The Virgin Mary: A Very Short Introduction by Mary Joan Winn Leith

Author:Mary Joan Winn Leith [Leith, Mary Joan Winn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion, Judaism, General, Christianity
ISBN: 9780198794912
Google: uMxKEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2021-11-25T20:32:49+00:00

Proclus praises Mary, the New Eve, as the personification of her own pregnant womb, the ‘spiritual paradise’ where the New Adam took on flesh. In Proclus’ unexpected imagery, Mary’s womb is ‘the workshop of the union of natures; the marketplace of the contract of salvation:’ a ‘marketplace’ for conceiving the child who will ‘buy us out of slavery’ and a ‘workshop’ where the flesh of the saviour is woven. The icon pictures the ‘union of natures’ in progress before our eyes, despite centuries of deterioration; a faint image of the infant Jesus (Figure 10b) is still visible on Mary’s chest, a prototype of the transparent womb of Damien Hirst’s The Virgin Mother.

Proclus also uses well-known Marian symbolism in the burning bush of Exodus 3. As Gregory of Nyssa wrote in his Life of Moses, ‘The light of divinity…did not consume the burning bush, even as the flower of [Mary’s] virginity was not withered by giving birth.’ Proclus’ ensuing phrase, ‘virgin and heaven, the only bridge from God to mankind’, elevates Mary above human nature—albeit metaphorically. For Proclus, Mary’s womb emphatically belongs to a human mother, but in his heightened poetic diction, Mary skirts the edges of the divine, precisely the effect of the icon’s golden light that gleams all around the Virgin, not to mention Mary’s jewelled golden throne and footstool so evocative of emperors, empresses, and Jesus in majesty. Even if only figuratively, the Virgin has been elevated to ‘heaven’, making it easier to imagine Mary as Theotokos, the ‘one who gives birth to God’.

Finally, Proclus links the gestation of God in Mary’s womb to the act of weaving, the female activity that symbolized chastity. Weaving was also associated with Eve, to whom, according to Epiphanius of Salamis, God gave the ‘wisdom of weaving’, a skill humans needed to cover the shame of nakedness for which Eve was blamed. Christians were long accustomed to applying the symbolism of clothing to salvation, teaching that with the fall, Adam lost the robe of glory he wore in Paradise. In a gracious exchange, Jesus the New Adam clothed himself in the old Adam’s fallen flesh so that, by baptism, Christians might once again put on robes of glory. Mary’s womb, declared Proclus, was the ‘awesome loom of the divine economy upon which the robe of union was ineffably woven’.

‘Robe of union’ refers to Jesus’s two natures. Preachers and painters linked the theme of Mary weaving the flesh of Jesus in her womb and the Protevangelium’s account the of Annunciation to Mary as she was spinning thread for the Temple, the scene on our icon. From the ball of yarn in Mary’s lap a thread extends up to the bunch of yarn in her left hand. A blood-red thread passes directly over the ghostly figure of Christ, suggesting nothing so much as an umbilical cord and simultaneously a thread pulled by a shuttle through a loom.

The ball of yarn with its strategically placed red thread alludes to yet another influential textile-based Marian metaphor,

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