Life of Mary Magdalene
Henri Lacordaire – 1859
Translated 20061
Preface
In Provence
As the traveler descends the declivity of the Rhone, at a particular moment, on the
left, the mountains open up, the horizon expands, the sky becomes more pure, the earth
more lush, and the air softer: he is in Provence. With its back to the Alps, Provence
leaves them slowly through valleys which lose, bit by bit, the harshness of the high
summits, and it advances like a promontory of Greece and of Italy towards this Sea that
washes every famous seaboard. The Mediterranean gives Provence, after the Rhone and
the Alps, her third belt, and a river, Provence's own, the Durance, hurls into her gorges
and plains the force of a torrent that never lets up. It is not possible to look at this land
without quickly recognizing a natural and historical affinity with the most renowned
countries of the Ancient World. Greek colonies conveyed to her early on the breath of
the East, and Rome, who gave Provence her name, left her ruins worthy of this power
that refused to no-one a portion of her own greatness, because she had enough for the
entire universe. When the Ancient World had withered, for a long time Provence, rich in
memories, and yet richer in herself, retained in the general breakup of things her
personality. She possessed her own tongue, her poetry, her customs, her nationality, her
glory, all those gifts which, in certain circumstances, make of a small country a great
land. Then, when modern empires had assumed their form and carved out their own
territories, Provence, too weak to maintain her independence against her Fate, fell to
France like a gift from God, and after having been for the Ancients the portal to the
beauty of the West, she became for us the first port where in imagination we meet Italy,
Greece, Asia, all those places that lend an enchantment to memory and all those names
that touch the heart.
But if nature and history have done much for Provence, perhaps religion has done
yet more. There are places blessed from the beginning of time which are lost in the mists
of time. Egypt saw the birth of Moses; Arabia still burns with the lightning from Sinai,
and the sand of its deserts has retained the footprints of the people of God, the Jordan
divided before this same people and, from the cedars of Lebanon to the palm trees of
Jericho, Palestine would hear and see things that would be the eternal preoccupation of
humanity. The Son of God was born on these sea shores; there his Word instructed the
entire world, and his blood flowed so as to save it. Rome, in its turn, Rome, the heir of
everything, received into its walls the legacy of Christ, and its amazed Capitol lent itself
to the chaste ceremonies of victorious love, after having for a long period served the
bloody triumph of war. There, above all, are the places religion has consecrated, the holy
places, those one could believe belonged to heaven rather than to earth. And yet a part
was reserved to Provence in this distribution of divine graces attached to the earth, a
unique part, and one like the last imprint of the life of Jesus Christ among us.
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Copyright Peter T. Hancock 2006
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When one goes out of Marseilles in the direction of the Alps, one enters a valley
alongside the Sea, which remains out of sight because a high mountain range conceals its
waves; another mountain chain rears itself up on the opposite side, and, confined as it is
between those two walls, the valley runs toward a steep amphitheatre which seems to
block its further progress, while a river with trees alongside it glides effortlessly through
the length of the plain and washes with its fecundity a thousand households. Its name is
as obscure as its water. To a certain extent it guides the traveler and, after expanding into
a much larger area of open countryside, halted in its tracks by the mountain, it turns
suddenly to the left, squeezes itself into a narrow gorge, becomes a torrent, and, rising
between a labyrinth of wooded treetops and of bare mountain summits, it finally finds its
source near a peaceful plateau, crowned with a huge and solitary rock. Not so long ago
one was in the heart of a rich and bustling town, one of the Queens of the Mediterranean;
one could hear the sound of the waves or the sound of men; or could see arriving from all
corners of the horizon ships propelled less by the wind than by the treasures they carried;
now everything is still at the same time as everything is sparse, and, from the stillness as
well from the barrenness of this desert, one would believe oneself conveyed by a
mysterious passageway to the inaccessible retreat of the ancient Thebaid. Several
crumbled walls can be seen in the middle of the plain, several houses standing at the end
behind a summit, but the vestiges of human existence in no way diminish the solemnity
of the spot. The heart senses it is in a solitude where God's presence is near at hand.
In the midst of these rows of elevated rocks, which resemble a stone curtain, the
eye picks out a dwelling which seems as if suspended in the air, and at its feet a forest
whose novelty strikes it. It is no longer the meager and odorous pine of Provence, nor the
green oak, nor anything of the shadowy coverings the traveler has come across on his
journey; one would say that by some miracle the North had flung down in that spot all the
splendor of its vegetation.
It is the sun and the sky of the South with the planted woods of England. Close
by, only a few feet away, on the side of the mountain, one rediscovers the true nature of
the country; this particular spot is the one exception. And if one penetrates the forest, it
immediately covers you with all its majesty, similar in its depths, its veils and its silences,
to those sacred woods never profaned by the axes of the Ancients. There also only the
centuries have access; they alone have exercised the right to cut down the old trunks and
to renew their sap; only they have reigned and reign yet, instruments of a respect which
comes from something higher than themselves, and which adds to the sudden emotion of
sight that of thought.
Who then has passed by here? Who has marked this corner of the earth with so
powerful a footprint? What is this mass of rock? What is this forest? What, finally, this
place where everything seems greater than us?
O Marseilles! You witnessed the arrival of the guest who first inhabited this
mountain. You saw alight from a bark the frail creature who brought you the second visit
from the East. The first had given you your port, your walls, your name, your very
existence; the second gave you something even better, it entrusted to you the living relics
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of the life of Jesus Christ, the souls which He had loved most tenderly on earth, and, so to
speak, the supreme testament of the friendship of a God. It was from the summit of His
cross that Jesus Christ had bequeathed His mother to John the Apostle; for you, it was
from the summit of His resurrection, between those shadows, which had been drawn
aside, of Death and the white light of eternal life that Jesus chose you to be the tested
refuge of his dearest friends. Is it necessary to name them to you? Is it necessary to tell
you who they are? No, your memory was always faithful to them, your story speaks to
you of them, your walls have mingled the tradition with the memories of your first faith,
and the sacred dawn of your Christianity is the very tomb where you venerate in your
apostles the friends of Jesus.
They were Lazarus, the man brought back from the dead in Bethany; they were
Martha, his sister, who had seen him emerge from the tomb, and who had believed in the
power of the Son of Man before it was made manifest; it was another woman, the sister
of both of them, more famous still, more loved, more worthy of being loved, she to whom
it was said: "Many sins are forgiven her because she has loved much", she who was the
first to see and touch Jesus on the morning of his resurrection, because she held pride of
place in this heart wounded moreover by a love that encompassed every living soul right
unto death.
It is about this woman I am writing. Praised in the entire universe by the Gospels,
she has no need for a mortal hand to revive in the shadows of the 19th century her glory
for all time. No name more than hers has resisted indifference, because sin itself opens
paths to men's admiration, and because virtue carves for her another pathway amongst the
generations of pure hearts. Mary Magdalene touches both sides of our life: the Sinner
anoints us with her tears, the Saint with her tenderness, the one soothes our wounds at the
feet of Christ, the other tries to exalt us to the ravishment of her ascension. But if Mary
Magdalene has no need of being praised by any other mouth than that of God, we can
take joy in doing what is of no use to her, and in offering her incense which comes back
to our heart like a benediction.
This is our desire. Perhaps also the ruins of the Sainte-Baume will tremble at our
voice, and Provence, moved by a neglect which points an accusing finger at her piety,
will rediscover, for so great a cult, the love of its ancestors and the munificence of its
princes.
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Chapter I
Of Friendship in Jesus Christ
Friendship is the most perfect of human emotions, because it is the most free, the
most pure and the most profound. In relationships involving filial piety and maternal
love, the child has not chosen his mother and his father; he is born of them without
having any say in the matter, and to the degree that his heart opens during his youth, he
knows more deeply the need of loving by an act which gives it to whom he chooses. If
his parents, all too aware of what is lacking in the love of even the best son, force
themselves to conquer it by an over-indulgence which brings them close to childhood,
this generally does no more than to prepare the way for more ingratitude on his part; and
if, jealous of this sacred authority that age and reason confer on them, they exert it with
the virility of a tenderness that does not forget duty, the child, more docile, it is true,
better regulated, better informed of his natural position, will not fail, however, to
conceive this fear which, completely filial though it may be, stops in its tracks the
outpouring of a fallacious equality between child and parents.
Barely yet a man, before even he attains maturity, the child of the most loving
mother aspires to break away from her and to verify these words of Scripture, so gentle
and so terrible at the same time: “Man will leave his father and his mother, and he will
join himself to his wife.” There, at last, will he find the liberty of choice that is one of the
conditions of love? Far from it. A thousand compelling circumstances point out to a man
the companion of his life. Birth, fortune, chance dictate their laws to him at the moment
where his heart alone should decide, and, a victim crowned with bitter roses, he advances
towards the altar to promise everything and to give very little. How many marriages
from which love is absent! And if the two souls have really spoken to one another, if the
rare spark of a reciprocal affection has illumined two promises, how many pitfalls are
concealed in this happiness and how many causes of its premature close!
Conjugal love, the strongest of all while it lasts, has, however, within it a
weakness that arises from its very ardour. The senses are not strangers to it. The beauty
of the flesh is its main source of nourishment, and this beauty, brief and precarious, is not
even certain of retaining as long as it lasts a hold on the heart that it has subjugated. Too
often, while the world still admires it, it has lost the happiness of its reign, and the crowd
offers it devotions that fall on a secret and woeful ruin. This beautiful face no longer says
anything to he who had adored it, and a horrible resignation, a resignation unknown that
one cannot even pity, falls on the intoxication of a cult that had promised itself
immortality. If the charm exerted by beauty lasts as long as its cause, this cause itself in
due course withers. Youth, which is an essential element of living beauty, hurries
towards its close, and it is in vain that art struggles against an inexorable decadence. The
husband wants to delude himself; he does manage to for some time. But there comes a
time when it is no longer possible, and love, which clung to this delicate wire of features
and colours, gradually evaporates even while still looking for what it loved only
yesterday.
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Friendship, when it is sincere, is not liable to these reverses of fortune. It is born
in freer regions, purer and deeper than any other type of affection. It is not the breast of a
woman bent over a cradle that gives it birth; it has not for its gateway a contract binding
different interests, and which is sanctioned by an altar whose fire has cinders within it; it
comes out of man by a supreme act of freedom, and this liberty lasts until the end,
without the law of God or of man ever consecrating its resolution. Friendship lives by
itself and by itself alone; free in its birth, it remains so in its course. Its food is a
sympathy with no material base between two souls, a mysterious resemblance between
the invisible beauty of one and the other, a beauty that the senses can perceive in the
revelations of the face, but which the overflowing of a confiding trust that grows by itself
reveals still more clearly, until the light makes itself manifest without shadows and
without any limits, and friendship becomes the reciprocal possession of two ways of
thinking, of two wills, of two virtues, of two lives free always to go their own ways and
never parting from one another. Age cannot weaken such a communion; because the soul
has no age. Superior to Time, it inhabits the eternal abode of spirits, and attached though
it be to the body that animates it, it does not know, if it so wishes, its weaknesses and
corruption. And even, by an admirable dispensation, Time strengthens friendship. To
the degree that outward events affect the lives of two friends, their mutual fidelity is
strengthened by the test. They see better the unity of their feelings under the shock that
might have destroyed it or weakened it. Like two rocks suspended above the same waves
and opposing to them an unyielding resistance, so the ocean of the years attacks in vain
the unfailing harmony of their hearts. It is necessary to live to be certain of being loved.
But is it not a dream? Is friendship anything more than a sublime and consoling
name? There are mothers who love their sons; there are wives who love their husbands.
These are imperfect links, nevertheless they are real: does friendship have any existence?
Is it not a flower of youth that withers before its spring? Is it not one of those golden
clouds that appear and dawn and never see the evening?
For a long time I believed that youth was the age of friendship, and that friendship
itself was like the gracious preamble to all our affection. I was mistaken. Youth is too
shallow for friendship; it is not yet seated either in its thoughts or in its wishes, and it
cannot, in giving itself, give more than hope. On the other hand, maturity is too cold for
this great sentiment; it has too many interests that preoccupy it and enslave it. It lacks the
generous liberty of being that does not yet belong to the world, and also the naivete that
fears nothing in life. Must I then withdraw the title of this chapter and inscribe friendship
among the dreams of Adam’s posterity? But the Gospels stop me here, my own history
stops me. Without doubt I have left by the way, like profane deposits, many affections
that had seduced me; I have seen perish in my heart the immaterial beauty of more than
one beloved soul. However, it would be just as difficult for me to be incredulous in
friendship as it would in religion, and I believe in the mutual attachment of human beings
as I believe in the goodness of God. Man deceives and God never deceives; it is there
that lies the difference: man does not always deceive; therein lies his resemblance to
God. Feeble and fallible creature, his friendship has all the more price that he conceives
and carries it in a more fragile vase. He loves sincerely in a spirit subject to egotism; he
loves purely in a corrupted flesh, he loves eternally in a day that has an end; I believe it
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and I know it. Except for first childhood, no age is unsuitable for friendship. Youth
brings to it more alacrity in its sympathy, maturity more constancy, old age more
detachment and depth. Neither rank, moreover, nor fortune, nor anything that separates
human beings has any effect here. Kings have been seen to love one of their subjects,
slaves attach themselves to their masters. Friendship is born of the soul in the soul, and
the soul only counts by itself. Once one has met on that sphere, everything else vanishes:
like a day and even better, when we meet each other in God, the universe will be no more
for us than a forgotten spectacle. But it is difficult to meet in a place so distant as the
soul, so hidden behind the ocean that surrounds it and under the cloud that covers it. If
the Scriptures say of God that he inhabits an inaccessible light; one can say of the soul
that it inhabits an impenetrable shadow. One believes one is touching it, and it is barely
as if the hand that searches for it has seized the hem of its garment. It contracts and
withdraws at the moment where one thinks one is certain to possess it, one moment a
serpent, the next a trembling dove, flame or ice, torrent or peaceful lake, and always,
whatever be its form or its image, the reef on which one breaks oneself the most and the
port into which one least enters. It is therefore a rare and divine thing, friendship, the
sure sign of a great soul and the highest of visible rewards attached to virtue.
It cannot therefore be alien to Christianity, which has uplifted souls and created so
many virtues. When two Christian spouses, for example, have found in their faith the
principle of their fidelity, Jesus Christ, who has blessed their love, has not promised to
them an immortal duration of their love. But if the ardour of the blood diminishes at the
same time as beauty fades, even that, instead of being a sign of the decay of their love, is
the forerunner of its progression. The soul does not cease to love because the body loses
its appeal; confidence, esteem, respect, the habit of an intimate and reciprocal interaction,
sustain in their hearts the portal of an attraction that grows stronger as it becomes purer.
Tenderness survives under a new guise. It is no longer the terrestrial emotions of an
earlier time, but the divine trembling of spirits assisted by the memory of a youth that
was pure and at the same time enchanted. The crown of Virgins descends from the
sacred heights of Christian marriage onto the forehead of the spouses, and they sing
together a canticle that death itself cannot silence, because eternity, which lends it to
them down below, returns it to them in the bosom of God. Instead of the horrible
torments to which the tainted flesh condemns the living heart, friendship rises from the
nuptial couch cooled like a lily perfumed by the love which is no more, and old age itself,
embalmed with this perfume that transforms it, inclines towards the tomb like those trees
hundreds of years old that have reserved for their last years their most beautiful flowers
and their best fruits. Friendship is, in Christianity, the final term and the supreme
recompense of conjugal love.
