STABAT MATER

THE PARADOX: MOTEHR OR PRIMARY NARCISSISM

IF IT IS NOT possible to say of a woman what she is (without running the risk of abolishing her difference), would it perhaps be different concerning the mother, since that is the only function of the “other sex” to which we can definitely attribute existence? And yet, there too, we are caught in a paradox. First, we live in a civilization where the consecrated (religious or secular) representation of femininity is absorbed by motherhood. If, however, one looks at it more closely, this motherhood is the fantasy that is nurtured by the adult, man or woman, of a lost territory; what is more, it involves less an idealized archaic mother than the idealization of the relationship that binds us to her, one that cannot be localized—an idealization of primary narcissism. Now, when feminism demands a new representation of femininity, it seems to identify motherhood with that idealized misconception and, because it rejects the image and its misuse, feminism circumvents the real experience that fantasy overshadows. The result?—a negation or rejection of motherhood by some avant-garde feminist groups. Or else an acceptance—conscious or not—of its traditional representations by the great mass of people, women and men.

FLASH—instant of time or of dream       Christianity is doubtless the doubtless

without time; inordinately swollen        the most refined symbolic construct in 

atoms of a bond, a vision, a shiver,        which femininity, to the extent that it

a yet formless, unnamable embryo.       Transpires through it—and it does so

Epiphanies. Photos of what is not yet     incessantly—is focused on Maternality.

visible and that language necessarily      Let us call “maternal” the ambivalent

skims over from afar, allusively.          principle that is bound to the species,

Words that are always too distant,        on the one hand, and on the other stems

too abstract for this underground        from an identity catastrophe that causes

swarming of seconds, folding in          the Name to topple over into the

unimaginable spaces. Writing            unnamable that one imagines as         

them down is an ordeal of               femininity, nonlanguage, or body. Thus

discourse, like love. What is loving        Christ, the Son of man, when all is said

for a woman, the same thing as           and done, is “human” only through his

writing. Laugh. Impossible. Flash         mother—as if Chritly or Christian

on the unnamable, weavings of           humanism could only be a maternalism

abstractions to be torn. Let a body        (this is, besides, what some

venture at last out of its shelter,           secularizing trends within its orbit do

take a chance with meaning under         not cease chaiming in their

a veil of words. WORD FLESH.          Esotericism). And yet, the humanity of

From one to the other, eternally,          the Virgin mother is not always

broken up visions, metaphors            obvious, and we

of the invisible.

Shall see how, in her being cleared of sin, for instance, Mary distinguishes herself from mankind. But at the same time the most intense revelation of God, which occurs in mysticism, is given only to a person who assumes himself as “maternal.” Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux, Meister Eckhart, to mention but a few, played the part of the Father’s virgin spouses, or even, like Bernard, received drops of virginal milk directly on their lips. Freedom with respect to the maternal territory then becomes the pedestal upon which love of God is erected. As a consequence, mystics, those “happy Schrdbers” (Sollers) throw a bizarre light on the psychotic sore of modernity: it appears as the incapability of contemporary codes to tame the maternal, that is, primary narcissism. Uncommon and “literary,” their present-day counterparts are always somewhat oriental, if not tragical—Henry Miller, who says he is pregnant; Artaud, who sees himself as “his daughters”or “his mother”… It is the orthodox constituent of Christianity, through John Chrysostom’s golden mouth, among others, that sanctioned the transitional function of the Maternal by calling the Virgin a “bond,”a “medium,” or an “interval,”thus opening the door to more or less heretical identifications with the Holy Ghost.

  This resorption of femininity within the Maternal is specific to many civilizations, but Christianity, in its own fashion, brings it to its peak. Could it be that such a reduction represents no more than a masculine appropriation of the Maternal, which, in line with our hypothesis, is only a fantasy masking primary narcissism? Or else, might one detect in it, in other respects, the workings of enigmatic sublimation? These are perhaps the workings of masculine sublimation, a sublimation just the same, if it be true that for Freud picturing Da Vinci, and even for Da Vinci himself, the taming of that economy (of the Maternal or of primary narcissism) is a requirement for artistic, literary, or painterly accomplishment?

