The holy scriptures employ a variety of human relationships to depict the soul’s relation to God. The image of a bride in relation to her bridegroom is a famous one, and even it comes with a few different modifications. The purity of the Song of Songs, where Solomon depicts the soul as a bride with dove-like innocence and the most earnest desire for her lover, contrasts with another common image of the people of God as a whore, or even an adulteress, who is called to repentance for infidelity to her husband. But in both cases the soul is female, and God is the bridegroom.
This relationship is often inverted in the “wisdom books,” mainly the books of Wisdom and Sirach, where the divine wisdom itself is depicted as female, and the man who loves wisdom seeks her out as man seeks out his bride. In a few other places, God is spoken of as female when he is compared to a mother; such passages contrast with the greater majority of texts which describe God as a father figure. Maternal and paternal depictions have in common, obviously, the fact that they describe God as a parent, and we creatures as his or her children.
And then there are a host of extra-familial relationships used to describe our relationship to God. In innumerable texts, we relate to him hierarchically as servants or subjects to our Lord. In the Gospels, we often encounter yet another inversion and a “democratization” of this relationship: Christ claims that he comes not to be served, but to serve; and he calls us no longer servants, but friends; etc. We are even to be called his brothers. Of course, the fraternal relation to Christ includes a filial relation back to God the Father, since by becoming brothers of Christ we become sons of God by adoption.
Most of these relationships and their corresponding inversions have received ample attention in the theological traditions of Christianity in whatever sect. Even the feminine depiction of God, whether as bride or as mother, has received its fair share of attention from rogue Russian “sophiological” theologians like Vladimir Solovyov or Sergei Bulgakov, not to mention Catholic mystics like the 14th-century anchoress, Julian of Norwich—however unpopular these “feminist” spiritualities might have been for much of the history of Christianity.
But one relationship, another inversion of one of those listed above, has not received the same degree of attention: the relation of parent to child, where we are the parent and God is the child. This omission should strike any reader of the Gospels as somewhat surprising, given that God enters the world in human form as a child of human parents. To my knowledge, there is little theological reflection on what it might mean to imagine our relationship to God as that of a parent to his or her offspring. Perhaps this omission can be attributed to the simple fact that the biblical metaphorical language about God is overwhelmingly bent towards depicting God as a Father rather than as a child, even though in the historical account of his entering into the world he comes in fact as a child. In any case, a brief reflection on the imagery of God as a child may shed an unexpected light on our relationship to God.
Yet I take my cue in this reflection not from the realm of theology or biblical scholarship, but from philosophy. G.W.F. Hegel’s first ruminations on the notion of the dialectic were actually inspired by his own experience of romantic love in the context of parenthood. For Hegel, the child is the synthesis that emerges from the dialectical relationship between the two parents. As such, the parents transfer their lives, their consciousness, their very selves, to their child by raising and educating him. The child is, in a manner of speaking, the death of his parents. Thus, in an early lecture which he gave during his tenure at the university in Jena, Hegel wrote:
In educating the child, the parents place in him their already-formed … consciousness, and they engender their death … What they give to him they lose; they die in him; what they give him is their own consciousness. Consciousness is here the becoming of another consciousness in it, and the parents contemplate, in the becoming of the child, their own dialectical-suppression.
“They die in him.” The Russian-born philosopher Alexandre Kojève, perhaps the most famous popularizer of Hegel in the 20th century, cited this passage in one of his own lectures on “The Idea of Death in the Philosophy of Hegel” (published in the Winter 1973 issue of Interpretation: a journal of political philosophy). Kojève added the observation that, by educating their children, the action of the parents is indeed conserved in its universality, while it is also abolished in its particularity. This abolition is nothing other than the death of the individual parents, who are nonetheless preserved in the memory and the consciousness of their offspring:
[T]he child educated by his parents prolongs their social and political action, which is their very being, and he thus assures to them a “survival” in the here-below, which is the only “survival” (albeit limited, in time) that is compatible with freedom. But historical survival conserves the universality of individual action, even while nullifying its particularity, this nullification being precisely the death of the individual. By educating the child, the parents prepare their own human or historical death, by passing voluntarily from the present to the past.
