Woman, faith, and ambiguity

Because I have been working recently on the origin of Mariology in relation to Christian views of womanhood, the books I have read over the last few months have been chiefly about women. Ingrid Maisch's Mary Magdalen: The Image of a Woman through the Centuries (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1998, translated from the German) attracted my attention because shortly before I saw the book, I had used slides of Georges de la Tour's paintings of the Magdalene to illustrate a course on religious symbolism. The first witness of the resurrection, "apostle to the apostles," as she was called in the Middle Ages, the Magdalene has had an ambiguous pictorial, literary, and theological history. Beginning with the New Testament, where her identity is not clear (was she Lazarus's sister?), through the legend of her sailing to southern France and her place at the heart of the gypsies' pilgrimage of les Saintes Maries de la Mer in the 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 the 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 the Church of the 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 the French). Hildegard of Bingen, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Beatrice of Nazareth, the two Hadewijch, and Marguerite Porete were all great mystics, nuns or beguines who lived and wrote in the 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 the nature and place of women emerges in Zum Brunn's description of the mystical experience in the 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 the judges of the Inquisition could not reconcile her explanation of the annihilation of the 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 the service of King Philippe le Bel's vendetta against the 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, the book never speaks of Joan's spirituality. I touched briefly on that topic in Marquette University's Joan of Arc at the University (Milwaukee, 1999, p. 44-58) and at greater length in The Spiritual Way of St. Jeanne dArc (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1998). Most of the essays in the Marquette volume, collected from a Joan of Arc celebration at the 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 the mark because excessively anachronistic. They also point to the ambiguous place of Joan in history. This heroine of the Hundred Years' War was worshiped by the French soldiers, hated and feared by the English soldiers, burnt as a heretic by order of a bishop, rehabilitated a few years later by a commission appointed by the pope, canonized in 1922, and lately the topic of largely fictional movies. The treachery of Pierre Cauchon, the bishop who worked strenuously, and unconvincingly, to have her excommunicated and burnt as a heretic while he allowed her to receive communion on the morning of her death, shows ambiguity at work in the very midst of the Church.

Passing to the seventeenth century on the American continent, Pamela Kirk's Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz: Religion, Art, and Feminism (New York: Continuum, 1999) studies some aspects of this remarkable Mexican nun (1648-1695), the greatest Spanish poet of the Americas and, I would add, the first major Mexican theologian. A brilliant self-made intellectual in an age when few women had much instruction, Sor Juana was compared to St. Catherine of Alexandria by some of her contemporaries, called "the tenth muse" in the first printing of her poems in Madrid in 1689 and "phoenix of erudition" in Mexico in 1691. While there is little that is new in Kirk's presentation, and the writing is marred by many infelicities and misprints, anyone who writes with sensitivity on this practitioner of Baroque poetry deserves encouragement. Sor Juana is not easy to read today, but the persistent reader is amply rewarded. Her religious meditations and plays have a timeless Christocentric focus that I studied in my book Juana Inis de la Cruz and the Theology of Beauty (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991). The disagreements as to what happened in 1693 are well described by Kirk. Was Juana forced into silence by a misogynist archbishop and her Jesuit confessor? Or did she rather choose to set her pen aside after perceiving that which cannot be expressed? She hinted as much, I believe, in one of her last poems, an encomium for the Spanish victory of Barlovento in the West Indies, when she foresaw and presumably announced some "wanton acts" at the moment when the human heart comes "close to the divine flame." Soon afterwards, in 1694, following a practice that had spread in Spanish universities, she signed with her own blood a private vow to defend the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception!