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Three Mourning Mothers: The Making and Unmaking of a Christian Figural Complex

RUDOLPH BINION
The Journal of Psychohistory V. 26, N. 1, Summer 1998

Illustrations: ALBERT SCHMIDT
Mr. Schmidt's Illustrations are not included at this time.
Captions and iconographical appendix: CAROLINE FISHER

Over the course of historic time, meanings and connections that were once self-evident may come to look strange and strained. The Christian middle ages in particular left behind a trail of statements both verbal and visual that were straight and clear in their time but now strike us as twisted and obscure. Conspicuous along that trail are the texts and images spawned by the twin concept of prefiguration and fulfillment. Not only are such texts and images bewildering to noninitiates today; they are barely accessible any longer even to scholars steeped in the culture of the period.

The concept of prefiguration and fulfillment was at the core of the whole new perception of the human lot that the apostle Paul and the evangelists propagated on Jesus' messianic account.1 It served in the first instance to authenticate Jesus' messiahship on the ground that every step along his way to the cross had been taken once already, albeit in an outwardly different form, and had been registered precursively in his people's sacred texts pending his advent. Thus for the evangelist Matthew, when wicked Herod had all the baby boys in Bethlehem slain upon learning that the Messiah was among them, the bereaved mothers' lament that ensued threw back some eighteen centuries to the matriarch Rachel's lament in Ramah for her children who "were no more,"2 meaning the children of Israel then held captive abroad in Babylon. On Matthew's construction, the later wailing in Bethlehem "fulfilled" the earlier wailing in Ramah,3 as when a harmony is resolved, and with that fulfillment the prophetic circle linking Ramah to Bethlehem closed. To sophisticated pagans confronted with this Christian figural construction, the equivalence between live deportees to Babylon and, long ages later, baby boys massacred in Bethlehem was no more compelling at first blush than it is now again in modern times. Yet not only did the figural view of sacred history as in Matthew penetrate the topmost reaches of pagan learning along with Christianity itself; once that approach to the scriptures was assimilated throughout Christendom it began to evolve, acquiring ever new latitude and fluidity over the centuries.

The earliest church fathers from Tertullian to Augustine already construed the Judeo-Christian holy writ imaginatively to the effect that a figure (Latin: figura) or type (Greek: typos) and its fulfillment or antitype, though separate in worldly time and space, were yet wholly at one in the eternal, absolute order of things. They spun out the concept metaphysically, that is, though without actually extending its use. Of greater practical moment was a later, creeping development, in full swing by the second Christian millennium, whereby a figure and its fulfillment might be drawn not just from the Old and the New Testament respectively, but both at once from Christ's life alone. Thus in art and letters equally, Mary holding the infant Savior might look ahead to Mary holding the crucified Savior,4 just as Mary holding the crucified Savior might look back to Mary cradling the infant Savior, with the one Mary reflecting on the other in both cases alike;5 or again, circumventing Mary to the same final effect, the dead Christ might be "stretched out on the altar in the form of a child."6 This slow turn in creative fancy to the possible interplay of prefiguration and fulfillment within the New Testament alone was quickened during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries by a mounting concern among Europe's faithful for the earthly, human experience of Mary and her son culminating in the Passion: their holy sufferings loom gigantic and intimate at once in Bernard of Clairvaux, in popular Franciscan sermons, in the best-selling anonymous Meditations on the Life of Christ, and in numberless devout poetic effusions such as then proliferated throughout Christendom.

In a further undatable innovation both conceptual and practical within the Christian figural scheme, not merely two but thenceforth three biblical persons, places, and events, as a rule one from the Old Testament and two from the New, might compose a single figural continuum while retaining their three distinct identities. In such cases of a figure fulfilled cumulatively in two stages instead of one, the terminal stage was invariably Christ's death and resurrection. These sets of three were of a kind with those in the highly influential late-twelfth-century teaching of Joachim of Floris that earthly events of divine import all came in threes: an Old Testament original would recur twice in new guises during the Christian era before achieving closure.7 And not just arithmetically was Joachim's unitary tripling akin to the twelfth- and thirteenth-century scholastic definitions and mystical visions of God as three distinct persons composed of a single substance.

