it, her the*logy can leave the impression that G*d is no more than discourse; religion essentially politics; and personal religious experience a kind of bad faith. This impression can hinder the wider incorporation of her work into feminist the*logies and spiritualities.

The gist of Irigaray's critique of In Memory of Her in "Equal to Whom?"—an essay that Morny Joy has rightly pointed out is not one of Irigaray's best and is filled with misunderstandings—is that Schüssler Fiorenza's reconstruction of the Jesus movement as a discipleship of equals is intended to compel women to remain affiliated with the institutional church and sacrifice sexual difference for a neuter equality within patriarchal structures driven by masculinist metaphysics.³ Irigaray further charges that Schüssler Fiorenza reduces Judaism, Greco-Roman society, and Christianity to "one" by arguing that Jesus is best understood in the context of Jewish renewal movements of the first century, and that the impulse toward equality in the early church was gradually stifled by the ekklēsia's adoption of the values of Greco-Roman patriarchal household codes. Irigaray mistakes Schüssler Fiorenza's insistence on Jesus's Judaism for a supercessionist claim that Judaism is fulfilled now in Jesus, and her analysis of the Greco-Roman politics of domination as a blanket judgment against a society that gave considerable symbolic power to women through the worship of goddesses. Irigaray's main concern in her...