Thanks Patrick. I understand the distinction you are making between grammatical gender and human gender. Why we humans do this is a matter of study in the field of psycholinguistics; I have taken a psycholinguistics course about 20 years ago.
I heard that St. Epiphanius of Salamis (314-403) asserts that there are motherly qualities to the Holy Spirit. I heard it on Catholic Answers as a passing comment- have no references.
So, I suppose that if every father receives his fatherhood from the one Father, every mother receives her motherhood from??? The Holy Spirit?
Just to expand on/correct my earlier post: to be more exact, Hebrew
rûaḥ is one of those special nouns that can either be feminine or masculine. In the OT it is mostly considered as a feminine noun (say, in Genesis 1:2 “the
rûaḥ of God was hovering over the face of the waters”), but there are also a few instances where the word is grammatically masculine (for example, Genesis 6:3 “My
rûaḥ shall not abide in man forever…” or 2 Samuel 23:2 “The
rûaḥ of Yhwh speaks by me…”)
St. Epiphanius spoke Syriac, a form of Aramaic, which itself is a language related to Hebrew. (Arabic is another related language; all of these are known as the Semitic languages.) As in Hebrew, the Syriac word
rūḥāʾ (
rūḥō) is grammatically a ‘she’; BTW so is the Arabic
rūḥ. This is why in some very early Christian literature written in Syriac, you can sometimes even find the Holy Spirit addressed as a “mother.” The apocryphal work known as the
Acts of Thomas (3rd century) is peppered with such references. From roughly the same period, Aphrahat (c. 270-c. 345) wrote this once (
Demonstrations 18.10 ‘On Virginity and Marital Continence’) commenting on Genesis 2:24:
Who is it who leaves father and mother to take a wife? The meaning is as follows: as long as a man has not taken a wife, he loves and reveres God his Father and the Holy Spirit his Mother, and he has no other love. But when a man takes a wife, then he leaves his (true) Father and his Mother.
After the 5th century, the use of terminology was reduced to a simile, under Greek influence: Syriac writers like Epiphanius occasionally compared the Holy Spirit to a mother, and liked to use the verb “to hover” (
rahhef; cf. Genesis 1:2; Deuteronomy 32:11) to refer to the Spirit’s action. Nowadays, the proper noun
rūḥo qadisho/
rūḥā’ d-qudshā’ “Holy Spirit” is treated as masculine. Perhaps the “mother” imagery of the Holy Spirit wasn’t pursued further because pagan cults worshipping divine triads consisting of a father, mother and son was widespread in ancient Mesopotamia (for example, “our Lord and our Lady and the Son of our Lord and Lady”): to an outsider, calling the Holy Spirit “mother” combined with a belief in the Father and the Son wouldn’t make Christianity any different from these religions.
Of course, again, this doesn’t really indicate much about the Spirit’s femininity. After all, the Greek masculine noun
Logos, the “Word” (as in, “In the beginning was the Word…”) was translated literally in Syriac with its equivalent, the feminine
melta/
melto, but as time went on
melta itself when it means the “Word” came to be considered masculine as well. In any case, there are even some works where female imagery is symbolic applied to God Himself: the Godhead compared to a wetnurse (courtesy of St. Ephrem, another Syrian writer) and the Father’s breasts being milked! Anyways, Ephrem also warned:
If someone concentrates his attentions
solely on the metaphors used of God’s Majesty,
he abuses and misrepresents that Majesty
by means of these very metaphors with which God has clothed himself.
Apparently some Jewish Christian sects also considered the Holy Spirit along the same lines. In a lost work which the writer Origen (and St. Jerome) identifies as the “Gospel of the Hebrews” has Jesus narrating in its version of the temptation in the desert: “Even so did my mother, the Holy Spirit, take me by one of my hairs and carry me away on to the great mountain of Tabor.”
A gnostic work, the
Gospel according to Philip (2nd century), attacks the orthodox idea of Mary conceiving by the power of the Spirit under the line of reasoning that if the Spirit is female, how could ‘She’ ever make Mary pregnant?
Some said, “Mary conceived by the Holy Spirit.” They are in error. They do not know what they are saying. When did a woman ever conceive by a woman? Mary is the virgin whom no power defiled. She is a great anathema to the Hebrews, who are the apostles and the apostolic men. This virgin whom no power defiled …] the powers defile themselves. And the Lord would not have said “My Father who is in Heaven” (Mt 16:17), unless he had had another father, but he would have said simply “My father”.
主の平和があなたにありますように
(Spanish is one of those languages that are descended from Latin like French or Italian or Portuguese, which we would call the Romance languages. Latin itself had three grammatical genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. The neuter was lost when Latin evolved into the Romance languages, with the result that only the masculine and the feminine remain.)
東日本 = Higashi-Nihon = East Japan.
.uoy htiw eb droL eht fo ecaep ehT