La Femme Coupee

Mary Magdalene, the repentant courtesan who followed Christ, is one of the most famed and least-known characters in the Gospels. Because of her early trade, some of the ancient church fathers, and later Christians of excessive scruple, have been embarrassed by her presence in the liturgy. On the other hand, her sinful past has been a never-failing godsend to novelists trying to put a little spice into stories with a New Testament setting.

A book published last week, Mary Magdalene (Pantheon; $3), is one of the most intelligent and provocative efforts yet made to reconstruct her character and its meaning. The author, Father Raymond Leopold Bruckberger, is a French Dominican priest, recently transplanted to the U.S., whose earlier books of memoirs and stories (One Sky to Share, Golden Goat) have had considerable success (TIME, Aug. 11; Nov. 24). His purpose in writing this one was to bring back to life the Magdalene, "la Femme coupee en morceaux--the woman hacked into bits by modern exegetes."

The Courtesan. Gospel references to Mary Magdalene are fragmentary. Although she is mentioned by name twelve times, there are few details given about her life or her significance as one of Christ's followers. Bruckberger holds to the view of most Roman Catholic scholars that she is mentioned elsewhere in the Gospels by other names.* She is, he believes, the "woman in the city" in Luke 7:37, who washes Christ's feet with her tears, and humbly begs forgiveness of her sins at the house of Simon the Pharisee. She is also, by this interpretation, the New Testament's Mary of Bethany, sister of Lazarus.

Dominican Bruckberger, basing his deductions on a study of early Christian history as well as the Bible, goes further than this. His reconstructed Mary Magdalene was a woman of wealth and beauty, and one of the ornaments of King Herod's court. Although a Jewess, she was Hellenized, and, like many among the upper classes in Palestine, considered herself as belonging to the rich but dying culture of Plato's Greece.

The ancient Greeks had high philosophic ideals, but the best of them, including Plato, ran into a great deal of difficulty trying to set up standards of personal morality. In their uninstructed search for the true and the beautiful, writes Bruckberger, they "gave to bodily beauty the character of a religious revelation." Since they felt that beauty should be enjoyed, the figure of the courtesan became not at all a shameful one. To Father Bruckberger, the clever courtesan Mary Magdalene symbolizes in the Gospels the outward beauty of the Greek ideal as well as its moral shortcomings.

The Law. Opposed to Plato's philosophy and the Greek search for philosophic wisdom, the Jewish Pharisees clung to a law of stern, ritual purity. Each tradition, in Bruckberger's view, was deficient. But broken, then united by Christ's love, they merged to give Christianity both its traditional faith and its abstract philosophy.

Mary Magdalene, writes Bruckberger, symbolized the Christian baptism of Greek philosophy. The sensual paganism of the Greeks, he contends, was really "a deep homesickness for the first Paradise, for its innocence, for its freedom of behavior." The search for wisdom was one expression of this. Magdalene, the sinner, made the great discovery that Paradise and wisdom could be found only through God's love and forgiveness.

But Author Bruckberger finds another moral in Mary Magdalene's conversion--she also proved the hollowness of her Pharisee countrymen. "Simon the Pharisee believes himself 'pure,' and thereby he becomes a sinner, impenitent because his sin consists in believing that he is without sin. Mary Magdalene knows herself, recognizes herself, proclaims herself 'impure' and a sinner; this is why she attains the wellspring of all purity. In this humility and [in] this contrition is she justified.

"This revolution--the greatest ever to have taken place in the moral order--the Pharisees could not understand. For them, justice lay in the practice of the Law, the absence of all material breach of this Law. Nor could the Greeks understand any better, because for them there was no sin, there were only ugly actions, but actions which did not touch God himself . . . The Pharisees betrayed the Law itself, the first commandment of which is the love of God. And the Greeks knew not true wisdom, which is to attune one's heart with God's."

The Scandal. In telling his story, Author Bruckberger includes a rarely original account of Christ's life and death, as the Magdalene saw it. The Christ of his book is a revolutionary who "gave scandal as though wantonly." Clearly subversive of both Hellenism and Judaism as they then existed, he was put to death not "by the ungodly, but by the 'just' and the 'pious.' "

He was also a man of infinite accessibility ("the most anti-Cellophane being imaginable"), who hated "both stoicism and puritanism." No one dramatized his love and mercy as did Mary Magdalene. Writes Bruckberger: "She foretells that God has come among men not for the sake of the just, but for sinners, for their salvation. He is not really at home among us save when he is in the midst of sinners; he is worthily received only with the tears of repentance ... He came to convert sinners, but he converted them only by making himself loved. That is what, without opening her mouth, this woman teaches us."

* Most Protestant scholars disagree.

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