It is also that of the virtues of youth. When a young man, helped by this allpowerful grace that comes from Christ, controls his passions under the rule of chastity, he
experiences in his heart an expansion in proportion to the constraints of his senses, and
the need to love, that is the basis of our nature, is born in him in a naïve ardour that leads
him to overflow into a soul like hers, fervent and contained. He does not look for long in
vain for its appearance. It offers itself to him naturally, as every plant grows from the
soil that best suits it. Sympathy is only refused to him who does not inspire it and he
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inspires it who carries in himself the generous ferment. Every pure heart possesses it,
and as a consequence, every pure heart draws toward it, at no matter what age. But how
much more so during youth. How much more when the face is adorned with all the
graces that soften, and when virtue illuminates it with that other beauty that pleases God
himself! Thus appeared David to Jonathan the day when David entered Saul’s tent,
holding the giant’s head in his right hand, and when interrogated by the king as to his
origins, he answered him: “I am the son of your servant Isaiah of Bethlehem.”
Immediately, say the Scriptures, the soul of Jonathan attached itself to that of David, and
Jonathan loved him as he loved his own soul. Only a while before, David was looking
after his father’s flock, Jonathan was on the threshold of a throne, and in an instant the
distance between them was abolished; the shepherd and the prince made no more,
according to the very words of Scripture, than one soul. It was because in this young
man still pale from the weakness of childhood, and nevertheless holding in his virile hand
the bloody head of a vanquished enemy, Jonathan had recognized a hero, and because
David, in seeing the son of his king leaning towards him, without any jealousy over his
victory and without any pride of caste, recognized in this generous movement a heart
capable of loving, and worthy in consequence of being loved.
Amongst the Ancients, neither conjugal love, nor the charm of youth could
produce this Christian friendship whose features we have just outlined. Woman was too
lowly to sustain a man’s attachment by the sole influence of the confidence he had in her
and the esteem he held her in; her power vanished with her beauty, and it was unusual
that she could survive herself in a more perfect sentiment. Old age, so magnificent and
so touching in Christianity, also brought with the ravages wrought by Time the
humiliations attendant upon abandonment: happy when a place remained for her at the
domestic hearth, under the protection of a law less harsh than the heart of her husband.
As for the young men of the Ancient world, too little chaste to be loved, he hardly
showed in the transport of his passions, whatever they might be, the pure outpourings of
an irreproachable ardor. He loved with his senses far more than with his soul, and if the
name of friendship was known to him, because man has never completely ignored nor
completely corrupted his natural self, he lacked moreover, save perhaps in rare cases, that
stroke of the bow which has made to gush out of us the source of unadulterated affection.
Jesus Christ is not the first father of friendship amongst human beings; it existed in the
earthly Paradise, when Adam and Eve, still covered with their innocence as with a veil,
walked together under the observation of God, smitten for each other by a sentiment
where tenderness equaled purity. But that was only for a day, an hour perhaps; soon the
flesh, frightened at itself, was enveloped in mournful shadows, and humankind no longer
loved as we had loved at first. But human beings carried away from this first love into
the abject condition of exile a memory that follows them everywhere, and when the Son
of Man came to save them, none of them were astonished at the Gospels being a book of
love, and love being the book of salvation. Jesus Christ called into being neither
tenderness nor purity, these two divine things, with which our heart was formed, but he
gave them back to us. He loved as nobody else was capable of loving and, amongst so
many friendships whose secret he has restored to us, I want to indicate one of which no
trace was found before Christ.
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Jesus Christ loved souls, and he has transmitted this love to us, which is the very
basis of Christianity. No true Christian, no living Christian, can be without a fragment of
this love that circulates in our veins like the very blood of Christ. From the moment we
love, whether it be in youth or in middle age, as a father or as a husband, as a son or as a
friend, we want to save the soul we love, that is to say, give it, at the price of our own
life, truth in the faith, virtue in grace, peace in redemption. God at last, God known, God
loved, God served, there is that love of souls that adds itself to all the others, and which,
far from destroying them, exalts and transforms them until it makes of them something
divine, however mortal they be in themselves. And, moreover, the love of souls leads to
friendship when one has been, near a poor fallen creature, the instrument of the light that
reveals her form and which gives back to her her own dignity, this sublime healing of a
death that should have been eternal sometimes inspires in two souls an indefinable
attraction, born of the happiness given and the happiness received. And if natural
sympathy is joined onto this movement that comes from on high, there forms from all
these divine chances into the same hearts an attachment that would have no name on
earth, if Jesus Christ himself had not said to his disciples: “I have called you my
friends.” This then is friendship. It is friendship such as God made man and dying for
his friends conceived it. But still, amongst these souls with whom Jesus Christ lived and
died, there was one who was especially favoured. He loved them all, but he loved some
more than others. It was there, in this world, the summit of human and divine affections;
nothing had prepared the world for it, and the world would only see again an obscure
image in the holiest and most celestial friendships.
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Chapter II
Of the Friendships of Jesus in the Town of Bethany
St. John is the evangelist of the divinity of Christ. Nobody else understood him
so well; none has repeated so faithfully what the Son of Man affirmed of the Son of God,
and none has seen any nearer what he had heard from less far. In reading him one is
astounded that Arianism could have been possible, to such a degree, at each step, does the
co-eternal union of the Word with God shine forth, and of the Son with the Father. But
St. John is also, by another privilege, the evangelist of the heart of Jesus Christ. Object
himself of one of His predilections, none has better expressed how He loved, none has
recorded more moving examples, or better expressed, in this admirable story of which
John is one of the four authors.
This, moreover, is how John begins the 11th chapter of his Gospel.
1. There was a man named Lazarus who became ill in Bethany, in the home of
Mary and Martha his sister.
2. This Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume, and washed his
feet with her hair, and it was her brother Lazarus who was sick.
3. The two sisters sent a message to Jesus, therefore, to tell him, “Lord, he whom
you love is sick.”
4. On hearing this, Jesus said to his disciples, “This illness is not for death, but
for the glory of God, that the Son of God be glorified by it.”
5. Jesus loved Martha, and her sister Mary, and Lazarus.
6. After they learned that Lazarus was ill, they stayed on two days in the same
place.
7. Finally he said to his disciples, “Let us return to Judea.”
8. His disciples said to him, “Master, the Jews are seeking to stone you, and you
would go there again?”
9. Jesus answered them, “Aren’t there twelve hours in the day? If a person walks
in the daylight, he does not stumble, because he has the light of this world.
10. “But if he walks at night, he will stumble, because he does not have the light
within him.”
11. That is what he said to them, and he added, “Lazarus, our friend, is sleeping,
but I am going to call him from his sleep.”
12. His disciples said to him, “Lord, as he is sleeping, he will be saved.”
13. Jesus was speaking of death, but the others understood him to be speaking of
an ordinary sleep.
14. He then said to them clearly, “Lazarus is dead.
15. “And I rejoice because of you, that you will believe, because I was not there;
but let us go to him.”
16. Then Thomas, also called Didymus, said to the other disciples, “Let us go
also, and die with him.”
17. Jesus then went, and arrived when Lazarus had been four days in the tomb.
18. Bethany was near Jerusalem, about 15 stadia distant.
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19. Many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary, to console them for the
death of their brother.
20. As soon as Martha learned of Jesus’ arrival, she ran to meet him; as for Mary,
she remained seated in the house.
21. Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have
died.
22. “But I know that what you ask of God, God will grant you.”
23. Jesus said to her, “Your brother will come back to life.”
24. Martha said to him, " I know that he will rise in the resurrection on the last
day.”
25. Jesus said to her, "I am the resurrection and the life who believes in me will
live even if he dies.
26. "And whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?"
27. She said to him, "Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of the
living God, who has come into the world."
28. And having said that she went, and calling Mary, her sister, in a loud voice,
she said to her, "The Master is here, and he is asking for you."
29. On hearing this, Mary also arose, and she came to him.
30. Jesus had not yet entered into the town and he was still at the place where
Martha had met him.
31. The Jews who had been with her in the house and had consoled her, seeing
that she had arisen and that she had gone out followed her saying, "She goes to the tomb
to weep there."
32. But Mary, having arrived at the place where Jesus was and seeing him, fell at
his feet and said to him, "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died."
33. Jesus seeing how she wept and the Jews also who had come with her, sighed
from his heart and was deeply troubled.
34. And he said, "Where have you placed him?” They said to him, "Lord, come
and see."
35. And Jesus wept.
36. The Jews said among themselves, "See how much he loved him."
37. But some said to themselves, "Isn’t he the one who opened the eyes of one
born blind -- couldn't he have done something so that this man would not die?"
38. Jesus, again deeply sighing, arrived at the tomb, where there was a cavern
and was a stone that closed it.
39. Jesus said, "Take the stone away.” Martha, the sister of the man who had
died, said to him, "Lord, there will already be a smell, because it is four days since he
died."
40. Jesus said to her, "Didn't I say to you, that if you would believe, you would
see the glory of God?"
41. They took away the stone then, and Jesus, his eyes raised to heaven, said,
"My Father, I give you thanks that You have heard me;
42. "I know, it is true, that You always listen to me but I say this for those around
me, that they may believe that You have sent me."
43. And having said that, He cried in a loud voice, "Lazarus, come out."
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44. And then appeared he who had died in the feet and hands tied it with
bandages and his figure covered with a shroud. Jesus said to them, "Untie him and let
him go."
I do not know what others may think; as for me, were there only this page in the
gospel, I would believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ. However much I may recollect
everything I have read, I know nowhere else where the truth imposes itself with so
palpable a power. There is not a word there that does not convey to the innermost being
of man the conviction that God alone has been able to act thus and to inspire someone to
write this. As a scene of friendship, nothing comparable exists in any past century and in
any language. Tenderness wells up out of this account, and yet one could say that it is
not expressed. It rests entirely within and, while feeling it all the time, one only hears it
by this one phrase: “And Jesus wept.” Jesus would not cry during his passion; he did not
cry when an apostle gave him the kiss of betrayal, nor when St. Peter denied him out of
fear of a servant girl, nor when at the foot of his cross he saw his mother and his dearest
friend. It was the supernatural hour of our redemption, and the divinity of the Just One
who redeemed us by his suffering could not be rendered visible by strength and majesty.
But just before this moment, when Christ, still free, lived his earthly life with us he could
not refuse at the tomb of a friend the weakness of grief. He trembles, he is disturbed
within, and at last, like one of us, he weeps. Holy trembling, happy grief, precious tears,
which prove to us that our God was sensitive like us, and which allow us also to weep
one day in our joys and our friendships.
Jesus had then in Bethany an entire family of friends. It was at this time that,
coming to Jerusalem, into the city where his sacrifice would be consummated, he rested
from the fatigue of preaching and took refuge from the sorrowful perspectives of the
future. These were pure hearts, devoted, friends; there, the incomparable good of an
affection that could resist all trials. It was also from Bethany that he set out to make his
triumphal entry into Jerusalem, and it was in view of Bethany, his face turned towards its
walls, towards the East, that he rose up into Heaven, at almost an equal distance between
Calvary where he died, and the house where he was most loved. Even today, when the
traveler coming down from Jerusalem has passed the torrent of Cedron and climbed the
Mount of Olives, he discovers on the eastern slope of these hills a few huts mingled with
the ruins. There is pointed out to him amongst this debris three spots barely distinguished
amongst the shapeless mass of ruins. “There,” he is told, “was the house of Lazarus;
there that of Martha; there that of Mary Magdala.” The memory of creatures has been
stronger than the destruction wrought by barbarians, and the name of the friends of Jesus,
lasting longer than the scattered stones, still strikes with a moving sound these indifferent
solitudes. On the other side, and from the same position where he is standing, the
traveler discovers Jerusalem lying in the evening sun, sad, pensive, having only a tomb
for its glory, but it is the tomb of its God. The thoughts and the gaze of the Christian
wander between these two sights of a different kind of desolation. Here, nothing more
than the name; there, a town still, but what a town! Jesus has not wanted to leave so near
to her the residence and tomb of his friends; he has carried everything away in his
ascension and, casting Bethany beyond the sea, he has prepared for those who loved him
on shores forever Christian, an immortal hospitality!
11
But if, reviving in our imagination these vanished habitations we enter them
piously in the footsteps of the Master; if we seat ourselves at the evening banquet with
Jesus, Lazarus, Martha and Mary, we will ask ourselves perhaps to whom amongst these
so loved guests the heart of Jesus went out most. Because, even in a special preference,
there are degrees of preference, so deep is love and its endless gradations. Can we
penetrate this mystery? Is it allowed us to descend with the Gospel, and to bring to it the
holy curiosity of a spotless devotion? I believe so. One cannot know too much about
where the Master’s heart dwelt, so as to know whom one must love most with him and
after him. If the Christian seeks in the dust the footsteps of the Saviour, how much more
so must he look in the Gospel for the trace of his affections! I will look for it therefore.
Traveler to the memories of Bethany, I can cross the vestibule, see everything that is
being done, hear everything that is being said, and answer myself when I put the question
to myself: “Who then was the most loved?”
Was it Lazarus? All there is about him is this phrase, which he shares with Martha
and Mary: “Jesus loved Lazarus.” And this other, which is personal: “Lazarus, our
friend, is sleeping.” And this final phrase, “Lazarus, come out.”
As for Martha, she is the first to know that Jesus has arrived, she runs to him first,
and before anyone else she says to him: “Master, if you had been here, my brother would
not have died.” But when the Saviour answers her, “Your brother will rise from the
dead,” she is not struck by a light which makes her understand the sovereign thought of
the Son of God. Her faith hesitates, and it is for Jesus Christ to say to her, “I am the
resurrection and the life, do you believe that?” Then, in spite of her reiterated
affirmation, that she does, when the Master orders the stone to be removed from the
entrance to the tomb, she cannot prevent herself from remarking to him that the dead man
has been there four days, and it is necessary for the Master to tell her reproachfully,
“Have I not told you that you will witness the glory of God?”
Mary is more retiring than Martha. She does not realize at first that Jesus has
arrived. She remains seated inside the house, until Martha comes in to tell her in a low
voice, “The Master is there, and he is calling for you.” It is Jesus who calls Mary. He
does not want what he has resolved to do to take place out of her sight. And she, as soon
as she hears of the arrival of the Master, runs and falls at his feet. Martha had remained
standing, Mary flings herself at the feet of Him whom she loves. Her words are the same
as those of her sister, “Lord if you had been here, my brother would not have died!” But
Jesus says nothing in reply to her, and asks from her no act of faith. He knows she
believes. The sight of her tears moves him, and he himself sheds tears. Up to that
moment he had concealed his feelings; before Mary his weakness breaks out, he breaks
down, he trembles, he is troubled, he weeps. “And Jesus wept.”
There was then in Mary a deeper humility, a more living faith, a greater hold on
the heart of Jesus. She was loved with a preference which her virtues revealed, because
they were at once the result and the cause of the love of the Son of God for her. And this
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conclusion is confirmed for us by a celebrated passage of the Gospel according to Saint
Luke, in his tenth Chapter.
38. And moreover, it happened that as he was traveling, Jesus entered a certain
town, and a woman called Martha welcomed him into her home.
39. And she had a sister called Mary who, sitting at the feet of the Lord, listened
to his Word.
40. As for Martha, she busied herself about the household and, standing before
the Lord, she said to him, “Lord, does it not bother you to see my sister leaving me to do
the housework alone? Tell her then to give me a hand.”
