This essay is about conflict and the ordering of the cosmos (make no small plans!). Mary Magdalene is a conflicted saint, and the basilica of Mary Magdalene at Vézelay in France is a conflicted site. But both surmount the conflicts that surround them with grace and a determination that make me think of that quote from Johnny Cash: “Put the screws to me and I’ll screw right out from under you!”
Mary Magdalene appears as a historical figure in all four Gospels and three of them describe her as the first person to see the Resurrected Christ, who sent her off to the apostles with the news, earning her the title “Apostle to the Apostles.” In the Gospels she is described as a sinner—“healed of seven demons”—who repented and then spent her time “ministering to Christ,” which I’m guessing meant washing his clothes and cooking for him, thereby establishing an unfortunate role model for women through the ages. Her identity as the prostitute who washed Christ’s feet with her tears of repentance and then dried them with her hair was concocted by Pope Gregory (540-604); he took this description of an anonymous woman in Luke’s Gospel, applied it to Magdalene, and for good measure, also identified her as the sister of Lazarus and Martha, the “Mary of Bethany” in the Gospels. Gregory was an influential pope and he sent a great wave of missionaries westward armed with Bibles and his essays; thus his vision of Magdalene became her legacy. She has often been described as a “composite” saint, because of this conflation and because of the changes she underwent in her lifetime. Prostitute, repentant, apostle, companion, hermit: she has something for everyone to identify with. Her role as a prostitute meant that male artists could indulge their wildest fantasies; you only need search Wikipedia for the range of possibilities. Her hair was a critical part of this persona, and is carved to spectacular effect in wooden sculptures from northern Europe, which usually depict her as an adolescent nude with her hair cascading over her breasts and discreetly covering her genitals. Donatello’s take on this theme stands out: his wooden sculpture ThePenitent Magdalene of c. 1454 is also nude and fully-haired, but old, haggard, and emaciated. Magdalene’s role as a repentant sinner meant that artists who cared to could indulge in pathos; the word “maudlin” comes from these sorts of interpretations. The kinky amongst us latched onto self-flagellation for imagery. And the loonies (pace, Dan Brown) saw her as the bride of Christ and the real Holy Grail.
Magdalene’s connection to Vézelay is a classic tale of false identity and relic theft, but she did not become the patroness of this abbey until almost 200 years after it was founded. Vézelay is a hilltop site in the Burgundy region of France, about 226 kilometers SE of Paris. The name itself, with all those crazy letters from the end of the alphabet, seems to zig-zag around just like the conflicts that form its history and the multiple identities of Magdalene. But the origin of the name is quite innocent; it simply means the land of Vertecillus, an anonymous Gallo-Roman landowner. Not so anonymous were the primary actors in the establishment of the abbey there, who were engaged in a bitter struggle for power. About 858, Count Girart of Vienne founded two abbeys to defend his frontier against the incursions of King Charles II (Charles the Bald), who had taken refuge in Burgundy after his son attacked his kingdom further north. Girart was no mean politician, and he placed the abbey of Vézelay under the protection of the pope, short-circuiting local episcopal power.
The original abbey was at the base of the hill, next to the village of Saint-Père, and it was dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Sometime around 870, the Normans swept through…you know the story…and the abbey was rebuilt on the hilltop. But it suffered. The Bishop of Autun was pissed that he had been excluded from abbey profits and continually harassed the monastery, so much so that it withered, and was once again destroyed by fire c. 936. And after that, it was like an evil spell had been cast over the site, because a series of petty wars plagued the site for the next 300 years. I assure you, hostile takeovers and leveraged buyouts were not an invention of the twentieth century.
Three rivals kept a constant watch on Vézelay, ready to pounce at a moment’s notice: the abbot of Cluny, the bishop of Autun, and the counts of Nevers. Cluny was the most powerful abbey in the west at this time, and like Vézelay, owed allegiance (and money) only to the pope. The Bishop of Autun and the counts of Nevers saw Cluny as their enemy. Between c. 1025 and 1150, each of these three rivals took control of Vézelay by turns, and often by force. Sometimes the monks of Vézelay rebelled against their own abbot and aligned themselves with the bishop, sometimes the Bishop of Autun threatened to excommunicate pilgrims who visited Vézelay, and in 1106 Abbot Artaud, who had substantially rebuilt the church with the taxes he levied on the townspeople, was murdered by same. In 1119 a council of three VIPs (the pope, the king, and the Abbot Suger of Paris) was planned to resolve the conflicts, but it was cancelled and the abbey was sacked by the angry town.
