I was in the Groeninge Museum in Bruges last week with its rich display of medieval Flemish art. As I wandered around I noticed a picture that looked very much like a medieval cartoon strip, if such a thing existed. It turned out to be a 15th century work of devotional art, an altar piece made up of two rows of panels, four to each row, not unlike the layout of an old Marvel comic. It depicted the legend of Saint Ursula, who may have been the daughter of a Cornish king and lived around the year 400. May have been, because the legend is very vague and even the artist’s name isn’t known for certain; he is generally referred to as the Master of the Legend of Saint Ursula.
According to the legend, which the Catholic Church does not regard as historically accurate, Ursula had set off on a three-year pilgrimage to Rome in preparation for her marriage. She was accompanied on her journey by 11,000 virgins. They boarded a ship and set off for the European mainland. But when they reached Cologne they were all brutally massacred, though the painting does not explain who killed them, or why. The penultimate panel in the altar piece is a gruesome representation of the massacre; not the sort of thing one might expect to see adorning a church altar.
The fresh, vivid artwork is striking, not least because of its similarity to a Marvel comic. But the most striking aspect, to my mind, is at the very top of the work. Sitting above the two rows of panels are two taller but narrower pictures; one on the left, the other on the right. Each picture is of a young woman. The woman on the left is wearing a crown and smiling contentedly; she has a chalice in one hand and a staff in the other. She is looking towards the young woman on the right, who is not looking back. This woman is not at all happy. She is blindfolded, her head is cast down; she’s holding a broken lance in her right hand and slipping from her grasp in her left hand are two stone tablets. Her body language and demeanour are fully the antithesis of her companion’s.
The two young woman are a familiar pair; you have probably come across them elsewhere. Known by their Latin names of Ecclesia and Synagoga they represent the Church and Synagogue. They appear in sculpture outside church buildings and cathedrals throughout Europe, as paintings on ecclesiastical artworks and as illustrations in manuscripts. The best-known example of the pair is at the entrance to Strasbourg Cathedral, where they stand on either side of a statue of King Solomon. They are also in Erfurt, Bamburg, Rheims, Amiens, Rochester, Abingdon, York and many other places. They were even several in English villages until they were destroyed during the Reformation.
The symbolism is self-evident. Synagoga has her eyes covered, as if to say that she is blind to the truth. The image first occurs in the Christian Bible, in the Book of Corinthians, which accuses Jews of reading Scripture wearing a metaphoric veil to stop them being overwrought by the truth, just as Moses wore one to prevent the radiance of his face from dazzling the Israelites.
The object slipping from Synagoga’s hands - sometimes a book, sometimes the tablets containing the ten commandments - also alludes to their alleged inability to understand the true meaning of the Bible. The reason for the broken lance is less clear, it may symbolise Moses’s staff which, in their refusal to accept the doctrines of Christianity, the Jews have symbolically broken.
Ecclesia stands in full contrast to Synagoga’s broken-down demeanour. She is resplendent and self-confident, wearing a crown and bearing a chalice to symbolise the Eucharist. In most representations she gazes towards Synagoga, sometimes in triumph, otherwise in hope, or perplexity.
The origins of the motif are thought to come from Augustine’s concept, that despite God abandoning the Jewish people after they failed to recognise Jesus as Messiah, they still play a critical role in history by preserving the ancient teachings. It was also Augustine who first personified the Church and Synagogue as women. In his commentary on the Book of Psalms, he described the Church as Jesus’s bride and the Synagogue as his now superseded mother.
In the 5th century, shortly after Augustine’s death an anonymous author composed a dialogue between the two women, an argument over which of them had the right to rule the world. As their argument drew to a close, Ecclesia lost her patience, pointing out to Synagoga that she had fallen from her throne:
Listen, Synagoga, listen and see, you widowed and forsaken woman! I am what you have not been able to be. I am the queen who has removed you from your throne .... My bridegroom is fair beyond the sons of men, the king of kings, who has set the marriage crown on my head.
This fictional dispute seems to have been the inspiration for centuries of sculpture, painting, engraving and illustration, all depicting the tension between Ecclesia and Synagoga. The earliest examples are found in 8th and 9th century manuscripts and plaques. They tend to show the church and synagogue as just two characters in a galaxy of motifs; they are not yet depicted in opposition to each other.
The art historian Nina Rowe argues that these early pieces were composed at a time when Jews were still largely absent from Northern Europe. It wasn’t until the 11th and 12th centuries, when Jews began playing a greater role in the economic life of Europe, when they were more visible in the towns and the cities, that the churches started to display the contrasting images of Ecclesia and Synagoga that we are familiar with. It has been suggested that they placed them over the doorways of the cathedrals as a rebuke to the Jews of the town, to remind them whenever they passed by of their inferior civic status. Another suggestion is that the images were there for the Christian population, to reassure them of what an idealised society should look like, with Jews who were humble and submissive, knowing their place.
Although the pair of images are clearly demeaning to Jews, they do not reflect the accusations that were hurled at them in day to day life. The 12th century was also the time when the blood libel first emerged, when Jews were accused of murdering Christian children. They were similarly blamed for spreading the Black Death and for poisoning wells, yet the images on the churches reflect none of these accusations. It is notable that when antisemitic attacks raged most violently, when, for example, thousands were slaughtered during the First Crusade, or unfounded rumours incited local populations to massacre their Jewish neighbours, it was the princes and the bishops who typically stepped in, however ineffectually, to protect the Jews. Jews were nominally under the protection of the State’s prince or king because they were economically useful. And the church protected them because they were theologically valuable. They wanted to keep the Jews subdued but they did not want to wipe them out, because in medieval church doctrine the conversion of the Jews was a theologically necessity, a precursor to the Second Coming. Theologically at least, the Church could not countenance the slaughter of Jews.
The triumphalist portrayal of Ecclesia’s victory over Synagoga is rightly characterised as antisemitic, even though it neither demonised the Jews nor descended to the depths of the calumnies circulating among the masses. But it leaves me with a puzzle. I wonder why it was so important to the Church to demonstrate, let alone flaunt, its sense that it had won a theological victory over the Synagogue. There was no doubt in anybody’s mind that as far as European society was concerned, the Church was sovereign. The Jews were downtrodden and persecuted, they were outsiders whose very survival depended on their utility and the goodwill of others. Why did the Church even contemplate commissioning images of a downcast religion which they believed they had superseded?
Was it just a display of power, just as an ancient emperor may have erected monuments showing the lands he had conquered? Or was there maybe something deeper? Did the Church fear that, despite their temporal dominance, there was no guarantee that the Jews really were part of theological history? Were they concerned that their theological victory was incomplete, that the Jews might prove them wrong after all? Is that possible? Why would they be so insecure?
This piece was an awesome read; I learned some cool stuff from it! I also came away kinda sad. For some reason, looking at those two statues, I have in mind that one set of my ancestors (my father’s) actively hated my other set (my mother’s).
The legend of Saint Ursula says she was killed by the Huns. Much of the story sounds like fantasy. For example it would have required a very large fleet of ship t bring 11,000 virgin from England to Colonia, as Cologne was called at the time.
But at least this part about the Huns checks out. The Huns came from Central Asia to southern Europe in about 380 AD, which is the time the Ursula story is said to have taken place.
William McCreight