A Cultural Study of Mary and the Annunciation

From Luke to the Enlightenment

Gary Waller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317316657
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

This book traces the history of the Annunciation, exploring the deep and lasting impact of the event on the Western imagination. Waller explores the Annunciation from its appearance in Luke's Gospel, to its rise to prominence in religious doctrine and popular culture, and its gradual decline in importance during the Enlightenment.

1 History and Historia: Reading the Annunciation Story from the Sixteenth and the Twenty-First Centuries

I start (and will conclude) this introductory chapter in confessional mode. Part, though not the only part, of the stimulus for this study – which, it should be stressed, is a cultural and not a theological analysis, although many theological and biblical commentaries, ancient and modern, have contributed to it – has been the Christian New Testament's story of the Annunciation, Gabriel's appearance to Mary, in the Gospel of Luke (Luke 1:26-38). Once established within the Christian canon, the Annunciation story became a standard Christian pericope.¹ In the Christian calendar, probably starting in seventh century Rome, it was celebrated on 25 March; in medieval England that feast became known as Lady Day (marking the start of the New Year as late as 1752 when England finally adopted the Gregorian Calendar). In the Catholic tradition (including the Church of England), Luke's account provides a liturgical reading for both the Feast of the Annunciation itself and leading up to the celebration of the Nativity nine months later (25 December). It also became the basis of one of Christendom's most popular prayers, the Hail Mary, and the associated devotion of the rosary, still a binding icon for many traditional Catholics. Even in the twenty-first century, in the secular multi-cultural West, the Annunciation scene is familiar as the initial tableau of the extended Christmas story and, within the frenzy of seasonal consumerism, appears on greeting cards, postage stamps, and posters; it also remains passionately affirmed by Christian believers and (not always the same thing) churchgoers, as a central historical or at least symbolic event. As Marina Warner comments on the conception and nativity narratives, 'it requires a herculean effort of will to read Luke's infancy Gospel and blot from the imagination all the paintings and sculptures, carols and hymns and stories that add to Luke's spare meditation'.² It is, I will argue, an extraordinarily rich story, some might say 'archetypal', that has become deeply embedded in our cultural history.

However, an even more powerful stimulus than its New Testament origins for my fascination with the Annunciation and what I present as its gradual 'disenchantment' within the turbulent and contradictory period we have come to term 'early modern', are the many years I have spent contemplating paintings, sculptures, and other visual representations of the scene. As Chapter Five will discuss, pictorial representations of the Annunciation date back perhaps to the third century AD. They proliferated in the late medieval and early modern periods: many drafts of this book were written in Florence, surrounded by seemingly innumerable frescos, paintings, sculptures and tabernacles of the scene. Like its rival Siena, Florence saw (and still sees) itself as under the special protection of the Virgin along with the city's official patron saint, John the Baptist. 'Florentia' implies the city of the flower, the Annunciation lily which became central to Florentine civic and religious symbolism, from the medieval coinage, the florin, to the contemporary football team, Fiorentina. The New Year festival is still celebrated on Annunciation Day and the basilica of the Annunziata contains both Vasari's rendition of Luke the painter being instructed by the Virgin, and a miraculous Annunciation fresco, reputedly completed by an angel at the Virgin's request.³ Ghiberti's celebrated designs for the doors of the Baptistery next to the Duomo in Florence include a heightened Annunciation, a masterpiece of dramatic tension, stressing the perturbation of the Virgin, who is raising her arm as if to protect herself. Ghiberti's work, undertaken to complement Brunelleschi's Duomo, provided, Michael Levey argues, a special challenge to Florentine artists to rival the psychological realism of his portrayal.⁴ Indeed, as I show, it is the artistic renditions that over the centuries made the Annunciation 'real', despite increasing scepticism about its historicity, even among Christian believers and certainly among many modern New Testament scholars.

