Mary Magdalene

by Bruce Chilton

  Faith/Wisdom follows a process of restoration in Mary Magdalene’s teaching, so that what is described as her compulsion to have intercourse is cured, and she is consequently able to relate to the Father and to the whole divine realm without her former hysteria. Once helplessly enslaved to her sexuality, Faith/Wisdom then takes her place in the divine order again. This pattern also became Mary Magdalene’s in the Pistis Sophia, and her image as a redeemed prostitute took deep root in Western Catholicism, aided by the influence of Gregory the Great during the sixth century.

  In the influential sermon of Gregory the Great, preached in 594, Mary is fully identified with the sinful woman who wiped Jesus’ feet in chapter 7 of Luke’s Gospel, with Mary of Bethany, and as a prostitute. The aim of this harmonization, however, is not to demean Mary. Rather, she becomes the image of the impatient lover in the Song of Songs, and her desire is compared to the restless love a monk rightly feels for God as he lies on his bed at night. The material linkage of Mary Magdalene to the world of the flesh is beautifully exploited by Pope Gregory to convey the need to transcend this world and discover a cognate passion for the divine. Mary Magdalene revealed the necessity for penance, but also proclaimed its triumph. As Gregory said, “In paradise a woman was the cause of death for a man; coming from the sepulcher a woman proclaimed life to men.” Medieval Catholicism would eventually lose the balance of imagery that Gregory achieved, instead highlighting Eve’s sin at the expense of the Magdalene’s announcement of salvation. This forced Mary out of the realm of Faith/Wisdom to wander in a labyrinth of fallen flesh.

  By the thirteenth century, a late form of Gnosticism flourished in the West, chiefly in the South of France and in the Rhineland of Germany. Known as the Albigensians (after the city of Albi in France) or the Cathars (perhaps from the Greek term katharos, meaning “pure”), these Gnostics insisted upon a strict separation between this world and the realm of Spirit. That led to their notion that sins of the flesh, while regrettable and to be outgrown before one’s death, were only to be expected. Even Jesus as a person of flesh had to be distinguished from the spiritual Jesus, the Christ. But of what sin could Jesus have been guilty?

  Mary Magdalene came ready-made as a sinner, given the legends regarding her trade as a prostitute, tales that had circulated for centuries. From there, it was a short step to make her into Jesus’ concubine. Their relationship symbolized human weakness and gave Jesus a sin that did not involve him in violence. Pope Innocent III was outraged, although his vehemence may have had more to do with the Cathars’ denial of papal authority (as part of the structure of this world) than with their peculiar teaching about Jesus and Mary. Innocent declared a Crusade against the Cathars in 1208, and the result has been called the first European genocide.

  Because the Crusade against the Albigensians was of genocidal proportions, it is difficult to ascertain any detail in regard to Cathar theology, although their denial of papal authority and their view of Mary Magdalene are well established. Their belief that they could be “pure” relates to a Gnostic conviction—most obvious in the teachings of Manichaeism—that all matter is evil by definition, so that only the world of Spirit is for the perfect. (Despite speculative claims to the contrary, the Templars were a completely separate organization.) The conduits of the Cathars’ ideas included the related Bogomil movement in the Balkans; contact with the syncretism of Muslim, Catholic, Jewish, and Gnostic ideas in Spain also fed their theology. A similar mix produced the medieval Kabbalah of Judaism during the twelfth century in both Spain itself and France.

  How precisely the Cathars’ dualism of flesh and spirit related to their teaching about Mary can’t be specified, but the relationship is probably much as in The Gospel According to Philip. This Gospel and the Pistis Sophia might even have been sources of their theology, directly or indirectly. The Cathars believed that they could be perfected by a baptism in Spirit with the laying on of hands, and that until then they could enjoy at least some of the benefits of this life, although they frowned on procreation. Accusations of sexual license abound in medieval literature, and the English term bugger is said to be a contraction of the name Bogomil. It’s impossible to know how far to believe such charges, given their distinctly Epiphanian ring.