Only on these gradually expanding and loosening figural terms of reference are the iconography of the Massacre of the Innocents and its eventual input into the Lamentation of Christ and, later, the Piete intelligible. That iconography and that input are my subject.

Depictions of the Massacre of the Innocents began where Christian art did: in the catacombs of Rome.8 The earliest extant Massacre scenes might show only fierce Herod handing down the grim order or only his henchmen doing his fearful bidding. More typically, though, Bethlehemite mothers also appeared in Massacre scenes from the first, either grieving in unison or else, increasingly over the centuries, clinging to innocent little victims before, during, or after the bloody deed. Also from the first, one of those mothers would stand out from the assemblage by dint of her raised arms. This stereotypical figure, full-fledged already on a surviving fifth-century ivory [1], held her ground in subsequent miniatures, ivories, mosaics, paintings, and sculptures of the Massacre well into the Renaissance, her arms ever distinctively aloft. Outside of Byzantium, her specific Oriental-style gesture of grief and despair alluded to wailing Rachel.9 So too did an occasional halo on a mourning Massacre mother allude to Rachel as the mourning matriarch of Israel.10 This figural referent for the Massacre scene was often spelled out in Greek or Latin in the form of Matthew's quotation from Jeremiah about Rachel weeping for her children who "were no more." Today such allusions or inscriptions are commonly held to have identified the gesturing mother or the haloed mother as Rachel herself physically present in Bethlehem, an impossibility in material fact that was just as impossible in the mode of figure and fulfillment. What they did was rather to affirm the Rachel original for the bereavement and lamenting in Bethlehem. That Rachel original was implicit besides in the pictorial convention that only mothers ever came into Massacre scenes bereaved and lamenting, with no matching fathers or other relatives ever in sight.

While Rachel's wailing in Ramah resounded in Bethlehem from Matthew onward, only toward A.D. 855 did Rachel herself, without budging from Ramah in the days of the patriarchs, figurally fuse with those later mothers wailing in Bethlehem. She did so in an arresting adornment of a monogrammatic "D" that flanked the text for Innocents Day in the sacramentary of Drogo, archbishop of Metz [2].11 Drogo, an illegitimate son of Charlemagne, was a leading European patron of the arts as well as a powerful conciliatory figure in the bloody disputes over the Carolingian succession. The indications are that he shaped and styled the sumptuous sacramentary prepared for him.12 In that case he personally was the source of the two big iconographic innovations wrought inside that historiated "D." Much the simpler of the two for all its huge significance was the reintroduction into Western art of the figure of a mourner holding or embracing a corpse. Lest that reintroduction pass unnoticed in Drogo's miniature, three aggrieved mothers each hold two dead sons at once across their knees. The earliest clear-cut precedents in art that I know for this intimate mourning are some clumsy archaic Sardinian statuettes of a hefty matron, perhaps a goddess, holding a small dead warrior on her lap;13 the closest such precedent in date is a graceful archaic Attic kylix decorated with Eos holding her slain son Memnon.14 Classical painting and sculpture shied away from any and all macabre pathos even though many potential subjects for it other than just Eos with dead Memnon abounded in antiquity: Thisbe with dead Pyramus, Hero with dead Leander, Thetis with dead Achilles, Hecuba with dead Astyanax, and Aphrodite with dead Adonis all qualified equally.15 Classical letters were less restrained than classical art: witness the curtain-ringer in Euripides' morbid masterpiece The Bacchae, with unsuspecting Agave sporting her son's bloody head as a trophy of her Dionysian revels until her tragic undeceiving. So were early Christian letters less reticent than early Christian art: thus in the fifth century of our era Basil of Seleucia, in a gripping sermon much imitated thereafter, related in graphic, gory detail how after Herod's massacre each weeping mother gathered the scattered remnants of her son to her bosom for a farewell kiss.16 Four centuries passed after that virtuoso pulpit performance by Basil before Drogo brought up the rear in art with his triplicate mother not even kissing her two undismembered dead sons, but at least holding them both on her lap.

