The need for the Madonna in reforming our culture

As Tom Holland’s 2021 book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World reveals, in every past civilization (even our Greco-Roman forbearers), women were either commodities, guarded by their families as dynastic assets, or simply booty, “sex objects”—as were their children.

The birth of God into history as a real baby of a real mother changed all that. Only Christian civilization achieved a prodigious overturning of men’s natural drives by insisting on the dignity of women as such, founded in motherhood.

Most astounding, in chivalry, devotion to the Madonna taught the manly virtues of chastity, monogamy, and reverence for women to testosterone-charged, rape-loving young Germanic warriors. We might contemplate the conscientious Sir Gawain. This was a naturally impossible achievement, overthrowing the natural norms of Huns, Vikings, Mongols, Arabs, Achaeans, Samurai, and Apaches. Achilles would have gaped. Nietzsche did rage.

Correcting idiotic anthropologies

Any post-Enlightenment anthropology that denies real freedom of the will cannot account for this prodigious “moral inversion.” A Freudian might attribute it to the arrested development of prepubescent boys, but that would imply that a developmental pathology could generate all the familial, political, and cultural blessings that resulted, not the least being monogamous fatherhood.

What’s more, it’s now becoming obvious that modern atheistic philosophy fumbles badly the reality of human consciousness. Aristotle points to this real mystery (Ethics IX— in the context significantly of friendship): “He who sees, discerns that he sees, and he who hears, that he hears… so there is something, when we are feeling or thinking, that is conscious of our feeling or thinking.” Yet atheistic philosophy, trapped in its mechanistic rhetoric, simply “hand waves” myself, being a self, a subject in the world among other subjects.

Hobbes and Locke were content to propose “words as the spies of the appetites,” but had no one “back at headquarters,” collating the intelligence. Hegel’s master-servant dialectic presupposes the very “being in and for itself” that it purports to explain: any weaker dog in the jaws of its alpha simply goes limp in submission. Nietzsche at least embraces honestly the modern effort to “assassinate the old idea of the soul,” embracing “the merely apparent existence of the subject” (BGE III.54).

In short, they all presuppose what they’re obliged to explain: consciousness as essentially, spiritually relational. As we will see, only embracing the origin of consciousness in love—a mother’s love—corrects these idiotic anthropologies.

Newborn development and the mother’s face

The study of newborn development is a latecomer to our self-understanding, given historically high infant mortality rates and consequential parental detachment. Yet, as Simone Weil saw, given the revelation of the Imago Dei in every person, Christianity is both theology and anthropology.

One early explorer of the terra incognita of babyhood was Thomist-pediatrician Herbert W. Ratner (The Family, an Office of Nature, 1982): “Because love holds together the delicate membranes of human society, and is the basis of our relationship with God, the chief need of the child is to experience love,” says Ratner. “For this task, nature selected the mother. As a female, her capacity to care for the newborn is unique.”

Humans with reasoned speech are essentially relational persons. Therefore, we enter the world naturally incomplete, neurologically underdeveloped, so we can learn the local lingo in all its subliminal analogies and distinctive poetry. Like Kanga’s Roo, we mature outside the womb in the maternal embrace, what Ratner calls “a womb with a view.” In Mommy’s cradling arms, soothed by her scent and already familiar voice, newborns are neurologically hard-wired to fix their gaze on her smiling face, with a focal range of a single foot, the distance from her breast to her face. “When the Psalmist pleads to God to ‘turn His Shining Face upon me,'” Ratner concludes, “he echoes the acceptance the nursling seeks from its mother, its source of security.”

Mommy constantly flatters us, so over those first formative weeks, we learn to distinguish speech-sounds from noise-sounds: sounds from the Shining Face are speech, and ambient sounds, mere noise. Babies thus nurtured can later, as adults, understand conversations in heavy traffic. Television cannot substitute. Babies deprived of face-to-face stimulus (like hundreds of Romanian orphans in the 1990s) suffer from permanently crippled frontal lobes.

Baby and Mommy wonder at each other—what we’ll shortly call Mimetic Communion—like two parallel mirrors. Aristotle identifies wonder as likewise the beginning of philosophy: “Why is there something?” But this sort of question assumes the mature distinctions of reasoned speech, which themselves presuppose that something, discerning that we’re reasoning. Our aboriginal experience is not the “why?” of anything, but the overwhelming fact, “That is there someone”—not something, but someone, the original wonder of Adam. That maternal friendship draws each of us into the Cosmos, entices us into the universe, conscious in our relationships to others as others.

“The infant’s inability to communicate verbally and conceptually bespeaks the woman’s ability to communicate in a modality of ‘feeling’,” Ratner elaborates, “knowing and loving through the intuitive, poetic, experiential, and affective. These non-conceptual modes of communicating result in a preternatural form of knowledge… a predominantly spiritual, sensorial gestalt.” So we mature as conscious beings in a family, preparing for lives of confident agency. However, we may be stunted in our maturation by our family’s (and eventually our own) failures to love. Friendship, delight in the being of others as others, with our shared good, is our life fabric, where we find happiness, “life fully alive,” freedom, and meaning.

The nursing couplet’s mutual delight explains our eventual ability to experience Beauty, given our aboriginal experience of the Shining Face’s bilateral symmetry, coherent complexity, and affirming participation: the ur-analogy of the goodness of Creation. This wonder of Beauty, delight in the simple being of that Shining Face, nurtures our delight in simple existence. This is the lived experience of the first axioms of Christian metaphysics and natural law: “To be and to be good mean the same.” And this, in its turn, refutes with aboriginal experience the supposedly undeniable, modern “fact-value distinction.”

