The European museum director asked me my field of study, and I replied, “icons of the Virgin Mary.” His silver beard unsuccessfully concealed a snicker. “Men don’t typically study Mary,” he told me. I suppose I might have shifted the conversation to sports, but, as the respective footballs of our continents are different shapes altogether, the exchange ground to an awkward halt instead, as did any prospects for the fellowship I was seeking.
I still found my way to Europe for my doctoral studies, visiting countless Byzantine churches, chasing depictions of Mary. I had grown quite used to a common image of the Virgin with her arms raised in a prayerful gesture of surrender, her womb revealing the omnipotent God within. The type is sometimes called the Virgin of the Sign (a reference to Isaiah 7:14), or “Platytéra ton ouranon,” a Greek phrase which today might be translated, “womb more spacious than the stars.”
My preferred nickname for the icon though is Our Lady of the Ultrasound. But as I looked up at one such Mary at the tiny church of St. Nicholas Kasnitzi in the Greek lake town of Kastoria, I was stopped in my tracks. It looked like the classic icon, except Mary was not Mary, but a man. He even looked like that silver-bearded museum director, nearly nine months pregnant.
Warren Woodfin has explained that the figure is St. Menas, a Roman soldier from Egypt who tradition relates was killed for his Christian faith. Offered a high military post, he replied “our government is in heaven,” traded his military belt for the circular standard of Christ, and was martyred. Later depictions of him, such as the twelfth-century image at Kastoria, are a reminder that Menas chose Christ over Empire (something Christians are prone to forget). But it is hard to ignore that Menas is the doppelgänger of the Queen of Heaven as well. The onetime warrior’s maternal turn is a fitting illustration of what happens when men grow up.
The Marian male, I have since learned, stems from the mystery Christians celebrate on March 25 (nine months before Christmas), the Feast of the Annunciation — when the Almighty became an embryo. The angel Gabriel announced to Mary that she would conceive a boy named Jesus (Luke 1:31). After her questions were answered, she consented to the invitation with an enthusiastic “let it be to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38). But all Christians, male and female, are called to be like Mary as well. “There is a profound analogy between the Fiat” — “let it be” — “which Mary said in reply to the angel, and the Amen which every believer says when receiving the body of the Lord,” wrote John Paul II.
That men, too, are called to also be like Mary is less a result of transgressive gender theory than of mainstream Christian theology. Jesus, after all, calls anyone his mother who does the will of God (Mark 3:35). “My little children,” says a maternal Paul, “for whom I am again in the pain of childbirth until Christ is formed in you.” (Galatians 4:19).
For Paul, not just women, but all Christians groan in labor along with creation itself (Romans 8:22-23). Later theologians developed the motif: “Each conceives in like manner to [Mary] within himself the God of all, as she bore him in herself,” said Symeon the New Theologian (d. 1022).
The medieval mystic Meister Eckhart (d. 1327) took such rhetoric to the extreme: “It is more precious to God to be born spiritually from every such virgin or from every good soul than that he was bodily born of Mary.” The impressive league of men named after Mary (Rainer Maria Rilke and Josemaría Escrivá, to name a few) will not find any of this a surprise.
“Are men really trying to take pregnancy from us a well?” some women reading this might ask. And there’s something to the objection. Because of the mechanics of the Annunciation, there is no way around the fact that for Christians, the salvation of the world was procured without male participation. Only the Holy Spirit and Mary were required.
“There was no end to the servitude and pain and affliction of women,” as one medieval text puts it. “But when the archangel said to the holy Virgin, ‘the Lord is with you,’ all the debts of affliction were erased.” The text later says, “there is no longer the lordship of man over you.”
The Annunciation, in other words, is the hammer that smashes patriarchy. There is good reason, therefore, that the priest Zechariah is forced into silence in Luke’s account of the months before Jesus’s birth (Luke 1:20), while Elizabeth and Mary, by contrast, shout to the Lord (Luke 1:42; 46).
That having been said, “Mary is for both men and women,” as my colleagues Amy Peeler and Jennifer McNutt have asserted, and both sexes can take her as their model. The history of art makes this perfectly clear. While in his twenties, Michelangelo gave us the traditional “Pièta” (1498-99). In his wiser seventies, through his self-portrait as a Nicodemus in the “Florentine Pièta” (1547-55), the artist took Mary’s place himself. Or consider Rembrandt’s Holy Family (1633), where a basket is placed by Joseph as if to imitate a womb. Beautifully enough, even Jesus and God the Father take on Marian roles in the history of Christian art.
In Orthodox icons of Mary’s Dormition, Jesus cuddles the swaddled soul of his mother, just as his mother once cuddled him. In “Gnadenstuhl” (Throne of Grace) images, God the Father embraces his dead son in the same way that Mary does in the more famous Pièta. The current El Greco show at the Art Institute of Chicago contains perhaps the most famous of such images (“The Trinity,” 1577-79), but it cannot be understood apart from El Greco’s image of Mary holding her dead son (“Pièta,” 1575) that the artist painted first. The Marian male tradition continues in contemporary art as well. Kehinde Wiley (“Mary, Comforter of the Afflicted,” 2016) fuses the Pièta and Black Madonna traditions by giving us a black man holding his dying son. Such images offer an antidote to unhinged masculinity far more potent than any shaving cream commercial.
Some outside the Christian faith make similar suggestions: “The body is like Mary,” wrote the Sufi mystic Rumi (d. 1273). “Every one of us has a Jesus within him, but until the pangs manifest in us our Jesus is not born.” This is an exciting convergence. Still, Christianity gives the intuitions of other faiths firm footing. God became human once, for all, in the womb of Mary. Then, through the Eucharist, he enters human bodies over and over for as long as time endures. Should these bodies lack a functional womb, or if they are, like all of us, broken, afraid, weary, sinful — this is no impediment. Mary may have been first, but all are invited to follow.
The Christian faith, inconceivable without Mary, is a far cry from the portrait of modern man painted so well by E.M. Forster in “Howard’s End”: “I am not a fellow,” boasts Henry Wilcox, “who bothers about my own inside.”
Years ago on the Feast of the Annunciation, I returned from our church communion rail to sit next to my newly pregnant wife, and realized that my male body was not entirely dissimilar to hers. Having consumed Christ’s body, I was bearing another within me as well. “O holy and ever blessed Spirit, who didst overshadow the holy Virgin Mother of our Lord,” prayed Jeremy Taylor (d. 1667). “Be pleased to overshadow my soul, and enlighten my spirit, that I may conceive the holy Jesus in my heart.”
The Feast of the Annunciation does not invite us to celebrate what happened to a brave first-century Jewish girl from a safe distance. It invites us all, men especially, to imitate her; and as Mary herself could tell us, that has never been safe.
Matthew J. Milliner (@millinerd) is an associate professor of art history at Wheaton College.
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