The Strange Fate of Women in Christian Culture (excerpt)

Editor's note: "The Strange Fate of Women in Christian Culture" is a chapter in a larger, unpublished work called "In Search of the Covenant: Rediscovering Biblical Ethics," and only a portion of it is excerpted below. The author outlines some of the relevant history of Mary Magdalene, and discusses the complexities in discovering her place within Christianity. The section in which he discusses Magdalene's depiction in art is not to be missed.

Mary Magdalen, the ‘Repentant Whore’

In her fascinating study of Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor, Susan Haskins relates that as a child at a convent school she once asked who was the red-cloaked, golden-haired and weeping figure at the foot of the cross. It was of course Mary Magdalen, weeping for her own sins and those of mankind. What sins? Those of the flesh, "that I would understand....when I was older."

In this terse exchange we have the essence of the Magdalen myth: a woman branded for unmentionable sin (signaled, however, through the redness of her robe and the wild, unkempt, golden, hair), yet who was acknowledged to have loved greatly and documented to have been at the foot of the cross. She was also documented by John’s gospel as the first human being to have greeted the risen Savior, and to have received from him the first apostolic commission.

How this could have happened to a woman was one of the great mysteries awaiting patriarchal mythic solution. The eventual resolution was developed through analogy with the Prodigal Son of Luke’s gospel. Mary Magdalen was indeed a wayward prostitute who had returned to Christ seeking remission for her sin. Her contrition and humbleness had brought her forgiveness and earned her the special attention and protection of the Savior. But that she should be made primus inter pares, the first apostle of Christ with the first apostolic commission, was going a bit too far, particularly since the heterodox Gnostic texts had accentuated this aspect of the Magdalen story. The orthodox myth-makers finessed these details (as does the post-Crucifixion account in Luke’s gospel) and then banished Mary to serve 30 years of post-Crucifixion penury, asceticism, and solitary repentance. By the time she returned from all this remorse, she was suitably elderly, haggard and emaciated: a perfect picture of repentant and desexed womanhood.

The biblical episode permitting the construction of the myth comes from a passage in Luke’s gospel which is not directly associated with the Magdalen. Instead, an unknown woman around town who was a ‘sinner’, comes in to Jesus while he was dining with a Pharisee named Simon, and begins to anoint his feet, crying and kissing them and drying them with her hair. Astonished by this bold behavior, the Pharisee wonders to himself how Jesus, if he were a true prophet, could be letting such a person defile his body. Jesus divines his thoughts and tricks Simon with a story about a creditor who releases two debtors, one of whom owed a substantial amount. “Which one would love him the more?” “I guess the one whom he forgave the more,” replies the unsuspecting host. “Exactly!” comes the swift response. Jesus then compares Simon’s empty formality with the woman’s heartfelt gifts. “I tell you, Simon,” he concludes, “her many sins are remitted, because she loved much. He to whom less is forgiven, loves less.”

This story is characteristic of Jesus’ contrarian thinking and his openness to women. It is not characteristic of what is directly known from the gospels about the Magdalen. However the latter appears in Luke’s gospel in the very next passage, as a companion of Jesus who had been cured of possession by demons. The myth results from a conflation of the above story with all the passages directly naming the Magdalen, as well as those naming Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, who also anointed Jesus’ feet, and an unnamed woman who anointed his head. These conflations, approved by the great Pope Gregory VII, took the steam out of the text identifying the Magdalen as first post-resurrection apostle and anchored her for good in the role of repentant whore. In that capacity, she could be permitted to attend the crucifixion and deposition of the dead Savior. Even better, she could be depicted in the dramatic post-resurrection scene, in which Jesus would have correctly said to her in her capacity as a former prostitute, following the Vulgate text, “don’t touch me!” (noli me tangere). It was this post-resurrection scene which would engage the attention of the image-makers, rather than that in which the Christ commissions her as apostle to the apostles. Then with Mary safely tagged as rejected sinner, she could be sent off into the wilds for decades to ponder, and atone for, her sexual misconduct.

