One Cʘsmos: There's Something About Mary, and it's Nothing

Tuesday, July 26, 2022

There's Something About Mary, and it's Nothing

There's definitely something ambiguous about Mary's role in the economy of salvation, surrounded on all sides by heterodoxy.

Protestants, for example, often accuse Catholics of worshipping her. Catholics, for their part, affirm that she is indeed blessed among women, first among saints, Mother of the Church, and Queen of Heaven, for which reason they claim to venerate the Theotokos but draw a line in the sand before worshiping her.

As a witch once put it, at this point what difference does it make?

Well, there's an inevitable overlap between Christology and Mariology: exactly who are they, and why? Addressing questions with regard to One has necessary implications for the (M)other, and early church councils dealt with both; for example, if Jesus was more of a ghost than a man, then he didn't come into the world in the usual way.

If we pull back to gain a larger perspective,

The contrast between the old creation, whose head is Adam, and the new creation, whose head is Jesus, led to many connections and comparisons between Mary and Eve, claiming that, as it was Eve who brought Adam to the tree, it was Mary who brought Jesus into the world, and eventually to the tree on Calvary (Justo Gonzalez).

I think one reason Mary's role may be ambiguous is because it is unique; in other words, if something is unique, then it doesn't fall into any intelligible form or category: it is not the example of a higher principle, but is its own principle, so to speak.

Because of this apparent uniqueness, explanations of her role can have an ad hoc quality -- for example, reading back her immaculate conception, which is said to be a consequence of the Incarnation, even though it it is temporally prior to it.

But if we pull back even further for the deepest and widest possible perspective, then I think we see that Mary must be ambiguous because she represents something that is in its very nature ambiguous. Moreover, any attempt to render the principle less ambiguous does violence to the principle hersoph.

This is all just a hunch on my part. In any event, I've dug myself a hole. Let's see if I can dig my way out.

Putting on my old psychologist's hat, let's stipulate that on the basis of psychology alone, there can be no category more primordial than Mother.

I don't want to get sidetracked into a pedantic discourse on attachment theory and developmental psychology, but one can look at development as a kind of gradual emergence and crystallization of the ego out of a prior union with the deep and formless infinite ocean of the primordial mother. Remama?

This is the reason why D.W. Winnicott remarked that "there is no such thing as an infant," because at first there is only the mother-infant dyad out of which the baby's self-awareness will gradually emerge. But never completely, for that oceanic field of unconscious energy will haunt -- or bless -- us forever.

Now, what if that infinite field is the prior reality, and the Great Mother is simply the formless-form it takes for us?

In fact, there was a famous book on the subject by the Jungian Erich Neumann, called The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype. I haven't read it in over 30 years, but the official description says Neumann

shows how the feminine has been represented as goddess, monster, gate, pillar, tree, moon, sun, vessel, and every animal from snakes to birds. Neumann discerns a universal experience of the maternal as both nurturing and fearsome, an experience rooted in the dialectical relation of growing consciousness, symbolized by the child, to the unconscious and the unknown, symbolized by the Great Mother.

That sounds about right, except that Jung and his acolytes were stuck on the level of myth rather than pure metaphysics, and what if the myths are but exemplars of an even deeper perspective?

In other words, a Jungian would reduce Mary to an instance of a mythological archetype, but what if she's the instantiation of something higher, not something lower?

Let's get back to the essay we were discussing yesterday, The Divine Feminine, by Patrick Laude. In it he specifies why She should be ambiguous by nature, for whereas the masculine is associated with the formal dimension -- e.g., Logos, law, institutions, Wait Until Your Father Gets Home, etc., -- the feminine "pertains to the informal, or rather supra-formal, realm" (emphasis mine). Thus,

the Feminine refers, at its highest level, to the Essence that transcends all relativities.... [It is] an inward space of freedom vis-a-vis the theological crystallization of a tradition. Issuing forth from this supra-formal and feminine dimension of the Logos, every masculine manifestation of this principle tends to embody the very form of the tradition that the Logos brings into the world.

Hmm. I'm stroking my chin. If this is true, or something like truth, it implies that our egoic emergence from the primordial realm of the Great Mother is something like God's own emanation or crystallization or something from a realm that is Beyond-Being. And this realm can never be mansplained: no man can see it and live.

As I said at the top, we are surrounded by heterodoxy. Is there a way to make the Christian shoe fit this metaphysical princess? Or is it enough to say that Mary is this princess, and be done with it?

It seems that there is something about Mary, and that this something is nothing, in the apophatic sense of the term.

Now, just what is that supposed to mean? We'll say more in the next post, but recall what was said yesterday about the Tao being a kind of plenitude of nothing that gives birth to everything -- which sure reminds me of Eckhart's once-upin-a-timeless dream:

I once had a dream. I dreamt that I, even though a man, was pregnant, pregnant and full with Nothingness like a woman who is with child. And that out of this Nothingness God was born.

In a more lucid dream, he once claimed that