Photocredits: (C) OÖNachrichten/kap. Image used with kind permission by Oberösterreichische Nachrichten
On Monday, July 1, 2024, Esther Strauß’s “Crowning” – a wooden figure depicting St Mary giving birth1 – was found with its head cut off in a side chapel specially designated for art exhibitions. An unexpected flood of international media coverage hit the organizers and the Diocese of Linz in the days that followed. The possible background of the perpetrator, his or her motives and connections to various possible groups were analyzed. There were repeated accusations of “Crowning” being a blasphemous depiction, to which the diocese reacted in a placatory manner, stating that the intention was not to offend religious feelings.2
Many important aspects of “Crowning” and its destruction have been written about in various media, including a post by Katharina Limacher and Jakob Deibl at this blog.3 Now that the more immediate public storm of controversy is past, my intention here is to cast a primarily theological eye on the thicket of this topic.
The following reflections, organized in three short sections, are each aimed at a broad readership (which given the exclusivity of a blog at an academic institution cannot ironically be as pluralistic as I would like it to be):
- (1) Roman Catholic Christians for whom Mary plays an important or central role in their faith
- (2) people who, for whatever reasons, occupy a distanced relationship to the Christian faith in general, and
- (3) people who are interested in art per se and for whom the religious context is not important but tolerated.
My three sections do not correlate to these three groups but rather each section will aim for aspects relevant to all three.
I. On a personal note: conversion induced by art4
As a middle-aged, heterosexual, white, highly privileged lay man in Roman Catholic theology, it took me long to allow Esther Strauß’s artwork “Crowning” to hit home. Hitting home is a telling English expression as it names the impact (“hit”) that is sometimes needed for something to really get one, i.e., to hit home. While I dare to say I am well informed about global sex trafficking,5 the abhorrent numbers of femicides (in Austria and beyond), the indecent insults that happen to women everywhere, I honestly and sadly cannot claim I have fully gotten rid of the perversion of the so-called “male gaze”. It still somewhat sticks.6 All the cognitively processed knowledge about women’s sexual misery has not really done the trick for me. Just being married and having three almost grown-up daughters has also not made the crucial difference. I have remained – way too long! – in a male bubble that I didn’t notice in its subtle expansion.
When a few months ago, Martina Resch, my colleague in theology, asked me if I’d be interested in giving a short theological input about Strauß’s “Crowning”, I felt both honored and some hard-to-name discomfort. I had a hunch there is no way for me to sneak past this provocative piece of art. I tried anyway when in preparing a short text,7 I rephrased issues that courageous feminist and womanist theologians had addressed for decades. I had read (some of) them, and I knew the main arguments. After “Crowning” got beheaded, my initial discomfort got even worse. I tried to write myself out of this malaise with some intellectual (here: theological) ‘chatter’, but I failed.
I came to realize that “Crowning” didn’t so much expose Mary’s vulva – something I would not prefer to look at directly (especially in this context)8 – as it exposed the socio-historical overdetermination of male sexuality, which in my concrete and searching embodiment had for quite a while started to feel queer in the context of Roman Catholic theology and church. By this, I don’t mean a certain area in Catholic moral theology, but rather the straightforward rhetorical, intellectual, psychological and physical domination of women by men – something that is invisibly written into my embodied sexuality. While I have known that for quite a while and even experienced three very different births given by my wife, all that together just didn’t hit home.
It was a slow, week-long exploration of Esther Strauß’s “Crowning” that birthed forth two things for me: (1) the strength and stamina every woman needs to give birth. Even if men, be they doctors, husbands or partners, support them, ultimately, they are not needed, because birth is an event between woman and child. “Crowning” impressively showcases the power of women giving birth, including, of course, Mary, dogmatized as Theotokos, Mother of God (431). (2) However, post-delivery (postpartum) this unique strength that can only be mustered by women must vanish again and give way to a historically and culturally fixed female weakness. This has long-ranging implications to this very day: it exposes women among them also my three daughters, who were all born in this millennium(!), to a much greater likelihood of experiencing different aspects of violence than I ever was or will be exposed to. Ironically and pathetically, each individual act of violence – be it verbal, hermeneutical, psychological or physical – publicly stages women’s ‘apparent’ weakness. Having started to get a better grip on this and to feel it to a certain (yes, limited!) extent in my own male body I call this a conversion of some sort triggered by being exposed to Esther Strauß’s “Crowning” and it being vandalized.
