London, UK - One subtle but important difference between the Christian west and the Christian east concerns the way in which the Virgin Mary is conceived (in more than one sense) and depicted. According to Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor, an English writer who lives in Greece, the eastern Mary “has the austere aloofness of an oriental empress…calm, unreal, hieratic”, while in the medieval west her statues seem “almost to woo her devotees…at worst there is a hint of an ogle”.
Amateur polymaths can allow themselves such sweeping observations. As a scholar of medieval history, Miri Rubin has no such luxury; every twist of her account of Mary’s veneration over the past 2,000 years has to be carefully footnoted. And on balance, her enormously ambitious project succeeds; as a sort of encyclopedia of Mariolatry, this commendably readable work will long serve as a reference point for every investigator of this subject, professional or otherwise, and inspire many of them to delve much deeper.
As Ms Rubin, a professor at London University, successfully shows, it is very nearly true to say that the story of Mary’s cult simply is the history of Christianity, and hence absolutely central to the narrative of European and Christian civilisation. By studying the different ways in which Mary was described, hymned and painted in medieval Italy, one can also describe Europe’s beginnings as a great political and commercial enterprise. Her absence was a defining feature of the colder, more rational world that emerged in the Protestant north. And in the colonial era, above all in Latin America, she metamorphosed seamlessly from conquerors’ champion to helper of the oppressed—long before any of the founders of modern literary theory had come up with fancy ideas about shifting metaphors and “floating signifiers”.
When describing the late medieval era—which was her first academic love—Ms Rubin draws on the nuances of social and economic history as well as art scholarship to produce a tableau as rich as any old-master crowd scene. Given the relative paucity of sources, her account of the first Christian millennium is bare-boned by comparison, concentrating on theology and imperial history. She describes the Byzantine empire’s appropriation of the Mother of God as protectress—of the city of Constantinople and its rulers—and the intricate metaphysical groundwork which made that change possible.
The faith’s official theology, after wrestling with the different senses in which Christ was human and divine, had crystallised with the pronouncement in the early fifth century that Mary was Theotokos, the Mother of God: the person whose body was the miraculous locus of a unique cosmic event, the coming together of the Creator and the created, physical world. Once this principle had been established, every deviation from it, every current of thought that called into question the double nature—divine and human—of Christ, could be presented as a direct insult to his mother; and theological arguments duly became more personal.
For all the differences between the first Christian millennium and the second, a common theme in discourse about Mary was polemic against the Jews, who especially in Byzantium were often regarded as the “other” in relation to which Christianity must define itself. In some contexts, the word “Jew” seems to have been used almost as a generic term for one who failed to give due honour to Jesus Christ and his mother. And as Ms Rubin notes, the early Christian era also saw plenty of Jewish counter-polemic, mocking the story of Mary’s virginity and suggesting that she was an adulteress.
As a counterweight to the lamentable history of Christian-Jewish sparring, Ms Rubin might have said a bit more about the latest insights into the apparently Jewish roots of the Christian feasts which are ostensibly devoted to the Mother of God. Also, having described the carefully constructed theological edifice of early Christianity, Ms Rubin could perhaps have said more about the ways in which—to eastern Christian eyes—the medieval west seemed to cut adrift from that structure, with effects that were palpable in art history as well as culture, politics and perhaps even social history. (There are social anthropologists, for example, who contrast the Catholic emphasis on Mary’s virginity with the Orthodox Christian Panayia—all-holy one—who seems more like an archetype of motherhood and protection of the family.)
To the eyes of the Christian east, the western Madonna often seems to be rather a shallow and sentimental figure because her theological role as agent and locus of the Incarnation has been forgotten or blurred. Travel writers, relying purely on intuition, can pick up that point; it would be wonderful if scholars—labouring under a much tougher set of constraints—could also find some way of expressing and explaining that difference.