However, one painting in particular has played a powerful formative influence upon this study, although it was not painted by a medieval or Renaissance artist. But it does capture what I hope is the spirit and the intellectual substance of my argument. In the mid 1970s the German painter Gerhard Richter, according to his own account, 'imitated' a postcard of an Annunciation painting by the sixteenth-century Venetian artist Titian.⁵ He produced a series of works which he entitled Verkündigung nach Tizian (the Annunciation after Titian) in which the familiar traditional figures of Mary and Gabriel were, over the course of five canvases, gradually dissolved and smeared into bursts of colour and textured swipes of paint (see Figure 1.1). Representations of the Annunciation have inevitably wrestled with the challenge of giving artistic expression to transcendent truths and with the mystery of representation itself; Richter's gradual dissolving of the possibility of depicting the scene marks what he saw as the end of painting in post-modernity and (more to my purposes) the fading and blurring of the Annunciation story itself over the course of what Max Weber, famously, seductively but over-simply, termed the 'disenchantment' of the post-medieval world.⁶ I extend the implications of Richter's reworking of Titian into broader cultural analysis, taking up but modifying Weber'sclassic observation, as I illustrate the slow and still incomplete fading of the Annunciation from event to story, history to historia, that occurs in early modern Europe. The causes of the blurring that Richter illustrates is a complex process that does not happen overnight, but it starts to emerge some 1400 years after it appeared in the Gospel account, and provides a window into the complexity and contradictions of the early modern period. Disenchantment is a key concept in this study. Enchantments of various kinds appear and disappear (and reappear) throughout human history, and the Annunciation story is, in many profound senses, a story of enchantment. With two of the three Abrahamic religions – not only Christianity but, perhaps surprisingly to many Christians, Islam – giving the Annunciation to Mary a central place, the Lukan story has generated countless re-tellings, imitations and transformations. Almost certainly a late addition to the text of what became the canonical Gospel of Luke, it developed into a centrepiece of the cult of the Virgin, which took shape slowly and flowered substantially after the fifth century. The Christian doctrine of the Incarnation became closely involved with (even if it is not, as many recent commentators make clear, identical with) the Annunciation story. The leading modern Catholic commentator on the Conception and Nativity narratives, Raymond E. Brown, comments that in Christian theology and devotion 'there has been more Marian reflection (and literature) based on this story than on any other in the New Testament'.⁷

Figure 1.1: Gerhard Richter, Verkündigung nach Tizian (1973). Reproduced with permission of Hirshhorn Museum, Washington. D.C.

The goal of my study is not simply to parade examples, however varied, magnificent, or bizarre, of this long fascination; nor is it to decide which interpretation or representation of the scene is 'authentic' or 'correct'. In pursuing my subject, I have read, as exhaustively as possible, hundreds of commentaries on Luke, from the patristic fathers to modern historical/critical studies and today's on-line blogs. All contribute to what I present as the scene's many 'invented traditions'. I am here adapting Hobsbawm's and Ranger's celebrated term 'the invention of tradition', which they define as 'a set of practices' or accounts of 'values and norms of behaviour', created for ideological purposes and thereafter assumed to 'have continuity with' and the 'authority of' the past.⁸ The particular traditions they discussed were mainly concerned with the construction of national cultures or ethnic identity, predominantly in the nineteenth century, but the term has received much wider application, including within religious and cultural history.⁹

We cannot, however, re-construct invented traditions as complex as the Annunciation by simply following authorized statements of belief or even works of religion or philosophy. They are constituted and enriched by a variety of cultural forms, and so we need as well to examine art, literature, popular culture, and also emergent and incipient discourses, thereby focusing on the gaps and silences, the 'saids' and 'not-saids' as well as what is apparently 'there'. It is also often on the apparent margins of society that cultural changes can often be first sensed and where eventual ideological transitions may start to take visible if not yet definable shape. Throughout therefore I use Raymond Williams's classic argument that a society's changing 'structures of feeling' may best be seen as 'social experiences in solution' as opposed to those that 'have been precipitated and are more evidently and more immediately available'. Signs may be found not only in established cultural practices, but also in 'new forms or adaptations of forms', and they may well appear within, without directly confronting, existing social forms. Williams adds that 'no analysis is more difficult than that which, faced by new forms, has to try to determine whether these are new forms of the dominant or are genuinely emergent'.¹⁰ The central questions I ask are therefore not only or even primarily theological ones but incorporate literary, historical, cultural and psychoanalytical issues. My task as a cultural analyst is to speculate why the Annunciation story had acquired such a central place in European history and why in the early modern period that place came under pressure (or under 'duress', as a recent conference at which I first articulated some of my arguments, put it). I ask most particularly why this story had (and to some extent continues to have) such a powerful hold over the Western imagination.

There are two seemingly easy answers to that question. The first is the explanation that would have seemed natural to virtually all Christians around 1500 and which, for some, continues without embarrassment into the present. It is simply that God – a God 'up' or 'out' there, even the Tillichian God as the 'ground' or 'depth' of being – chose the Annunciation and all that followed after as His way of bringing salvation to the world, and there is no need to explain the matter by speculative reference to any further human cause or motivation. Virtually no scepticism about such an explanation surfaced among Christians before the late fifteenth century and even then for a century or more it was questioned largely only in elitist scholarly circles.

