atholicism with its striving for
absolute uniformity, acknowledging no individual differences, but eager
to shape all life and all doctrines in harmony with one definite ideal,
very consistently pronounced one single, historical woman to be divine,
and made her the object of universal worship. This dogma had to be
rigid, immutable, and almost meaningless. Again, the historic and pagan
principle of Catholicism was maintained; a unique event in the history
of the world was immortalised and systematised and all new religious
conceptions were excluded. Catholicism invariably places all really
important events in the past, even in a quite definite period of the
past, a period unassailable by historical criticism. But with the
commencement of individual intellectual life the uniform, ecclesiastical
image of the Madonna gradually gained life and individuality. Just as
according to Protestant teaching every soul must establish its
individual relationship with God (which is subject to change because
individuality is not excluded as it is in Catholicism), so the
imaginative emotionalist created his own Queen of Heaven. Frequently he
was still under the impression--this was especially the case with
monks--that he was worshipping the ecclesiastical deity, when he had
long been praying to a metaphysical conception of his own. The great
Italian art since the fourteenth century, as well as the Neo-Latin and
German cults of the Virgin Mary were, though apparently still orthodox,
in their innermost essence the outcome of a personal desire for love,
and had therefore abandoned the teaching of the Church and become
Protestant. The fact that the so-called Protestant Church looked askance
at Mary, and that the rather coarse-minded Luther said, in his
annoyance: "Popery has made a goddess of Mary, and is therefore guilty
of idolatry," does not contradict my statement. The true Queen of Heaven
was a conception of the artist and lover, incomprehensible to those who
were only thinkers and moralists.

Through the legitimation of a divine woman open enmity between the
religion of woman and the religion of the Church was avoided. A woman
had stepped between God and humanity as mediator, intercessor and
redeemer. Every metaphysically-loving soul could conceive her as it
pleased, could love her and pray to her without being a heretic and
worshipper of the devil. Matfre had complained that men

Abandoned in her beauty revel
And unawares a