You are often cited as a stereotypical figure of the intellectual. Is it not then a paradox that you were lamenting with me over this fact: you are no longer physically fit enough to do the round of the seven Santa Marijas tomorrow, as you used to do until recently.
On the contrary, it is because I am a philosopher with more than a passing interest in the philosophy of religion, that I love our festi. Admittedly, I love some more than others, for instance that of your parish Mosta where I have many long standing friends at the Isouard Band Club.
When I was a very small boy during the war, we lived right at the back of St George’s Basilica in Victoria, and I served there as an altar boy. But, for the feast of the Assumption, I very innocently insisted on also going as an altar boy to the Cathedral. The bishop, the redoubtable Michael Gonzi himself, had to intervene personally for it to be allowed.
When Pius XII declared the Assumption to be a dogma, many intellectuals, some Catholics as well as Protestants, were not at all enthusiastic. There is nothing in scripture that directly supports it. If you tried to understand it as if it were some kind of scienti-fic statement, it sounds like nonsense.
It was the ordinary people with no high-flying pretentions who rightly understood religion to be a poetic and richly symbolic language. It was housewives and hawkers and that kind of people who spun out, in both east and west, the belief that has now been given multiple expression in the polysemic figuration of Mary assumed body and soul into Heaven.
You know that the image of it that I love most is Caravaggio’s painting, now in the Louvre. It is related to the Byzantine tradition which Caravaggio loved. (I have shown how clearly he was influenced in other works by the mega-icon of Our Lady of Damascus in the Greek Church near the Grand Master’s Palace in Valletta).
Caravaggio excelled in the tenderness with which he portrayed Our Lady as much as he did in depicting violence, as I amply showed in my book on Caravaggio for children of all ages. In the Assumption painting, the supernatural dimension is superbly and subtly shown just in the movement of the light and the red curtain occupying most of the background space.
Caravaggio seems to have anticipated the concept developed by the great 20th century theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar, that Mary’s role in history of salvation was essentially dramatic. She lived her life and death as an actor playing a part.
She figures as the representative of others – the Church, even humankind, all of us. In the Assumption, Balthasar sees her as poised between time and eternity, signifying that all of us in this phase of human history are also in that position.
As in the Nativity, she represents a new Garden of Eden for the new Adam to appear within it, so in the Assumption she represents the new Jerusalem within which the new humankind reconstituted in the Risen Christ was eventually to appear.
Why has Balthasar’s account aroused so much controversy?
He linked it to his interpretation of sexuality, that became famous when it was practically taken over by Pope John Paul II.
Balthasar believes that the Bible presents Adam when first created as not being either male or female and that sexual differentiation only occurs when Eve is created. He then takes it that when Christ rises from the dead (and when Mary is assumed into His glorious presence), the original condition transcending sex is resumed.
Some have made this theory the basis of what has been called “a new Catholic Feminism”. Others have argued that it reduces womanhood to just a transitory contingency.
Do you think there is any awareness of this kind of discussion arising out of reflection on the Assumption among those who will be celebrating the festa?
The festa is almost totally a form of street theatre. Because of that, there could hardly be a more effective, if unintended, illustration of Balthasar’s thesis, namely that Mary’s role in the history of salvation is essentially dramatic and the event to which it refers is essentially symbolic.
The festive procession with the baroque statue can hardly be surpassed as means for the effective communication of the meaning and message of the Assumption, at least as understood by Balthasar. Certainly no theological treatise, or panegyric, or answers by me to your questions can match it as the image of the threshold-figure in transition between time and eternity.
There is now increasing female participation in all aspects of the festivity, including band marches, whether as musicians or otherwise. This cultural development is allowing women a more ecstatic and supra-rational self-expression: that mode has been at least historically the most typical of religious verbal and bodily language.
No doubt, some excesses are unacceptable, but women can in this way fulfil a more shaman-like leadership role than if they were ordained to the priesthood. They would then have been constrained to the tame, if not, lame duck style of the Latin rite clerical caste.
Its so far exclusively male members, already quasi-robotised by Canon Law, are in process of being more and more dis-animated, not only by their ever more mortified image in the media, but also by the churning out of over-baked and instantly-stale regulations formulated and codified by the progres-sive, intellectual churchmen’s establishment.
But we have only to look at the Assunta to realise the Pope’s motif when defining the dogma: that she appear as a rainbow of hope in our world of gloom and doom.
By the way, you can also watch the Mosta feast live on TV.
Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.