In the bandroom of an iconic bar in Melbourne, I once looked up in the dim light at a ceiling filled with a hundred icons and paintings of the Virgin Mary. Each were tiled closely alongside one another, akin to that gothic style, horror vacui, “fear of empty space,” in which every inch of a surface is filled with detail, pattern, or decoration. The display resembled a framed collection of family photos that might hang on a wall in the living room or the hallway, a mosaic of fallen and upright rectangles. Fractured light bounced off all those Marys with her whitewashed, porcelained veneer, giving her a sort of ironic appeal. She was at once completely familiar and strange, ready to be enjoyed in that unexpected setting.
Without a degree of distance, Mary can be rather unapproachable in the broader Australian context of which I am from and think. The two aspects that have largely delegitimatized Christianity in the public sphere are always front of mind—the child sex abuse scandals and the church’s identification with the colonial power which has and continues to take up space in the ancestral home of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, whether epistemologically or materially in regard to the land that was never ceded. Whatever one thinks of her, Mary’s image is still ubiquitous both in Australia and abroad, infinitely depicted across the globe wherever Christianity touched, each context having a different relationship to her.
It is from here that I consider Amey Victoria Adkins-Jones’ multilayered book Immaculate Misconceptions: A Black Mariology, which offers a contextual theology, rooted in the US but extending beyond, for a world which has and continues to reduce Black women to mere flesh, inviolable. In unison with the Mother of God, Black women’s bodies confront us as sacred, the site of the divine itself.
In Christianity, Mary is so centrally there, “gravely overlooked” (4) as Adkins-Jones notes, the predicate of the incarnation itself, yet rarely given attention by systematic theologians. Not only did the meaning of Mary become crucial during early Christological formulations, but Mary was also theologized during the period in which Christianity needed to snip its umbilical cord with Judaism. Among many things, Immaculate Misconceptions can thus be seen as reckoning with the occlusion of the mother as observed in various other subfields, and recently in political theology. While also being one’s absolute origin, the mother can be abjected or ejected from the self to the point that the place she still occupies becomes one’s blind spot.
Sarah Jane Boss argued that ever since the turn of modernity and the propensity to see nature as a thing, the cornerstone of Mariology—the principle that matter can be infused with the divine—has been rendered unintelligible. Mary’s meaning is instead reduced to her personal femininity and the degree of her agency. Mary is thus a swampy figure, and attempting to re-present her in the “West” can seem like winding between marshy fields, trying to dodge serious critiques and disinherit certain legacies. One quickly realizes that this is impossible. But to refuse to consider her is only to keep her obscured in that blind spot.
This refusal reproduces the ancient idea that Mary is pure necessity, yet given no substance (Timaeus’s receptacle), which is precisely the devastating feminist critique of “the vessel” that women, and especially mothers, are often reduced to. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaids Tale depicts mothers needing to be controlled through diminishment at all costs precisely because of their necessity. “Alone of all her sex,” Mary’s privileged position in the symbolic order as the Mother of God does not serve women in the end, according to Marina Warner and many others. Mary as ideal mother and pure virgin excoriates women who can never be sufficiently what others need from her; never self-giving enough, never self-discipled enough. An illustration of Mary’s exceptionality might be that the prohibition against women on Mt Athos—the monastic peninsular in Greece which is the largest area in the world where women are not allowed to enter—is thought to be given and enforced by Mary herself. With her miraculous powers of fecundity and virginity, Mary is lifted up until she becomes a sort of quasi-mythological figure. In order to eschew these problems, Elizabeth Johnson soberly proposes that we focus on her role as “friend of God,” prophet, our equal, “truly our sister.”
While also winding between marshy fields, Adkins-Jones undergoes a marine excavation of the kooky and wonderful Black Madonna phenomena, which—while mostly taking place in European white contexts—can also be found in Latin America, a region known for its Mariology of liberation. Adkins-Jones scoops up a decapitated Black Madonna of Aparecida in Brazil, covered in seaweed and barnacles, in order to foreground Mary’s Palestinian Jewishness as a means of Black feminist liberation theology.