Drogo's innovative miniature of the Massacre was still more of a significant first in assimilating not merely the lament in Ramah into the lament in Bethlehem as Matthew had done, but also Rachel herself figuratively or spiritually into the assemblage of lamenting mothers in Bethlehem. All three bereaved mothers in Drogo's mournful "D" are as if poured out of the same mold and then displayed at different angles. The three together stand for the totality of the Bethlehemite mothers, three being as many as a marginal "D" could accommodate in the mutual isolation that Drogo clearly intended for them. One of the three holds a single arm straight up, signaling a conjunction with Rachel. Further, the two dead baby boys draped side by side over each mother's knees betoken Rachel's own two sons. To be sure, Rachel died bearing her second son, and the children of Israel lamented by her in Jeremiah's prophetic vision were mostly grownups. More, the two dead boys trebled in Drogo's "D" are roughly identical in each case, which in good logic would make them either twins three times over or else not both the same mother's. The clear point, however elusive in retrospect, is that the two are no more literally Rachel's sons than that grieving mother with one arm raised is herself literally half Rachel. Rather, their twoness is an additional sign of Rachel's figural convergence with the bereaved mothers of Bethlehem. That convergence transcending geography and history lasted as long as the figural perspective itself did even though the aggrieved mothers, initially a uniform lot, were increasingly individualized in gothic depictions of the Massacre beginning some three centuries after Drogo commissioned his seminal "D."

In conjoining Rachel herself figurally with her Bethlehemite successors, Drogo's miniaturist lifted their common spiritual posture out of its two narrative contexts and suspended it in the middle of nowhere. This transpersonal fusion of those distinct identities across time and space, thenceforth a settled iconographic fact, was strikingly pronounced in Drogo's dreamlike surrealism. Rarely again did Rachel appear so integrally fused with the bereaved mothers in Bethlehem. Nor for another few centuries did that resultant composite of maternal grief again loom so nearly solitary or self-enclosed as, despite her triplication, she managed to do even in Drogo's tiny "D."

That looming was her delayed legacy. For, just as Drogo's bold composition marked a gigantic figural stride forward, so did it foreshadow further developments down that same figural path running from Ramah to Bethlehem and eventually beyond. The most conspicuous of these developments that ensued was the gradual emergence within full Massacre scenes of just such a distinctive, commanding, monumental figure as Drogo's of a mother self-isolated in her grief over the dead son she holds, emotionally alone even inside or alongside a Massacre crowd that would grow ever more tempestuous and diversified over the centuries ahead. Her aloneness beside that agitated company was in the nature of maternal grief as it is in fact experienced. But her detachment also went with her figural transcendence of the maternal grief specific to Bethlehem. Being emblematic of a composite lament common to Ramah and Bethlehem, that matronly mourner was no more the bodily Rachel translocated from Ramah to Bethlehem than was the older stereotypical lamenter with arms aloft, who indeed might henceforth conjoin with her or else appear beside her. Like that arms-up icon of raging grief before her, this singularized figure of self-enclosed desolation in its turn upstaged the rest of the doleful maternal chorus in Bethlehem. By the eleventh century its pictorial ascendancy over the Massacre scene was pronounced and definitive from one end of Europe to the other.

That commanding figure of bereavement came in two basic postures. One, which took off from the Drogo model itself, was at its simplest a seated mother holding a dead son across her lap. This lap-type model promptly swept Europe in every visual medium from pictorial miniatures to giant frescoes and from fine carvings to monumental sculpture. Here for a change letters followed instead of leading art: a twelfth-century Italian preacher cited a panel painting of Herod's butchery of the babes of Bethlehem as a basis for his horrific account of the event culminating in his pathetic evocation of a mother who "held her newly slain infant on her knees and bitterly wept."17 Intact, impressive early specimens of the Drogo model adorn an eleventh-century ivory plaque from Lorraine [3], an early-twelfth-century mural in the village church of Saint-Jacques-des-GuŽrets [4], a later twelfth-century one in the abbey of San Pietro in Valle in Ferentino, a still later twelfth-century stone cathedral faade in Soria [5],18 and a metal cathedral door of about 1200 in Benevento [6].19 Some na•ve eleventh-century depictions piled three or more sons at once onto that single, doleful maternal lap.20 Byzantine miniaturists took up the model only tardily and artlessly despite its remote derivation from that fifth-century Greek sermon by Basil of Seleucia: it first appears in Byzantine manuscripts of about 1100 in a simplistically stylized version recopied time and again thereafter.21 But even this inglorious tardy appropriation from western Christendom suffices to disprove the received view of Byzantine art as fairly impervious to outside influence.22

