Among Christ’s male and female disciples were the sisters Mary Magdalene and Martha and their brother Lazarus, whom Christ loved with familiar affection. Descended from royal stock among the Jewish people, they had a father named Siro and a mother named Eukaria. They divided the great wealth of their inheritance among themselves so that Mary received as her portion a certain fortress called Magdala, from which she was named Magdalene; Martha received the town of Bethany, which was about two miles from Jerusalem; and Lazarus, who practiced military service, received a considerable portion of Jerusalem.
[Running head: Chapter Nineteen, Folio 199.]
Mary is interpreted “bitter sea,” “illuminatrix,” or “illuminated.” It is commonly held that this Mary was the sinner who washed Jesus’s feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair in Simon’s house, as recorded in Luke 7. Gregory and Augustine expressly assert this, although others, including Jerome and Origen, say that she was another woman.
Cause 1, Question 7, If Anyone, quoting Council 7, says: “We know that Mary was first a sinner, although after her conversion she was holy and chaste; nevertheless, she was numbered among the deaconesses.”
Note that she is called a deaconess not because she had the order of the diaconate, but because she held the office of reading the Gospel with a homily at Matins.
Christ conferred great benefits upon her and displayed signs of love, so that where sin abounded, grace might abound still more. He cast seven demons out of her. He willed to have her as his hostess and provider on the journey, ministering to him from her resources, as Luke relates.
He gently excused her from the complaints of others: at Simon’s house, when Simon called her unclean and a sinner; before her sister, when Martha called her idle; and before Judas and his companions, when they accused her of extravagance.
When he saw her weeping, he could not restrain tears of compassion. For love of her he raised her brother Lazarus from the dead after four days. According to Ambrose, he healed her sister Martha from a flow of blood that she had suffered for seven years.
In the time of grace, Mary was the first to undertake solemn penance. She anointed the Lord’s feet and head with precious ointment. Sitting beside the Lord’s feet to hear his word, she chose the best part. She stood beside the cross during Christ’s Passion. She also prepared ointments to anoint him after his death.
Finally, because she burned more ardently than the others, she merited to see Jesus rising victorious from the lower regions and to receive the first joys. The Lord made her the apostle of the apostles when he first sent her to announce the glory of his Resurrection. Among women, we read that she preached to the people.
Some assert that Mary had been betrothed to John the Evangelist and that, because Christ led John away from the wedding by calling him to preserve virginity, Mary indignantly gave herself over to pleasures. This account is refuted as easily as it is asserted. It has no plausibility that she, wealthy, noble, and most beautiful, would marry a poor, ignoble, and uncultivated man.
§ I: Mary Magdalene’s Journey to Gaul
Several years after the Lord’s Passion, when the apostles had been driven from those regions, the Jews rose against Mary, Martha, their brother Lazarus, Marcella, Martha’s maidservant—who, while Christ disputed against the Pharisees, had cried, “Blessed is the womb that bore you,” and so forth—Celidomium, whom Christ had given sight although he was blind from birth, Maximinus, one of Christ’s seventy-two disciples, and several other faithful people.
They placed them in a ship without a rudder and exposed them to the sea so that they might be submerged all the more quickly. By divine guidance, however, they reached Marseille unharmed.
When they disembarked and no one received them as guests, they took shelter in a portico of a temple of that region’s gods. When the people came to sacrifice to the idols, Mary Magdalene began to preach to them and rebuke the worship of the gods. Everyone marveled at her wisdom and eloquence.
Meanwhile Mary Magdalene appeared three times in dreams to the prince of the province and his wife. She harshly rebuked their cruelty because, while abounding in delights and riches, they permitted God’s saints to be tormented by hunger. In fear, they received the saints humanely.
The prince and his wife were sterile. After hearing Mary preach Christ to the people and proclaim his powers, they said to her: “If you can obtain from your Christ that we have a son, we are ready to obey your words and believe in Christ.”
Mary Magdalene obtained this through her prayers, and the woman conceived. Because Mary had commended the apostle Peter, who was then at Rome, as the principal teacher of this doctrine and as confirming it by very many miracles, the prince resolved to go there for fuller instruction. His wife, although pregnant, wished to follow him. Mary made the sign of the cross upon their shoulders so that the ancient enemy could not hinder their journey.
While they sailed, a great storm arose. The pains of childbirth seized the matron, and after delivering a male child she died in labor. The prince was greatly dismayed both by his wife’s death and by the death that threatened the wailing infant because it could not be nourished without milk.
When the sailors wished to cast the dead woman’s body into the sea, a certain hill like a little island in the sea appeared to them. They disembarked there and placed the mother with the crying infant upon it, commending them to Mary Magdalene.
They continued their journey and reached Rome. The prince visited the apostle Peter, who reverently instructed him in every matter and charitably received him. When the prince told him of the misfortune at sea and his wife’s death, Peter comforted him, saying that the Lord would console him.
When the prince afterward returned by sea to his own land and approached the hill where he had left his wife’s corpse with the infant, he disembarked from the ship and found his wife alive with the child.
Rejoicing exceedingly at so great a miracle, they rendered immense thanks to God and attributed everything to the merits of blessed Mary Magdalene. They afterward reached their city and recounted God’s wonders. Destroying all the city’s idols, they built many churches, and very many received faith and Baptism.
They appointed blessed Lazarus bishop of Marseille. Passing from there to the city of Aix, they led its people to the faith and ordained blessed Maximinus, mentioned above, bishop there.
§ II: Mary Magdalene in the Wilderness
At last blessed Mary Magdalene, eager for divine contemplation, sought a most rugged wilderness. She remained unknown to human beings for thirty years in a place divinely prepared for her.
In that place there were neither streams of water nor the comforts of trees, showing that our Redeemer had resolved to satisfy her not with earthly feasts but with heavenly refreshment.
At each of the seven canonical hours every day, angels lifted her into the sky. With her bodily ears she heard the glorious harmonies of the heavenly companies. Daily nourished by them as by the sweetest foods and then carried back by the angels to her own place, she needed no bodily food.
A certain solitary priest, desiring to lead the eremitical life, built himself a cell about a mile and a half from that place. One day the Lord opened the hermit’s eyes, and with his bodily eyes he saw angels in human form lift someone from that place and again set the person down after an hour.
When he proceeded toward the place, he began to lose his strength as he drew near; when he retreated, he recovered his former strength. Understanding from this that it was a mystery of God, he adjured the person in Jesus Christ’s name to tell him, if human, who and what she was.
Mary Magdalene said that she was the sinner about whom one reads in the Gospel.
[Running head: Sixth Title.]
She told him how long she had remained there, how the angels lifted her seven times every day, and commanded him to reveal this to blessed Maximinus.
When she was about to depart from the body, the Lord revealed it to her. She told the hermit to have blessed Maximinus await her in the church at dawn on the following Sunday so that he might give her Viaticum.
The hermit did this and received great joy from it. Just as she had foretold, while blessed Maximinus awaited her in the church, blessed Mary appeared amid angels, raised two cubits above the earth and surrounded by great light. Before the clergy and people she received the Eucharist with many tears, rendered her spirit there to God, and was buried beside the altar. Egyssippus agrees sufficiently with the foregoing history.