Abrahamic Religion, Scripture, and The Fatherhood of God: an Anthropological Digression

Two cheers for the patriarchy, or why the Abrahamic scriptures (or at least two of them) are so gender-marked for fatherhood and why it matters. Hear me out, 'infernal peers' (Milton).

Readers will have observed, perhaps with raised eyebrows, that I deliberately refer to the God of Israel in the masculine gender and as a paternal entity: ‘He,’ and occasionally ‘His,’ and even ‘Father.’ There are a number of contingent reasons for this usage and some deeper and more analytic ones as well. The contingent reasons come from my respect for the integrity of the text and the tradition and my commitment to oppose, or at least not to mindlessly reinscribe, the extreme discountenance of fatherhood across the board in Euro-American culture at this time. This discountenance extends from the carceral system and the law through popular culture and psychology to the famous spirituality-without-religion itself.

While the negation of fatherhood stems no doubt, at least in part, from instances of paternal absence and/or misuse of power, it comes also, I think, from a blind insouciance to what I will be simple minded enough to call human nature and diviine authority (Before I sound too judgy, let me say that I know all about this because I have passed this way myself.) The result of this blind rebellion in my view has been for some time serious and widespread social and psychological dysfunction. Furthermore, this dysfunction is by way of over-compensation driving many young men and even some young women into the arms of the most authoritarian and patriarchal forms of religion - not to mention those of regressive political leaders. (In my case, full confession, it drove me into a toxic and violent Marxist-anarchist fundamentalism. Pace Emma Goldman and Peter Kropotkin of honorable memory, it was not a healthy move, to say the least.)

Anyway, the claims against fatherhood are also costing us, sons and daughters alike, important access to a great part of the treasury of our ancestors and our cultural heritage. Among other things, they weaken our families and traditions, fuel widespread erasure of our civilizational past, and prevent important affiliations with our best teachers and guides, those who not only make that past present for us but provide us with precisely the knowledge we need to deconstruct and surpass it when called to do so. Instead of engaging with that past, we have simply dismissed our elders and declared game over. This denial of authority even in its legitimate and hard-won forms has debilitated the humanities, eviscerated any transmission of serious and informed ethical paradigms and models, and contributed profoundly to the anomie and subsequent inanition of human agency and to our patent inability to govern ourselves and establish control over our own inventions, both ideological and material. These daimons now enslave us and hope to do so more and more. (This is no luddite statement; these are bad masters, good servants. But they are more the former at the moment.) Christian atheism hopes to correct these tendencies, and in many instances is doing so consciously (see Cadell’s work on fatherhood and the Lacanian symbolic) and as part of its agenda. but the problem lingers, and it lingers in my view especially when it comes to the fatherhood of God and the doctrine of the Trinity.

Pausing to support this unpopular and perhaps too tendentious view — no doubt I am hot under the collar here - let me just note on the ground that men, fathers, and especially black fathers are incarcerated in vast numbers in the United States, numbers far out of scale with those of other countries. Fathers consistently lose in court cases regarding custody: the law is by no means neutral here. Furthermore, prison sentences are typically passed on fathers without regard to family situations, and little provision is offered to keep them in touch with their children when they do go to jail. Across the board, in popular culture, in psychoanalysis, in education, and in many other domains, fathers, like mothers in another way, come off as alienated and alienating oppressors and are thus thought to be easily and properly dismissed or dispensed with.

Even in therapy we cast our parents as pure obstacle, however enabling, and seek to outwit the paternal function by calling it ‘castration’ or a testament to ‘lack’ - terms that, however defined as having positive aspects, have never lost their crude and pejorative reductions or their overtones. We ‘see through’ our parents and live in the irony of their attempts at propelling us forward through time and space to establish their lines. Fine. But to what end exactly? Often the end less of freedom than of an ego-aggrandizement that has never been able to earn its chops or master its fundamental defensiveness. The masculine itself is generally in deep trouble in our culture, as we know, but I think it is worthwhile and helpful to break out the disdain for fatherhood, like the condescension and hostility toward motherhood, as a key aspect of this deadly problematic.