In her other, later basic posture, that mother who stole the bloody scene in Bethlehem grieves over a tiny son stretched out dead before her. This alternative, ground-type pose occurs in romanesque and especially gothic France, with crowning examples on a wall and a window of the cathedral in Chartres [7, 8].23 Its earliest showings beyond the French heartland date only from the early 1300s.24 In a ghastly subform of it, which spilled over from French churches into French miniatures, a kneeling mother cradles or kisses a little head severed from a body seen somewhere nearby [9, 10].25

Unlike the first, lap-type model of the emblematic Massacre mother with her dead son, this second, ground-type model did not penetrate Byzantium in its own right. There instead, inspired with some lag by sermons of George of Nicomedia in the ninth and Symeon Metaphrastes in the tenth century,26 a scene of Mary caressing the dead Christ emerged out of the traditional Entombment27 to parallel that ground-type Bethlehemite posture then germinating in France. Possible influences either way are hard to explore with any precision because the record is so spotty and the datings mostly uncertain on both sides of the east-west split within Christendom. Nor does it help that on either side of that split only the blurriest of lines separated the evolving Entombment from the emergent Lamentation with its sharper focus on Mary cradling a dead Christ recumbent before her: in both funerary scenes alike Mary is simply the chief one of her martyred son's intimates preparing his body for burial [11, 12].28 But the trickiest complication is that the Lamentation developed in Italy with a visible Byzantine impress from the late eleventh well into the thirteenth century even as midway its two central figures overlapped with the ground-type Massacre mother and dead son atop the royal portal at Chartres [13].29

This ground-type iconographic convergence of the bereaved mother lamenting in Bethlehem with the bereaved mother lamenting in Gol-gotha made good medieval Christian sense. For the Crucifixion fulfilled the intent of the Massacre, which was to kill the Messiah.30 Accordingly, by the logic of prefiguration and fulfillment, the mother mourning her innocent son martyred in Bethlehem anticipated the mother mourning her innocent son martyred in Golgotha. Mary's figural continuity with the Bethlehemite mother was adumbrated as early as the Massacre mosaic of A.D. 432-440 on the triumphal arch of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome with its row of mothers holding their sacrificial baby sons in the newly standardized likeness of Mary holding the infant Jesus.31 The figural continuity was traced in high relief on the mid-eleventh-century wooden door to the church of Sankt Maria im Kapitol in Cologne, where in the Massacre panel a ponderous sorrowful mother holding a son either doomed or dead on her lap (he is too damaged to tell which) is cut in the very mold of the ponderous sorrowful Mary holding Jesus on her lap in the parallel Flight into Egypt panel [14, 15].32 Similarly, on a twelfth-century ivory altarpiece in Salerno a compassionate Mary watching the Massacre together with a horrified infant Jesus has a face just like that of the Rachelite Massacre mother below her with arms aloft [16].33 And to the same effect once removed, the several extant versions of the Ordo Rachelis, a liturgical drama of the eleventh and twelfth centuries that was performed on Innocents Day or Epiphany, featured a Rachel fantastically spirited to Bethlehem to mourn the slain Innocents and repeatedly termed this Rachel in Bethlehem a sorrowing virgin mother, thereby identifying that sorrowing nonvirgin mother in so many words with the sorrowing virgin mother at the cross.34