  Within that perspective, however, there are two questions, among others, that remain unanswered. What is there, in the portrayal of the Maternal in general and particularly in its Christian, virginal, one, that reduces social anguish and gratifies a male being; what is there that also satisfies a woman so that a commonality of the sexes is set up, beyond and in spite of their glaring incompatibility and permanent warfare? Moreover, is there something in that Maternal notion that ignores what a woman might say or want—as a result, when women speak out today it is in matters of conception and motherhood that their annoyance is basically centered. Beyond social and political demands, this takes the well-known “discontents” of our civilization to a level where Freud would not follow –the discontents of the species.

A TRIUMPH OF THE UNCONSCIOUS IN MONOTHEISM

It would seem that the “virgin” attribute for Mary is a translation error, the translator having substitute for the Semitic term that indicates the sociolegal status of a youg ummarried woman the Greek word parthenos,which on the other hand specifies a physiological and psychological condition: virginity. One might read into this the Indo-European fascination (which Dumezil analyzed)² with the virgin daughter as guardian of paternal power; one might also detect an ambivalent conspiracy, through excessive spiritualization, of the mother-goddess and the underlying matriarchy with which Greek culture and Jewish monotheism keptstruggling. The fact remains that western Christianity has organized that “translation error,” projected its own fantasies into it, and produced one of the most powerful imaginary constructs known in the history of civilizations.

  The story of the virginal cult in Christianity amounts in fact to the imposition of pagan-rooted beliefs in, and often agains, dogmas of the official Church. It is true that the Gospels already posit Mary’s existence. But they suggest only very discreetly the immaculate conception of Christ’s mother, they say nothing concerning Mary’s own background and speak of her only seldom at the side of her son or during crucifixion. Thus Matthew 1:20 (“…the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because she has conceived what is in her by the Holy Spirit’”), and Luke 1:34 (“Mary said to the angel, ‘But how can this come about since I do not know man?’”) open a door, a narrow opening for all that, but one that would soon widen thanks to apocryphal additions, on impregnation without sexuality; according to this notion a woman, preserved from masculine intervention, conceives alone with a “third party”, a nonperson, the Spirit. In the rare instances when the Mother of Jesus appears in the Gospels, she is informed that hlial relationship rests not with the flesh but with the name or, in other words, that any possible matrilinearism is to be repudiated and the symbolic link alone is to last. We thus have Luke 2:48-49 (“…his mother said to him, ‘My child, why have you done this to us? See how worried your father and I have been, looking for you? ‘Why were you looking for me? He replied. ‘Did you not know that I must be busy with my fathers affairs?’”), and also John 2:3-5 (“…the mother of Jesus said to him, ‘They have no wine.’ Jesus said, ‘Woman, why turn to me?³ My hour has not come yet.’”) and 19:6-27 (“Seeing his mother and the disciple he loved standing near her, Jesus said to his mother, “Woman, this is your son.’ Then to the disciple he said, ‘This is your mother.’ And from that moment the disciple made a place for her in his home.”)

  Starting from this programmatic material, rather skimpy nevertheless, a compelling imaginary construct proliferated in essentially three directions. In the first place, there was the matter of drawing a parallel between Mother and Son by expanding the theme of the immaculate conception, inventing a biography of Mary similar to that of Jesus, and, by depriving her of sin to deprive her of death. Mary leaves by way of Dormition or Assumption. Next, she needed letters patent of nobility, a power that, even though exercised in the beyond, is nonetheless political, since Mary was to be proclaimed queen, given the attributes and paraphernalia of royalty and, in parallel fashion, declared Mother of the divine institution on earth, the Church. Finally, the relationship with Mary and from Mary was to be revealed as the prototype of a love relationship and followed two fundamental aspects of western love: courtly love and child love, thus fitting the entire range that goes from sublimation to asceticism and masochism.

NEITHER SEX NOR DEATH

Mary’s life, devised on the model of the life of Jesus, seems to be the fruit of apocryphal literature. The story of her own miraculous conception, called “immaculate conceptioin,” by Ann and Joachim, after a long, barren marriage, together with her biography as a pious maiden, show up in apocryphal sources as early as the end of the first century. Their entirety may be found in the Secret Book of James and also in one of the pseudoepigrapha, the Gospel according to the Hebrews (which inspired Giotto’s frescoes, for instance). Those “facts” were quoted by Clement of Alexandria and Origen but not officially accepted; even though the Eastern Church tolerated them readily, they were translated long before glorifying the life of Mary on its own but always under orthodox guidance. The first Latin poem, “Maria,” on the sheim (who died before 1002), a playwright and poet.

