Praising Mary: Devotion, Difficulties, Devices, and Differences

            Praising Mary is a difficult task for medieval authors; doing the Virgin justice despite their own perceived lexical and moral limitations is their first concern. Among our readings for last class, Conrad of Saxony’s Mirror of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Walter of Wimborne’s “Ave Virgo Mater Christi” come to grips with this task. Both authors seek to praise Mary in similar ways, but their works yield different images of the Queen of Heaven. Conrad and Walter are inspired by the Hail Mary in structuring their pieces, and use repeated imagery and other rhetorical devices to evoke their own ideas of Mary.

            Conrad begins by expressing his concerns about his undertaking to praise Mary, citing his “utter insufficiency” by dint of the “sublimity,” “supreme glory and praiseworthiness” of the subject, his lack of sufficient knowledge, the “aridity of my speech” and the “unworthiness of my life” (Prologue). Encouraged by the words of St. Jerome and St. Augustine, he concludes that it is his duty to glorify her “’with all his might’” (Prologue). As a Franciscan monk trained in effective preaching, he constructs repetitive and structural memory-aids into Mirror of the Blessed Virgin Mary. He uses the familiar structure of the Hail Mary to give shape to his argument. For instance, in delving into this angelical salutation, he finds five adjectives that describe Mary (“pure,” “full,” “firm and secure,” “worthy,” and “useful”) that correspond to the five clauses of the Hail Mary (Ch, I). Conrad uses the first word of the prayer, which he interprets as meaning “without woe,” to introduce the “threefold woe” of actual sin, original misery, and eternal punishment (Ch. II). Each of these is threefold, dividing respectively into the woe of guilt of the heart, lips, and deeds; of the misery of them that are born, them that bring forth, and them that die; and the greatness, multitude, and duration of punishments in Hell (Ch. II). Similarly, an etymological exercise in Chapter III finds four different meanings of “Mary,” which Conrad introduces as the second word of the Hail Mary. In structuring his homiletic text according to the Hail Mary, he grounds his interpretation of Mary’s qualities in a prayer that would have been familiar to Conrad’s audience, which adds a mnemonic aspect as well as legitimacy to his opinions. Furthermore, providing his work with a precisely outlined, family tree-like structure fraught with repetition of key terms makes his ideas about Mary easier to remember.

            Walter of Wimborne uses many of the same devices as Conrad in his “Ave Virgo Mater Christi.” The entire poem is based on the Hail Mary as well. Though the prayer does not guide and inspire analysis here, it functions as a loose guide for the structure of each stanza: many begin with “hail,” followed by a Marian epithet, but all address Mary in the second person singular and seek to define some aspects of her, much like the Hail Mary does. Like Conrad, he relates the limitations of praising Mary in human writing, whom no one has the “ornaments of eloquence to praise” (58). He does, however, make a lexical exercise out of his praise with his use of a huge vocabulary to, like Conrad, repeat themes, and specific reference to Latin grammar (54, 59-61, 122). Perhaps with a different audience than Conrad’s in mind, Walter weaves some grammatical jargon into his exalting of Mary that otherwise adheres to the same themes of conventional devotion. She is she “through whom passive/that Word is made, that active/was from the beginning” (a reference to her role in conceiving Christ and to her general importance), by which “a substantive acquired an adjective,” in whom “the primitive [root-word] is derived” (Christ, from whom everything is derived and built off of, like a root-word, is “derived” from her) (54, 59, 60). Additionally, she is “the ablative of death” (perhaps in reference to the case’s sense of motion-away-from), the “genitive of a son/born without sin” (maybe to do with the case’s possessive uses or as a pun with the “genite” on the next line) and through whom “the verb becomes a participle,” a weaker, adjectival verb (a transformation which reflects the others in stanza 122) (60, 61, 122). Whatever the intended meaning of this syntactical wordplay, it reveals Wimborne’s work as one focused, perhaps in later examples in a tongue-in-cheek way, on the specifics of praising Mary despite being able as an unworthy mortal to do so properly. This is perhaps fitting as praise of the Mother of the logos.

            Despite their structural and rhetoric similarities, these two texts present very different images of the Virgin. Conrad speaks of Mary as she relates to mankind, likely in part because of his audience. His Virgin is without the many varied woes that plague mankind, and that this makes her appear unique in relation to other humans. He also elaborates on her “five sweet prerogatives” and further defines who she is with different definitions of “Mary” (Ch. 1). To Conrad, whose prose seeks to be a “dim mirror” of the Virgin (Prologue), Mary is a figure unquestionably far surpassing humans in virtue and who has an essential role in Christian worship, reinforced by imagery reflecting her importance. By contrast, what we have taken to calling “temple imagery” pervades “Ave Virgo Mater Christie” in the place of Conrad’s more specific honouring of Mary in her own right. To Walter, Mary is primarily a vessel for God, and important as such. His entire poem runs in this thread, aided by his lexical agility; she is a “hamper full of bread,” a “drinking bowl”, a “bright vessel” and her “belly is a casket/of celestial incense” (13, 33, 44, 10). His many colourful descriptions of her, often through metaphor, give the reader the sense that Mary and her function are reflected in many everyday things and concepts, and that she is important in her capacity as Mother of God as well as for her own characteristics. 

