Woman, Faith, and Ambiguity
2000; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 82; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2163-6214
Autores Tópico(s)Medieval Literature and History
ResumoBecause I have been working recently on origin of Mariology in relation to Christian views of womanhood, books I have read over last few months have been chiefly about women. Ingrid Maisch's Mary Magdalen: The Image of a Woman through Centuries (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1998, translated from German) attracted my attention because shortly before I saw book, I had used slides of Georges de la Tour's paintings of Magdalene to illustrate a course on religious symbolism. The first witness of resurrection, apostle to apostles, as she was called in Middle Ages, Magdalene has had an ambiguous pictorial, literary, and theological history. Beginning with New Testament, where her identity is not clear (was she Lazarus's sister?), through legend of her sailing to southern France and her place at heart of gypsies' pilgrimage of les Saintes Maries de la Mer in Rhone delta, she has been seen alternatively as a model for penitent sinners and as a model for contemplatives, at times both together. Ingrid Maisch guides us through a maze of traditional depictions of this holy woman and of theological interpretations of her. She ends on a hauntingly prophetic note. Mary Magdalene must be rediscovered. But will she be the prophet of a Magdalenian age embodying virtues of liberated women, who, in spite of St. Paul, will speak and whose words and experience will become paradigmatic of a new humanity? A number of women indeed had a deep and widespread influence in Church of Middle Ages. This is manifest in Women Mystics in Medieval Europe, by Emilie Zum Brunn and Georgette Epiney-Burgard (St. Paul: Paragon House, 1989, translated from French). Hildegard of Bingen, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Beatrice of Nazareth, two Hadewijch, and Marguerite Porete were all great mystics, nuns or beguines who lived and wrote in twelfth (Hildegard) and thirteenth centuries, Marguerite dying in 1310. Their lives and their doctrine, which is illustrated with passages from their works, are presented with delicacy. Being hitherto mostly unacquainted with Marguerite Porete, I have also read a French edition of her Mirror of simple and annihilated souls (Le Miroir des ames simples et aneanties, Paris: Albin Michel, 1997). The ambiguity of traditional Christian culture regarding nature and place of women emerges in Zum Brunn's description of mystical experience in tradition of Meister Eckhart. All of these authors, though perfectly orthodox, were suspected of heterodoxy at one time or another, Marguerite dying by fire when judges of Inquisition could not reconcile her explanation of annihilation of soul into God with standard Christian teaching. At times of course Porete is obscure. Her judges, however, should have wondered if there was not a deficiency in their assumption that all levels of Christian experience can be formulated in clear univocal language. Their legal careers at service of King Philippe le Bel's vendetta against Knights Templar show them eager to condemn supposed heretics to death by fire. Ambiguity of a different kind persists in Siobhan Nash-Marshall's Joan of Arc: A Spiritual Biography (New York: Crossroad, 1999). Like most books on Joan, this one abounds in historical mistakes. In spite of its subtitle, book never speaks of Joan's spirituality. I touched briefly on that topic in Marquette University's Joan of Arc at University (Milwaukee, 1999, p. 44-58) and at greater length in The Spiritual Way of St. Jeanne dArc (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1998). Most of essays in Marquette volume, collected from a Joan of Arc celebration at University in October 1996, are paradoxical in their attempt to look at Joan from a postmodern point of view. Several of them are way off mark because excessively anachronistic. They also point to ambiguous place of Joan in history. This heroine of Hundred Years' War was worshiped by French soldiers, hated and feared by English soldiers, burnt as a heretic by order of a bishop, rehabilitated a few years later by a commission appointed by pope, canonized in 1922, and lately topic of largely fictional movies. …
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