Polemics and Provocations

Essays in Anticipation of the Daughter

Paul Gilk

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9781608993710
  9781498255905
• eBook ISBN:
  9781621893967
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

In the twelfth century, an Italian monk named Joachim caught the attention of the Christian West by announcing the Three Ages of the World. Joachim arrived at his formulation by a meshing of the Christian Trinity with the Old and New Testaments, proclaiming--in sequence--the Age of the Father, the Age of the Son, and the Age of the Holy Spirit. In the early modern period, however, archaeologists uncovered the remains of an agrarian village social stratum that predates the rise of civilization. The divinity of this period was the Mother Goddess, a divinity that civilized monotheism, with its strict Father God, steadily and severely repressed. Paul Gilk has modified Joachim's Three Ages revelation by placing this newly discovered Age of the Mother at the beginning of Joachim's sequence. But it's obvious that Mother, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not psychologically coherent or linguistically consistent. The only way to make semantic sense of Joachim's enlarged formulation is to recognize the Age of the Holy Spirit as the Age of the Daughter, for if there's a Mother, a Father, and a Son, then the Holy Spirit implicitly and quietly reveals Herself as Daughter. With this understanding, it's possible to discern the prophetic power and transformative cultural significance of both the contemporary women's movement and the feminine-Earth sensibility of the growing ecological outrage. Gilk goes on to assert that the radical servanthood and radical stewardship contained within Jesus' "kingdom of God" proclamation is, at least in part, an attempt to spiritually reconnect with the agrarian village culture of the Mother's Age; but it's also a lifting of that Age to a finer spirituality and toward an ethically Green political order. The "kingdom of God" is Green, Gilk says, and its overarching divinity is the Daughter. The Age of the Daughter is Green and is struggling to be born.

1

In the Image of God

As we all know, there has been (and will continue to be) a lot of talk about Islam, the relationship between Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, and about all three religions as “Abrahamic.” These religions are composed of monotheists who as People of the Book should have, in principle, more to share and agree on than to squabble over or fight about. And so the bulk of conversation, at least on the liberal or Left side of the political and religious spectrum, congeals in the direction of tolerance, dialogue, and friendly exchange, stressing the importance of learning to understand one another through courteous listening and perhaps even liturgical sharing.

I ambiguously concur with this impulse, this point of view. At its deepest level, such a stance is not merely humane but also embodies, when push comes to shove, or when harsh rhetoric translates into bullets and bombs, the Gospel directive to help the stranger and love the enemy. I say this now for two reasons. First, I believe the Gospel directive is true. That is, I believe helping the stranger and loving the enemy leads to or at least points toward that place we might call the kingdom of God, invoking by that term the primary concept utilized by Jesus in the first three Gospels. But the second reason I mention the directive to help the stranger and love the enemy is that, for all the inflated “Christian” posturing in this country, with all the righteous self-assertion and self-promotion of ourselves as a “Christian” nation, our method of expressing this Christian nationhood toward the rest of the world comes largely in the form of battle groups, aircraft carriers, attack aircraft, drones, bombs, missiles, guns, soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines. We “love” our enemies with the sword. We may wish to see our enemies “saved,” but first we have to vigorously suppress their false convictions and bad attitudes. This may be a righteous expression of so-called Tough Love, but it is a dreadful corruption of the Gospels.

So while I truly believe Jesus was and is right in his prescription of radical servanthood and radical stewardship, I also believe that Christianity has, for the most part, weaseled out of this hard, simple requirement by creating for itself a truly elegant rationalization and complex justification for righteous imperialism.I Furthermore (though some may say I am on shakier ground), I generalize from the Christian situation to the Islamic and Jewish situations by saying I suspect there may be as few Moslems or as few Jews, proportionately, who have immolated their egos in the fire of the divine as there are Christians who have done so. Righteousness may ignite the ego to halogen-bulb brightness, while humility is content with the flickering illumination of candlelight. Righteousness is the brilliant radiance of blind arrogance mixed with unexamined presumption.

In other words, I believe that religions are largely cultural constructs catering to what seems to be a universal human craving for alignment with cosmic authority and moral self-justification. We seem to want to believe that the group I belong to knows the Truth, and I am therefore under the moral umbrella of that Truth. Therefore I am a good and (if you really want to know) a superior person by virtue of my religious affiliation. I doubt if there is need here to expound on such concepts as Chosen People, Manifest Destiny, Holy War, or American Exceptionalism.