Conversions, be they religious, intellectual, moral or whatever, cannot be ‘induced’ on demand. They happen against one’s intention. If they happen, they are powerful and overturn a former status quo. Conversions turn us around.
II. What art can do with and to us
While in some parts of the world the importance of Marian piety has changed within the Catholic church and theology in the decades following World War II (including the Second Vatican Council), Mary remains for many Catholics a categorical presence to be venerated, prayed to and theologized about. As such, Strauß’s “Crowning” embodies a crossroad at which Catholicism’s inner plurality touches the faith-sensibilities of some individual Catholics. There’s nothing new about this plurality which continues to trigger strife and to foster its richness. Indologist and scholar of religion Wendy Doniger is said to have described Hinduism and Catholicism(!) as the two most intrinsically diverse religious traditions. Thus, it is not only up to religious leaders to negotiate these differences but, prior to that, it is necessary for all Catholics not to misread Catholicism’s own religious pluralism as a deficit. “Crowning” could be a test case here: who is willing to take up such negotiations? Who is interested in facilitating fora to encounter each other? While Esther Strauß’s agenda is explicitly feminist – which someone might be critical of or reject altogether –, the destruction of her artwork is not suited to the negotiation of such differences but only to their summary rejection. For while an impulse to protect one’s faith and its boundaries may be good, such a destructive act forgoes the opportunity to grow in faith through the encounter with others about an object that one may even perceive to be gross, shabby or blasphemous.
What do we expect if we ‘encounter’ an artwork? Do we really want to see or hear what is already part of our imagination? Do art and religion function as mere reassurances for how we think about and want reality to be? Are they nothing but representations of the already known rendered in an aesthetic form? When art and religion function this way (and they certainly do at times), they then grant comfort, security, and a sense of rootedness amidst a world in upheaval. However, neither art nor religion need to be reduced to that because it would misread the dynamic nature of human existence. To be human means to also be drawn beyond oneself, beyond security, roots, and limits (without ever getting rid of them).
Art and religion, thus ‘play’ with humanity’s transgressive limitedness. Life is that serious play in which we communally handle the boundaries between the visible and the invisible, between the possible and the impossible, between the limited and the infinite – a play best facilitated by art and religion, each in their own way. Such play would not ‘entertain’ us (i.e., not get us going in and through life!) if it would only comfort us. In their unmanageable diversity of expressions, art and religion are ‘doing’ something with and to us. Sometimes we can resist this ‘agency’, sometimes we are literally at the mercy of art and religion’s expressive power.
Yet when we try to dominate works of art or rituals, if only hermeneutically, we cut ourselves off from the possibility of something happening to us that we cannot control – for better or worse! – but which, ideally, might open us up to something beyond our imagination. It is this inner quality of art and religion that can at times and not at our own disposal be responsible for something like a conversion.
III. The centrality of ‘virginitas’
Christian faith is about pushing the envelope. Christianity’s long and increasingly institutionalized history has at times twisted this faith’s cutting-edge quality beyond recognition. The rather stable link between Christian faith and society established in Europe and in countries colonized by Europeans has largely dissolved or is about to become dissolved. Yet this dissolution can arouse strong sentiments and anxieties. Some miss Christianity’s sacred canopy which modern life has torn apart to leave them metaphysically unsheltered. Others crave for a transcendental power that legitimizes their political vision. Still others are sad and frustrated about the waning public significance of a faith-embedded life that is dear to them.
While these reservations and fears may be strong, they must be examined dialogically and critically, especially as it is a characteristic of the Christian faith not to shy away from human abysses, like betrayal, violence, lies, sins, to name but a few.
