Feminine language for God in Christian history: a brief timeline
People have been employing words and images for the Divine that move beyond the masculine from the very start. I thought I’d compile some examples chronologically.
Links in any of the points lead fuller explanations or excerpts. Feel free to add on to this timeline!
Paul himself, right there in the canonical Bible, implies that God is pregnant with all that exists! And he’s not pulling that image out of nowhere, but from his own Jewish scriptures.
“In his ineffable essence he is father; in his compassion to us he became mother. The father by loving becomes feminine.”
- St. Clement of Alexandria
“Come, secret Mother; Come, You who (fem.) are manifest in your deeds; You who (fem.) give joy and rest to those who are united to You (fem.)”
- The Acts of Thomas
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”She is the kind and heavenly mother…”
- Symeon of Mesopotamia (speaking of the Holy Spirit)
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St. Barbara envisions both God and those who follow God as Saints as being beyond the human gender binary
the earliest Syriac Christians frequently employed feminine language to all three members of the Trinity, including Mother language for God and sometimes using She pronouns for the Holy Spirit
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“He who has promised us heavenly food has nourished us on milk, having recourse to a mother’s tenderness. For just as a mother, suckling her infant, transfers from her flesh the very same food which otherwise would be unsuited to a babe…so our Lord, in order to convert His wisdom into milk for our benefit came to us clothed in flesh.”
- St. Augustine of Hippo
“And you, Jesus, are you not also a mother?
Are you not the mother who, like a hen,
gathers her chickens under her wings?
….
And you, my soul, dead in yourself,
run under the wings of Jesus your mother
and lament your griefs under feathers.
Ask that your wounds may be healed
and that, comforted, you may live again.”
- St. Anselm of Canterbury
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“In Hildegard’s day there were other traditionally feminine theological ideas: for instance, the Cistercians feminized the language for God by replacing ‘God’ with ‘God is love’, and, because love (caritas) was a feminine noun, God could be denoted as ‘she’.” - Andrea Janelle Dickens
“What does God do all day long? God gives birth. From the beginning of eternity, God lies on a maternity bed giving birth to all.”
- Meister Eckhart, German theologian (c. 1260 – c. 1328)
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St. Francis of Assisi envisioned the Trinity as a group of three women (who give him a feminine title!): “Three poor women appeared by the road as Saint Francis was passing. They were so similar in stature, age, and face that you would think they were a three-part piece of matter, modeled by one form. As Saint Francis approached, they reverently bowed their heads, and hailed him with a new greeting, saying: ‘Welcome, Lady Poverty!’”
“As we know, our own mother bore us only into pain and dying. But our true mother Jesus, who is all love, bears us into joy and endless living.”
- Julian of Norwich
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In various places in medieval Europe starting around 1320, Jesus’s side wound was frequently depicted as a vulva. Scholars have suggested various reasons for this depiction, including: making Christ androgynous as androgyny was seen as more holy than belonging to an earthly (binary) gender; and helping women see themselves in their Lord (birthing girdles were even made bearing Christ’s wounds so that one could imagine their labor pains in parallel to Jesus’s pain on the cross)
- See my #androgynous Christ tag for more info + scholarly sources
Madre Juana de la Cruz in Spain imagines the Trinity as working together to weave divinity and humanity into one being (Jesus), just as a seamstress sews a shirt. She also envisions God the Father as having a womb, and, speaking in the voice of Jesus, said: “And all those who seek in me a father, will find in me a father. And those who seek in me a mother, will find in me a mother. And those who seek in me a husband, will find in me a husband. And those who seek in me a bride, will find in me a bride. And those who seek in me a brother, or a friend, or a neighbor, or a companion, likewise will find in me everything they desire…”
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A convent in Belgium commissioned a painting of Jesus in which he has breasts
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God cares for us with an everlasting maternal heart and feeling.”
- Martin Luther, who also pictured scripture as God’s womb.
1800s: “My Father, my Mother, it is in You that I sleep, it is in You that I breathe. Awaken!” - Saint Mariam Baouardy (1846 – 1878)
I recommend Lynn Japinga’s article “Language about God” for information on how and why to expand what gendered language one uses for the Divine. I share excerpts from the article in this post, as well as a link to the full thing.
