And As The Pope Exits

From a book review by Hilary Mantel of "Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary" by Miri Rubin

Mary’s body was a battleground from the beginning. Who was she before the angel called? Why was she chosen, why not some other good girl? Did she suffer pain in childbirth? What was her afterlife? Did she have more children? What happened to her body when she died? There’s something about Rubin’s respectful, soothing, even-handed tone that makes you want to raise all the old embarrassing questions, as if you were some sniggering medieval novice in the first week of your induction to the convent.

When Jesus was delivered, what happened to Mary’s hymen? The scholar Jovinian in the fourth century thought her virginity came to an end in childbirth. He was excommunicated for his error. Body-loathing Manicheans did not believe that a divine person could be born in the messy human way. For Syriac scholars, and later for the Cathars, Mary conceived through the ear when the Holy Spirit whispered to her, and she was pregnant for only two months. In the Koran, where she is an ordinary woman, she gives birth to a prophet, a talking baby, but she delivers alone and suffers an agony which ‘drove her to the trunk of a palm tree. She said: “Would that I had died before this and become a forgotten thing.”’ But in Christian legend Christ’s birth is painless, even ecstatic, and his mother is surrounded by signs and wonders.

St Ambrose stressed her purity: her sealed womb, her intact state, her substance unmingled with the alien substance of the body of the opposite sex. The tension between her divine and her human nature is troubling and exquisite. Augustine said that Mary and Joseph were really married, but without ‘intercourse of the flesh’. If Jesus was divine, every aspect of his story had to accord with his divinity, and Mary’s life had to be worthy of him. Was she conceived without original sin, or did she receive a special grace in the womb that made her sinless?

The dispute ran for centuries. Rubin traces, as it evolves, the notion of Mary’s Immaculate Conception: the idea that she herself was conceived without the stain of original sin, which has been the heritage of humanity since the sin of Eve. It was impossible that such a temple of purity should die and rot in the ordinary way. Scholars reassured the faithful that gusts of perfume, not the whiff of putrefaction, issued from her corpse; she did not so much die as fall asleep, and was ‘assumed’ to heaven.

...Rubin’s book contains and illustrates a chilling history of anti-semitism. Christians borrowed their learning from Jewish scholars, using Old Testament exegesis to justify themselves, dignifying both Christ and Mary as living fulfilment of Old Testament prophecies. The central text is in Isaiah: ‘Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name Emmanuel.’ The word used is alma, which means a young girl rather than a virgin, but early Christian thinkers were keen to tell the Jews that they didn’t understand their own scriptures. Jewish scholars familiar with the Greek world were uncomfortably aware that Christian claims about virgin birth echoed pagan legends. Jewish polemicists continued through the centuries to dissent, and struck back against Christian myth, sometimes ferociously: Mary was an infertile woman, who had intercourse not with Joseph, but with an enemy of Joseph who tricked her; and to make matters worse, this trickster had sex with her during menstruation, when she was unclean. A Jewish text of the early 13th century asked shrewdly why Jesus was born to a 13-year-old, not a three or four-year-old; now, that would have been what you call a miracle. In the 13th century the rabbi David Kimhi of Provence (1160-1235) asked:

[How can I believe] in a living God who is born of a woman, a child without knowledge and sense, an innocent who cannot tell his right from his left, who defecates, urinates and sucks from his mother’s breast out of hunger and thirst, and cries when he is thirsty and whom his mother pities; and if she would not he would die of hunger as other people do?

The smug unanswerable Christian argument to all logical objections, to all historical and philological objections, was simple: God knows best. He makes the words that frame experience, he makes human anatomy, he is Lord of impossibilities; he can break his own universal laws at a whim. Denying Christ’s divine nature, Jews were seen, by the Middle Ages, as not just ignorant but malevolent, active enemies of Mary and those whom she protected. In an essay in Framing Medieval Bodies (1994) Rubin explored medieval horror stories in which Jews cut out the wombs of Christian women. In 1240 Louis IX staged a mock trial in which the Talmud was tried for blasphemies against Mary. As the blood libel took hold of Europe, Mary’s miracles served to bring the murderous misdeeds of Jews to light, and to resuscitate their innocent victims, who sang the Virgin’s praises even with their throats cut. Marian chapels were built on the razed sites of synagogues and Jewish houses.