Following the example of Jesus of Nazareth, who stands in the long tradition of Jewish prophets, Christians strive to stick with people who are about to fall or have fallen into whatever abyss, thereby embodying God’s unconditional ‘yes’ to all of God’s creation. Putting one’s faith into a man who was killed alongside villains by the powers of his time has meant pushing the envelope from the very beginning. Only after the Christian faith became mainstream and was transformed into Christendom could the cross often (although certainly not always) ‘work’ publicly in the interest of the powers while justifying and safeguarding a certain social order.
There is yet another pushing-the-envelope issue central to the Christian faith. One of the things the early church proclaimed from its inception, as found in its creeds, is God become incarnate, “born of the virgin Mary”. While there’s nothing miraculous about Jesus’ death, there’s nothing miraculous about Jesus’ birth itself either.9 It had to be a birth like any other for God to become truly incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth. As the early church was grappling to understand and conceptualize its faith in Jesus, the Christ – as being fully human and fully divine –, it became unavoidable to include Mary in the church’s doctrinal considerations. It is important to keep in mind that regarding Mary and within the Roman Catholic church these considerations have dragged on for centuries – even up to 1950.
On a side note: this means, firstly, that all dogmatic formulations have a time index and, secondly, that they are the result of theological disputes. And thirdly, it means that the history of the reception of any dogmatic definition is always linked to interpretation and contingency. Theology is not about unambiguity. It must find a language that is clear yet does not “suffocate” the incomprehensibility of God revealed in Jesus of Nazareth “born of the virgin Mary.”
While the linguistic and intellectual horizon of antiquity is very different from our scientific one, the assessment that the ancients had a naïve view of the world, while we have a realistic one, would fall short of the mark. As humans we were and always will be surrounded and even penetrated by a world, we cannot but interpret: we eat ‘world’, we breathe ‘world’, we think ‘world’ for ‘world’ sustains us through and through.
Coming back to Strauß’s artwork “Crowning”: the central theological reservation that one can raise against it (from a Roman Catholic point of view) is the theological formulation of perpetual virginity (sempervirgo), especially regarding the so-called virginitas in partu, i.e., virginity during childbirth. Technically speaking, this is a theological term with a very complex history of interpretation, and the different interpretations are themselves linked to various practices of Marian devotion. Since virginitas has been made into proper theological terminology, it needs to be and has been distinguished from (today’s) medical or biological terminology, otherwise theological language becomes obsolete. Theology is using language used in its ‘surroundings’ while crossing over with it to another ‘territory’, which is also the original meaning of metaphor. When it comes to virginitas in partu all one can say – citing Karl Rahner – is this: “Church doctrine affirms, with the real substance of tradition, that Mary’s childbirth, as regards both child and mother, like the conception, is, in its total reality, as the completely human act of this ‘virgin’, in itself (…) an act corresponding to the nature of this mother, and hence it is unique, miraculous and ‘virginal’. But this proposition (…) does not offer us the possibility of deducing assertions about the concrete details of the process, which would be certain and universally binding.”10
Doctrinal assertions expressed in theological language shy away from laying down all the details. Ironically, such an attempt, understandable as it is, would tend to obscure what is meant to be revealed without ever selling out the mystery. Thus, there is and always was hermeneutical leeway.
Looking at Mary and how she is portrayed in Scripture and tradition, one theological reading of ‘virginitas’ is receptivity, i.e., the willingness to be open for (new) things to occur, appear, ‘come out’ – an attitude independent of sex or gender. Positively speaking, virginitas expresses a covenant- or kingdom-of-God-like living that concedes the other to decenter oneself while – paradoxically – standing one’s ground, i.e., “the completely human act” (Rahner) necessary to give birth. Mary, the mother of Jesus, solemnly proclaimed at the Council of Ephesus (431) as Theodokos embodies such virginitas by standing her ground. Motherhood means juggling openness to the unknown (before, during, and after giving birth) and standing one’s ground. Without standing one’s ground the attitude of virginitas opens the door to all kind of abuse. If Mary, as most contemporary theologies hold, models ideal human living in her virginitas, her sometimes(!) being overwhelmed by the other/ Other does not mean being overpowered by it. Just the opposite, the salvific point of the incarnation is to empower people, especially those who for whatever reasons have been impeded in living life to the full. God’s Spirit is the one who empowered Mary – as such she became the model in her receptivity, attentiveness and in standing her ground.
