Androgyny: A Midlife Revelation
Androgyny appears more often in non-canonical Christian scriptures, so much so that it must have been systematically suppressed after the church acquired police powers. The orthodox attitude toward heresies is that they deviate from the true faith of the apostles, but manuscripts that have survived orthodox book-burning (along with excerpts in diatribes against heresy) suggest otherwise. Apostolic Christianity seems to have been a smorgasbord of beliefs, most of them still consistent with the ambiguous stories and aphorisms of Biblical gospels and letters. One of these beliefs is a rejection of the male-female distinction in human beings, along with the idea of an androgynous God, a creator who is both female and male.
This is particularly explicit in the gnostic branch of Christianity, which Irenaeus, the 2nd century bishop of Lyon, saw as a serious threat to orthodoxy and condemned in his book, Against Heresies. The gnostic Secret Book of John, an ancient scripture recovered in 1951, called God "the invisible perfect Virgin Spirit," incomprehensible, complete, and beyond all descriptive terms, even perfect, blessed, and divine. The highest image of God we can relate to is his "self-aware thought," a figure named Barbelo and revealed in Christ. This highest God of human experience is both female and of ambiguous gender: "She is the universal womb / She is before everything / She is: / Mother-Father / First Man / Holy Spirit / Thrice Male / Thrice Powerful / Thrice Named / Androgynous eternal realm." "She" is womb and yet is three times a male. How can this be?
Elaine Pagels saw foreshadowings of 20th century feminism in her groundbreaking interpretation, The Gnostic Gospels (1979), but, according to David Brakke in 2015, she and later scholars have come to doubt this. A likely interpretation is that men were still understood to define the species--women to be inferior variations on the theme Man. Still, even if superior, Adam was diminished when Eve was removed from his side. He became fragmented when part of his primal Thrice-Male completeness was externalized in woman. Men, even if dominant, are diminished by this loss of androgynous unity, by alienation from their female halves.
The gnostics read the two creation accounts in Genesis as one continuous story. Initially, God created mankind "male and female" (1:27), which was read as saying that Adam was created androgynous and became masculine (non-feminine) only after Eve was removed from him (2:22). According to the gnostic scripture, spiritual masculinity restores the feminine (which was removed by an evil power, not the true God), and men and women are equally called back to a "masculine" androgyny. In The Gospel of Thomas, the disciples want to expel Mary (presumably Magdalene) because she is a woman, and Jesus replies, "I shall lead her in order to make her male so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males." This promises--in an ideology of blinkered male-supremacy--to make her an androgyne like Adam.
The Gospel of Thomas, a collection of Jesus sayings that may date from the first century, overlaps verses in Matthew but explicitly dismisses male-female as a false duality like above-below, inside-outside, and self-neighbor that must be transcended to achieve the Kingdom (§22). A days-old infant, innocent of these distinctions, can teach an old man about "the place of life" (§4). The saved who achieve divine knowledge discard all of the coverings of the world, all illusions of dualistic identity, including awareness of gender: "When you disrobe without being ashamed and take up your garments and place them under your feet like little children and tread on them, then will you see the Son of the Living One, and you will not be afraid" (§37). Life in gendered flesh has made us forget our androgynous wholeness, which is miraculously restored through the fullness of God revealed in Christ (Colossians 2:9). But my personal encounter with androgyny, my own midlife rebirth, wasn't informed by gnostic scriptures--which I was unaware of then--but by study of Carl Jung, who read them.
Jung's theory of personal development, including a movement toward wholeness called Individuation, was central to my 1995 book, The Hobbit: A Journey into Maturity. We construct a narrowly defined ego in the first half of life--a protective shell of self-definition--and then at midlife we are ideally are strong enough to break out of it and to discover a more complete and balanced identity. The first half of life is defined by subtraction (deciding what we aren't) and by belonging (selecting groups and values to frame what we we are). Beginning with an infant's separation from his mother--before which he belonged to an undivided unity--the process moves through stages of separation to create a gendered child and then an adult. In the decades after late adolescence, after we "discover ourselves," we work toward becoming what we have discovered. This is "success," and some people are stuck here. For them, everything that was rejected in adolescence remains rejected, including personal impulses they felt ashamed of (the Shadow) or impulses toward the "wrong" gender (in males, the Anima). They stagnate.
Jung considers it a positive development if men are driven by a painful sense of emotional dryness to integrate their Shadows and Animas, to become simultaneously less rigidly "good" and more like their "inner woman" (often in relationship with an outer one). Women experience something like this too, but I will focus on my own characteristically male mid-life crisis, which hit when I was 42 and teaching at Chattahoochee Valley Community College. It has defined me ever since and begins with disorientation and despair: Is this all there is? and God, I'm dying in here! It begins with gray temples, seeing the end of life and wanting more.
Of course, there is always the insane fantasy of a reboot, of rewinding back to 21 and starting over, a seductive whisper from the unconscious. Some men listen and start a new family, but I was saner than that, perhaps because Jung helped me to see through the illusion. When my Anima, my young muse, appeared miraculously in the flesh, I recognized her: a real person, yes, but a person whose power over me was a projection of my own spiritual need, a partner in soul-work beneficial to us both. We embodied archetypes in each other.
