Mary Through The Centuries – Jaroslav Pelikan, 1996 ★★

Immaculate, Maybe; Inflexible, Never

Jesus may be the basis of Christianity, Paul its founder, and Peter its rock, but if there is one enigma in the faith’s hierarchy, it is neither man nor God but rather a woman who stands alone not only for her proximity to divinity, but for her singular involvement in its creation.

Who was Mary? Or to ask perhaps an even more relevant question regarding a religious icon, what has she become in the centuries since the end of her time on earth? Theologian Jaroslav Pelikan reviews humanity’s shifting views in this, a companion volume to his landmark 1985 study, Jesus Through The Centuries.

“O woman marvelously unique and uniquely marvelous, through whom the elements are renewed, hell is redeemed, the demons are trampled under foot, humanity is saved, and angels are restored!” So Pelikan quotes the 11^th century English theologian Anselm of Canterbury, one of many Christian guiding lights featured here.

As Pelikan explains it, Anselm wasn’t indulging in mere hyperbole. For him, as for generations of Christians before and since, Mary formed a “bridge” of faith in many ways, between God and man, between the divine and the mortal, even between rival faiths.

There’s no overstating the importance of Mary. Pelikan even floats an estimate that a single Marian shrine, Lourdes in France, has attracted more pilgrims in less than two centuries than has Mecca in thirteen.

In many ways, Mary’s stardom is a post-New Testament phenomenon. Pelikan notes she is mentioned strikingly little in either the four Gospels or the Acts of the Apostles.

“Whether as stimulus or irritant or inspiration, Scripture has dominated attention to the Virgin Mary though it has not always controlled it,” Pelikan notes.

What is mentioned about Mary, specifically in the Gospels of Matthew and of Luke, has triggered both controversy and devotion, that she was a virgin when she “immaculately conceived” the Son of Man. That is a core component of Catholic dogma though not exclusively Catholic, and in fact was not even official Catholic dogma until the 19^th century.

Pelikan probes the question of Mary’s virginity:

But further reflection did produce the puzzling discrepancy that the rest of the New Testament remained so silent on the subject, if indeed it was so unambiguous and so essential. The epistles of Paul, the other epistles of the New Testament, and the preaching of the apostles as recorded in the Book of Acts – none of these contained a hint of the virginal conception.

There is even mention in some of the New Testament, of Jesus’s “brethren,” Pelikan notes, suggesting the possibility of siblings.

Mary was a controversial figure for other reasons, Pelikan notes. Going back to Christianity’s early days, when it was still finding its way out of the catacombs and coliseums, the faith was riven by other questions to which Mary was central.

Arianism was a once-mighty branch of early Christianity which saw Jesus as not divinely begotten but rather a human subordinate to divinity. For Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria in the fourth century, Arianism was a dangerous creed, and not only for its denial of the Holy Trinity, the essence of Catholicism as we know it today:

“You have gone further in impiety than any heresy. For if the Logos is of one essence with the body, that renders superfluous the commemoration and the office of Mary.”

For Athanasis, as for others, Mary was central to the Christian story because of her place as bringer of the divine. She was the Second Eve, the woman who not only didn’t repeat Eve’s mistake but crushed the serpent at her feet by willingly taking on a savior for mankind when she was tasked by the angel Gabriel in one of the New Testament’s centerpiece moments, the Annunciation.

Henry Ossawa Tanner's 1898 depiction of the Annunication, one of many such depictions featured in Mary Through The Centuries. Asked in 1998 by The New York Times whether the many portraits of the Annunciation make it so special a moment in the New Testament, Pelikan answered: "I think it's the other way around." Image from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Henry_Ossawa_Tanner_-_The_Annunciation.jpg

Later on, she was seen as Theotokos, literally “mother of God,” a designation so freighted with importance that it pushed awkward questions about how immaculate such a woman must be:

Yet, the virgin birth of Christ from one who had herself been conceived and born in sin did not seem to resolve the question of how he could be sinless in his birth if his mother was not. Sometimes, in the eyes of its critics and even of its supporters, such argumentation seemed to lead to the notion of an infinite regress of sinless ancestors, going back presumably to Adam and Eve, all of whom had been preserved free from sin in order to guarantee the sinlessness of Christ and Mary.

While examining vital questions in the same engaging spirit as Jesus Through The Centuries, Pelikan’s Mary makes for a dissatisfying follow-up in many ways. It employs a less strictly chronological approach than Jesus did, and strains at making the sort of ecumenical points that Jesus landed so effortlessly.

Pelikan calls Mary a “bridge” not only between Christian branches but to other religions, namely Islam and also Judaism. But his evidence is thin in all departments. In Islam, for example, it is noted that Mary is the only woman mentioned by name in a title of one of the chapters of the Koran. But as Pelikan delves into the chapter, it is revealed that “Maryam” is but a minor figure in the larger picture, whose main focus is bringing to life in Jesus a figure of some importance at the time who nevertheless pales in comparison to Mohammad, the greatest Prophet.

“The Koran inspires a devotion to Mary of which Muslims might have made more,” Pelikan concludes weakly.

Pelikan pushes a Jewish vision of Mariological devotion which is even more strained, suggesting she somehow resides at the core of the Song of Solomon. For isn’t the female object of that Song described as “black and comely” and many icons of Mary similarly dark enough to be called “Black Madonnas”? I may be missing Pelikan’s point, or else grossly simplifying it; suffice to say I didn’t buy it.

There is more than a hint of Pelikan playing to the gallery in his writings, of putting one out there for the ladies after celebrating the Son of Man so successfully. Jesus Through The Centuries was a rare commercial success for Pelikan, a professor at Yale and author of many scholarly tomes. Whether he’s pointing to Mary’s central place for many supposedly misogynistic Church fathers or the humble nature of her known life as harbinger of a classless society, you feel Pelikan pushing to offer in Mary the kind of lessons he knows will please a cosmopolitan, modern audience.

To this end, Pelikan jumps around a lot, which gets irritating, especially when he lands on a worthwhile point. Such is the case of Mary as an agent of divine intercession, the Mediatrix:

The consummation of the believer’s glory was the awareness that Mary stood as the Mediatrix between him and her Son; in fact, God had chosen her for the specific task of pleading the cause of humanity before her Son.

I could have read far more of Pelikan’s thoughts of Mary’s historically shifting role as Mediatrix, particularly buttressed with a more in-depth examination of the many portraits of her, some in color, which decorate this book. Pelikan does offer some glancing notes in this direction, but mostly goes off on various tangents, such as her place in Dante’s Divine Comedy, Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Faust, and the ruminations of Martin Luther.

All of this, while supposedly representative of Mary’s centrality to Western Civilization, doesn’t come close to connecting up into a coherent portrait and smacks of academic preening as Pelikan’s citations become ever-more recondite and off-the-reservation Mary-wise.

I did enjoy parts of Mary, and felt Pelikan’s mastery of the subject matter even as he strayed from the points at hand. It’s an engaging book, just not as coherent as the subject would seem to demand.