Maternalisation is materialisation—A happy, and cosmic, Mothering Sunday to you all!

Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus”

A short “thought for the day” offered to the Cambridge Unitarian Church as part of the Sunday Service of Mindful Meditation

(Click on this link to hear a recorded version of the following piece)

 

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As some of you may now know, in a couple of weeks, I am giving a talk at the General Assembly of Unitarian & Free Christian Churches for the British Chapter of the International Association for Religious Freedom on the subject of “Free-Religion: A Japanese Yuniterian (sic) Perspective.”

Naturally, in preparing for that I have been re-reading and revising some of the key texts by the most important twentieth-century Japanese Yuniterian, Imaoka Shini’ichirō (1881-1988) that I have translated over the past two-and-a-half years. And, in an essay from 1959 called, “What kind of church is Kiitsu Kyokai?” (“Returning-to-One Fellowship” or, sometimes, “Unitarian Church”), I was struck again by the fact that he suggested the “essence,” or actually perhaps, better, the “pith and marrow” of religion (宗教の神髄) lies in “the great life of free and selfless creative evolution” (自由で無得な創造的進化の大生命), “a vast cosmic life force” (宇宙的大生命) that he thought was eternal (永遠) and to which he, you and me, and all things, always-already belong.

As a religious naturalist myself — i.e. as a person who finds their religious meaning in the natural world rather than in some supernatural world or being — I find Imaoka-sensei’s idea of the essence of religion as being the “great life of free and selfless creative evolution,” very amenable indeed.

But, like most human beings, sometimes (and more often than I sometimes care to admit) I find it helpful to personify such an idea, which, despite its beauty — and I think truth — can be a little highfalutin and abstract. Consequently, I’m very much with one of the most influential modern new materialists, political theorists and philosophers, Jane Bennett, who expressed her naturalistic belief in the vibrancy and vitality of matter, and that, therefore, “a careful course of anthropomorphization can help reveal that vitality, even though it resists full translation and exceeds my comprehensive grasp” (Vibrant Matter, Duke University Press, 2010, p. 122).

So, my question today is what might an appropriate and careful personification of the “great life of free and selfless creative evolution” look like? Well, today on Mothering Sunday, I want to suggest that it looks like the 1st-century Roman poet Lucretius’ depiction of Venus, who in his wonderful poem, “On the Nature of Things,” functions as both the mother [māter] of all things and also the very matter [māteria] of all things (including herself as mother, of course). 

Let me try to explain . . .

It is, perhaps, helpful to start with the ancient myth of Venus’ birth and to have before you as an aide-memoire Botticelli’s glorious painting, “The Birth of Venus” (see above). In what follows, remember that Venus is the Roman name of the goddess whom the Greeks knew as Aphrodite.

So, according to Hesiod, while Ouranos (Sky) was having sexual intercourse with his mate Gaia (Earth), he was ambushed and castrated by his son Kronos, who cast his father’s genitals into the sea. Foam issued from them and, within the foam, a maiden grew. The genitals came eventually to land at Cypress, where Aphrodite stepped ashore (William Hansen, Classical Mythology, OUP 2004, p. 105). In Botticelli’s painting, Venus comes ashore, much less gruesomely, in a beautiful giant scallop shell. It’s important to notice that all the images contained in the painting (and in Lucretius’ poem) are evocations of the vibrant, creative, flowing, swirling, folding, and weaving of the flux of matter. An obvious example in the painting is the depiction of Zephyr, the wind god, blowing Venus ashore. But, perhaps less obviously, we also see this in the fact that Venus is made of the foam of the ocean. Here is the philosopher Thomas Nail’s description of this in the first volume of his trilogy about Lucretius’ poem:

“Bubbles and froth are produced when the continuous flows of the ocean fold back over themselves, trapping air within their pleat. The fold gives the flows of air and water depth, extension and spatiality. The fold produces the appearance of unity, extension and stability, grounded in the continuity of a heterogeneous flux — the ‘Iridescent-throned Aphrodite’ as Sappho writes” (Nail, Lucretius 1, p. 27).