There are, however, even deeper reasons than these cultural, political and psychological ones for a refusal to expunge the masculine and the paternal from the discourse of the ‘desiring God of monotheism.’ In the first place, gender marking comes with the linguistic nature of this God, as I have shown with respect to grammar itself in my previous post. It is an aspect of the limitation of language that lies at the heart of the ‘linguistification’ of the divine so important to the Abrahamic traditions. (I’ll be discussing this issue further in the next post on Lacan, lack and the feminine in monotheism.) These traditions involve an investment in language that is highly erotic and involved with the binaries of human generation and regeneration, a matter of “this loved philology” as Emily Dickinson called it.

To cleanse the language for understanding of and communication with the divine of gender-marking or seek to by-pass that marking from some reductive gender-equity point of view is to render it sexless and anodyne, which it is not. Not incidentally, doing so — as when we try to refer to God as ‘she,’ a practice that remains profoundly unpersuasive to most practitioners, myself included — also prevents us from reckoning with the real size and import of the maternal. To anticipate a later argument, this latter, feminine mode of the divine is the reciprocal of divine fatherhood and vice versa. Though obscured both by bad faith and by essence, it is the very ground of that enabling jouissance to which, out of a courtesy and a negative capability generous beyond our comprehension, the doctrine of the fatherhood of God points the way. But fatherhood is also sacred and divine, though partial, in part because it is relational, and relational between and among men.

Let me run to Tolkien for cover here:

The link between father and son is not only of the perishable flesh; it must have something of aeternitas about it. There is a place called ‘heaven’ where the good here unfinished is completed; and where the stories unwritten, and the hopes unfulfilled, are continued. We may laugh together yet.”

But to descend for a moment from these truths, which are for the most part over our heads and expressible only in myth, fantasy and symbolic narrative, where we humans park things we can’t understand, there is also a dimension of gender, masculinity, and paternity involved in the construction and transmission of any religion with a global and historical drive, any religion, that is that has or thinks it has, as the tao expresses it, “the mandate of heaven” for the empowerment of this drive. This mandate makes fatherhood in scripture and writing essential to its project.

Such a project depends to a great extent on a textuality driven by the paternal agenda — sometimes indeed, alas, to the obscuration of the maternal, though this mode is always present and cannot ever be completely supressed. This agenda is especially in the driver’s seat, if only on straight anthropological grounds, when it comes distinctive, counter-intuitive and highly constructed religious visions aspiring to temporal power. These are visions are not easy to establish or transmit; they need the support of a patriline as well as a matriline to endure. Abraham is the very figure of the mandate for this paternal drive in the scriptures of the three monotheisms. Not for nothing is he called ‘Our Father in Faith,’ and not for nothing has he given his name to the collective formed by the three religions of the book.

This stress on gender cannot simply be by-passed for some jump into the life and being of angelic and unsexed spirits, who have no need for temporal power and no mandate for establishing it. Our calling is different from theirs. We are meant to join earth and sky together, not just to flit around up there taking messages and singing hymns. No shade on that, and we hope to join in that music some day, God willing, and at our best adding our own blue note to its chromatic scale, but not until our work down here is done. Even the spirits themselves are commanded to bow down in respect before our challenge and destiny here, though the good ones do so willingly, out of deep respect for us. Satan made a big deal of saying no to this command, with fairly catastrophic consequences for himself and us, or so the myth goes, but he lost to St. Michael, of course, in the end and is still gnashing his teeth over it.

But down here on earth, my friends the rule is simple: no fathers, no children; no children, no future, at least in terms of this world, and this world is what is at stake in most religions, especially the ones we are referencing here. No mothers no children too, of courses, but that is obvious. The corollary, it appears, is less so, at least at the moment. (I am not talking about some literal gender binary here. Doubtless two same-sex bodies are fine, provided both roles are covered, though there are special practical and emotional challenges in this situation, as many same-sex parents would freely acknowledged if they could do so without their views and lives being weaponized by our life-denying authoritarians.) Be that may, even theologically speaking, incarnation did not start with Jesus; the God of monotheism is an embodied, an active, participant in this world and the project of its collective and individual salvation from the beginning. Bodies are sexed, variably, but none the less. Like his son, God can’t simply be a neuter being, a disembodied ghost. He has to be relational.

