Maternalisation Is Materialisation—A Happy, and Cosmic, Mothering Sunday to You All! by Andrew James Brown

Highlights

he suggested the "essence," or actually perhaps, better, the "pith and marrow" of religion lies in "the great life of free and selfless creative evolution", "a vast cosmic life force" that he thought was eternal and to which he, you and me, and all things, always-already belong.

religious naturalist
a person who finds their religious meaning in the natural world rather than in some supernatural world or being

sometimes (and more often than I sometimes care to admit) I find it helpful to personify such an idea, which, despite its beauty -- and I think truth -- can be a little highfalutin and abstract.

Jane Bennett
"a careful course of anthropomorphization can help reveal that vitality, even though it resists full translation and exceeds my comprehensive grasp" ([Vibrant Matter, Duke University Press, 2010, p. 122).

what might an appropriate and careful personification of the "great life of free and selfless creative evolution" look like?

it looks like the 1st-century Roman poet Lucretius' depiction of Venus, who in his wonderful poem, "On the Nature of Things," functions as both the mother [māter] of all things and also the very matter [māteria] of all things (including herself as mother, of course).

according to Hesiod, while Ouranos (Sky) was having sexual intercourse with his mate Gaia (Earth), he was ambushed and castrated by his son Kronos, who cast his father's genitals into the sea. Foam issued from them and, within the foam, a maiden grew. The genitals came eventually to land at Cypress, where Aphrodite stepped ashore (William Hansen, Classical Mythology, OUP 2004, p. 105).

space is vital here, because if there were only ever the chaos of flux, nothing could come to be in the way things clearly do.

the protective, enclosing klin, the curve of Venus' shell, reminds us that the chaos of flux is always-already producing local and regional stabilities that gift us with the universe of things in which we live and move and have our being.

although Lucretius holds Venus up as a goddess in this fashion, she is not understood by him as being some kind of supernatural being, standing outside nature making the world but, instead, as a way by and through which a person can more easily meditate upon the way nature-natures, i.e. how the world continually makes and remakes itself.

Lucretius' depiction of Venus in his poem is a poetic supreme fiction which aims both to help us understand, and be passionate about, the way nature-natures and how her mothering hand, which is always-already making and touching us and all things, is simultaneously, also always-already "being touched back by what it touches" (cf. Maurice Merleau-Ponty in Nail: Lucretius 1. p 88).

As Nail reminds us, Venus is:

". . . the mother [māter] of Aeneas, from which the Latin words māteriēs [material] and māteria [matter] also come. Māter is also the tree or matrix, the source of the tree's growth, whose Indo-European root is described by the Greek word hūlē, meaning tree and matter. First philosophy, for Lucretius, begins with the mother, with matter itself, with the creative power of matter itself to produce all things, the aeneadum" (ibid, p. 23).

the concept of māteriēs "both maternalizes matter and materializes the mother at the same time"

"In other words, the mother of all creation is herself made of the same matter that she creates. Her materiality is the same materiality of the world. The mother of matter is the matter of the mother. Her creation is, therefore, the process of matter's own process of materialization. Maternalization is materialization" (ibid, p. 24).

because everything about her as a poetic supreme fiction speaks so well of the way we are coming to think our world works, she is for me a meaningful and beautiful personification before whom my expressions of gratitude for her bounty can be expressed, and my poetic, ethical, and natural science-related thoughts and meditations can usefully and creatively flow, fold, and weave.

you may think that there really is no need to personify the way nature-natures, let alone actually set up a votive image of the goddess Venus. Well, you are probably right, you don't need to do this.

I do feel such a need and I continue to think that an appropriate, poetic supreme fiction, when knowingly understood as fictive, but nevertheless wilfully believed in or contemplated, can usefully help me -- help us -- both better understand and fully enter intra-actively into the world and draw forth from it great meaning and beauty.

Venus is for me the perfect personification of the "the great life of free and selfless creative evolution," the "vast cosmic life force" of which Imoaka Shin'ichirō-sensei spoke of as being the "pith and marrow" of religion.

References

Brown, Andrew James. “Maternalisation Is Materialisation—A Happy, and Cosmic, Mothering Sunday to You All!” Caute, 27 Mar. 2025, https://andrewjbrown.blogspot.com/2025/03/maternalisation-is-materialisationa.html.