Markin comment:
The following is an article from an archival issue of
Women and Revolution, Summer 1977, that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of
Women and Revolution during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
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Alone of All Her Sex; A Review-The Cult of the Virgin Mary-Susan Adrian
Warner, Marina.
Alone Of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976.
Marxists find contemporary religion — in which fear degradation comprise the liturgy through which
believers are rendered stupid and impotent before divinity of their oppressors — an odious thing. We
understand, however, that what sustains religious affiliation in the scientific age is not so much intellectual conviction as social oppression. Thus, while the anti-clerical spirit which animates Voltaire's earnest
wish that "the last king---be strangled with the entrails of the last priest" may be sincere and even justified, such a "war against god" does not transcend petty-bourgeois idealism. Religion will disappear only when the society which creates the need for it is destroyed.
The bourgeois revolutions established the principle of separation of church and state, but, as Marx pointed out, this did not result in freedom from religion. Nor has the decline in the vitality of organized religion eliminated religious sentiment.
While there has never been a state religion in the United States, the coupling of religious bigotry with nativist right-wing movements is well known, and patriotism, piety at d prosperity have been the time-tested trinity of American imperial politics. Thirty to forty million Americans currently consider themselves "born-again" Chris'/ans, not to mention the more traditional sects, mi;, h less the wretched mysticism which serves as a junkyard for New Left derelicts still searching for personal liberation on the cheap.
The sanctimonious tone of the last presidential campaign and the fact that victory went to holier-than-anybody Jimmy Carter, who claims to consult his "faith-healing" sister in, important decisions, suggest not so much a serious religious revival as a despairing passivity Vyhich hangs over the American working class. An indication of the relationship between political defeat and religious conversion is the growth of the Black Muslim sect, Which gained from the despair and cynicism among black people following the political failures and physical destruction of the black move¬ment in the sixties.
Not surprisingly it is women who are often the most fervent devotees of religion. Isolated from social production and social struggle within the suffocating confines of the family women have generally been the
most susceptible to and the most reliable instruments of the "gendarmes in cassocks."
Myth of the Virgin Mother of God
Marina Warner's book, Alone of All Her Sex, attempts to explore the religious myth which has been most explicitly directed toward molding and deforming women's consciousness—the myth of the virgin mother of god. The rituals and intricacies of Catholic theology are more prevalent and familiar in Europe and Latin countries than in the U.S., but this particular image is not at all unrelated to more general stereotypes or models of the "ideal woman."
And what a powerful myth it has been! Dante and Botticelli were inspired by it; the spires and towers of Notre Dame and Chartres were ostensibly raised to celebrate it; even Elizabeth I—never one to let religious scruples interfere with the affairs of state—allowed herself to be draped in the imagery of the "Virgin Queen."
The myth of the virgin birth of the god/redeemer is, of course, not unique to Christianity, but has its roots in ancient lore. William Butler Yeats'spoem/'Ledaandthe Swan" (1923), revives the mythical encounter between the god Zeus and the mortal Leda:
"A sudden blow: the great wings beating still Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill, He holds her helpless breast upon his breast. How can those terrified vague fingers push The feathered glory from her loosening thighs? And how can body, laid in that white rush, But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there The broken wall, the burning roof and tower And Agamemmnon dead. Being so caught up, So mastered by the brute blood of the air, Did she put on his knowledge with his power Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?"
In describing the growth of the cult of the virgin mother in Western Europe, Warner attempts to explore
what she poses as a paradox: "that in the verycelebration of the perfect human woman, both
humanity and women were subtly denigrated." Some 300 pages later she asserts her concluding hypothesis:
"The Virgin Mary is not the innate archetype of female nature, the dream incarnate; she is the instrument of a
dynamic argument from the Catholic Church about the structure of society, presented as a God-given code. The argument changes, according to contingencies —
"The Catholic Church might succeed, with its natural resilience and craft, in accommodating her to the new
circumstances of sexual equality, but it is more likely that the Virgin will recede into legend...the Virgin's legend will endure in its splendour and lyricism, but it will be emptied of moral significance, and thus lose its present real powers to heal and to harm."
However, it is not the myth which harms but the reality that it mystifies, and it is not the refurbishing of the myth which will "heal" women's oppression. Marx and Engels quoted approvingly the motto-on the journal of the French republican Loustalot:
"The great appear great in our eyes Only because we are kneeling.Let us rise!"
