8.11.25 - Email excerpt on God and Gender
In really broad sweeps, I think there are two mappings of "GOD" that precede Christianity's (attempted) synthesis:
FIRST: the whole, the truth, the divinity that precedes differentiation.
-this is where I think you're at
-this platonic in nature which I don't believe I need to elaborate to you (you're more familiar)
-this has analogues in Hindusim, which has a better vocabulary to talk about what we're talking about IMO; in Hinduism there's Brahman, which is like the ultimate truth/reality; Brahman is not gendered but differentiates itself into Gods with gendered forms and who are agentic in nature; here's an excerpt from Wikipedia: In Hinduism, Brahman connotes the highest Universal Principle, the Ultimate Reality in the universe.[83][84][85] In major schools of Hindu philosophy, it is the material, efficient, formal and final cause of all that exists.[84][86][87] It is the pervasive, genderless, infinite, eternal truth and bliss which does not change, yet is the cause of all changes.[83][88][89] Brahman as a metaphysical concept is the single binding unity behind the diversity in all that exists in the universe.[83][90]
-In chinese cosmology this appears to be called Taiji;
SECOND: An agentic, sometimes providential force that is credited with giving life to the Cosmos
-this is at least closer to what I'm talking about (but not quite); I'd say this is the Old Testament account of GOD; the GOD from Genesis.
-this conception of GOD is closer to a Pagan "god," he's an entity with intentions, agency, and intervenes in the world. The Jews, while they were getting around to the idea of one perfect God, didn't fully abandon a God that is pagan in its character, more like Zeus than a platonic God. I guess this is why some early Christians, the Gnostics, thought of the Old Testament God as a separate creator of the physical world rather than their perfect "father" in heaven.
-This GOD is sometimes depicted as sharing, I guess you'd call it "divine space" with other divine entities like angels and demons and fairies and such and the relationship between this God and evil is a persistent theological mystery.
-Evil is modeled as something like the absence of GOD or rebellion against GOD rather than a perversion of harmony, or a byproduct of the fact that there limitations in how the we can represent the nature of the One/Wholeness of GOD (I think this is how evil works in the First mapping of God, evil is like a byproduct of the fact that the perfect/platonic whole cannot be captured on our plane, almost like its hyperdimensional, and can only be represented here with distortions, just like we can only represent the shadow of a hypercube in three dimensions by shortening some of its edges we can only try and align with the WHOLE by distorting things)
-I think this kind of GOD leaves room for a "remainder." I think of the fact that in the Lord of the Rings cosmology the Spider Shelob's mother Ungolian is suggested to descended from the darkness that precedes creation. The Catholic church sort of has a begrudging, equivocal position that there are divine entities floating around that aren't under the providence of GOD. There are demons, fairies, etc.
-This GOD is not the WHOLE
-This GOD can be characterized as masculine; I think the feminine is captured in the remainder, the darkness, the latent potential of the cosmos (GOD isn't eternally pregnant, but the substrate of reality is fertile, maybe waiting for the Word of GOD)
I think what's interesting about Christianity is it tries to mash these two concepts of God together. It's a synthesis (an imperfect one). It inherits a very pagan, agentic, God with roots as a God of War, and then tries to synthesize it with a perfect heavenly father. It thus has to map a masculine concept onto a perfect, platonic one. This creates a gender problem that I think the early solution to was the weird theology around the Virgin Mary. The Father and Jesus captured the agentic/masculine side of things, but there was a theological gap. Pagans had fertility godesses etc. that they liked praying to. The whole thing with Mary is probably a way to meet that demand, and has some weirdness to it, that I nonetheless find satisfying (isn't the beginning of the universe essentially a virgin birth?).
I don't think one is right or one is wrong by the way. They are different human mappings to describe the same thing--probably. Different vocabularies. Where "God" means something subtely different in each. I think we are also limited that we're mapping some of these things into conversational english which is informed by a Christian vocabulary. When you say God you mean something closer to Brahman or Taiji; but in those languages those words don't mean God! In Hindi God is Baghwan, and Chinese seems to have more words for it.
The second mapping of God is less neat, its messier, and it has paradoxes. It has a less clear answer to the problem of evil, a less satisfying account of creation, and puts the feminine in a category of weird mystery. That's why I like it.
knxnts