Headnote:

It is life today that gives life to Mary's life yesterday.1

Once again at my parish church on a marian feast day, I hear that Mary is the one woman who never had to say "I'm sorry." She is not only the mother of Jesus but our mother as well, able and willing to carry our petitions to her son and his heavenly father. It is traditional and comforting-deeply so for the powerless, ill, suffering, and dying-to turn to a compassionate mother who persuades God to forgive our weaknesses and honor our needs. But is this the woman of the Gospels? Is this what we need to know about Mary toda ?

I think not. Disagreement about her role, however, is in keeping with the history of marian devotion. In its long, complex diversity, marian piety has often diverged from official teaching and frequently changed it. Within traditional forms but stretching beyond them, it has responded to human spiritual needs that transcend intellectual definitions. Following the history of marian devotion is to re-member Christianity, to hear its good news as relevant to all human beings. In recent decades, a number of prophetic voices have suggested that Mary's role is not fully or accurately defined as that of perfect woman and mother. Whether we turn to a Catholic pope (Paul VI called Mary the first disciple and our sister), or a Protestant martyr (Dietrich Bonhoeffer called her Magnificat the most passionate, the wildest, the most revolutionary Advent hymn ever sung), we are told that she was, above all, a representative human woman, first in the community of saints, someone who challenges us to bring about the justice on earth that her compassionate God desires.

Many contemporary women, however, do not hear the voice Luke caught with such liveliness in his Gospel. As they strain to recover their own history, they do not even consider Mary as a model because her image has been so idealized and sentimentalized, often to keep them in their place. Like other women in history, Mary has been largely silenced, but hers is a more difficult case. For like a good child, she has been seen but not heard. She has been the beautiful background of powerful and influential voice-overs, usually clerical and male. The overemphasis on her physical virginity and her selfless motherhood has almost removed her from serious secular consideration in our hypercharged, sexually active culture, and from that of many Christian feminists as well.

Unlike Mary of Magdala, Hildegard of Bingen, Joan of Arc, or Dorothy Day, she is not yet prominent among Christian women being restored to mainstream history as viable models. Because Mary is a central symbol from a past that has divided her as well as separated her from other women, it takes time to disentangle her portrait from the projections of others and see her true function as one who connects, challenges, and empowers. Sarah has come out of her tent, Hagar is increasingly honored, and Eve is rehabilitated, yet only now are we beginning to rediscover the most influential woman in the history of religion. Though Marina Warner loved the marian art and legend she described so well in Alone ofAll her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary, she insists: "The reality her myth describes is over; the moral code she affirms has been exhausted." Mary is given serious attention in historian Gerda Lerner's classic volume on The Creation of Feminist Consciousness, but only on the basis of the motherhood she shares with other women. Her creation of new life is related there to her connection with nature and to the goddess. While certainly important, her motherhood is not connected to her human life and message and her continuing religious significance within Christian tradition.

Fully aware of the dangers idealization and distortion of Mary's image have presented throughout history, a number of women are equally aware of the value Mary's complex "reality" has offered them. As Mary Gordon suggests,

One must sift through the nonsense and hostility that has characterized thought and writing about Mary ... one must travel the road of metaphor, of icon, to come back to that figure who, throughout a corrupt history, has moved the hearts of men and women, has triumphed over the hatred of woman and the fear of her. and abides shining, worthy of our love, compelling it.2

Most of us do not yet know Mary as well as we think we do. Though her life was exceedingly simple, she is surprisingly complex. Faithful Jewish woman whose son gave birth to Christianity? A "woman of truth" in Islam, related to Hagar and beloved by Muslims? A virgin who is a mother? A lowly peasant who is Queen of Heaven? Someone who keeps appearing to the least likely people? It takes serious historical, sociological, and psychological digging, as well as the ability to live with uncertainty, to unearth the connections between such seemingly contradictory elements of Mary's role and character. No superficial search could be faithful to the actual development of marian piety, nor would it in the end uncover the important insights of contemporary seekers.

To see both the nonsense and hostility that Gordon speaks of in the making of Mary, we must revisit the differing historical contexts in which her images arose, clashed, and seemed at times to represent those who disagreed violently with one another. Now for the first time we can do this with the added awareness that gender difference has always characterized marian piety. This is a relatively new assumption, though evidence for it is ample. In 1960, Protestant theological student Valerie Sawing explained how a mother could experience self-transcending love, but that she needed first a strong individual self if she were ever to act selflessly, something male theologians had not understood. In this groundbreaking essay, religious feminist thought began to express explicitly the view that gender experience determines perception, and that in theology women's experience had not been consulted or understood.3

Seeing the results of scholarship in many fields through an imaginative feminist lens that assumes such gender difference, we can catch glimpses of a mother who has challenged assumptions of power and hierarchy in every era. We also find evidence that women have probably always related to Mary in ways other than those officially suggested to them, and that their views are slowly being incorporated into mainstream understanding of her significance.