  The Cathars were eventually wiped out during the course of a succession of persecutions. The Crusaders seemed to triumph over any suggestion that Jesus may have sinned, with Mary or anyone else. Yet three centuries after their Crusade began, Martin Luther continued to countenance the idea that Jesus had a sexual relationship with Mary Magdalene.

  The Catholic Church would never question Jesus’ chastity, but in one respect the Cathars continue to influence Catholic theology. Pope Innocent and the Crusaders despised the Cathars’ heretical idea that Mary Magdalene was the same person as the woman taken in adultery, whose stoning Jesus prevented (John 8:1-11), but the link between Mary and the woman taken in adultery was too good to pass up for long. By the time the thirteenth century had closed, Franciscan preachers were exploring exactly the same theme. In Mel Gibson’s recent film The Passion of the Christ, this identification is embraced, packaged as if it were part of the Rosary.

  Medieval theology didn’t limit itself to literal history any more than the ancient Gospels did. Typically modern preoccupations— such as what really happened and what didn’t—did not constrain practitioners and believers in antiquity or the medieval period. Some documents, crafted to guide the practice of adepts who sought continuing visions of the risen Christ, abandoned historical concerns almost entirely in their continuing quest for the most authentic visions or insights into the deadliest of all sins. Mary’s destiny in the West was to embody the whole spectrum of vision and sin at one and the same time.

  Afterward

  RELICS OF THE MAGDALENE

  Catholic beliefs during the Middle Ages drew on many streams of thought and practice. In addition to the Gospels, we have seen that the deep polarity between flesh and Spirit in Gnostic sources, the ascetic eroticism of Pope Gregory the Great, the legends of Mary’s torrid past and her miraculous travels in Provence, as well as the scandal of the Cathars’ teaching all fed the medieval portrait of Mary Magdalene. Diverse though these influences were, Catholic theology proved remarkably resilient despite its many changes.

  The emergence of the medieval Magdalene illustrates that resilience. Belief in her was so varied that it tipped into heresy in the judgment of Pope Innocent III, who launched the Albigensian Crusade in response. The Cathars nonetheless vitalized the image of Mary, influencing Catholics and the Protestants who came after them (as well as modern devotees of the Magdalene). Devotion to Mary Magdalene was diverse, but it also expressed the deep conviction that made Catholic theology coherent: Medieval faith was grounded in the assurance that the presence of God’s Spirit, focused by devout belief, could transform human flesh.

  Mary Magdalene, the converted sinner and sister of Lazarus the leper, was an ideal representative of that conviction; she symbolized the idea that any believer, whatever that person’s faults, could, like Mary, become “the sweet friend of God.” The legends, pilgrimages, shrines, and ritual practices that grew up around her were all designed to reach ordinary believers in their physical lives, to give their flesh a share of eternity. Most of these beliefs and practices did not endure, many seem superstitious by the standards of modern common sense (not to mention critical history), and all of them have been subject to drastic change. But in the midst of change and reform and revision, the medieval conviction that supernatural Spirit could make all the difference remained consistent. In their confidence that God’s Spirit could alter the physical world as well as their own bodies, devotees of Mary during the Middle Ages undoubtedly invented evidence to suit their beliefs. But those inventions were perfectly sincere, and they reflect the passion for Mary Magdalene that continues to grip the modern imagination.

  In December of 1279, the crown prince of the house of Anjou, whose petty kingdom covered parts of France a
nd Italy, ordered an excavation of the church crypt at Saint-Maximin in Provence. One chronicler said that the prince dug with his own hands, working so fiercely that sweat streamed off him. Guided by local Provencal legend, the Angevin prince was convinced he would find the bodily remains of Mary Magdalene interred at Saint-Maximin.

