My mother had now come to me. Moved by her faith, she had followed me across sea and land, trusting entirely in You through every danger. When we were at sea, she was the one who comforted the sailors—even though it’s usually the sailors who comfort anxious passengers—because You had shown her in a vision that we would arrive safely.
St. Augustine, Confessions, Book VI, Chapter I (paraphrase)
Christianity is often criticised as patriarchal. Its priesthood is male, its God is Father, and its scriptures reflect ancient power structures in which women are subordinated. But this is only part of the story. If we look at the underlying metaphors that Christianity is built upon—the messages that move its rituals, shape its imagery, and structure its theological imagination—we find something quite different. Christianity may speak the language of the father, but it is governed by the fantasy of the mother.
At the centre of Christian doctrine is the Virgin Birth—a woman who conceives a child without sexual intercourse. No man intrudes; no father appears, except the heavenly one. In the ancient world, where a woman’s reproductive power was inseparable from her subordination to a male lineage, this narrative represents a historical conquest. The Virgin Mary does what many women of her time probably wished for: she produces a son without being penetrated, without being claimed by a man from another house. The son she bears is not simply her child—he is the Son of God, and she remains untouched.
This theological claim is a fantasy, a wish-fulfilment. In traditional kinship systems, especially those rooted in patrilineal inheritance, women hold power only through their male kin. A queen may not rule directly, but she may exercise power through a brother or a son. A case in point is the myth of Oedipus: Jocasta, the queen, regains power not by her own claim but by her son’s return. But even there, her position is unstable, tragic, and ultimately condemned, as she commits suicide before she can be killed by Oedipus. In Christianity, by contrast, Mary is glorified. She is called Queen of Heaven (Regina Caeli). She retains her virginity. Her son is exalted, and she is exalted through him (Luke 1:48).
The Church inherits this maternal structure. She is the Mother of the faithful (Galatians 4:26; Cyprian, De unitate ecclesiae; Augustine, Sermon 213.8). She gives birth to Christians through baptism—a ceremony of water—while being composed of those very Christians. She is both the womb and the offspring, as if the children were never meant to leave the womb. Yet she is also the Bride of Christ (Ephesians 5:25–32), and the Body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12:12–27; Romans 12:4–5). She gives herself to him and receives him in return, caught in a kind of eternal honeymoon. The Church is the mother of her own husband-to-be—and no less in love with all her legitimate children.
This multiple incestuous fantasy is not merely metaphorical. According to Aquinas, drawing on Aristotelian metaphysics, the Eucharist effects a real union: while the accidents of bread and wine remain, their substance becomes the actual body and blood of Christ. In the Eucharist, Christians eat the body of Christ in order to become members of that very body (John 6:53–56; 1 Corinthians 10:16–17). They are told they—the Ekklesia (Greek for ‘congregation’)—are the Body of Christ, eating the Body of Christ, joined to him through this act of ritual consumption. So, if the Church is understood as feminine—and Christian tradition constantly speaks of her in these terms (Catechism of the Catholic Church, §§757–766)—then the Eucharist becomes a ritualised maternal act of incorporation: the mother consuming her son, so that she may live on.
This reverses the classical Freudian formulation of incest as the child’s desire for the parent. In mythology, it is often the mother who desires the son, and Christianity is no exception. The son is offered, broken, and consumed by the community. This is not far from the Sphinx devouring men, a figure who can be read, as in the case of Oedipus, as an emanation of the mother herself, once her desire is liberated by the death of her husband. In this case, however, the mother is waiting for her son to immolate himself, while the father recedes into the background—displaced, abstracted, or sanctified as the heavenly witness.
This helps explain why Christianity spread so effectively. While it spoke in patriarchal terms, it offered a deep symbolic elevation of feminine desire. It gave women power and centrality in the struggle to live through one’s descendants. Just as Abraham was promised children as numerous as the stars, Christ restored the balance between the sexes, granting the Jewish mother a lineage that endures through ritual and flesh.
I tricked her. She was trying to hold me back—either to stop me from leaving or to come with me—and I lied. I told her I had a friend who was waiting for a good wind, and I couldn’t leave him behind. So I lied to my mother— and what a mother!—and I escaped.
St. Augustine, Confessions, Book V, Chapter XIII (paraphrase)