Imagining Mary

A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Devotion to the Virgin Mother of God

Daniel Rancour-Laferriere

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351349673
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Imagining Mary breaks new ground in the long tradition of Christian mariology. The book is an interdisciplinary investigation of some of the many Marys, East and West, from the New Testament Mary of Nazareth down to Our Lady of the Good Death in the twentieth century. In Imagining Mary, Professor Rancour-Laferriere examines the mother of God in her multireligious and pan-historical context.

The book is a scholarly study, but it is written in a clear, straightforward style and will be comprehensible to an educated – and, above all, intellectually curious – general audience. It will appeal to anyone who has ever wondered, for example, about the flimsy scriptural basis of many beliefs about Mary; or the tendency of many mariologists to depict Mary as an incestuous "bride of Christ"; or the theological notion of Mary's "loving consent" to her son's crucifixion; or the idea that Mary was a "priest" officiating at the sacrifice of her son; or the unfortunate association of Mary with Christian anti-semitism; or the curious appeal of Mary to the terminally ill; and so on. Special attention is given to the psychology of representations of Mary, such as: the psychological basisfor promoting Mary to the status of a "goddess"; the psychology of Mary's compassion for her son at the foot of the cross; and the psychological conflict in Mary's personal relationship with her son Jesus.

These topics are admittedly diverse, but they all have long been on the minds of mariologists. The author takes a questioning approach to received wisdom about marian themes – including the assumption that one has to be a theist in order to understand the great appeal of Mary down the centuries. Indeed, Imagining Mary may be regarded as a first step in the direction of an atheist mariology.

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1 Introduction

From a Humble Mother of Nazareth to “Our Lady of Everywhere”

Mary in Scripture

Mary’s son Jesus is the most important figure in canonical Christian scripture, and Christian believers would eventually come to accept him as their God. Mary herself is a different matter altogether. She has a minimal role to play in the New Testament, even if she is the mother of the Messiah (that is, the Christ). She conceives and gives birth to her child only in Matthew and Luke, with the author of Luke’s gospel paying additional attention to the circumstances of the conception as well as to some aspects of Mary’s involvement in the development of the child. Mary appears rarely during the ministry of the adult Jesus in any of the gospels, and her silent presence at her son’s cross is registered only in John. After Jesus dies, Mary has no further contact with her son, despite his alleged resurrection from the dead. Mary then makes just one (again, silent) appearance at the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles, a work believed to be a continuation of the gospel of Luke. By this time, Mary’s son had already “ascended” into heaven. After that comes total silence about Mary. The other authors of what remains of the canonical New Testament do not mention her by name.

One might therefore be inclined to ask: if the crucifixion of Jesus is the most important event in Christian scripture, and if the cross is the chief symbol of Christianity,¹ then why is there any need to speculate on the relevance of Mary to this event and this symbol? Such a question would seem particularly obvious to most Protestants and to other Christians who do not believe Mary is of any special importance for the Christian faith, and who are for the most part not relevant for this book. The question is also obvious to historians, for there is so very little historically reliable information to go on.

There is, however, much more to Christian belief systems than what is presented in canonical scripture. The relentless post-biblical growth of marian narratives, doctrines, poetry, drama, music, visual imagery, political discourse, pilgrimage sites, and so on, makes it obvious that Mary is important – for many Christians, even more important than her son.

Questers of the “historical Jesus” are already familiar with the problems of insufficient, inconsistent, and outright fabricated accounts in the New Testament. Some of these accounts involve the mother of Jesus as well, in particular the so-called infancy narratives early in Luke and Matthew. For example, the genealogies of Mary’s husband Joseph, given by Luke and Matthew, cannot be reconciled with one another.² Or, Luke tells a story (2:1–7) about a journey made by Mary and Joseph from Nazareth to Bethlehem in order to register in what would have been the wrong city for a Roman imperial census, which, in any case, did not take place at the time indicated.³ Matthew too (2:1–13) places Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem for the birth of the future Messiah – but only because this was supposedly prophesied in Micah 5:2. The subsequent flight into Egypt, the slaughter of the innocents, and the move to Nazareth (Matthew 2:14–23) are also attempts by Matthew to historicize Old Testament prophecies, so that New Testament scholar Gerd Lüdemann concludes that the “historical content” of the second chapter of Matthew is “nil.”⁴ Even a strongly mariophile church Father such as Maximos the Confessor (d. ca.662) admits that there are problems with the historical veracity of some passages in the infancy narratives and attempts (unsuccessfully) to solve them.⁵ It comes as no surprise that the group of historical scholars known as the Jesus Seminar concluded that, “there is very little in the two infancy narratives that reflects historical reminiscence.”⁶ Any quest for the “historical Mary” would appear to be doomed from the start.

