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Ann Loades
First published as Ch. 10, in After
Eve,
edited by Janet Martin Soskice.
Collins Marshall Pickering
1990
Reproduced on our website with the necessary permissions
Mary the mother of Jesus has been the focus of an
extraordinary amount of piety and theology down the centuries, and whatever it
is she represents has been and remains central to the vitality of Christianity
in many parts of the world. It would be worthwhile to try to understand that
quite apart from the phenomenon of feminist theology. Mary is also, inevitably,
a focus of discussion in inter-church dialogue - indeed, this particular
discussion of my own had its origin in an invitation to me from the Oxford
branch of the Ecumenical Society of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which requires of
its members only that they should be prepared to say or sing the Magnificat,
though it is a society unlikely to concern itself with feminism as a
post-1960s movement, or with feminist theology. As an ecumenical society it
will be unable to avoid that concern indefinitely, so long as women alert to
feminist and feminist theological concerns continue to make the effort to
participate in Christian institutional structures, or Christian societies. One
recent attempt to contribute to ecumenical dialogue, with attention to women
and their status in mind, is Pope John Paul II's Sixth Encyclical,
Redemptoris Mater (Mother of the Redeemer) published on 25th March,
1987, to initiate the Marian year which began on Pentecost Sunday, 7th June,
1987, and which concluded on the Feast of Assumption, 15th August, 1988. The
Feast, incidentally, survived the Reformation to remain in Oxford University's
Calendar, though since it falls in the middle of the long vacation, it is not
the focus or occasion of particular celebration, no doubt to the great relief
of at least some of the Canons of Christ Church, at once college chapel and
diocesan cathedral.
It may be helpful to make a statement about how this
present writer sees the enterprise of feminist theology, before turning to my
exploration of how Mary is now viewed by a variety of feminist and other
theologians, moving along a spectrum from the extremely hostile to the more
constructive - none of which falls along strictly denominational lines in any
necessary way, so far as one can see. Feminist theologians within the Christian
tradition have an argument with that tradition and its values for them in their
present culture. If we agree to define feminism at its most minimal as a
movement which seeks change for the better in terms of justice for women, it is
obvious that a feminist theologian need not be female by sex; and not every
female theologian is a feminist theologian. The major feminist theologians at
the present time are female, however, because a primary need for women is being
expressed in this form of theology, that is, self-reliance in understanding
themselves and their relationship to the God they have found to be theirs
although mediated to them by a religious tradition which causes some of their
problems. They are concerned to use gender analysis to examine the way
religious traditions work, the symbolism they use, the characteristics of roles
within them, the way religious traditions reflect social assumptions and shape
and re-shape those assumptions, and especially the gender-related way in which
we talk about divine reality. Theology is itself one such gender-related term,
reflecting the unease about the association of the female and the feminine with
the godlike. Feminist theologians hope that some of the old stories can be
re-told and new ones invented to verbalise God in an inclusively human manner,
which takes account of female human beings and what particular societies,
including Christian ones, make of the biological differences which render some
of us female and some of us male. The languages which mediate divine reality to
us have differed depending on their relationship to shifting contexts, and
feminist theologians want to imitate the motivation of those who have
re-deployed the language, and perhaps even reuse some of the content. The point
of the whole endeavour is to try to get us to make an imaginative and moral
shift, so that we can come to share a new vision of goodness and be given and
gainaccess to it. This is hardly a destructive or unworthy goal, though the
route there may be a painful one. For so far as feminist theologians are
concerned, it is not just the biblical texts, but centuries of habits of
exegesis, ecclesiastical practice and tradition which are now ripe for
scrutiny, all alike without immunity of any kind. And this includes the texts
and traditions and devotions about Mary.
Feminist theology is young, but women have been engaged
in the re-evaluation of texts and traditions for some time. For instance, one
Eliza Sharpies in 1832 addressed a meeting, in the course of which she
said:
The tyrant God, Necessity, said to the subject man:
'Of the tree of knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat'. Sweet and fair
Liberty stepped in ... spurned the order ... of the tyrant. 'She took of the
fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her, and he did
eat.' Do you not, with one voice exclaim, well done woman! LIBERTY FOR EVER! If
that was a fall, sirs, it was a glorious fall, and such a fall as is now wanted
... I will be such an Eve, so bright a picture of liberty. (1)
And twelve years later, in 1844, reformer Emma Martin,
who once lectured on 'The Holy Ghost, HER Nature, Offices and Laws' (presumably
without the benefit of the Syrian Fathers) remarked, 'I have asked the
learned (?) clergy for rational answers to knotty questions . . . they
won't (sic) answer them because they are asked by a woman, yet they
obtained Christ from the same source. I wonder they did not object to him
on that account.' (2)
The doyenne of the movement as a whole is Elizabeth Cady
Stanton, veteran of the nineteenth century's anti-slavery campaign as well as
of other battles, passionately concerned as she was about women's needs and
their expression in society. In her eighties, she and a team of colleagues
produced a collection of comments on the parts of the Bible which explicitly
refer to women, published in 1895 and 1898 as The Woman's Bible, and in
a new paperback edition in 1985. (3)It is convenient to pick up a passage from
The Woman's Bible, which represents a not untypical reaction to the 1854
dogma of the 'Immaculate Conception', a dogma not only profoundly troublesome
to women, but also, given its long and contentious history, to the relationship
between the Roman Catholic Church and other Churches, not just Protestant ones
but Orthodox too. This will give us a line of connection to the present-day
feminist critique. For the dogma states that:
the Blessed Virgin Mary, in the first instant of her
conception, has been, by a special grace and privilege of Almighty God, and in
view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the human race, preserved
and exempted from every stain of original sin . . (4)
We could cite here as a commentary, as it were, Redemptoris
Mater:
In the liturgy the church salutes Mary of Nazareth as
the church's own beginning, for in the event of the immaculate conception the
church sees projected and anticipated in her most noble member, the saving
grace of Easter. (5)
In The Woman's Bible there is a comment from one
of Elizabeth Cady Stanton's collaborators, which muddles two doctrines
together, but nevertheless manages to make a point about the way in which this
doctrine is still 'heard' and 'read' by women no matter what is said to them
about what the doctrines are supposed to mean, that is, excluding women's
meanings, Elizabeth Cady Stanton's collaborator seems to have written in some
desperation from within a context of hopelessly idealised maternalism when she
wrote that:
I think that the doctrine of the Virgin birth as
something higher, sweeter, nobler than ordinary motherhood, is a slur on all
the natural motherhood of the world. I believe that millions of children have
been as immaculately conceived, as purely born, as was the Nazarene. Why not?
