This essay, originally presented for an Adult Forum at St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Barrington Hills, IL, is an edited compilation of excerpts from two sources, with additions to provide details and context. These primary sources are: Sebastian Brock, 1990, The Holy Spirit as Feminine in Early Syriac Literature (http://www.womenpriests.org/theology/brock.asp) and Steve Santini, 2001, The Feminine Gender of the Holy Spirit (http://www.musterion8.com/feminine.html).
For Christians, God has been revealed as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.
This revelation is rooted in Jesus' history as recorded in the canonical Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
That Jesus called God "Abba, Father (or Papa, Daddy)" is part of that history.
And that Jesus was incarnate as a male is also part of that history— although the Nicene Creed in the original Greek insists that Jesus' significance lies in his having been "made human (anthropos)" rather than male (aner).
These first two points almost require masculine pronouns for God as Father (though not God as Trinity— see Genesis 1:26-27, below), and Jesus as Son.
What follows are points that almost require feminine pronouns for God as Holy Spirit.
Let's begin with Scripture, following Richard Hooker's formulation in his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1594, 1597):
"What Scripture doth plainly deliver, to that the first place of credit and obedience is due; the next whereunto is whatsoever any man can necessarily conclude by the force of reason; after these the voice of the church succeedeth."
In other words, Scripture, reason, and Church tradition, in that order, are authoritative sources.
We start at the very beginning of Scripture with the first part of Genesis 1:26:
Genesis 1:26: "Then God said, Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness. . . ."
The original Hebrew uses plural pronouns because the Hebrew word for "God" is a plural noun: elohiym.
The New Revised Standard Version [NRSV] of the Bible translates the Hebrew lowercase adam as "humankind."
The uppercase Adam doesn't occur until Genesis 2:20, where it is used as a proper noun for the "first" human being in that chapter's alternate creation story.
Genesis 1:27: "So God created humankind in their image, in the image of God they created them; male and female they created them."
Because the Hebrew text continues to use the plural word for "God," I have changed the NRSV's masculine pronouns to gender neutral plural pronouns.
Christians who know God as a Trinity of Persons should not be astonished by the use of plural pronouns!
Turning to the Gospels, Jesus used feminine images for God:
Luke 15:8: "Jesus said, 'Or what woman having ten silver coins. . . .'"
In chapter 15 of his Gospel, Luke brings together 3 of Jesus' parables: the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son; or perhaps more accurately, the finding shepherd, the searching woman, and the watching father. Parables are like jokes— the first named is the protagonist, and typically a parable's first-named actor is a stand-in for God. In these three parables, the shepherd, the woman, and the father all represent God.
Luke 13:34 and Matthew 23:37: "Jesus said, 'How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!'"
Many Christians in the succeeding generations of the Church reasoned out the implications of Scripture, and their reflections formed the tradition of the Church.
Gregory of Nyssa, one of the principle architects of Trinitarian theology, delivered 15 sermons on the Song of Songs (also called the Song of Solomon) around AD 390.
Reasoning from 1 Corinthians 8:6— "for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist"— Gregory wrote, "There is one Mother of all things which exist, the cause of their being. . . ."
and
"The Deity is neither male nor female; how after all could any such thing be thought of in the case of the Deity, when even for us human beings we all become one in Christ, putting off all signs of this difference along with the whole of the old humanity? For this reason, every name we invent is of the same adequacy for indicating the unutterable Nature, since neither male nor female defiles the meaning of the inviolate Nature."
Jerome, around AD 420, quotes a passage from the apocryphal Gospel according to the Hebrews where Jesus speaks about "my mother the Holy Spirit."
Jerome then observes that this should scandalize no one, because "Spirit" is feminine in Hebrew, masculine in "our [Latin] language," and neuter in Greek, "for in the deity there is no gender."
Continuing Jerome's note about grammatical gender, ruha, the standard Aramaic word for "spirit," is, like ruah, the Hebrew word for "spirit," grammatically feminine.
What effect did grammatical gender have on how early Christians understood the role of the Holy Spirit, for example in the image of the Holy Spirit as "mother?"
In what ways did their grammatical gender affect other images and metaphors for the Spirit?
To begin answering these questions, here's a survey of several languages and their differences in gender use:
(1) In English, gender is for persons, and there are masculine, feminine, and neuter pronouns (he, she, and it). Articles, adjectives, and verbs are genderless.
(2) In French, gender affects things as well as persons, and there are masculine and feminine forms for pronouns, articles, and adjectives.
3) Greek is similar to French in that gender affects things as well as persons, except that Greek, like English, has masculine, feminine, and neuter forms.
(4) Hebrew, Aramaic, and Syriac have masculine and feminine forms for pronouns, adjectives, and verbs, but not for articles.
(5) In certain languages, such as Armenian, no grammatical gender exists and a single pronoun covers both "he" and "she."
This difference in the role played by grammatical gender means that the surprise English speakers might experience when hearing spirit described as "she," would be mirrored by, for example, Syrians hearing spirit described as "he."
In the earliest Syriac literature, up to about AD 400, the Holy Spirit is always treated grammatically as feminine. This is the norm in the three main monuments of early Syriac literature, the Acts of Thomas, and the writings of Aphrahat and Ephrem.
Beginning in the early fifth century, some people began to object to treating the Holy Spirit as grammatically feminine, and so they began to treat the word ruha as masculine whenever it referred to the Holy Spirit.
By the sixth century, ruha is regularly treated as masculine when it refers to the Holy Spirit, although the feminine form persists in some liturgical texts and poetry.
This three-stage development is reflected in the history of the biblical translations.
