Bataille, Balthasar, and sexual violence

Georges Bataille is a French philosopher and novelist who thinks that we need to go so deeply into mystical experience (he prefers 'inner experience', which doesn't have such theological connotations) that we go beyond any dogmatic ideas about God existing or being trinitarian or good or whatever. He rejects the idea that self-denial or chastity are routes to this inner experience: instead, we get there by plumbing the depths of anguish, by going to extremes of laughter, eroticism, sacrifice and poetry.

He says this:

Access to the extreme limit has as a condition the hatred not of poetry but of poetic femininity (the absence of decision; the poet is woman; invention, words rape him).

Hans Urs von Balthasar was a Swiss theologian and priest who also thought we should go deeply into mystical experience, though he was much more of a good Catholic, who believed in the Trinity, in Jesus, that God was good and so on. He thinks that the Church is exemplified by the figure of Mary, who gives us a model of 'active reception' which we should all imitate in our relationships to God.

He has Christ say this to the Church:

I dared to enter the body of my Church, the body which you are ... my Spirit has overpowered my unruly and recalcitrant flesh ... (Never has woman made more desperate resistance!) ... our blood-wedding, the red wedding of the Lamb - is, already, here and now, the white bridal bed of divine love.

As Tina Beattie points out, this basically compares the love between Christ and the Church to an act of rape.

So, both Bataille and Balthasar present women as essentially rapeable. Bataille thinks this is a reason to reject femininity; Balthasar thinks it's a reason to imitate it. Which is worse?

Mary and Catholic Women

Michelle Spencer-Arsenault (Ponder for a moment the possible meanings of 'Arsenault') published an article in the journal Sociology of Religion in 2000 called Mother Mary: the (Re)Construction of a Female Icon. As a woman who had grown up in a Catholic family, though no longer considering herself a Catholic, she was fascinated by the role of Mary in relation to the way that women in the Catholic Church understood themselves.

Various sociological studies have suggested that not only does religion have an important role in shaping the way that men and women understand their gender, and in maintaining gender differences, but that women and men actually have different experiences of religion. Spencer-Arsenault (every time I write her name I giggle a little, which is of course terribly rude, but I just can't help it) wanted to answer some of the following questions: How do Catholic women construct their identities within a religious context in which Mary is held up as a role model? Can the image of Mary, which often represents so many patriarchal ideas, really be relevant for modern women? While Mary is often held up as a model for all Christians within Catholic teaching, there's often a particular emphasis on devotion to Mary for Catholic women. The Catholic church tends to particularly emphasise Mary's role as virgin, ideal mother, and an example of quiet obedience. To understand how Catholic women related to these ideas about Mary, Spencer-Arsenault spent time interviewing Catholic women in Eastern Canada.

Mary, an image of ritualised awe
Spencer-Arsenault describes the annual May crowning of Mary in which many Catholic women participate. Young girls dress up in white and blue, and parade through the streets to the church, where they process down the aisle to the altar, where there's a statue of Mary which the girls crown before leading the congregation in the Hail Mary.

Spencer-Arsenault says that, for most of the Catholic women she interviewed, this ritual was at the heart of their understanding about Mary, and they'd often describe their experiences of the May crowning whilst trying to explain the importance of Mary. Many of the women she interviewed saw the high value that Catholic church placed on Mary as representing a high value of women in general, especially of women as mothers and as people responsible for transmitting their faith to their children. Because of motherhood, many women saw Mary not only as an object of awe and reverence, but also as a friend, who they could relate to through their own motherhood. Like them, Mary often experienced difficult things during her time on earth, and this helped Roman Catholic women to feel that there was someone who understood their own struggles, and could act as a bridge between heaven and earth.

I found the questions that Spencer-Arsenault asked more interesting than her answers, to be honest (I got to the end of the article and thought, 'Oh. Is that it?' I had to scroll to the end of the bibliography just to make sure there wasn't any more). Even in the Catholic church, not all women use contraception, some are infertile, and some never even get married: what happens to women who never become mothers? Still, some interesting insights.

Photo credits: May-crowned Mary by Clare O'Hagan; Catholic girls by webchicken on Flickr.

Loving angels instead

Rosemary A. Arthur says that in the intertestamental period – that’s the gap between the end of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New Testament, the way that the Jews saw God underwent a transformation, which correlated closely to the transformation of the political order they lived in. The kings in the Old Testament are a very human bunch. They screw up; they get angry; they fancy women; they go to the loo; they listened to women fighting over a baby; they asked for ornery shepherd boys to play them music. And their kingdoms were also pretty small: they were never that far away from the ordinary people. And the God of the Old Testament was similarly engaged. He showed up in bushes; he got people out of bed in the middle of the night; he threatened to go off in a huff because his people were disobedient; he talked about Israel as the beautiful woman he loved. He was right there, in the middle of history, talking to ordinary people, accessible.

But when the Israelites went into exile, they were caught up into far vaster empires with much more complicated bureaucracies, and layer after layer of civil servants. Alexander the Great was an almost mythical Emperor; his empire spanning continents, containing unimaginable numbers of people. And as the meaning of kingship and authority changed, so did the Jewish conception of God. Increasingly, God’s transcendence was emphasised, his utter apartness from ordinary human beings. And because he was so inaccessible and far away, there was a new need for something to bridge the gap between God an man. This is where the angels came in. Picking up some ideas from Babylon, Jewish thinkers slowly developed the idea of a hierarchy of angels mediating between God and man, much as the ranks of civil servants mediated between Alexander and ordinary people. All sorts of hierarchical schemes of angels were proposed, often corresponding pretty closely to the structure of contemporary royal courts. This idea of mediating angels got picked up by Neoplatonism, Gnosticism (an early Christian heresy), and early Christianity. It surfaces in Clement of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa, and Dionysius the Areopagite, to name but a few.

I think it’s interesting that a change in the structure of society was reflected in a change in ideas about God. I wonder how much that’s still the case. Hans Kung, a Catholic theologian (though not one very popular with the present Pope), argued that, as the infallibility and authority of the Pope became more important over time, there was a corresponding rise in the importance of Mary within Catholic devotion and doctrine. Maybe Mary fulfils a similar function to the angels: she is accessible and human where God, like the Pope, is other, distant, and cut off from ordinary people by layers of hierarchy and bureaucracy.

Is there a relationship between the way that we seem to want politicians to sell themselves to us as personalities and the way that we talk about a ‘personal relationship with Jesus’? Is there a relationship between the way that we’re subjects of the Queen, but don’t let her have any real power, and wheel her out at Christmas and special occasions to say a few kind things that the fact that 70% of British people call themselves Christians and yet hardly ever attend church, except maybe at Christmas and special occasions? Any more?