Mary Magdalene is the woman who loves. She represents all those women who really love. But this love, if it is taken seriously reveals more beauty and depth than we usually think Vicente Durán Casas

Vicente Durán Casas

 

Mary love Bogotá - Mary Magdalene has turned out to be a very attractive character for all those who out of ignorance or naiveté have been seduced by second or third class literature that some call esoteric, and of which Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code is a magnificent example. I haven’t read the book and I’m not going to either (why read bad books if there are so many good ones?) and that is why I cannot speak about what it says or hushes up about Mary Magdalene. I suppose they are mere inventions that seek to scandalize, which is only partly achieved like everything that is mediocre, and that most of the people hardly realize they are the victims of a pseudo-cultural commercial company built upon the sombre foundations of a bourgeois, lazy, self-obliging collective ignorance. But Mary Magdalene doesn’t have to perish forever in the hands of those who mean to make of her the wife of a Jesus that has been invented by the decadent mentality that wants to be imposed upon us. Turning her into a feminine figure that must accommodate to our own foolishness –even if it is done forcefully- doesn’t do justice to history nor to literature. I sustain that esoteric literature concerning Mary Magdalene instead of letting this marvellous woman speak out, submits and conceals her. And here is the proof. In 1911, German poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) was walking absentmindedly down Rue du Bac, in Paris, and when he entered an antique bookstore, he started to pry into an old manuscript that contained an anonymous French sermon of the 17th century. As he read it the literary beauty that had fallen under his eyes by mere chance, and that had touched his intelligence and moved his heart astounded him. The text, called L’amour de Madeleine (Magdalene’s Love), had apparently been discovered by abbé Joseph Bonnet in Saint Petersburg’s Imperial Library, and some consider that due to the literary characteristics, it should be attributed to the famous preacher Jacques Bénigne Bossuet (1627-1704). Rilke quickly bought the text, translated it into German in his austere room of Rue de Varenne and showed it to the world. His words about it are precise: “an extraordinary sermon, luminous, of a true spiritual relevance”. What is the sermon about and why did it impress the author of Duino Elegies, who many consider the greatest German poet of the 20th Century, so deeply? The subject of the sermon is no different from what the title reveals: Mary Magdalene’s love for Jesus. But instead of many of the current approaches to the subject, whose texts reveal the disgrace and ambiguities of a decadent culture, the sermon that caused so much aesthetic impact on Rilke talks about Mary Magdalene’s love with the same delicacy and discretion that love usually falls upon those who end up being witnesses of its’ irresistible magic and fascination. The text begins like this: “Magdalene, Jesus’ saintly lover, loved him in his three conditions: she loved him alive, she loved him dead, she loved him resurrected. She showed the tenderness of her love for Jesus Christ present and alive, the perseverance of her love for Jesus Christ dead and buried, the impatience and the transport, the outbursts, the fainting fits and the excesses of her helpless love for Jesus resurrected and ascended to heaven”. Rilke must have understood immediately that is was something truly profound, indeed something deeper and more important than the mere historical fact in which Brown and his imitators seem to get tangled up. Today we know that the person we call Mary Magdalene is in fact the result of identificating three different people in one woman: Mary of Bethany, sister of Martha and Lazarus (Lc. 10,38-39; Jn. 11,1), Mary Magdalene or Magdala (Mc. 15,40-41, 47; 16,1; Mt. 2755-56, 61; 28,1; Lc. 8,2-3; 24,10) and the anonymous sinner who wet Jesus’ feet and dried them with her hair (Lc. 7,38). There is no doubt that these are three different women that popular imagination as well as western Roman Catholic Liturgy –unlike Eastern- united into one person. But beyond knowing who Mary Magdalene really was, the author of the sermon we are commenting was attracted by the hearts of these three women we adore as one and the same. And this heart reveals much more than meets the eye. In the background of everything is the love of Sulamite in Song of Songs. “I have come to my orchard, my sister, my wife… Where has your love gone, that we may look for him together? Set me like a seal upon thy heart, like a seal in thy arm, love is as strong as death”. Mary Magdalene is the woman who loves, better still, she represents all those women who really love. But this love, if it is taken seriously (women’s love is often trivialized and neutralized by men) reveals more beauty and depth than we usually think. That is why Rilke was so moved when he read things like this: “When I gaze at Magdalene at the feet of Jesus it seems to me that I see lost love that is ashamed of having been lost and seeks the right path at the feet of He who is the path himself… Love unites, sin draws apart, but penitent love shares both. Magdalene runs to Jesus: that is love; Magdalene dares not come close to Jesus: that is sin. She rushes in: that is love; se approaches frightened and confused: that is sin. She perfumes Jesus’ feet: that is love; she bathes them with her tears: that is sin. She lets her hair down loose: that is love, to dry his feet: that is sin. She is anxious and insatiable: that is love; she dares not ask for anything: that is sin. But she cries, sighs, watches, remains silent: that is love and sin at the same time. Penitent love is so kind in its submissive daring, in its repressed liberties and its trembling liberties! And again, how kind because it loves, because it honours, because it practices justice and relinquishes the rights it has been given because of the name and quality of love so that –feeling penitent- justice can prevail”. (The love of Magdalene, Herder, Barcelona 1996, p. 23) Making Magdalene a sort of wife of Jesus, apart from being a daring and arbitrary but highly lucrative invention is nothing more than trying to submit and placate the irresistible force of love, just as Magdalene’s love shows us. Or could it be that in 100 years from now, Dan Brown will be more known and studied than Rilke? I hope not.
__________________
Vicente Durán Casas S.J. Dean of the Philosophy Faculty, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogota Colombia .