In other words, what the parents do by rearing their child is to make a living sacrifice of themselves: they immolate themselves for the sake of their children, to whom they offer everything that they are. They pass on to their children their whole world, even their own consciousness and their knowledge (to wit, by educating them), letting what is individual about themselves die, while that which is universal about them—their knowledge and creativity, their moral commitments, their love—survives in their children.
It struck me upon reading these rather dense philosophical formulations that what the atheists Hegel and Kojève are describing is strangely reminiscent of how the Christian soul relates to God. According to great Christian mystics like Meister Eckhart, the soul’s salvation resembles the passing away of the individual consciousness into the consciousness of God. The same movement that describes soul’s deification also describes its annihilation. Yet it also wouldn’t be far off the mark to say that the soul is annihilated precisely in its particularity or its individuality, while it is preserved only in its universality, which just is the consciousness of God.
For these reasons, one should not be surprised to find Eckhart in his mystical sermons (most of which were preached to women) comparing the sanctification of the soul to a birth—but, importantly, not the soul’s birth. Rather, it is the birth of God within the soul. Eckhart’s language is designed to appeal not only to the natural parental instincts of humans, but in particular to the maternal instincts of women. The soul in relation to God is thus shown to resemble none other than the biological parent of Jesus: his mother, Mary.
As I have noted in an older blogpost, the Latin word for “mother” is mater, which is famously a close relative to the word for “matter,” materia. In the Middle Ages, following an ancient tradition in the natural sciences, the matter or physical stuff out of which a child is generated was thought to originate almost entirely from the mother. (Meanwhile, the “form” was somehow contributed from the semen of the father.) The mother literally offered her own body to be the stuff out of which her child was to be made. This profound act of self-gift continues after giving birth, in the act of nursing the infant from the milk produced from her own body. Thus, in a special way, what a mother does for her child is almost indistinguishable from death, since she quite literally gives away her body for the physical formation of her child. To be a mother is to be an inherently self-sacrificing and self-immolating creature.
This is one reason why, in the Catholic tradition, Mary is often referred to as the “Co-Redemptrix” along with Christ the Redeemer. Because Christ himself was made out of the very stuff that Mary offered of herself, his sacrifice was itself but an extension of hers: she offered herself to the one who offered himself to God for the sins of humanity. In the death of Jesus, which she herself beheld from the foot of the Cross, Mary died a second time, for she had already died by giving herself away to him as his mother.
Fathers can do something similar, albeit in a less physical way. A father can offer his conscious selfhood—his ego, his knowledge, his ideals, his joys and desires, etc.—for the spiritual formation or education of his child. Of course, mothers do this too, but the mother is unique in that, in addition to giving herself spiritually, she is capable of giving herself in an absolutely physical way that a man cannot replicate, no matter how “strong” he makes himself physically. In any case, by raising and educating their children, both parents offer themselves up spiritually, as the spiritual “stuff” from which their children are to be made; and this requires a spirit of unrelenting self-sacrifice.
As a father, it is not infrequently that, whilst sitting up late at night comforting a sleepless toddler or rocking a baby back to slumber, I have had occasion to see my own children as little incarnations of God, in a manner that I think might be vaguely analogous to how Mary and Joseph doubtless saw their own child. Of course, seeing my children in this light doesn’t immediately make the job of parenting any easier; on the contrary, it is often precisely because it is difficult—because it challenges me and my wife to constantly deny ourselves—that I am led into this meditation on parenthood. Even Jesus—the perfect child—was nonetheless the occasion of a spiritual sword to Mary’s heart, as Simeon warned her in the temple. But even if it doesn’t make it any easier, it is certainly a palpable grace to be able to see my children in this way. And it is likewise a grace that parenting might thus open my heart towards God with the same tenderness of self-emptying love that I (strive to) give to my children. May it do that.