Sermon: The Blessed Virgin Mary
The Very Revd Victor Stock is Dean of Guildford
- Preacher:
- Victor Stock
- Date:
- Sunday 15th August 2010
- Service:
- Eucharist
The glory of Mary is simple, because she said yes, we can. ‘I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, my soul shall exult in my God. He has clothed me with the garments of salvation, he has covered me with the robe of righteousness’. The sixty-first chapter of the prophet Isaiah presents a personification of Israel in the form of a woman, with resonances going back to the Song of Hannah in 1 Samuel, chapter 2, and forward to St Luke’s Magnificat based on Hannah’s song, and onwards to that other personification used on today’s Feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary from the twelfth chapter of the Revelation to John: ‘And a great portent appeared in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun with the moon under her feet and on her head a crown of twelve stars’. This also originally a personification of Israel, Israel prefiguring the Church for Mary is the Mother of the Church, indeed, in the tradition, this is one of her titles.
The place of the Blessed Virgin Mary as a personification of all that is good and true, gathering up heroic women from Deborah to Hannah and Queen Esther, she in the French sense brave – good, honest, courageous – our full human splendour revealed. Around the year 1310 Giotto painted his The Death of the Virgin, now in Berlin. The Virgin lies on a sarcophagus in the centre of the picture on a cloth held by angels, an apostle bends over her, embracing the upper part of her body. Christ stands behind the sarcophagus, holding the Virgin’s soul in the form of a small child. It’s a marvellous picture – the soul of Mary carried as a child up into heaven, which later in the history of art, indeed, quite soon after this painting, develops into Christ holding what looks like a small child, but in fact a fully formed human person, in the way that early Byzantine ivories show the Virgin herself holding the Christ child, but on closer examination the child a fully formed man, who is judging the world.
Art and theology rush together to paint these pictures and carve these images. Until the early 14th century the dominant image of today’s feast is the falling asleep of the Virgin Mary, her Dormition as it is still called in Greek and Russian Orthodoxy, a dormition which leads through Christ alone to her triumphant coronation in heaven, her crowning with glory; personification, metaphor and art tumbling over each other to rejoice.
Perhaps the most famous image, for those of us who enjoy European holidays, of today’s feast, is Titian’s masterpiece in Venice, Titian’s Assumption, unveiled on 19 May 1518. With this great altarpiece, a single panel of unprecedented dimensions, measuring 6.9 metres in height, Titian declared a new style in Venice, a monumental High Renaissance style to rival the achievements of Michelangelo and Raphael in Rome. His composition, constructed of a circular zone above a lower rectangular unit distinguishes the golden glow of heaven from earth below, its symbolic geometry of palette recalling the theological structure of Raphael’s Disputa. Titian’s painted heaven naturalises the golden half-domes of Giovanni Bellini’s earlier altarpieces, as well as their own ultimate inspiration, the mosaic domes of San Marco itself.
It is of this painting that Ruskin, who hated everything Baroque, falls over himself with exuberant praise speaks of Mary, ascending by her own volition, her own power, into the heavens, unimpeded by anything that could bind her to earth. This has always fascinated me because Titian is really painting something of a quite un-Medieval style, the triumph of the human person of Mary ascending by her own volition into heaven, an image we are more familiar with in Baroque art, the art so despised by Ruskin. That art, for example, of the Spanish School, as in those Murillos that take the twelfth chapter of the Revelation of John literally and paint Mary Immaculate and Assumed as a woman clothed with the sun, the moon under her feet and on her head a crown of twelve stars, seen on banners and statues in churches and homes throughout Catholic Europe.
The development of the artistic image echoes the development of doctrine about Mary, which doctrine received its final form in the pontificate of the Second World War, Pope Pius XII, who on 1st November 1950, came out onto the loggia above St Peter’s and announced to the thunderous applause of a million-strong crowd, ‘The Immaculate Mother of God, Mary ever a virgin, when the course of her life was run was assumed in body and soul to heavenly glory’.