  Sacred relics were priceless. It was believed that any small part of a holy person’s body conveyed the same sacred power the saint had achieved during life. By the time of Charles of Salerno, as historians today call this Angevin prince, medieval Europe had long embraced Saint Augustine’s teaching that a saint’s relics effected miraculous healings. This doctrine went beyond the evidence of a few anecdotes; it was an article of faith, and throughout the Middle Ages, people felt that their experience confirmed their belief.

  Augustine taught that when Constantine embraced Christianity, that set in motion the thousand-year rule of those who were true to faith in Jesus, as the Revelation of John (chapter 20) had predicted. That last book in the New Testament, also called the Apocalypse, has fed and framed apocalyptic thought in Christianity ever since it was written. In Augustine’s interpretation during the fifth century of the Common Era, the millenarian prediction of the Revelation had truly begun on earth. The power and influence of the Catholic Church during this last interim before the end of all things, which Augustine called the Christiana tempora, convinced him that the prophecies of Revelation were unfolding, just as had been predicted.

  Logically, that meant that God must already have been transforming human flesh into the holy flesh of eternity. Augustine—a firm materialist in the anti-Gnostic tradition of Catholic Christianity— believed that all people would be resurrected with physical flesh after the thousand-year reign of the saints. The millennium formed the fulcrum between mortality and paradise; the literal flesh of the saints proved by its healing properties that this transition was really happening. Relics of saints amounted to metaphysical data, not just historical curiosities. They brought healing to believers, as Augustine says happened when bits of Saint Stephen’s body wrought miracles in and near his city of Hippo in North Africa, conveying the power of the world to come to the physical bodies of those who venerated the relics.

  That power manifested itself politically as well as physically. Emperor Constantine himself had ordered the excavation of what is today known as the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. According to fifth-century legend, the excavators said they found nails there, prompted by Helena, the emperor’s mother, who reported a vision of where the true cross lay. Precious as those nails were, Constantine had some melted down and added to the metal of his helmet in order to make himself invincible in battle. Relics projected the force of God’s heavenly Kingdom into the uncertainties of this world. Christ was drafted to make the emperor invincible.

  Charles of Salerno dug at Saint-Maximin at the time his father, Charles I, was extending the dynasty’s power outward from its axis in Provence and northern Italy. The prince would eventually reign over his parts of modern France and Italy as Charles II, and he endowed churches all over his realm for the veneration of Mary Magdalene, his patroness. He also saw to the future protection of his dynasty by having his dead son, Louis of Toulouse, canonized as a saint—ensuring that divine power ran through the veins of his family as well as through the Angevin ground that Mary Magdalene protected.

  The Provencal legend that spurred on Charles and his diggers has come down to us in The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine. The Dominicans of Charles’s time actively used The Golden Legend in their preaching against the Cathars, hoping to keep devotion to Mary within orthodox bounds. (Those unconvinced by the preaching and inquisition of the religious arm of the Albigensian Crusade were subject to penalties and executions inflicted by its secular arm.) The identification of the Magdalene with Mary of Bethany, which had been taught since the time of Gregory the Great, had held up without challenge, and it would prevail through the Reformation. Only in 1969 did the revised calendar of the saints authorized by the Second Vatican Council of the Roman Catholic Church acknowledge that Mary of Bethany and Mary Magdalene were two different people. Nonetheless, the conflation of the two women persists in our time.

  Mary Magdalene’s wealth and promiscuity prior to her conversion were equally legendary, as several examples already cited have indicated. Many more examples have been cataloged, especially by art historians. In this book, I have referred to the best and earliest examples of the main types of portrayal of Mary Magdalene in order to avoid getting lost in the permutations and combinations of these types in the art and literature of the West. The baroque variations, for all their complexity, reflect the stable set of typical portrayals we have encountered.