Out of this doctrine, and that which is akin to it, have sprung all the
monasteries and nunneries of the world, which have disgraced and distorted and
demoralised manhood and womanhood for a thousand years. I place beside the
false, monkish, unnatural claim of the Immaculate Conception my mother, who was
as holy in her motherhood as was Mary herself.(6)
Leaving aside for the moment the problems raised by
Christian asceticism at its awful worst rather than at its splendid best, it is
important to be honest about the way in which, as this writer has suggested,
doctrines about Mary are consistently assessed by women (even when some kind of
theoretical or doctrinal understanding seems to have been achieved) as
suggesting the denigration of all other women who are mothers, or even just of
all other women, mothers or not. As Edward Schillebeeckx so disastrously
exclaimed, 'It is clear that she must be a creature of matchless wonder, this
Immaculat and Assumpta, with whom even the most physically and
spiritually beautiful women in the world cannot in any way be compared . . .'
(7)
Even without expressly defined dogma, in Orthodox
tradition we may be invited to 'stand with reverence in the house of our God,
and cry aloud: Hail, Queen of the world; hail, Mary, sovereign over all of us;
hail, thou who alone art blameless and fair among women . . .' (8)which may
prompt a question about what all other women, as distinct from men, are being
blamed for. Being first to sin could be part of the answer. And the Te Deum
sung at Anglican Matins includes as a reflection on the divine
self-emptying, 'When thou tookest upon thee to deliver man / thou didst not
abhor the Virgin's womb'. Why 'abhor'? Why should any woman's womb and body be
thought of as a possible source of abhorrence? Quite apart from the astonishing
prurience displayed in devotion to Mary on the part of some of her adherents,
(9) not the least remarkable feature of the Christian tradition is the extreme
rarity of the sane comment made by the ninth century Ratramnus, attempting to
combat beliefs consequent upon the assumption that the womb was impure, when he
insisted firstly that no creature was created vile, and so, also, that 'a
woman's uterus is not indecent, but honourable'. (10) He lost his argument.
Luther's attitude to women and to the feminine is
somewhat complex, including what Jean Bethke Elshtain calls the 'institutional
moment' of his masculinisation of theology - his assault on 'mother' church,
and his loss of 'a female linked transcendent moment', (11)notwithstanding his
personal devotion to Mary.
She is my love, the noble Maid,
Forget her can I never;
Whatever honour men have paid,
My heart she has for ever.
(12)
To the present purpose what matters is his defence of
the goodness of sexual desire, which led him to comment on Crotus,
who wrote blasphemously about the marriage of
priests, declaring that the most holy bishop of Mainz was irritated by no
annoyance more than by the stinking, putrid, private parts of women. That
godless knave, forgetful of his mother and sister, dares to blaspheme God's
creature through whom he was himself born. It would be tolerable if he were to
find fault with the behaviour of women, but to defile their creation and nature
is most godless. As if I were to ridicule a man's face on account of his nose!
For the nose is the latrine of man's head and stands above his mouth!