41. And the Lord answering her, said to her: “Martha, Martha, you busy yourself
too much about household affairs.
42. There is only one thing that is necessary. Mary has chosen the better part,
and it will not be taken from her.”
What was this better part, if not a greater love for our Lord, merited by a more
perfect return? Martha served, Mary listened and meditated. Martha was standing, Mary
was seated at the feet of the Lord. Martha was complaining, Mary was silent. Between
these two forms of affection so differently expressed, it is impossible to hesitate in
declaring that of Mary better. Jesus of necessity said she was the preferred one, and
preferred with this promise that her better part would be reserved to her forever.
But who was this Mary who had succeeded in the love of Christ in reaching such
an exalted abdication of everything except contemplation and meditation! St. John is
careful to inform us from the second sentence of his account. Hardly has he named Mary
than he interrupts himself to tell us! It was this same Mary who anointed the Lord with
an unguent, and who dried his feet with her hair. Clearly, the apostle attaches some
significance to making her known to us, and in making her known by an action which
does not allow us to confuse her with any other woman of the Gospels. If any other
woman had anointed the Lord with an unguent, and dried his feet with her hair, this
action, being no longer applicable to a single individual, would no longer indicate clearly
that it was Mary of Bethany. Moreover, St. John wanted to indicate her clearly, and he
wanted to do so, because the very act he used to distinguish her from all other living
creatures, was an extraordinary act, unique, sublime in his eyes and worthy of being
remembered for all time. Several women followed Jesus and waited upon him; several
had for him a love worthy of the Son of Man and the Son of God, of the Son of God by
the chaste adoration of a supernatural tenderness, of the Son of Man by the care they took
of this infirm nature which he had assumed for us. But only one woman amongst them
all had had the inspiration to anoint with perfume and to dry his wet feet with her hair
like a linen cloth. This last detail reveals one soul alone. There are actions that can be
repeated by the same soul who has conceived them, but that cannot be copied by another.
Twice a woman threw herself at the feet of the Lord; twice a woman poured over them
the liquid of a priceless perfume and dried them with her hair, but even if the Gospel had
not hinted at it, even if tradition had been silent, we could be certain that there was here
one sole source of inspiration, and that, if the anointing occurred twice, there was only
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one heart to conceive of it and only one hand to perform it, just as there was only one
God to receive it.
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Chapter III
Concerning the First Anointing of Jesus by Mary of Bethany
(also known as Mary Magdalene)
Jesus Christ had embarked on his public ministry. It would last a short time, and
from the first moment one notices three kinds of people around him: simple disciples at
first, men converted by his words, looking upon and treating him as the Saviour of the
World; then, between the two, twelve apostles chosen to be the foundation of the spiritual
society of which their Master would be the eternal life; finally, amongst those apostles
and disciples, several souls predestined to be the friends and consolers of God made Man.
All doubtless were united to Him by the link of charity; all, apart from one traitor and
several deserters, loved Him with a sincere love which Jesus Christ returned, to all of
them, and which, greater for his apostles, permitted Him to tell them: “I have called you
my friends.” But it is evident, in reading the Gospels, that the apostles themselves, every
one of them chosen as they were and holding the first place in the works of redemption,
were not, however, by the privilege of their future role, the most dear to the heart which
had called them. Jesus, the image of our life, in the same way as he wanted to have a
mother, wanted to have friends who were friends not merely by dint of their office, but
out of an affection independent of any other principle but itself. St. John was one of
them, and he himself, in his Gospel, distinguishes himself from the others by these words
so beautiful in their grace and simplicity: "The disciple whom Jesus loved.”
We do not see in the gospel the first causes of the preference for St. John. He
was the son of a fisherman of Galilee, and had a brother called James. One day when
they were repairing their nets in a boat, Jesus saw them, and called them.
“Straightaway,” says the Gospel, “they left their nets and followed him.” That is all we
know of a friendship that makes of the fisherman John an apostle, an evangelist, a martyr,
the last of the prophets. However, this is not the case where Mary is concerned, the sister
of Lazarus and Martha, and here is the scene where she appears before us for the first
time, at the feet of the one who would make her the most famous among women, one
alone excepted.
The account is from St. Luke, in his 7th chapter.
36. A Pharisee having invited Jesus to eat with him, Jesus entered into the house
of the Pharisee and seated himself at the table.
37. And behold a woman who had been a sinner in the town, having known that
he was at the table in the house of the Pharisee, arrived with an alabaster vase filled with
perfume;
38. She waited behind him at his feet, weeping, and her tears began to fall on his
feet. She dried them with her hair, kissed his feet, and anointed them with perfume.
39. Seeing this, the Pharisee who had invited Jesus said to himself, "If this man
were a prophet he would assuredly have known what kind of woman is touching him and
that she is a sinner.”
15
40. And Jesus, responding to his thoughts, said to him, "Simon, I have something
to ask you.” And Simon said to him, "Master, say it."
41. "A lender had two debtors, one who owed him 500 denarii and the other 50.
42. "Neither one nor the other having any way to pay him, he remitted the debts
of both. Which one of these two then loved him more?"
43. Simon responded, "I suppose it was the one to whom he had given more.”
And Jesus said to him, "You have judged rightly."
44. And turning toward the woman, he said to Simon, "You see this woman? I
entered your house, and you did not wash my feet, but this woman has washed my feet
with her tears, and she has dried them with her hair.
45. "You did not greet me with a kiss, but this woman, from the time she entered,
has not ceased kissing my feet.
46. "You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with
perfume.
47. "This is why I say to you, many sins will be remitted to her because she has
loved much. The one who has been forgiven little shows little love."
48. Then he said to the woman, "Your sins are forgiven."
49. And those who were at the table began to say to themselves, "Who is this
who forgives sins?"
50. But Jesus said to the woman, "Your faith has saved you, go in peace."
Few pages in the Bible have left in the hearts of men so profound an impression,
and without doubt no friendship on earth has begun like this one. From the depths of the
deepest abjection to which her sex could fall, a woman lifts up her eyes towards divine
purity and does not despair of the beauty of her soul. Still a sinner, she has recognized
God in the flesh of the Son of Man and, full of shame, she decides to go right up to Him.
She takes in a vase of alabaster, symbol of light, a precious perfume. Perhaps it was the
very same vase from which she had extracted the means of adorning her features to make
them sinfully alluring and this perfume that she was carrying for another purpose,
perhaps she had looked in it for a means of increasing her shameful pleasures. She had
profaned everything and she could only present the ruins of herself before God. Thus she
enters without saying a word and leaves in the same fashion. Repentant, she will not
accuse herself before Him who knows everything; pardoned, she will express no words of
gratitude. The entire mystery is in her heart, and her silence, which is an act of faith and
of humility, is also the last effort of a soul that is overflowing and can do no more. It was
the custom in this voluptuous East to anoint the head with perfume, and it was a cult to
touch in this way a man with an anointing on the very summit of his beauty. Mary knew
this better than anyone, and often, during the time she lived in sin, she had honoured in
this way those enslaved by her charms. For this reason she is careful not to come near
the blessed head of our Saviour, but, like a servant girl used to performing the vilest
function, she leans down towards his feet, and, without touching them at first, she waters
them with her tears. Never, since the beginning of the world, had such tears fallen on the
feet of any man. People had adored them out of fear and out of love; people had washed
them in perfumed waters, and the daughters of kings had not disdained, during the times
of primitive hospitality, this homage to the weariness of the traveler, but it was the first
16
time that repentance sat in silence at the feet of a man, and let fall on to them tears
capable of ransoming a life.
Still crying and without waiting for a word of encouragement that is not uttered,
Mary lets her hair fall down about her head, and, making of its splendid tresses an
instrument of her penitence, she dries with its humiliated silk the tears she is shedding. It
was also the first time that a woman condemned or rather consecrated her hair to this
ministry of tenderness and expiation. Women had been known to cut their hair as a sign
of mourning; others had been seen offering it in an act of homage on the altar of some
divinity: but history, which has noted down everything unusual in the actions of
humanity, nowhere shows us repentance and sin creating together so moving an image of
themselves. It struck the disciple of love, fully initiated though he was into the inner
secrets of the holocaust; and wishing to transmit to future times what distinguishes Mary,
he found nothing better to paint her and to make her known than to say of her, “It was
this Mary who anointed the Saviour with a perfume and who dried his feet with her hair.”
That done, the sinner was emboldened. She approaches the feet of our Lord with
her dishonoured lips and covers them with kisses that efface the mark of all those she has
ever given and of those she has received. At the contact with this more than virginal
flesh the last fumes of old memories vanish; the inexpiable signs of degradation
disappear, and this transfigured mouth breathes only the living air of sanctity. Only then,
and so as to consummate all the mystery of penitence through love, she opens the
alabaster, that contains with the perfume the image of immortality, she pours it onto the
feet of the Saviour, on top of the tears and the kisses with which she has covered them;
her purified hands no longer fear touching them and anointing the Son of God, and the
house is filled with the virtue that comes out of the fragile vase and the immortal vase, of
alabaster and of the heart.
Who would believe it? The man has not understood this spectacle; he has
understood neither the repentance, nor the expiation, nor the love, nor the pardon, and his
sole thought is a doubt about the God who has just given such a penetrating revelation of
his presence.
It is then that there begins between Jesus Christ and the Pharisee this sublime
dialogue that opens with these words: “Simon, I have something to tell you,” that
terminates by these words: “Many sins are remitted to her because she has loved much.”
Ah! it is not in vain that posterity has heard it. It is not in vain that such acts and such
accents have illuminated our poor human nature. No, chaste tears of the converted
sinner, hair floating on the feet of the Saviour, sweet and bitter kisses of repentance, scent
poured on the spotless flesh of the Man-God, no, you have not been in vain! Generations
have come on the trace of this ineffable commerce between Sin and Justice, between
eternal death and eternal life. Other Marys have risen from the bed of vice; they have,
from century to century, approached the still-damp feet of the Saviour of Mankind; they
have wept there in their turn, they have in their turn attached the braids of their hair; they
have offered the kisses of a shame acquired through remorse, and poured out the perfume
left at the bottom of the vase where the first Mary had deposited it. The world has seen
17
it; enemy of the purity that resists it, it has not been able to refuse its admiration for the
purity that is reborn from the ashes, and, quite blind though it be, it has understood why
Jesus, wanting to choose friends on earth, had called the sinner after having chosen the
chastity of St. John, and it has pardoned the one who pronounced over a lost woman
these words: “Many sins are remitted to her because she has loved much.” Oh my God,
you are God, because your words have created virtue, and your friendship for a sinner has
created saints.
Such was the first anointing of Jesus by Mary of Bethany. It probably took place
at Bethany itself, because the Evangelist St. Luke, the only one to record it, says
expressly that the scene occurred in the house and at the table of a Pharisee called Simon.
Moreover, according to St. Matthew and St. Mark, the second anointing, of which we
shall speak shortly, occurred at Bethany, in the house and at the table of Simon the Leper,
and St. John adds that Lazarus was among the guests and that Mary waited on them.
This resemblance of name between Simon the Pharisee and Simon the Leper, in two
events that are similar, and which however differ in time and in their circumstances, leads
one to think that the two anointings occurred at the house of the same Simon, united by
close neighbourhood with the families of Lazarus and Martha, and consequently at
Bethany. At the time of the first, Mary was still a sinner, and it was her conversion that
introduced Jesus into the intimacy of Lazarus and of all his relations. Bethany became
thenceforth for the Saviour a refuge of tenderness and peace, the only place that seems to
have inspired in him, by the return journeys he made to it and the memories that he left
there, a very special fondness.
I have mentioned the sister of Lazarus and of Martha, the divine friend of Jesus
Christ, called Mary of Bethany. Nowhere, however, do the Gospels call her by this
name. It only distinguishes her in St. John, in the two famous chapters concerning the
resurrection of Lazarus and the last anointing, by her relationship to Lazarus and Martha.
There she is always Mary, the sister of Martha and of Lazarus. Everywhere else she
seems to vanish. One does not rediscover her, under this family designation, either at the
foot of the Cross, or at the tomb of the Saviour, or at the resurrection, or anywhere else.
This woman, so special one moment, whom you will soon see anointing for the second
time the feet of Jesus, on the eve of his passion, and of whom Jesus will say, to avenge
her for the jealousies of others of which she is the object: “Wherever this Gospel will be
preached throughout the world, what she has just done will be recounted to her glory”;
this woman vanishes. Two days before His Passion, Jesus was still saying about her and
her precious perfume that she had just poured over him, “Let her do it, and let her be free
to conserve it for the day of my burial.” However, on the day of his burial, the sister of
Martha and of Lazarus does not appear. At Bethany she is everything; outside Bethany
she is nothing.
Clearly, that is not possible. Mary of Bethany has a name that ought to be
famous, a name occurring in every page of the Gospels; and if at the time of the
happenings at Bethany it is not pronounced, it is because in this place, the place itself
indicates her name and names her in an unmistakable fashion.
18
The Gospels know only two Marys, apart from the Mother of God, Mary
Magdalene, from whom St. Luke says that the Saviour “had chased seven demons,” and
Mary, sister of the very holy Virgin, on one occasion called Mary of Cleophas, from the
name of her husband, and one other Mary of James and Joseph, from the names of her
children. That is why St. Matthew, in speaking of the women who were present at the
burial of the Saviour, says as if it were the most natural thing in the world, which could
mislead nobody, “There were present there Mary Magdalene and the other Mary.” And
later, on the morning of the Resurrection, “Mary Magdalene and the other Mary came to
visit the tomb.” If, in addition to Mary Magdalene and Mary the sister of the very holy
Virgin, there had been another Mary there, sister of Martha and of Lazarus, it is clear that
the language of the Evangelist would have been inexact and even false. For him, and
consequently for all the Evangelical world, there were in the concerns of the Saviour,
after Mary his mother, only two other Marys, and thus logically Mary of Bethany was
one of the two, either Mary Magdalene, or Mary of Cleophas. But she was not Mary of
Cleophas, sister of the very holy Virgin; she is, therefore, Mary Magdalene.
This is also what is affirmed by tradition, the liturgy of the Church, and the most
ancient monuments elevated to the memory of Mary Magdalene. Their language shows
us in the unity of the same glory the sinner weeping at the feet of Jesus and drying them
with her hair, the sister of Lazarus assisting at the resurrection of her brother, the faithful
friend standing at the Passion and, at the death of her Beloved following him to the tomb,
and thus earning the right to see before anyone else the splendor of the Resurrection.
Any division of this glory is chimerical, contrary to Scripture, to the memory of the ages,
to the piety of the Saints to the universal cult that puts before us, everywhere under our
eyes and in our soul, the image of a single woman in whom are realized the most moving
mysteries of penitence and friendship.
Mary was called Magdalene from the town of Magdala, on the shores of Lake
Galilee, either because she came from there, or because she had lived there a long time.
What is certain, is that she had inhabited Galilee; because St. Matthew and St. Mark
mention particularly that she was of the number of the women who had followed Jesus
from Galilee and who waited on him. That is why several commentators have thought
that her conversion took place at Magdala, and that Simon the Pharisee, in whose house
the first anointing took place, was another person from Simon the Leper, at whose house
the second occurred. Whatever of these conjectures may be right, Mary Magdalene,
having repented of her mistakes and in the intervals between following Jesus, lived at
Bethany, near her brother and sister, and the tradition of the area is that her house there
was separate from that of Lazarus and of Martha.