The power of this myth has waxed and waned according to the agendas of succeeding ages. But until recent times, little theological effort had been made to deconstruct the myth and separate out the biblically recounted episodes attributed to the Magdalen from those that were not, as well as from all the non-Biblical elaborations. Mary Magdalen as repentant whore is embedded in the tradition of patriarchal Christian culture. Such a role could counteract any notion of her as special companion to Jesus, which could otherwise be inferred from her presence at the Cross and her unique meeting with the resurrected Christ and commission as apostle to the apostles—a commission which was in any case, according to Gnostic tradition, vigorously rebutted by Peter. In addition, accounts in the Mark and Luke gospels report that the apostles would not believe the Magdalen and her companions when they reported having met with the risen Christ, and according to Luke, Peter had to run to the tomb and see for himself.

From this Petran tradition we get a sense of the controversies surrounding the Magdalen’s role as the special intimate of the Savior and the one who most passionately and persistently mourned him. We do not need the Lucan story of the repentant whore to understand that the woman who is clearly the Magdalen passionately loved Jesus and, according to the original Greek text of John’s gospel, actually embraced or clung to him after discovering him outside the tomb. This privileged Magdalen, rejected as an expression of Gnostic heresy, also constituted a serious obstacle to a patriarchal religion committed to abstinence, for which an untouched and sexually uncompromised Savior was a sine qua non. The myth of the Magdalen as whore reduced her to the level of other fallen women and permitted her to be viewed as an object of pity and forgiveness, consistent with the well-established empathy of Jesus for female sinners.

Furthermore the Magdalen of myth, as repentant whore, could perform a vital role in advancing the theology of repentance. A sinner and copulator, just like Eve, and thus a source of contamination and death to men, her case could be used to demonstrate the power of the new covenant to excite repentance and atonement, in short to redeem carnal and defiling womankind. Whereas the Virgin Mary, as the complete obverse of Eve, had to be elevated to a status of purity beyond the reach of ordinary male mortals, the Magdalen could be displayed as a fallen woman, who in the presence of Jesus repented mightily of her sins of the flesh, who could acknowledge her guilt by crying and weeping, and who could spend all her latter years in solitary remorse. This archetype presented a real flesh and blood woman, moreover an Eve tainted with sexual sin and pride and in crying need of remorse and renewal—exactly the type of woman whom the Savior could and did redeem and set back on her feet.

Furthermore the myth could be, and was, used to articulate the Church’s policy towards women in general and prostitution in particular. As prostitute par excellence, the example of the Magdalen could be called upon to reveal the way forward for women needing to seek repentance from sexual misconduct (the theme so searingly explored in the movie of the Irish magdalens). Beyond that, the ‘example’ of the Magdalen as solitary recluse, who abjured the pleasures of body and flesh, could be used as a model for fallen women seeking to purify themselves by means of Christian mortification and abstention.

In short, the mythic Magdalen could be utilized in all kinds of ways to advance patriarchal agendas. In addition to those mentioned above, we should appreciate the special frisson created by the juxtaposition of male Savior and female slut. Celibate men seeking, not always successfully, to model the assured abstinence of the Savior could find in the myth of Jesus and the Magdalen a paradigm for the management of their own sexuality. The Jesus who dined with Simon, and the resurrected Christ of ‘noli me tangere’, illustrated how it should be done. The fact that Jesus also sat with the mythic Magdalen, in her capacity as Mary of Bethany, demonstrated the fruits of his influence in the conversion of the former whore to a self-possessed woman who was content to sit in humble admiration at his feet. Later, according to John’s gospel, the Magdalen, in her guise as Mary of Bethany, would go further and once again anoint those same feet before Jesus faced his own sacrifice.

The power of this myth has been sufficient to produce some very striking, and in certain respects discordant, artistic images. Many such images are discussed in studies by Haskin and Margaret R. Miles; we will limit ourselves here to examples illustrating key episodes or attributes in the establishment of the myth, which at the same time introduce other perspectives on the Magdalen.

To begin with the often depicted episode of the Magdalen as repentant whore, a most dramatic and highly articulated study was created by the 16th century Venetian artist Veronese. This depicts the feast in the house of Simon as occurring under a huge Venetian loggia opening out to an urban scene of palatial buildings and arcades, symbols of patriarchal achievement and power. The Magdalen kneels in the exact center of the picture drying the feet of the Savior with her telltale long orange hair. Simon looks on disapprovingly, as do a number of other diners. But it is the moment when Jesus has just told the story about the debtors and is challenging Simon to perceive her love. Above the diners two cupids hold aloft a pennant proclaiming Jesus’ well-known statement that there will be joy in heaven over one sinner that repents, more than over ninety-nine just persons. The painting is a statement about repentance and true joy, proclaimed in full view of the urban aristocracy, and challenging establishment males to check out their own receptibility in the afterworld that awaits them.

