Medieval Christian Theology: The Virgin Mary
"He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek."
—Luke 1:52
Within modern Christianity, veneration of the Virgin Mary—the Jewish woman who according to Gospel accounts conceived a child with no human father but “by the power of the Holy Spirit” and who thus miraculously gave birth to Jesus—has become a clear line of demarcation between confessional denominations. One the one hand, Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy have made Mary a vital part of their theology and modes of devotion, while most Protestants view her as a less central, sometimes even peripheral, figure, and regard her status in the older Churches as bordering on idolatry; the Anglican Communion sits, perhaps not uncomfortably, on the fence between these two extremes. Although modern Catholic veneration of Mary has developed and intensified in recent centuries, particularly after the Council of Trent (1551) and with the spread of Catholicism across the globe, her high position in the hearts and minds of many today is continuous with the affection and adoration she inspired in the religious imagination of medieval Latin Christendom.
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As an object of devotion, the Virgin Mary offered something for everyone. She was a wife and a virgin, humble and exalted (Luke 1:52), powerless and powerful, the "handmaid of God" and the Queen of Heaven, a daughter of the sinful Adam and the mother of the incarnate God. In embracing these paradoxes, she was not unlike her holy son, whose existence as both God and human similarly engaged the Christian imagination. In fact, theological doctrine and popular beliefs regarding the Virgin Mary often developed side-by-side with ideas about the status of Jesus himself.
One of the core insights about Mary that emerged very early in the Christian theological tradition involved her standing as a counterbalance to Eve. Just as Eve was understood to be the mother of the entire human race, Mary was considered the mother of a new kind of way of being in the world, and often specifically as the "mother" of the Christian Church. Mary’s act of obedience to the will of God in agreeing to the conception of Jesus stood against Eve’s misguided disobedience in seeking the forbidden fruit. Mary’s humility counteracted Eve’s pride; her virtue overcame Eve’s moral weakness. Where Eve’s succumbing to temptation allowed sin and death to enter the world, Mary’s glad cooperation with God provided the means, through Jesus, for sin and death to be abolished. As many a poet, theologian, and homilist would note, the name Eva in Latin spelled backwards yields Ave (“Hail!”), the first word of the angel Gabriel’s speech to the virgin in the Gospel According to Luke: “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee!” (1:28)
Despite the importance of the Virgin Mary to the Christian narrative of redemption, and to later Christian piety, the New Testament accounts of her are relatively terse. She appears only in passing in the Gospel According to Mark, and then not even by name. But in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, with their lengthy Nativity narratives, Mary achieves considerable prominence as the young but chaste wife of the carpenter Joseph and the mother of Jesus. Luke’s gospel places special emphasis on Mary, providing considerable detail about her conception, pregnancy, and about the birth of her child. Alone of all the gospel witnesses, Luke narrates what became known as the Annunciation, the angelic declaration to Mary of her impending role in the Incarnation and of her glad consent to this calling. Luke also tells of Mary’s visit during her pregnancy to her kinswoman Elizabeth, the expectant mother of John the Baptist, an episode that provides the occasion for her famous canticle, the Magnificat (named for its first word in Latin): "My soul doth magnify the Lord, Mary’s hymn of praise memorably showcases her subjective response to the salvific events in which she was taking part, and, by the early Middle Ages her words were taken up as a staple of evening prayer. On this use of the Magnificat, the Venerable Bede (ca. 672-735) writes that "By meditating upon the incarnation, our devotion is kindled, and by remembering the example of God's mother, we are encouraged to lead a life of virtue" (Commentary on Luke, I.56). The Gospel According to Luke’s last glimpse of the young mother similarly highlights her interiority. Upon finding the twelve-year-old Jesus authoritatively lecturing the Temple elders on Scripture, Luke writes that Mary “kept all these things in her heart” (2:51).
Luke’s narratives of the Annunciation, Visitation, and Nativity have been pictorially compelling, mainstays of visual art from the early Middle Ages to modernity. But the New Testament also records other episodes from Mary’s later life. The Gospel |
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according to John records a few episodes from Mary’s later life, emphasizing her witness to her son’s life and her participation in the renewal of the world that he was initiating. John describes the wedding feast at Cana in Galilee, where Mary persuades her son to miraculously change water to wine. This episode inaugurates Jesus' public ministry, and it also establishes what for medieval Christians would be the appealing dynamic of a mother who was able to implore her son to use his power to take pity on others. John's other mention of Mary comes literally at the end of Jesus's earthly career, as she stands at the foot of the Cross, watching her son die in agony. This moment too, especially from the thirteenth century on, encouraged an empathetic and affective response to Christ's suffering, and it established Mary as a figure who could well understand the suffering of sinners throughout the ages. The New Testament's final explicit depiction of Mary comes in the "Pentecost" scene in The second chapter of The Acts of the Apostles. There, Mary is mentioned prominently among the group of Jesus's followers who receive the Holy Spirit as "tongues of fire" after the risen Lord's Ascension to heaven.