However, they added: "But to rise it is not enough to do so in thought and to leave hanging over one's real sensuously perceptible head the real sensuously perceptible yoke that cannot be stabilized away with ideas."
Foundations of Christianity
Christianity began as the ideology of the poor Jewish masses under the Roman Empire. As economic relations did not provide opportunities for the mul¬tiplication of wealth through the development of the productive forces, the possessing classes of Rome could sustain their wealth only by the continual and ever-expanding plundering of conquered areas. The ex¬treme cheapness of slave labor procured in such a fashion was the only thing that made large-scale enterprises (mainly agriculture and some mining) reasonably profitable relative to those of the small peasants. The wealth accumulated through plunder was devoted almost exclusively to consumption, to the pursuit of enjoyment.
The fundamental cause for the decline of the Roman Empire was the contradiction inherent in the growing
luxuriousness of the possessing classes, the incessant growth of surplus value on the one hand and the static
character of the mode of production on the other; and it is in this contradiction that one must also seek the
roots of primitive Christianity. Abram Leon writes:
"...while it is obvious that the majority of Jews played a commercial role in the Roman Empire, we must not think that all the Jews were rich traders or entrepreneurs. On the contrary, the majority was certainly made up of small people, some of them making their living directly or indirectly from trade: peddlers, stevedores, petty artisans, etc. It is this mass of small people which was first hit by the decline of the Roman Empire and suffered most from Roman extortion. Concentrated in great masses in the cities, they were capable of greater resistance than ppeasant people dispersed in the country. They were also more conscious of their interests— It was among the poor layers of the great cities of the Diaspora that Christianity spread. Just as the Jewish insurrectionse followed by insurrections of the non-Jewish popular masses, so did the Jewish communist religion rapidly find its extension among these pagan masses." —A. Leon, The Jewish Question
As an ideology of protest on the part of the dis¬possessed and powerless, Christianity embodied a trenchant anti-plutocratic spirit. In the Gospel of Luke, for example, one finds:
"Blessed are ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God.
Blessed are ye that hunger now; for ye shall be filled —
But woe unto you that are rich! Woe unto you, ye that are
full now! for ye shall hunger."
The Epistle of James is similarly explicit:
"Come now,ye rich, weep and howl for your miseries that
are coming upon you Your gold and your silver are
rusted; and their rust shall be for a testimony against you,
and shall eat your flesh as fire "
The "communism"of primitive Christianity was not based—could not have been based—on communalizing the productive capacities of society but on communalizing consumption; "communism^ by plundering the rich," in the words of Karl Kautsky. But as Christianity spread, its leaders took pains to blunt its anti-plutocratic thrust.
The process which the church was undergoing was not primarily one resulting from the greed and individual ambition of its officials; it was not simply a tool for deceiving and fleecing the masses. Christianity
became the state religion of the Roman Empire under Constantine at the same time that the empire's decadence, based on parasitism and brigandage, led to reforms by Diocletian and Constantine which attempted to set it on the foundations of a natural economy. As the religion of the class of great landed proprietors at the inception of feudal economy in Europe, Christianity's original anti-plutocratic fire was now reserved for merchants and usurers.
Secularization and Celibacy
Warner cites an interesting link between the growing wealth of the Church and its sanctification of celibacy. (The scriptures themselves fail to even mention the "immaculate conception" and raise a number of doubts concerning Mary's virginity.) Under Roman law a woman was allowed to inherit and dispose of her own wealth independently after a certain age. It was common among Roman families to raise the sons in the old religion and the daughters in the new; moreover, it often happened in the period of Roman decadence that families had died out in the male line. Thus, a vocation of celibacy (i.e., no heirs) for Christian virgins and childless widows was remarkably profitable for the church. It was thus as a part of the growing secular power of the church, according to Warner, that the cult of thei virgin first achieved prominence.
Augustine, who lived in the 5th century, drew an explicit and literal connection between sexual inter course and original sin, Christ was born of a virgin because that was the only way he could avoid the contamination of original sin. The perception o virginity as an inherently holy state and the identification of spiritual purity with sexual abstinence continue to dominate church doctrine to this day.
The image of the mother of god—all but ignored for the first four centuries of Christianity—was not the humble, submissive girl of the annunciation but the triumphant queen of heaven, an image which also served to symbolize the church's competitive edge over other temporal rulers throughout Europe and the Byzantine Empire. This image of Mary as the queen ofl heaven remained essentially unaltered, except perhaps; for the increasing opulence of her raiment, for man) centuries, lending the authority of divine sanction to the concept of monarchy.