II

I say all this as prelude. That is, for all our talk of dialogue and tolerance, as important as these concepts and practices may be, we are living in fantasy if we think dialogue and tolerance are about to rule human behavior any time soon. We may earnestly desire dialogue and tolerance, we may strive for those spiritual qualities and pray until sweat rolls down our faces (I am not making fun, although I am suggesting our passion is rather tepid), but we are not only to be as innocent as doves but also as wise as serpents. Plus it is perfectly reasonable to say that real dialogue and real tolerance depend on real soul-searching and real repentance, and that means facing into and coming to grips with how fully our inherited sense of superiority serves to justify our comfortable array of empire privileges in a spiritual as well as a material sense. You may therefore take (and perhaps you should take) what I am about to say as serpent’s wisdom, or maybe just forked-tongued gibberish. I am going to share with you the insight, vision, revelation, or serpent’s hallucination that came to me almost exactly thirty years ago and that, if anything, has strengthened over the subsequent three decades.

But first I need to sketch a preamble to the serpent’s bite.

III

I grew up on a small farm in northern Wisconsin, perhaps one of the last “Jeffersonian” enclaves of small-scale farm culture in the country. And when, as a young man in St. Louis, I missed that rural life, that agrarian culture, even as I was aware small farms were dying, I asked smart people to explain to me why small farms were dying. The answers I received were unsatisfactory at best, so I began to study the history of agriculture in a catch-as-catch-can sort of way. I read a lot. But to drop only two names here, I was greatly influenced by the great American historian Lewis Mumford and by that classics professor turned explicator of Freud, Norman O. Brown.

More or less simultaneously with this agrarian preoccupation, there were at least two additional preoccupations eating at me. One, thanks to the seemingly endless American war to demolish Vietnam (Daniel Ellsberg, in his Secrets, traces American intrusion back to the Truman administration), was the prevalence of aggressive, brutal militarism in the history of civilization. Why was war so common, especially at the level of civilized empire? Another preoccupation, thanks to the rise of the women’s movement, was whether feminism had a deeper meaning than mere idiosyncratic social corrective, whether it represented something greater than minor reform. That is, do women merely want in on the game of empire, or do they want to fundamentally restructure the game itself in the direction of equality and conservation?

These elements—the origins of agriculture in the gathering activities of Neolithic women, the impoundment of the agrarian village and its economic abundance by male warriors at the dawn of civilization, the inherently militaristic and imperial nature of warrior civilization, and the modern rise of feminist rebellion—began to cook and bubble inside me, along with a growing awareness of global ecological devastation. Here I need to invoke two additional steps that led to my serpent’s revelation.

IV

First, I learned in reading about Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels that the profemale anthropology that Engels in particular brought to the table of political agitation had come from a book called Mother Right, an early work of archeology by a Swiss scholar named Johann Jakob Bachofen. In his book, Bachofen insisted, on the basis of his scholarly findings, that underlying patriarchal civilization was a matriarchal stratum, represented by all manner of goddesses in statuary form. He called this stratum Mutterreich or Mother Rule. Second, from reading Michael Harrington’s Socialism, in an early chapter where Harrington surveys what he considered the Western antecedents of socialist values, I learned about a twelfth-century Italian monk, a Cistercian named Joachim of Floris (or Fiore), who created a conceptual schema, based on a meshing of the Christian Trinity with the Old and New Testaments, positing Three Ages in human history: the Age of the Father, characterized by monarchy, discipline, and law; the Age of the Son, characterized as love institutionalized in the church; and, still to come, an Age of the Holy Ghost, characterized as consecrated (or holy) anarchy.II

It apparently took a while for the Church of Rome to realize it didn’t like this schema, for it implied the obsolescence of the church’s rule and the disintegration of its supremacy in Western Europe. But that realization was slow enough in coming so that Joachim got to die a natural death. Some of his followers may not have been so fortunate.

When the serpent of wisdom bit, it was with both fangs. One fang was named Bachofen. The other was named Joachim. The intoxicating wisdom injected through those fangs entered a reservoir full of unresolved cultural turmoil in which Mumford and Brown, feminism and civilized militarism, the impoundment of Neolithic agrarian abundance and contemporary ecological limitation were all interacting in a bubbling pool ready and even eager for spiritual liberation. When the serpent bit and the intoxicants struck home, this was the ensuing revelation: there are not Three Ages to think about; there are Four. It was not just Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, but Mother, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

But wait! Something there did not quite ring true. Some feminist theologians were insisting the Holy Ghost (or Holy Spirit) was and is feminine. And so the configuration was not just Mother, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, but, to be psychologically consistent, it had to be Mother, Father, Son, and Daughter. That was the insight, the revelation that forever changed my life.