Anthropologists Victor and Edith Turner remind us that, from a Christian perspective, no marian symbol is adequate that does not see Mary as "a signifier meant to represent not only the historical woman who once lived in Galilee, but the sacred person who resides in heaven, appears at times to living persons, and intercedes with God for the salvation of mankind."4 It is necessary, then, that any true image of Mary should resemble the mother of Jesus as she appears in the Gospel stories, for there is no other historical evidence of her existence. Later objects of art and devotional practices should be evaluated according to their ability to reveal such a connection.

John Henry Newman was perhaps the pioneer thinker of marian piety to take such a developmental perspective, using the linguistic, textual tools of scholarship first available in the nineteenth century to survey her role. This was not a purely academic undertaking on his part; while still an Anglican, he found the sentimental devotions to Mary of his era a stumbling block. (Apparitions flourished on the continent, and a famous hymn written by his colleague Keble spoke of her as the "blessed Maid, Lily of Eden's fragrant shade ... whose name all but adoring love may claim.") In contrast, Newman discovered that Mary's figure was central in salvation history; although the definition of her as God-bearer at the Council of Ephesus in 431 best expressed the importance of the woman of the Gospels, her significance continued to expand over the centuries as the church grasped the meaning of its own doctrine:

She raised herself aloft silently, and has grown into her place in the Church by a tranquil influence as a natural process. She was as some fair tree, stretching forth her fruitful branches and her fragrant leaves, and overshadowing the territory of the saints.5

NEW VIEWS OF MARY IN THE GOSPELS

A century and a half later we are able to draw on the insights of women who share Newman's methodology but add an awareness of gender difference to his conclusions. New Testament scholar Beverly Gaventa, for example, tells us she writes about Mary as a Protestant and a feminist, if the latter term means being "committed to the realization of the full equality of women and men in life together." She also illuminates the feeling of generations of women, Catholic and Protestant, who have identified with Mary for a special reason:

I also write as a mother. My profound connection with my child makes it impossible for me to do otherwise, and I cannot pretend to distance myself from certain aspects of these texts. When Matthew's Gospel depicts the bloody Roman sword in Bethlehem and the threat to Jesus, a cold fear grabs me. When Luke describes Mary's puzzlement over the son who is both hers and not hers, I worry with and for her. Some may find this lamentably sentimental. For me it is simply a fact of life.

Gaventa's experience makes her sensitive to the emotional language Luke has deliberately given Mary; it made her retranslate the text she felt did not do justice to it. Only "anguish" is adequate to describe Mary's words to her son when she discovers his absence from the caravan heading home. Gaventa also points out that at the Visitation, in the "joyous exchange of Elizabeth and Mary the fulfillment of the promise already begins." The good news is announced first in women's words; the familiar scene takes on new significance, strengthening women's sense of their ability to image and preach God.

Mary's response to Elizabeth's greeting in her Magnificat is hardly proof of the self-abasement that contemporary women complain about in her. She tells us God has done great things for her and all generations will call her blessed. She sums up the Christian experience of a God who is (in our concepts) both paternal and maternal, echoing the powerful prayer of Hannah in 1 Samuel. It is possible that this prayer was said by Jewish women of her time when they first became pregnant, and so it relates Mary to all those pregnant with new life.7 It connects her to the powerless as well; what Mary calls her lowliness is a matter of class and lack of power, placing her (and her son) among those whom God protects. To a number of feminist biblical scholars-and third-world theologians, most notably Tissa Balasuriya-this prayer makes Mary a prophet whose social message is an important reminder to Christians today.

Mary's witness transcends ideology, creed, and gender because her life, even in the brief glimpses of it in the New Testament, is rooted in relationships that constantly demand creative faithfulness in the face of ever-changing conditions. That is why the mother of Jesus pondered events over and over, even at the Nativity when the shepherds were rejoicing. That is why in John's Gospel she is at Cana and under the cross, the only disciple to be present both at the beginning and end of her son's mission.

Mary is given short shrift in Matthew's account of the birth of Jesus, for he is attempting to connect Jesus with the history of Israel; she says nothing and is the subject of only one active verb in the whole Gospel, when she gives birth. But in Luke she is disciple, prophet, and thinker as well as mother. Her Magnificat reveals her intimacy with the Hebrew Scriptures, and its final lines recalling "Abraham our father" remind us that she is carrying on his tradition, answering God's summons. Mary was not called to be an ideal middle-class wife and mother. As Elisabeth SchOssler Fiorenza reminds us,

In the center of the Christian story stands not the lovely "white lady" of artistic and popular imagination, kneeling in adoration before her son. Rather it is the young pregnant woman, living in occupied territory and struggling against victimization and for survival and dignity.8

Remarkably, Newman appreciated Mary's reliance on observation and judgment as well as her ability to live with ambivalence. She became for him the model of each person's need to reflect on the presence of God within, to face doubts and still be faithful, always trying to reconcile faith and experience without forcing them together. Before he entered the Roman church, he concluded that she represented the necessary attitude to faith "not only ... of the unlearned, but also of the Doctors of the Church, who have to investigate, and weigh, and define, as well as to profess the Gospel."9