While virginitas has always been praised in women, standing their ground has been at best frowned at. Historically and systemically speaking this has meant and means to this very day, to put women in a most vulnerable position. Virginitas did not work for women: it hurt and killed too many for they were neither allowed nor encouraged to stand their ground.
Esther Strauß’s “Crowning” dares to expose what was a most precious, vulnerable, and highly precarious moment in the lives of us all, i.e., when each of our heads dilated the vulva so much that there was only one possible direction: into the world! Virginitas in partu (during childbirth) means that every mother is, at some point, ‘willing’ (while being forced) to let go and in doing so to ‘receive’ new life. In doing this, she cannot but stand her ground. Writing as a man, husband, and father of three, I can only be a witness to an event in which my wife and my daughters took center stage supported by others including me. As an active and emotionally strained bystander, these moments when my daughters ‘appeared’ (at differing paces) were simply overwhelming, robbing me of words to describe them. Italian singer-songwriter Gianmaria Testa (1958-2016) seems to capture some of the blurriness and, yes, also tenderness of such moments, when in “Il viaggio” (The Journey), he ‘meanders’ poetically about the exact point at which the water of a river flowing into the sea meets the salt water of the sea. And very tenderly he wonders about the exact point at which “[t]he river caresses the sea”.11 Even though we know so many things, do we know, as Testa asks, where exactly the river meets the sea? Do we know what is happening to us – the mother, the child, the father, the medical professionals, the bystanders – in this overdetermined moment of “crowning”, of giving and receiving birth? While giving birth is something ‘natural’ and, as such, somewhat predictable, it nevertheless is stuffed with some kind of ‘beyondness’: beyond what we can fully grasp, catch up with or comprehensibly describe. Using ‘traditional’ language with Rahner: each birth is “unique, miraculous and ‘virginal’.”
If such beyondness implies that certain experiences and events, even things, are and will remain beyond human reach and full appropriation, then this beyondness points to an undeterminable, an overdetermined, to something holy. However, the ability to be touched by this beyondness depends on circumstances that are beyond the realm of feasibility.
This subtle ‘holiness’ which permeates any birth, whether it goes noticed or not, may infect all of us with the ‘full-blown’ holiness revealed in the birth of the God incarnate in Jesus by the virgin Mary. And why should anyone object to this depiction of birth when we depict so readily Jesus’ brutal death?
Esther Strauß’s “Crowning”reveals what we know (only through others who told us!) that all – or at least, today many – of us have ‘gone through’, the narrow gate, i.e., our mother’s vulva that frequently gets torn in giving birth. When the church firmly holds on to the true humanity of Jesus, professed as the Christ, it is for salvific reasons. He shared our lot from birth to death, he is no stranger to anything human. As the archetype of human openness – receptivity – to God and neighbor Mary personifies this in her female body with all its gifts and pains. Virginitas is meant to subvert a lofty ‘untouchability’: it describes the strength, the force that is needed to give birth while being deeply touched, even wounded by this event.
With its thorny quality of pushing the envelope, Christian faith has from the outset allowed a plurality of readings not as a concession to relativity but to be in synch with the ineffability of God’s name. Such plurality has always required an attitude of dialogue among possibly conflicting interpretations; something that takes place too rarely. Catholicity (not to be confused with Roman Catholicism) functions as the frame in which such dialogues can and should occur, since it embraces the ecumenical breadth of the Christian faith. While people can and will disagree (often strongly) about theological interpretations, religious feelings, and artistic expressions, the unorthodox, the blasphemous, the appalling will not go away if it is suppressed, silenced, burnt or beheaded.
