The Sacred Community: Art, Sacrament, and the People of God

6. The Community in Repentance: Georges de La Tour and the Art of the Counter Reformation

87 Chapter 6 The Community in Repentance Georges de La Tour and the Art of the Counter Reformation John did baptize in the wilderness, and preach the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins. Now after that John was put in prison, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God, and saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel. —Mark 1:4, 14-15 The common note in the ministries of John the Baptist and Jesus is the call to repentance. In the first words that he utters at the beginning of his ministry in Saint Mark’s Gospel, Jesus makes two demands—that people repent and believe the gospel. The clue to the idea of repentance—μετάνοια—in the New Testament lies in the Septuagint version of the Old Testament, where its usual meaning is to feel sorry for something with the intention of change.1 The sense is invariably that of turning away from one way of life toward another, a change of mind and heart, and it is the prerequisite for belief and entry into the kingdom of heaven. In the parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15), the errant boy finally “came to himself” and returned to his father with the words, “I have sinned against heaven, and in thy sight” before he was accepted back with great celebrations, the community of the family restored into new life. In the preaching of the apostolic and early church the call to repentance was invariable, for without it faith is impossible. The 88 The Sacred Community Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus lists at length those who must change their way of life “or be rejected,” including gladiators, soothsayers , and actors. Harlots, those castrated, or “any other who does things not to be named” are simply rejected outright, “for they are defiled.”2 Canonical penance in the early Christian centuries was severe and public, for the community of the faithful was to be kept pure, though penitents, although excluded from the liturgy, were the focus of a “brotherly spirit” of correction. The Greek historian Sozomen describes the practice in Rome about 450: There the place of those who are in penance is conspicuous: they stand with downcast eyes and with the countenance of mourners. But when the divine liturgy is concluded, without taking part in those things which are lawful to the initiated, they throw themselves prostrate on the ground with wailing and lamentation. Facing them with tears in his eyes, the bishop hurries towards them and likewise falls on the ground. And the whole congregation of the church with loud crying is filled with tears.3 In his description of the Lenten penance of all the faithful, Saint Ambrose (ca. 339–397), expands on the Pauline image of the athlete in training to perfect the body, and he reminds his congregation that they are always under surveillance, for the heavenly community, with whom, finally, they are one, is watching them: “The Archangels, the Powers and Dominions, the ten thousand times ten thousand Angels are all watching you.”4 But our focus in this chapter will be later in the history of the Western church. For by the Middles Ages, Mary Magdalene had become the most prominent female saint after the Virgin herself, and for two reasons.5 First, for her role in Christ’s passion and as “apostola apostolorum,” but perhaps even more for her status as a penitent , emphasized after the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), whose Canon 25, Omnis utriusque sexus, required a minimum of annual confession to a priest of all believers. By the seventeenth century, the statutes of the Convento delle Convertite in Venice refer to Mary Magdalene as the “Mirror of Repentance” and the patron saint of women who had been “taken from the hands of the devil . . . and from the filth of the flesh . . . to the chaste life of the spirit.”6 To her story we now turn. The Community in Repentance 89 ❃ ❃ ❃ One of the most important books for the understanding of later medieval art and literature is that extraordinary, perverse, beautiful, and persistently influential work by Jacobus de Voragine entitled The Golden Legend (ca. 1260). It portrays the lives of the saints in stories both factual and fictional that range from the preposterous to the profound , from the shocking to the theologically acute, and its...