St Mary of Egypt - A western thinker tries to think in an eastern way

I always wondered if the reformers during the Protestant Reformation rejected some of the saint lore (Hagiography) on stylistic grounds. Surely the medieval accounts of saints often appear fantastic, almost hyperbolic in their presentations compared to the very realistic sounding biblical narratives sprinkled with a supernatural event here and there, but never in the spectacular way that medieval tales present supernatural events.

Let me illustrate this with St Mary of Egypt, since her feast day is April 1st, and she is celebrated during this 5th week of Lent.

St. Mary's life is one of extremes. She lives in the 4th century. Her life is a licentious life, half of it lived in Egypt -- generally the biblical location for living a worldly life, a life of plenty, and a life of vices. She is not only a prostitute, we are told, but she so enjoys her profession that at times she renders services without demanding pay. In short, her appetites are insatiable.  After her conversion, she goes across the River Jordan --realm of John the Baptist's ascetic life-- to live a life of repentance. And if anyone ever did a 180, St. Mary did.  Where Christ is tempted in the desert for 40 days, she  is in the desert for 40 years + 7 years, 7 being the number of perfection.  Clearly, Christ had nothing to repent of, where Mary had much.

Still as her repentance nears its completion, she walks on water, though she makes nothing of it and insists to her dying breath that she is a sinful woman. She lives on almost no food or water but the three loaves she brings with her into the desert.  At the end of her life when Fr. Zosima, comes to see her and brings her lentils and figs to eat, she honors his hospitality and takes 3 lentils-- one for father, one for son, one for Holy Spirit, clearly indicating that her nourishment comes not from this world.

When at another point in the story Mary meets Fr. Zosima at a prearranged location, Fr. Zosima takes 20 days to get there by foot, St. Mary gets there in 1 hour --which would, indicentally, indicate that she traveled at near the speed of sound (Mach 1). What is all this about?

No, in case you wondered, I am not saying that medieval tales are 'tall', like the tales of Paul Bunyan, but neither are they characterized by the realism and down to earth simple narrative style we see in the New Testament gospels, and I think that is why such tales were rejected by the Protestant reformers.

Medieval tales are possessed of a dichotemy that clearly contrasts the worldly choice and the divine choice. In medieval tales, the reader is not asked to wrestle with questions of ambiguity nor to find nuances in the meaning of life the way the classical Greeks did. 

The choice is clear in medieval lore. We are in living color presented with the correct model. Our job is to follow it. Temptation, the lusts of the flesh, the world and its vices are ever present to us in an ugly, threatening light. But, there is hope. Our medieval hero or heroine will prevail to the end and achieve the Promised Land through the mortification of the flesh--and so must we.

Let us take St. Peter from the Gospels and contrast him with St. Mary. His story is told in the first century AD, where St. Mary's is told in the 4th century, but not recorded until the 7th century (an important detail, I think).

St. Peter's life as a fisherman is worldly, to be sure, but he is not evil or base or full of vices. We know he has a mother in law, but otherwise we know little of his family. He is hotheaded and rash, and we ordinary folks can relate to him and his impulsive nature. He seems to have a good heart, and he wants to do the right thing, only, at times he stumbles, like when he denies Christ three times, or when he cuts off the ear of a man during Christ's arrest. We understand the reasons for his doing so. He is afraid, and he is lashing out to defend himself. We too are afraid, and we are comforted because St Peter was one of us, we are like he was. If he can get beyond himself to follow Christ, so can we.

St. Mary is an example to us, not because she is like us, but because she shows us two choices. The way of the appetites, which leads to death, or the way of repentance which leads to life. In either lifestyle of hers, she overpowers us with her zeal. Which Mary do we want to follow?

I found her difficult to read for years, because I am a person who distrusts extremes. You see, a reading of the story of St. Mary does not include her choosing a disrespectful profession because she is starving or afraid she cannot provide for her family, which would be what I would be looking for. Did she have a family? We do not know. We are given no context, no excuses for Mary. The details are irrelevant. All that matters is her repentance.

It is appetite that drives her, through and through, and it is appetite that she needs to get rid of in the desert across the Jordan River. Nothing else matters.

Why did I struggle with this simple dichotomy. Well... I am a scientist, I am an academic. I thrive on nuance, detail, and analysis. Here were my initial thoughts on the story...

1. the story was written by a male almost 3 centuries after the actual encounter between St. Mary and Fr. Zosima, not by a female.
2. my guess ---forgive my speculation --- is that the author, St. Sophronius--a monk-- had little contact with women. The story had been passed down to him  from monk to monk over 3 centuries and likely all these monks had no idea  what a life of prostitution would be like for a woman. 