(13)
Not the most helpful analogy in the circumstances, but
the general point stands. And for sheer punitive nastiness, there is little to
beat the comment made by Suarez in 1584, who wrote of that 'troublesome
weariness with which all pregnant women are burdened, she alone did not
experience who alone conceived without pleasure'. (14) Another gem from the
writings of a seventeenth-century male saint observes that 'It is a subject of
humiliation of all the mothers of children of Adam to know that while they are
with child, they carry within them an infant . . . who is the enemy of God, the
object of his hatred and malediction and the shrine of the demon.' (15) This is
at once a 'theological' response to the sheer difficulties of childbearing,
from pregnancy, through birth to lactation and weaning, the risks to the
mother, and to the high mortality rate common to children apart from those born
in privileged societies, as well as being a preface to the assertion of the
need for 're-birth' by baptism, normally male-administered. What it may also
express to women is the theology of 'God punished women more', which in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries hindered the use of anaesthetic and
analgesic drugs in childbirth even when these had become comparatively safe and
available. Women were not seen as related to the new 'Eve', nor helped to
experience birth as she may have done, relatively without pain and distress, a
point made by Leonardo Boff, when he suggests that Mary was free not from pain
itself, but from the way we have pain. (16)
If Elizabeth Cady Stanton is the doyenne of the
nineteenth-century movement in feminist theology, Mary Daly is the doyenne of
the twentieth-century one. Mary Daly indeed acknowledges that despite some
elements of the tradition, Mary has been for many women their only symbol of
hope, not least when they have been on what she calls 'spiritual starvation
rations''(17) - which includes those of the Protestant tradition, eliminating
not only Mary 'the apostle to the apostles', but Mary the mother of Jesus and
such women saints as there were, from view. Before turning to Mary Daly's
pungent comments on Mary the mother of Jesus, however, it is worth noticing
that she is herself the product of the North American Roman Catholic tradition
which by the time of the Second Vatican Council included some of the most
formidably well-educated women in the USA. And to illuminate her exasperation
with her original Communion, and that of other women with Christian
institutions, we could refer to the documents of the Second Vatican Council,
(18) and pay some attention to what they do and do not say about women, as
about Mary, because apart from one or two distinctively Roman Catholic touches,
the documents are not untypical of Christian attitudes to women,
The documents cut Mary down to size. In Leonardo Boff's
book, The Maternal Face of God, he summarises various routes into
Mariology, the second of which was the one followed by the Council. In the
words of Boff s summary, 'Mary never lived in or for herself. Mary was a woman
ever at the service of others - of God, of Christ, of redemption, of the
Church, of the ultimate meaning of history.' From this perspective, Mary is
never to be the subject of a theological consideration of her own, but finds
her place in other theological treatises. (19) This feminine non-entity is
purportedly rescued from redundancy by the claim that 'Our Lady is the creature
who realised to a super-eminent degree whatever values are being discussed or
mediated.' The language of perfection is thus largely transferred to the
Church, a somewhat problematical move, but as Anne Carr comments in her book
Transforming Grace, (20)Mary is still in contrast with 'Eve' - all other
women - and it does not take much expertise to discover how they are to be
viewed. In some respects the documents of the Council are extremely promising.
One of the few explicit references to women indeed regrets that fundamental
personal rights are not universally honoured for women, such as the right and
freedom to choose a husband, embrace a state of life, or acquire an education
or cultural benefits equal to those recognised for men. And Pope Paul VI in
International Women's Year in 1975 said that what is most urgent is 'to labour
everywhere to have discovered, respected and protected the rights and
prerogatives of every woman in her life -educational, professional, civic,
social, religious - whether single or married'. (21) Paragraph 52 of The Church
Today, on 'the nobility of marriage and the family', to its credit affirms that
if the life of the family is to flower it needs kindly communion of minds and
painstaking co-operation of the parents in the education of their children. But
there is no sense that things could be different and indeed better in what
follows.
The active presence of the father is highly beneficial
to their formation. The children, especially the younger among them, need the
care of their mother at home. This domestic role of hers [my emphasis]
must be safely preserved, though the legitimate social progress of women should
not be underrated on that account.
What the writers miss is the essential active
presence of a father to his children, not least to his daughter(s), and the
effects on women of their continued restriction to the 'private', as distinct
from the public and political, realms, reinforced by suburban housing patterns;
not to mention the massive double work burden many of them carry for a very
long time, inside their homes in 'unpaid' work, and outside their homes in paid
employment, necessary if their families are not to fall into poverty. And in
societies where the family is still the economic unit, some 50 per cent of the
Third World's food is produced by women, including their work at the heavy
agricultural labour involved. How then are women to read not only the documents
of the Council, but the words of Redemptons Mater'?
In the light of Mary, the church sees in the face of
women the reflection of a beauty which mirrors the loftiest sentiments of which
the human heart is capable: the self-offering totality of love; the strength
that is capable of bearing the greatest sorrows; limitless fidelity and
tireless devotion to work; the ability to combine penetrating intuition with
words of support and encouragement.
Women's well-being may well depend upon their finding at
least some of these characteristics less than unambiguously praiseworthy. In
Section 60 of the Council's assessment of'The Church Today', it is indeed
acknowledged that women are now employed in almost every area of life, so that
it is deemed appropriate 'that they should be able to assume their full proper
role in accordance with their own nature' (my emphasis). Given the
peculiar association of women, rather than men, with nature, it seems to be
understood that women's nature is both well defined and limiting, though there
is an implicit concession to new possibilities in the need for everyone to
'acknowledge and favour the proper and necessary participation of women in
cultural life', and other options seem to be indicated in the sentence added
during the final drafting to paragraph 9 of the document on the laity, in the
section on 'the various fields of the apostolate', pointing out the importance
of women's participation in the various fields of the Church's apostolate.
Readers are no doubt meant to be reassured by the footnote which draws
attention to the point that this is one of the few places in all the council
documents where special attention is given to the contribution of women to the
mission of the Church, though it was clearly (to whom?) the mind of the Council
that they were included 'and eminently so', whenever the general role of the
laity was discussed. The note adds that by the time the Council ended, twelve
lay and ten 'religious' women were present as 'auditrices', though not of
course what Anne Carr records, that no woman was allowed to read a paper before
the assembly (cf. 1 Timothy 2.12, presumably), and that attempts were made to
try to bar women journalists from attending council masses or receiving
communion during its meetings. (22) Real exasperation could be provoked by the
closing messages of the Council, messages to men (males) regarded in terms of
their diversified contributions to society, with women having a message
addressed to them alone, and as is typical in Christianity, with reference to
their sexual states.(23) Women are addressed as girls, wives, mothers and
widows, as consecrated virgins, and women living alone, though with the
acknowledgment that they constitute half of the immense human family, and with
the claim that the Church has 'glorified and liberated' them, a claim not
without weight, notwithstanding this present reading of the Council's
documents. Women are associated with 'the protection of the home', with cradles
and deaths (cf. the nativity and crucifixion scenes?). Mothers are exhorted to
'pass on to your sons and daughters the traditions of your fathers' - mothers
not having any? Women are invited to reconcile men with life, to guard purity,
unselfishness and piety, to aid men to retain courage in their great
undertakings, with women's own concern to be particularly with the peace of the
world. They are clearly excluded from the address to 'workers' - 'very loved
sons', with its sense of unease, mistrust and lack of understanding between the
institution and the workers.
