Feminist Challenges to Conceptions of God: Exploring Divine Ideals

Abstract

The aim of the present chapter is to challenge conceptions of a divine ideal against which human subjects measure their ethical points of view. I locate my own position at the interface of debates concerning the positioning of a first-person human subject in relation to a third-person divine ideal in Anglo-American philosophy of religion and Continental feminist philosophy. My critical point of departure is Luce Irigaray’s feminist challenge to what she sees to be a masculine conception of God; her alternative is for women to become divine (Irigaray L, Divine women. In: Gill GC (trans.) Sexes and genealogies. Columbia University Press, New York, pp 57–72, 1993; Irigaray L, La Mysterique’. Divine women. When the Gods are born. In: Joy M, O’Grady K, Poxon JL (eds) French feminists on religion: a reader. Routledge, London, 2002), or for ‘a divine in the feminine’ (Irigaray L Towards a divine in the feminine. In: Howie G (ed) Women and the divine: transcendence in contemporary feminism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. pp forthcoming, 2007). Irigaray’s provocative accounts of divinity are having a profound impact on feminist philosophers and certain theologians. The poetic or, some would say, slippery style of Irigaray’s French psycholinguistics finds expression in sexually differentiated conceptions of the divine, including accounts of ‘divine women,’ and of becoming divine as women and as men (Jantzen GM, Becoming divine: towards a feminist philosophy of religion. Manchester University Press, Manchester,1998; Martin A, Luce Irigaray and the question of the divine. Maney Publishing, Leeds, 2000).