Nevertheless, the Mary of the New Testament is a figure singularly open to cultural and personal interpretation. Contemporary women find hidden dimensions in Luke's story prompted by their own experience. In the Annunciation, for instance, which might more accurately be called the Proposal (in both senses of the term), they see a brave young woman (of twelve or thirteen) willing to commit herself to an action whose consequences she cannot foresee. Aquinas saw the Annunciation as a kind of marriage between human nature and the Son of God. This lofty concept might best be understood today in a cosmological sense. From a psychological perspective, Mary's consent reminds me of Carol Gilligan's female adolescents and their passionate concern for justice. Unfortunately, most of these girls lose their fervor and confidence under social pressure. Despite scandal, religious disapproval, and extreme suffering, Mary did not.

To share just one other woman's view of the Annunciation, in her novel about a feminist desperate to have a child, Sara Maitland introduces a startling subjectivity into Mary's view of the virginal conception: "that purely conscious, unalienated woman who can so assent with the entirety of her person needs no biological intrusion between her desire and its fulfillment." She is "a slap in the face to anyone who wants to see the virgin birth as anti-sexuality. Her small, tired face. weary with trying to explain the obvious, says sexuality goes beyond the moment of genital receptivity."

She cannot explain. The neighborhood is filled with delighted scandal: this might teach her not to walk about ignoring men and acting so high and free. But she is not afraid. Not her, in her moment of pure assent. She uprooted her desire and carried it as far as it would go; carried it beyond mind and logic higher and higher to the throne of the living God, to the source of light, to the infinite word ....

Assent becomes the moment of conception. 10

THE EARLY CHRISTIAN CHURCH

Eve, Mary, and Other Women

If the Bible itself opens Mary's story to so many potential elaborations and interpretations, popular devotion and legends begin to add their own almost from the beginning, filling in the Gospel gaps, but often changing the evangelists' emphasis. Mary is the true heroine of the second-century Protevangelium of James, a narrative purportedly written by the brother of Jesus, widely translated and circulated down through the Middle Ages. The stories it told of Mary's parents Anna and Joachim, of her early education in the temple, her marriage to a widowed older Joseph and her triple virginity (before, during, and after the birth of Jesus), all found their way into art and church teaching, mingling seamlessly with details from the New Testament. As Beverly Gaventa points out, when it comes to the subject of Mary, one cannot distinguish sharply between popular literature and the teaching of patristic writers.11

The tendency of popular assumptions to trickle up and merge with church teaching is particularly clear in the hardwon unity of view that culminated in the declaration of Mary as theotokos, or God-bearer, at the Council of Ephesus in 431. In the second- and third-century era of the martyrs, marian piety was minimal in the Latin-speaking church. Struggling to establish Christianity in a hostile Roman Empire and wrestling with heretics in the attempt to define true doctrine, the fathers turned to the mother of Jesus only when they needed her to establish his human nature. When they did, they did not hesitate to criticize her for lack of faith (Tertullian) or impatience at the wedding of Cana (Irenaeus).

In the earliest marian theological interpretation, she was evoked (very briefly) as a good counterpart to the bad Eve, mother of the living in the Hebrew Scripture. Just as Paul had called Christ the New Adam, so Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Tertullian called Mary the New Eve. The fathers' descriptions of Eve and Mary, however, reflected a misogynistic culture in their distortion of Genesis 2-3. They grouped all women except Mary with Eve, a weak seductress tempting the noble Adam to a fatal fall. Milton repeated this interpretation centuries later, and vestiges of such attitudes persist even today. Icon painter Yaraslava Mills, for example, commissioned to create a resurrection scene in a church window, asked her clerical donors if she could uncover Eve's hands-traditionally invisible under red cloth-so that Christ could reach out his hand to her as well as to Adam. She was told no; it was impossible because Eve was unclean.

Seeing Mary as a human woman like themselves, contemporary women see her connection with an Eve liberated from her role of cliche seductress. Barbara Grizzutti Harrison represents the feelings of many when she calls Eve her sister because "without the genetically transmitted knowledge of good and evil that Eve's act of radical curiosity sowed in our marrow, we should not desire to know and love God, we should have no need of him. We should have no need of one another." 12 Phyllis Trible's groundbreaking rereading of Genesis rescues Eve from being seen as temptress. In the scene with the snake in which Adam is passive but later blames Eve, God accepts her explanation, damning only the serpent, but making both Adam and Eve responsible. Trible says: "The Yahwist narrative tells us who we are (creatures of equality and mutuality); it tells us who we have become (creatures of oppression), and so it opens possibilities for change, for a return to our true liberation under God." 13