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Chapter IV
Concerning the Second Anointing of Jesus by Mary Magdalene
But the hour was drawing near when the Son of God was obliged to complete the
redemption of the world by the sacrifice of His life, and put to the test by misfortune the
fidelity of those he had chosen and especially loved. Six days before this Easter, that
would be the last one of the old world and the first of the new, he came to Bethany, and
on this very day, on the eve of his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, supper was prepared
for him in the house of an individual whom the Gospel calls Simon the Leper. Lazarus
was amongst the guests and Martha, always active, bustling, waited on them. It was not
the last and supernatural supper that would immediately precede the death of the Saviour,
and conclude by the institution of the Eucharist all those sources of grace that he had
made to gush out upon the work; this one was the supper of friendship, the last meal
before the great week of the Passion, that was opening on the following day. Jesus Christ
had only six days to live of His life on earth, and in a few hours he was going to appear in
Jerusalem as its king, while waiting for the time to die there soon as its God. St. John
has indicated in a deliberate manner the moment of this pause at Bethany, at the entrance
to the Via Dolorosa of the Son of Man: “Six days before Easter,” he writes, “Jesus came
to Bethany, in the place where Lazarus had died and He had revived him, and they
prepared a supper for Him there. Martha waited on them, and Lazarus was one of the
guests reclining beside Him.”
Since Jesus Christ, the true Passover, died on a Friday, a little before the last hour
of the day, we must conclude that the supper at Bethany took place on a Saturday
evening. It took place, not at the house of Lazarus or of one of his two sisters, but in the
house of Simon the Leper. This choice at such a moment proves that Simon was not
unknown to Jesus Christ or to the family of Lazarus, and confirms us in the conviction
that it was the same Simon who had been a witness and actor, three years earlier, to the
conversion of Mary Magdalene.
The latter is not named amongst the guests or the servants. Her tenderness,
informed by a light from above, told her that this meal had about it a valedictory nature
and that they were at the threshold of happenings of overwhelming significance. She
therefore took in an alabaster vase, as she had on the first occasion, a precious ointment,
that St. John says was spikenard, and she went into the room where the meal was taking
place. It was no longer this woman in whom youth and beauty ill-disguised the masks of
vice and who came up timidly to the feet of Christ, like a servant girl, to anoint them with
her tears and then to dry them. Three years of grace had passed over her and it was
sanctity with which her whole person was robed as with a divine aura. She entered then,
and, breaking the alabaster vase she held in her hands, she poured the ointment over the
head of the Saviour. Magdalene broke the vase, because she understood that all was
consummated, and that never again would our Lord receive from the piety of mankind a
similar homage. This action of despair and of a prophetic love performed, Mary
remembers her former degradation, and running up to the feet of Jesus, she pours onto
them with a fragment of the vase the rest of the ointment that she dries with her hair. But
the Gospel no longer speaks of her tears. She must have shed them for the last time on
20
another occasion and in another place. Here, strength and serenity were what were called
for; it was no longer the moment of forgiveness, and it was not yet the moment of the
sepulchre.
Eternal wretchedness of man’s condition! This time it is no longer the Pharisee
who begins to doubt God because he sees him being touched by a sinful woman; it is the
disciples themselves who are outraged at seeing a very precious ointment poured over the
head of their Master, and on this head that they will soon see under a crown of thorns.
“To what good,” they ask among themselves, “is the loss of the ointment? It could have
been sold for over 300 denarii and the money given to the poor.” One recognizes the
feebleness of our intellect before the mysteries of God. Jesus does not take offense at
their small faith; he says to them kindly, “Let her alone, why do you upset her? It is a
good deed she has accomplished through me; you will always have the poor with you,
and, when you want to, you will be able to do them good, but me you will not have
always. This woman has done what she could with what she had at her disposal, and she
has anointed my body for burial in advance. Verily, I say unto you, wherever this Gospel
will be preached, throughout the world, it will be said of her, to her glory, what she has
just done.”
One senses in the words a note of sadness, and one also sees in them the
superiority of Mary Magdalene in love and in knowledge. What words have already been
said of this woman, and from what a mouth! “Mary’s sins will be forgiven her because
she has loved much. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from
her. Wherever the Gospel will be preached, it will be said of her, to her glory, what she
has just done.”
We have said that the supper at Bethany was the supper of friendship; it ended in
betrayal. Scarcely had the Saviour uttered the words where he justified the purity of
Mary Magdalene, when the Gospel adds: “Then one of the twelve, who was called Judas
Iscariot, went to find the high priests and said to them, ‘What will you give me if I hand
him over to you?’ And they agreed with him on 30 pieces of silver.”
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Chapter V
Of Mary Magdalene at the Cross and at the Tomb of Jesus
There remained the cross and the tomb; it was there that Eternity waited for God
and Man. The cross and the tomb still live; but they only concern man. At the time of
which I speak, they were both the great concern of man and the great concern of God.
Let us approach them, therefore, the cross first, like the centre where it has pleased the
eternal wisdom to attach for us light, love and life. Then it was, the day following the
acclamation of Jerusalem, no more than a horrible instrument, a torture of pain and
opprobrium. It horrified the world, and yet it was this that should have reassured it; it
was damned, and it was He would bless it. But this transfiguration had not yet taken
place, and the cross of Calvary, the cross of the Son of Man, had still on this particular
day all of its horror and all its nakedness. Let us look to see who we will find faithful to
this rendezvous of Heaven and of Earth.
God is not there, because the Son laments that his Father has abandoned him. The
angel of the Garden of Olives is not there either, and when the Crucified One lets these
words escape his lips: “I am thirsty,” it is not the invisible hand of a pure spirit that
presents the cup to him. Nothing supernatural has yet appeared. The air is calm; the sun
shines in the splendour of the East; Mt. Sion does not moan; the temple is tranquil, and
the veil that covers the Holy of Holies is unmoved; it is the world’s hour, and the world is
present. Here are the executioners who have finished their work and who are resting;
beside them the Pharisees, who have not finished theirs, and who look in a derisory
manner at the One who had exposed the hypocrisy behind their virtues; farther off, the
Roman guard and the centurion, who commands it, his eye set, his heart troubled by a
presentiment that preoccupies him; but that has not yet enlightened him; finally the
passersby who shake their heads, and who, without bothering themselves any further
about the spectacle, say gaily: “Go on! You who destroy the temple of God and who
will rebuild it in three days, save yourself!” Everywhere, betrayal, silence, outrage,
blasphemy; and yet it is the Son of God who is there, the Saviour of the world, the King
of Time, the heir of everything that has ever been done, the one before whom every knee
will bend in the Heavens, on Earth and in the lowest depth of Hell! Ah! are none of his
friends there, and will there not come from amongst the living and the dead any friend to
recognize him and to greet him in the divinity of his wretchedness?
Oh! No, not all of them are absent. If God is absent by a decision of his wisdom
and of his justice, if he has struck with terror, by another decree, the majority of those
whom His Son loved, nevertheless there remains a group of them at the foot of his Cross,
and his eyes, in lowering themselves, can make out His Mother; Mary of Cleophas, his
mother’s sister; Salome, the mother of the children of Zebedee; Mary Magdalene; the
apostle St. John; and several faithful women who are not named, but who had followed
and served him. That was all there was of the world’s love at the foot of the Cross. But
it is enough; it is enough for the Saviour to recognize all those who had loved him before
his coming on to the Earth, and all those who would love him one day. He saw in his
Mother, the Virgin par excellence, the entire assembly of Virgins; in Mary of Cleophas
and in Salome, the entire chorus of mothers and of Christian wives; in St. John the model
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of the apostles, the martyrs, the prophets, all young men dedicated to chastity, and of men
drawing from the Faith the supernatural dignity of all human offices; he saw finally, in
Mary Magdalene, the limitless and sacred multitude of converted sinners rediscovering in
penitence the nuptial robe dipped in the blood of the Lamb.
At the sight of this little flock, pusillus grex, as he himself had called the ocean of
his elect, the Saviour remains silent with everyone, except his mother and St. John. He
says to his mother: “Woman, behold your Son”; to St. John, “Behold your mother!” On
the cross these were the only words related to simple human affection. All His other
words were concerned with eternal life and went back to it. Mary Magdalene was given
no more attention than the rest; it was not the Passion that was supposed to be her
moment of triumph, nor the nature of her sanctity. Jesus Christ was waiting for her on
another theatre, at a more gentle moment; and it was there that, putting the seal on his
predestination, reserved for her grace which no other person received then or has
obtained still.
The tomb opened beneath the Cross. The Son of Man lay in it like one of us,
guarded by soldiers as if death had not sufficed to do away with his power, and as if a
mysterious victory would have been able to emerge from his tomb. The tomb, in effect,
remains if not the object of hope, at least the rendezvous of a piety that outlives
everything else. Mary Magdalene is there; she is there first, as if in a place that is her
own, and of which she has merited the right to guard by the prophetic tenderness of her
double anointing. And the Evangelists give her in this encounter the primary role. From
the very evening of the Passion, which indicates that she has not left Calvary, she
observes the spot where the body of the Lord is deposited. It is St. Mark who tells us
this expressly. The Sabbath day over, when the dawn of Sunday had not yet risen, she
leaves with the holy women, all carrying spices and perfumes. But the first rays of the
Sun show them the stone of the tomb pushed to the side and the tomb empty. While they
abandon themselves to a feeling of consternation, without the thought coming to them of
the mystery that has taken place, two angels appear to them, saying: “Why do you look
among the dead for he who is living? He is no longer here, he has risen up from the
dead.” Perturbed, amazed, the holy women run to Jerusalem to report what they have
seen and heard. The apostles listen to them as if their words were words of delirium,
deliramenta. Nevertheless, St. Peter and St. John hurry off; Magdalene alone follows
them. They reach the monument; they enter: nothing. The Shroud is on the stone, the
covering of the head separate from it. The two apostles do not know what to think, and
return. No one on Earth yet understood what had happened, neither St. Peter, nor St.
John, nor Mary Magdalene. A veil was over all their eyes. Where is Jesus? Magdalene
has remained alone, alone of the holy women, alone of the apostles, alone of all, with this
tomb empty and much loved. O moment of Love at grips with Death, and not knowing
yet that death is conquered!
There is only St. John to tell us what is going to be. Let us listen to him:
11. Mary stayed in outside near the sepulchre, and cried. And while we think,
she bends down to see within the sepulchre;
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12. And she saw two angels dressed in white, seated at one at the head and the
other at the feet there where the body had been placed.
13. They said to her, "Woman, why do you weep?” She said to them, "Because
they have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have placed him."
14. And saying this, she turned around, and she sought Jesus there; but she did
not know that it was Jesus.
15. Jesus said to her, "Woman, why do you cry? Whom are you seeking?” And
she, thinking that this was the gardener, said to him, "Lord, if it was you who took him,
tell me where you have put him and I will take him away."
16. Jesus said to her, "Mary.” Mary turning around, said to him, "Master."
17. Jesus said to her, "Do not touch me because I have not yet ascended to my
Father; but go to find my brothers and tell them, I am ascending to my Father and your
Father, to my God and your God."
18. Mary Magdalene went then and told the disciples, "I have seen the Lord, and
he has told me these things."
Thus, in this solemn moment of the resurrection of the Saviour, a moment that
settled everything, the victory of God over the world and of Life over Death, it is not to
his mother that Jesus appears first; it is not to St. Peter, the foundation of the Church and
the summit of theology; it is not to St. John, the well-loved disciple; it is to Mary
Magdalene. That is to say, to the converted sinner, to Sin become Love through
penitence. The Saviour had said before: “There is more joy in Heaven over a sinner who
repents than over 99 just, who have no need of repentance.” But it was a truly sublime
translation of these words, the privilege accorded to Mary Magdalene to see first the Son
of Man risen from the tomb, conqueror of the Devil, of Sin, of the world, of death, and to
acquire first, by this view, the certitude and the consolation of the eternal salvation of
mankind. Her degree of love must have earned the glory of His appearance, and what
feelings on her part must have welcomed this reward of love! I only half understand it, I
glimpse it, I adore it, and, if I can do no more, at least I pull myself short with a reflection
that makes me turn toward these words of the Gospel: “He appeared first to Mary
Magdalene.” It is there, on the forehead of this illustrious and fortunate woman, a star
that does not pale, and that will make to rejoice till the end of time all those who study it,
with a soul enlightened by God, the mysteries of his dealings with us.
“He appeared first to Mary Magdalene,” and if we cannot well penetrate
everything that took place in the heart of one and of the other, in the heart of God who
gave to his dearest friend on earth the first fruits of his regained life, and in the heart of
the creature who received from her God the mark of an unheard-of preference, at least we
can follow the Gospel with the humility of tender admiration, and search there, in the
shadow of our own shortcomings, the imperfect joy that is allowed us here below.
Up to now, all the words that we have heard on the subject of Mary Magdalene
have not been addressed to her directly. When Jesus says of her, “Mary’s sins will be
remitted to her because she has loved much,” it is to Simon the Pharisee that he is so
saying. When he says, “Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away
from her,” it is to Martha that he replies. When he says: “Wherever this Gospel will be
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preached, throughout the world, it will be narrated of her, to her glory, what she has just
done,” it is to his disciples that he gives this notice. Here for the first time, at the
entrance to the tomb, on the dawn of his resurrection, Jesus speaks directly to Mary, and
he talks to her, not to resume the discussion except in the inaccessible region where his
Ascension will carry him. It is the crowning, the farewell, the page where Magdalene is
about to disappear from the Gospels and to enter for the remainder of her life the somber
avenues of history. Let us then kiss with love these last words fallen from the lips of
Christ into the soul of his friend, and let us ponder them for the pleasure of our faith and
the charm of our unachieved pilgrimage.
“Woman, why do you weep?” He had not said this to her, when on the day of her
conversion she wept at his feet. Now the time for tears is over; penitence, the cross, the
tomb, all have disappeared in the triumphal splendour of the Resurrection. Mary must
only shed those tears that are eternal in the hearts of saints, because God causes them and
a state of ecstasy that sheds them.
“Who are you looking for?” There is nothing any more to look for, Mary: You
have found the one whom you will never lose. You will no longer see him on the cross
between the hands of death. You will go no more to his tomb to embalm him in the
perfume of charity. You will no longer demand him from anybody on Earth, or from
anyone in Heaven, or from Him least of all; because He is your soul, and your soul is
Him. Separated briefly, you have come together in a place where there is no longer
space, no longer a barrier, no more shadows, no more of anything that impedes union and
unity. You are one as he wished it, one as you hoped to be, one as God is God in his Son,
at one with the essence that you inhabit by Grace and that you will inhabit one day by
glory.
“Mary!” Oh! What a tone there was in this word! a tone of reproach, because
Magdalene had not recognized Jesus, through its tone of reproach revealing the speaker’s
identity. “Mary!” Alas! Even on earth, how our own name is sweet-sounding on the
mouth of a friend, and how far it goes to the sorrowful depths of our being! And if it
were God who pronounced it in a low voice, if it were God who had died for us, risen for
us, who called us by our name, what echo would it not stir in the infinite depth of our
wretchedness! Mary Magdalene heard everything in the utterance of her name; she heard
the mystery of the Resurrection, which she did not understand, she heard the love of her
Saviour and in this love she recognized Him. “Master!” she replied. A word was
enough for her, as a word has been enough for the Son of God. The more souls love one
another, the more their language is brief.