  Mary Magdalene’s proselytizing in Provence and her later withdrawal into contemplation prior to her burial in Saint-Maximin were matters of agreement by the time of the royal excavation at Saint-Maximin. Nonetheless, doubt had already been expressed about Mary’s levitations as described in The Golden Legend. Among Charles of Salerno’s contemporaries, faith required tangible proof as validation of visions and legends.

  Several pilgrimage sites claimed various parts of Mary’s skeleton when Charles of Salerno made his “discovery.” Mary’s bones had long been venerated at Vezelay, in Burgundy—north of Provence and well outside the Angevin orbit. A monk named Badilus had supposedly stolen the skeleton from under the noses of the Saracens in 749, then removed it from Provence to Burgundy. So how could Prince Charles say that he had found Mary’s skeleton? After all, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux had preached the Second Crusade from Vezelay in 1146, and Louis IX—the Crusader king, later canonized a saint—made several pilgrimages to Vezelay during the thirteenth century.

  Fortunately for Charles of Salerno, signs testified to the authenticity of the bones in Saint-Maximin. Relics were valued more as metaphysical evidence than as historical fact. Physical authentication in the form of healings and miracles made a bigger impression than arguments about history. The Dominican friars into whose care Charles confided the skeleton produced their Boo’t of Miracles of Saint Mary Magdalene, which describes the cures her bones in Saint-Maximin effected, and the relative powerlessness of the bones kept at Vezelay. A Franciscan chronicler recounted a story of a butcher who had gone to venerate Mary Magdalene at Saint-Maximin and got into a fight over how genuine the bones were. He killed his antagonist, but Mary Magdalene assured him in a vision that he would be released from the gallows. She sent a dove to dissolve the chain by which he would have been hung.

  Chroniclers sometimes stumbled over themselves in recording the wonders wrought by Mary Magdalene of Saint-Maximin. Charles was kidnapped during his long war with Aragon, and in one account (the Dominican Legend, published about a century and a half after the events), he prayed to Mary Magdalene for release and promised to find her relics once he regained his freedom. Unfortunately for that legend, Charles was actually kidnapped after he discovered Mary’s alleged sarcophagus. Yet the tale’s purpose was not plausibility, but the multiplication of supernatural validation for relics.

  In the Dominican Legend, Mary promises Charles that he will find a written inscription on her sarcophagus, a bit of skin remaining on her skull, where the risen Christ touched her, an amphora containing blood-soaked earth from the foot of the cross, hair turned to ashes, and a plant growing in her mouth, where her tongue had been. The healing potency of these enchantments miraculously proved what skeptics might question.

  The relics at Saint-Maximin proved stronger than rational doubt, at least for the pious supporters of the house of Anjou. The prince himself made a golden holder for Mary’s skull, inscribed with his name and a prayer for Mary’s patronage, and he had Pope Boniface VIII declare these relics authentic. (Boniface diplomatically said nothing against the remains in Vezelay, which Pope Stephen had authenticated by papal bull more than two centuries earlier.) To this day, they are displayed annually on July 22, the feast of Saint Mary Magdalene.

  Pa
pal authorization was politically crucial to Charles, and he confided the care of Mary’s relics to the Dominicans, papal favorites who had risen to fame because their leader, Dominic Guzman, had joined the Albigensian Crusade to preach against the Cathars. As a result, the cult at Saint-Maximin emphasized Mary’s penitence rather than any alleged intimacy with Jesus. A later Dominican inquisitor, Moneta da Cremona, derided the claim among the Cathars that Mary’s example authorized preaching by women. In 1297, the Dominicans embraced Mary Magdalene as their patron saint, denying the heretics any similar claim. Charles hewed the line of Dominican orthodoxy and the requirement of private confession introduced earlier by Innocent III, the same Pope who had authorized the slaughter at Beziers and the genocide of the Cathars.

  Papal recognition of Mary Magdalene’s relics at Saint-Maximin reciprocated Charles’s loyalty. Charles’s support of Boniface went beyond orthodoxy: He had been instrumental in the Pope’s campaign for election.