Mary's Virginity

When sexual renunciation replaced martyrdom as the mark of true Christian dedication in the fourth century, influential churchmen like Jerome and Ambrose urged women to join communities of committed virgins and widows. No longer seen as the Jewish mother and disciple of the Gospels, Mary became the heroine of this new asceticism. Her virginity (before, during, and after giving birth to Jesus) became moreand more associated with the church itself, especially in the view of the influential Bishop Ambrose of Milan. Matthew and Luke had spoken only of Mary's virginal conception of Jesus, highlighting divine action in his birth. But the fourth-century fathers seemed to know better what kind of mother was fitting for God. It is startling to hear bishop Athanasius of Alexandria describe her:

Mary ... was a pure Virgin, with a harmonious disposition .... She did not want to be seen by men .... She remained continually at home, living a retired life and imitating a honeybee .... She generously distributed to the poor what was left over from the work of her hands .... She prayed to God, alone to the alone, intent on two things: not to let a bad thought take root in her heart and to grow neither bold nor hard of heart .... Her speech was recollected and her voice low. 14

This perennial male fantasy of a quiet, selfless woman may not, however, have convinced his feminine audience as much as a more available figure of Mary from popular culture. The Protevangelium depicted Mary entering the temple to study when she was three, and the theme became a popular and continuing one in art. This temple presentation of Mary is celebrated in the Catholic liturgical calendar (Nov. 22); its theological justification is that Mary belonged only to God. Women, however, may well have seen it differently. In the early centuries of the church, they could gain an education only as consecrated virgins and widows. Historian Peter Brown says that evidence from the lives of many women who joined celibate communities at this time suggests that it was not the image of the reclusive honeybee that attracted them but that of Mary as student. Following the norms they could not change, such Christian women were able to lead meaningful lives of scholarship and service, strengthened by their devotion to Mary as a lifelong learner. 15

In our world, women have had to reinterpret Mary's virginity to make it meaningful to them. Both ordinary people and scholars seem to agree that the word defines Mary's autonomy. "She's not under any man's control" sums up the common view, echoing Sojourner Truth's famous outburst on the floor of the Women's Rights Convention in 1851: "That little man in black there, he says women can't have as much rights as men 'cause Christ wasn't a woman. Where did your Christ come from? ... From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with him." 16

Instead of allowing male authority to assign significance to their experience, women today are discovering its meaning themselves. In the Mediterranean world from which Mary and the church arose, virginity symbolized not only the temporary absence from sex of the small number of Vestal Virgins, but the independence and self-direction of the goddesses, rather than their abstinence from sex. It was their freedom that made them virgins: No one owned them. In Scripture, Mary is never portrayed as under the control of any man: "The image of Mary as a virgin," theologian Elizabeth Johnson reminds us, "has significance as the image of a woman from whose personal center power wells up, a woman who symbolizes the independence of the identity of women." 17

Deploring Mary's passive, submissive image as one responsible for much violence used against women, Asian Christian women echo Johnson's judgment. They do not see Mary in exclusively biological terms, but find her life open to wholeness and to others. Korean theologian Chung Hyun Kyung says Mary strengthens women to tell the truth; her unbreakable spirit is their model.18

Emergence of the Mother of God

In the early church, however, knowledge of the Bible or the possibility of an education were possible only for the elite. The great majority of Christian urban dwellers and displaced agricultural workers streaming into Rome and Constantinople because of the constant invasion of Huns, Vandals, Goths, and Persians in the fourth and fifth centuries demanded childbearing rather than virginity of their women. The exclusion of any female images from the Christian concept of divinity in the Latin Church-- concerned to eradicate the worship of pagan goddesses-was particularly hard on people whose experience with life-producing powers had been connected with the female principle for millennia. They became devoted to a more popular image of Mary, that of the compassionate Mother of God, the theotokos, venerated in the liturgy of the Eastern Church at least since the second century. In the Odes of Solomon, Mary is called a woman of power and agency, giving birth to Jesus "like a strong man with desire."

The more Jesus was divinized by the fathers, the greater was the need for a mediator who could remind people of his humanity. Slowly the mother of Jesus became accepted by the public as their protector. St. Ephrem's poetic praise of her role as "the daughter of humanity" whose "luminous eyes" see all things clearly represented the view of the great Cappadocian Fathers-Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nanzianzus. When Christianity became the established religion of Rome and the Latin Fathers no longer feared Mary's connection with earlier mother goddesses, the whole church declared the mother of Jesus to be theotokos (literally the God-bearer). at the ecumenical Council of Ephesus in 431. Crowds celebrated noisily in the streets outside. Icons, churches, and feasts in her honor multiplied. Mary was credited with saving Constantinople from barbarians in 626-the first of innumerable similar accomplishments attributed to her in the next thousand years. The compassionate figure of the mother of God permitted believers to preserve their differences as well as their communal ties. Her intercessory role satisfied the most primitive needs for protection at the same time that it supported complex intellectual arguments for her son's humanity. The God-bearer was and is an accurate symbol of Mary, for it recalls the spirit-filled woman of Luke's Gospel and her words.

