Madonna, On The Other Hand, Can Subdivide With The Ease Of An
Amoeba, And Yet Never Lose Her Identity Or
Credibility; moreover, thanks
to her divine character, anything can be accredited to her - anything
good, however wonderful; lastly, the traditions
Concerning her are so
conveniently vague that they actually foster the mythopoetic faculty.
Hence her success. Again: the man-saints were separatists; they fought
for their own towns against African intruders, and in those frequent and
bloody inter-communal battles which are a feature of Italian
medievalism. Nowadays it is hardly proper that neighbouring townsmen,
aided and abetted by their respective saints, should sally forth to cut
each others' throats. The Madonna, as cosmopolitan Nike, is a fitter
patroness for settled society.
She also found a ready welcome in consequence of the pastoral
institutions of the country in which the mother plays such a conspicuous
role. So deeply are they ingrained here that if the Mother of God had
not existed, the group would have been deemed incomplete; a family
without a mother is to them like a tree without roots - a thing which
cannot be. This accounts for the fact that their Trinity is not ours; it
consists of the Mother, the Father (Saint Joseph), and the Child - with
Saint Anne looming in the background (the grandmother is an important
personage in the patriarchal family). The Creator of all things and the
Holy Ghost have evaporated; they are too intangible and non-human.
But She never became a true cosmopolitan Nike, save in literature. The
decentralizing spirit of South Italy was too strong for her. She had to
conform to the old custom of geographical specialization. In all save in
name she doffed her essential character of Mother of God, and became a
local demi-god; an accessible wonder-worker attached to some particular
district. An inhabitant of village A would stand a poor chance of his
prayers being heard by the Madonna of village B; if you have a headache,
it is no use applying to the Madonna of the Hens, who deals with
diseases of women; you will find yourself in a pretty fix if you expect
financial assistance from the Madonna of village C: she is a
weather-specialist. In short, these hundreds of Madonnas have taken up
the qualities of the saints they supplanted.
They can often outdo them; and this is yet another reason for their
success. It is a well-ascertained fact, for example, that many holy men
have been nourished by the Milk of the Mother of God, "not," as a
Catholic writer says, "in a mystic or spiritual sense, but with their
actual lips"; Saint Bernard "among a hundred, a thousand, others." Nor
is this all, for in the year 1690, a painted image of the Madonna, not
far from the city of Carinola, was observed to "diffuse abundant milk"
for the edification of a great concourse of spectators - a miracle which
was recognized as such by the bishop of that diocese, Monsignor Paolo
Ayrola, who wrote a report on the subject.
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