The stakes for control of Vézelay were significantly raised back in 1050, when Abbot Geoffrey re-dedicated the church to Mary Magdalene, exhibited her relics, and promoted a story that a certain monk Baidilo had brought them to Vézelay from Jerusalem after his pilgrimage there. His promotion was part of a two-pronged effort related to identity and competition for pilgrims. To establish an identity linked with the Gospels, the religious VIPs in France were suddenly keen to claim the saints of Antiquity as their own. They searched for evidence that the most important saints had lived in or visited France (Gaul at the time). If the evidence didn’t exist, they created it, and that is what happened with Magdalene at Vézelay. The abbot Geoffrey obtained two bulls from the pope (think Executive Orders); one confirming the re-dedication of the church and the other confirming the presence of Magdalene’s relics. Never mind that their origin and nature were unknown: “All things are possible with God.” But, inquiring minds want to know, and the story changed to add requested details. The final version published by the Vézelay Abbey Press was partially based on Pope Gregory’s conflated history of the saint, and has Magdalene, Lazarus and Martha fleeing Jerusalem by boat to avoid persecution, and washing up on the beach at Marseilles. Magdalene moves into the hills to end her life as a hermit, but just before dying returns to Aix-en-Provence, where she was buried in the church of Saint Maximin. Flash back to the founder of Vézelay, Count Girart. He and his abbot send our hero Baidilo to hunt down some Magdalene relics and lo! The town of Aix is a hotbed of plague and ruin, and Baidilo has the good fortune to find himself alone with the coffin of the saint, which he opens, to find her body intact and sweet-smelling. Baidilo to the rescue! He hustles Magdalene out of that ungrateful wretch of a city and brings her to Vézelay.
The abbot Geoffrey bet on this story to bring pilgrims to Vézelay, and he bet well; the pilgrims came, and the abbey grew rich. A few decades later, in 1096, Abbot Artaud began construction on a new church but his fund-raising methods were not appreciated and thus his murder. In 1120 there was another fire, this one especially terrible in that it killed over 1000 pilgrims, and afterward, the Abbot Renaud began construction began on the nave and narthex that you see today, which were finished c. 1132.
The new design hearkened to Carolingian motifs in more than one way. The narthex (a large “vestibule” at the front of the church separated from the nave) recalled the galleries and the westwerks of Carolingian churches and was unusual for this area. However, the narthex was originally conceived of as an open porch, and that is why you find the elaborate tympanum over the interior entry rather than on the westernmost façade. The other aspect that hearkens to Carolingian churches like Aix-en-Chapelle and Saint Michael’s Hildesheim is the alternating colors of the voussoirs (individual stones that make up an arch) of the transverse arches in the nave. This is a particularly striking feature here; it emphasizes the power of the arches which sweep overhead at the same time as it dematerializes the structure. This motif became popular for the great Christian churches of the Byzantine period when the structural aspects of architecture were eroded by the constantly shifting patterns of mosaic coverings and these alternating voussoirs. It carried significant religious authority; the Dome of the Rock, a hotly contested sacred site in Jerusalem built in 691 as an Islamic shrine, borrowed the device to great effect, as did the Carolingian churches mentioned above. The relatively simple forms of the Romanesque architecture of Vézelay were offset by the remarkably lively sculptures of the column capitals and the tympana over the entry doors. The final phase of basilica construction took place at the end of the twelfth century when the Romanesque apse was replaced with a Gothic chevet.
The heyday of Vézelay lasted about 150 years, and then alas, in 1279 the nephew of King Louis IX found the “true” body of Magdalene in Aix-en-Provence in the church of Saint Maximin, the pope confirmed the discovery, and if you want to see her relics today, you’ll need to go there. This situation is confirmed, sort of, by science; in 2019 ten scientists undertook a computer aided facial reconstruction of the relics based on hair and skull analysis. The identification of the skull is given as that of “Mary Magdalene” in quotes, so they are hedging their bets, but their subject skull was the one in Aix.
Before all the saintly façade came crashing down at Vézelay, a roll call of impressive visitors put it on the map as the launching point for the Crusades, starting with Saint Bernard of Clairvaux in 1146. A little later in 1166 Thomas Becket used the basilica steps to plead for the lifting of the excommunication of Henry II. C. 1190 Richard the Lionheart and King Philip Augustus used Vézelay to launch the Third Crusade. More humble visitors were problematical. The Franciscans arrived in 1217, seeking a site to establish a convent, and they were permitted to do so on the northeast slope of the hill, but when the Vézelay monks saw that the Franciscans attracted more pilgrims than their Magdalene relics did, they kicked them out. The years rolled on, and in 1538 the basilica was secularized by Pope Paul III, then returned to Catholics in 1570. Vauban, the famous military architect who served under Louis XIV, was born in Vézelay in 1633, and during the Revolution many of the Vézelay sculptures lost their heads.