Another very powerful image of the Magdalen was created by the brilliant Venetian artist Titian, a much older contemporary of Veronese and one of the seminal influences in the creation of Renaissance and Baroque esthetics. This is an intensely dramatic depiction of the ‘noli me tangere’ scene, done while the artist was still in his early to mid twenties. (It is a pity that the artist did not apparently have access to the Greek version of this episode). In this picture the Magdalen in her hallmark red robe and long, unkempt orange hair kneels before the risen Christ, one hand on her jar of unguent, the other reaching out to touch the Christ. A large tree rises up behind her, beneath which the body of the Christ as gardener sways away, eluding her outstretched hand. As befits Easter, it is a beautiful, sunlit day; it is also a day in which not just the Christ and the Magdalen but the divine and human orders as a whole are physically drawing apart.

Some twenty years later Titian produced another vision of the Magdalen, in which there is no hint of rejection of her proffered love. This exists in several versions and has become one of the most famous images of the Magdalen. It shows a young woman of powerful, sensual beauty, with her head uplifted in a state of adoration towards the unseen Savior. Her famously provocative orange hair is entwined around her breasts and body and in the original version constitutes her only covering. The shocking fact conveyed by this picture is that a basically naked woman clothed only with the unkempt hair of a seductress could be depicted as in the rapture of unconditional love with the Christ, without requiring any mediation on the part of religious authority.

In his final painting, done when he was around 90, Titian produced an austere and glowering version of the Pieta scene. In front of a tomblike architectural shroud the dead Christ lies in the arms of his mother, while the Magdalen, standing to the left, flings out her arm in anguish. To the right the friend and follower Nicodemus, shown as a self-portrait of the aged artist, kneels in suffering before the Christ. On either side two harshly fanged lion heads enclose the drama of the human event. If Nicodemus and the Christ project the suffering of death, the Magdalen projects a defiance that refuses to accept death as finality. Her urgent, standing figure reaches out, as if to summon life back into a scene of dread mortality. No repentant whore here, she personifies with dramatic intensity the urge to life crying out amidst the pall of death.

Another artist who pondered the story of the Magdalen was the exquisitely sensitive 15th century Flemish artist Rogier van der Weyden. One of his most poignant pictures shows the Magdalen, in her guise as Mary of Bethany, preparing to anoint Jesus before he goes to his death. The Magdalen is shown in half portrait in front of a serene Flemish landscape. She has the long orange hair, but it is pinned together, and she wears over it a beautifully tailored Flemish hat and veil. She is dressed in an austere blue tunic and robe, but with richly brocaded arms. In her right hand she holds the jar of ointment. She has an expression of sadness and pensiveness, which is heightened by the teardrops on her cheeks. But she also projects a character of spiritual strength and beauty, and an air of readiness to carry out her sorrowful task. Her image is that of a woman of grace and true compassion. Once seen, it is not easily forgotten.

Van der Weyden also depicted the Magdalen as Mary of Bethany in her contemplative mode, seated and reading a book, but with her jar of unguent not far away. But then, in one of his most famous paintings, he presented a very intense and dramatic representation of the deposition of Jesus. In this picture (now in the Prado Museum in Madrid) the Magdalen’s neatly braided hair is covered, but her body writhes in pain as she sees what has been done to the body of the man she loved. She is portrayed as a woman recoiling in agony from an unjust and terrible death. In all these images of the Magdalen, the artist sees far beyond the stereotypical myth into the thought and heart of a woman who loved deeply and passionately. It is the Magdalen as Magdalen (or Magdalen and Bethany), undiminished by any trace of theological error. Another stunning image of this scene by Botticelli, the Florentine artist who loved above all to depict women, shows the Magdalen kneeling and cradling with her hands and cheek those feet, once beautiful upon the mountains, of the anointed servant-son. Discreetly this act is depicted in the lower left-hand corner of the painting. But as an expression of deep and loving reverence, its meaning could not be clearer.