The intriguing confluence of Mary lamenting the dead Christ Byzantine-style in Western art with the second, ground-type model of the mourning mother in Bethlehem was merely extrinsic or formal in one crucial respect. No more than her Byzantine counterparts was Mary in the Western Lamentations self-isolated in her grief over her dead son as was her opposite number in the French gothic Massacres. On the contrary, she too in every case formed an integral part of a funeral party ritually mourning the Savior in unison while also ritually preparing his body for burial. As against this Mary lamenting in harmony with her son's disciples and other relatives, and far more radically than even the ground-type lamenting Massacre mother, the older, lap-type one withdrew into ever deeper spiritual detachment, and the more conspicuously as her numbers multiplied in north central Italy after her powerful, poignant showing in the foreground of a stupendous pulpit that Nicola Pisano sculpted for the Siena cathedral in the 1260s [17]. Later highlights of this increasingly desolate self-enclosure include a striking row of four such mourning mothers in a Massacre painted around 1300 by Giotto's expressionistic coworker Palmerino di Guido in the basilica of Santa Chiara in Assisi [18],35 three or four more in what may be Giotto's own Massacre of c. 1305 in the lower basilica of San Francesco in Assisi [19, 20], two in the front predella of Duccio's majestic Maeste of 1308-11 (plus a ground-type one there too for variety's sake) [21], two dated 1316 carved onto the frontal altar of the Zenone cathedral in Pistoia, another two on a relief panel attributed to Tino di Camaino at the Trinite monastery in Cava dei Tirreni, and two strikingly novel ones on an anonymous fragmentary painting at the Pinacoteca in Bologna36 and again on a mural in the lower church of the Sacro Speco monastery in Subiaco.37 Around 1300 this rash of first-manner Bethlehemite mothers sorrowing in radical inner retreat from the carnage around them spilled over into France and the Germanies and even as far afield as Sweden [22].38 But its privileged locus was indubitably Tuscany and Umbria, its grand masters incontestably Sienese and Perugian. It scaled its highest artistic heights on Nicola Pisano's son Giovanni's pulpits in bold relief, at once touching and terrifying, for the Church of Sant'Andrea in Pistoia (1301) [24] and again for the cathedral in Pisa (1302-11) [25], each containing fully three lap-type Bethlehemite Rachels and the latter also a fourth verging on the ground-type alternative.

Over and beyond the occasional express convergence of the Bethlehemite grieving mother with the grieving mother of God in western Christian art and letters, the two also connected implicitly through juxtapositions of the whole Massacre scene with the whole Crucifixion scene. These juxtapositions abounded in all artistic media throughout the late middle ages. A mid-thirteenth-century English bible pictured Christ's life in nine squares arranged three by three, the Massacre proper (complete with a Rachel symbol and a lap-type lamenting mother) being centered directly above the Crucifixion (itself complete with a sorrowing Mary) [26].39 In a frieze of the same vintage on Notre-Dame at Etampes, the order of the scenes of Christ's infancy drawn from Matthew was reshuffled so that the Massacre and the Passion might appear on adjacent capitals.40 On Giovanni Pisano's Pistoian pulpit as originally executed, "the corner with the mystical Christ was meant to appear at the upper center, separating the Massacre of the Innocents from the Crucifixion"41 - or, better, joining the two. The prophet panel to the right of the Massacre on the front predella of Duccio's Maeste is inscribed with Matthew's quotation from Jeremiah about Rachel lamenting in Ramah; thus situated, "this prophecy presages the Lamentation over the dead Christ."42 And an English cope of about 1325 was so embroidered that an Innocent impaled on a spear forms a cross just below the Crucifixion proper at dead center.43 But this configurative message was most articulate in Barna da Siena's overpowering Crucifixion crowned by a Massacre in his serial depiction of Christ's life painted about 1350 for the Collegiata of San Gimignano [27]. There the Virgin in the Crucifixion swoons diagonally opposite the Rachelite lap-type mourning mother in the Massacre; a soldier stabbing Christ in the Crucifixion offsets one lancing an Innocent in the Massacre above; a heap of slaughtered Innocents in the upper panel weighs straight down over the dying Savior's head. To achieve this whole richly suggestive vertical alignment, Barna too shifted the Flight into Egypt out of its narrative sequence as given by Matthew "so that the Massacre of the Innocents could occupy the lunette above Christ on the Cross."44

