BOOKS

The many faces of Eve

James Buchan

MARY MAGDALEN by Susan Haskins HatperCollins, £25, pp. 518

Archduchess Maria Magdalena of Austria, Grand Duchess of Tuscany, as Mary Magdalen, 1625-30, by Justus Sustermans, Palazzo Pitti, Florence

St Hugh of Lincoln, who was reputed to be the most learned man in England in the late 12th century, once visited the monastery of Fecamp in northern France to view an arm of St Mary Magdalen. According to his biographer, Hugh scan- dalised the French monks by tearing the silk and linen wrapping off the holy relic and attempting to break off a piece with his fingers. When that failed, he used his teeth, justifying the violence with some instant casuistry:

If a little while ago I handled the most sacred body of the Lord of all the saints with my fingers [i.e. at Communion], in spite of my unworthiness, and when I partook of it, touched it with my lips and teeth, why should I not venture to treat in the same way the bones of the saints . . . and without profanity acquire them when I have the opportunity.

This edifying story is repeated in an excellent section of Susan Haskins' book that deals with the manufacture, trade and theft of holy relics in the late Middle Ages and, in particular, the bitter competition between the Abbey of Vezelay in Burgundy and the basilica of St Maximin in Provence for the right to claim the holy sinner's rest- ing place. That there was nothing in scrip- ture or old tradition to suggest that Mary Magdalen went anywhere near France was absolved by the fabrication of new tradition and convenient visions.

This was the fate of many Christian saints; but more than any other figure from scripture, Mary Magdalen has been made and made over to reflect the wishes, anxi- eties and, in the case of Vezelay and St Maximin, economic requirements of differ- ent ages; and their ideals of femininity. (Miss Haskins uses feminine and female interchangeably; by feminine, I mean female in its social aspect.) The follower of Christ and witness of the Resurrection the apostle to the apostles — became in time the model of the sinful and repentant woman; a contemplative in the desert; a pin-up; a patron of social reform; the lover or mistress of Christ; and finally, in our day, a modern and independent woman.

The pattern for Susan Haskins' book, which combines scriptural exegesis with art and social history, is Marina Warner's study of the Virgin in history, Alone of All Her Sex (1976); but the Magdalen's story is, well, sexier. Miss Haskins' purpose is not simply to peel off and label all the layers of myth and legend that have laminated the picture of Mary Magdalen since her first appearance in Mark 15. She also has what the Americans call an agenda: by empha- sising Mary Magdalen's original apostolic' role, she hopes to buttress the case for the ordination of women. She conducts her campaign with restraint and circumspec- tion, and there is nothing in this interesting book to offend those homeless Spectator Anglicans who, aghast at the General Synod's vote of last November, are making their gloomy ways towards Rome, Constantinople or Mecca.

The Mary Magdalen of scripture is an enigmatic figure. We know she came from Magdala on Galilee, was cured of seven devils (Mark and Luke), was present at the Crucifixion; was among the women who went to the sepulchre to anoint Christ's body; was a witness to the Resurrection; and, in John, in the beautiful and sugges- tive scene in the garden known as the 'Noll me Tangere', saw and spoke to the risen Christ. We can also assume that since she is defined by a place-name and never by her relationship to a father, husband or son, and was among the women followers who 'ministered unto him of their sub- stance' (Luke 8), that she was a woman of independent means. Meanwhile, in the so- called Gnostic Gospels — the scriptural accounts suppressed in the first centuries of the Church — a woman who seems to be the Magdalen is either the chief disciple or contests that primacy with a rather petulant Simon Peter.

However, from the earliest times, and presumably because of the contagious image of anointing, she became identified with the sinner 'in the city' who anointed Christ's feet at the house of the Pharisee in Luke 7; with Mary of Bethany, who sits at Christ's feet, while her sister Martha bus- tles about, and thus became a model of contemplative as opposed to active piety; and, through the association of sex, with the Samaritan woman at the well and the woman taken in adultery. This conflation of the women, known as the theory of unicity, became orthodoxy with Gregory the Great's homilies in Rome in the 590s in which he stated:

She whom Luke calls the sinful woman, whom John calls Mary, we believe to be the Mary from whom seven devils were ejected according to Mark. And what did these seven devils signify, except all the vices? ... It is clear, brothers, that the woman previously used the unguent to perfume her flesh in for- bidden acts.

The theory survived, with occasional chal- lenges, in the Roman church until 1969. The apostle of the apostles became the image of fallen and redeemed womanhood, a second Eve.

In the Gospels, Christ is always astonish- ing his disciples and the Jews in general with his unconventional sympathy for women. Miss Haskins thinks that church attitudes to Mary Magdalen changed as women were driven out of the ministry and generally downgraded, and celibacy and virginity went to a premium; sex, as embod- ied in the Magdalen, was the threat par excellence to the asceticism of the early

church. Meanwhile, as the Virgin became more remote and perfect, women may have needed a more accessible heroine. At around this time, and through some confu- sion with the ascetic Mary of Egypt, new legends attached to Mary Magdalen: how she lived for 30 years in the desert (later precise as Provence), naked but for her lux- urious head of hair, expiating her life of desire and luxury. She became the patron of women mystics and was portrayed in art as contemplative, sorrowing and repentant; until, with the Renaissance, her penitence becomes rather less interesting to artists than her beauty.

Miss Haskins concentrates on Titian's Magdalen in the Pitti Palace in Florence, with her cascades of luxurious hair that leave the bust well uncovered, to the hor- ror of Ruskin at his most bovine and per- verse; Coreggio's sensational figure (which disappeared from Dresden in 1945) who reads her missal as if it were Hello! maga- zine, while her pretty little feet peep out from her garment of hair; and Francesco Furini's outrageous Magdalen from Vienna (1633). These pictures tend towards pornography in its classical sense: they record the persons and activities of whores, or, as Miss Haskins comments:

All these paintings were intended to inspire the spectator to feelings of remorse and con- trition, but the visual language of many of them . .. would probably have inspired less creditable emotions.

This image of the Magdalen triumphed in the 19th-century academy, even as the saint herself became the patron of attempts to control prostitution and the word `mag- dalen' became a Victorian euphemism for whore. The Decadents became fascinated by the nature of her relationship with Christ (i.e. did they do it?) and the specula- tion becomes explicit in Martin Scorsese's film, The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), where Christ dreams on the Cross of passion and domestic felicity with the Mag- dalen. In as much as she still enjoys an iconological existence, Mary Magdalen is either an unrepentant whore (perhaps the dominant ideal of femininity in Anglo- Saxon society) or a thoroughly modern working woman. Miss Haskins gallops through this section, but the vulgarity and stupidity of modern representations may offend the intelligent reader, let alone the pious.

Miss Haskins ignores Islam, which has always seemed to me indispensable to an understanding of Christianity; but she appears to know Greek and Latin and French, German and Italian in both modern and mediaeval forms; and that ain't so common nowadays. If her advocacy of women's ordination is a little muted, I suspect it is as a result of her researches: there are always passages in scripture to justify one or other notion of what women and men should be or do and, if there aren't, they can be invented.