In the first pages of the book, Adkins-Jones narrates that in 1717, unlucky Brazilian fishermen prayed to the Lady of the Immaculate Conception prior to an important visit by the governor from São Paulo. When they let down their nets again, they raised up a small statue of a headless Black Madonna, then her head, then the catch of fish they needed. At home, they re-membered Mary’s head with melted wax. Later, a man named Zachariah, enslaved in Brazil, was on his way back to the plantation after an attempted escape. As he was passing by a shrine to the Lady of Aparecida, he prayed to her and his chains immediately broke. In appealing to this oral tradition, Adkins-Jones foregrounds a Mary who is in solidarity with the oppressed: “Her apparition is particularly special—a Black Madonna in relationship to Black people, to the enslaved and those whose ancestors were enslaved—and her miracles yet testify as an emblem of justice” (3).
Building upon this Marian tradition of liberation, Adkins-Jones pays due attention to the process through which Mary became “Christian.” For Adkins-Jones, Mary’s virginity and her sin-free life—her Immaculate Conception—was required as a means of erasing Mary’s material location as a Palestinian Jewish peasant, turning her instead into a symbol and principle. There is thus a supersessionist logic at the foundation of Mariology, which Adkins-Jones spotlights and subverts.
In contrast to Elizabeth Johnson’s influential work, I wish to emphasize Mary’s strangeness that was captured on the ceiling of the bandroom and that Adkins-Jones evokes when she discusses doll-sized statues dressed in elaborate textiles. These Black Madonnas appear in a material world that is fecund and porous. This strangeness can also be seen in Marian icons, which are said to bleed, cry, and lactate, or in the Marian apparitions on the periphery of Adkins-Jones’s book. There is something interesting about the (oc)cult of Mary and her ability to exceed boundaries, material or theological. Adkins-Jones invokes “disruptive sites of the unorthodox within the presumed orthodox” (34). As Francis X. Clooney writes in his comparison of Mary with Hindu goddesses, Mary is the only person whom Christians have had to continuously say, “She is not divine.”
Mary can even be understood as a leitmotif of theology’s relationship to the secular. Political theology foregrounds the insight that Christianity is the mother of a secularism that has forgotten her. But by foregrounding such an insight, there is the risk of relegitimating a sort of Christian triumphalism. We could subject Mary to a sort of razor of the immanent frame, slicing off any excess growths or appeals to the transcendent register; or we might undertake the opposite gesture, using her as a means to carve out a space within the frame itself.
In order to do so, perhaps we can appeal to Mary’s capaciousness. Adkins-Jones notes that the ship which carried Christopher Columbus’s 1492 expedition across the Atlantic was called Holy Mary of the Immaculate Conception, which resounds with that political theology of conquest over “virgin territory.” Rather than implying that Mary is empty space due to be filled, her ability to make space might instead be read as a negative political theologyin which she is invoked in “white” contexts like Australia—where Christianity represents those in possession of the ruling hand—as someone who abdicates power in order to “make space” for the other.
This can be helpfully reinforced by what Simone Weil summoned by “grace.” Grace, she writes, is not using all of the powers at one’s disposal; it is relinquishing the infinite growth of one’s spatial reality out of love for the existence of the other. Famously, she parallels prayer with the act of relinquishing this tendency to infinitively expand oneself, such that an encounter with the other must take place in the void. Less well known is her collection of writings against the French colonialism of her time, which can and should be read as coextensive with her broader work. Weil suggests that there is a continuity between the law that gas expands in a container and the forever expanding tendency of the human collective. The collective necessarily extends the boundaries of its own body in accordance with its own capacity—if it can expand, it will. For Weil, the genuine “miracle” of grace is the capacity to resist this condition, which is the work and gift of grace itself.
A Weilian-inflected Mariology implies that to love the other is to want them to exist outside of yourself, and to do this one must carve out space literally within one’s own material reality. The pregnant body might be a primal analogy of this, but it is certainly not singular. It is not only the capacity of any parent or even any person in relation; it is already our condition.
