A Rose a Day No.12
Artists often depicted Mary seated in a formal rose arbor in the company of thornless roses and angels and saints, as in Stephan Lochner’s ‘Madonna in a Rose Arbor’ (1440-42) But in Sandro Botticelli’s beautiful ‘The Virgin Adoring the Sleeping Christ Child’ (c.1485), the ‘closed garden’ becomes a more informal setting in which Gallica Roses enclose and protect mother and child.
For Roman Catholics Virgin Mary is simultaneously the Mother of God - including the ‘Mater Dolorosa’ or the suffering mother - and the Blessed Virgin. She is the ‘second Eve’, who cleanses humanity of the sins of the first Eve. In the fourth century, Saint Ambrose wrote: ‘Let, then, the life of Mary be as it were virginity itself, set forth in a likeness, from which, as from a mirror, the appearance of chastity and the form of virtue is reflected’. Saint Jerome (347-420AD) emphasized Mary’s perpetual virginity, even as he also praised her as Christ’s mother, saying that ‘the mother of the Son [of God], who was a mother before she was a bride, continued a Virgin after her so was born.’ Mary was called upon to personify the virgin, bride, mother, queen, mourner. She was full of divine grace, a spiritual intercessor, dispenser of grace to the faithful, and principle of transcendent spiritual union. Mary was, indeed, ‘alone of all her sex’, as the fifth century poet Caelius Sedulius wrote.
In order to help give tangible form to the complex symbolism of the Virgin Mary, the Church evolved a ‘Marian’ rose through progressively neutralizing its associations with paganism, downplaying it sensual perfume and symbolically removing its dangerous thorns, and the Virgin Mary is known as the ‘rose without thorns’. Note that Botticelli’s Gallica roses therefore have no prickles. A flower that had been closely allied with the Mother Goddess, and especially with eros, was re-planted in the Christian garden as the flower of agape.
Saint Jerome described Mary as the ‘rosa pudoris’, the rose of modesty, and argued that the roses that grew in the Garden of Eden were without thorns, and only gained them only as a result of the Fall. Eve is the thorn-bush, and Mary the rose flower. The prickles therefore symbolize Original Sin. A common term of address for the Virgin became the 'rose without thorns', since she was immaculately conceived. The sixteenth century writer of sermons, Cornelius van Sneek wrote: ‘And as in the morning the rose opens, receiving dew from heaven and the sun, so Mary’s soul did open and receive Christ the heavenly dew.’ She was the model of faith in the word of God. It was said that on the third day after the Virgin Mary’s burial, mourners at her tomb found her body had vanished gone and that her shroud was full of roses. ‘Mary is the most beautiful flower ever seen in the spiritual world…..and therefore, is called the Rose, for the rose is called of all flowers the most beautiful’, wrote the English Catholic convert Cardinal Newman at the end of the nineteenth century in an essay that sought to explain the multi-layered symbolism of the Marian rose as it had coalesced by that period.
But the rose’s characteristic botanical morphology - the fact that it has a beautiful flower and also dangerous thorns - poses a basic theological problem which coul bde rendered as the question: Why does the God of Love make us suffer? The roses in the Garden of Eden are said by the Church to be thorn-less, and it was the Fall that produced the prickles. The Virgin Mary, the Second Eve, is there to intercede to redeem humanity from sin. But, as the historians Anne Baring and Jules Cashford observe: ‘Mary has what divinity she has not because she offers an image of the whole nature in all its manifest and unmanifest mystery, but only by virtue of being set apart from the laws of nature within which humanity is held.’
When the rose is imagined without thorns, it is no longer very closely linked to any real rose (although, there are indeed a few real roses without thorns). But then, the Marian rose is purely allegorical.