Imitation, desire, and consciousness

How can this aboriginal experience of consciousness find traction in our current debates?

Rene Girard argues convincingly in I See Satan Fall Like Lightning that civilizations first arose with the ritual sacrifice of a scapegoat. Human beings are not instinctual animals, not merely reflexive, but rather mimetic, imitating the behaviour and motives of others. Thus, we are naturally capable of community and cultural innovation. The cost, however, is mimetic desire: a toddler sees another playing with an unnoticed toy, imitates the desire for that toy, then fights for it.

In adulthood, this metastasizes into mimetic competition within society at large, people competing for possessions, sexual prey, and public prominence, for the sole reason that others want them. Over time, these tensions build to unbearable levels, threatening the common peace. Finally, spasmodic, cathartic violence erupts, focusing the community’s accumulated resentment upon a single innocent victim. This mimetic snowballing develops over the ages into the ritual sacrifice of divinized victims. This Girard sees as the driver of all coercive (pre-Judeo-Christian) cultures.

There’s little space here to discuss Girard’s anthropology, except to affirm his persuasive realism. He asserts (like Tom Holland) the utter uniqueness of the Judeo-Christian revelation in “siding with the victim.” Yet he carefully brackets his analytical science from any synthetic metaphysics, restraining, for example, the temptation to identify mimetic competition with Original Sin. So, to his analytical hammer, all the world looks like a competitive nail, with archaic cultures arising only in cathartic violence. Yet, mimetic competition describes a failure of love, a corruption of a more fundamental, maternal Memetic Communion. Toddlers first compete for toys, but they can then learn to play together.

The origin of consciousness in Mimetic Communion, implicitly presupposed by Gerard’s Mimetic Competition, explains the primeval myth of a lost Golden Age. It explains the capacity for conqueror-guilt or “tragic sense of life,” awakened in virile barbarians (Agamemnon) by their sacking the awesome, archaic temple cities (Priam) in the so-called Axial Age. It explains the aboriginal awareness of “an ocean of supernatural energy,” revered by prehistoric shamans.

The mother’s smile and nurturing communion

This “intuition of pure being” constitutes the real substratum of all cultures (pace Hobbes).

“It may seem paradoxical to suggest that the [origin] of human [culture] is found in the highest type of knowledge—the intuition of pure being,” says Christopher Dawson in Progress and Religion, “but mankind’s development is not so much from the lower to the higher, as from the confused to the distinct… A ‘low’ culture can produce [visual and poetic] art perfect and incapable of improvement.” Likewise, Chesterton in The Everlasting Man views the prehistoric cave-painters and their ochre horses as perfect as Picasso’s Dove. A reverent awareness of the All, the other as a nurturing Totality, inspires the most primitive hunter-gatherer cultures. Among feudal warriors, iconic motherhood inspires Gothic cathedrals. In bureaucratic cultures, infant daycare inspires a plague of Happy Face stickers, longing for their truant Shining Face.

Theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, in Mary: The Church at the Source, focuses on this aboriginal infant consciousness, “this founding event of human existence… recognized only in our own day.” We now realize that the helpless newborn is “intrinsically ordered to ‘being with’ (Mitsein) other humans…and awakens to consciousness only through other humans, normally his mother.” The mother’s smile “draws him into a welcoming world…the primordial experience [where] he becomes aware of himself for the first time.”

So, while insisting the Divine Son always remains in conscious communion with his Father, von Balthasar suggests that “Jesus himself has His Mother to thank for his human self-consciousness”—his understanding of Aramaic and Hebrew, the idioms and rhythms of Israel’s faith, and humanity’s myriad idiocies. He “increased in wisdom and stature” (Lk 2:52) by learning, like any good teacher, what his students do not know. If Jesus of Nazareth was to be “fully human,” von Balthasar concludes, his nurturing communion with his mother must have been more than simple biological, but spiritual (Luke 8:21).

What ultimately became the Greek term for Christian charity—agape—originally pointed only to the irrational self-sacrifice of postpartum mothers for their newborns. And in a manner paralleling the recent and God-friendly discoveries in astronomy and genetics, developmental psychology is reconfirming the Christian anthropology of motherhood. The conclusion here is the necessity of Marian symbolism, the Madonna, in any renewal of a Christian culture.

Culture of Power v. Culture of Love

In the end, humanity’s fundamental alternatives are a Culture of Power, coercion, and rape, or a Culture of Love, chivalry, and motherhood. If we seek the rebirth of a sacrificial Christian culture, as Marian Chivalry once transformed homicidal Germanic warriors, that effort cannot be hamstrung (as it has been) by skeptical or sectarian male contempt for the Providential dignity of Jesus’ mother and motherhood itself.

Cultural prescriptions in music, literature, or visual art are chancy at best, but recall the explosion of “Notre Dames” in every major market town of 12th-century Europe. As Kenneth Clarke described in Civilization, Abbott Suger’s unpredictable genius—weightless Gothic pillars, bathed in divine light—seized the imagination of Western Christendom. Today, Christians of all stripes are responding in defense of the embattled family, but our eventual success will be enabled by the image of the Madonna, the Mother of God. By way of introduction, see Gerard Manley Hopkins’ prophetic poem, “The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air We Breathe”.

The simply human face of the Economy of Salvation is seen in the Stabat Mater—“the Mother standing” beneath the cross of her bruised and broken Son, suffering more than any other human creature has ever suffered. The notion that the Perfect Man might inflict that pain upon his own mother indifferently, pointlessly, is simply grotesque, unless her pain—“her cross”—shares joyously in his salvific purpose.