THE MIDDLE AGES: PRAYERS, PILGRIMAGE SHRINES, AND BLACK MADONNAS

The power and influence of the theotokos was present everywhere in medieval Christendom: in the daily prayers of monks and nuns, in the art and worship of churches, in the books of hours and portable altars of the nobility, in the banners, statues and imagination of peasants. As at Ephesus, Mary seemed to perform different functions for her varied devotees, depending on their class, state in life, and gender. In social function as in life, she was the very image of incarnation.

A scholarly abbot like Anselm of Canterbury did not hesitate to pray to Mary in the erotic language of the Song of Songs, which had become part of the regular readings and chants for her feast days, nor to connect her function with that of natural renewal:

O woman full and overflowing with grace, plenty flows from you to make all creatures green again. 19

Devotion to Mary seemed to transform the emotional life of powerful abbots like Anselm and Bernard of Clairvaux, making them more humble and understanding religious superiors. It did not, however, carry over into their attitudes to real women. Art, sculpture, and sermons demonstrate that the Eve-Mary split remained dominant throughout the medieval world.

Yet women-including women monastics-did not necessarily see themselves as they were seen, nor did they relate to Mary as male monks did. If marian devotion made men more tender, it served to strengthen women. It is instructive to look at the role Mary played in encouraging the twelfth-century Benedictine nun Elisabeth of Schoenau to pursue the vocation to which she felt called by God. At the age of twenty-three, Elisabeth began having visions that urged her to criticize priests and church authorities publicly for their laziness and failure to instruct the people. These "arrows of the Lord" were a torture to her, because she feared what people would think if she, a woman, obeyed them. But when Mary appeared to her wearing priestly garments and signed her with the sign of the cross, she lost her fear. When an angel appeared to her shortly afterwards and told her to act "manfully," Elisabeth began her new career as an outspoken preacher and prophet.20

Her courage was reinforced by the example and words of the older abbess, Hildegard of Bingen, who encouraged her in what she called their common vocation as prophets. She shrewdly advised Elisabeth not to claim too much, however, but to explain humbly to those who questioned her that as a woman she was only an instrument-a trumpet through which the Spirit broadcast the mysteries of God.

Though Hildegard was heard in her time, even by popes and emperors, her music, drama, manuals on healing, and rich theological art were not included in mainstream tradition. Only in the last few decades, and largely because the nuns of her order preserved and translated them, have we been able to share in her visions, which assign a central role in world salvation to Mary and contain an unusual rehabilitation of Eve. Hildegard didn't focus on original sin, which so dominated mainstream western thought, but on the Creator's love and joy in creation. She saw the world as wedded to its maker and Mary as central to this ongoing marriage. Because Mary brought God's son into the physical world, Hildegard believed that Mary and Eve were now united: "Mary is Eve: there is only one Woman, she who was born of Adam in order to be, like Wisdom, the mirror of God's beauty and 'the embrace of his whole creation'." Hildegard believed women fulfilled an essential purpose on earth: "At every level the feminine is that in God which binds itself most intimately with the human race, and through it with the cosmos."21

Hildegard's works, of course, were not available either to the townsfolk or to the vast majority of illiterate peasants in medieval times. Mary, however, was as close to them as the nearest wayside shrine. They remembered her daily when they paused at work to pray the Angelus and meditate on the mystery of the Incarnation. The rosary served to keep the Gospel stories alive in the imagination of the vast majority of believers, including clerics, who had no Bibles and little theological guidance. And those who made pilgrimages-kings, queens, and commoners-sought her out together at the same shrines. Apart from that of St. James at Compostella, almost all of the best known (Chartres, Montserrat, LePuy, Dijon, Rocadamour, Loreto, Walsingham, and many others) were dedicated to Mary. Recorded legends and the miracle books still preserved at these shrines testify that Mary was constantly responsive to the needs of the sinners and saints who asked her help in conception, healing, and forgiveness.

One form of art that became the focal point of such shrines in western Europe were portable wooden statues, small enough to be carried about among the populace on feast days. These Romanesque statues of Mary holding on her knees the child who resembles her exactly were called Virgins in Majesty or Thrones of Wisdom. Both artists and viewers thought of them as portraits, and they evoked an immediate response. St. Ignatius of Loyola tells us in his Diary-presumably referring to the Black Madonna of Montserrat-that Mary "showed me that her flesh was in that of her son."

