Ave Maria, Stella Maris
The Virgin Mary, as she appears in the "Gospel According to Luke" was an immemorially sacred/natural ("pagan") mother, a Jewess—consciously of the seed of Abraham, Jacob, and the house of David (referred to by the annunciatory angel Gabriel, as the "father" of her "Son"), the bearer of Christ. In a word, the blessed mother and child are the pivotal figures of Judeo-Christianity, and the many subsequent "Christians" who deny this full, originary reality are apostate.
Luke was the pivotal figure through whom the Greek (and Roman) tradition and nation became Judeo-Christian for good. Mary is a central and shining figure in his story; her son, the "Magnificat"—in which her soul ("it") "magnifies" the God of Israel—is, along with the Psalms of David, an archetype of creative glorification of God in Western post-biblical culture. Handel's "Messiah," sung every Easter in churches, is the best-known version echoing the original song.
Despite the appearance of her first appearance to us in "Luke" and the other Gospels, Mary became a faded figure of Christianity before the overwhelming reassertion of the presence in the Middle Ages.
Kenneth Clark, in Civilisation, assigns this phenomenon to the Crusades which brought back striking imagery of her from Byzantium. Likelier, she was part of the powerful renewal of faith, which gave us Chartres, dedicated to her, (as was Notre Dame de Paris and many other coeval cathedrals.
Kenneth Clark, looking with us at the row of tall Kings by a portal, solemnly declares that their spirituality, gravitas, intimate inwardness of expression was unprecedented; by contrast, Greek and Roman (or any other) equivalent statuary was "brutal."
Nobles and "quality folks" from all over France came with utter humility to participate in the construction of this supreme 13th-century homage to Our Lady. Clark and many others see this moment as a turning point of our Western culture at its finest, before secular modernity set in.
Isn't that spiritual renewal a Great Awakening, together with the original splendor of her, enough of a context for what happened? We might add this: the immemorial sacred/natural phenomenon of motherhood (and ancient Mother Goddesses; Isis, Demeter) had been eclipsed and back-burnered by male-dominated, nature-fearing later Western religiosity (Greek, since the coming of the Hellenes, and Judaic) as Robert Graves persuasively claims in The White Goddess. This too called for atonement and redressing—a gender "pendulum swing"—of the sort history has seen cyclically in the twenty major waves recorded by Amaury de Riencourt in Sex and Power in History. Feminism, certainly the modern brands of it, are largely beside the point of all this, as our finest feminine minds admit.
When male-led civilization, manipulation of life, uninspired and anti-natural rationalism, go too far and bring moral and physical ugliness and pollution, fascist dynamism of the statist, rigidly systematic, futuristic, neo-classical sort exemplified by Robespierre, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, we naturally think of Her.
The anti-Semitic reason-worshippers of the German Enlightenment—Kant, Fichte, Michaelis, Hegel, Marx—following the collectivist Rousseau (not the lovely pre-Romantic) of the Social Contract which eventually gave us Auschwitz, were the opposite of Goethe, who put the Virgin Mary at the peak of his universe in Faust. His friend, Rahel Varnhagen, a Jewess, became the muse of the Schlegels, Kleist, Heine, etc. It was the Maman-worshipper in Rousseau who influenced humane figures like John Stuart Mill, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman. Henry Adams, seeing the growing horror of the "dynamo" as Charlie Chaplin, Ingmar Bergman and Tarkovsky would, turned for comfort to women, Chartres, and Our Lady, in "The Virgin and the Dynamo" (in Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres).
Now we need her more than ever, along with the "strong arm" of the God she magnifies.
Post-revolutionary, reason-worshipping statist secular France gave us the neo-classical Athena-like Statue of Liberty. Emma Lazarus added a touch of Mediterranean warmth in the humane poem at her feet. But she is not our motherly Judeo-Christian Lady. And heaven knows the arrogant, Babel, commercial, phallic trade tower planned for "ground zero" nearby won't be.
A biblically-modest monument, amid greenery, to Abigail Adams, Eisenhower's mother, almost anybody's mother, would be better than that and could help save us. Ave maria, stella maris, guide our modern ship of fools away from the reefs of arrogant folly threatening as we plunge on blindly ahead...
