complexity of this history. She admits (31) that “The intensity with which embodiment,
gender and the unconscious are wilfully ignored and repressed in much Anglo-American
philosophy of religion, and the anxiety such repression bespeaks, would be a significant
study in itself,” which she cannot here explore in detail. Her discussion (in the same
chapter) of the purported identification of the “male” philosophical subject with God in
analytic philosophy of religion is equally brief: three very different scholars (Richard
Swinburne, Keith Ward, and Vincent Brümmer) are taken to task for an “unproblematic”
assumption that “God isa relatively straightforward analogate of a human person” (29).
The criticism has a point, especially in the case of Swinburne's earlier work,^6 but, as we
shall see, Jantzen will not have recourse to a sliding scale of “analogy” to help either her
or those whom she accuses off the hook of the “literal” identification between the human
and the divine.
It is in fact somewhat later in Jantzen's book, in connection with her critique of the
apophatic, that she launches her attack on “analogical” speech for God (1998, 173–77).
Again, one cannot help wondering whether this ploy is in her own best feminist interests;
for might one not think that a nuanced account of how God profoundly differs from
humans—ontologically, and thus also in our mode of linguistic apprehension—would
help the deconstruction of “male” idolatry? But in fact, for Jantzen, the appeal to
“analogical” speech can only be subject to the same hermeneutic of suspicion that
attended her dismissal of “negative theology.” Her (frankly, eccentric) reading of
“analogy” in Thomas Aquinas and his various modern followers starts with the assertion
that “the doctrine of analogy[shows] how the masculinist imaginary[forecloses] the
divine horizon by trying to pin down the sense and reference of words about God” (175,
my emphasis). She goes on to assert, even more oddly, that “philosophers of religion who
appeal to analogy” fail to notice Thomas's “debt to Pseudo-Dionysius.” Whether or not
this is true, it would not help them, according to Jantzen, if they did notice the debt, since
she has already claimed to reveal the fatal “masculinism” in Dionysius's own valorization
of “men's minds” (177).^7
Jantzen's final criticisms of analytic philosophers of religion circle back, more explicitly,
to the question of necrophilia. In her discussion of “salvation” in philosophy of religion,
Jantzen claims that the doctrine is central to Christian, especially Protestant, thought,
precisely because it is “embedded in an imaginary of death” (1998, 159). “Patriarchal”
interests in “salvific” individual rewards and punishments repress the material and the
maternal, she claims, and should be con
end p.501
trasted with a feminist focus on natality. Her attack here on John Hick (1973, 1976) for
his well-known interests in “salvation” in the context of world religions seems a little
strained granted Hick's own “liberal” reduction of metaphysical belief structures to
ethical or pragmatist alternatives, a ploy that Jantzen herself endorses (see 1998, 168–69).
More predictable, doubtless, are Jantzen's objections to the way that the problem of evil
has classically been handled in analytic philosophy of religion. As we might expect, she
finds the emphasis on the “free will defence,” and especially the “higher order goods
theory,” morally repugnant as strategies of theodicy; the “conundrum” of the problem of
evil “does not arise,” she avers, “unless the attributes of omnipotence, omniscience, and