“Do not touch me, because I have not yet ascended to my Father.” Twice Jesus
Christ had let Mary Magdalene touch him, and twice he had praised her for it. And now,
after his Resurrection, when his body is already transfigured by a higher stage of life, he
forbids the chaste embrace of Mary. He does not wish these hands that had previously
poured ointment on his feet and head to come near him. Why this unexpected austerity,
and how can the Resurrection restrain the old familiarity of a well-tried tenderness? It is
because Jesus is no longer who he was, the object for everyone of a physical contact that
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encourages faith and of a charity that involves itself with earthly discourse. He is
between earth and heaven, still visible for several days, but going towards His Father, and
it is nowhere else but there, there where all flesh will be transformed like his own, that he
wants to be touched and possessed by his own friend. He gives Mary Magdalene, by this
harsh lesson, an indication that she must aspire higher, and that henceforth Bethany is in
the bosom of the Father who sent his Son, and where the Son is going to rejoin him to
prepare there for his friends the place of an unending embrace. Do not touch the Son of
Man, because He has not yet ascended to the Father, and you yourself, Mary, you are not
yet risen there either. Your lips, all pure though they may be, all suffused with the fire
that the seraph of penitence and the seraph of love have left there, are not capable of
giving to the resurrected body, to the glorious body of Jesus, the stigmata of the
tenderness purified by death. You must die with Jesus so as to touch Jesus, only then you
and he will be similar; then you will bear to his feet the ointment of the Resurrection, and
you will place there the virginal breath of reconquered immortality.
“Go and find my brothers and tell them I ascend to my Father and your Father,
toward my God and your God.” These are the last words of the Saviour to Mary
Magdalene, and these words give her, in preference to everyone else, the revelation of the
mystery that is going to conclude the passage of the Son of God amongst us and the work
of our redemption, Apostle of the Ascension near to the apostles themselves, Magdalene
will retain the character for the rest of her life, and we will see her tender towards Christ
vanished among the clouds, by heights that will not surprise because we believe in the
wonders of a love that aspires upward; we believe in the words of a charity that comes
down to earth.
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Chapter VI
Concerning Mary Magdalene in Provence
Jesus is no longer of this world in visible form. He has left the Apostles, his
Mother, his personal friends, but in providing to each of them a life and a death that He
had predestined. St. Peter dies in Rome the same mode of death as his Master; all of the
Apostles confirm their faith by martyrdom. St. John, himself, is not entirely spared; he
suffers in Rome, in front of the Latin Gate, a painful process of torture, and only escapes
death by conserving the glory of a willing martyrdom. However, it is clear that the
Saviour watches over him with the memory of the special affection he bore him; escaping
from the ordeal by a miracle, and from exile by the overthrow of a hated tyrant, he
prolongs his days into an old age which attracts the attention of the entire Church, and
which allows him to render to the divinity of Jesus Christ, in the last and most sublime of
the Gospels, an irrefutable testimony. He belongs to him also, by a privilege unique in
the New Testament, to see prophetically the future of the Church, and he dictates the
revelation under a form which will enlighten one day and fortify, in their tribulation, in
the Elect of the end of time. He dies after that, wrapped in peace and only knowing how
to repeat to Christians these words fallen from the mouth of Jesus Christ: "My children,
love one another."
The Mother of Jesus does not survive by so many years the Resurrection and the
Ascension of her beloved Son. She feels herself borne towards Him by an aspiration that
unbinds in the depths of her soul everything which held it captive, and from his tomb,
visited by him, she mounts to the throne from where she reigns for ever over the angels
and over mankind saved by the fruit of her womb.
Like the Mother of God and like St. John, Mary Magdalene will not finish her
days by martyrdom. She will also live in the tranquil benediction of her love. She will
live at the feet of the vanished Christ, as she lived in Bethany and in Calvary, a lover
accustomed to the delights of contemplation, and having no other need but to look with
her soul at the One whom she looked upon in other times through the transparent veil of
mortal flesh. But what famous or obscure havens will have been prepared for her? Where
will she hide the blessed remainder of her existence? Are they to be the deserts of the
East, the river banks of the Jordan, Mt. Sion, the field after the harvest of Nazareth or of
Bethlehem, which will be the last witnesses of her inaccessible charity? Jesus Christ
bequeathed his Mother to Jerusalem, St. Peter to Rome, St. John to Asia --- to whom
will he have bequeathed Mary Magdalene?
We know already, it is France who received from the hands of God this part of the
Testament of His Son. Tradition, history, the monuments tell it to us clearly, and
Providence has taken care to give to their testimony an invincible clarity. One cannot
bring one's feet down on the soil of Provence without encountering at each step the
memory of St. Mary Magdalene. Everywhere present, she does not live there under the
form of an isolated accident; she is linked to the soil by the fact which holds the first
place in the history of all Christian people, by the great events of their conversion, and
nothing doubtless ought to have perpetuated more obstinately in the memory of a race
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and of a country, than this change brought to its beliefs and customs by a new cult,
proscribed, and triumphant by dint of its own virtue. In addition, there is no Christian
nation which has not kept the memory of its first Apostles, which has not honored their
tombs, built churches in their name, invoked their help, and which does not laugh at the
vain reasonings of a blind science against this popular and all-powerful tradition.
Provence was not a barbarous grouping of an insignificant people when Christianity
appeared there; it was since more than a century a Roman province. It had received from
its masters all the culture of Rome, and from its origin all that of Greece. It was
connected by Marseilles to all the seaports of the Mediterranean, and untiring vessels
conveyed to it from then on the tribute of the furthest shores. When, then, the first sound
of the Gospels struck its ears, it could not be in error about those who were bringing to it
from the East this great revelation. It knew them, judged them, and, converted by them to
the new law, their names were sacred to them as no name had been for them until that
moment. Who could doubt it? Who does not see that a people, above all when it is a
question of its religion, has a more reliable memory than that of a man, and that age,
instead of altering it, renews it without ceasing? That which is engraved on the altar by
worship and in the heart by prayer, lasts longer than marble and than bronze, and the
kings who have only history to live by have assuredly less than the soul of generations
gives to their apostles.
From whom then does Provence date its faith? To whom does it give thanks, after
nineteen centuries, for having received, on the day after the proclamation of the Gospels,
a ray of the light that had just risen over the deep shadows of humankind? It gives thanks
to this illustrious family of Bethany which had had Jesus Christ as a guest and as friend to
Lazarus, to Martha, to Mary Magdalene and to their companions Trophime and Maximin.
These are the names that the sons have learned from their fathers, and which the fathers
have received from the knowledge of their ancestors. Marseilles wishes that St. Lazarus
had been its first bishop; Aix attributes this glory to St. Maximin, Arles to St. Trophime;
Avignon and Tarascon name St. Martha as the apostle who delivered them from error;
and St. Mary Magdalene, united to all by a memory which is supported by this which
goes beyond it, hovers over the whole Church of Provence, like the sovereign of the
apostolate which established it.
The monuments respond to the acclamation of the centuries. It is in vain that the
barbarians have covered Provence with their fleets; it is in vain that, renewing their
ferocity once it was appeased, the Saracens have added to the ruins already there long and
terrible scimitar blows: those ruins already twice consummated have not been able to
prevail against the monuments that the people and Providence have destined to perpetuate
the memory of the holy founder of the Church of Provence. Marseilles still sees, in the
cavern of the ancient abbey of St. Victor, the crypt where there assembled under St.
Lazarus the first Christians which it had formed for God, and where rested the very body
of its first bishop, right up to the day when he was plucked away from the ravages of the
followers of Islam by a translation with which the Church of Autun was endowed.
Tarascon venerates the tomb where the relics of St. Martha are enclosed, where it keeps
them still, and of which the mark, stronger than time, enables the pilgrim to recognize,
despite its mutilation, the very living scene of the resurrection of Lazarus. Two other
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tombs, still more famous, two tombs reunited in the same crypt by a fraternal piety, recall
to the traveler that St. Magdalene lay there opposite St. Maximin, and the name even of
St. Maximin, given to the spot when this double and unique burial took place, testified to
the impression which it produced in the people -- an impression that has never been
extinguished. It is there that St. Mary Magdalene ended her pilgrimage; it is there that
St. Maximin buried her in an alabaster sepulchre, in memory of that other alabaster
where the saint had twice enclosed the ointment with which she anointed the Savior; it is
there that St.Maximin himself wanted his mortal remains to be deposited, beside those
other remains so dear to his heart, to Jesus Christ, to the angels, and to mankind and
where they came in quest of it -- a veneration that will soon be twenty centuries old.
The tomb of St. Maximin stands for the apostolic mission that was given to him
by Jesus Christ. That of St. Magdalene retains the trace of the various characteristics of
the life of the Son of God, and on a frieze that the piety of the faithful has more than
mutilated, one could see at one time, according to venerable and reliable testimonies, the
ointment that she poured on her beloved Master.
All of these tombs, linked together by the divine relationships of Time, of people
and of sanctity, convey the impression of the first period of Christianity. One recognizes
first of all the Roman form, and this unusual mixture of Christian subjects with the
symbols of idolatry, that was familiar to this epoch. There is no archaeologist who has
not been struck by it, and the avowals of the least credulous have confirmed people in the
respect they attach to these old and faithful witnesses.
They are not the only ones. The liturgy of a multitude of churches is in accord
with them and with the tradition, and finally history itself, supporting tradition, the
monuments and the liturgy, has put the seal of a final demonstration on all these
certainties. For a long time it was believed that the pen of no classical writer had touched
upon the life of St. Mary Magdalene and engraved the important events of her life into
the solid block of history. Against the belief of people through the ages, the mute
language of marble, the feasts and lessons of the Church, the chain of all this proof -- was
opposed the primitive and continuous silence of human writings. It was asked where was
the history of St. Magdalene and if before the 11th or 12th century there had been found
in the libraries of Europe any trace of a biography consecrated to a woman who ought so
naturally to have seduced the heart and to have inspired the genius of saints. At Oxford,
in one of the 24 colleges of this famous university, a college still dedicated today to St.
Mary Magdalene, pious hands have discovered a manuscript bearing the name of RabanMaur, Archbishop of Mainz at the beginning of the ninth century, and containing the life
of St. Martha and of St. Mary Magdalene. The authenticity of this manuscript has been
confirmed by the collection of letters that in the archaeological world inspire confidence
in the date of the book, its authenticity and its integrity.
We will not enter into these details, which are to be found elsewhere, and we will
limit ourselves to saying that Raban-Maur was, in the 9th century, by his knowledge, his
piety, his influence, his renown and his dignities, one of the most considerable men of his
time. Abbot of Fuld for 20 years, then retired voluntarily, by the resignation of this
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office, into a deep solitude, then called despite himself to the archbishopric of Mainz, he
shines out in his century by everything that can recommend him to posterity, the
exactitude and sincerity of a historian. His biography of St. Martha and of St. Mary
Magdalene is sober, he follows the Gospels step by step, and when the Gospel vanishes
with the ascension of our Savior, he draws on writings that he declares to be ancient and
to have been the foundation of his account.
And, moreover, these ancient writings have been rediscovered as have his own;
they have been unearthed in the public libraries of Paris: pages all the more precious and
venerated in that in comparing them to the history of Raban-Maur, one recognizes them
almost word for word. They are of the kind, according to the testimony of the
Archbishop of Mainz, that are well before the ninth century, since he calls them ancient,
and they are in effect, in their naturalness and their brevity, of the taste of a century that
had not yet known, with regard to saints, the vain amplifications of a false rhetoric. They
are thought to be of the fifth and sixth centuries, that is to say from an epoch where all the
monuments of St. Magdalene's apostolate and of her companions in Provence were still
young, where the invasion of the barbarians and that of the Saracens had not yet
destroyed the very names of our churches, from which, as a consequence, it had been
easy to draw, in order to write them, annals true and certain.
It is thus that time, instead of weakening the glory of St. Mary Magdalene, has
prepared for her resurrection. What is happening today for the Christian Bible, whose
veracity has been confirmed by the same lapse of time, has happened also for the Bible of
St. Mary Magdalene. A deeper science has reclothed the tradition in a more vivid light,
and, taking up henceforth the life of our dear and illustrious saint at the empty sepulchre
of the Savior, we can follow its course in this blessed land of Provence.
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Chapter VII
Of St. Mary Magdalene at Sainte-Baume and at St. Maximin
The persecution of Christianity began with persecution of Jesus Christ. It did not
delay in spreading from around his tomb. St. Stephen was, after his Master, the second
martyr, and soon he who would become St.Paul carried the persecution right up to the
walls of Damascus, until he himself became an illustrious victim. Blood calls for blood,
and one does not stop along this route until one is shifted from it by the flood that always
gushes up and that finally reaches the thighs of those who have formed it. Christianity
received its baptism in the same waters as its founder, and its first disciples, dispersed by
the cross from which they were born, carried a long distance the word that was to
enlighten the world and the blood that was to purify it. It was the second emigration of
the human species. The first had formed peoples, the second was going to form the
Church. Whoever had witnessed these unknown men go out of Jerusalem by all its gates
and take the way of all the winds, would doubtless have taken them for common
travelers. God alone knew the secret of the wind that blew them, and the difference
between this departure and that from Babel.
A ship amongst others sailed away from the beautiful shores that extend from
Mount Carmel to the mouth of the Nile. It carried in its narrow confines the family of
Bethany, and several families who had joined themselves to the benediction emanating
from it. The hand that directed all the apostles conducted them too, and under its
invisible impulse, hidden by that of the waves, they alighted at a town that was from
thenceforth one of the portals of Europe. Marseilles saw them enter without knowing the
treasure that was landing with them. Whoever had named to it Lazarus, Mary
Magdalene, Martha would have said nothing to its ear, even less to its heart. Glory was
not born for Christianity; it came as an unknown, and those very same people who would
erect scaffolding to prepare triumphs for it, as yet knew neither its name nor its works.
Its power was hidden in its humility, and the Earth went past the Heavens without even
suspecting it.
Solitary places, underground crypts witnessed the august mysteries of the
Redemption of Man celebrated in the shadows. A small flock formed itself of the blood
transported from the Cross by those who had seen it flow. Sailors, perhaps, artisans, poor
women made up this church, born around the resurrected Bethany. Time ripened the seed
and brought it to fruition; Marseilles was finally moved by the rumours of the new
doctrine, and the blood of Lazarus gave it its first saint, its first martyr, and its first page
in the book of life wherein it still writes each day.
What was the part of Mary Magdalene in the apostolate of her brother, one does
not know. There only remains of her, in Marseilles, a memory, that of an altar that bears
her name in the caves of the abbey of St. Victor, a venerable and significant memory,
since these caves are the most ancient monument of the Christian faith at Marseilles, and
like its catacombs.
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It is at Aix that the traces of St. Mary Magdalene begin to grow more important;
there could still be seen, in the first years of this century, an oratory venerated for being
the one where she prayed with St. Maximin, the privileged companion of her pilgrimage.
It bore the name of Saint-Sauveur, and rose upon the lateral nave of the metropolitan
church, even though it broke the lines of the architecture, so powerful was the tradition
that looked upon it as the cradle of Christianity in the capital of Provence. But Aix, no
more than Marseilles, was the predestined spot where Jesus Christ was to await his old
and faithful friend to enable her to enjoy this role that she had preferred, and which none
might take away from her, as he had solemnly promised. This role was contemplation in
solitude.
