Abstraction, Mysticism, and Revolution: From Catholicism: End or Beginning? to Beyond God the Father and Pure Lust

The rediscovery of Catholicism: End or Beginning? reveals the distinctiveness of Mary Daly’s mature thought. In her abandoned essay, she relies on male thinkers who contributed to her own philosophic education: Thomas Aquinas, Teilhard de Chardin, Mircea Eliade, Jacques Maritain, and Paul Tillich. Daly supposed she could weave the abstractions of these men into a workable ontology, but she failed. Her immediate experience in the Women’s Liberation Movement led her to recognize a dynamism that could not be held by any reified image of the divine, let alone a brittle organization like the Catholic Church. This essay compares Catholicism: End or Beginning? to parallel passages in Daly’s later works, Beyond God the Father and Pure Lust , to demonstrate the transformative power of Daly’s “creative political ontology.”