My life felt desiccated even though everything was fine. The irony of a mid-life crisis is that it is about success becoming a gravestone. I had a Ph.D., a tenured position, a restored historic home, four sons aged 11 to 19, and a wife seven years my junior whom I loved and had just put debt-free through her own Ph.D. program. She was beautiful--and, perhaps, more importantly, a loyal friend and compatible partner in the business of marriage. My sex life was satisfactory. Nothing was wrong except in the lopsided ego that had achieved this success. I had escaped a lonely and unhappy childhood by defining myself as a junior scientist, poet, and scholar along with a clique of teenage friends, all of us "sissies" in football-playing sense of an Alabama high school, but but we affirmed a different species of guy-thing, intellectualism. High school math spoiled me for science, but I coasted through the masculine world of English graduate school (no female professors at LSU in 1965) to earning a Ph.D. at the age of 25, by which time I had two sons.
My college years weren't lonely. In graduate school, I only had to drop a word to a few friends at the Student Union, and a loud BYOB party would overflow my house on a Saturday night. But for fifteen years after that, while I was teaching a full load, raising four children, and putting my wife through school, the world closed in. My Myers-Briggs personality type, as solidified in high school, prevailed. It was INTP (introverted intuitive thinking), described as The Logician. Words mean something, patterns matter, feelings are secondary. As a young professor, I was embarrassed if a minute late to class, returned essays promptly even if I lost sleep, never dismissed class early, and was respected even if not liked. Students did not gather in my office.
The midlife crisis brought a tidal shift toward my feminine side, toward extroverted feelings that I had previously scorned. I grew toward (if not fully into) ENFP (extroverted intuitive feeling), previously devalued as the profile of a moody female. 16personalities.com describes the type this way: "They are often the life of the party but . . . are less interested in the sheer excitement and pleasure of the moment than they are in enjoying the social and emotional connections they make with others." The reborn me embraced emotional connections. Students began to gather in my office. I'm still an analytic intellectual, still need to consciously reach for my feelings, but the change has not been, I think, altogether lost.
Twenty years after the transformation, I regularly hung out at a coffee shop near the Western Kentucky University campus and was astonished when a young woman--an undergraduate when I was in my sixties--wrote to me not long ago, years after I had moved out of town: "Thank you, friend, for being such a source of inspiration! You are such a foundational experience of my time at Western: how to create community through humor, friendly cheer, and open, humble honesty. Thank you for these gifts, they are ones I am inspired to pay forward." I learned during these transforming midlife years was that I, even without a grade book in my hand, had the power to bless, as I knew others had the power to bless me, and I that was called to exercise it. In foolish inferiority and rigidity, I had not realized this.
This didn't happen in a vacuum. There were people, helpers who seemed to be magically called up by my need--and I was lucky, I think, to be in daily contact with hundreds on campus. Any attempt to describe all the emotional contacts, the strange, harmless intimacies I experienced, sometimes complete strangers, after I began (as I described it) "putting out signals" would fill a book. But the centerpiece is a beautiful, brilliant woman exactly twenty years younger than me who appeared mysteriously, smiling into my eyes. I can't recall how. I do recall her sitting in my office, for more than a year being there larger than life, a perfect carrier of my Anima, my muse, my soul. She told me every detail about her life, orders of magnitude more about any non-male person than I had known before, and I listened hungrily, sharing in return.
Our relationship was erotic but not sexual--gendered, attractive, and emotional, but we never touched while talking and parted with a hug and close-lipped "kiss of peace." Challenged not to be homophobic, I've kissed bearded friends more sensuously, if less sincerely. Such emotional levitation is inherently unstable. Ultimately, I think, after months of miraculous suspension, it was either a "real" relationship or drifting apart, and I had another Anima-figure at home, thank you, the mother of my children. I was fragmented, not crazy. But in the crucible of that year, I was changed and divide my life now into three phases: before age 25, when I easily made close friends, mostly male; 25-42, when I drifted toward having no friends outside formal relationships; and after 42, when I again made close friends, but most (not all) were female or gay, bearers of androgyny.
I told the story of my living muse in "Straw," a sequence of ten lyrics published in the Spring 1988 Coe Review. The eighth lyric strangely parallels verse 37 of the Gospel of Thomas, which says that we approach God by disrobing like children without being ashamed--an apparent reference to removing dualistic gender along with other surfaces of out ego-identity. The lyric recorded a spontaneous dream:
Then he dreamed them both naked
As brown children sprawled together
In some noisy gymnasium or plaza.
"We tried to make poems about walls,"
She said, "It didn't work. The symbols
Caught inside our throats like splinters,
Sharp-edged scraps of broken defenses."
Not looking, what he did not see
Half-puzzled him: their brown bodies,
Shoulder-close in warm light.
Breasts neither hung nor did not hang
On her ribbed chest. Legs apart,
She neither showed nor hid her sex,
But she lacked no part of herself.
"I think this is the poem," she said.
I see this as a dawning of androgyny, a dream of progress into wholeness. It didn't deliver the promise of The Gospel of Thomas that, by treading the clothes of gendered self under foot, I would see "the Son of the Living One" (one dream does not a transfiguration make), but it gestured in that direction. In the 1980s, its meaning was mysterious. Now it seems more clear.
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