From Cú Chulainn to Cordell Walker: The Ranger "Mans Up" to Cosmic Marriage
Earlier talks in this series focused on Masculinity in Judaism and in Early Buddhism.
The talk I’m giving could be a companion--Masculinity in Early Christianity. Traditions of
masculinity in early Christianity, however, at least in early pre-Scholastic patristic traditions,
don’t subscribe to masculinity or what we today identify as socially constructed gender,
distinct from biological sex. In fact, they subvert social constructions of gender by focusing
on the integrity of body and soul, and the incarnate yet transcendent nature of human
beings, ultimately beyond even the biological binary of male and female. This is not how
Christian approaches to masculinity are often understood today, however, which is a second
reason for not naming this talk Masculinity in Christianity. E.F. Schumacher, a conservative
Catholic, was asked why he titled a key essay of his classic book Small is Beautiful as
“Buddhist Economics,” not “Christian Economics.” He said he could make similar countercultural points using the latter focus. But he said more folks would resist it with that title.
That’s a third reason for a camouflaged title.
Still, I am willing to connect my scholarship in early Irish and British views of nature
with my study of Christian literature in regard to this topic, because I think in many ways
young men coming of age in our society today face a huge crisis in a lack of mentoring and
initiations in what it means to be a man. Just as an example I recently shared coffee with a
counselor at a public university, and a colleague at a technical college in our area. They both
lamented their experiences with a rising tide of young men depressed, avoiding work and
family life, and taking refuge in video games, as noted also in national surveys. Men are
becoming a declining minority among college graduates and increasingly of graduate and
professional schools at a time when such degrees are even more important. Here at Bucknell
men are at the center of problems in the campus climate report. When I spoke to Phi Beta
Kappa inductees last year I was struck by how three-quarters were women. The success of
those women was wonderful to hear about. But increasingly troubling statistics and
indicators about young men cause concern and remain largely unaddressed. And Christianity
has traditions shared in family backgrounds of many young men that can be helpful,
traditions far richer than usually understood and portrayed. These traditions offer stories,
symbols and ritual to help guide young men into a mature active adulthood integrated with
community and an embodied sense of manhood.
I only have a few minutes here. I’ll tell a couple stories, both humorous in context,
from pop cultures influenced by Christian notions of the need for young men to engage in a
cosmic marriage to realize themselves fully. The notion of a cosmic marriage first needs
definition. The Celticist Máire Herbert, a scholarly hero of mine at University College Cork,
has detailed how the Irish notion of the sovereignty goddess involved a marriage between
the would-be king and the goddess in order for the king to rule. The cosmic king assumed
certain taboo-like restrictions on his actions and in effect remained in a kind of contract with
the goddess whose realm in the Otherworld was an often Paradise-like, but sometimes
threatening, spiritual overlay landscape on the actual geography of the king’s realm. Erica
Sessle detailed from a feminist perspective how probably the most famous early Irish story,
the Cattle Raid of Cooley, features the hypermasculine hero Cú Chulainn pitted against
Queen Medb of Connacht. Sessle figures Medb as a sovereignty goddess run amuck without
any proper king worthy of being her partner. Cú Chulainn is a ranger essentially, not a king.
He is someone who ranges the land of Ulster and its borders, an archetypal expression of
maleness outside the law and drawn to comical proportions.
Indeed, it is the conclusion of my scholarship, reflecting ecocritical readings of the
Cattle Raid of Cooley and related tales, that Cú Chulainn was drawn as a satirical figure
there. He was not interpreted so in the nineteenth century by scholars and writers. Then he
was seen as a man’s man whose incredibly absurd violent exploits were to be emulated: Such
as the warp spasm by which one eye would pop way out, the other way in; his hair would
become all spiky; and he would become an incredible danger to all, outrunning the fastest
wild animals to catch them, killing friend and foe alike. Teddy Roosevelt used Cú Chulainn
as an example of the “strenuous life” that he advocated for manly American men forming a
new empire. Páidrig Pearse used Cú Chulainn as a figure of hypermasculinity to rally Irish
nationalists against the English in the early 20th century as well. Yet in the Cattle Raid of
Cooley and associated stories, Cú Chulainn is a crazy berserker like a cartoon character, who
kills his own son and leads a successful defense in a war caused by the intransigence of male
leaders over the pointless prize of two bulls. The bulls end up killing each other out of the
hands of the armies of men seeking to control them, a symbol of the vanity of war and the
uncontrollability of nature. Thousands are slain for no reason. Queen Medb, who is also
ridiculed misogynistically, nonetheless returns to her kingdom to rule again.
Why this apparent satire of both hypermasculinity and hyperfeminiity? The various
versions of the narrative were pieced together by Christian monastic scholars, partly from
native pre-Christian traditions, but melded and shaped from the worldview of what
Donnchaid Ó Corráin called a mandarin caste of scholar-aristocrats, whose culture included
at least a few powerful women saints and abbesses, and probably a matrocentric element in
its patriarchal social networks. He has argued that their law codes featured laws against
sexual harassment and for women’s rights to property and divorce not seen in many parts of
Europe until the twentieth century. These monastic writers had reason to satirize the
hypermasculinity of pre-Christian warrior traditions, in an era before Scholastic Christianity
got behind the Crusades to create the myth of chivalry.
