BIOGRAPHY: Mother of God A History of the Virgin Mary By Miri RubinAllen Lane, 533pp. £30
‘SALVE REGINA, Mater Misericordiae, vita, dulcedo et spes nostra, salve.”
“Hail Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, hail our life, our sweetness and our hope. To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve, to thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.”
This beautiful and powerful prayer, which dates back to the 11th century, captures many of the attributes of the most famous woman in the world – her motherhood, her mercifulness, her regality, her pity for suffering humanity, and her intercessory powers. By the time it was written, Mary was the second most powerful personage in the Christian pantheon, after her son. How this came about is the subject of this new history by Miri Rubin, a scholar of the European late medieval period, with a special interest in religious culture.
Mary, mother of Jesus Christ, barely features in the four canonical gospels which form the basis of the New Testament. She is there for the Annunciation, the Nativity, the feast at Cana and the Crucifixion, but nowhere else. There is no mention of her family background, her childhood or her thoughts and feelings.
As Christainity spread through the Middle and Near East and westwards to Europe, there was a need to go beyond the ideological content of the Gospels and provide a back story for Christ and his mother, who was of course of great interest to potential converts. The Protogospel of James,written circa AD 150, is the first biography of Mary. In it we learn that she was of royal descent, who her parents were, what kind of child she was, and what her religious observances were.
The early Christian debates focused on the dual character of Christ – as God and human – and naturally the character and circumstances of his mother and birth became huge issues, often dividing believers. The concept of the virgin birth provoked much dissension, not least claims that the original prophecy in Isaiah was mistranslated: the relevant word meant “maiden” or “young woman” rather than “virgin”.
Elements of profound misogyny surface throughout this debate, which rumbled on through the Middle Ages. For example, Nestor, a Christian priest who converted to Judaism in the 10th century, wrote to a Christian bishop: “I wonder that you are not embarrassed to worship him who dwelled in the oppression of the womb, close enough to hear his mother’s flatuses when she moved her bowels like any other woman, remaining in deep darkness for nine months. How can you say that any aspect of divinity dwells in such an ugly place?” During the reproduction wars of the 1980s in Ireland, Nell McCafferty referred to the levels of woman-hatred revealed in some of the debates. It wasn’t new.
Jews refused to believe in the virgin birth, while Muslims created an entire set of attributes around Mary’s motherhood, and worshipped her as the mother of a prophet. (She is in fact mentioned more often in the Koran than in the New Testament). She successfully supplanted older female deities, particularly the capricious Greek and Roman goddesses, who could not be relied on to provide succour to suffering humans.
Belief in her consistent charitable intent and lack of egotistical qualities made her a far better object for supplicants than Artemis or Diana, who might turn against them for no obvious reason. Rubin points out that, of the older female deities, the nearest in kind was Isis, the Egyptian goddess of motherhood and fertility, who had similarly protean qualities to Mary and was credited with similar consistent mercy.
The ascent of Mary in tandem with the spread of Christianity and its establishment as a powerful institution with huge influence and control over the lives of millions is a fascinating mixture of realpolitik, complex theology and magic. At the Council of Ephesus in AD 431, she was declared Theotokos(God-bearer), after intense debate between factions from Constantinople and Alexandria.
Consensus was reached with the help of considerable bribery of the Byzantine court by Cyril, the wily bishop of Alexandria: “77,760 gold pieces, twenty-four carpets, twenty-five woollen tapestries, twenty-four silken veils . . . ivory stools, Persian drapery and ostrich eggs.”
Rubin makes a strong case for Mary’s popularity among the poor, women and others excluded from the strongly patriarchal and hierarchical structures of the church. Her image was capable of adaptation to local circumstances, and her mixture of power and mercy made her appealing to those in whom the punitive aspects of the church militant inspired fear.
When Marina Warner wrote the groundbreaking Alone of All Her Sexin 1976, she was writing from the centre of second-wave feminism, and her perspective was immensely refreshing, deconstructing an iconic figure who had affected her own childhood, and interrogating her general effect on the well-being of women. She was critical of Marian emphasis on the fallen state of womankind, while creating in the adherent a hopeless yearning and sense of inferiority. The Virgin "establishes the child as the destiny of woman, but escapes the sexual intercourse necessary for all other women to fulfil that destiny".
This problem remains for liberal Christian women who wonder why such an impossibly narrow standard for female perfection had to be created, while still admiring the many empowering aspects of Mary’s myths. Christianity has always had the capacity for ingenious self-reinvention; perhaps this most central question will be reviewed in the light of radically different ideas about women which have existed for some time now.
Rubin charts Mary’s ascendence through 10 centuries from virtually unknown vessel for Christ’s birth, to worshipped virgin mother, to powerful intercessor with her son, to mater dolorosa, to queen of heaven. She traces the development of Mary’s specific feasts – the Annunciation, the Purification, the Nativity of Mary, and the Assumption – and Mary’s specific prayers. She is acute on Mary’s devotees in monastic life, where she was often more popular than in the heavily patriarchal world of the institutional church. She relies on religious texts, illuminated manuscripts, early ivory and wood carvings, icons and paintings, poetry and music, and the range of her sources is breathtaking.
Catriona Crowe is a senior archivist in the National Archives of Ireland, and a former president of the Women’s History Association of Ireland