“Ecce homo – behold the human being”: even after beheading, Esther Strauß’s “Crowning”, stands its ground and perhaps is made only the more eloquent. The artwork seems to silently utter forsakenness. ‘She’ whispers the names of countless women who had the courage and strength to give birth to a child, who stood their ground while fearing of being left alone, being hurt, and even beheaded. Contrary to the perpetrator’s intention, Esther Strauß’s mutilated artwork now radiates an aspect of the memoria passionis.
Mary the birth-giver and Theotokos stood her ground from the beginning to the end. In giving birth, in watching her son walk his path, in being rejected by him, and in holding her dead son in her arms, Mary embodies true virginitas, i.e., receptivity to what lies beyond the expectable and beyond the (almost?) bearable. In all of this, Mary stood her ground and is thus a model in faith for true humanity, that gains its texture and quality only next to the abyss of human existence.
Wrapping things up: “Crowning” was designed and realized as a ‘third Mary’. In size, shape and clothing, she matches the more than one hundred years old nativity scene in the Cathedral of Linz and could be placed there. Right now, the ‘third Mary’ is taken care of by the artist. In its decapitated absence “Crowning” remains a silent reminder of the pushing-the-envelope quality of the Christian faith. The ‘third Mary’ will stay with us. However we feel and think about this artwork, we are well-advised to ‘leave our heads on.’
Footnotes:
- Cf. https://www.dioezese-linz.at/institution/418409/100jahremariendom/donnastage/article/271706.html. Most of the texts about this issue are written in German. These days online translation tools make it fairly easy to access them anyway. ↩︎
- Cf. for an extended document about FAQ (German only): https://www.dioezese-linz.at/dl/NrkkJKJkNKNoNJqx4KJK/FAQ_crowning_pdf. ↩︎
- Cf. https://rat-blog.univie.ac.at/?p=4105. ↩︎
- No text is an island. It reflects the author’s attempt to pull together what s/he has read and with whom s/he has discussed it before and during the writing process. While many more people have contributed to this text, I feel the urge to at least express my deep gratitude to the following: my wife Bärbel Telser, Jakob Deibl, Barnabas Palfrey, Carlton Chase, and Martina Resch. ↩︎
- For one recent and well-researched chapter on the issue cf. Doak, Mary, A Prophetic Public Church. Witness to Hope Amid the Global Crisis of the 21st Century, Collegeville/ MN 2020, 75-115. ↩︎
- To use a title (for this piece) that plays with originally Randy Newman’ song from 1972(!) You can leave your hat on indicates this, while also evading it if one notices the irony of the lyrics typical for many of Newman’s songs. ↩︎
- Presented on June 27 together with inputs by Martina Resch, Martina Gelsinger, and Maria Reitter-Kollmann (cf. https://www.dioezese-linz.at/institution/418409/100jahremariendom/donnastage/article/271706.html). ↩︎
- I share Christoph Niemand’s unease to directly look (gawk?) at the exposed vulva (cf. https://ku-linz.at/universitaet/aktuelles/detail/stellungnahme-von-rektor-niemand-zur-zerstoerung-der-skulptur-crowning). ↩︎
- Admittedly, this is a complex statement, because this birth is surrounded by a density of theological statements that threatens to obscure a clear and different view of it. The way in which virginity, the reception of the late(!) Augustine with his pessimistic view of human sexuality in connection with so-called original sin and an increasingly scientific view of reality have become intertwined and seemingly without alternative must be described as simply tragic. The breadth of the Catholic tradition would certainly allow for other receptions, of which it could justifiably be claimed: “… as the Church has always taught.” ↩︎
- Rahner, K., Virginitas in partu, in: Theological Investigations IV, London – Baltimore 1966, 134-162; 162 (some emphasis is mine). ↩︎
- „… il fiume accarezza la mare, …“
https://www.angolotesti.it/G/testi_canzoni_gianmaria_testa_4911/testo_canzone_il_viaggio_186384.html ↩︎
Photocredits: (C) OÖNachrichten/kap
RaT-Blog Nr. 17/2024