  Fourth-century asceticism, developed by the Fathers of the Church, was grafted on that apocryphal shoot in order to bring out and rationalize the immaculate conception postulate. The demonstration was based on a simple logical relation: the intertwining of sexuality and death. Since they are mutually implicated with each other, one cannot avoid the one without fleeing the other. This asceticism, applicable to both sexes, was vigorously expressed by John Chrysostom (On Virginity: “For where there is death there is also sexual copulation either”); even though he was attacked by Augustine and Aquinas, he nonetheless fueled Christian doctrine. Thus Augustine condemned “concupiscence” (epithumia) and posited that Mary’s virginity is in fact only a logical precondition of Christ’s chastity. The Orthodox Church, heir no doubt to a matriarchy that was more intense in eastern European societies, emphasized Mary’s virginity more boldly. Mary was contrasted with Eve, life with death (Jerome, Letter 22 “Death came through Eve but life came through Mary”; Irenaeus, “Through Mary the snake becomes a dove and we are freed from the chains of death”). People even got involved in tortuous arguments in order to demonstrate that Mary remained a virgin after childbirth (thus the second Constantinople council, in 381, under Arianistic influence, emphasized the Virgin’s role in comparison to official dogma and asserted Mary’s perpetual virginity; the 451 council called her Aeiparthenos—ever virgin). Once this was established, Mary, instead of being referred to as Mother of man or Mother of Christ, would be proclaimed Mother of God: Theotokos. Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople, refused to go along; Nestorianism, however, for all practical purposes died with the patriarch’s own death in 451, and the path that would lead to Mary’s deification was then clear.

girl in the arms of her son who henceforth becomes her father; she thus reverses her role as Mother into a Daugher’s role for the greater pleasure of those who enjoy Freud’s “Theme of the Three Caskets.”

  Indeed, mother of her son and his daughter as well, Mary is also, and besides, his wife: she therefore actualizes the threefold metamorphosis of a woman in the tightest parenthood structure. From 1135 on, transposing the Song of Songs, Bernard of Clairvaux glorifies Mary in her role of beloved and wife. But Catherine of Alexandria (said to have been martyred in 307) already pictured herself as receiving the wedding ring from Christ, with the Virgin’s help, while Catherine of Siena (1347-80) goes through a mystical wedding with him. Is it the impact of Mary’s function as Christ’s beloved and wife that is responsible for the blossoming out of the Marian cult in the West after Bernard and thanks to the Cistrcians? “Vergine Madre, figlia del tuo Figlis,” Dante exclaims, thus probably best condensing the gathering of the three feminine functions (daughter-wife-mother) within a totality where they vanish as specific corporealities while retaining their psychological functions. Their bond makes up the basis of unchanging and timeless spirituality; “the set time limit of an eternal design” [Termine fisso d’eterno consiglio], as Dante masterfully points out in his Divine Comedy.

The transition is more active in the West, with Mary rising body and soul toward the other world in an Assumption. That feast, honored in Byzantium as early as the fourth century, reaches Gaul in the seventh under the influence of the Eastern Church; but the earliest Western visions of the Virgin’s assumption, women’s visions (particularly that of Elizabeth von Schonau who died in 1164) date only from the twelfth century. For the Vatican, the Assumption became dogma only in 1950. What death anguish was it intended to soothe after the conclusion of the deadliest of wars?

IMAGE OF POWER

On the side of “power,” Maria Regina appears in imagery as early as the sixth century in the church of Santa Maria Antiqua in Rome. Interestingly enough, it is she, woman and mother, who is called upon to represent supreme earthly power. Christ is king but neither he nor his father are pictured wearing crowns, diadems, costly paraphernalia, and other external signs of abundant material goods. That opulent infringement to Christian idealism is centered on the Virgin Mother. Later, when she assumed the title of Our Lady, this would also be an analogy to the earthly power of the noble feudal lady of medieval courts. Mary’s function as guardian of power, later checked when the Church became wary of it, nevertheless persisted in popular and pictorial representation witness Piero della Francesca’s impressive painting, Madonna della Misericordia, which was disavowed by Catholic authorities at the time. And yet, not only did the papacy revere more and more the Christly mother as the Vatican’s power over cities and municipalities was strengthened, it also openly identified its own institution with the Virgin: Mary was officially proclaimed Queen by Pius XII in 1954 and Mater Ecclesiae in 1964.