Finally we should note the statue, done by the 15th century Florentine sculptor Donatello in the last years of his long life, showing the Magdalen returning from her mythic 30 year period of fasting and remorse. What we see here is a gaunt, haggard and toothless old woman. We are presented with the image of a saint who has devoted herself to a life of extreme austerity. If there was ever any error in her past, it has long since been eliminated by years of penance. But the face is that of a woman who seems to have lived with an unbearable memory. This is not the Magdalen who might have embraced the risen Christ and received his mandate as first apostle. It is instead an old woman consumed by suffering and remorse, who has lived too long with bitter memories. She reminds us of the ongoing agony symbolized and experienced in the crucifixion.

In all these depictions the imaginations of the artists take us far beyond the agenda of the myth towards an interpretation of the Magdalen as a flesh and blood human being who lived in intimate relationship with the Savior. The gospel words that linger in the mind of the artists are those declared by Jesus of the unknown ‘prostitute’, that “she loved much” (dilexit multum). Esthetically the Magdalen emerges as the woman who truly loved Jesus: with intensity, as in Titian, with gratitude, as in Veronese, with heartfelt devotion, as in van der Weyden and Botticelli, or with painful anguish, as in Donatello. These of course are all of them male projections into the meaning of the story of the Magdalen. But they are projections that work around the myth of the Magdalen as repentant whore to uncover a more emotionally satisfying representation of love between woman and man, as revealed in situations of crisis. For example, the abject pain of the Magdalen at the foot of van der Weyden’s cross is contrasted with the swooning mother. One drops into a lifeless faint, the other stands and writhes. Although the Magdalen stands to the side of the picture, it is her lively agony, as contrasted with the Madonna’s immobilizing faint, which catches the viewer’s attention. The Magdalen lives her agony, and in Titian’s Pieta she is the one who alone stands and cries out to the world. Indeed, at the very time that theologians and opportunists were rabidly pursuing the destruction of women as witches, the great Titian chose to project the Magdalen as a solitary life force, defiant amidst a world of death.

The Status of Women in the Kingdom of Heaven

A subject of fairly critical importance to the future of Christianity consists in how its founder related to women and they to him. Was Jesus an equalizer in terms of gender roles, or did his attitudes towards women fit in with modes of patriarchalism prevailing in both secular and religious life in his time? Depending on that answer, can the present day world of Christianity reform itself sufficiently to adopt a positive stance towards Divine and human power in female manifestation? More broadly, can men and women find the means through the religious life to create an equal playing field, in which both expressions of humanity can be fully empowered and realized?

To take the matter of the Jesus mission first: one of the sticking points in the way of defining the mission as gender-equal has been the Biblically reported focus of Jesus’ training on male discipleship. The twelve apostles were male, and when one dropped out, the others found another male to replace him. In addition, Jesus prayed to God as Father, at least so far as we have it in the received text. However, our English text is translated from the original Greek and the Latin Vulgate versions, which have already patriarchalized Jesus’ reported diction. Translations from Aramaic—the language that he actually spoke—put it differently. “Our Father, which art in Heaven” is apparently translated from the Aramaic as “O Birther! Father-Mother of the Cosmos.” How interesting. What if we were to discover that Jesus’ thought and diction in Aramaic lacked the patriarchal emphasis that emerges in our translations from Greek and Roman? What if the God of Aramaic thought is regarded as beyond the divisions of gender and sexuality, or combining both? What, at least, if Jesus’ God is Oneness? If Jesus considered God, not as Father, but as Father-Mother, or Creator-Birther, or Breather of Life, Christians could be invited to do the same: to reconsider two thousand years of sitting, kneeling or bowing to an all-powerful Father figure and expand their minds beyond gender-limitation of the Divine—as Jewish and Christian esoteric traditions, and as Christian Scientists through the words of Mary Baker Eddy, already have. (Of course, as someone once pointed out to me, Mary Baker Eddy was a woman).