            Conrad and Walter, as skilled Franciscan writers, employ many interesting devices despite (or, perhaps, because of) their worry of inadequately praising Mary. Using the Hail Mary as a structural template and repeating terms or imagery are effective rhetorically in conveying their ideas about Mary and their exaltation of the Virgin. Conrad’s Mary is one vastly different from humans by her own nature and merit. Walter’s Virgin, on the other hand, is lavishly described in verse, and considered important as she who gave birth to Christ and well as in being a marvellous and deeply holy figure on her own.

LS

The Immaculate Rod of Jesse

Thursday’s class discussion and readings brought the tension between Mary as a synonym for the Word and Mary as a woman to the fore. At some points she is described a human worth emulating while at others she is the incarnation of the Word, a metaphor more than a woman. Attempts to contextualize Mary in the Old Testament led to conflation of who exactly Mary’s father and husband are and confusion on my part as I tried to make sense of Marquard, Conrad and Walter.

Mary is sometimes described as a standard humans can aspire to, emphasizing her humanity over her divine qualities or import. Marquard presents Mary as “a potent model for identification and imitation to the individual” (243). If Mary can be emulated then she is more than just the bringer of the Word, she is a person. The Legenda aurea may have had an ulterior motive for humanizing Mary; he uses her example to encourage Christians to travel to Holy sites (256), an act that I assume brought the Church revenue through donations. However, Mossman notes that Marquard does not do this. Instead he contemplates, Mary as having a “mystical union with God” (258). He describes her manner of prayer and holds her up as an example of an excellent and devout Christian. Marquard goes as far as to state that Mary completely lost herself “in the abyss of darkness” in God, seeing his eternal light (264). This oneness with God almost felt more Buddhist than Christian to me. However, it is still grounded in the belief that Mary is a very special and important human rather than some form of divinity or metaphor.

Mary’s own humanity is relevant in terms of her lineage.  In the works of Conrad of Saxony and Walter of Wimborne, Mary is described as the progeny of Jesse. Walter hails her as the “rod of Jesse” (7). The import of Mary’s lineage seems strange given that Jesus is the Son of God and, theoretically, not Mary’s by nature. However, Conrad illuminates why Mary’s family tree is important: Isaiah prophesized that the Lord’s rod of power would “spring forth a rod from the root of Jesse,” (16) and therefore Mary must be from Jesse in order for Jesus to conform Old Testament predictions of the Messiah. Yet, Conrad also conflates Jesus and Mary. He says: “the rod is the Son of God, who is the ray of Mary, our star” (12). Can Mary be both star and rod? If rod merely means descendent then Mary is a rod of Jesse, as Jesus is a rod of both Mary and Jesse. However, such generalized meaning creates a headache for interpreting scripture.

Ties to the Old Testament also create confusion as to whose wife Mary is. In what I believe is a reference to Psalm 44:11-15, Hugh uses what Mossman calls “bridal mysticism” to describe Mary’s union with God (273). Notably, this section is brimming with carnal imagery but is interpreted to describe the blessed virgin. Has Mary really “tasted [God’s] sweetness” and “yielded” to him? Can a story evocative of sexual imagery be interpreted as purely faith-based? Richard presents God as both Mary’s father and husband. By reason of her contemplation, Mary is brought to God not out of fear of punishment or desire for reward but out of “love and affection for the father like a daughter” (284). This section is confusing to me in its conflation of carnality and paternity and who exactly God is to Mary. However, it is not the first time paternity, Mary, and sex have been discussed in tandem. We know how Jesus is Mary’s son, father, groom and brother. We’ve also discussed that the erotic discussion between a bridegroom and bride in Song of Songs is commonly read as a conversation between Jesus and Mary. Mechthild describes Mary as the bride of the trinity who suckled the prophets. Yet the trinity includes a father and son. Perhaps the desire to find Old Testament references to Mary and Jesus is partially responsible for these consistent conflations.