An art historian who came upon little-known examples of these statues in northern Spain wrote to me about their continuing evocative power:

The power of these images-vs. the insipid plaster Marys I had always known-made me re-think Mary's place in the church ... and in my life. Theologically, the Madonnas speak to the humanity of Jesus which the worshipers could see in a concrete way. She seems to be communicating directly: This is the child of my body, my blood, my genes. He dwelt among us; he shared our destiny. He was human as we are. In an age of "high" Christology, a clericalized church, and a remote Eucharistic celebration, these images offered consolation and support for ordinary Christians in the midst of uncertain and fearful times. What a source of communal bonding! She belonged to the people, not to the hierarchical church, it seems.22

MARY AND THE GODDESS: THE POWER OF ARCHAIC SYMBOLS

It is both significant and mysterious that many of these Virgins in Majesty-like some of the most famous painted icons in Eastern Europe-- were black. There are many theories as to why-accidental change, aging, the effects of soot from candles or fire; some may be pagan idols taken for Mary. Church authorities accepted them as visual texts of the Incarnation, citing the Song of Songs in explanation: "I am dark but lovely, 0 daughters of Jerusalem." There is no question, however, that they also absorbed the functions of Greco-Roman goddesses.

Like Demeter and Isis, Mary was dark like the fertile earth as she took over the traditionally feminine role of mediating human transitions from birth to death. "Pray for us now at the hour of our death" joined the earlier part of the Ave Maria after the plague in the late Middle Ages when the feast day of Mary's Assumption was moved to the time of the harvest festival. As at Ephesus, Mary's figure was capable of absorbing important aspects of the feminine divine in response to human religious need at the same time she reminded people how Christ-so often portrayed as a stem judge in the Middle Ages-was always with them. Through devout communal belief and creativity, Mary was thus able to deliver the message of her Magnificat in a different age.

Nobel prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney believes that the Christian poet's imagination has been blessed because Catholicism managed to preserve part of the old feminine religion in its structure. "The Virgin Mary as intercessor, mother of Mercy, Star of the Sea, occupies in the common psychology the place occupied by the muse in the poetic psychology."23 To those who think only literally and often ahistorically, such an attitude is superstitious, heretical, even devilish. Such literal beliefs accounted for the ferocity of the attacks on black madonnas during the Reformation and in the French Revolution.

To those able to think metaphorically, however, they stimulate thought. Undismayed by Mary's ability to assimilate elements from different cultures, including the pagan, Newman saw it as the effect of sacramental grace enlarging and refining the church's teaching: "We even hold that one special way in which Providence has imparted divine knowledge to us has been by enabling her to draw and collect it together out of the world."24

Today such symbolic accretions are less shocking than the fact that Mary was used to justify anti-Semitism and made a constant patroness of war, or that her influence was invoked against the Muslims (who venerated her greatly). Opposing armies from Christian countries even fought each other under separate banners of Our Lady (Vladimir for the Russians, Czestochowa for the Poles). What is more important and harder to explain is how the image of Mary managed to overcome such projections and distortions so that her message of God's compassion was able to reach ever greater numbers of people.

Victor Turner says that the ability of a symbol to absorb and mediate archaic elements-exactly what black madonnas do-is an important part of their transforming function. The conflict of multiple meanings they arouse is not idolatry but the desire to purify. Contemporary science tells us that we all contain archaic responses in our own bodies. Such symbols root them and allow for the purification of archaic ideals. If we destroy such symbols, rather than reverence them, we will lose a vital mediating source of transformation.25 This seems evident in the power of black madonnas to attract many who are seeking the feminine divine today. As China Galland's spiritual journeys indicate, the symbol of Mary as black madonna is capable both of integrating and empowering the feminine self on behalf of others and of serving as a bridge to images of the feminine divine in other religions.26

Just such bridging and transforming accompanied the appearance of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico in the sixteenth century, an event that made it possible for the indigenous Aztecs to become Christians. Both the Spanish and the Indians venerated the dark image of Guadalupe as the mother of the true God. In 1531, according to local legend, this image of Mary appeared on the tilma of the poor Indian Juan Diego. Speaking in his own language, Nahuatl, she requested him to ask the bishop to have a church built for her on Tepeyac, a hill sacred to the Aztecs. She told him that she wished to give consolation and relief to his suffering people. Virgil Elizondo recently translated a Spanish version of the original Nahuatl poem reporting her appearance. It conveys Juan Diego's recognition that the lovely vision he saw shared the place among the lowly that the biblical Mary assumed. Understandably, she calls him "my most abandoned son"; surprisingly, he calls her "my most abandoned daughter."27

Within a few decades, Guadalupe (and other black madonnas such as Aparecida in Brazil) helped foster relationships of respect within Latin American society for those of different backgrounds and color. The results have been far from perfect, but these images retained the potential to stimulate the liberation theology of our time. The veneration of such black madonnas has also brought about a powerful and inclusive feminist understanding of Mary, leading Brazilian theologians None Gebara and Maria Clara Bingemer to extol Mary's ability to reawaken the extraordinary creative energy in human beings.28

THE POST-REFORMATION RETURN OF MARIAN INFLUENCE

Mary appeared in the New World just as European Christendom was splitting in two, marking the end of unified devotion to Mary. Late medieval accretions from paganism, nationalism, and sentimental devotion-sometimes making Mary's motherhood seem more important than the word or person of God-understandably contributed to the Reformers' antagonism to marian art and devotion. Most pre-Reformation clergy were poorly educated, and their homilies on Mary had little biblical or theological basis. How could one who valued the Bible not be shocked at Saint Bernardine of Siena's praise of Mary as a kind of spiritual seductress?