This solitude existed. God, who has created everything with a view to the future,
and who has not designed a riverscape, erected a mountain, watered a valley or dug a sea
without knowing for what people and which souls he was working, God, in the Creation,
had thought of Mary Magdalene, and had made for her, deliberately, in a corner of the
Earth, a sanctuary. I have described it from the first page of this book. I have named
before all the Saint-Baume, as the centre where I call Christian hearts to rest themselves
from the world and to venerate a great mystery of God’s love. A grace drew Mary
Magdalene there, the same grace that had chosen her, a sinner, led her to the foot of the
Cross, and rendered her, at the gates of death, the first witness of the resurrection of the
Son of God. She came there as she had gone to Christ, by the same light and the same
movement. Thus were the deep retreats of the Thebaid peopled; thus St. Anthony
discovered, between the Nile and the Red Sea, the mountain of Kolsim, from which he
reigned over the deserts and over generations of cenobites; thus, from century to century,
the saints touched with their feet unknown lands, blessed them, rendered them fertile with
divine sweat, and sowed there that glory that survives everything else because it is not the
daughter of Time. Mary Magdalene was of the race of all these founders, and nearer than
them to the trunk from which they all emerged; she carried up to the sacred heights of the
Sainte-Baume a virtue that had no equal, so to leave there a memory that has no tomb.
The holy places are to the world what the stars are to the firmament, a source of
light, of warmth and life, and, when one asks oneself why God has consecrated such a
mountain or such a valley, one might as well ask why he has thrown to the summit of the
sky the still star that guides our sons and brothers on the waves of the ocean. Ah! Would
to God they were more frequent, these places where love has dwelt! Would to God that
our heart found more often on this cold earth cinders wherein to warm it! But it is of that
which is holy, as of that which is great, and if Grace is economical like nature, let us
know at least how to recognize her words and repudiate not her miracles!
St. Paul says, “I know a man in Christ, not fourteen years ago, was it in his body,
was it out of his body, I do not know, God knows, who has been lifted up to the third
Heaven; and I know a man, was it in his body or out of his body, I do not know, God
knows, who has been lifted right up to Paradise, and who has heard secret words that it is
not permitted man to hear.” [2nd letter to Corinthians, Ch. XII, vss. 2,3,4.] What St.
Paul was unable to say, nobody will say; but his very powerlessness shows us enough; it
gives us the force to follow Mary Magdalene in her solitude, and to assist there without
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surprise at the marvels of what she contemplated. There, separated from the men who
had crucified her Saviour and the Saviour of the world, she had only one thought, that of
seeing again the divine friend whom she had lost. For neither distance nor death breaks
true love; it digs the deeper into the soul the more it is deprived of an outlet. And if one
has witnessed certain lives wither over the tomb of a son or of a wife, what would be the
case for Mary Magdalene, who had held the feet of the Son of God, and who had loved
him beyond all natural friendship and every unction of Grace? Therefore I am not
astonished when tradition tells me that each day, and seven times a day, she was taken up
from her grotto to the top of the rock that covered it, to hear there what St. Paul declares
he had heard without being able to express it.
Holy ravishment! The man who is a stranger to God and to his Christ does not
understand you. Attached to the earth by all the weight of sin, he does not know what
God has of empire over a holy soul and what a holy soul has of control over its body. He
believes in the attraction of worlds, but he does not believe in the attraction of God.
Leave to him this science that flatters his pride, and for us, simple sons of the Gospel,
who have seen our God die for love and return to the heavens through the same love, let
us know that there is our road, our hope, our eternal future, and give thanks to God who
has given us in his saints, even here below, examples of the ecstasy into which we are
thrown by the vision of Him.
The Saint-Baume was the Tabor of St. Mary Magdalene. More fortunate than St.
Peter, who said to our Lord the day of His Transfiguration: “It is good for us to be here,
let us make three tents,” Magdalene received this tent that was refused to the Prince of
the Apostles. She lived there in solitude, between the penances of the grotto and
ecstasies on high. Nothing has changed there, any more than at Tabor. The faith,
respectful adorer of all memories of greatness, still inhabits the two mountains, and from
their immaculate peaks, she looks on high, upon the God who visited them.
For thirty years God gave this spectacle to his angels so as to leave a memory for
the rest of time. For thirty years Mary Magdalene went from a state of penance to one of
glory and from one of glory to one of penance, and reunited in those alternating states the
double life that she had led, that of the sinner and that of the friend of Jesus. In the
depths of her grotto, behind a venerated grille, there rises up a rock where, tradition
reports, she used to pray, and which alone, in this spot humid throughout, preserves a
pious and incorrupt dryness. Outside, on the sheer side of the mountain and at its highest
point, but slightly to the left of the grotto, is the point marked by tradition as that where
Magdalene was lifted up each day. A chapel called St.-Pilon consecrates the site and
attracts to it the veneration of pilgrims.
There came, however, the hour when St. Magdalene must pass from this
terrestrial and intermittent ecstasy to the unchanging ecstasy of eternity. She knew it, and
for the last time, before dying, she wanted to receive in the form of the Eucharistic Bread
the Body and the Blood of her Saviour. When one leaves the parapet of the terrace that is
in front of the Sainte-Baume, behind one is a mountain that runs from west to east on a
line parallel to the Mediterranean. Opposite extends another chain, not as high and of a
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less-steep aspect, that seems to come from Marseilles, and which, near to the SainteBaume, terminates abruptly in a rapid slope: this is Mount Aurelien. Beyond, and as if
on the rear-guard of the horizon, rises up the wild and difficult outcrop of Sainte-Victoire,
the famous mountain at the foot of which Marius defied the Cimbians and the Teutons.
This triple rampart leaves no passage to the eye, unless it be towards the East. There
opens up a vast and deep plain, ending in the Alps, but which, near to the spectator, has
for peristyle another narrow and circular plain formed by hills that descend from Mount
Aurelien, from Sainte-Baume and from Sainte-Victoire. This is the plain of St.
Maximin, placed by a singular contrast between the two most dissimilar historical facts in
the world, between the name of Mary Magdalene and the name of Marius. St. Maximin
built an oratory there, driven by the same impulse that led Mary Magdalene to the SainteBaume. Both of them, one in the mountain, the other in the plain, could see the retreat
where God had brought them close together without distracting them.
When, therefore, the dweller of the heights felt the time of her call approaching,
she was, according to tradition, carried by angels to the edge of the Aurelian Way, at the
point where this Way cuts the route that still leads from Saint-Baume to St. Maximin.
The famous pillar, the Saint-Pilon, reminds the traveler of this memorable event in the
passage of the saint to the next world. One sees her there on the summit sustained by the
angels who seem to transfer her from one spot to another. Several steps away rises up the
humble oratory of St. Maximin, near the town called Teguleta in the itinerary of Antoine.
The bishop awaited there the friend of his Master; he received her, gave her the
Communion of the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ; overtaken by the sleep of death, she
slept in peace. S. Maximin laid her body in an alabaster tomb, and prepared his own
burial opposite the monument where he had buried the relics that would call down onto
this unknown corner of the world an immortal fame.
Such is the belief of people through the ages and the belief of the Church; such
the tradition, the history, the language of the places and the periods in time, and never did
more glory give authority to the miracles of God in one soul. We are going to see in
effect at this tomb a series of events which, by themselves alone, would be a
demonstration that there is there, under the stone, an admirable object of the Providence
and predilection of God.
Every sacred place should have a guard that preserves it from profanation and
oblivion. But during the first days of the Church, when persecution raged against it from
all sides, it was much that it had crypts, catacombs and sepulchres. There, below ground,
the Church concealed the blood of its martyrs, and an obscure piety alone watched over
this mysterious deposit. Several paintings badly traced out, several words badly written
sustained in these solitudes the vigilant memory of the faithful, and while the Caesars
surrounded their crimes with an exuberant immortality, the Christians, buried beneath
their palaces, raised to unknown virtues the humble bronze of a tranquil memory. But
came at last the century where the shadows of Christ were scattered. Having emerged
victorious from this other tomb, He appeared with his saints to a world astonished to see
him. The crypts opened, the catacombs were lit up, the tombs became temples, and a
guard, more certain than that which watched over the entrance to the Capitol or the
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Palatine, placed herself in front of these new glories to attest their origin and to
perpetuate their antiquity. Thus it was for the rock of Sainte-Baume and the grave of St.
Magdalene. From the fourth century, a breath of the Orient conveyed to the Gauls the
renown and the rules of the solitaries of the Thebaid. St. Martin at Tours, St. Honorat in
the isles of Lérons, the priest Cassian at Marseilles were the first promoters of the
cenobitic life amongst us. Cassian, the last of the three, visited the monasteries of Egypt,
and retraced in his celebrated writings their institutions and their customs. On his return
to Marseilles, his own country, he founded there the abbey of St. Victor, on the very
crypt where St. Lazarus had his tomb. But, in love with solitude where he had seen so
many grand spectacles, he sought out without delay a shelter where he could occasionally
flee the din of wars and of mankind. The Sainte-Baume would naturally touch his heart,
and doubtless nothing could better recall what he had admired beside the Nile. He came
there, then, with several of his followers, and placed there a guard that, for a thousand
years, from the fourth to the thirteenth century, was faithful to the memory and the relics
that Providence had confided to him. Established at the same time at the Sainte-Baume
and at St. Maximin, at the place of the ecstasy and of the burial, the Cassianite monks
proved themselves worthy of the choice that had been made of them for a double measure
of divine grace.
One can still see today, a little below Sainte-Baume towards the East, a hermitage
called the hermitage of Cassian, and close to it, a fountain of living water also called the
fountain of Cassian. The mountain that dominates this savage retreat bears the same
name. The shepherds who wander with their flocks on the escarpments round about have
no other method of designating the mountain, the hermitage or the fountain. They do not
know who Cassian is, but they repeat his name to the traveler, and the echo faithful to
tradition repeats it after them, without knowing any more than they do.
At the beginning of the eighth century, the Saracens hurled themselves upon
Provence, and strewed there in intervals a devastation that lasted for 300 years. The
Cassianites, fearful for the relics of St. Magdalene, made the crypt that contained them
disappear beneath a pile of sand and earth, and thus prepared, without intending it, a
future and magnificent revelation of the Saint. Not content with having concealed it from
sight and filled the burial ground, they went so far as to disturb the internal arrangements.
The body of St. Magdalene was placed at the bottom of the crypt, to the left, in an
alabaster tomb, and that of St. Maximin, on the right, facing the other. Then, a third and
a fourth tomb were added to the original monuments. Sidoine, bishop of Aix, had wished
to be buried in the crypt beside the founder of his church, and he had been deposited to
the right, on entering. Opposite, and consequently to the left, on the same side as St.
Magdalene, another marble received the relics that were called the holy innocents, either
because they had been conveyed from Palestine, or because they were simply the bodies
of children who died in infancy with the grace of baptism. Moreover the Cassianites, the
better to conceal from discovery the so-precious deposit entrusted to them, conveyed it
from the famous alabaster where it rested into the tomb of St. Sidoine, emptied
beforehand of the remains of this bishop, and placed there two inscriptions that should
bear witness one day to the truth of the body of St. Magdalene.
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This day was not near. Nearly six centuries rolled over these acts of fearful piety.
The ravages of the Saracens went on beyond everything that had been predicted, and,
when they finally came to an end, the memory of the spot where lay the remains of the
Saint had been obliterated. It was known that her remains were under the paving stones
of the basilica, and they were venerated there; but no authority, no hand was lifted to
draw her from the shadows that time had accumulated. God allowed this so as to render
more striking her reappearance, and also to give, while waiting, to the veneration of the
friend of his Son, a splendour that would fill France, Europe and Asia.
It was the eve of the Crusades. At that time, a rumor had spread little by little
around the abbey of Vézelay, in Burgundy. This abbey, founded in the ninth century by
Gerard of Roussillon, Count and Governor of Provence, had for a long time been without
renown. Towards the end of the eleventh century, either in all sincerity or else by
manipulation, the rumour spread that the body of St. Magdalene, removed from St.
Maximin by Gerard de Roussillon, was lying within the abbey walls under the high altar.
This rumour having taken firm root, the bishop of Autun, under whose jurisdiction the
abbey did not fall, it being under the immediate jurisdiction of the Holy See, but who was
nevertheless the diocesan bishop, believed it his duty to forbid the pilgrimages that were
beginning, because he did not share the conviction of the pilgrims. An appeal was made
to the Holy See. The sovereign Pontiff, Pascal II, overrode the bishop’s ruling in a bull
dated 1203 that authorized the pilgrimage, and called on every class of the French people
to go on it. It was a movement of which it is difficult to convey an idea. It seemed as if
all France rushed to Vézelay, and this spot became so renowned in the public mind and
amongst the pious, that Louis VII went there with St. Bernard in 1147, to preach the
Second Crusade. A mass of lords and knights pledged themselves to the Cross under the
impression made on them by the eloquence of the holy abbot of Clairvaux. From then
on, the veneration of St. Magdalene was closely associated with the enthusiasm for the
Crusades. Penitent sinners devoted to the deliverance of the Holy Sepulchre to atone for
their faults, the Crusaders found naturally in Mary Magdalene, the converted sinner, a
protectress of their arms, and they could not carry to His profaned sepulchre a name more
worthy of it than the name and the memory of the woman who had loved Jesus Christ so
much, and who had merited to see Him first, at the very entrance of His tomb, glorified
by the Resurrection. Europe thus gave back to Asia this treasure it had received from
her; Mary Magdalene returned to Bethany under the flags of the Christian faith, and her
name, mingled with the acclamation of victory or with the martyrdom of defeat,
reminded our knights of all the mysteries of which she had been the witness, and of
which they had desired for themselves on their battlefields the mournful and the
triumphant traces.
In 1190, Philip-Augustus and Richard Coeur de Lion arranged a rendezvous at
Vézelay, to prepare there the third expedition to the Holy Land. The same sentiments
produced there the same result. Later on, finally, when St. Louis was on the brink of
setting out a second time for the Orient, in 1267, he came to Vézelay to end the era of the
Crusades, and there to give to St. Magdalene an homage that was the last she would
receive in a spot that was not her own. Because, despite the influx of pilgrims and the
fame of the events that had occurred there, Time had not confirmed the error that had
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been the inspiration of them all. The protest of the bishop of Autun was still
remembered, and people began to ask on what proof was based the belief that the body of
St. Mary Magdalene had been conveyed from St. Maximin to Vézelay. One can find a
remarkable indication of this disposition of minds in the journey that St. Louis, on return
from his first Crusade in 1254, made to St. Maximin and to the Sainte-Baume, recounted
as follows in his Life by the Sire de Joinville: “After these things, the King left for
Hyères and went to the city of Aix-en-Provence for the honor of the blessed Magdalene,
who lay a short day’s journey away, and was in the Baume, in a very high rock, there
where it was said that St. Magdalene had lived as a hermit for a long space of time.” It is
impossible that Sire de Joinville was unacquainted with the pretensions of the abbey of
Vézelay, and yet, nevertheless, he says without hesitation that the body of St. Magdalene
lay at a short journey’s distance from Aix.
The secret of God could not remain obscure for much longer. The mistake of
Vézelay had exalted St. Magdalene and linked her memory to the greatest military and
religious movement seen in the world. It had also given a solemn consecration to the
certitude of her having come to Provence and of her burial at St. Maximin. There
remained to reconnect in St. Maximin itself the chain of this glory, and to render finally
to the pity and to the sight of the entire universe the undoubted relics of the illustrious
penitent. For this there were required unsullied hands, a heart known to God and to man,
sovereign authority, outstanding testimonials of the truth – and we will see in fact that
Providence had thought of this from far back.