For early and medieval Christians, Mary thus occupied a unique place among all humanity, and by the second century both popular tradition and theological speculation had filled in many details about her life. Although a variety of opinions existed, a consensus emerged early on that she remained a virgin throughout her life (despite the New Testament’s mentions of Jesus’ brethren, who then had to be explained away as either stepbrothers or cousins). A non-canonical second-century text known as the Protogospel of James claimed that Mary was herself conceived miraculously and that her childhood as a handmaiden in the Temple at Jerusalem was exemplary. At the Council of Ephesus in 431, it was decided—amid heated and highly-politicized debate—that Mary might be appropriately referred to not just as the mother of Jesus but as the Theotokos, "God-bearer," the Mother of God himself. The Council's decree was divisive, and forced the Nestorian Church (also called the Church of the East) based in Syria and Persia into schism with the rest of Christendom.
The doctrine of Mary's perpetual virginity also caused disagreement within the Church. Many theologians, such as St. Jerome, considered Mary's virginity throughout her life as an example of moral excellence (for both women and men) and as a dignity befitting the woman who carried God himself in her body; Ambrose of Milan even went so far as to claim that her virginity was retained even after the passage of Jesus through the birth canal. Ambrose's younger contemporary Augustine of Hippo, however, saw Mary's virginity after Jesus' birth as a matter of indifference, peripheral to Christ's redeeming intervention in the world. The issue of Mary's Immaculate Conception—the idea that, to be a worthy vessel for the Incarnation of God, Mary must herself have been conceived without the taint of original sin—had been around since early in the Christian era, but it became a matter of some debate in the High Middle Ages. Although such heavy-hitting theologians as Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) and Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) argued against the Immaculate Conception on the basis that it rendered redemption superfluous, the idea had a broad basis in popular piety and its feast day was widely celebrated; the Oxford scholar Duns |
Scotus (1266-1308) formulated what became the prevailing theological argument. (Tellingly, the Immaculate Conception was not declared an official doctrine of the Catholic Church until 1854.)
Although Marian doctrines like the Immaculate Conception were sometimes controversial, resting on extra-biblical speculations and traditions, one theory about Mary that went largely uncontested was the idea of her bodily Assumption into heaven at the end of her earthly life. Because of her exalted position as the Mother of God, early and medieval Christians had no difficulty imagining for Mary a "death" unlike that of any other human being. By the fifth century, and perhaps earlier than that, Christians routinely believed that Mary had been bodily assumed into heaven, an event called the Assumption; Mary's body had not suffered corruption or burial (or perhaps even death) but was already "pre-resurrected," so to speak, body united with soul, a fate other humans would only share at the end of time. United with God in heaven, Mary was also imagined as a celestial queen, the Queen of Heaven, and some writers spoke of the Coronation of the Virgin, an affirmation both of her unique position in the history of salvation and also of her ability to combine maternal care with regal power to ensure the well-being of sinful humans.
Although Marian doctrines like the Immaculate Conception were sometimes controversial, resting on extra-biblical speculations and traditions, one theory about Mary that went largely uncontested was the idea of her bodily Assumption into heaven at the end of her earthly life. Because of her exalted position as the Mother of God, early and medieval Christians had no difficulty imagining for Mary a "death" unlike that of any other human being. By the fifth century, and perhaps earlier than that, Christians routinely believed that Mary had been bodily assumed into heaven, an event called the Assumption; Mary's body had not suffered corruption or burial (or perhaps even death) but was already "pre-resurrected," so to speak, body united with soul, a fate other humans would only share at the end of time. United with God in heaven, Mary was also imagined as a celestial queen, the Queen of Heaven, and some writers spoke of the Coronation of the Virgin, an affirmation both of her unique position in the history of salvation and also of her ability to combine maternal care with regal power to ensure the well-being of sinful humans.
It was, then, as an emblem of purity, a bearer of divine grace, a loving mother, and a powerful queen that medieval Christians appealed to the Virgin Mary for all manner of intercessions: recovery from illness, mitigation of various hardships, safe travel, etc. Mary, they believed, looked upon those faithful to her with motherly concern, and could implore her divine Son to come to the aid of those in need. In all this, she was a sort of “super-saint.” The term is not a frivolous one—Aquinas and other theologians discussed Mary as an object of hyperdoulia, “super-veneration,” which, in order to avoid charges of idolatry, they distinguished from latria, the worship strictly due only to the One God.