Apparent contradictions in with whom and how Mary produced Jesus also speak to a confusion about how human Mary is. Is she more of an idea, able to platonically marry the entire trinity, or a human woman whose relationship with God and/or her son can be described in carnal terms? Is she so holy that she can be described carnally and still be understood to be a virgin? Modern religion has taken the latter view but I am not convinced. From a historical point of view, I would postulate that it makes sense that the Holy Spirit is Mary’s father, God is Mary’s husband and Jesus is her son. Mary was raised reading scripture (the Holy Spirit), is impregnated by God to have a virgin birth and raise Jesus. To me this idea has more clarity, something writers like Conrad seemed to be searching for. I’m confused as to why no one seems to be championing the possibility of delineation between Father, Son and Holy Spirit with regards to Mary; perhaps again a desire to make as many Old Testament passages applicable to Jesus and Mary governs a more conflated approach. I will acknowledge that my affinity for my theory is not purely liturgical; as a modern woman, I’m perturbed by a description of God/dad getting Mary drunk so she would “yield forth” (273) to him.

Walter too seems confused about exactly who Mary is. He calls her the “nuptial of the Word” (25). However, multiple times he refers to her as a variation of “dwelling of the Word” (2). Mary contains God and marries him, she is Jesus’ wife and mother. In Conrad, Mary is treated as the incarnation of the Word, something he is not worthy to speak about. In Marquard, the word is being born in her soul at all times (267). She is married to the Word, she contains the Word, she is the Word. It seems strange that during a time when scholars were attempting to create systems for religion, Mary is so mystified. Again, perhaps this stems from a desire to fit Mary into multiple systems.

Mary is to some degree human and to some degree divine. This idea is easy to understand in theory but more difficult to nail down with the specificity Thursday’s writers seem to desire. I found it particularly confusing (and somewhat disturbing) to distinguish Mary’s father from her bridegroom. Perhaps confusion must necessarily follow when attempting to systematize the divine using Old Testament references.

JLK

Tradeoffs in Understanding Mary

            Mile wide, but inch deep. Jack of all trades, but master of none. The temporal nature of our existence forces us to pick between skimming the surface of many topics in a subject or becoming an expert in only a few. However, the constant element in either approach is that it is simply not possible to learn absolutely everything about one particular subject. Similarly, as this week’s readings have shown, the approach to describing Mary as a Spotless Mirror of God’s Majesty can come in essentially one of two formats: (1) that of Wimborne and Conrad who use a wide range of metaphors and titles to understand Mary but fall short of rigorously examining any specific one, or (2) that of Marquard and Scotus who deeply explore only a few elements regarding Mary’s nature and life. In this post, I will examine the tradeoffs in each approach and the universality similarity of the authors’ inevitable inability to fully uncover the mysteries of Mary.

Wimborne and Conrad: Multitude of Metaphors

            Wimborne and Conrad begin their pieces with the crux of Marian devotion: the greeting of Gabriel at the Annunciation. Each author then expands upon this event using variety and number of metaphors as their main devotional tools. All 164 stanzas in Wimborne’s “Ave Virgo Mater Chrisit” begin with some basic variation of Gabriel’s words and then continue to offer sets of metaphors, titles, and other praises in reference to Mary. For example, one of my favorite stanzas is number 9: “Hail, virgin, abyss of honey, / you who drive far away the ancient gall / of death and sorrow, / you who with the needle of providence / joined God with mud / and the lowest with the highest.” We can see in this and other stanzas how Wimborne uses many short yet descriptive images to paint a mural of the Blessed Virgin. Conrad too uses the beginning of the “Hail, Mary” to start his commentary, and is he more explanative per metaphor yet less loquacious in terms of the total number of metaphors than Wimborne. In addition to explaining what Mary’s 5 prerogatives are and the 9 woes from which Mary was saved, Conrad also gives explores 4 names for Mary, the most striking of which is “Star of the Sea.” Using a nautical analogy, Conrad describes how with the combined effort of the wood of the ship (the wood of Jesus’ cross) and the guiding light of the star of the sea (Mary), the pilgrims on the ship will safely be able to sail to the shore of salvation. Unlike Wimborne, Conrad gives a much more detailed and Scripturally-based explanation of his metaphors and apparently likes using three parts in each level of his analysis.

            What we see in both Wimborne and Conrad is that despite the multitude of metaphors in their approach to praising the Blessed Virgin, we are still left with the unsolved underlying mysteries. Mary is described as the “Temple of Solomon” by Wimborne or “Star of the Sea” by Conrad, but at the same time the real meaning at the core of these metaphors eludes us. In other words, while we know what and temple or star is and how Mary could be thought of as a temple or star, we really can’t understand that to which the metaphors refers, namely what it means for Mary to be the Mother of God whose guides the faithful as an intercessor in heaven. Again, I don’t think it is possible to elaborate specifically on the temple imagery used to describe Mary other than to repeat that Mary is a temple for Christ, and we can’t fully understand what happens when Mary co-mediates on our behalf and guides us in times of trouble. In reality, the core meaning of such seemingly simple metaphors end up being beyond our ability to comprehend, and so Wimborne and Conrad use a myriad of them to try to continually grasp at what is essentially unreachable.