St. Louis had a nephew, born of his brother Charles of Aragon, King of Sicily
and Count of Provence. This nephew, who was also called Charles, had for Mary
Magdalene a tenderness that he inherited from his race, and which, though common to all
of French chivalry, attained in him the highest degree of ardour and sincerity. While he
was still only Prince of Salerno, God inspired in him the idea of finally penetrating the
mystery that had covered for six centuries the burial of her whom he loved through his
love of Jesus Christ. He went to St. Maximin without any pomp and ceremony, with
several gentlemen of his suite, and, after interrogating the monks and old people, he had
the trench in the old basilica of Cassian opened. On the 9th of December 1277, after
efforts that had been unfruitful up to then, he removed his cloak, took a pick-axe, and dug
up the earth with the workers. Soon they struck the stone of a tomb. It was that of St.
Sidoine, to the right of the crypt. The prince ordered them to raise the entablature, and
the perfume that wafted out of it alerted him instantly to the fact that God’s grace was
near. He leaned forward a moment, made them close the sepulchre, sealed it with his
seal, and summoned the bishops of Provence to assist at the ceremony of the recognition
of the relics.
Nine days later, on the 18th of December, in the presence of the archbishops of
Arles and of Aix, and many other prelates and gentlemen, the prince had the seals he had
affixed to the sarcophagus broken. The sarcophagus was opened, and the hand of the
prince, while brushing aside the dust that covered the bones, encountered an object that
broke from age in his fingers. It was a piece of cork from which fell a leaf of parchment
in barely legible handwriting. It contained the following: “In the year of the birth of our
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Saviour 710, the 6th day of the month of December, in the reign of Eudes, the very pious
king of the French, in the time of the ravages of the perfidious nation of Saracens, the
body of the very dear and venerated Mary-Magdalene has been very secretly and during
the night transferred from its sepulchre of alabaster into this one, which is of marble, and
from which the body of Sidoine has been removed, so that it will be better concealed and
out of reach of the same perfidious nation.”
The King Eudes named in the inscription was Eudes of Aquitaine, who declared
himself independent when Pepin the Short took possession of the Kingdom of Austrasie,
and who ruled France in sovereign fashion from the South of France to the Loire.
A report of the inscription and of the manner in which it had been discovered was
drawn up by the prince, the archbishops and the bishops present, and Charles, at the
height of joy, having again sealed the tomb, summoned for the 5th of May of the
following year an assembly of prelates, counts, barons, knights, magistrates, both from
Provence and from neighboring states, to assist at the solemn translation of the relics that
he had in a manner revived, or at the very least extracted from the obscurity of a long
succession of centuries. Their fame advertised the miraculous circumstances attending
them, and on the 12th May 1280, a considerable gathering of dignitaries and of people
stood at the tomb of St. Mary Magdalene. It was the first time that glory took around her
body royal proportion. Buried in alabaster, under a modest crypt, it had been, through the
era of persecutions and that of barbarians, always venerated and always loved, but
without any pomp answering to this veneration and to this love; and the very precaution
taken to save it had ended up by digging in the memory of men a tomb deeper than that in
which it rested. Now gold and precious stones will succeed to alabaster, a basilica of the
first rank to the humble oratory of St. Maximin, a famous monastery to the cloister of the
Cassianites; kings and pontiffs will come to this sepulchre in so great number that the
footsteps of bishops and great lords will no longer be able to be counted, and, after the
Sepulchre of our Lord and of his apostle Peter, there will not be in the world a tomb
comparable to that of Mary Magdalene.
A third time then, in the presence of an illustrious and numerous assembly, the
Prince of Salerno opened the monument that had been sealed, and its seals were
recognized as being intact. The head of the Saint was whole, save for the lower jawbone,
which was lacking; the tongue survived, dried up but still within the palate; the limbs
showed to the eye only bones stripped of their covering of flesh, but a sweet perfume
enveloped these remains exposed to the daylight and to the piety of souls. They were
lifted from their couch of dust to be venerated more closely, and every look was glued to
this forehead that had rested on the feet of our Lord, these empty cavities that had once
been filled with the most beautiful tears that had ever fallen before God, this tongue that
had spoken of Jesus Christ to Jesus Christ, these bones that had bent before him and had
adored him, this entire dead being that Faith had revived and which she at the same time
brought to life. An eternal glory had been promised to Mary Magdalene by an infallible
mouth, and this glory, all the world saw it, felt it, breathed it in himself and in others.
Thirteen centuries had passed over this body, and it was there; it was there without voice,
without life, without a soul, and yet immortal. They went on looking after having looked
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their fill, and the unction of Christianity filled this scene, and entered into the actions and
witnesses of an ineffable ascension towards God.
It was already known that a particular sign and one absolutely divine had been
recognized on the forehead of Magdalene. It was a piece of moving and transparent flesh
that was shining on the left temple, on the right consequently of the spectator, that had
inspired in all at the same moment, by an act of unanimous faith, that it was there, there
indeed, in this blessed spot, that the Saviour had touched Magdalene when he said to her
after his Resurrection: “Noli me tangere – do not touch me.” There was no proof of it.
But what could one believe in seeing in this place a touch of life so palpable, and which
obstinately resisted thirteen centuries of burial? Chance has no sense for the Christian,
and there where nature is clearly violated in her laws, the Christian goes back
immediately to the final cause, to this Cause that never acts without reason and whose
reasons are revealed to hearts that do not reject the light. Spoken language has passed on
the impression of those who first saw this point of life remaining in the body of Mary
Magdalene: it is still called today the Noli me tangere: sublime name, because it has
been created by faith for someone worthy of it. Five centuries after this first translation,
the Noli me tangere survived still in the same place, with the same character, and a
deputation of the Cour des Comptes of Aix, consisting of the first president, of a general
councilor, and of two councilors, made an authentic recognition of it. It did not detach
itself until 1780, on the brink of a period that would not spare any memory and religious
relic, and yet, at this very moment, the doctors, called upon as witnesses by the highest
law court of the land, testified that the Noli me tangere had adhered to the forehead by the
very force of a life that had been conserved there.
Charles divided the body of St. Magdalene into three parts: the head, which
represented par excellence the heart of the Saint; a bone of the right arm with which she
had poured the perfume onto the feet of our Saviour; finally, the limbs that did not
correspond to any particular idea. Through his care, the first of these relics was enclosed
in a gold bust, the face covered with a crystal mask and that in turn with a moveable gold
mask. The father of the prince, Charles I of Anjou, sent from Naples his own crown,
which was also of gold encased in precious stones, so that it might rest for ever on the
saint’s head. The second relic, the bone of the right arm, was deposited in a reliquary of
gilded silver, itself in the form of an arm borne on a pedestal that was sustained by four
sculpted lions. The other parts of the body were conveyed into a silver reliquary. An
ingenious piety thus graded the honours without dividing the glory.
One must not forget that, during the course of the translation, while they took the
bones one by one, a second inscription had been discovered engraved on a wooden tablet
wrapped in a ball of wax. It bore these simple words: “Here is the body of St. Mary
Magdalene.”
The first step had been taken in the royal glorification of this very holy body. It
had come out of the earth victorious over the centuries, with a certainty that defied all
incredulity, and a pomp that testified to the progress of the faith and love in the hearts of
men. A prince of the blood of St. Louis had dug the soil with his own hands to discover
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it, bishops had touched it with trepidation, a king had sent it his crown; gold, silver,
precious stones worked artistically provided it henceforth with a couch and with
ornamentation; a numerous crowd of people had greeted its re-appearance and from end
to end of the Christian world the rumour of it had moved all the friends of Him whom she
had loved. But it was necessary that Rome, which is the source of glory as it is of truth,
consecrate by its approval this solemn triumph. Charles was thinking of this, when the
misfortunes of his family and of his own relatives placed an obstacle in the way of his
pious interest. A prisoner of Spain for six years, called to the throne by his father’s death
while he was still a captive, for a long time he could only wait for a better day. Free at
last, he went to Rome. It was Boniface VIII, a friend of his family, who occupied the
apostolic seat. He presented to him the two autographic inscriptions found in the tomb of
the Magdalene and attached to an act which attested its authenticity under the signature of
a large number of prelates. He also opened in front of him the gold bust which enclosed
the saint’s head, and the Sovereign Pontiff was able to see with his own eyes the
extraordinary sign of life that death had left. As we have said, the lower jaw bone was
missing from the relic. Boniface remarked on it, and, remembering that there was
conserved at the church of St. John Lateran, under the name of St. Magdalene, a bone of
this kind, he ordered it to be brought to him. The two relics brought together and placed
side by side fitted to each other with an accuracy so perfect that there could not remain
any doubt that they belonged to the same person and to the same head.
Moved by what he had seen, Boniface VIII issued, under the date of 6th April
1295, a bull in which he recognized as genuine the discovery of the body of St.
Magdalene, and authorized Charles II, King of Sicily and Count of Provence, who had
the merit of the discovery, to transfer the monastery of St. Maximin from the Order of
the Cassianites to that of the Brother Preachers. This new order in the Church was
making a great sensation, and Charles judged it capable of responding to the plan he had
conceived of building at St. Maximin, on the same grounds as those of the ancient
oratory, a basilica worthy of receiving and of keeping the treasure newly come to enrich
Christianity. It was the last honour in the world still lacking to St. Magdalene, and the
greatest of all, because it is the most splendid and the most popular. Eloquence and
poetry are less subject to perishing than is a monument, but they only speak to the
cultured in books that are always rare and only fall into the hands of the privileged. The
monument addresses itself to the eyes and to the hearts of all – the poor man has his place
as well as the rich; the simple man can admire it as much as the artist. Thus every great
thought has sought expression in a great monument, and from the tower of Babel to the
temple of Solomon, from the temple of Solomon to the basilica of St. Peter’s, the distant
peoples of the world have been seen to create in marble or granite a representation – the
most memorable possible – of their love and of their faith. It was appropriate, therefore,
that the friend of Jesus Christ have somewhere on the earth a temple worthy of her, and
there was no better plan for it to rise but there where had been her burial ground for
thirteen centuries, there where piety had just rediscovered her body and near the
mountain where she had finished her life in the highest mysteries of contemplative life.
By 1295, Charles had the plan drawn up and the work began. It took the form of
a basilica, that is to say of a building consisting of three long naves without a cross, the
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form of the primitive oratory that it had to replace; but at the same time there was
imprinted in it in every structural detail the characteristic of a Gothic vessel, so that it
might be a faithful image of two periods, ancient and modern times. Charles II did not
finish, despite his generous donation, the monument he had put his heart into; it was the
work of his entire race for two centuries, and when the second but last of his successors
to the County of Provence, and to the Kingdom of Naples, the good king René, died in
1480, he had the good fortune of seeing the church and the monastery almost finished
such as they are today. This was also the time assigned by Providence to the sovereign
house of Anjou, as if it had only been called to the throne to give to St. Mary Magdalene
all the luster that a piety and munificence transmitted from reign to reign, for many
generations could alone communicate. There was no prince of this house who did not
visit, in different states of good or bad fortune, the Sainte-Baume and St. Maximin, nor
confirm its privileges, and who did not give his aid to the completion of the basilica. It
rose up at last, after two hundred years of effort often assailed by difficulties, as posterity
still sees it, a monument of a severe and simple art, where grace is united to grandeur, and
which, in this solitary plain at the foot of these high mountains, between these poor and
few habitations, seems like a ship gone aground by chance and waiting for the powerful
hand that will launch it on the waves. The waves have come; in fact, they have come
from the peoples agitated to their depths; revolutions, after the kings and the popes, have
visited the basilica of St. Magdalene, and these thunderbolts that have hurled down
thrones have only flashed over the humble friend of the Saviour’s feet, respecting her
roof. Bethany is no more, but Jesus Christ has given to Magdalene the house she lost,
and the one and the other, the Master and the Disciple, the God who was loved and the
woman who loved, live together at St. Maximin, as in other times they lived on the sides
of the Mount of Olives. Marseilles is the Jerusalem of this new Bethany, and France is
the greater and more faithful Judea.
I say France; because it was she that inherited Provence, and with her St.
Magdalene. One might have feared that this last part of the heritage would have been
neglected, and that our kings might not understand the gift that Providence had made
them. Nothing of the sort. Louis XI, the first who united the crown of the Capetians to
that of the Counts of Provence, set the example of a limitless veneration of St.
Magdalene. He treated her like a princess of the royal house, and bequeathed to his
descendants his pilgrimage as the special pilgrimage of the French monarchy. Charles
VIII and Louis XII made it a point of glory to imitate him. Anne of Brittany, the wife of
one and then of the other king, visited St. Maximin and the Sainte-Baume, and had
herself represented under the form of a golden statuette at the front of the reliquary that
contained the head of St. Magdalene. Francis I, after the battle of Marignan, went there
to offer up thanks, with his mother, his wife and his sister. He had the hospice for
foreigners at Sainte-Baume repaired, and wished to have constructed there three rooms
for the three principal people of the court: these apartments took the names of the king’s
chamber, the queen’s chamber and the dauphin’s chamber. That of the king was in the
very interior of the convent inhabited by the monks. The same prince adorned with a
portico the entrance to the grotto. His successors, Charles IX and Louis XIII, followed
him there and rediscovered there these traces of his royal munificence; Louis XIII went
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there in 1622, after the siege of Montpellier and the submission of the heretics of
Languedoc.
The last king of France to perform the pilgrimage to the Holy Places of Provence
was Louis XIV. He arrived at St. Maximin on the 4th February 1660 with his mother,
Anne of Austria, and ascended the following day to the Sainte-Baume and to Saint-Pilon.
On his return he presided over the translation of the body of St. Magdalene into a
porphyry urn that had been sent from Rome by the general of the Friars Preachers, which
was placed on the high altar after the reliquary it was to contain had been opened, reclosed and sealed in the presence of the King. Thus, at the time when the monarchy
reached its highest point of splendor and inscribed one of the centuries of French history
amongst the great centuries of the world, it came, in the person of the king who had the
good fortune to give his name to this memorable era, to kneel before the relics of the
humble penitent sinner of Bethany and to leave there a ray of this majesty that is still
called and will always be called the age of Louis XIV.
What did there remain to be done to fulfill the promise of Jesus Christ? Over
sixteen centuries ago a bark had brought Mary Magdalene to the soil of France, and since
then a prodigious succession of things had, one after the other, confirmed and increased
the splendor of her cult. The Sainte-Baume, where Jesus Christ had resumed with her the
conversations interrupted at the Holy Sepulchre had become one of the mountains
celebrated by the visit of God. It had received near there, from the hands of an apostolic
bishop, a burial that was never forgotten, and the alabaster vase where her body lay, more
long-lasting than that from which she had poured the perfume over the feet of the
Saviour, met nothing from time and from men but the immortality of respect. It still
survives in the same earth and under the same sky. A holy guardian was given it, once
the persecutions were over and piety was permitted to stand up and be visible at the entry
to the great tomb. When Europe rose to reconquer the first of its tombs, that where Mary
Magdalene herself had waited nearby in prayer, Christian knighthood took her for its
lady, and her name, carried in the hearts of the Crusaders, came to die on their lips on the
fields of battle with a supernatural honour. An entire race of princes was finally
consecrated to her service. The first amongst them discovered her body hidden for an age
out of fear of the barbarians, and exposed it to the light, more splendid than it had ever
been. The scars of God’s friendship appeared in living form on her forehead, and
indescribable tears fell at the sight of her from eyes the most worthy to let them fall. A
basilica illustrious by its grandeur and its beauty rose up over the well-beloved relics,
rendered more dear by absence, and kings and popes were seen to follow after one
another there in great numbers. A single day saw five kings; one century brought eight
popes. When it was over, the blood of St. Louis that had given to the tomb of
Magdalene the counts of Provence and the kings of Sicily, gave it finally kings of France.