In the Old Syriac translation of the Gospels, dating from the late second or early third century, the Holy Spirit is grammatically feminine.
Eusebius, the Bishop of Caesarea from 314 to 340, wrote in his Ecclesiastical History that Hegesippus, an earlier chronicler who died in 180, "made some quotations from the Gospel according to the Hebrews and from the Syriac Gospel"— which indicates that there was a Syriac New Testament before AD 180.
The oldest copy of a Syriac Gospel, Syriac Sinaitic (syrs), is a late fourth century manuscript, also known as the Sinaitic Palimpsest.
A palimpsest (pa-lim-sest) is a manuscript on which the original writing has been erased to make room for a later writing, yet still contains traces of the original, and this Syriac gospel had been overwritten in 778 by a biography of women saints and martyrs.
This palimpsest was found by Mrs. Agnes Lewis in St. Catherine's Monastery at Mt. Sinai, and transcribed by Syriac Professor R. L. Bensly of Cambridge in 1892.
The words of John 14:26, transliterated, read:
"But the-Spirit She to you who he will send the-Paraclete She in-my-name my Father She thing every She-will-teach you which (of) all She-will-remind-you."
Now compare with the English NRSV:
"But the Advocate [Paraclete], the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you.
Here is John 14:26 and a bit of 27 from the Sinaitic Palimpsest:
When the Syriac New Testament was revised in the fifth century, it was called the Peshitta, a Syriac word meaning "simple version," or, perhaps, "common"— as in The Book of Common Prayer, i.e., for all the people.
The Peshitta preserves the feminine pronoun in many places; in others, they are altered to masculine pronouns.
Interestingly, and distressingly, there are only two places in the Gospels where the Peshitta changes the feminine to the masculine gender, and both are where the Holy Spirit "teaches"— in John 14.26, which we just saw in an earlier version with feminine pronouns, and in Luke 12.12: ". . . for the Holy Spirit will teach you at that very hour what you ought to say."
Otherwise, the Peshitta retains the feminine of the Old Syriac, including two contexts of central importance, the Annunciation to Mary (Luke 1.35) and Jesus' baptism by John.
Here is Luke 1:35: "The angel said to her, 'The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God."
In order to prevent a literalist reading of Luke 1.35, many later Syriac writers deliberately distinguished between the "Holy Spirit" (feminine) and "the Power (hayla) of the Most High (masculine)."
By the early seventh century, the Harklean version always translates ruha as masculine wherever it refers to the Holy Spirit.
Now let's turn from this historical overview and focus on the Syriac tradition that describes the Holy Spirit as feminine, and more specifically as "Mother."
The earliest example, which dates from the early third century, is The Acts of Thomas, a non-canonical writing by Gnostic Christians, who thought that they had received special spiritual knowledge (gnosis).
In this eponymous Acts, Judas Thomas offers several prayers to the Holy Spirit as "Mother":
"We hymn you [Christ] and your unseen Father and your Holy Spirit, the Mother of all created things."
"We name over you [the newly baptized] the name of the Mother."
"Come, holy name of Christ, which is above every name; come Power of the Most High, and perfect mercy; come exalted gift [i.e. the Holy Spirit]; come, compassionate mother."
"Come, hidden mother . . . come, and make us share in this Eucharist which we perform in your name, and in the love to which we are joined by invoking you."
This imagery of Holy Spirit as Mother also appears in other Syriac writings:
In AD 350, Aphrahat makes this comment on Genesis 2:24: "as long as a man has not taken a wife, he loves and reveres God his Father and the Holy Spirit his Mother, and has no other love. But when he takes a wife, he leaves his Father and Mother."
The fourth or fifth century Macarian Homilies include a similar take on Genesis 2:24: "you have as a Mother the excellent Spirit of God."
The image of the Holy Spirit as Mother is by no means confined to Syriac writers or to those working in a Semitic milieu.
Hippolytus, writing in Greek around AD 200, describes Isaac as an image of God the Father, his wife Rebecca as an image of the Holy Spirit, and their son Jacob as an image of Christ— or of the Church.
Synesios, the early fifth century Bishop of Ptolemais, wrote a hymn which includes this verse:
"I sing of the [Father's] travail, the fecund will, the intermediary principle, the Holy Breath/Inspiration, the centre point of the Parent, the centre point of the Child: she is mother, she is sister, she is daughter; she has delivered [i.e. as midwife] the hidden root."
The seventh century monastic writer Martyrius speaks of "the all-holy Spirit, who, like a mother, hovers over us as she gives sanctification; and through her hovering over us, we are made worthy of adoption."
"Hovering" recalls Genesis 1.2: "And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters" (NKJV).
For Martyrius, the Spirit "hovers over" the baptismal font, and also the Bread and the Wine, transforming them into the Body and the Blood of Christ.
Similarly, the ninth century Syrian Orthodox theologian and scholar, Moses bar Kepha wrote: "the Holy Spirit hovered over John the Baptist and brought him up like a compassionate mother.
+ + +
In summary, although it isn't "wrong" to use masculine pronouns for the Holy Spirit, any more than it is "wrong" to use feminine pronouns for God (or plural pronouns for the Holy Trinity), using feminine pronouns for the Holy Spirit is a way to honor the Scripture's assertion that the image of God includes male and female, and Jesus' two parables with their female imagery for God, while continuing to honor the Scripture's images of Father and Son, and a way to remind ourselves that the God revealed in the Scriptures both comprehends and transcends male and female, feminine and masculine.
This is why Ingrid and I use feminine pronouns for the Holy Spirit when praying the Nicene Creed:
"With the Father and the Son she is worshiped and glorified. She has spoken through the prophets."
Amen.