By the time that Western piety conjoined Mary with Rachel figurally in and through that bereaved mother in Bethlehem, such treble composites were no novelty in the Christian repertory. The figure of Mary Magdalen for one had already shaped up in art as "a compound of several of the women mentioned in the different gospel narratives."45 This many-personed Magdalen acquired a further, figural referent after she threw up her arms in demonstrative grief at Christ's death in Byzantine art. For she thereupon duly followed suit in Italian art,46 where her gesture served as a further token of Rachel at Christ's bewailing.

I have saved for the last the supreme end product in Western art of that figural tripling from Ramah through Bethlehem to Golgotha: the German Piete [28]. Its Italian name, preferred even in German from the first to such native variants as Vesperbild or Marienklage, suggests that the inspiration for it came from Italy. Yet the Piete itself did not, despite some close approaches to it in and near Giotto's circle.47 Indeed, for the first century after it emerged in the early 1300s in devotional statues loosely scattered along the Rhine it remained a German product even in Italy, being either imported there from German workshops, produced there locally by itinerant German sculptors, or fashioned there by Italians after German originals.48 Ever since Drogo's death-ridden "D," a continually thickening line of reliefs, frescos, and miniatures of the Massacre had featured an iconographical prototype for the Piete in the lap-type mourning mother.49 In late pre-Piete Italian Massacres that lap-type mourning had attained extreme psychological isolation in the very thick of the intense, cruel, and violent action surrounding it. In France meanwhile it reverted closer to its compositional source in Drogo, as when the miniaturist Jean Pucelle, in copying the lap-type twosome from Giovanni Pisano's Pistoian pulpit, distanced it from the Bethlehemite slaughter physically as well as psychologically.50 Perhaps the lap-type mourning mother's absorption in her grief over her dead son to the exclusion of everything else was why, when the Bethlehemite metamorphosed into the Golgothan twosome on a figural license, it took the starkly reductive form of freestanding statuary.

This self-contained freestanding German statuary in turn brought the self-enclosed mourning in Golgotha to a still higher level of abstraction from any and every earthly context. It is true that much preaching, drama, and poetry since the early middle ages had prepared the way for a last, intimate farewell from Mary to her dead son within the developing story of the Passion and that as of the twelfth century the bittersweet funereal monologues invented for Mary in the Germanies had already separated her spiritually from the other mourners surrounding the dead Christ.51 But it is equally true, and decisive for its artistic meaning, that the Piete burst the confines of the Passion itself and therewith removed its subject root and branch from any and every scriptural frame of reference or point of departure.52 One early authority observed just a bit guardedly: "The PieteÉ focuses almost exclusively on Mary and Christ alone as an inwardly self-contained group; no more real lamenting, hardly even any more mourning; instead a pained yet controlled absorption, a mute, solitary dialogue between the mother and her dead child..."53 A second early scholar elaborated: "All distracting company has been removed from the mother and son, every tie with the drama unfolding has been severed, and nearly all allusions to the time or place of this lament have been suppressed. All by itself, a mother's timeless, eternal anguish over her son, without bounds, without setting, and without witnesses, touches the devout believer's heart more directly than ever before."54 And a third early historian of that bleak image insisted succinctly and trenchantly: "The German Piete is from the first no episode out of the Virgin's laments with all their lively narrative imagery, but a timeless union of the mother with her crucified son - a devotional image divorced from all narrative context."55 This divorce brought to a head the inner aloneness of the key Massacre mother as in Duccio, Giotto, the Pisanos, and other Tuscan and Umbrian artists active just before the Piete emerged north of the Alps - the radical unworldliness of that mater dolorosa oblivious to whatever is not her dead son or her deathless sorrow.