The first monarchy of the world became the protector and client of the friend of Jesus
Christ, and when, having reached the summit of human splendor, it was on the brink of
experiencing a catastrophe as amazing as its past fortune, there came a king greater than
the others to represent them all, and this one, heir to the glory and piety of his fathers,
brought to the tomb which they had honoured the final homage of France.
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Was it to be the last? One might so believe. A mocking scepticism had taken over
people’s minds, and an unforeseen revolution was about to throw down beneath its feet,
together with the throne of France, the very throne of God. But while the most venerated
sanctuaries did not escape the tempest, a special protection covered the monastery and
basilica of St. Maximin. An unknown man whose name would soon be aggrandized
beyond all measure, the brother of a young captain destined one day to reopen the
temples and to fill the world with the surprise of his glory, Lucien Bonaparte, was the
savior of the monuments raised by the faith of the princes and the people to the love of
Mary Magdalene. Not a stone of that respected mass fell, not an altar was destroyed, not
a picture disappeared from the walls; and when the divine anger, appeased by so many
misfortunes, withdrew from us, an astonished France rediscovered still standing the work
of the nephews and sons of St. Louis, having at its frontispiece the name of a new race
and the beginning of another history. Even the relics of St. Magdalene had not perished,
and her head and the bone of her right arm, piously collected by a faithful hand, were
authenticated; and if the gold or precious stones were lacking to this treasure, the grace of
God manifested by so many marvels survived more living than ever. Less fortunate, the
Sainte-Baume had suffered the outrages of an implacable devastation; there remained
only the rock itself and a part of its forest. Repaired a first time, damaged again in 1815,
it was finally blessed solemnly in the month of May 1822, the Monday of Pentecost, in
the presence of more than 40,000 people who rushed to this spectacle that bore witness so
markedly to the impotence of ruin against God. From the top of the terrace that is above
the Sainte-Baume, the Archbishop of Aix raised his hands with the blessed Sacrament
over the multitude that covered the plain and the forest, and the Sign of the Cross fell, in
the midst of an absolute silence, on those sites and on those men who once again found
together Jesus Christ the vanquisher of the world. An immense acclamation, issuing
from 40,000 mouths, succeeded suddenly to the religious silence of the blessing, and the
centuries, brought back to life by this cry of faith, were able to hear, in the eternity where
they all return, the profound echo of this feast given by so many souls to the soul of Mary
Magdalene.
When the stranger comes down towards the river that divides Paris, he encounters
a square whose extent and monuments give rise to reflection. On one side is the palace of
the kings of France, and opposite him, at the edge of a long avenue, a military triumphal
arch. In a second perspective that cuts the first in the form of a cross, two temples
correspond to one another: one, which is that of the laws; the other, which is that of God.
In the middle there rises up an Egyptian obelisk, but which disappears under an invisible
monument nevertheless present to all minds, the scaffold of Louis XVI. All France on
this square: royalty, military glory, liberty, religion, revolution. If, moreover, one
approaches the temple that is like the part of God in this representation of the country,
one will read on it this inscription: “To the very good and great God, under the
invocation of St. Mary Magdalene.” Mary Magdalene is there, under the eyes of France
and of the world, in the 19th century of Christ, and the triumphal spot that she occupies, a
conqueror, a man elevated by fortune to the summit of human affairs, had destined to
receive, in marble, in bronze, in gold, the name of his battles and the image of his
soldiers. He was supposed to preside himself, in a kind of apotheosis, over this pantheon
of his person, and he had called it in advance, by the temerity of pride, the Temple of
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Glory. In his place, he suddenly having fallen, has come the humble penitent sinner who
washed with her tears the feet of Jesus Christ; one sees her on the pediment of the
monument, kneeling as once before her Master, and in the interior, under a splendid
canopy, she appears, borne up by angels, in the drunkenness of the ecstasy that was from
here below the price of her love.
By an infinite delicacy of providence, this temple contains not only the glory of
Magdalene, it also possesses a part of her mortal remains, amazingly escaped from that
which would perish. In 1785, the heir of Spain, Ferdinand, Duke of Parma, wished to
have for his chapel a portion of the holy relics. Louis XVI, to whom he had
communicated his desire, ordered the monks of St. Maximin to satisfy his wish, and the
porphyry urn where Louis XIV had transferred the ancient relics, having been opened
with the required precautions and solemnities, the prior removed from it a long bone that
he himself carried to the duke of Parma. Furthermore, in 1810, this treasure was with
many others brought to Paris in the wake of our conquest and, after having passed from
the hands of an exiled cardinal into those of the venerable Mme. de Soyecourt, the abbess
of the Carmelites of the rue de Vaugirard, it was finally ceded to Monsignore de Quélen,
archbishop of Paris, who made a gift of it to the church of St. Mary Magdalene.
Thus, of the three parts that Charles II of Anjou had made of these renowned
relics, namely: the head, a bone from the right arm, then the rest of the bones; the first
two were saved from the Revolution, and have not left St. Maximin. The third part,
placed by Louis XIV in the porphyry urn of the high altar, has disappeared, but a
fragment of it has been saved as we have just said, and to the porphyry urn of Louis XIV
that had contained it, has succeeded the most magnificent temple that has ever been
elevated on earth in honour of the penitent sinner of Bethany.
This glory has not only travelled across the centuries, it has grown with them, in
spite of all events. And I do not know if there is in the history of the saints an example of
so persevering and divine a progress. And yet the guard placed at the saint’s tomb, that
had not missed its watch for a single day in fifteen hundred years, this guard no longer
existed. The basilica stood with its monastery, with its crypt and its burial places, with its
saved relics, with the immense memories of a life that goes back to the cradle of
Christianity and attaches itself to the very name of Jesus Christ; it stood, and yet the
pilgrim did not enter without a request and without a sigh. He looked, astonished, at this
immobile mass, victorious over men more even than over time, and it seemed to him he
was penetrating into the silence of the desert rather than into the silence of God. He
prayed on his knees to the great and holy friend of the Redeemer of souls whom he had
come to visit; he saw everywhere the picture, the name, the glory, the virtue, and yet the
unction of his prayer was not without sadness, like those tears that one carries to beloved
places, but where there is lacking something that the heart had seen there and which it
would like to find again. Oh goodness of God in answering our wishes, we have seen
with our own eyes the empty cloister fill up, the ancient ceremonies resume their
interrupted harmony, the past emerge from the tomb with a youthfulness of which one
did not believe it capable, and we believed we heard Jesus Christ say to the faithful friend
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who could not believe in his resurrection this word of reproach and of enlightenment:
“Mary!”
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Epilogue
The tomb of Mary Magdalene at St. Maximin is the third most important tomb in
the world. It comes immediately after the tomb of our Lord at Jerusalem and that of St.
Peter at Rome, because the very holy Virgin Mother of God has no tomb amongst men;
scarcely touched by death, she was snatched out of his power by the triumph of her
Assumption. No more has St. John, the well-beloved disciple, left for the veneration of
Christians his bones or his tomb; he has been, by divine permission, removed from this
glory, so as to remain as if buried in his own Gospel. There remain then on earth three
great tombs: that of the Saviour, removed by barbarians from the free access of our
homage, but retaining in servitude the empire of the world; that of the apostle St. Peter,
presiding in Rome over the destinies of Christianity, and from the dust, hidden beneath
indescribable splendours, seeing and hearing the passage of continuous prayer from one
generation to the next; finally, that of Mary Magdalene, less elevated than St. Peter in the
hierarchy, but closer to Jesus Christ by her heart, to whom none can dispute the third
place amongst the great names of the evangelical age.
Here, perhaps, at the close of our work, one asks oneself why the divine Master of
Souls has chosen as the one to love Him more than anyone else a poor sinner, and
bequeathed her to us as the most moving example of holiness. The reason is not difficult
to discover: innocence is a drop of water in the world, repentance is the ocean that
envelops it and saves it. It was worthy of God’s bounty to elevate repentance as high as
possible, and that is why, in the Old as in the New Testament, he has put before us a
perfect model of the rehabilitation caused by penitence, David and Mary Magdalene.
David, one would have thought, could not be surpassed, his character having been
sketched with such tenderness and depth. Simple shepherd boy, keeping his flock on the
hillsides of Bethlehem, he became a soldier in the face of an insult done to the God of his
country, to Jehovah. His sling brought down the blasphemer, and, all radiant from his
victory, he won in a day the people’s heart. But jealousy, the companion of heroism, did
not delay in interposing between glory and his person. The King himself envied David’s
youth, and, tormented by foreknowledge of David’s future greatness, brooded during fits
of sinister melancholy over means of killing him. It was then that David, in order to
appease him, stirred for the first time the chords of the harp that would sing all God’s
mysteries and echo in the hearts of future generations. Poetry would blend with courage
in his destiny, and friendship, misfortune and religion joining in, this young man mounted
at last the throne that would forever be called the throne of David. There, at the peak of
his good fortune, blessed by God more than were Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, predestined
ancestor of Christ, he falls suddenly into adultery, betrayal and murder. Happy fall,
because it made of the culprit the immortal king of peace, and has given to us all, sinners
coming after him, tears for our faults and the tones of voice to carry our tears to the
presence of God. Who amongst Christians has not wept with David? Who has not found
in his poetry the unction for which his heart craved? Even the Gospels have not been able
to efface the impress of the Psalms, and this king dishonoured by crime is at every
moment the father of our virtues.
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Such was in the Old Testament the model of repentance, and nobody, assuredly,
could have foreseen what God would do in the New to put beside Jesus Christ another
and more divine figure of penitence. He succeeded nevertheless in so doing. Mary
Magdalene is a simple woman with no other history except that of her sinfulness; she has
neither the sword, nor the sceptre, nor the harp, nor the eye of the prophet; she is a sinner
like the rest. She spoke only once in the Gospels, at the tomb of the Master, and her
words are without distinction. But first of all she is a woman, that is to say the being in
whom the mark of defilement is the most irremediable, and this difference between the
Old and New Testaments is in itself alone a sublime step forward in mercy. It is no
longer the man who is redeemed by repentance, but the woman. No woman, marked by
vice, had been rendered great before Jesus Christ; Jesus Christ alone has done it. And
holding to his word, he has patiently followed the sinner through the ages, to safeguard
her glory, resuscitate her and rejuvenate her for ever. David sang his repentance in
unequalled lines of verse, and this poetry made him immortal. As for Mary Magdalene,
she has only had her tears, but they fell on the feet of the Saviour; she only had a vase of
perfume, but this perfume embalmed the body of the Son of God. The simplicity is even
grander here, the tenderness more profound; it is no longer a man who weeps and who
loves, it is a woman, a woman who has seen God, who has recognized Him, and who,
comparing his infinite purity to the degradation to which she has descended, has not
doubted that it is possible for her to be forgiven because of the depth of her love.
Humble and hidden away after finding grace, she did not go far from those feet that
purified her. She only makes use of her new acquaintance with Christ to follow and to
serve him. She follows him all the way to the Cross and all the way to the tomb.
Separated from the Master, the sole object of her life, she goes far from the places where
she lived with him, and, looking for a shelter from the last vestiges of the world, she
buries herself in an unknown cave, with her memories and her soul. Only the angels can
discover her there, and they bring to her from above the invisible manna that causes
ecstasy and the separation of the soul from the body. She dies finally of love, while
receiving, from a bishop sent by God, the sacred body of the Son of God.
What is there left to say now? The places, so famous and so venerated, that I have
described – this grotto, this tomb, this crypt, this basilica, this monastery, this whole
collection of monuments that nature and grace, Time and princes have raised up to the
glory of Mary Magdalene – all that is still standing, but poor, naked, desolate, covered
with the scars of a century that delighted in ruin as others delighted in building up. One
ascends to the Sainte-Baume only by steps of broken stone, between crumbling walls; the
chamber of the kings of France has disappeared, and the humblest pilgrim finds barely a
shelter to rest himself from his journey. Today, the hospice has only holes in the rocks
where the beams of the structure once were supported; the convent, hastily restored,
offers to the monks only cells separated by planks, and these that they share with the
stranger. Between these two ruins opens up the grotto of penitence, itself empty of the
ornaments bestowed on it by the secular piety of people and prince. The splendid lamps
that once lit it shine only by the dazzling silence of which Tacitus speaks. Unremarkable
marbles make up the chapel of the saint, and behind the altar, on the mysterious rock
where her vigils and ecstasies took place, rests semi-recumbent a profane statue unworthy
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to the first degree of the majesty of the spot, over whose memories it casts a pall of
sadness.
If from the heights and miseries of the Sainte-Baume we re-descend to St.
Maximin, by the same route that the Saint followed to seek her tomb, we will rediscover
the same contrast of indigence and splendor. The basilica is solemnly seated on its old
ground; it there commands still the admiration of the artist and the homage of the
Christian; but, unfinished from its portico onward, it leads us with regret towards the
crypt where St. Maximin deposited in alabaster the body of St. Magdalene. The
alabaster still exists; beside it are still ranged the burial places that fervent piety planned
and constructed near this tomb; but what a state of abandon, what darkness, what sadness
of heart in these walls! Happy the catacombs that have had no glory, and that sleep
silently wrapped in a mystery that has never been troubled! Here, all recalls the knees
that bent on the flagstones; everything is redolent of the antiquity of a veneration that has
never been interrupted, and yet it is thought alone that renders it magnificent, and God
does not appear there except in the light of the soul. A poor wooden reliquary, given by
peasants, covers the head, where the brother of St. Louis, Charles I of Anjou, placed the
royal crown of Sicily, and the feet of which Anne of Brittany, twice Queen of France,
was sculpted on her knees and in gold. An episcopal hand, it is true, will cover these
traces of an unhappy period, and give back to the forehead of Mary Magdalene a part of
the splendor that man and the centuries once attached there. But what mournful vestiges
there are to repair after that! What miseries to reclothe! What shades to transform!
Oh! wherever you may be, who read these pages, if ever you have known the
tears of repentance, or those of love, do not refuse to Mary Magdalene who has wept so
much and has loved so much, a drop of this perfume with which she anointed the feet of
your Saviour. Do not neglect the grotto where the angels visited her; do not forget the
tomb where Jesus Christ removed her from the insults of barbarians to present her to the
homage of the Christian centuries; do not disdain this head that survived the rest because
God himself touched it with his finger. Bring your tribute, however feeble it may be, to
the renovation of one of the greatest and most loved monuments of Christianity; bring to
it your faith, your vows, your needs, and let it not be said that France – to whom Jesus
Christ wished to confide in Mary Magdalene the guardian of reparation and of love – has
been unfaithful to this sacred mission. As for me, who have brought back to the
mountain and the basilica, all unworthy though I am, the ancient militia charged by
Providence to keep watch there day and night, may I write here my last line, and like
Mary Magdalene two days before the Passion, break over the feet of Jesus Christ the frail
but faithful vase containing my deepest wishes!
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