[This
entry is for the class on November 3, “Mater sponsi, sponsa Dei.” The readings were from Hildegard of Bingen,
Elisabeth of Schönau, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and Gertrude of Helfta. I focus on Mechthild here, though.]
Looking
through Mechthild’s writing again, I noticed how frequently she uses the word “love.” On pages 52-53, for examples, the word love
appears 18 times. This isn’t
particularly surprising, given the focus on love in the New Testament and in
Christian tradition, but Mechthild seems to talk about it more than other
figures whose work we’ve read. In her
retelling of the Passion narrative, Mechthild distinguishes between its effects
on the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene.
While both suffer because of their love for Christ, Mary Magdalene is
inconsolable because she has “simple love without lofty knowledge” (203). The Virgin Mary is unique because she has
both love and knowledge. Mechthild claims that Mary spoke to “our Lord” and “his
Godhead then answered her sometimes” (203).
Does this mean that Mary can talk to Jesus because she is close to him
or is Mechthild implying that she has special communication with God in a
non-earthly sense? I read it as the latter at first, perhaps because “Godhead”
is not a term I particularly associate with Jesus. Perhaps Mechthild is inclined to view Mary as
the recipient of divine knowledge because of Mechthild’s own experience of
visions. In any case, she describes the
Virgin Mary’s combined and special traits of both love and knowledge, which
together allow her to bear the grief of her son’s death. Others may love him,
but they lack Mary’s unique knowledge.
What is
interesting to me about this is that Mary is not characterized just in terms of
her love and devotion to Christ but as a figure of knowledge, perhaps in
reference to her association with Wisdom.
Mechthild writes, “of all humankind her heart was most deeply filled
with divine knowledge” (204). Mechthild
then connects this trait to virgins, who “preserve their chastity out of love
for God” (204). “They are able to move
the heavenly Father on our behalf because they bear his likeness fully in
themselves” (204). This quote strikes me
as a radical interpretation of virgins’ special access to God. Like Mary (though not necessarily in
imitation of her), virgins have a special relationship with God because they
are a reflection of God on earth. Each
of the four female authors here (Elisabeth, Gertrude, Mechthild, and Hildegard)
have a connection to Mary (and God?) because of their merits and devotion. Some of them have visions of biblical figures
and events because, like Mary, they have both an aptitude and a calling.
Mechthild
presents an image of Mary suckling the “pure lamb…from her heart” (75). Later she feeds Christ with “the sweetness
flowing from her pure heart” (199). Virgins
seem to have a similar role of sustaining Christ with love in Mechthild’s
account. Is this capability specific to
female virgins? I suspect that isn’t the
case for any of the four authors, given their close relationships with
brothers, confessors, etc., but there also seems to be a slightly different
relationship between the women in these texts and Mary because of their ability
to have visions.
I keep
thinking about our discussion of Marina Warner in class. While it seems to me that she likely applied
aspects of her own experience to radically different contexts, I’m tempted in
each reading for this class to question what the depictions of Mary mean for
the author’s (and by extension, their society’s) perceptions of gender. To me, religion plays a hugely significant
role in the construction, legitimation, and maintenance of gender ideologies—though
to be clear, I think perceptions of gender also contribute to religious
understandings and practices; the relationship between them isn’t in any way
straightforward. Part of me wants to
believe that as anachronistic as some of Warner’s ideas may be too much of the
history of Christianity, it still means something that two exalted roles of
Mary are contradictory for other women.
Granted, these aren’t the only roles of Mary and she means more than her
relational position. However, each of
the cultures in which our sources were produced featured inequality—sometimes incredibly
pervasive and harmful—between men and women. Both men and women could be devoted to Mary
and feel particular kinship with her, but ultimately none of these women could
be priests and very little of their writing, much less their direct, unfiltered
thoughts, survives.
Much of
the material in this class points to previously unexamined symbols and
conceptions of Mary, but I keep finding myself wanting to make sure that the
possibility isn’t lost that perceptions of the Mother of God had an influence
on the way women in general were perceived.
It’s a different question than the ones we focus on (for good reason,
since the things we talk about in class have often been ignored), but it’s one
that remains important to me. Has anyone
else been struggling with similar ideas?
They seem apt for this class session, since the authors are all women.
- J.F.
Something interesting to consider when we think of Mary as an unattainable ideal for women is the degree to which she served, in a different way, as an unattainable ideal for men as well. Indeed, the whole cult of the saints in general strikes me as setting up a host of unattainable exemplars, especially when we consider the incredible feats that the saints accomplish in so many medieval hagiography. How does this constant establishment of unattainable heroes shape a culture in general? Or, from another angle, how does it differentiate a society from the one we live in today? Of course, this is largely just a broadening of the question which you ask.
ReplyDeleteInteresting also is the connection between wisdom and virginity, we tend to divorce intellectual achievement from personal conduct, but that divide was not present at all, indeed it was actively rejected, by the authors we read. What does that say about knowledge (perhaps more accurately about wisdom) as conceived of by these authors, and what sort of impact might virginity have on our ability to know?
To follow on dyingst's comment: it is important, I think, to distinguish between Mary as an exemplar and the effect of having such a female figure on the development of ideas about women. I, for my own part, think that the reason that Western civilization, specifically, Western Christian civilization developed the very radical ideas that it did about women was precisely because Mary had such an elevated place in medieval Christian theology and devotion. To blame Mary for being an "unattainable ideal" makes no more sense than to blame Jesus for being a God-man rather than simply a holy man or saint. That we now see both of them in these terms ("insulting" rather than "inspiring") has (as I have been trying to suggest) more to do with changes in how European Christians think about what kind of knowledge they want to have about Jesus and his mother than it does with medieval efforts (as Warner et al. have contended) to "keep women down." On the specific imagery that Mechthild uses: as far as Mechthild and her sisters were concerned, they had achieved the highest ideal possible for women--namely, virgins. They were in no way considered lesser because they were not also mothers, for after all, as virgins, they expected (or hoped) to sing the new song reserved for virgins before the throne of the Lamb, themselves elevated above all other women who had been mothers. The sense that women should be *both* virgin and mother like the Virgin Mary would have struck them as nonsensical, I expect. Which leaves us with the puzzle of how it ever came to be normative for Catholic women (as Warner seems to have be taught or imagined). RLFB
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