Like an iconographical hyphen connecting the lap-type proto-Piete derived from Drogo's "D" with the Piete proper is an early, perhaps the earliest, group of Rhenish Pietes: those with the dead Christ baby-sized, yet complete with beard and even crown of thorns [29]. The usual understanding of these bizarre halfway specimens relates them, no doubt rightly, to the Virgin and Child as condensing the two ends of Christ's life into a single image.56 But Erwin Panofsky for one saw them also as the transitional forms they no doubt were, mediating between the proto-Piete in the Massacre and the Piete proper.57

Whichever Pietes came first - and this is still a moot question - in them culminated the transcendent triunity of the lamenting mother in Bethlehem with both Rachel before her and Mary after her. Yet at the same time - and this was the paradoxical payoff - the Piete also cut off the mourning mother of God visually from that same treble continuum. So did the Lamentation in its perfected form lose the deeper, figural dimension of Ramah and Bethlehem behind it even as it contracted forwards into the single plane of the Passion. Nor did that triple composite of Ramah-Bethlehem-Golgotha dissolve all alone, in isolation from the rest of the Christian figural repertory; the whole figural world view itself disintegrated along with it, marking an apt symbolic end of the middle ages.58 The Massacre did not therewith recede from sight; on the contrary, even as the figural world view disintegrated, "the fifteenth century honored the Holy Innocents with special veneration"59 - this, though, no longer for their pivotal figural role, but by reason of their specific fate in its own right, which quintessentialized our all-human fate seen as an execution for no crime. Perhaps it was Fra Angelico who in 1448 last wove a recall of Rachel together with a lap-type and a ground-type mourning mother into a single, prophetic Massacre scene complete with inscriptions drawn from Matthew. Thereafter the fragments of that triunity survived only as occasional stage props in the grandiose dramatic spectacle that the Massacre became for a Raphael or a Poussin once it was relieved of its figural extensions backwards and forwards beyond its own bloody confines - relieved, that is, of all need for the lamenting in Bethlehem to resonate with that in Ramah before it and that in Golgotha after it. A triunitarian disciple of Joachim of Floris, Michael Servetus, in his Christianismi restitutio (The Restoration of Christianity) of 1553, could still posit triple figural runs galore including even a new one for lamenting Rachel,60 but only to be condemned to the flames forthwith first by the Inquisition, then by Calvin's Geneva when he sought refuge there. Remnants of the tattered and faded figural vision with Bethlehem at its midpoint put in a last few fleeting appearances, among them one in that artistic monument of the Counterreformation, Caravaggio's Entombment, painted in 1603 for a Chapel of the Piete, with Mary Magdalen striking the old Rachel pose.61 Then the entire kaleidoscopic Christian congeries of compound meanings and crisscross allusions came apart definitively for all the fevered piety suffusing the seventeenth century. And once that figural scheme as a whole lost its organic cohesion, the life went out of its residual components as well. Like the scattered bits of the cut-up Innocents in Basil's seminal fifth-century sermon, those disjointed fragments of a defunct figural complex can now be put back together again only outwardly and at best incompletely.

That lost cohesion was subjective. Where an associative symbolic complex such as Ramah-Bethlehem-Golgotha cohered was within the minds and hearts of the faithful. How that Ramah-Bethlehem-Golgotha complex in particular shaped up, spread, ramified, and ultimately dissolved is therefore a piece of psychohistory even though my account took little note of the artists, poets, or preachers, let alone the patrons and believers, whose product it was at every stage. It is astonishing, when considered afresh, that a tale such as this one of concepts and images evolving could be told as I did tell it here, impersonally - that it unfolded as if by an inner developmental logic despite its having been a running result of numberless individual doings over many eventful centuries. The psychohistorical term for such unthinking collaborative unfolding, "group process," has a deceptive ring of scientific savvy to it. Actually such behavior in concert as the term denotes is still fraught with mystery. Perhaps something can be glimpsed about its workings from how this minute strand of refined Christian fantasy and illusion conjoining Ramah with Bethlehem first, and then with Golgotha as well, ran its course.