Secondly, there is the shell. Nail continues:

“. . . the most vulva-like of all seashells . . . the scallop shell is an organism, like other seashells, that gathers in the liquid flows of calcium carbonate from the periphery towards a place of central condensation. The seashell is formed by gathering these pedetic mineral flows and folding them together and over one another again and again. The shell, therefore, introduces a “klin”, a curvature, inclination, or desire, into the chaotic flows of the ocean” (ibid, pp. 27-28).

Thirdly, there is the idea of “space”. As Nail observes:

“It is the “klin” or curve of desire in Venus’ shell that introduces space into the chaos of flux” (ibid, p. 28).

Now, space is vital here, because if there were only ever the chaos of flux, nothing could come to be in the way things clearly do. But, wonder of wonders, the protective, enclosing klin, the curve of Venus’ shell, reminds us that the chaos of flux is always-already producing local and regional stabilities that gift us with the universe of things in which we live and move and have our being.

Importantly, although Lucretius holds Venus up as a goddess in this fashion, she is not understood by him as being some kind of supernatural being, standing outside nature making the world but, instead, as a way by and through which a person can more easily meditate upon the way nature-natures, i.e. how the world continually makes and remakes itself. Lucretius’ depiction of Venus in his poem is a poetic supreme fiction which aims both to help us understand, and be passionate about, the way nature-natures and how her mothering hand, which is always-already making and touching us and all things, is simultaneously, also always-already “being touched back by what it touches” (cf. Maurice Merleau-Ponty in Nail: Lucretius 1. p 88).

As Nail reminds us, Venus is:

“. . . the mother [māter] of Aeneas, from which the Latin words māteriēs [material] and māteria [matter] also come. Māter is also the tree or matrix, the source of the tree’s growth, whose Indo-European root is described by the Greek word hūlē, meaning tree and matter. First philosophy, for Lucretius, begins with the mother, with matter itself, with the creative power of matter itself to produce all things, the aeneadum” (ibid, p. 23).

Nail also points out that Venus becomes the material mother-goddess, and so the concept of māteriēs “both maternalizes matter and materializes the mother at the same time”:

“In other words, the mother of all creation is herself made of the same matter that she creates. Her materiality is the same materiality of the world. The mother of matter is the matter of the mother. Her creation is, therefore, the process of matter’s own process of materialization. Maternalization is materialization” (ibid, p. 24).

Of course, in one important sense, Venus cannot be said to exist as a discrete, identifiable entity whom I, you, or Lucretius, could meet in the temple, town or countryside. However, because everything about her as a poetic supreme fiction speaks so well of the way we are coming to think our world works, she is for me a meaningful and beautiful personification before whom my expressions of gratitude for her bounty can be expressed, and my poetic, ethical, and natural science-related thoughts and meditations can usefully and creatively flow, fold, and weave. As Diogenes Laërtius says in his chapter about Lucretius’ greatest philosophical influence, Epicurus, “The wise person will set up votive images” (Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Book X, §131), I freely confess that in my study, and in the Manse garden next door, you will find multiple depictions of Venus set up around the place before which I often find myself stopping, thinking, pondering, wondering, and, yes, offering-up a prayer of gratitude.

Now, you may think that there really is no need to personify the way nature-natures, let alone actually set up a votive image of the goddess Venus. Well, you are probably right, you don’t need to do this. But, along with countless other human beings through the many hundreds of thousands of years of human existence, I do feel such a need and I continue to think that an appropriate, poetic supreme fiction, when knowingly understood as fictive, but nevertheless wilfully believed in or contemplated, can usefully help me — help us — both better understand and fully enter intra-actively into the world and draw forth from it great meaning and beauty.

So, for what it is worth, as far as I am concerned, depicted thus, Venus is for me the perfect personification of the “the great life of free and selfless creative evolution,” the “vast cosmic life force” of which Imoaka Shin’ichirō-sensei spoke of as being the “pith and marrow” of religion. And this means that, today, on Mothering Sunday, in addition to raising a toast to my earthly mother, I have no hesitation now in raising another glass of aqua vitae to toast and give hearty and joyous thanks to the Mother of Matter, creatrix, bountiful Venus.

A happy, and cosmic, Mothering Sunday to you all!