Only a perfectly clean container can hold something holy.
This is the fundamental assumption underneath all that follows.
Each religion has different needs for their container.
Each religion has different ideas of what clean is.
Each religion has a different idea what perfectly clean is.
I struggled to understand a lot of the logic until that finally clicked in just how central that is.
The early Christian church wanted to differentiate itself from its Jewish origins. They also wanted to overcome the concept of original sin, which was the reason for Jesus’ coming.
So to overcome the concept of original sin, one must return to a “before-the-fall” state of Adam & Eve. Since we couldn’t do that on our own, Christ was necessary as a bridge. From Christ, we learned about asceticism, a life “untainted by passion and lust” (pg 46). But if Christ is our bridge to a pre-fall self, what is Christ’s bridge to humanity?
Through his mother.
She had to remain virginal and be free of Eve’s curse of pain in labor, through which she “transformed into the image of the resurrected Christ” (pg. 44)
Mary became the symbol for the Church, used by the Church as representative of the ideal cloistered life, constrained to the domus (domestic space) according to Ambrose (pg. 50) in contrast to the more extroverted women in Judaism who had far more freedom to visit other women, and also as the Church itself via concepts of purity and “undefiledness”.
The Shi’ite needs for Fatima were different. She legitimized the divine authority and succession of the Imams by transcending “mundane limitations ascribed to the female form” (pg 43), not menstruating or blood loss during childbirth. Her “clean vessel” status ensured the divine light (of Muhammad) was uncontaminated and could ensure Imam continuity through the generations to come. Hers was not a state that could be imitated but a unique one, set in the Garden of Eden to continue throughout time. But both Mary and Fatima were used as symbols to ensure male power across time over women and institutions and other men.
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