Imagining Mary: A Major Contribution to the Psychohistory of Religion

Emeritus Professor of Russian History at the University of California, Davis, our author Daniel Rancour-Laferriere (RL for short), is familiar to readers of psychohistory, most recently with The Sign of the Cross: From Golgotha to Genocide (2011). You might say this latest work extends his religious topography from the Savior’s crown of thorns to his impaled foot on the cross where his sorrowing mother is shown on the jacket cover. Mary’s appearance here also bookends her central position in Church history between crib and cross. In tracing her various roles throughout history, RL’s first counterintuitive insight is the otherwise minor part she plays in biblical texts. This elision enables theologians, clergy, nuns, and laity to more than amply fill in the blanks, even though the efforts may reveal more about us than about someone of whom very little is known. How far do the additions extend? Maurice Valency’s throwaway line from a university Renaissance Literature class that in the 12^th century God became a woman has long intrigued me. Undoubtedly over the centuries, Mary has meant many things to countless believers. Hence this thoroughly researched project promises a major contribution.

“In the New Testament,” RL writes, “Mary is a simple peasant woman from Galilee” who “receives little attention from the authors,” while others “felt obliged to praise her to the skies” (18). But her scriptural presence is highly scripted and mostly fleeting as, for example, the Presentation in the Temple and her marriage feast of Cana request. In fact, “neither Mary nor Joseph plays much of a role in the gospel drama over all” (11). Never named, she is not shown greeting her resurrected

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son (1). But since her Savior was “born of woman,” as St. Paul has it (2), her role must be officially addressed. Thus arises a central crux in Christianity—the virgin mother: mystery or mismatch? Jesus cites only his immortal father, never the mortal one (10-11). Mary’s virginity is secured by having her impregnated, often portrayed at her prie-dieu, via the ear by the Holy Spirit in the form of a sacred dove. Her fiat constitutes her miraculous conception (9). Joseph’s misgivings over cuckoldry are laid to rest by an angel entering his dream.

Adding to the general confusion, brothers and sisters of Jesus crop up in the gospels who, RL speculates, may be “full siblings, half-siblings, cousins, or others” (9). Jesus never mentions them and plays instead the Divine-origins card in asserting oneness with the Heavenly Father (11). Church fathers, who would consider the origin’s riddle through a Divine Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, succeeded in stirring endless disputes over an orthodoxy secured by heresy trials and religious conflicts. For her part, Mary is further set apart from our common humanity with an Immaculate Conception exempting her from the inherited stain of Original Sin, and her “Virgin Birth” of Jesus preserving her hymen’s integrity. Thus purity prevails over flesh and blood as theology supplants nature.

Slighted in the Gospels, she is elevated by her literal Assumption (58-62), stationing her beside the ascended Lord. RL elaborates on the poetic tradition of the couple united beyond the grave as heavenly bride and bridegroom (13-14) and observes that, by the 5^th century, she was being represented as a “kind of goddess” (23), transformed by mariophiles (devotees of the mother of God) into a “powerful deity” (56), and, in effect, “deified” (63). Popes and Church councils didn’t go quite that far. All the same, she inspired among the faithful a flourishing “cult of Mary as Mediatrix” of Grace and prime intercessor with the Lord (81; interesting word-choice, cult, connoting an alternate belief-system).

Such bestowed honors may have meant to compensate for her exclusion from the androcentric privilege of administering the sacraments (a recuperative gesture in postmodern terms). As it is, the gendered sequence of Divine access may comport with children’s developmental stages of going through their maternal attachments prior to engaging the paternal domain (Protestant churches have never taken to her intercession benefits). At this point my own Catholic background kicks in with a cautionary, “Watch your step, son.” For his part, RL has disengaged from his Catholic Canadian past: a declared atheist, not a Mariophile, but a genuine Mariologist. Having so far only drawn on portions of this brilliantly erudite study, I can confess (former habits die hard!) to veering out of my depth. Foregoing absolution, I will resort to my adopted home discipline of psychohistory where other textual connections emerge.