It was in response to the Council that one of the most
important books in feminist theology appeared in 1968, Mary Daly's The
Church and the second sex, and the invitation to write that book was
prompted by an article of hers which was published in 1965 when she already had
a doctorate in theology from Fribourg University in Switzerland, where she was
studying philosophy. Mary Daly and Rosemary Radford Reuther were crucial in
forming the women's caucus within the American Academy of Religion, at which
they both delivered important papers in 1971. Rosemary Radford Reuther's was to
appear as 'Misogynism and virginal feminism in the fathers of the church',
available with other useful essays in the collection she edited called
Religion and Sexism: Images of Women in the Jewish and Christian
Traditions (1974). (24) Mary Daly's much reprinted essay had a
deliberately menacing title: 'Theology after the demise of God the Father; a
call for the castration of sexist religion', and she was to part company with
Christianity in the course of writing Beyond God the Father (1973), now
re-issued with an 'Original Reintroduction'. One also needs to read
Gyn/E-cology (1978) (25) and Pure Lust (1984) (26), each of which
contains devastating attacks on Christianity's core symbolism. Tucked away in a
footnote of Beyond God the Father is her assessment of Phyllis Trible's
paper of 1973 on 'Depatriarchalizing in Biblical Tradition', on which Mary Daly
commented that 'It might be interesting to speculate upon the probable length
of a "depatriarchalized Bible". Perhaps there would be enough salvageable
material to comprise an interesting pamphlet'. (27) It is relevant to bear this
in mind particularly when we attend to her treatment of the story of the
Annunciation.
For Mary Daly, Mary is killed by the dogmas about her,
killed, though apparently alive, like a dolled-up Christmas tree. She points
out that the 1854 definition (which was in the forefront of the attention of
Elizabeth Cady Stanton's collaborator's mind) coincides with the first wave of
feminism, though it is in fact doubtful that the definition was aimed at
feminism. Here is a woman preserved from original sin by the grace of her son
not only in advance of his birth but of her own. As Redemptoris Mater
puts it, 'together with the Father, the Son has chosen her, entrusting her
eternally to the Spirit of holiness . . .'. What she is purified from is her
own autonomous being; her psyche is already dismembered; and the story of the
Annunciation affirming her need of male acceptance - 'according to thy will' -
makes her doubly a victim. She can then function only as a token woman of hope,
since she stands over against the incompetence and array of weaknesses ascribed
to women in general. So for Mary Daly, the impossible ideal of Virgin/Mother
has ultimately a punitive function, since no actual woman can live up to it,
throwing all women back into the status of the first Eve, and essentially
reinforcing the universality of women's low-caste status. (28) Yet she
acknowledges that the Immaculate Conception could be understood as the negation
of the myth of feminine evil, foreshadowing the 'Fall into the sacred . . .
free from the crippling burden of submersion in the role of the Other,'
(29)
This is the convenient point to couple with her opinions
of the 1854 dogma Mary Daly's treatment of the 1950 dogma of the Assumption:
'The Immaculate Mother of God, Mary ever virgin, having run the course of her
earthly life, was taken up body and soul into the glory of heaven . . .'.
Edward Yarnold SJ has eloquently pointed out the differences, let us say,
between the Assumption as painted by Titian and an icon of the Dormition in the
Orthodox tradition, maintaining nonetheless that 'Both sides of Christendom
believe that Mary was received body and soul into heaven to be reunited with
her Son in glory'.(30)Mary Daly has made the point that the dogma could at long
last indicate a 'no' to the peculiar association of women with sin and flesh
and matter, and it could also, in the immediate post World War II period,
remind us of the importance of bodies, even indeed of Jewish ones.
Unfortunately, the dogma's promulgation coincided with a backlash against
female independence, not wholly understandable as part of the need to re-found
families. For Mary Daly, this dogma then annihilates women's earthly presence,
and rehabilitates her as defeated, eliminated from public life, saved, once
again, by the male. (31) Given her assessment of the male monogender mating of
the Trinity, one could see too what she might make of Leonardo BofFs attempts
to secure a special relation of the third 'person' of the Trinity with Mary,
Boff breaking well out of the constrictions of the Vatican II documents.
