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Behind the Sex of God (Women’s Issues (Ready Reference series))

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The Work

In Behind the Sex of God, Carol Ochs discusses philosophical systems based on matriarchy, patriarchy, or androgyny as means to understanding the nature of a deity, ethics, the material world, and the meaning of life and death. In her discussion of matriarchy, Ochs accepts the theory that Western religious systems were originally matriarchal. According to Ochs, matriarchal systems primarily valued the blood bond between mother and child, thus emphasizing relationship as a primary value. Matriarchal systems also valued the material world, saw death as the end of existence, worshiped a female deity, and imagined a cyclical view of time. On the other hand, patriarchal systems did not consider blood ties to be of greatest importance and opted instead for a system based on abstract ethical principals. Patriarchy valued reason over material creation and thus emphasized a spiritual world that was beyond the material world. In patriarchy, death was the entry into the spiritual world, the deity was male, and time was viewed as linear.

Ochs elaborates her theory of the importance of blood ties by comparing the matriarchal traditions surrounding the Greek goddess Demeter and the Eleusinian Mysteries with the patriarchal Judeo-Christian tradition as illustrated, for example, in the binding of Isaac by his father, Abraham (Genesis 22). According to Ochs, the blood tie between Demeter and her daughter Persephone becomes the basis for salvation within the mysteries. On the other hand, in the Hebrew Bible narrative of the binding of Isaac, the blood tie between parent and child is superseded by the blood sacrifice that Abraham is willing to offer on behalf of his ethical commitment to God. This example illustrates the matriarchal/patriarchal dualism that Ochs seeks to avoid in her monistic theory.

Ochs also rejects an androgenous alternative that would combine the experiences of matriarchy and patriarchy or male and female in the image of the deity. She acknowledges the historical necessity of reclaiming matriarchal thinking but claims that this historical necessity is not a metaphysical necessity.

Ochs questions whether maleness and femaleness were originally in opposition to each other. By rejecting this dualism, she proposes a position of theistic monism. In this system, the deity is not separate from all other reality. God is not father, mother, or a combination of the two. God is neither separate from the material world nor defined by the world. In challenging the matriarchal and patriarchal dualism, Ochs questions the implications of all dualistic thinking in Western philosophical systems.