But this, it may be objected, is mere semantics. What about the twelve apostles? What about the commission to Peter: the rock upon which Jesus would build his congregation, and the guardian of the keys to the kingdom of Heaven? One might interpret the Peter commission by noting that the text reporting it is immediately followed by a lacerating criticism of Peter (“Get thee behind me, Satan”); moreover, the commission is more prominently asserted in the late first century non-Pauline text of Matthew than it is in the earlier, mid-century letters of Paul, which are in places quite critical of Peter. Paul applies the foundation stone metaphor only to Jesus. The Peter depicted in Paul’s early letters to the communities in Asia Minor is a rock made of sand rather than granite.

But to return to the twelve apostles: we have noted that the first post-resurrection apostolic commission was, as reported in the John and Mark gospels, given not to a male apostle but to the Magdalen, to whom also was reportedly accorded the first sighting, touching, and discourse with the resurrected Christ. Women, in fact, are reported as playing a critical role in the Crucifixion and post-Crucifixion events. Women are also reported as accompanying Jesus on his mission and supporting him out of their resources. All four gospels recount that it is a woman or women who at one stage or another anoint Jesus with precious ointment. In three instances, that anointing is the act that identifies Jesus ceremonially as the Christ (Anointed One) and prepares him to undertake his entry as Messiah-king into Jerusalem and his arrest and execution at the hands of the Roman imperium. So important did Jesus consider this ceremony of anointing that he insisted that wherever the gospel should be preached throughout the world, this deed that the woman anointer had done would be told about, in memory of her. To have a woman perform such an act is itself of enormous significance in defining Jesus’ recognition of the truly sacramental role of women. Last but not least is the role accorded to Mary the mother, not simply in the infancy narratives, but as participant in his adult mission, mourner during his crucifixion, and commissioned by the dying son as apostolic matriarch.

To sum up: Jesus was birthed and reared by a woman, supported materially by women during his mission, anointed by a woman in preparation for his entry as Messiah into Jerusalem, surrounded by women in his suffering on the cross, and as resurrected Christ greeted by a woman who had come to attend to his burial and who passionately loved him. In short, women were critical to the conduct and the denouement of the Jesus mission. Many of them were also its direct beneficiaries; and as reported in the Acts and the early letters of Paul, many women became missionaries of the new covenant. Many women also became martyrs for the cause of proclaiming Christianity. All this suggests strongly that Jesus treated women as intrinsic to his mission and not only accepted their participation but actively depended on it. The gospels also intimate that he had very close personal relations with one or more women, valued what they did for him, and wanted the memory of one woman’s sacramental deed remembered in perpetuity. No doubt if women had been co-directing the Christian church over all the subsequent centuries, that deed would be better remembered and its significance better understood and ritually incorporated into modern liturgies than is currently the case. (Our modern-day liturgies and creeds are still basically those inherited from the early patristic church)

There is a great need in contemporary Christianity to rethink and reformulate from the ground up the role of women as bearers of religious and spiritual tradition. In terms of progress in this matter among the general public, we are still close to zero. The appointment of a few women to ministerial positions does little more than tinker with a closed system and does not get at the question of women as bearers and transmitters of divinity. The language, culture and traditions of modern Christianity are still fundamentally patriarchal. This was evidently not the intention of its founder. The renewal of Christianity will occur when the energy, language, spirituality, and recognition of women as carriers of divinity are fully engaged, as Jesus had intended.

For this to happen, men and women will have to find the means, and the myths, to create an equal playing field in which the religious resources of both can be fully developed. In this day and age, women are no longer going to be deprived of the opportunity to give full expression to their religious power, in ways that do not simply advance patriarchal agendas. That will occur either inside of Christianity or outside of it. A few marginal Christian churches have already fully empowered women as religious leaders and activists. But mainstream Christianity is still too timid and cluttered with tradition to make this kind of unconditional commitment. Until that happens, men and women living in Christian cultures are both the losers.

At a more personal level, men reared in the Judeo-Christian traditions need to search out the spiritual and religious power represented by the female element in existence, and women as human bearers of that life force need to activate it in a way that is definable to men. Our non-Christian myths about women, such as those inherited from Classical Rome or from pre-Christian European Goddess cults, are themselves sufficiently powerful as to present aspects of female power which are extremely appealing and attractive to men. But within a dominantly Christian cultural tradition, the mythic power of such figures as Venus and Diana or Morgan La Faye, potent as it is, cannot been seen outside the primal mythic context of Eve as seducer and betrayer. In any case, part of the potency of the Venus myth in Christianized culture derives from the problems associated with the myths about the Virgin Mary and the Magdalen; while attitudes towards the pre-Christian Goddess cults and their heroines are still infected by the centuries-long persecution of witches.

