" The
fresco of the Camposanto at Pisa, ascribed to Orcagna, shows the
transfigured Virgin sitting by the side of Christ, not below Him. The
numerous legends in which Mary, often regardless of justice and
propriety, delivers her faithful worshippers from all manner of dangers,
were written during the same period. One of the most famous of these is
the legend of Theophilus, the forerunner of Faust. In a German version
(by Brun of Schoenebeck) dating from the thirteenth century, Theophilus
abjures God and all things divine, with the sole exception of Mary,
wherefore she saves him from eternal damnation. This poem therefore
shows us Mary as absolutely opposed to God.
We have now arrived at the third stage of the cult of Mary; the new,
spiritual love, translated into metaphysics, was projected on her; she
was approached by her worshippers with the ardent love which hitherto
had been the prerogative of earthly women. The two currents, the one
arising in ecclesiastical tradition, and the other in the soul of the
metaphysical lover, had met; the genuine spiritual cult of Mary was the
creation of the great metaphysical lovers, who existed not only in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but are met not infrequently later
on; man's irresistible need to raise woman above him and worship her,
created the true Madonna, for whose sake romantic souls of all times
have "returned home" into the fold of the Church, the true Madonna who
at heart is alien to the principles of the Church, but is re-born daily
in the soul of the metaphysical lover.
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