But Protestants have long been nervous of Mary, seeing Medieval devotion to her displacing the proper honour due to her Divine Son, and from the liturgical observance and ecclesiastical calendar of Protestantism Mary has largely disappeared. For the Roman Catholic the promulgation of the dogmas of the Immaculate Conception of Mary in the nineteenth century by Pius IX, that inveterate enemy of the modern world, and then the 1950 proclamation by Pius XII of the Corporeal Assumption, the Roman Catholic Church has gone further in its definitions of Marian doctrine than any Protestant would wish to go and further indeed than Greece or Russia, whose ancient churches honour Mary and believe her to be Theotokos, the God-bearer, as do Anglicans who, like the Orthodox, assent to the doctrines of the Council of Ephesus.
Perhaps, however, Ruskin has a point – not a theological but a human one. Theologically he’s wrong. Mary achieves her triumph because of grace, not by her own volition. She’s drawn into heaven by the bands of love. But Ruskin is looking at Titian in the Frari in Venice and seeing something magnificent about the human form, what Blake calls the ‘human form divine’. There is an intrinsic beauty about the human person and in Mary we see this magnificence fulfilled. The Church of England takes its cautious way historically through the minefields of Marian doctrine, retaining in the Book of Common Prayer her major feasts in the calendar of the University of Oxford, even maintaining the Feast of her Assumption.
With the growth of the Mothers’ Union, the child of that redoubtable woman-foundress, Mary Sumner, banners depicting Mary were carried, as the nineteenth century developed, with a ubiquity and ordinariness that would have astonished seventeenth century Puritan divines in the Church of England. Quite moderate parish churches have a picture or a statue of Mary honoured with a vase of flowers and even a couple of candles. In the twentieth century we have seen the recovery of the Eastern Orthodox icon as part of the furniture of Anglicanism, and I doubt if there is a cathedral in the Church of England that doesn’t have an icon or statue of Mary flanked by banks of votive candles lit by the faithful as aids to prayer, another sight which would have made our forebears rub their eyes. But it is facile and, like much that is facile, a truism to say that Protestantism undervalues Mary and Catholicism exaggerates her, which leads to a smug self-satisfaction for Anglicans that we’ve got it just about right, this Feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary, as the calendar of Common Worship calls it, avoiding the word ‘Assumption’ so as not to offend, though you can bet your bottom dollar that hardly an Evangelical church will be keeping today’s Feast, though it is prescribed for today, whatever the Church of England calls it.
But let’s return for a moment to Giotto in 1310. The dominant figure of his Death of the Virgin is not Mary, but Christ, holding her soul. He’s come down to earth to take her soul up to heaven. Then, Titian. By contrast with the Giotto, with its holy water sprinklers and its attendant acolytes and its angels, a very ecclesiastical scene, the Titian is disturbingly modern – no ecclesiastical paraphernalia, just a woman, surging upwards in all her power and glory to be received by God the Father.
Today’s Feast rests, I think, precisely here. There’s been too much in the tradition of Mary’s submissiveness, her oriental subservience to the demands of the Angel. This woman has suited her masculine world, she might as well be in a niqab or burqa or imprisoned in a zenana or harem. And her sexuality has been an embarrassment, especially to the Roman Catholic Church, which has exalted her precisely because somehow or other she’s had a child without losing her virginity, and by being freed through her own Immaculate Conception from the stain of hereditary original sin, passed on like some ghastly contamination from Eve. But Titian’s picture won’t have any of this. Mary, the Glory of the Friars, for that’s the title of the church in which this great masterpiece hangs and over which it so startlingly soars, isn’t the victim of some kind of male subjugation. She is, what every human person is intended by God to be, wholly alive, free, ascending, fulfilled, drawn by God Himself into what God wants all of us to be. For Mary is not only the Mother of the Church, she is the mother of us all and shows us how powerful, strong and beautiful we might be.
So, beneath Titian’s Assumption could be inscribed in letters of gold the words of the second century theologian, Irenaeus, ‘The glory of God is the living man and the life of man is the vision of God’, or those words from that holy, gentle, civilised and long-suffering seventeenth century Anglican Bishop, Thomas Ken,
‘Heaven with transcendent joys her entrance graced,
Near to his throne her Son his Mother placed,
And here below now she’s of heaven possessed
All generations are to call her Blessed’.