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.
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