Prostitution is not a life of pleasure but one that likely would be loathed by most women. Also, St. Mary, if she lived such a life, would very likely be saddled with a lot of children to take care of, but also -- I bet-- be infested with the sorts of diseases that accompany such a profession. Not a fun life.

But that is science and realism, and such thinking of mine should be condemned along with my speculation that Mary is zipping along at Mach 1 to meet Fr. Zosima.

Such thinking ruins medieval story telling --- shame on me. :)

The point of medieval stories is to inspire people to imitate virtue and reject vice --- not to scrutinize whether it is possible for her to live naked in the desert or to live on 3 loaves of bread and a few herbs in 47 years, nor whether she can REALLY walk on water, nor how  she managed never to encounter another human being or even a dangerous wild beast -- to say nothing of how she broke the sound barrier :P .

This medieval story is full of antithesis -- a favorite scheme of the medievals, since it sets pairs of things in contrast.

Mary in her worldly life exposed her body to shame, so in her repentance she exposes her body to the elements of the weather to purge the shame.

Mary  in her worldly life lived for her appetites, so she in her repentance lives AGAINST her appetites.

Mary in her worldly life lived amongst men, to secure the admiration of men,  so in her repentance she lives apart from men, done with the vanities of the world.

St Mary of Egypt is the antithesis, also, to Mary the Mother of God, the obedient, chaste, humble ideal of a woman, who as soon as she was old enough to decide, chose a life lived for God. For Mary the Theotokos to shine, St. Mary of Egypt must stand in stark relief -- hence a story of extremes. It is a literary form, which borders on allegory --which became more popular in high and late medieval times, but which Boethius already made use of in his Consolation of Philosophy in the 5th century AD.

The reformers of the 16th and 17th centurry (at the very dawn of the age of Reason) steered away from medieval lore, and as such, they rejected in particular  stories about the saints. They wanted to go back to the basics, back to more realism, back to the Bible.

Their approach to Christianity very much seems to go with the one literary genre found in the Gospels, that bare bones, realism way of recording the life of Christ in the Gospels, almost to the point where that style of analysis (perhaps to a fault) is applied, also, to texts in the Old Testament.

But to wrap up with St. Mary and her blessed memory. It took me years, after I became an Orthodox Christian, to appreciate St. Mary.

I was hindered by the (perhaps) slight touch of misogyny I kept reading in the story of St. Mary and at times, also in the Bible's depiction of women.

St. Mary is portrayed as this person who was driven by an insatiable and irrepressible passion. So are some of the 'sinful' women of the Bible -- the woman at the well with several husbands, the woman caught in adultery about to be stoned, the sinful woman in tears, bathing Christ's feet.

Sometimes I wonder if the only sins of women that male writers of the Bible  and of hagiography are capable of imagining are sexual sins.  And perhaps  that is the case, since most 'good' Roman, Greek, and Jewish women in biblical times kept to their homes, so the women a man might met in the street often were of that 'flavor'.

Add to that, that most of the women saints of the early centuries AD were young women who refused to get married. In fact, so many of them staunchly held onto their virginity even at the cost of death by frightful mutilation, often of the parts of the body that are distinctly female.

But, just as I questioned the wisdom of the reformers' literary analysis above,  so I must not reject medieval hagiography, merely because it is written from a limited perspective--a black and white perspective. The men who wrote hagiography wrote about what they knew and not about what they did not know. They had a clear message, and did not want it obscured by detail or nuance. In the specific case of St. Sophronius perhaps he knew little of what it was like to be a woman or what kinds of sins women most struggle with. In my native Danish, the expression is "Tyv tror hver mand stjæler" -- a thief thinks every man steals. :)

The beauty of the story of St Mary lies in her great repentance, not in her miracles (my opinion, obviously). We are inspired by her running the race to the finish (Romans 6:16), by God's providing for her in miraculous ways, so that she was able to stay faithful to her calling, and be an inspiration to Elder Zosima, who--as we are told --had a rather lofty view of himself and thought that he had reached the pinnacle of spirituality and could learn nothing from anyone.

Choosing a woman for the story, a naked woman running in the desert  completes the humiliation of Elder Zosima. Not only has he accomplished almost nothing compared to a naked woman who was never part of a monastery, who had no elder to teach her anything at all. She--the naked WOMAN (of all low things!)-- has gone further in her spiritual life than he with all his chastity, all his years of prayer and services can ever hope to achieve. St. Mary's simple repentant heart says 'yes' to God, and nothing more is needed. Unlike Zosima, she is free from ambition, and has no drive but to be united with her Savior.