Saint Anne, Part Two

Update: I inadvertently deleted this post from the blog - mea culpa! It's a bit lengthy but reading through it will help you appreciate the link to the painting at the end.

Part of enjoyment here is searching out artwork to illustrate the posts. It wasn't easy to choose which piece to use for the post on St. Anne and St. Joachim but I decided that Bro. McGrath's Whole Holy Family was just right. The runner up was a late 15th century oil painting by Geertgen tot Sint, entitled The Holy Kinship.

In the Introduction to Legends of St. Anne, Mother of the Virgin Mary, editor Sherry Reames offers some interesting background:

“Although the canonical books of the New Testament never mention the parents of the Virgin Mary, traditions about her family, childhood, education, and eventual betrothal to Joseph developed very early in the history of the church. The oldest and most influential account of this kind is the apocryphal gospel called the Protevangelium of James (which) fell under a cloud in the fourth and fifth centuries when it was accused of "absurdities" by St. Jerome and condemned as untrustworthy by Popes Damasus, Innocent I, and Gelasius. Jerome's most explicit complaint was that it explained the brothers of Jesus… as Joseph's sons by an earlier marriage. In the interpretation preferred by Jerome and the Western Church, the so-called brothers are interpreted as cousins of Jesus, sons of Mary's sisters, thus allowing both Joseph and Mary to be envisioned as lifelong virgins...

“Anne was initially just a minor character in the legend derived from the Protevangelium. But her role was capable of great significance because of what it could imply about the Virgin Mary and about the workings of God in this world. Christians were obviously curious from the start about when and why God had selected Mary for her unique position as the mother of the Redeemer. The legend attempts to answer such questions by borrowing from Biblical stories about other long-awaited children, including Isaac, Samson, John the Baptist, and especially Samuel; thus Mary becomes both a child of destiny, heralded before birth as a chosen instrument in the redemption of God's people, and a sign of God's favor toward her parents, a virtuous couple who had long been barren...

“Anne also played a useful role for medieval commentators on the Bible when they attempted to explain the extended family of Jesus. As mentioned earlier, Jerome had argued successfully that the "brothers" mentioned in the Gospels were Jesus’ cousins, sons of Mary's sisters. Biblical commentators in the early medieval West went on to identify those sisters with two other Mary’s mentioned in the Gospels, to take Anne as the mother of all three, and to explain the names of her second and third daughters by creating the theory of the trinubium, or three marriages of Anne. According to the trinubium, Joachim must have died soon after the birth of the Virgin Mary, so that Anne could marry a second husband named Cleophas, by whom she bore Mary Cleophas, and (after Cleophas's death) a third husband named Salome, by whom she bore Mary Salome. From these three daughters, the theory continued, came Jesus and all six "brothers" or cousins named in the Gospels. James the lesser or younger, Joseph or Joses, Simon, and Jude were explained as the sons of Mary Cleophas, who had married Alpheus; James the Greater and John the Evangelist, as the sons of Mary Salome, who had married Zebedee. Thus Anne became the grandmother of some of the most prominent apostles, as well as Jesus himself.

“The trinubium theory was condemned in the twelfth century and later by a number of theologians, who felt that multiple marriages and additional children were incompatible with the purity and holiness that must have characterized the Virgin's mother, and some Biblical scholars rejected it on the grounds that it depended on misinterpretations of particular names and details...”

Although rejected, the trinubium made its presence felt in art - and that brings us back to The Holy Kinship. This work plays out the theory of Anne's three marriages, depicting Anne on the left with a book in her lap and beside her are Mary and the Christ child. On the right are Elizabeth and her son, John the Baptist and in the background are various of Anne's apocryphal spouses and their children - all gathered together in church. Or, as I look it, this painting is a 15th century version of our Sunday 9:30 Mass!

(Repeated on July 26, 2008)