Salvation for women by a God manifested contingently as
a male was coped with in earlier periods via the analogy of 'male is to female
as form is to matter', an analogy no longer defensible, any more than is an
assumption associated with it, that 'the first and principal cause of offspring
is always in the father', and here Marina Warner's book on Mary is
illuminating. She quotes the passage in Aeschylus' Oresteia, where
Orestes at his trial cries out in protest, 'And dost thou call me a
blood relation of my mother?' Apollo arbitrates with the judgment that 'The
so-called offspring is not produced by the mother . . . She is not more than
the nurse, as it were, of the newly conceived foetus. It is the male who is the
author of its being'. (32) This has been untenable without considerable
qualification since the development of embryology from the early nineteenth
century onwards (and Boff, to his credit, tries to pay attention to this
development), but it still influences doctrines about the ministry as it does
doctrines about Mary. So in the Bishop of London's November 1985 newsletter he
did his best to elaborate the view that 'in the whole of human instinct and
understanding it is the masculine which is associated with giving and the
feminine with receiving', a piece of gender construction as intolerable for men
as it is dishonest about women, and in the latter is liable to produce some
hilarity in those who have become aware of and articulate about their role in
securing the well-being of men without any firm expectation that the converse
will obtain. In Marian doctrines, we can still see the influence of this
theory, which has to do with what a culture thinks reproduction is all about,
that is 'the relationship between procreative beliefs and the wider context
(world view, cosmology, culture) in which they are found'. (33) Paternity, in
Carol Delaney's analysis, has meant 'the primary, essential and creative role'
in reproduction, and the meaning of maternity as 'nurture' is epitomised by
Mary.
Carol Delaney takes the root meaning of 'virgin birth'
(and we may add the dogmas already mentioned) to be a version of folk
theories about procreation, the essential implication of which is that a
child originates from only one source, and so is entirely consistent
with theological monotheism. Her fieldwork in a Turkish Muslim village enabled
her to identify an appropriate theory of procreation, which is that 'The male
is said to plant the seed and the woman is said to be like a field', so the
woman's role is secondary, supportive and nurturant. So she identifies a
further analogy, of 'Woman is to Man as the created, natural world is to God',
and we connect this again with metaphors from the Orthodox liturgy quoted
earlier. First:
Then the power of the Most High overshadowed her that
knew not wedlock, so that she might conceive: and he made her fruitful womb as
a fertile field for all who long to reap the harvest of salvation, singing:
Alleluia! (34)
Second, we find Mary urged by the unborn John in
Elizabeth's womb to rejoice as the 'vine with unwithering shoot', 'farm with
untainted fruit', 'arable yielding a bountiful stack of pity', 'furbishing a
lush pasturage'. (35)
Carol Delaney is surely correct to point out that the
knowledge that women are co-engenderers, co-creators, providing half the 'seed'
so to speak, half the genetic constitution of the child in addition to
pregnancy, birth and suckling, has not yet been encompassed symbolically.
Paternity is indeed a cultural construction of a powerful kind, and one cannot
simply claim that the meaning of Mary's virginity is that 'the role played by
the human race in the Incarnation is simply that of accepting God's gift as a
gift and as a grace, and nothing more', (36) yet another gender construction
associating receptivity with the feminine and giving with the masculine. Though
there is something important to hold on to here for our culture, as Lochman
wrote in his comment on how Mr Fix-It is set aside, for humanity in the
Incarnation is involved 'in the form not of a primarily creating,
controlling, self-assertive, self-glorifying humanity but as a primarily
listening, receiving, serving and blessed ("graced") human being', as Mary is
impressively described in the Christmas narrative. (37) Redemptoris Mater,
however, returns us firmly to gender construction, influenced apparently by
a particular school of psychology, when the text says that in Mary's faith,
first at the annunciation and then fully at the foot of the cross, 'an interior
space was reopened within humanity which the eternal Father can fill "with
every spiritual blessing" . . .'.
One needs also to look at another strand in the
tradition, which has to do with the point that early Christianity offered women
who did not or could not fulfil certain socio-sexual roles a new kind of
aspiration, (38) and for them, the virgin Mary was a possible symbol of
that discipleship which took overriding priority in their lives. For to be
sexually virginal was to be freed from a measure of male domination, to be
unexploited and unexploitable, to enjoy a certain sense of transcendence as an
element of personhood, so sexual asceticism was not necessarily imposed on
women as a kind of constraint. This is an important and neglected possibility
in the Protestant tradition. Even Mary Daly acknowledges this, when she writes
that the doctrine that Mary was a virgin before, during and after the birth of
Jesus, 'by its very absurdity . . . literally screams that biology and
abstinence from sexual activity are not the essential dimensions of the
symbol of Mary as a virgin ... '. (39) The doctrine may be saying something
about female autonomy to women, about the possibility of women's relation to
divine reality without male mediation, although there is a further problem
about the metaphors used to indicate the divine that would have to be tackled
at this as at other points of Christian doctrine. And Mary Daly and others may
be mistaken about the possibility of enjoying transcendence and autonomy
without the necessity for sexual virginity or chastity, depending on how sexual
relationships are construed and function in a particular society. Sarah
Maitland's brilliant novel Daughter of Jerusalem (1978) catches this
element of virginity beautifully in her initial reflection on Mary, small,
dark, devout, probably illiterate, unconventional, of unassailable
self-assurance:
Of course her assent is a sexual act, she tried to
explain, pushing her hair back under her scarf, and grinding her bare toes into
the coarse sand, because it was complete, it was made with the whole of her
being. It was an assent to the totality of herself, to a womanhood so vital and
empowered that it could break free of biology and submission, any dependence on
or need for a masculine sexuality - that furrow in which the crop of women's
sex has been held to be rooted. (40)
One extremely important manifestation of this sense of
'womanhood' was that it made the pursuit of learning possible, even if it often
meant retreat from the public world into the seclusion of the book-lined cell -
not the worst of all fates. Helen Waddell might be approximately a good
twentieth-century example, daughter of an Irish Presbyterian missionary family
as she was, even though reading the sympathetic biography of her by Dame
Felicitas Corrigan may still leave one with a sense of regret for a life not
entirely fulfilled. But consider, for example, what is expressed in her
translation of a ninth-century lament for a young abbess, a translation made
during the bombing raids of September 1941, which makes it all the more
poignant:
Thou hast come safe to port,
I still at sea,
The light is on
thy head,
Darkness in me.