Patristic influences on the early Irish included an awareness of the rich paradoxes of
the Christian view of men and women in a larger context than often recognized since. That
context was an understanding of how man was created male and female in God’s image and
likeness, and the consensus of patristic writers that this binary was a concession to the Fall
but not an absolute. It was, argued the Irish John Scottus Eriugena following Greek church
fathers, a division overcome by Christ and to be overcome by all in the second coming when
the earth and heaven would be metamorphosized in the bodily resurrection and bodily
return of Christ. St. Paul wrote that there was neither male nor female in Christ. He also
wrote that while the wife was to obey the husband as head in marriage, the husband was to
follow Christ in that role, laying down his life for his family in service to his wife and
children. From this came a Christian notion of manliness as self-restraint rather than
hypermasculinity. For whether married or not, monastics and all believers also were included
in the body of Christ that was also, as the universal Church, the bride of Christ. And the
Church was identified also with Mary the Mother of God as a figure also of Paradise, the
highest regularly conceived human achiever of spirituality, by her willing agreement to the
Incarnation. Dean Miller points to parallels between iconography of the Mother of God as
empress in Byzantium, and early Irish and Welsh descriptions of the Celtic sovereignty
goddess. The feminist Luce Irigaray praises the bodily integrity of the Virgin Mary in
Christian tradition, along with her eschewing of objectification or appropriation of others.
Similar qualities are celebrated paradoxically in Christian traditions of manliness.
The failure of cosmic marriage involving the ranger Cu Chulainn and Queen Medb,
and the satire of it, became superseded in later English literature, influenced by early Insular
Christian themes, by the notion of cosmic marriage as a realization of courtly romantic love.
We see reflections of this continued in recent Anglo pop culture in the figure of Walker
Texas Ranger. His hypermasculinity is over the top and often absurd. Yet, as we shall see, he
is not completed until growing into his own version of a cosmic marriage to Alex Cahill, a
district attorney typing the community rule of law, over against Walker’s rangerly proclivities
to violence as an outrider.
I’m going to talk over the video here due to time constraints. Nothing comes simple
in Walker and Alex’s romance. They are married in a Christian ceremony, by the actor who
played the father on Happy Days, but then blessed by the Indian Chief White Eagle, in a way
similar to how early Irish tales of cosmic marriages melded native and Christian beliefs. They
honeymoon to Paris, the Otherworld to which Alex brings Walker from his world of Texas
violence. But on the way their plane is attacked by an assassin, and Walker and Alex have to
land the plane, which they can only do by working together at the cockpit controls. In the
process they burst the plane through a billboard that symbolically represents a contrary
consumer approach to objectifying love, bearing an image of a ménage a trois designed to
sell high-end jewelry. And as these avatars of cosmic marriage come down from the sky, they
set off fertility in the land (as did the early Irish cosmic marriage) by prompting the two
Rangers Gage and Sydney watching their descent on TV news in a bar to begin a romance
after years of not finding a meaningful relationship.
When Alex afterward becomes pregnant, however, she confronts Walker with the
way in which his violent ranger life haunts them, while an evil crime boss is hunting down
the Rangers. Under stress from this she goes into early labor and the baby is in danger when
born. It is at this point that Walker has a visionary encounter with an otherworldly feminine
figure like the sovereignty goddess, an angel or perhaps the Mother of God in Tex-Mex
Catholic tradition. The baby is miraculously saved as a real symbol of life transcending the
random violence of Walker’s ranger life. Finally after a last burst of violence in which
Walker defeats the criminal genius targeting his family, Alex, Walker and baby Angela, whom
he calls his angel, come home to the fertile fields of their ranch. Cosmic marriage is fulfilled
in the very last episode of the hit eight-year TV series, as Walker’s manhood is integrated
and transformed in it.
Now at the end, to return from pop culture to spiritual practice, I’ll quote Mother
Gabrila, a spiritual mother of the Orthodox Church. She summarized patristic tradition on
cosmic marriage as it relates to manhood in this way: “Marriage is a Sacrament. You must
die to be reborn. It is a Sacrament just like Baptism. Unless you are reborn in the heart of
the other and the other is reborn in your heart, God is absent.” This cosmic marriage often
won’t mean family life in a big ranch house like Walker’s. In many places, it is sought
through asceticism in monastic communities or among laity associated with them, and in
participatory liturgical rites. But in one form or another cosmic marriage is seen in patristic
Christian tradition, and its echoes however distant, as essential to the mystery of being a
man, through an empathetic self-restraint, at once both transcendent of and immanent in
one’s bodily self. It’s no crime in patristic Christianity to say “it’s a mystery.” And the
mystery of sex is engaged more deeply through love with another that also rests in the
divine, which guarantees the absolute meaning of each. To return for a moment to Cordell
Walker, in one episode Alex is asked why Walker knows so much about the legendary
frontier Ranger Hayes Cooper from a century before. Everyone needs a hero, she replies,
and Hayes Cooper has always been Walker’s, she adds. To the Christian man of the patristic
era and today, Christ is the real hero who, as in the early English poem The Dream of the Rood,
climbs heroically onto the Cross to win a victory. But it was a victory of laying down his life
in service for others. as the cosmic bridegroom who thus wins victory over death for all.