The Touch that Goes Beyond Touching

a reflection to celebrate the Feast Day of Saint Mary of Magdala

This is an essay that was published as a book chapter in Reimund Bieringer, Barbara Baert and  Karlijn Demasure (eds.), Noli me tangere: New Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium (Leuven, Paris, Dudley MA: Peeters, 2016): pp. 335-354. For copyright reasons, I’m sharing the final draft version and most of it is behind a paywall. Non-paying subscribers have free access for one week.

“THE TOUCH THAT GOES BEYOND TOUCHING”[1]:

A REFLECTION ON THE TOUCHING OF MARY OF MAGDALA

IN THEOLOGY AND ART

by Tina Beattie

She who binds to herself a joy

Doth the winged life destroy.

But she who kisses the joy as it flies,

Lives in eternity’s sunrise.

(William Blake – modified)

Touch and sight are two senses which intertwine enigmatically through scripture and western philosophy, from Aristotle’s ambiguity about touch and whether or not it could be called a sense, to Jacques Derrida and Jean Luc Nancy’s postmodern deconstructive ruminations on noli me tangere[2].

We whose culture has been shaped by the Christian tradition are continuously touched by Mary of Magdala. She reaches out to us through veils of scripture, myth, and legend across a gap in the story of Christ, touching us with the touch of her desire, so that her touch becomes the chiasm wherein our desire reaches out and seeks to cross the boundary of infinity and absence to discover anew its elusive object. From the greatest works of western art to Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, Mary of Magdala touches our desire.

The Resurrection - Noli Me Tangere - Milan Duomo Bronze Doors - photos by Tina Beattie

This desire is beautifully expressed in a bronze panel on one of the doors of the duomo in Milan. Noli me tangere. The sculptor focuses our attention on the paradox of that prohibition, by showing us Mary of Magdala touching Christ in such a way that their hands seem to melt into one another. Both the prohibition and the desire seep out through the surface of the bronze, drawing the living human hand to touch the touching, to polish away the patina of time, and to let the glow of that touch appear before us in all its enigmatic appeal.

On a visit to Milan Duomo last year, I watched as tourists lingered before those polished hands, before giving in to the irresistible desire to touch the touching:

Touching the Untouchable - The Resurrection - Milan Duomo Bronze Doors - photos by Tina Beattie

But Mary of Magdala also awakens the artist’s desire to make visible the not-touching which always brushes up against the barrier of absence, prohibiting the immediacy of bodily touch. The desire of art is stimulated only through the absence of the object of desire – the body or the God, the real presence, which would render all representation, sublimation and substitution redundant. Jean-Luc Nancy asks why painters have so often been drawn to depict this scene, and he suggests that

it is because it puts into play a particularly delicate and complex exercise of vision. On the one hand, everything takes place before the empty tomb, in a reversal of the gaze from the tomb. On the other hand, the vision that is given is complex: first indecisive, then supplemented by speech, and finally held at a distance, able to see only the time of knowing that this vision must be allowed to leave[3].

Nancy refers to

a remarkable game of hands: approach and designation of the other; arabesque of slender fingers; prayer and benediction; suggestion of a light touch; a brushing; an indication of caution or warning. These hands always form a promise or a desire to hold each other or to hold each other back, to join together with others. ... These are hands ready to be joined but already disjoined and distant, like the shadow and the light, hands that exchange greetings mixed with desires, hands that show bodies but that also point to the sky[4].

How many artists have played with these hands and these bodies? Touching – turning away – yearning – rejecting – desiring – separating. What does this touch mean, a touch of which we know nothing except the prohibition? Was it a touching, a clinging, an erotic embrace, an ecstatic welcome, a sorrowing farewell? All of these or none? We do not know, but still we are caught up in the woman’s desire and invited to follow where it leads, tracing the footsteps of all who have arrived at this touch and found themselves touching and being touched, in imagination, prayer, music and art.

We know from the history of art and devotion that Mary of Magdala touches the desires of every age, but that her touching – like her person – has an anamorphic quality. It is fluid and dynamic, changing its shape to fit the desires it feeds. If we are to discover the significance of that touching for our own time, we need to retain the abundance of the historical tradition and allow Mary of Magdala to stand before us in all her complex guises. Modern biblical scholars and feminists offer us a pared down figure, stripping away the accretions and distortions of tradition to rediscover the woman of the Gospels[5]. But to take away those layerings of interpretation is also to take away the desires that have shaped the image of the woman known as the Magdalene, which have been refracted and revealed through the prisms of art and devotion in all their changing contexts. To divest Mary Magdalene of her historical and cultural identity is to divest our own Catholic tradition of one of its most significant bearers of meaning, pregnant anew in every generation with redemptive possibilities. The Mary of our desire is the apostle to the apostles. She is several women of the Gospels. She is the medieval preacher and slayer of dragons. She is the penitent sinner and bare-breasted prostitute. She is the hirsute ascetic in the desert. All of these and more may tell us little if anything about the “real” Mary of Magdala, but they tell us a great deal about ourselves as disciples of Christ who seek to follow in her footsteps.

Undoubtedly many of these images are vehicles of masculine desire, for the changing identity of Mary Magdalene closely follows changing social constructs of female sanctity and sexuality. But we know from women’s devotions and the writings of women mystics that Mary of Magdala has also been a potent expression of women’s desires, not only because of her intimacy and friendship with Christ, but also because of her associations with prostitution and penance, and with different forms of sexual abuse, exploitation, and shame that are particular to women’s lives[6]. In different times and places, women have identified with Mary of Magdala as one whose nearness to Christ has assured them of their own inclusion in the promise of redemption, not only in spite of but sometimes because of her associations with prostitution and sin, however unbiblical these might be. (Nowhere in scripture is Mary of Magdala described as a prostitute).

In what follows I offer a feminist theological reflection that follows the patterns of contemplative and devotional readings, traversing the surface of the biblical text to draw maps of desire which connect unexpected moments and apparently disconnected events – just as the hands of Christ and Mary of Magdala reach out to touch and not touch across an unmappable terrain of difference – between time and eternity, mortality and immortality, body and language, possibly between man and woman, in the now and not-yet mystery of the risen Christ. In this approach, I seek to discern the winding pathways of woman’s desire through the brambles of imagined time from the garden of Eden to the garden of the resurrection, to arrive at the desire that the touch of Mary of Magdala awakens in us.