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It is generally agreed among historians, however, that there did exist a man from the Galilean village of Nazareth named Jesus (Iēsous in the Greek original of the New Testament, Yeshua in Hebrew), who was crucified on the outskirts of Jerusalem in approximately 30 CE.⁷ This Jesus was a Jew, and he must have had a biological mother who was also Jewish.⁸ Indeed, all four canonical gospels, as well as Acts, allude to the “mother” of Jesus. Although the name of this “mother” is not always mentioned when she makes an appearance, and although she is not named at all in John’s gospel, it is reasonably certain from the 18 times she is named in the other (synoptic) gospels and the one time in Acts⁹ that her name was Mary (Mariam [or Maria] in Greek, Miryam in Hebrew).¹⁰ Mary’s son Jesus, by contrast, is named 913 times in the New Testament.¹¹

Mary, then, is historically real, if infrequently mentioned by name and included in few events that have historical credibility. Mary was no more a docetist phantom than was Jesus himself – who was real enough to die and who, therefore, must have been sufficiently real to be born, as Tertullian (d. ca.220) insisted in his polemic De Carne Christi.¹² If Jesus was “born of a woman,” as Paul says (Galatians 4:4), then both Jesus and this “woman,” Mary, are historically real.

Early Elaboration

Mary’s son led the way. Marian narratives and imagery could not be enabled until ideas about her son became thoroughly unmoored from reality in the minds of his increasingly populous followers. After the crucifixion, there were sightings of Jesus by some who had been emotionally attached to him, and who had not had an opportunity to complete the mourning process that normally leads to acceptance, rather than denial, of the death of a loved one (apparitions of the newly departed are a commonplace of bereavement).¹³ In this case, the lost object was also a charismatic religious leader. Word spread of the “resurrection” of Jesus from the dead, and increasingly grand, idealizing theological constructs deriving from what Jesus had preached would eventually come to be the church’s “christology.” Jesus the Messiah/Christ was made flesh through the action of the Holy Spirit within Mary’s virginal womb, and evidence of Jesus’ pre-existing divine identity could be found in some writings, which were to become the New Testament.¹⁴ Orthodox Christians were expected to believe that Christ was essentially one with God the Father, according to conclusions reached at the Council of Nicaea in 325. By the Council of Chalcedon in 451, a definitive doctrine about the person of Christ was achieved.¹⁵

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Of course, this oversimplifies the early historical development of beliefs about the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God’s incarnation in his person, his place in the holy trinity, and the two distinct yet inseparable natures – perfectly human and perfectly divine – of Jesus Christ. But, our primary concern here is with beliefs about Christ’s mother Mary.

If Jesus Christ was indeed God as well as a human being, then what was believed to be the status of his mother? Was she the one who gave birth to the man (anthrōpotokos), to the Messiah/Christ (christotokos), or to God himself (theotokos)? The most contentious and effective voice in this matter was patriarch Cyril of Alexandria (d. 444), who, in 429, expressed his indignation about the teachings of Nestorius (then patriarch of Constantinople): “I was completely amazed that certain people should be in any doubt as to whether the holy virgin ought to be called the Theotokos or not. For if our Lord Jesus Christ is God, then how is the holy virgin who bore him not the Theotokos?”¹⁶ Because of Cyril’s untiring efforts at the Council of Ephesus in 431 (and with the support of his fellow mariophiles there and at Chalcedon in 451), Mary was officially recognized as what might variously and clumsily be translated into English as the “Birthgiver of God,” or the “Godbearer,” or the “Godbirther” (Greek Theotokos, roughly equivalent to the Latin Dei Genitrix/Genetrix or Deipara).¹⁷ As for the more personalized notion “Mother of God” (Greek Mētēr theou, Latin mater Dei), it had been sporadically utilized before Ephesus, but was slower to gain acceptance in the Greek East than in the Latin West.¹⁸

The male Christian leaders who ratified the theotokos designation were painfully aware of pagan polytheism, with its various gods and goddesses. Unlike pagans, they believed in a god named Jesus Christ, and there were no Christian goddesses. With time, of c...