At present, men and women are still trapped by these myths, as is reflected daily by the institutional forces and gender assumptions, both religious and secular, under which we labor. The myth of woman as seducer lying at the heart of patriarchal religion still lives on and flourishes, even though it has long since lost its utility as a means of preserving cultural power. The Eve myth is in fact now seriously damaging our culture, as is indicated by the far too pervasive male degradation and violence towards women which infects our culture, as well as the violence towards, and damage of, the earth, which has long been mythically identified with female power. At least Adam, so far as the Bible is concerned, never beat or raped his wife and children or polluted the earth. But today, in America and elsewhere, far too many contemporary Adams are doing exactly that.

Yet the Adam and Eve myth, as I implied in the previous chapter, is also damaging males. As a male I feel compelled to point this out to other males; at the same time I am compelled to ask women to recognize their own complicity in perpetuating these female-distorting myths. If I am angry with people of my own gender for shaping me into another Adam and my sister into another Eve, I also cannot accept that the latter lacks power to undo the myths binding her and me. The female, just as much as the male, is the manifestation and image of the “Birther-Mother-Father of the Cosmos.” To put this in other words, existence is both unitary and dyadic: unitary in respect to the oneness of the source and emanation of life; dyadic in respect to its manifestation in reproductive and gender-related form. If a renewed cosmos or kingdom of heaven is to be birthed, it must be done through the linked power of both genders.

The Christian myths about women have gone most astray not with Eve or the Virgin Mary but with the Magdalen. The Eve myth long predates Christianity; and although it is less guilt-ridden in Rabbinic Judaism, the association of Eve with death is a Jewish myth inherited through Paul by Christianity. The Virgin Mary myth, although in its full expression unique to Christianity, is constructed on elements, such as virgin birth, that were common throughout the middle east well before Christianity made its appearance. The concept of Mary as intercessor and protector has brought healing to innumerable people and is by any measure an active and valuable expression of spiritual life for millions of men and women.

On the other hand, the myth of the Magdalen as repentant whore is an artifact that reflects far more about its makers than it does about the Magdalen herself as an avatar. The Biblical records, coupled with artistic insight, tell us something about the Magdalen that is quite different from the standard myth constructed by orthodox Christian theology. Instead of the repentant whore, what we see is a woman who deeply loved Jesus and who was deeply loved by him. Indeed, according to Gnostic records, she was his most intimate companion. It is this aspect of intimacy, rather than the apparent choice of her as apostle to the apostles, that seems to have caused most trouble to orthodox Christianity. The possibility that the Magdalen and Jesus might have had a relationship of loving intimacy was simply too much of a challenge to a religion whose priesthood (and monkhood) was for centuries anchored on a foundation of male celibacy and to a large extent still is. In addition, the notion of the Magdalen as primus inter pares ran up against powerful belief systems that regarded male expression as the ultimate image of divine spirituality and female expression as an imperfect and secondary manifestation of human flesh. These beliefs, rooted in arcane patristic theology, underlie continuing Western notions about the superiority of male in relation to female life.

Several recent studies, both scholarly and unscholarly, have explored the scandalous notion that Jesus might in fact have been married and, if so, was very likely married to the Magdalen. The arguments, as sociology, are certainly plausible, but they run up against two thousand years of invincible patriarchal certitude that Jesus, as depicted in the four authorized Gospels, was a single person whose life was dedicated solely to the propagation of the kingdom of heaven. Christianity is still a long way from considering, much less accepting, the notion that Jesus might have been married, that the Magdalen might have been his spouse, and that together they might have borne children. In this respect, Christianity differentiates itself fundamentally from religions in which union between divine avatars, or between gods and humans, is regarded as the norm. There is at present no Christian theology that could permit us to construe Jesus and the Magdalen as lovers or marital partners in any physical, earth-bound way; only a spiritual union, anchored in healing of the soul, is deemed feasible. But this very absence of a fully worked out marital theology within Christianity means that the latter comes up short on the single most important relationship within human existence. In that respect the myth of the Magdalen is still very far from consummation.