But why did He so often (though not always) choose the masculine gender for generating and validating this relation in his linguistic revelation, and why must the paternal be so marked in most Abrahamic scriptures so often at the expense of the maternal and feminine? How can we understand this masculine gender-marking and why it is so prominent in the monotheistic doctrine of God? This gesture is interpreted, wrongly I think, in terms of a zero-sum economy, where to elevate and bless one term of that binary can only be seen as happening at the expense of the other. But that misprison is a strong one, and it calls our attention. By way at least of address to this problem, I want to bring in here some basic structural anthropology, drawn largely from the work of the great Harvard anthropologist Nancy Jay. (See her magisterial — forgive me, I want to say seminal — book Throughout Your Generations Forever: Religion, Sacrifice, and Paternity from the University of Chicago Press, 1988).

Let me begin by noting, with Jay, that anthropologically speaking, fatherhood is a very fragile construct. It doesn’t just happen; it is the product of deliberate construction and affirmation marked by law, ritual, and verbal practices and codes. It is not established by sheer phenomenological facticity, as is motherhood, which in its normative biological form is manifest and ‘proved’ by the bloody ordeal of childbirth and enacted in the primary responsibility for the human neonate, who unlike other mammals suffers an extended period of mortal dependency for life on the maternal breast, touch and voice or some substitute. By contrast, the claims of fathers on their children are speculative by nature, and they must be reinforced and upheld over time and space in and through culture, public language, and textuality. This does not mean that such claims are unimportant. It’s just that they are, at least for some time in human life, supplementary. The former establishment leans zoe; the latter leans bios.

To put this differently, a mother’s values, her culture, and her legacy are conveyed primarily and normatively through bodily connection, bloody ordeal, and early proximity. The transmission is largely non-verbal, at least as the verbal is commonly understood, and it comes primarily through the imaginary, that is through inarticulate and relatively undifferentiated signs like coos and whispers and lullabies and rocking -chair rhythms. This transmission is non-linear, and its preferred locus is a womb-like space, an “interstitial matrix,” as Lacanian philosopher Bracha Ettinger calls it, one that is primary for all human subjects throughout their early years and well beyond. Indeed, though it may be overshadowed by the later more linear development in the symbolic, this imaginary, primal, non-linear bond continues to ground human life as long as it endures. Even when language arrives in full, our ‘mother tongue,’ as we call the private speech of an intimate family with its babies and toddlers not yet fully assimilated into the totally symbolic paternal system, is the wellspring of our art and the mother of our invention. It is the primary substance of all effective, living communication, and neither philosohy nor politics can do without it.

Not so when it comes to the father. Not that fathers can’t and don’t communicate within the interstitial matrix just as mothers do. . Both parents can, do, and must operate in booth maternal and paternal modalities. Indeed only where these are in balance internally and not just distributed externally between persons and venues, can there be real, human maturation, personal or collective. But when it comes to the paternal role, its specialty, so to speak, is the symbolic. But that dimension of the child’s formation does not arrive naturally in the course of things. It must be deliberately instituted and established either by acts of ritual, law, contract and witness or in default of these, by physical proof in a lab. And it must eventually, if necessary, be certified by written documents or at least by sign systems of a symbolic, representative kind.

[By that qualification am thinking here of the remarkable practice in the American slave-trading communities where, deprived of legal identity in a white regime and moral authority in the public sphere, people commissioned a formal photograph where the image is coded by artificial hand and body gestures, usually deployed to document marriage and/or sexual bonding and its entailments in terms of property and legacy by those excluded from written textuality.] Hence this establishment of the father-child bond and obligation or lack thereof are supported in human societies first through transmission in the symbolic, especially around contracts and namings, and then, as a socius expands beyond immediacy to extension across time and space, by being guaranteed or ‘underwritten’ through some form of symbolic practice.