Pluck thou in heaven's field
Violet and
rose
Whilst I strew flowers that will thy vigil keep,
Where thou dost
sleep,
Love, in thy last repose. (41)
And we could add to that her translation of an eleventh-century verse
about the virgins in the fields of the blessed, the girls illustrated as it
were in Fra Angelico's picture of St Thomas Aquinas and St Bonaventura
conversing in Paradise together:
Gertrude, Agnes, Prisca, Cecily,
Lucia, Thekla, Petronel,
Agatha, Barbara, Juliana,
Wandering there in the fresh spring meadows,
Looking for flowers to make them a garland,
Roses red of the Passion,
Lilies and violets for love.(42)
We have forgotten why it was that virginity could signal
a vocation, and this forgetfulness has in part to do with its praise by
undoubted woman-haters, even making the most generous allowances in the
interpretation of the rhetoric of misogyny. For virginity may be associated
also with stony asexuality, and the bizarre behaviour which can accompany it,
the product of a tradition which deemed women not to be as godlike as men are,
approximating to godlikeness only in so far as they approximate to masculinity.
When males are taken to be the normative and representative and essentially
life-giving expression of the human species, with females as defective,
imperfect and merely nuturant human beings, then virginity changes its meaning,
and signifies the approximation to an ideal one can never reach. One
manifestation of this is the phenomenon of anorexia, the inability to eat, not
necessarily a religious or indeed peculiarly Christian phenomenon, but
undoubtedly present in those women with a passion for what they took to be
moral and spiritual perfection - virility and virtue -an
approximation to that image of deity they might be thought not to bear in their
own right. The asceticism necessary for the pursuit of their virginal vocation
sometimes tipped them into uncontrollable anorexia and so to amenorrhea, not
least where they were in rebellion against the dependent forms of Christianity
on offer to women. Getting control of her body in asceticism however extreme,
retrieves a woman from the sense of helplessness she experiences simply by
virtue of being female. It commands attention, and for a time, tremendous
energy, as well as the ability to by-pass religious controls, find communion
with the deity, and criticise popes and archbishops.
The search for transcendence here can tip women into
near or actual half-unconscious destruction as petrified living dead. (43) If,
however, we could retrieve the association of 'virgin' with autonomy, but
carefully balanced with a sense of co-inherence, and without the abasement of a
woman's visual image;(44) and if we could by-pass sugary sweetness and dizzy
immobilisation on a pedestal, then Mary might be re-associated with the
affirmation and not the negation of what women discover themselves to be, and
we might re-connect Mary to present needs as, for example, Rosemary Radford
Reuther attempts to do. (45)
She, like Mary Daly, wants female presence acknowledged
without fear of real women, a fear not always unjustifiable; she wants the
co-ordination of nature and grace recovered for those whose ecclesiastical
traditions have lost it - again, arguably expressed in Mary's rapturous assent.
Arguing that we cannot remain with a doctrine of salvation mediated by the male
alone, she asks for the genuine reciprocity of women and men together in the
Churches, an expression of the way in which the female plays a co-operating
role in the work of salvation. This could have important consequences outside
the Church too, in the support each person gives to the dignity and
self-actualisation of the other. We could connect with this ideal of
'reciprocity' a remark of C.S. Lewis's - astonishingly, since he is not
frequently associated with perceptive comments about the reciprocity of men and
women together, of a kind which women can recognise as being supportive to
them. Yet perhaps as a result of his life with Joy Davidman he was to write
after her death:
It is arrogance in us to call frankness, fairness and
chivalry 'masculine' when we see them in a woman; it is arrogance in them to
describe a man's sensitiveness or tact or tenderness as 'feminine'. But also
what poor, warped fragments of humanity most mere men and mere women must be to
make the implications of that arrogance plausible. (46)
And it is Lewis, too, who anticipated in a way the
appropriation of Mary for 'liberation' theology, writing of Jesus as very much
his mother's son, in his Reflections on the Psalms:
There is a fierceness, even a touch of Deborah, mixed
with the sweetness in the Magnificat to which most painted Madonnas do
little justice; matching the frequent severity of His own sayings. I am sure
that the private life of the holy family was, in many senses, 'mild' and
'gentle', but perhaps hardly in the way some hymn writers have in mind. One may
suspect, on proper occasions, a certain astringency; and all in what people at
Jerusalem regarded as a rough north-country accent. (47)
Rosemary Radford Reuther ties the Magnificat in
to the revolutionary spirit of liberation theology (a possibility obliterated
for centuries by the practice of having it sung by pre-pubescent boys in skirts
and frills) with women above all representing the 'nobodies' made to be persons
as a result of the self-emptying of divine power in Jesus. Anne Garr makes Mary
herself a symbol of the transformed world for which women hope, edging away
from Mary as the impossible double-bind figure identified by Mary Daly. Anne
Carr acknowledges that Mary is a Utopian figure, a mystery. 'Her
intimate place in the Christian pattern enables us to imagine a healed,
reconciled, finally transformed world. While it is God who works human
salvation in Christ, and the Spirit who inspires the active response of the
Church, it is Mary who is the sign of the final transformation of the world.'