Moving forward to the nineteenth century, we find that the power struggles that plagued Vézelay in the Middle Ages transformed into intellectual and academic arguments over architecture and identity. Post-Revolution, France wanted to establish a national identity based on republican ideals. Vézelay served as a model of these ideals based on the popular revolts against the wealthy abbots that took place in the Middle Ages; it was a “temple of reason” according to Paul Joanne, a writer of tourist guide books (in competition with the Baedeker series). The historian Jules Michelet casts Burgundy as the true heart of France, and Viollet-le-Duc, who has worked tirelessly to promote Gothic architecture as the French national style, and who spends twenty years working on the “restoration” of Vézelay, decides that the Gothic style started here. “Whoa, Nelly!” cried the choir…”We all know that Gothic began in Paris, where the kings lived.” To understand this debate it helps to know that at the time Gothic architecture was getting up a head of steam in the twelfth century, the French monarchy in Paris had far less territory and military resources than did the dukes and counts of Burgundy, Normandy, Aquitaine, and numerous other regions. The bottom line here is the classic struggle for identity. Who has the power to define that sticky wicket? One could argue that tour guides play more than a minor role in this process.
All these agitated waves of conflict can be brought to rest on a peaceful, sandy shore by the story of the tympanum and by the saint herself. The architecture of Vézelay was always admired by those like Prosper Merimee and Viollet-le-Duc who were charged with identifying key sites in France; it was seen as a “sublime” marriage of the Romanesque and the Gothic by the latter. The sculpture however was problematic; its restless, demonic energy was associated with the chaos and mysterious disorder of the Middle Ages. The “curious” and “bizarre” sculptures patiently waited for the late-twentieth century, when historians had put different lens in their glasses. Enter Conrad Rudolph, with an interpretation of the tympanum fresh off the press of Speculum, the journal of the Medieval Academy of America. The semi-circular tympanum has been interpreted before as having a “Pentecostal” theme, one in which the flames of preaching passion are transmitted to the apostles, usually by the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove, but this time, by Christ himself. His apostles dance in excitement to either side of the inner semi-circle, and the probable figures of Mary Magdalene, Peter, and Paul are found at Christ’s feet (probable because they are missing their heads). Two larger semi-circles frame the inner one: the first includes “peoples of the world” as described in encyclopedias such as that written by Isidore (remember him? Week 8), and the outer includes the zodiac figures and the labors of the months. There are also abstract images in the background that play an important role in Rudolph’s interpretation.
Rudolph reads the scene as transcending the idea of Pentecost to become a story of micro and macro cosmos, a reflection of medieval concepts of the universe. Platonic ideas, filtered through Isidore and others, are expressed in the four elements (fire, water, earth, and air) and their physical positions relative to the other figures. Numerology is important. Four elements, four seasons, four cardinal directions…and then four times three equals twelve months, twelve apostles, etc. etc. And just as Plato played with juxtaposing a geometric ordering of the universe with the idea of constant movement and change in Timaeus (and in addition, linked these ideas to politics!), the figures of Vézelay are in constant motion. Dominating all of this universe is the relief of Christ who, with his outstretched arms, offers a reassuring gesture to the visiting pilgrim; the world is indeed diverse and mutable, but he has it under control. This is another aspect of Rudolph’s view, for he sees this tympanum as an important work of public art that was interpreted by monastic guides similar to any museum guide we might meet today. In this way a complex assembly of contemporary views of the cosmos as understood by the elite was made accessible to the illiterate.
Just as the Christ in this tympanum shows us that he has a disorderly world under control (although he may have been sleeping as the events at Vézelay unfolded), Mary Magdalene is an intercessor whose primary role is to remind us that even the worst sinner can repent and be forgiven. I’m not one to dwell on my relationship with a Christ figure, but I do look for reassuring models that offer some relief from the chaos of the world. It’s not easy to remember that the four elements are essential parts of our existence, that they should be our friends and not our enemies; to find a sense of rhythm in a year that is regulated more by the dates of commercial holidays, movie releases, and TV series than by the seasons. I’ll let you know if I find anything worth putting on a tympanum, and in the meantime, consider a visit to this remarkable UNESCO site once you feel safe to travel again.
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References for Weeks 26 through 30: Mary Magdalene
Books and articles
Please note that sources listed here may be available in more recent editions.
Beck, Bernard. “Women of the Year: Mary Magdalene, Wild Nights with Emily, and Other Untold Stories,” in Multicultural Perspectives, 21:3, 2019, pp 148-150.
Charlier, Philippe et alia. “Computer-Aided Facial Reconstruction of “Mary-Magdalene” Relics Following Hair and Skull Analysis, in Clinical Medicine Insights: Ear, Nose and Throat, Vol. 12, 2019, pp 1-7.
Erhardt, Michelle A. and Amy M. Morris, Eds. Mary Magdalene, Iconographic Studies from the Middle Ages to the Baroque. Leiden: Brill, 2012.
Geary, Patrick. Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.
Kalkavage, Peter. Plato’s Timaeus. Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing, 2001.
Lobrichon, Guy. ‘Vézelay’ in Les Lieux de Mémoire, (volume 3). Paris: Gallimard, 1997, 4141-4176.
Rudolph, Conrad. “Macro/Microcosm at Vézelay: The Narthex Portal and Non-elite Participation in Elite Spirituality,” in Speculum 96/3 (July 2021), pp 601-661.