EIA MATER, FONS AMORIS!

Fundamental aspects of Western love finally converged on Mary. In a first step, it indeed appears that the Marian cult homologizing Mary with Jesus and carrying asceticism to the extreme was opposed to courtly love for the noble lady, which, while representing social transgression, was not at all a physical or moral sin. And yet, at the very dawn of a “courtliness” that was still very carnal, Mary and the Lady shared one common trait: they are the focal point of men’s desires and aspirations. Moreover, because they were unique and thus excluded all other women, both the Lady and the Virgin embodied and absolute authority the more attractive as it appeared removed from paternal sternness. This feminine power must have been experienced as denied power, more pleasant to seize because it was both archaic and secondary, a kind of substitute for effective power in the family and the city but no less authoritarian, the underhand double of explicit phallic power. As early as the thirteenth century, thanks to the implantation of ascetic Christianity and especially, as early as 1328, to the promulgation of Salic laws, which excluded daughters from the inheritance and thus made the loved one very vulnerable and colored one’s love for her wit all the hues of the impossible, the Marian and courtly streams came together. Around the time of Blanche of Castile (who died in 1252), the Virgin explicitly became the focus of courtly love, thus gathering the attributes of the desired woman and of the holy mother in a totality as accomplished as it was inaccessible. Enough to make any woman suffer, any man dream. One ends indeed in a Miracle de Notre Dame the story of a young man who abandons his fiancée for the Virgin: the latter came to him in a dream and reproached him for having left her for an “earthly woman.”

  Neverthelss, besides that ideal totality that no individual woman could possibly embody, the Virgin also became the fulcrum of the humanization of the West in

  Scent of milk, dewed greenery, acid      general and of love in particular.

And clear, recall of wind, air, seaweed      It is again about the thirteenth century,

(as if a body lived without waste): it        with Francis of Assisi, that this

slides under the skin, does not remain      tendency takes shape with the

in the mouth  or nose but fondles         representation of Mary as poor,

the veins, detaches skin  from bones,      modest, and humble—madonna

inflates me like an ozone balloon,          of humility at the same time as a

and I hover with feet firmly planted        devoted, fond mother. The famous

on the ground in order to carry him,        nativity of Piero della Francesca in

sure, stable, ineradicable, while he          London, in which Simone de

dances in my neck, flutters with my         Beauvoir too hastily saw a

hair, seeks a smooth shoulder              feminine defeat because the

on the right, on the left, slips on the         mother kneeled before her barely

breast, swingles, silver vivid blossom        born son, in fact consolidates the

of my belly, and finally flies away           new cult of humanistic sensitivity.

on my navel in his dream carried           It replaces the high spirituality that

by my hands. My son.                     assimilated the Virgin to Christ

                                        with an earthly conception of a

                                        wholly human mother. As a source

Nights of wakefulness, scattered sleep,      for the most popularized pious

sweetness of the child, warm mercury in      images, such maternal humility

my arms, cajolery, affection, defenseless      comes closer to “lived” feminine

body, his or mine, sheltered, protected. A      experience than the earlier

wave swells again, when he goes to sleep,      representations did. Beyond this

under my skin—tummy, thights, legs:        however, it is true that it integrates

sleep of the muscles, not of the brain,         a certain feminine masochism but

sleep of the flesh. The wakeful               also displays its counterpart in

tongue quietly remembers another           gratification and jouissance. The

withdrawal, mine: a blossoming             truth of it is that the lowered head

heaviness in the middle of the bed,            of the mother before her son is

of a hollow, of the sea...                     accompanied by the immeasurable

Recovered childhood, dreamed peace         pride of the one who knows she is

restored, in sparks, flash of cells,             also his wife and daughter. She

instants of laughter, smiles in the           knows she is destined to that eternity

blackness of dreams, at night opaque        (of which every mother is

joy that roots me in her bed, my           unconsciously aware, and with regard

mother’s, and projects him, a son, a         to which maternal devotion or even

butterfly soaking up dew from her          sacrifice is but an insignificant price

hand, there, nearby, in the night. Alone:      to pay. A price that is borne all the

she, I, and he.                             more easily since, contrasted with

He returns from the depths of the nose,      the love that binds a mother to her

the vocal chords, the lungs, the ears,         son, all other “human relationships”

pierces their smothering stopping            burst like blatant shames. The

sickness swab, and awakens in his            Franciscan representati