This should be no problem here, both maternal lines and maternal ones are surely — it goes without saying — of great human importance and they can and indeed must co-exist or better. But alas, it seems, there is a hitch. The two legacies are not identical. By virtue of the incest taboo, the father and mother must marry to one degree or another outside their own lines. Thus when it comes to the replication of his culture and legacy there is always a certain though variable degree of difference, a split or gap. Motherhood can feel vis-a-vis fatherhood like a threat here, an alien force, in part simply be implying in its difference a weakness, a lack or dependency in the totality of the masculine domain. It can register to the patrimony as alien and even as corrupt. by default. Among other things, the mother has the power of life and death over the fetus and the neonatal child. It takes a lot to counteract this power, and it must be at least counterbalanced, mediated and ordered if human life on earth is to go on.

Anthropologically and genealogically speaking, or so Jay’s argument goes, texts, ritual naming ceremonies are usually ceremonies of initiation into the masculine symbolic realm. They were virtually invented to offset the maternal contribution/challenge to generational transmission and to support the paternal donation. Indeed there is an argument to be made that the chief material function of religion itself is to do precisely this. To deny, obscure or expunge this father function, to try to erase fatherhood and gender, is thus not just a losing battle, but a self-defeating one. Even in proximate terms such a misguided effort threatens a regression to the womb, to an unmediated primitive matriarchy and/or to a monoculture that cannot be sustained.

To abbreviate an extended and technical argument, Jay has established through research and analysis over a wide swath of anthropological data from many societies, that such contracts and religious ceremonies, which have to do with matters perpetuation in the human order, have in ancient and many recent times called for ritual sacrifice, even strongly and specifically the sacrifice of a living being of flesh and blood, most often a mother’s first son. or at least the symbolic sacrifice of substitutes for these, Such rites witness to the power of paternal bonding to transcend the maternal matrix of space and time and to mimic or exceed the power of maternal dominance over life and death. Sacrifice, her great and telling slogan goes, is childbirth done better.

She is able to apply this analysis not just to a variety of tribal cultures but to the anthropology of ancient Israel and more, and she does so with rigorous attention to the historical and textual sources, especially to the redactional strains of the Hebrew Bible. These vary with the various degrees of concern for patrilineal succession over time, with great concern animating the priestly investments of the strand Biblical scholars call P and focussing on priestly masculine sacrifice tending toward the literal and the lesser degrees of concern allowing redactions s like the J source to acknowledge, at least to some extent, the maternal role and to remain in for the most part the symbolic, as we would say..

As I have tried to show in my book on motherhood, sacrifice and monotheism, her analysis applies to the anthropology underlying the historical institutional development of the Christian denominations as well as to the Bible. In this structure, denominations concerned above all with precise and orthodox transmission of the patrimony and its exact replication over space and time hold a high and strong, sometimes even literalalistic understanding of the ecclesiastical institution and of its ritual practices, most notably the ritual of the ‘sacrifice of the mass.’ Because this concern requires downplaying of maternal difference, women are debarred from priestly agency in this ritual. Those formations less concerned with exact and same repetition and more concerned with accuracy of transmission hold a low and weak understanding of their sacrificial practices and are relatively indifferent to female agency except for contingencies of context.

Thus the diversity of Christian denominations varies directly with their concerns for the kind and quality of transmission they feel is most called for, repetitive or differentiated. There is is a coherent and conceptually relevant structure here, and it a deeply grounded one in anthropological experience and analytically quite scrutable. Their diversity may be mapped out on spectrum along these lines.. Gender issues here have less to do with attitudinal misogyny, I fear, which might be subject to political intervention, than with a certain structural necessity. By definition, to change one term in this structure, like the view of the real bodily presence of the elements in the eucharist, the bread and wine which become the body and blood of strong sacrifice, has profound aspects on all the others, like ritual prohibitions around gender and the institution of priesthood itself.