The second, closely related but not identical, explanation is that the authority of the Church and what it decreed to be the revelation found in the canonical Gospels, along with authorized traditions, became so powerful that any available or discussable alternatives would not have been given minimal if any credibility. It is only in the past two or three centuries that widespread (and even, in some places, legally permissible) challenges to the authority of Christian belief and practice have seemed plausible, except perhaps (and then often precariously) among the intellectual elite. By the nineteenth century, David Friedrich Strauss could speak, though not without causing scandal, of the Annunciation story's raising questions that made a 'supranaturalist' interpretation implausible; he boldly asserted that the two opening chapters of Luke were a later and inauthentic addition to the words of Jesus, echoing a view that, as my final chapters will show, had gathered only slow momentum through the early modern and Enlightenment periods, but which became a distinctive early modern contribution to the 'duress' under which the Annunciation came.¹¹ Arguments that Jesus was an unusually charismatic but hardly unique religious figure, and that many of the revered details of the Holy Land were legends, elaborated or invented by centuries of pilgrims and polemicists, today no longer seems scandalous except in the most theologically fundamentalist of circles. But the tolerant scepticism that many educated Western men and women today take for granted is a relatively recent phenomenon. As recently as the 1960s, the shock of Bishop John Robinson's Honest to God and the writings of 'radical' and 'death of God' theologians brought about demands for censorship or persecution from conservative Church (and even some civil) authorities. Attacks on 'godless' intellectuals (a category that frequently includes liberal academic biblical scholars such as the distinguished New Testament scholar Bart A. Ehrman, to whose work I frequently refer) can still be heard in parts of the United States.

This second explanation contains, I think, some truth but it is also not the complete explanation. Studies of popular religion like Michael Carroll's have repeatedly stressed that the long-lasting appeal of religious beliefs and practices depends on a combination of the power of ecclesiastical and civic authorities acting in accord with and reinforced by underlying psychological and social factors.¹² It is those underlying factors that I wish, even in a small way, to investigate. When we consider how the Annunciation story was overwhelmingly understood around 1500, why for a millennium and a half (and indeed beyond) has it retained such power? What needs and desires below the level of intellectual assent, does it, as Lacan would put it, open up a relationship to the psychological 'real'? What 'knowledge that is not known' or even difficult to admit, might it convey?¹³ What are, as I phrase it throughout, some of the stories behind (and projected upon) the Annunciation story that made it so taken-for-granted in the beliefs and practices of late medieval and early modern men and women?

The main historical focus of my study is therefore what leads up to and culminates in that rich and contradictory period we have come to term 'early modern', roughly from the mid fifteenth century – in parts of Europe such as Florence perhaps as early as the 1420s – to the late seventeenth and early eighteenth. Before, virtually all Christians were in agreement that the Annunciation story was an actual historical event recorded by Luke, an educated Greek Christian believer and sometime companion to St Paul who was later accorded sainthood, and that it had been written with the inspiration of the Holy Spirit or even, according to some, with the help of Mary herself. Since the Enlightenment, however, while those affirmations have remained the pious, if perhaps unexamined, beliefs of many, the historicity of the scene and the identity of its authorship have been increasingly called into question, most significantly by many modern New Testament scholars.

In the early chapters, I reach back to the history of the 'traditional' Annunciation story's origins and to the speculations, squabbles, and battles through which what came to be 'orthodox' (via what Ehrman terms 'proto-orthodox')¹⁴ Christian beliefs about the Annunciation triumphed over 'heretical' views in the first four Christian centuries. Chapter Two examines the alternative versions of what became the canonical Gospel of Luke, both with and without the initial Conception and Nativity stories, and their circulation within what Diarmaid MacCulloch terms the 'cacophony of opinions and assertions' of early Christian communities, before the more powerful of those voices tried to bring about a unity of belief and devotion.¹⁵ In Chapter Three and Chapter Four I survey some of the intellectual and underlying psychological structures by which the Annunciation story was constructed, especially to exclude certain explanations, and to privilege one in particular, the association of the Annunciation scene with a 'virgin birth'. I also glance at Muslim and Jewish stories of the Annunciation, most notably the version in the Qur'an.

In the second half of the book I focus on the transition between the late Middle Ages, when Marian devotion was at the centre of most European societies, and the early modern period, when a multiplicity of emerging cultural shifts – the impact of humanist learning, the accelerating effects of the Reformation, the slowly and spasmodically emerging Enlightenment, and anticipations of our own fragmentarily secularized post-modern culture – start to be felt. Chapter Five investigates how the Annunciation was represented by literary and especially visual artists, thus overwhelmingly reinforcing what had become its orthodox interpretation, and how that consensus was challenged by the emergence of a new aesthetic, especially seen in late fifteenth century representations of the...