Some of the economic tribute deemed fitting for . queen—and the separation between the temporal and the divine was conveniently blurred—can be seen in the extraordinary wave of adulation which was the( ostensible motivation for the raising of 80 cathedrals ir France within one century alone.
French feudal law in the 12th and 13th centuries permitted a woman to hold rank and property in her own right; and in a society where acquisition of land was a constant and pressing necessity, heiresses sometimes wielded enormous power—Eleanor of Aquitaine (c. 1122-1204) is the most celebrated. But the consolidation of France and other territories as nation-states conflicted with the centrifugal tendencies of feudal inheritance patterns. Eventually women lost many of their former economic rights.
Part of the battle for the national consolidation of France was fought as a holy war by the Pope and the northern French lords to subjugate southern France, the breeding ground of the popular Cathar heresy. This heresy, an ascetic form of Manichaeism, allowed women to enter the clergy and held that casual sex and sodomy were less reprehensible than marriage, which populated the foul universe. Southern France was also the terrain of the Provencal poetry of the troubadours, which exalted adulterous love. From different vantage points, therefore, both heretics and troubadours were anathema to the church and the northern Capetian dynasty. The battles waged, against the south at the beginning of the 13th century destroyed half a million people.
It was the generation of Eleanor of Aquitaine's granddaughter Blanche of Castille, which, encouraged by both church and state, began to focus its ardor on Mary as virgin. This "new" Mary assumed much of the character and function of the original figure in Provencal poetry but without celebrating hedonism and permissiveness. She was still acknowledged a powerful queen but only, it was emphasized, by grace of her son, not in her own right. She was portrayed as the incarnation of loveliness and divine ardor, but above all as the incarnation of chastity.
As Warner points out, the special status accorded the virgin mother of god has as its reverse side an equally special loathing for ordinary, non-virginal women, who are viewed, like Eve, as "occasions of sin," temptresses who distract men from god and lead them into everlasting perdition.
To Pluck the Living Flower
Warner's book is an often unfocused welter of historical and sociological research, nostalgia and self-analysis. She is frank in her ambivalence:
"I could not enter a church without pain at all the safety and beauty of the salvation I had forsaken. I remember visiting Notre Dame in Paris and standing in the nave, tears starting in my eyes, furious at that old love's enduring power to move me."
Not having satisfactorily settled even her own personal accounts with religious obscurantism, Warner explains the church's hold over believers entirely in psychological/ideological terms.
One must indeed acknowledge the church's "gen¬ius.^, for getting a grip on its followers' psyches," in the words of a Village Voice review. In fact, in countries where the Catholic Church has been a dominant cultural and political influence, It has so maimed and distorted the psyches of masses of people that even •politically motivated demonstrators have been driven to orgies of twisted anti-clericalism. For instance, when in 1909, the Spanish government attempted to call up military reservists for defense of its Moroccan colonies, the population responded with a general strike and a five-day frenzied protest which included streets with the corpses of nuns dug up from1
At the same time, the church has psychological manipulation.and coercion—physical and social. When anarchist and peasants in the first six months of the Spanish Civil War burned 160 churches to the ground, they were not rebelling merely against psychological oppression but against a powerful state institution, fanatically devoted to the preservation of the monarchy and to reaction.
In the end, Warner rejects the female eunuch of the Catholic Church, albeit with a bizarre, feminist ambivalence:
"Although Mary cannot be a model for the New Woman, a goddess is better than no goddess at all, for the sombre-suited masculine world of the Protestant religion is altogether much like a gentlemen's club to which the ladies are only admitted on special days."
And so the question of religious mythology remains in the end a dismal choice between pernicious fantasy and a bleak and sterile reality.
Marxists insist that these are not the only alternatives. Marxist criticism of religion demystifies religious fantasy and demonstrates that man has created his gods and goddesses and not the other way around—not in order that the toiling masses be deprived of whatever small comfort these fantasies may provide in a harsh world but in order that these poor illusions may be replaced by a far richer and more rewarding reality. Marx put it most eloquently:
"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart-of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless
conditions. It is the opium of the people The demand to give up illusions about the existing state of affairs is the demand to give up a state of affairs which needs illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of the vale of tears.
"Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the -living flower."
—K. Marx, Contribution to a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Lawn
