goodness are explicitly accepted as those of the God of the western onto-theological
tradition” (260). Only, in other words, if “God” looks suspiciously like the male moral
agent of the “symbolic” consciousness will the arguments fall out as they do: “By making
[the problem of evil] an intellectual problem to be solved, concentration on the
adequacyof the preferred solution can take up all the time and energy that could
otherwise be devoted to doing something about the suffering itself” (260).
Once again denouncing such purportedly “masculinist” presumptions, Jantzen feels free
to move on at the end of her book to enunciate her own explicitly “pantheistic” projection
of the “feminine divine.” Although she has drawn heavily on the thought of Feuerbach,
Heidegger, Derrida, and Levinas in the course of her book, she finally finds all these—
her male “pantheon” of continental heroes—inadequate when it comes to the “Western”
masculinist “dread of death” (Jantzen 1998, 129), in which, she claims, even these
scholars share. Some help, however, is provided by the French feminist Julia Kristeva,
whose analysis of the transgressive potential of the “semiotic”—expressed in poetry,
music, childbirth, or Mariology—suggests ways of escaping the dominating power of the
“male imaginary” and the “change of Gestalt to an imaginary of natality” (Jantzen 1998,
200).^8 Finally, Jantzen hangs her hope on the possibility of such a redefinition of the
divine.
This detailed account of Jantzen's argument has indicated how complex and rich is her
network of appeals to continental philosophy and feminist theory, but also how deep is
her resistance to the discourses of analytic philosophy of religion. Can that discipline
represent anything but a whipping boy for Jantzen? That is the question we must face as
we now attempt a brief assessment of her book. In doing this, we shall point forward to
those themes that Pamela Sue Anderson will treat rather differently, themes that will have
crucial implications for our interest in a possible future rapprochement between analytic
philosophy of religion and feminist theory.
Perhaps the most puzzling aspect of Jantzen's book, first, is the ambivalence one detects
in her adherence to the Lacanian theory of the male symbolic and to Irigaray's and
Kristeva's critical enunciation of the same theme. There are times when Jantzen
announces the Rule of the Father as if there were no hope of shifting
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its influence, at one point (1998, 217) declaring it impossible even for good-hearted
feminist women to escape its power and linguistic constraints altogether: “We speak in
our fathers' tongue.” Because the pessimistic theory of language as intrinsically
phallocentric is so general as to fall foul of the Popperian principle of empirical
nonfalsifiability, Jantzen rests her whole case on a dangerously fragile fundament. Yet
her own blanket dismissal of “empiricism” would presumably disallow any investigation
of this matter according to evidences. But what if we were to challenge the theory of the
repressive masculinism of all systems of language? Would we not merely underline or
reinscribe the mutual incomprehension of discourses that currently exists between
analytic philosophy of religion and French feminist psycholinguistics? But it is precisely
that incomprehension that we seek to overcome, and Jantzen, ironically, does little to help
us here. Indeed, she herself shows considerable indecision about the extent to which even
the tactics of French feminism can indicate a liberating escape route from Lacan's