The Christian figural scheme that in this instance conflated one imaginary lament with a second and then a third by dint of remote equivalences and through multiple, dispersed, allusive signs mimicked the language of the human unconscious. Its figurative devices were the consecrated Freudian ones that shape messages from our psychic depths: condensation, as between Ramah and Bethlehem, Bethlehem and Golgotha, Ramah and Golgotha; displacement, as with Rachel's attribute of the raised arms removed to Bethlehem and later to Golgotha; twisted words, such as Rachel's about her children who "were no more"; pictographic ploys, such as Barna's dead innocents literally on Jesus' mind at the Crucifixion; juxtapositions to signify connections, as between the Massacre and the Crucifixion; symbols aplenty, including attributes such as Rachel's raised arms; the whole smoothed over artistically the way a dream is, only more so. By the same token, in overriding as it did any and every constraint of time, place, or situation, the Christian figural scheme affirmed outright the same wishful deathlessness as governs our mental underworld. The Ramah-Bethlehem-Golgotha continuum specifically stood warrant that all things return even as it put a fable-like spin on cruel death undeserved - on the Massacre symbolizing our mortal lot. This primal sense of the Massacre emerged in all its starkness once that continuum was broken: then "all the images tending to evoke the horror of death" were assembled in the fourteenth-century churchyard of the Innocents at Paris.62 But already the alignment of the Massacre mother with Rachel in Ramah on the one side and with Mary in Golgotha on the other was an unconscious denial of death in that the Israelite exiles lamented by Rachel were not really dead63 any more than Jesus lamented by Mary was really dead. The exiles would return from captivity, and Jesus would rise from the grave, so that the massacred Innocents in between duly survived by association to be named the first martyrs to the Christian faith and thence privileged to circle the Virgin's head as angels forever.

Pagan elites resisted Christianity for its teachings themselves, to be sure, but just as much for its elevation of an archaic, wishful mode of deconstructing and reconstructing reality to a hieratic device for discerning hidden truths. From the church fathers to the scholastics, Christianity enforced, rationalized, and solemnified a regression to a quasi-magical cast of mind, and this in more than just the figural scheme that I have been illustrating. The regressive thrust of the Christian agenda pokes through those naive articles of the faith, beginning with miracles, that the Enlightenment had a field day debunking. But my point is a different one: that, doctrinal contents aside, the Christian persuasion represented a step backwards on the rudimentary level of mass consciousness itself. Christian orthodoxy was an offensive waged against straight thinking on behalf of a would-be higher order of meanings and relations actually fetched up out of our species' mental refuse bin. The aura of enchanted superrationality that marked the Christian vision at its loftiest arose out of those subrational depths whence our dearest dreams issue. The renaissance, the scientific revolution, and the enlightenment - modernity for short - renewed with pagan antiquity in countless more conspicuous ways, but also in the basic way of restoring the reality principle to the privileged place it had won for itself in ancient centers of learning.

Such humanistic, scientific, enlightened restoring was programmatic with the great modernizers and strident with their eager followers. But as can be seen on a small scale from when and how the double figural backdrop to the Lamentation and the Piete fell away, the battle against the Christian perspective on human existence was won deep down before it was even joined. It was won not by the reality principle militant, moreover, but because that figural mode of thought that was at the very heart of the faith self-destructed. The mournful continuity from Ramah to Bethlehem called for a further fulfillment at Golgotha that would transcend Golgotha: a supreme sorrow that would presage a supreme redemptive joy. But then that further, transcendent fulfillment, by dint of its very transcendence, left Ramah and Bethlehem behind. If this single figural case is indicative, the Christian dream simply dreamed itself out before the Christian scheme was refuted.

Rudolph Binion is Leff Professor of History at Brandeis University and a contributing editor of this journal. His most recent book is Sounding the Classics. From Sophocles to Thomas Mann (Westport CT: Greenwood and Praeger, 1997).

References for:
Three Mourning Mothers: The Making and Unmaking of a Christian Figural Complex
Captions and iconographical appendix by CAROLINE FISHER
Illustrations: ALBERT SCHMIDT
Mr. Schmidt's Illustrations are not included at this time.

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