obedient handmaid legitimates the idea that women’s virtue lies in being receptively obedient to the authority of males, be they divine or human.”5 Simone de Beauvior suggests that in the narrative of the Annunciation, “For the first time in human history the mother kneels before her son; she freely accepts her inferiority. This is the supreme masculine victory, consummated in the cult of the Virgin.”6 Mary Daly argues that Mary’s role “is utterly minimal . . . She bears the Son who pre-existed her and then she adores him.”7 Daphne Hampson’s feminist theology criticizes the Mary of “biblical religion” by observing that “Biblical religion is not about Mary, who is wholly peripheral, but about Christ. Furthermore, Mary is scarcely a woman whom women today might be expected to find to be a symbol who represents them. She fulfils a typically female role: she is the one who receives from a God conceived as male. That is to say she conforms to the masculinist construction of femininity.”8
Feminist theologians, struggling with traditions that emphasize feminine submission to masculine authority, set the stage for new interpretations of the Annunciation that seek to reclaim a voice for Mary as a strong character.9 As Johnson argues, “Luke’s gospel narrative of the annunciation presents a powerful example of a young girl’s positive response to the invitation of God operating within history.”10 Johnson’s theological interpretation situates Mary within the communion of saints—within “the grace of the living”—where, she observes, to “call Mary blessed is to recognize the blessedness of ordinary people who are called to participate in the work of God in our own day.”11
Grounding their hermeneutics in the experience of marginalized women in Latin America, Ivone Gebara and Maria Clara Bingemer seek to retrieve from the biblical texts a vision of Mary as an agent—as a special revelation—of the Kingdom of God; Gebara and Bingemer see Mary as “a ‘worker’ in the harvest of the Kingdom, an active member of the movement of the poor, as is Jesus of Nazareth.”12 Gebara and Bingemer insist that the fruit of Mary’s womb is the birth of a people committed to the restoration of divine justice in the world, a justice that brings liberation to the poor: “Mary, collective figure, symbol of the faithful people from whose womb emerges the New Creation, unfolds before human beings all their infinite horizons with their indescribable possibilities.”13
Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza notes that feminist biblical scholars read the texts searching for a feminine voice of liberation, in order to transform biblical interpretation through a “hermeneutics of re-vision [which] investigates biblical texts for submerged meanings, lost voices, and authorizing visions.”14 Schüssler Fiorenza proposes that a feminist hermeneutic might rightly be “sophialogical”—one that seeks to recover the words of “Wisdom-Sophia” in the biblical text.15 For Schüssler Fiorenza, “Divine Wisdom-Sophia, as G*d the Creator and Liberator, is not exclusive of other religious traditions but is at work among all peoples, cultures, and religions. She teaches justice, prudence, and well-being . . . She embraces creation in its living beauty and manifold variety and delights in its wonders. Divine Wisdom encompasses and sustains everything and everyone.”16 Schüssler Fiorenza suggests that traces of Wisdom-Sophia are present in the image of Mary.17
Beverly Gaventa seeks to retrieve from “glimpses” of Mary in biblical and extracanonical texts a portrayal of Mary “as a model for all Christians.”18 For Gaventa, Mary, as disciple, prophet, and mother, is portrayed in the gospel as vulnerable, as reflective, and as a witness: “What we do have in these glimpses of Mary are some important aspects of what it means to be a disciple of Christ: living with vulnerability, reflecting with care on the advent of Jesus Christ, and witnessing God’s actions in the world.”19
From a feminist philosophical viewpoint, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva creatively exemplify alternative readings of the text of the Annunciation. For Luce Irigaray, the event of the Annunciation is an advent of the divine, reaching incarnation in a relationship of attentive love as two subjects—Mary and the divine—share the gift of breath.20 In the text of the Annunciation, Irigaray finds the possibility to understand Mary as a model for the incarnation of feminine divinity.21 Through her (re)reading of the narrative of the Annunciation as an encounter between two subjects, Irigaray develops a rich understanding of Mary as a divine manifestation participating in the incarnation of divinity—and becoming divine herself—by sharing an attentive love with the divine. Julia Kristeva’s “Stabat Mater” offers a creative psychoanalytic interpretation of the conception of Jesus.22 She considers the ambivalence of the Virgin Mary as a religious and cultural symbol, and the direct consequences this symbol brings to representations of the maternal body. Kristeva proposes that the pregnant maternal body—with its undifferentiated fusion of mother and child, of subject and Other—is the appropriate foundation for a heretical ethics (a “herethics”) of love. Kristeva’s “Stabat Mater” explores the significance of the Virgin Mary—as a symbol that is saturated with meaning—with an intermingling poetic reflection on her own experience of birth and motherhood.
The interpretation of the Annunciation that I develop in the following chapters is facilitated through a philosophical hermeneutic that employs an interdisciplinary interweaving of phenomenology, theology, and feminist philosophy. In biblical studies, this interpretation is somewhat untraditional as it creates a space within the discipline for constructive theological and philosophical work with a particular biblical text. In the field of phenomenology, this manuscript, through an active and engaged interdisciplinarity, extends even further its inherent theological possibilities.
Since this work is so engaged with phenomenology, chapter 1 begins with an introduction to the phenomenologies of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. The chapter considers the possibilities in their work for the development of a phenomenological theology opening from the world of visible phenomena to the invisible world of the transcendent. Husserl’s transcendental phenomenological method leads the experiencing subject from the experience of a phenomenon, through a reflection on the experiencing I, to the transcendental I and the transcendental consciousness. Although much of Husserl’s phenomenology suspends—or brackets—the transcendence of God in human experience, there are indications in his later writings of an openness of the transcendental I to the divine as the ideal telos of the intersubjective community of the transcendental We. Heidegger’s ontological phenomenology describes and interprets the appearing and self-showing of Being, as well as the openness of Dasein (the human person) to Being. In his later writings, Heidegger begins to emphasize the experience of Gelassenheit—the openness or releasement of Dasein in response to the lighting-up and coming-to-presence of Being. Heidegger inherits this understanding of Gelassenheit from mystical theology and, while Heidegger’s understanding of the releasement of Dasein to Being is primarily secular, it is analogous to the experience of releasement to the divine that is described in mystical theology. This chapter also introduces Dominique Janicaud’s argument that the turning of phenomenology to theology is a transgression of the phenomenological method.23