(48)
There remain, however, a number of less 'orthodox' possibilities. Marina
Warner(49) and Mary Daly (50) both spot something else in Mary which makes her
important to women by exhausted imperceptive moralism, and this was something
explained, oddly enough, in The Times of 7th February, 1987, by Rabbi
Ephraim Gastwirth, though he evidently disapproves of what he describes,
preferring, rather, 'the love and fear of a stern father'. For mother, he tells
us, has a love which is eternal and her broad arms encompass all her children
without distinction. 'Indeed, her love is often stronger for the weak and
wayward child, seeking to ensure his survival and to keep him within the family
group. The mother's love is unconditional.' The point is that there is a sense
in which Mary is as splendidly unconventional as Jesus was, since her loyalty
to her own explodes the bounds of strict justice, as Marina Warner makes clear.
'Through her, the whole gay crew of wanton, loving, weak humanity finds its way
to paradise.' So Marina Warner quotes the devils who say, 'Heaven's the place
for all the riff-raff/ We've got the wheat and God the chaff.' (51) This
association of Mary with unconventional love and with self-determination, could
relate her back to some less hallowed women, taking a clue from the genealogy
of the First Gospel - women such as Ruth, Tamar, Rahab and Bathsheba, all
specially related to messianic promise,(52) as well as to some of the
thoroughly idiosyncratic women of the apostolic tradition. We would recall that
Elizabeth's greeting, 'Blessed art thou among women', recalls comparable
blessings to both Jael and Judith, before paying close attention also to the
woman who wiped Jesus' feet with her hair, to the Syro-Phoenician woman who
argues it out with him as does Martha in the Fourth Gospel, the Samaritan woman
of the same Gospel, first missionary despite her past, and Mary of Magdala, not
that figment of ecclesiastical imagination, a reformed prostitute, but someone
healed of 'demonic' illness by Jesus. This 'apostle to the apostles' proclaims
the resurrection as did the mother of the Maccabean martyrs, and is followed by
Phoebe the deacon, Junia, given apostolic acknowledgment by Paul, and many
others. And Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel has made a particularly interesting
reassessment of tradition about Mary, (53) pleading for much more honesty about
its biblical origins, with the limitations imposed by that origin, and makes us
see Mary as a 'living, critical, angry unadapted mother', just as difficult as
some of the other people around Jesus, men as well as women. She emphasises
that Mary needs to take her place, perhaps a preeminent place, but only one
place, among all these other 'sisters'. Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel suggests that
one of the greatest defects of the tradition, even with the presence of at
least some women saints available, has been its monolithic character, the
attempt to load into just one symbol much of what women can represent in human
life, to men primarily, but with women finding in Mary possibilities for
themselves. Feminist theologians who follow Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel's lead
will not want Mary confined by ecclesiastical definition however subtle, but
want to be able to relate Mary to other women and the multiplicity of vocations
and possibilities of their lives now and in the future. So if, and only if,
women want to find role models in biblical and non-biblical tradition, Mary may
still have something to offer.
Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel made a proposal, 'Becoming
human in new community', at the World Council of Churches meeting in Sheffield,
in June 1981, 'The community of women and men in the Church', the proceedings
of which were edited by Constance Parvey. (54) In her report on the meeting,
Constance Parvey drew special attention to the fact that Mary had been singled
out as one of the basic paradigms, not least in the section on tradition and
traditions. She wrote that Mary is seen as a sharing woman seeking out
Elizabeth to tell the news of her pregnancy; as being in the tradition of
prophecy; neglected by her son in favour of his mission; and as a disciple
journeying in partnership with Jesus along with other women and men. 'Then we
witness her profound grief at the death of her child under the judgement of
religious and political powers, her faithfulness to follow him to the tomb, and
the divine gift bestowed upon her to be a witness of the resurrection of the
"flesh of her flesh, the bone of her bone".' Here is no model of submission and
subordination, but someone fully living out her partnership with God in the
Christ event. (55)
Between the present and the fulfilment of Anne Carr's
vision, there are elements here which could be extremely valuable to those who
still find their resources in the Christian tradition in relation to the
appalling circumstances of their lives, as well as in hope for blessing and
flourishing.
This essay represents a stage in exploration and does
not attempt to do more than indicate some options. For the present writer, the
least that could be said about Mary is that she represents what novelist
Robertson Davies suggests in his phrase 'having the body in the soul's
keeping', (56) but also, that 'Grace is not faceless', to quote Cornelius Ernst
OP. (57) The material drawn on towards the end of the essay, however, would
edge us towards meaning for that phrase rather more incarnated in women's lives
than theology has so far been prepared to concede.
NOTES
1. Quoted in B. Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem
(Virago, London, 1983), p. 146.
2. Ibid., p. 153.
3. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Woman's Bible
(Polygon, Edinburgh, 1985).
4. Cited from K. Rahner, Theological Investigations
(Darton, Longman and Todd, London, 1961), Vol. 1, p. 201.
5. Redemptoris Mater, as published in Origins:
NC Documentary Service, Vol. xvi:43 (9th April, 1987), pp. 745-67.
6. Woman's Bible, p. 114.
7. E. Schillebeeckx, Mary, Mother of the Redemption
(Sheed and Ward, London, 1964), p. 172.
8. Ecumenical Society of the Blessed Virgin Mary, The
Akathistos Hymn (Bocardo Press, Oxford, 1987), p. 17.
9. H. Graef, Mary: a history of doctrine and devotion
(Sheed and Ward, London, 1985), p. 245, quoting from the twelfth-century
Amadeus of Lausanne: 'The Holy Spirit will come upon you, that at his touch
your womb may tremble and swell, your spirit rejoice and your womb flower . .