Scotus and Marquard: Crosshair Analysis

            Scotus and Marquard extensively explore only specific parts of the nature of the Blessed Virgin and don’t use the numerous metaphors of previous authors. In his defense of the idea that the Mary was not conceived in Original Sin nor ever took any stain from it, Scotus focuses on this issue alone but explores it to great depth. He mainly argues against the two-fold objection that Mary must have been in sin at some point because she was conceived via carnal lust and because otherwise she would not have needed the redemption of Christ. Scotus offers some fairly complicated theological arguments, but the main gist of his defense is that is it more excellent for Mary to have been saved from ever falling into sin that to have been saved right after falling, meaning the Virgin needed Christ’s salvific power more than any other human being. Similarly, Marquard narrows his focus on another element of Mary’s nature, namely how she is a quiet contemplative who had a mystical union with her Son. Marquard offers support for his hypothesis by citing how infrequently Mary speaks in the New Testament, and he uses Augustine’s three modes of prayer to explain how Mary prayed as one who (1) was filled with true faith and love, (2) believed herself unworthy to know what was revealed to her, and (3) was eager to perform virtues. In all things, Mary was characterized as a contemplative who had a humble passivity to the will of God.     

            While Scotus and Marquard write in detail on one aspect of Mariology and don’t try to briefly cover many different metaphors like Wimborne and Conrad, neither despite their strict analysis can fully unveil the mystery about which they are writing. We see that Scotus admits his own argument is one from the perspective of greatest excellence, and Marquard in his excursions into speculative theology cannot but offer a persuasive argument about Mary as a mystical contemplative. The further each author explores an element of the nature of Mary, the more often they run into the realm of faith and that which is beyond reason and necessity. Again, even this different approach to understanding Mary ends up not being able to explain everything. Which path gets us closer to discovering some truth about Mary: many understandable metaphors using images like the temple which don’t try to explain how only Mary could contain all of God, or a detailed metaphysical proof on Mary’s sinless existence that nevertheless cannot fully explain why it is necessary for her to have been graced to live this way?

Conclusion

            To directly compare the broadly descriptive pieces by Wimborne / Conrad with the narrowly focused writings of Scotus / Marquard is not totally fair given that these authors have different agendas for their selected pieces, but the point still stands that whether your strategy is to use an overwhelming amount of aesthetic imagery or a strict, detailed analysis of an aspect of Marian theology, neither approach will help us solve the mysteries behind the person who is the Spotless Mirror of God’s Majesty. And maybe that’s the point.

J.B.

Without Woe but with Sorrow

Conrad of Saxony’s “Mirror of the Blessed Virgin Mary” says that Mary was “absque vae,” or “without woe” (II). He describes at some length the ways in which she is “entirely immune” from woe, including “the woe of original sin, of original misery, and the woe of the punishment or pain of hell,” and the fractal-like component parts of each kind of woe. From this chapter, we might have expected Conrad to describe Mary as consistently happy, free of all kinds of woe, despite the trials of her life.

However, in the next chapter, he describes Mary according to a translation of her name: the “bitter sea” (III). One of the kinds of bitterness he ascribes to Mary is that “Mary in the Passion of her Son was filled with bitterness when the sword of sorrow passed through her soul.” He compares this to the “bitterness” Noemi describes when she changes her name to Mara to articulate the pain she feels at the death of her sons. This chapter does not mention the word “woe” at all, but it seems to describe Mary as full of pain.

I am not sure how these parts relate to one another. The pain that Mary felt at the crucifixion, if it felt like a “sword of sorrow” as Conrad describes it, certainly sounds like woe. Of course, they are different kinds of woe-- he never said that she was immune from emotional pain-- so there is no direct contradiction, but there does seem to be a complicated tension.

One of the kinds of woe he describes Mary as being immune from is the pain of “that original curse pronounced against Eve, ‘Thou shalt bring forth children in sorrow.” This strengthens the apparent tension in two ways. First, if Mary is immune from the woe of childbirth, which ordinary women also face, should she not be immune from the even worse woe in her soul at seeing her son crucified? Second, and more interestingly, the word “sorrow” is both the word in the verse about Eve and the descriptor Conrad chooses for the “sword” that passes through Mary’s soul at the crucifixion. The linguistic similarity makes it harder to explain away the tension by saying that they simply refer to totally different things.

It seems like part of this tension is a general one we have seen in other texts as well: Mary is powerful and totally unlike other women, but also has universally-recognizable maternal traits. To the extent that this is what is going on in the “Mirror,” it is not necessarily a weakness; it could be just another of the miraculous paradoxes that surround Mary as well as Christ. However, it does seem to me that something more complicated is happening here. Conrad seemed too adamant about Mary’s total exemption from woe of all kinds to suddenly forget about that and describe her woe in detail in the very next chapter, and the pain she he describes her feeling at the crucifixion is too central to that chapter to be ignored.

-- ADM