Our author perceptively addresses the Holy Family’s convoluted

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oedipal themes stemming from a father/son unity bound to a virginal mother impregnated by an ambiguous third member of the Holy Trinity (12-18, 63, and 236-8); the Holy Family also computes with Freud’s “Family Romances” (Standard Edition, Vol. 9, 235-241). At the risk of slipping reductive, I have also been struck by the psychodynamic import of the Freudian “primal scene” of human origins as fueled by the child’s exposures to and fantasies about parental intercourse. The historicity of the Bethlehem birth story with Herod cast as the arch villain has been questioned by scholars, but the perennial Manger depictions assume a subjective coherence in part from child-development sequences that rework early conflicts over precocious exposure to adult sexuality.

Central to the religious birth scene is a blissful mother-child dyad. If on one level it is painfully perceived by an older sibling, it is also joyfully endorsed by angels, shepherds, and livestock, with the nominally oedipal father, Joseph, passively converting to the Immaculate Conception/virgin birth dogmas. He beams with paternal pride in modern calendar art, but is traditionally posed bearded and bald, crouching over a staff at a distance. The arrival of the Wise Men on the scene bearing gifts may reduce young observers’ anxieties over exclusion and stem from anal transformations of the infant’s first “gifts” to please/placate the nursing caregiver. The infant may thus serve as an idyllic self-projection or a disturbing image of a newly arrived sibling rival—hence the prevalence of babies stolen from today’s cribs in outdoor Nativity scenes and ending up crushed or abandoned on highways.

Regardless of the primal fantasy and the jealous vandalism, the key early dynamic between Jesus and Mary is one’s becoming human through mirroring exchanges that ground future attachments and various forms of desire—filial, erotic, platonic, narcissistic, etc. (see Margaret Mahler, The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant, 1975; Donald Winnicott, “Mirror Role of Mother and Family in Child Development,” in The Visual Behavior of Infants in the First Year of Life, Peter Lomas, ed., 1968, 26-33; and Lomas, ed., The Predicament of the Family, 1967, 111-18). This—call it miraculous—maternal reflective power may underpin Mary’s archetypal Madonna/Child images; such profound wishful components may fuel this artwork’s magnetizing, transcendent appeal.

As RL demonstrates, Mary as Virgin Mother “has been and continues to be many things to many people(s),” acquiring “countless salutations, honorific titles, poetic epithets, hyperbolic expressions, biblical typologies, and tutelary titles” (20). As self-sacrificing breast, she “provides herself (her milk) to her son, who will in turn provide himself (the Eucharistic bread),” thus rendering Manger and Altar equivalent (146-51). Psychodynamically, she personifies the weaning infant’s “good breast” (in Melanie Klein’s parlance), but in a role reversal she is also the daughter of Jesus (63). She is the Mother of God, “Madonna of Humility” (144-6), the Queen of Heaven, emblem of obedience, and model of

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selfless suffering. But as virgin, bride, mother, and saint, she incorporates contradictory images. Such far-reaching over determinisms suggest she incarnates all things to men and women alike; all, that is, except for the traditional female role of sexual partner. Taken together, these traits, along with that libidinal hiatus, comprise an enduring, manifold religious group fantasy. It is fed not only by historical realities, e.g., Mary as nurturant caregiver during social famines, but is also a product of unconscious ideation not bound by logical and perceptual contradictions.

She induces all of these and more. To her formal religious offices, we can add the psychohistorical role of delegate for purity. Nestled within an enveloping group fantasy are agendas promulgated by a chaste hierarchy to desexualize women into disembodied spiritualized ideals. We can inquire to what extent young men’s lives constrained by celibate vows provide a refuge from fears, e.g., of engulfment, emasculation, etc., by dangerous females. One may also wonder if this defensive strategy of idealized chastity as the hallmark of virtuous fidelity may, to some, offer cover for various sexual abuses fomenting the current crises in Catholicism. On these pressing issues, Imagining Mary provides an invaluable sourcebook for further research.

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