O the unthinkable power of the Virgin Mother! One Hebrew woman invaded the house of the eternal King; one girl, I do not know by what caresses, pledges or violence, seduced, deceived and, if I may say so, wounded and enraptured the divine heart and ensnared the Wisdom of God .... 29

For several hundred years, Mary would be glorified by Catholics and largely ignored by Protestants. Catholic women had long been devoted to the Mary of everyday life-witness the realistic feminine actions and emotions conveyed in Giotto's life of the Virgin in Padua (early fourteenth century) or the widespread appearance of the pieta after the suffering and enforced caretaking caused by the plague in Europe. Notice, too, that it is largely to poor, vulnerable young women that hundreds of nineteenthcentury apparitions occur.

They cannot be ignored in a history of marian piety. From the third century onward, private visions of the Blessed Mother have been recorded; they blend with legends and fact in the Middle Ages and in such appearances as that at Guadalupe in Mexico. In the increasingly secularized world of Europe in the nineteenth century, they multiplied, became public and serial. Some were dubious, all were affected by local needs. The Catholic Church is cautious in its approach to such events, never saying Mary appeared, but only that in some cases-when the source is holy and the fruits of an apparition are sound, as at Lourdes-that it is not against faith to pray there. For the poor young women who saw Mary, such apparitions seem to function as the creative theology of the marginalized. In almost every such case, the community rallied around the seer or seers, making these events public, communal affirmations of faith in situations where church and livelihood seemed threatened.30

But it was the publicly expressed need and hope of Protestant English and American women in the same century that first gave explicit voice to Mary's agency on behalf of social justice and her ability to strengthen women's sense of identity, vocation, and social image. These women pointed out that feminine symbols were missing from their churches and from public life. As they visited Europe and the new museums at home, they observed the wealth of painting and sculpture in which Mary was depicted as a strong and admirable woman. The shrines and daily devotions English social reformer Frances Power Cobbe witnessed in her travels to Italy convinced her that Protestants should ask themselves whether they were wise to have given up "something with which their creed can ill dispense." To Catholics, Mary "is the representative of all the feminine virtues and perfections"; they know that "Love, motherly tenderness and pity, is a divine and holy thing, worthy of adoration. The heart of humanity longs to rest itself on the compassion of its Creator."31

To the Americans Margaret Fuller and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mary was helpful both in strengthening their sense of identity and purpose and providing a useful model for other women to follow. Both kept favorite marian paintings by Raphael in their homes. Fuller's essays and poems reveal her attraction to Mary both as mother and virgin, a magnet for her own psychic yearning for wholeness. Perhaps for the same reasons, she was deeply moved by the image of the mother of sorrows who endured her son's death and went on to join the community of hopeful grievers. In her Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) she placed the mother of Jesus in the roster of goddesses and virgins who might spur the development of contemporary women. She did not see Mary as a goddess; her role was special because she alone was part of human history. Fuller comments that Mary's potential for enlarging the freedom of women has yet to be realized. What is most surprising, perhaps, is that this freethinking woman saw Mary's chief virtue as potency of Spirit and believed that only a spiritual transformation of society could bring about true equality between the sexes.

Harriet Beecher Stowe's identification with Mary was equally intense but almost exclusively oriented to her role as a mother. Not only was she writing at the height of the Victorian era, which idolized selfless, maternal women, but she herself had suffered the loss of two beloved sons, Charles and Henry. This daughter and wife of Calvinist ministers viewed Mary as a prophet because of her Magnificat. But above all, Stowe identified with Mary as the mater dolorosa, whose suffering drew her to the "idea of sorrow in heaven-sorrow for the lost, in the heart of God himself."32 Mary's image, particularly as represented in Raphael's Sistine Madonna, inspired Stowe's authorial attempts to introduce a more maternal God into the paternalistic Calvinism she knew so well.

All the elements necessary to reveal Mary as a liberating model for women were available in the late nineteenth century, but unfortunately they existed in different groups, classes, and religions whose members did not communicate well with one another. By the time the second wave of the women's movement captured main-stream acceptance in the 1960s, many of its most public proponents found religion and maternity part of womens' problems, not liberating solutions.

Time, however, has brought about more nuanced and differentiated views of what constitutes women's liberation. These include interdependence, both with nature and humankind across the globe. Mary's Magnificat arose at a particular historical turning point, as Christianity developed from Judaism. Yet its meaning is relevant in our very different historical situation in which Christianity and Judaism are in a new relationship to other world religions, now recognized as valid traditions in touch with ultimate reality. Mary is venerated in Islam and Hinduism. The potential of her presence to evoke the divine feminine and heal divisions without canceling diversity is a tremendous, largely untapped resource.

Will contemporary feminists come to appreciate Margaret Fuller's insight that devotion to Mary is potentially beneficial to women?