I have no idea how to mediate this. The floor is open. When as a grown woman, a feminist, and a recovering Protestant, hence less subject to gaslighting and moral blackmail than in my early years, I became a catechumen in the Roman Catholic church, I raised this issue, Monsignor Enderbrock, our revered and saintly parish priest, who was in charge of my conversion, told me gravely that he saw the problem and it worried him. All he could do, he said, was pray about this and leave it to the Holy Spirit to bring it about if it were the will of God.

Obviously that Spirit is a work among us today, and just as obviously it operates outside human structures and doctrinal norms. I myself, however, have no clear leading on how here and no special revelation, though I have great respect for those who think they do on both sides. I just know that I, like my husband, am made in the image of God, and that God is my father as his, and that like him and my beloved son, I am a candidate for the empowerment of full salvation, rib or no rib. If that entails agency restricted to the masculine in its in a priesthood, then so be it. But I’m not entirely sure of the best path forward here. Among other things, I would hate to lose the real presence, and I think that might be the unintended consequence of a simple revision. What is called for is a different practice and a different theology. Holy Mary, Mother of God, co-mediatrix and sedes saptientiae, pray for us in this difficult matter.

Be this all as it may, let me summarize again for clarity the base argument here about the importance of that fatherhood in the Abrahamic traditions. I repeat that that one of its functions, human and divine, is to preserve and perpetuate a paternal as well as a maternal legacy of faith and practice from father to child in a legitimate, explicit, and publicly guaranteed way. The doctrine of God entails valuing that transmission. Sacred scripture is the primary and best adapted medium for doing that. This mandate does not and cannot cover the waterfront of religious order; the maternal has an equal and in many respects and more primary role. Butit is an important mandate, especially for a vision that seeks transformational agency in history. Much of the discourse of the Hebrew Bible and to some extent of the New Testament as welll, though in a more explicitly qualified a way (Matthew’s genealogy for Jesus includes four of his maternal ancestors) exists to support this mandate. though it must be acknowledged that both show more glimmers of the underlying feminine and maternal ground than many ancient scriptures of religions do or that is often allowed today.

If I say so, the need to mark this kind of paternal testament in scripture and religious observance and impress it through the generations is part, at least, what Abraham was doing, there on Mt. Moriah, when he took Isaac, first born of Sarah his mother, away from her and up the mountain to sacrifice him in witness to a unique vision he wished to inscribe on the future minds and memories of his progeny by its very extremity. He was subjecting his son and heir to his vision, not hers, and to its propagation ‘throughout his generations forever’ through the witnessing enactment of an act of sacrifice that amounted to ‘childbirth done better.’ The mortal extremity of that sacrifice was necessary to counterbalance the mortal extremity of that natural ordeal of childbirth.

In terms of this analysis, Isaac legacy from Sarah was a natural and slightly different one, threatening to import a certain otherness, a certain adulteration of or at least a quasi-atheist and skeptixal challenge to his father’s culture and vision. In her case, this difference is marked: she is on record as having doubted Abraham’s claims from the first, though she was eventually, it seems, convinced - or so he thought. Isaac’s inheritance from Abraham was an acquired vision, a cultural one, transmitted by ritual and by textuality and needing support as such. So strong was his need to countervail hers that it may have caused her an even greater and more mortal ordeal than childbirth, silence and death as a result of having to endure the offering up of her son. Certainly, it left her without further written testament, and left us the option to call her atheist, for Genesis assumes that after the return of her husband and son Sarah had nothing more worth recording to say.

She died in silence, at least as far as the written record is concerned. Her influence, her culture, her values, her difference, her and possible alternative regime of mercy over the paternal law was almost lost to recorded history. Her only memorial was not a text but a tomb by a well, though she was claimed for the lineage by Abraham’s respect for her, as he made that burial site a place of pilgrimage. Indeed it still is so for his heirs in all three monotheisms to this day. Something similar, we might in fear and trembling say, was going on in the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross and the role of Mary in that event, though like all else the mortal valence of this act was changed in the process. What went on there at the cross, however, exceeded its human mandate and its partial and sometime distorted theological interpretations. But that is another story.