V

I wish to bring this back to the beginning, back to the three Abrahamic religions and to why I believe tolerance and humane dialogue are not going to rule the newspaper headlines any time soon. The three Abrahamic religions, in their orthodox, conventional expressions, can certainly be seen as determined and even fierce repositories of male presumption, mythic cores of male prerogative. The divine when identified as strictly Father, God when perceived as exclusively Male, generates religions that elevate maleness into psychological, cultural, and spiritual superiority.III Looked at psychoanalytically—here I take a deep bow to Norman O. Brown—religions with explicit and exclusive male divinity arose as a consequence of the victorious warrior energy at the heart of Middle Eastern civilization. Without warrior civilization, the three Abrahamic religions, with their exclusively male divinity, are simply unthinkable.

Civilization congealed precisely at that point where, by armed force and political coercion, male warriors expropriated the agricultural abundance of the precivilized agrarian village, and this abundance was overwhelmingly the product of a feminine horticulture that had its origin in the attentive experimentation of female gatherers. The divinity of this village abundance was the Mother. Warrior civilization crushed Her. This is what Johann Jakob Bachofen discovered and taught.

In terms of historical stages, Mother, Father, and Son clearly work. It’s possible to lay such a schema on actual historical progression. The question is whether Daughter is spiritually prophetic or merely New Age fluff. In proposing such a modification of Joachim’s vision I am, no doubt, also incriminating myself as a Christian heretic. I am bending or expanding the Christian Trinity into a post-Christian Mandala. I am saying that if the divine can be imputed to have gender, if we are made in the image of a gendered divine, then the divine is as much Female as it is Male. If there is a Father, there has to be a Mother. If there’s a Son, there has to be a Daughter. Either no gender or both genders. God as strictly Male is idolatrous.

VI

Now—I will compact these final remarks mercilessly, as befits a person under the influence of serpent hallucinogens—the coercive globalization of civilization, as a system of imperial male conquest and violent righteousness, has brought us to a Global Crisis, as the newspapers so wisely and regularly inform us. This crisis is political, it is economic, it is cultural, it is ecological, and it is religious. It is in the gendered imagery of the divine—an imagery we psychologically internalize—where an immeasurably large portion of our contemporary global crisis is lodged. The underlying force of globalization in its dominant mode is male warrior energy, simultaneously aggressive and righteous. This energy has both shaped and infected all Abrahamic religions, regarding themselves as superior, chosen, and virtuous above all others. This energy claims divine legitimacy. It has contempt for the troubling self-critical and certainly for the feminine. It conflates male presumption with the will of God. It therefore acts with the arrogance of holy entitlement and, when obstructed or opposed, it acts or can act with righteous sadism.

The Four Ages of the divine—Mother, Father, Son, and Daughter—implies that the Age of the Son will be superseded by the Age of the Daughter, an age of “consecrated anarchy,” as Joachim (or Michael Har-rington) so giddily put it. If so, how do we get there? Let’s start by acknowledging that the women’s movement, broadly speaking, is alive and well, even if its energy has gone largely into an integration with what previously have been overwhelmingly male domains—law, medicine, business, and the clergy. For the last forty or fifty years, women have been flooding the basement of the male Establishment, and the female water level keeps rising. The Global Crisis, however, is alive and increasingly unwell, and its unwellness grows with every passing month and year. The magnitude of crisis is compounding, with Climate Change and Population Growth closing in by leaps and bounds. The handwriting is not only on the wall, it is flashing off and on with manic urgency.

At the heart of this accelerating crisis is civilized male arrogance with its sense of cosmic entitlement. The driving engine of global breakdown is the blind, arrogant, aggressive, unrelenting industrial and financial globalization of male-controlled civilization. And in the jaws of Global Crisis the options become quite stark. One option is annihilation, some variation of End Times, disaster minus rapture, disaster minus any divine rescue, just unremitting desolation. Another option (an unlikely one) i...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: In the Image of God
• Chapter 2: Temper Tantrum
• Chapter 3: A Little Early
• Chapter 4: Absolutely Scandalized
• Chapter 5: Except for You
• Chapter 6: An Epilogue to Hissy Fits
• Chapter 7: Rusty Ancient Hinges
• Chapter 8: An Induced Absence of Discernment
• Chapter 9: A Theology of Cosmological Aspiration
• Chapter 10: The Underlying Religion of Civilization
• Chapter 11: Our Settled Resignation
• Chapter 12: One Last Little Thing
• Chapter 13: At the Foot of the Lord’s Castle
• Chapter 14: This New Place
• Chapter 15: The End of This Road
• Chapter 16: Restoring the Fundamental Assumptions
• Chapter 17: The Underbelly of the Superstructure
• Chapter 18: Something of a Watershed
• Chapter 19: Prophets Raging in the Slums
• Chapter 20: Legitimating the Policeman
• Chapter 21: An Unseemly Eulogy for My Father
• Bibliography