Yet the common image of Mary kneeling in supplication before her male child, or of the young virgin allowing herself to undergo divine impregnation, has not unreasonably been troubling to many modern feminist sensibilities. Simone de Beauvoir saw Mary as the West's ultimate exemplar of female self-abnegation and subservience, and her claims are not easily dismissed. |
But what some feminist critics perhaps do not take into account is the richness and variety of ends to which veneration of Mary was directed throughout the Middle Ages. Men and women alike knelt in sometimes tearful prayer before images of the Virgin, imploring her aid. Many Christians had the Marian prayers Ave Maria and Salve Regina committed to memory, a practice to which Dante refers when he claims "Mary" as the name of the bel fior ch'io invoco / e mane e sera ["the beautiful flower whom I invoke night and day"] (Par. XXIII.88-89). Or believers could walk the Stations of the Cross, meditating on and through Mary's imagined experience of the torture and death of her son. Stories of miracles
Like most of us, medieval Christians faced much hardship and uncertainty, and—perhaps unlike most of us—they also felt keenly the pressures of avoiding eternal damnation and of securing a place among the blessed in the afterlife. The Virgin Mary offered one of medieval Christianity's richest spiritual resources. Mary's appeal was motherly and consolatory, and, in contrast to God, her love for her devotees was not mingled with judgment. Moreover, affection for
and dedication to Mary made one fit to benefit from her intercessory power. It is for this reason that Geoffrey of Monmouth's King Arthur carries an image of the Virgin on his shield, that the French poet Rutebeuf panics at the thought of her possible absence at his final hour, and that Petrarch ends his sequence of 366 poems of (mostly profane) love with a serenely beautiful hymn to Mary: "O lovely Virgin, clothed with the sun ..." In a similar vein, Alfonso the Wise aspires to be the Virgin's troubadour. The tenth-century German nun Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim delighted in Mary's ladylike graces, while her twelfth-century counterpart Hildegard of Bingen considered the Virgin as co-extensive with the fertility of God's green earth, and the thirteenth-century Gertrude of Helfta took comfort in imagining Mary as the powerful queen of heaven. The Psalter belonging to the twelfth-century English anchoress Christina of Markyate suggests that Mary could be an empowering figure for women, a leader among Christ's followers and the foremost recipient of the Holy Spirit. The Virgin Mary was called upon by fishermen hoping for a safe landing amid stormy seas, by women in the pangs of childbirth, by soldiers before battle, and by those grieving the loss of spouse, or parent, or child. Her prominence in medieval Christendom by the end of the Middle Ages was undisputed; in fact, Marian devotion significantly displaced devotion to many other saints. Although devotion to her was criticized and condemned, perhaps not without cause, by Reformers such as Luther and Calvin, who found that the focus on Mary distracted and detracted from the honor done to Jesus himself, her influence in the Western and global cultures of subsequent centuries has continued to thrive.
This illumination from a Book of Hours owned by Mary of Burgundy highlights the act of reading and contemplation of the Virgin Mary as a mode of private spiritual practice: the intimate domestic space of the sitting room opens into a theater of more public devotion to the Virgin and her Child. (Produced in Flanders, ca. 1477)
Further Reading
- Alfonso X, Songs of Holy Mary of Alfonso X, the Wise: A Translation of the Cantigas de Santa Maria, trans. Kathleen Kulp-Hill (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2000)
- Eamon Duffy, "Prayer to the Virgin in the Late Middle Ages," in Sacred Space: House of God, Gate of Heaven, eds. Philip North and John North (Continuum, 2007)
- Gautier de Coincy, Les plus beaux miracles de la Vierge (Lanore, 1932)
- Guillaume de Machaut, La Messe de Notre Dame, perf. Oxford Camerata (Naxos, 1996)
- Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, trans. Granger Ryan and Helmut Ripperger (Longmans, Green & Co., 1941)
- Miraculae Sanctae Virginis Mariae, ed. E. F. Dexter (University of Wisconsin Press, 1927)
- Daniel O'Sullivan, Marian Devotion in the Thirteenth-Century French Lyric (University of Toronto Press, 2005)
- Jaroslav Pelikan, Mary Through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture (Yale University Press, 1998)
- Miri Rubin, The Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (Yale University Press, 2009)
- Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (Vintage Books, 1983)