Reception and Legacy

Across two thousand years, Mary Magdalene has been received in two very different ways: in the East as the Holy Myrrh-bearer and Equal-to-the-Apostles, the first witness of the Resurrection; in the West, after Gregory the Great, as the composite “penitent Magdalene,” patron of sinners and contemplatives. This file traces that double afterlife — in liturgy, art, scholarship, and popular imagination — and the modern recovery of the un-conflated Magdalene, which has brought West and East back toward the Gospel figure the East never lost.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Equal-to-the-Apostles, Myrrh-bearer)

Two Receptions

The history of Mary Magdalene’s reception is, more than for almost any other saint, a tale of two figures. In the Christian East she has been from the beginning the Myrrh-bearer and Equal-to-the-Apostles: the healed disciple, foremost of the women at the tomb, first witness of the Resurrection, in the tradition a preacher at Ephesus and before Caesar. Her cult in the East never acquired a penitential or sexual cast; her feast (July 22) and her place in the Paschal Sunday of the Myrrh-bearing Women honor her apostolic dignity, and her iconography shows her robed and apostolic (see The Feasts and The Iconography).

In the Latin West, after Gregory the Great’s Homily 33 (AD 591) merged her with the sinful woman of Luke 7 and Mary of Bethany, she became the composite “penitent Magdalene” — the reformed prostitute, patron of penitents and of the contemplative life, heroine of the Provençal legend, subject of the Golden Legend, and the most painted female saint of the Renaissance and Baroque after the Virgin (see The Three Marys and The Provençal Legend). Her name entered the language as a common noun: a “magdalen” became a reformed prostitute, and the “Magdalen” asylums and laundries for “fallen women” — some of which endured into the late twentieth century — bore her name (Haskins, Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor, 1994). The same saint was thus, East and West, two persons: the apostle and the penitent.

In Art and Devotion

The Western penitent Magdalene became one of the great subjects of European art. From medieval altarpieces to the canvases of Titian, Caravaggio, Georges de La Tour, and countless others, she was painted as the weeping penitent with loosed hair and jar of ointment, often in the wilderness with a skull — an image of repentance that, in many hands, became also an image of sensuality (Haskins, 1994). She was patroness of penitent women, of perfumers and apothecaries (for the ointment), of hairdressers (for the hair), and of contemplatives (for the thirty years in the cave of the Provençal legend). The Eastern devotional image, by contrast, remained constant and restrained: the apostolic Myrrh-bearer with her jar of myrrh and her red egg, venerated as Equal-to-the-Apostles.

In hymnody and popular piety the two figures persisted side by side. The Eastern services hailed her as the first herald of the Resurrection; Western hymnody and devotion dwelt on her tears and her love much forgiven. Both traditions, it should be said, found in her a figure of immense devotional power — the East in her apostolic witness, the West in her penitent love — and both drew real grace from her, even where the West’s historical premise was the conflation.

The Modern Recovery

The twentieth century brought a scholarly and ecclesial recovery of the un-conflated Magdalene. Biblical scholarship increasingly recognized that the Gregorian merger had no basis in the Gospel text, and that Mary Magdalene, the sinful woman, and Mary of Bethany are three distinct figures — the reading the East had always held. The decisive ecclesial step came with the Roman Catholic liturgical reform: the Calendarium Romanum of 1969 distinguished the three women and made July 22 the commemoration of Mary Magdalene alone, “to whom Christ appeared after the Resurrection… not the sister of Lazarus nor the sinful woman” (Calendarium Romanum, 1969; see The Three Marys). In 2016 Rome raised her commemoration to a feast and recovered the ancient title apostolorum apostola, “apostle to the apostles” (Congregation for Divine Worship, decree Apostolorum Apostola, 3 June 2016). The trajectory of the recovery has been, in effect, a return toward the Eastern Magdalene — the apostle rather than the penitent.

Modern scholarship — Susan Haskins’s Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor (1994), the work of Victor Saxer on the Western cult, and the studies of the gnostic texts — has charted both the formation of the composite figure and its dismantling. This recovery has also, unfortunately, opened the door to the opposite distortion: the modern “wife of Jesus” myth, which exploits the now-unmoored figure to construct a fictional married Magdalene (see The Gospel of Mary and Modern Myths). The disciplined task, East and West alike, is to recover the Gospel figure without inventing a new myth in place of the old conflation.

The Saint Beyond the Myths

What endures beneath all the receptions is the Mary Magdalene of the Gospels and of the Church’s living veneration: a woman whom Christ delivered from a grievous bondage; who followed Him from Galilee and supported His ministry; who stood by His Cross when the men had fled; who came to His tomb in the dark to anoint the dead; who was the first to see Him risen and to hear her own name from His lips; and who was sent, the first of all, to proclaim the Resurrection to the apostles. To this the Eastern Church has held without wavering, calling her Holy Myrrh-bearer and Equal-to-the-Apostles, and this is the figure that, after fourteen centuries of conflation and a generation of myth, the wider Christian world is recovering. The legacy of Mary Magdalene, rightly received, is the legacy of the empty tomb: she is the saint in whom the Church first heard, and still hears, the word “He is risen.”

See Also

References

  • Haskins, Susan. Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994. (The standard history of the reception, East and West.)
  • Saxer, Victor. Le culte de Marie Madeleine en Occident des origines à la fin du moyen âge. Paris: Clavreuil, 1959.
  • Calendarium Romanum. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1969.
  • Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. Decree Apostolorum Apostola, 3 June 2016.
  • Gregory the Great. Homily 33 on the Gospels [PL 76:1238–1246]. Trans. David Hurst, Forty Gospel Homilies. Kalamazoo, 1990.
  • The Menaion, July 22; The Pentecostarion, the Sunday of the Myrrh-bearing Women.