Man looks upon Woman, in this relation, always as he should .... Frivolity, base appetite, contempt are exorcised, and man and woman appear again in unprofaned connection as brother and sister, children and servants of one Divine love, and pilgrims to a common aim.33

I hope so. Rescued from her long silence, Mary reveals that women's voices are not confined to a suppressed female truth, but are meant to speak the truth for all. She is indeed the "daughter of humanity" St. Ephrem named her, calling on all cultures to respond to the challenge of the Spirit today.

Footnote:

1 Ivone Gebara and Maria Clara Bingemer, "Mary," in Mysterium Liberationis: Fundamental Concepts of Liberation Theology, ed. Ignacio Ellacuria and Jon Sobrino (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1993). 483.

Footnote:

2 Mary Gordon, "Coming to Terms with Mary," Commonweal (Jan. 15, 1982). 12

Footnote:

3Valerie Sawing made the point in "The Human Situation: A Feminine View" (1960), reprinted and duly praised in Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion, ed. Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow, (New York: Harper & Row, 1979).

4 Victor and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 143.

Footnote:

5 J. H. Newman, The New Eve (Oxford: Newman Bookshop, 1952), 77-8.

6Beverly Roberts Gaventa, Mary: Glimpses of the Mother of Jesus (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999), ix.

Footnote:

7 Cf. Hans Klein, "The Magnificat as a Prayer of Jewish Women," Theology Digest 46 (Spring 1999), 43-7.

8 Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza, Jesus: Miriam's Child, Sophia's Prophet (New York, Continuum, 1994), 187.

Footnote:

9As quoted in Hilda Graef, Mary: A History of Doctrine and Devotion (Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1985) 2:106.

10 Sara Maitland, Daughter of Jerusalem (Henry Holt. 1995), 324.

Footnote:

11 Gaventa has performed a real service by including the text of this hitherto almost unavailable work in an appendix to her Mary.

12 Barbara Grizzutti Harrison, "A Meditation on Eve," in Out of the Garden: Women Writers on the Bible, ed. Christina Buchmann and Celina Spiegel, (New York: Fawcett-- Columbine, 1994), 1.

13Phyllis Trible, "Eve and Adam: Genesis 2-3 Reread," in Womanspirit Rising, 81.

Footnote:

14 From his Letter to the Virgins, quoted in Hilda Graef, Mary: A History of Doctrine and Devotion (Westminster, MD: Christian Classis, 1985), 1, 52-3.

15See Peter Brown's The Body and Society: Men, Wonen and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press. 1988), esp. ch. 13, to see how women managed to lead productive lives in this harsh cultural context.

Footnote:

16As quoted in Lerner, Feminist Consciousness, 106.

17Elizabeth A. Johnson, "Marian Tradition and the Reality of Women," Horizons 12/1 (1985), 133.

18 Chung Hyun Kyung, "Who is Mary for Today's Asian Women?" in Struggle to Be The Sun Again (Maryknoll, Orbis, 1990).

Footnote:

19 Anselm of Canterbury, The Prayers and Meditations of St. Anselm (Baltimore: Penguin, 1973; 120.

Footnote:

20 Cf. Anne L. Clark's Elisabeth of Schoenau (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992).

21 As quoted in Barbara Newman, Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard's Theology of the Feminine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 66, 160, 250.

Footnote:

22 Letter from Philadelphia art histroian Bobbey Burke.

Footnote:

23Seamus Heaney, The Furrow, Sept. 1985.

24 J. H. Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), 381.

25Victor Turner, Image and Pilgrimage, 144.

Footnote:

26 For her account of personal geographical journeys and spiritual development that focus increasingly on the transformative power of black madonnas, see Galland's Longing for Darkness: Tara and the Black Madonna (Baltimore: Penguin, 1990), and The Bond Between Women: the Journey to Fierce Compassion (New York: Riverhead, 1998).

27 See Virgilio Elizondo, Guadalupe: Mother of the New Creation, (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1997).

28Ivone Gebara and Maria Clara Bingemer, Mary: Mother of God, Mother of the Poor. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1987).

Footnote:

29Graef, Mary, 1:317.

30 For more analysis of these complicated phenomena, cf. David Blackbourn, Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), Turners, Image and Pilrimage, and Sandra Zimdars-Swartz, Encountering Mary: From La Salette to Medjugorje (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).

31 Frances Power Cobbe, "Madonna Immacolata," ch. 14 of Italics (London, 1864) 329, 331.

Footnote:

32 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sunny Memories of Foreign lands. 2 vols. (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1854), 2:350.

Footnote:

33 Margaret Fuller: Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1855 reprint; Norton, 1971), 305, 308-9.

Author Affiliation:

Sally Cunneen is Professor Emeritus of English Language and Literature at Rockland Community College (SUNY). She is cofounder of the ecumenical quarterly Cross Currents and author of several books. including In Search of Man.: The Woman and the Symbol (1996).

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