Coda: you will have noticed that I have excluded consideration of Islam here, which seems to violate the rule I am with Jay trying to trace, the rule of foregrounded fatherhood. In fact, as I have tried to show in my previous publications, it is in many ways the exception that proves that rule. For this Abrahamic vision was not transmitted through culturally established and legitimate paternal lineage and affiliation, nor even by maternal and tribal authority, but purely by divine nature and grace — Hagar and Ishmael alone in the desert except for God — beyond all corruptible ascsriptions of gender and earthly incarnation. Islam derives itsauthority and its duration not from Isaac, the ‘first [legitimate] son’ of Abraham by his wife Sarah, whose primogeniture and role in hierarchical transmission must be guaranteed by ritual sacrifice and passed from father to son, but from Ishmael who has no such role, has indeed nothing but his faith in God’s justice and mercy to guarantee his role in bringing about the kingdom of God.

To put this in terms of the structure I am tracing, religious transmission in Islam proceeds not from generation to generation through a sacrificial or a symbolic priesthood, as in Judaism and Christianity severally in that order, but by conscious and internal individual choice and affirmation. Islam, we note, has imams and revered teachers, not priests and ‘fathers,’ literal or symbolic. Indeed the Qur’an is full of expressions and exclamations of horror at the ascription of fatherhood and family relations, always subject to corruption, to God. Faith in that God arrives directly and is disseminated from person to person, from teacher to disciple, not father to son, and this with sublime insouciance as to gender, family, and ethnic inheritance.

There is no need to balance maternal and paternal legacies here, or bloodlines from their sublimation in symbolic lineages, because neither is in play. It is a breathtaking move, and one with the potential, no doubt, to upend this whole structure apart and redefine it, provided there is not a relapse into the idolatry of masculinity or an abstraction into a false universality and spiritual by-pass. These are, of course, lacking some safeguards (including the safeguard of ritual sacrifice, which it indulges in only at its margins), which is a major danger for the Muslim dispensation. Its siblings have their own problems, however, as I hope I have sufficiently indicated hee.

Well, we have strayed in this post from the heights of philosophy into the wilds of anthropology and gender studies, problematic turf indeed. Without this understanding and without some regard for tradition and for the bloody and deadly stakes in play here, however, I do not think we can begin to estimate why the Bible is throughout so obsessed with fatherhood, patrimony, and genealogy in the male line, and why the constant foregrounding of gender-marked language is so important in this respect. This emphasis is given special pertinence by the very ‘unnatural’ and counter-intuitive nature of is message, the vision, the legacy in at stake here, its formidable improbability and even impropriety vis-a-vis the much more scrutable, established and widely-shared polytheist matrix and from religions that are not blessed or cursed with a divine mandate for historical intervention.

Whether we need or are simply and willfully going to repeat or ceaselessly reinscribe this mandate at its most problematic, or whether the very terms of the anthropological, political, and theological situation here have changed or are changing, is an important question. Before we take it up, however, we need to recognize at a far deeper level than mere identity politics or dogmatic reification, what is going on here in the scriptures. How we recognize or fail to recognize the paternal function here is highly relevant to the question of future life on this planet. That function may need to be mediated or even transcended, but it has to be understood first. As Christians, ‘atheist’ or not, we are charged to deal with the gate of entry of declaration “in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” Pace Zizek, and to anticipate one of my forthcoming arguments, we cannot just erase the first two terms of this Borromean knot and go for Spirit reduced to the terms of secular solidarity.

Let me end by saying, should I not have made this clear, that the human and sacred function of paternal transmission is not the only thing going on here, and fatherhood and masculinity are not the only mode of encountering Abraham’s vision or dealing with his legacy. We do not need to repristinate its moments of partiality. But as the author of the wonderful substack called Neanderthal Paganism (q.v.) has recently said in another context, in attending to the fatherhood of God in monotheism:

Our [first] task…is not to reconstruct what has been lost, nor to return to an imagined past, but to learn to recognize the shape of inheritance when it appears, to tend it where it still lives, and to remember that we stand inside a story far older than ourselves.