.'
10. Ibid., p. 176.
11. J.B. Elshtain, 'Luther Sic - Luther Non',
Theology Today, Vol. xliii (July 1986), pp. 155-68, pp. 167-8. And see
chapter two of her Meditations on Modern Political Thought:
Masculine/Feminine Themes from Luther to Arendt (Praeger, New York,
1986).
12. V. White, Soul and Psyche (Collins London,
1960), p. 134, quoting the translation of another Dominican, Sebastian
Bullough. And see M. Thurian, Mary, Mother of the Lord, Figure of the Church
(Mowbray, London, 1985/1963) for more material on the Marian theology and
devotion of the Reformers.
13. J.B. Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman (Robertson, Oxford,
1981), p. 87.
14. M. Warner, Alone of all her sex (Picador, London, 1985), p.
43.
15. Ibid., p. 57.
16. L. Boff, The maternal face of God (Harper and Row, San
Francisco, 1987/1979), p. 148.
17. M. Daly, Beyond God the Father (Women's Press, London,
1986/1973), p. 81f.
18. W.M. Abbott, ed., The Documents of Vatican II (Chapman,
London, 1965).
19. Boff, op. cit., pp. l0f.
20. A. Carr, Transforming Grace: Christian Tradition and Women 's
Experience (Harper and Row, San Francisco, 1988), p. 191.
21. Ibid., p. 33.
22. Ibid., p. 30.
23. Abbott, Documents, pp. 732-5.
24. R.R. Ruether, ed., Religion and Sexism: Images of Women in the
Jewish and Christian Traditions (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1974).
25. M. Daly, Gyn/Ecology (Women's Press, London 1984).
26. M. Daly, Pure Lust (Women's Press, London, 1984).
27. Daly, Beyond God the Father, p. 205.
28. Ibid., pp. 81f.
29. Ibid., p. 86.
30. E.Y. Yarnold, The Assumption, 1980 Assumption Day Lecture for
the Parish Church of St Mary and All Saints, Walsingham.
31. Daly, Pure Lust, p. 128.
32. Warner, op. cit., p. 41.
33. C. Delaney, 'The Meaning of Paternity and the Virgin Birth Debate',
Man, Vol. xxi:3 (1986), pp. 454-513.
34. Akathistos, p. 19.
35. Ibid., p. 33.
36. J. McHugh, 'The Virginal Conception of Jesus', paper of 25th
October, 1985, published for the ESBVM, p. 6.
37. J.M. Lochman, The Faith We Confess: an Ecumenical Dogmatics
(Fortress, Philadelphia, 1984), pp. 112-13.
38. R.S. Kraemer, 'The Conversion of Women to Ascetic Forms of
Christianity', Signs, Vol. vi:2 (1980), pp. 298-307.
39. Daly, Beyond God the Father, p. 85.
40. S. Maitland, Daughters of Jerusalem (Pavanne, London, 1987),
p. 30.
41. Dame F. Corrigan, Helen Waddell: a Biography (Gollancz,
London, 1986), p. 317.
42. H. Waddell, The Wandering Scholars (Penguin, Harmondsworth,
1954), p. 123.
43. See Chapter 3 of A. Loades, Searching for Lost
Coins (SPCK, London, 1987).
44. Ruether, 'Misogynism' etc. as in note 23, p, 166.
45. R.R. Ruether, Mary, the Feminine Face of the
Church (SCM, London, 1979); and Chapter 6 of her Sexism and God-talk:
towards a Feminist Theology (SCM, London, 1983).
46. C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (Faber, London, 1986), p.
43.
47. C.S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (Fontana, London,
1961), p. 13.
48. Carr, Transforming Grace, p. 193.
49. Warner, op. cit. her chapter on 'The Hour of our Death'.
50. Daly, Beyond God the Father, pp. 91-2.
51. Warner, op. cit., p. 325.
52. R.E. Brown, K.P. Donfried, J.A. Fitzmyer and J.
Reumann, eds, Mary in the New Testament (Chapman, London, 1978), p. 82;
cf. J.C. Anderson, 'Mary's Difference: Gender and Patriarchy in the Birth
Narratives''Journal of Religion, Vol. lxvii:2 (April 1987), pp.
183-202.
53. E. Moltmann-Wendel, A Land Flowing with Milk and
Honey (SCM, London, 1986), pp. 193f.
54. C.F. Parvey, ed., The Community of Women and Men
in the Church (WCC, Geneva, 1983); cf. The Ecumenical Review, Vol.
xl:l (January, 1988) for articles developing the community study.
55. Parvey, op. cit., p. 141.
56. R. Davies, The Rebel Angels (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1985),
p. 56.
57. C. Ernst, Multiple Echo (Darton, Longman and
Todd, London. 1979). p. 124.
Patricia and Charles Vereker gave me hospitality when I
wrote the first draft of this paper. I am immensely grateful to them, and to
audiences in Oxford, Earlham College, Richmond, Indiana, Vanderbilt Divinity
School, and especially the Faculties of the Lutheran School of Divinity,
Chicago, and Catholic Theological Union, Chicago, for their comments. Professor
Herbert Anderson arranged for me to read this paper at CTU, at which I had the
privilege of meeting Professor Anne Carr, Professor Dianne Bergant and
Professor Carolyn Osiek. Without the hospitality Professors Herbert and Phyllis
Anderson gave me whilst in Chicago, this paper would not have developed as it
has, and my final thanks are specially to them.
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