source

From Stanford Encyclopedia, Feminist Philosophy of Religion, by Mary Frankelbury, Dartmouth College

The early Daly carved out a philosophy of religion, as found in her Beyond God the Father: Towards a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (1973 [1985]). Ultimate reality is conceptualized not only as Verb, expressed in the present participle “Be-ing,” but as an “intransitive Verb” in which all being participates (1973, 34; 1978, 23; 1984, 423). In these terms, Daly provides an ontological analysis of the urge toward transcendence, or participation in be-ing. Here the urge to transcendence is raised to the cosmic scale, and the vision of peace, justice, and ecological harmony that Daly projects bears a close resemblance to prophetic biblical texts. “Quintessence” expresses another metaphor for the be-ing in which we live, love, create, are. Daly says that Quintessence “is that which has been drawn on in my writing and searching. The quest for Quintessence is the most Desperate response I know to the call of the Wild. It means throwing one’s life as far as it will go” (1998, 4). She analyzes Quintessence as the highest essence, above the four elements of fire, air, water, and earth; it is what permeates all nature, the Spirit that gives life and vitality to the whole universe. Although it can be blocked or partly destroyed by violence and pornography, poverty, racism, medical and scientific exploitation, and the threat of ecological and nuclear destruction, its apparent invincibility imparts an important measure of transcendence.

The later Daly’s trilogy developed a modified, more immanent, theory of the divine, beginning with Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (1978), and continuing through Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy (1984) and most of Quintessence—Realizing the Archaic Future (1998). Here the dialectic shifts subtly from the earlier balance maintained between immanence and transcendence, and tips in favor of a divine that is purely immanent within the female Self. Rather than being the divine milieu within which the self lives, the divine is only alive within the self. In GynEcology the emphasis is on the power “to spin” meaning out of women’s own divine orbs and to find the power of being within one’s self.