Abstract
Feminist philosopher and theologian Mary Daly describes her overarching theological methodology—despite her disdain for methodologies as “methodologicide”—as “Piracy.” Among all of those influential on her thought—Aquinas, Jacques Maritain, Simone de Beauvoir, Nelle Morton, Susan Griffin, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Nietzsche, and the death of God theologians—it is Paul Tillich who has the most enduring and significant impact on Daly.1 As a “Pirate” and “Alchemist,” Daly gives these figures some credit but acknowledges that she often appropriates and misappropriates their ideas for her own playful usage. A “Call to Piracy” for Daly is to poach and “accumulate” such intellectual “treasures of knowledge that had been hidden from my Tribe.” Although Daly simultaneously exhibits a disdain and respect for Tillich, she engages no other thinker so directly throughout her writing. She refers to Tillich in both Outercourse and Quintessence as a thinker “used” as a “spring-board.”2 In doing so, Laurel Schneider suggests, Daly has initiated “a profound and invaluable critique of the limitations and distortions embedded in his thinking.”3
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Richard Grigg, Gods after God (Albany, NY: SUNY University Press, 2006), 15; Mary Daly, in an interview with Susan Brindle, “No Man’s Land,” What Is Enlightenment? 16 (1999), online;
Daly, The Church and the Second Sex, ed. Harper Colophon (New York: Harper, 1975), 185;
Daly, “The Problem with Speculative Theology,” The Thomist 29 (1965), 215.
Other significant influences include Susan B. Anthony, Teilhard de Chardin, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Bishop James Pike, and Hildegard of Bingen (Linda Olds, “Metaphors of Hierarchy and Interrelatedness in Hildegard of Bingen and Mary Daly,” Listening 24.1 [1989], 65).
Mary Daly, Outercourse (New York: Harper San Francisco, 1992), 157, 129, 159; ibid., Quintessence (Boston: Beacon, 1998), 245–246 n. 25; ibid., Pure Lust (New York: Harper San Francisco, 1992), 29n.
Laurel Schneider, “From New Being to Meta-Being,” Soundings 75.2/3 (1992), 421.
Hannah Tillich, From Time to Time (New York: Stein, 1973), 241; Daly, Gyn/Ecology, 378.
Daly, Gyn/Ecology, 1991 ed. (Aylesburg, England: Women’s, 1991), 94–95. It is also worth mentioning that Daly has a clear respect for Hannah Tillich and her courage to write about her own experiences after Paul Tillich’s death—Daly quotes Hannah Tillich several times and uses Rollo May’s smear campaign to prevent her from publishing her books as crucial examples of patriarchal power attempting to silence women (Daly, Outercourse, 101; Gyn/Ecology, 435–436 n. 40, 442 n. 1;
Mary Daly and Jane Caputi, Webster’s First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language (Boston, Beacon, 1987), 189–190;
cf. Marcella Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology (London: Routledge, 2000), 88;
Rachel Baard, “Original Grace, Not Destructive Grace,” Bulletin of the North American Paul Tillich Society 30.4 (2004), 8).
Wanda Berry, “Feminist Theology,” Feminist Interpretations of Mary Daly, ed. Sarah Hoagland and Marilyn Frye (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 2000), 34.
Daly, Outercourse, 136. Cf. Mary Daly, “The Courage to See,” The Christian Century 83 (1971), 1108–1111.
See, for example, Christopher Rodkey, In the Horizon of the Infinite (PhD diss., Drew University, 2008), 210–215.
Daly, “The Courage to Leave,” John Cobb’s Theology in Process, ed. David Griffin and Thomas Altizer (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1977), 90.
Daly, “Abortion and Sexual Caste,” Commonweal 95 (1972), 417; ibid., “The Courage to Leave,” 85.
Darla Fjeld, Gender and Divine Transcendence (PhD diss., Drew University, 1974), 224, 240.
Mary Daly, “Mary Daly on the Church,” Commonweal 91 (1969), 215; Schneider “Courage”, 69.
Mary Daly, “A Short Essay on Hearing and on the Qualitative Leap of Radical Feminism,” Horizons 2 (1975), 121, 123; ibid., “The Spiritual Revolution,” 170.
Margorie Suchocki, “The Idea of God in Feminist Philosophy,” Hypatia 9.4 (1994), 59–60.
Christopher Rodkey, “Paul Tillich’s Pantheon of Theisms: An Invitation to Think Theonomously,” Models of God and Alternate Ultimate Realities, ed. Jeanine Dillerand Asa Kasher. (Dordrecht: Springer, 2013), 489–490.
Paul Tillich, Love, Power, and Justice (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), quoted by Daly in Pure Lust, 276–277.
Catherine Keller, From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism and the Self (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), 78, citing Daly, Gyn/Ecology, 79.
Catherine Keller, God and Power: Counter-Apocalyptic Journeys (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2005), 86; Cf. ibid., Apocalypse Now and Then (Boston: Beacon, 1996), 246–247.
Marilyn Frye, “Famous Lust Words,” The Women’s Review of Books 1.11 (August 1984), 4.
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2015 Russell Re Manning
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Rodkey, C.D. (2015). The Nemesis Hex. In: Manning, R.R. (eds) Retrieving the Radical Tillich. Radical Theologies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137373830_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137373830_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-67767-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-37383-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave Religion & Philosophy CollectionPhilosophy and Religion (R0)