Sacred Androgyny & the Bible

At its core—is a mystic male-female state.

“The truth is, a great mind must be androgynous,” says Coleridge, the English poet. It was not in church, of course, but in college that I encountered this idea of a higher human faculty being . . . both? But being male and female—seemed to double the work. And was the opposite of everything I’d been trained to be, back in church.

In Christianity, as it had been presented to me, the more a man is a man, the more God likes him. The more a woman is a woman, the more kids she’s having, and the better dinner tastes.

But great writers throughout history seem to take a different view. Virginia Woolf tries to explain: “In each of us two powers preside, one male, one female… The androgynous mind is resonant and porous… naturally creative, incandescent and undivided.”

Her incandescence led her to take a stroll through the Ouse River, as I went on a deep dive into the Bible and Bible scholarship, night after night, pondering this treatise in—sacred androgyny?

And God created man in his image,
in the image of God created he him;
male and female created he them.

In this three-line poem, here in the recent Bray & Hobbins translation, the most obvious fact is an indirect one—about God.