God Has No Sex

I’ve read that Texas Republicans have attacked and mocked James Talarico because at some point he affirmed that God has no gender. Sympathizing with the spirit of what Talarico intends to convey, nevertheless I want to disagree with him a bit. As I see it, God does have a gender in the fundamental sense of “gender.” He is conceived to be male because in the social discourse in which we participate to be male is to be powerful and wise and protective—all the things we want to attribute to God. But I do not think that God has a sex. I take my argument from a general sense of Christian dogma, with John Milton as my guide in the process. However, I take the title of this post from a barber/beauty shop I used to go to when I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The shop was called “Mitchell’s Croppers—Hair Has No Sex.”

 

As it turns out, Mitchell, assuming that such a person was the proprietor of the place, was wrong. Hair does have a sex, marked by the XX or XY chromosomes or whatever variant of chromosomal sex markers an individual might have. But the spirit of the name was just right, I thought. Why distinguish one haircut artist from another just on the basis of the clients they served?

 

Spirit itself, almost by definition, seems to me rightly to have no sex. I’m not given to Platonic dualism as a general proposition, but nonetheless surely spirit is spirit precisely because it is not a physical phenomenon. Lord knows how many nineteenth century experimenters set out to discover the existence of spirit by weighing the body of a dying patient just before and just after the person died. The experimental design was crude, but its purpose clear: the difference in weight in the before-and-after weighing would indicate the mass of the substance that rose up to the heavenly or sank to the infernal.

 

No experiment yielded a quantifiable result. The inference? Assuming that indeed there does exist a spirit that departs the body at death, then that spirit is entirely immaterial. It’s a bit of a tautology, I think, but the point is clear: spirit is disembodied. And since sex is an eminently embodied characteristic, it follows that spirit can have no sex.

 

In Paradise Lost Milton underscores the distinction between the material and the immaterial. When he has the archangel Raphael explain to still unfallen Adam the architecture of Creation, he celebrates the mutuality of the “two great sexes” that, he says, “animate the world.”

 

To my mind the poem makes it clear that the complicated relationship of male and female is the key to preserving Paradise. Unfortunately, Adam fails to understand the relationship, and his misapprehension leads directly to the fallen condition of humanity after he and Eve eat the forbidden fruit. The misunderstanding derives from Adam’s assumption of male superiority. When he affirms that superiority to Raphael, the archangel “with contracted brow” chastises him. He had asked the Son for an equal, and an equal is what the Son had created, says Raphael.

 

The point is subtly expressed and verges on the ambiguous: “Weigh with her thyself; / Then value.” In context, however, it seems to me that Raphael simply urges Adam to value in Eve exactly what he values in himself, the capacity to reason and to come to rational conclusions. Extolling her material beauty, enthralling himself to her body, is an error that

 

. . . attribut[es] overmuch to things

Less excellent, as thou thyself perceivest.

For, what admirest thou, what transports thee so,

An outside? fair, no doubt, and worthy well

Thy cherishing, thy honouring, and thy love;

Not thy subjection.

 

Although “half abashed,” Adam takes the correction well. He has been seeking knowledge from Raphael from the moment that Raphael arrives in Eden, and the archangel’s mild tongue lashing serves to further his knowledge. Nonetheless, to turn the conversation into a less confrontational path, Adam then asks, “Love not the heavenly Spirits, and how their love / Express they? by looks only? or do they mix / Irradiance, virtual or immediate touch?” In other words, what’s angelic intercourse all about?

 

Raphael blushes, “with a smile that glowed / Celestial rosy red,” but answers that

 

Whatever pure thou in the body enjoyest,

(And pure thou wert created) we enjoy

In eminence; and obstacle find none

Of membrane, joint, or limb, exclusive bars;

Easier than air with air, if Spirits embrace,

Total they mix, union of pure with pure

Desiring, nor restrained conveyance need,

As flesh to mix with flesh, or soul with soul.

 

Spirit has no “membrane, joint, or limb.” It has no bodily parts because spirit is not embodied. Angelic coition is the complete interpenetration of spirit with spirit, more easily than air mixes with air.

 

It’s not until the nineteenth century romanticizes heaven that angels are presented as female. Before then, all the angels are gendered masculine, at least by name. Raphael. Michael. Gabriel. Uriel. Azrael. And so on. Since that’s the case, assuming that the names denote the angels’ sex and not their gender makes what Raphael contemplates in his blushing description of angelic coition into a rampant homosexual extravaganza in heaven. But, again, there are no body parts involved. Angels may be gendered, for the same reason that God is gendered. But like God, angels have no sex.

 

Keep in mind too that although angels may not be material, they do have substance. They are created beings, creatures of God’s prolific creativity. God himself—I use the gendered pronoun quite deliberately here—is not created, not a creature. To conceive of God in those terms is a bit like thinking about the universe that modern physics has constructed for us and trying to figure out what there was before the Big Bang. The conventional answer is that that is an illogical question because the Big Bang produced spacetime, which means that there was no time before the Big Bang and so to ask what came before makes no sense. Similarly, how can we conceive of a being who existed before there was substance, who is therefore not only immaterial but insubstantial, not a creature at all?

 

My imagination fails at that point. But it follows from that insubstantiality that the absence of sex applies a fortiori, as the logicians say, when it comes to God. The gendering of God’s insubstantiality is like the gendering of the angels, a matter of how we humans understand power and its adjuncts. But the gendering of angels or of God is about us, not about them.