The Extraordinary Marie Magdeleine Davy
The word “extraordinary” comes from the Latin extra ordinem, “outside the normal course of events.” The life and work of the late, great medievalist Marie Magdeleine Davy (1903-1998) was extraordinary in that technical sense: she entered into the all-male world of Catholic medieval scholarship as a trail-blazer in the 1930s, initially as a student of Étienne Gilson’s. After she earned her doctorate, she produced hundreds of scholarly articles, translations, and books on Christian monasticism, mystical theology (especially Bernard of Clairvaux and William of Saint-Thierry), and comparative religion, staggering in their volume and range. And she did so without a “school,” without the support of a permanent academic teaching appointment.
But Davy was extraordinary in the more common sense of the word too. Religious experience was the beating heart of her life’s work, and we catch glimpses of it in her massive translations of twelfth-century monastic writings from Latin, her later works on comparative mysticism from Greek and Hebrew sources, and the hefty books she wrote about some of her friends, fellow spiritual seekers and serious intellectuals: Gabriel Marcel, Simone Weil, Henri Le Saux, and Nicholas Berdyaev. Late in life, Davy wrote less on medieval texts and more like she was being consumed by the inner light she had spent her life studying. Davy published her last book, a constructive theological meditation, Tout est noces in 1993. Davy lived her life with an unwavering sense of vocation and love of her work, and her written legacy is the stuff of the soul.
But her life was also remarkedly realist, political, down-to-earth. She was active in the resistance to Nazism but said almost nothing about it. The courage of her life and her relative silence about it stand in sharp contrast to our own time, when radical politics seems, at times, to live in conversation alone, and nowhere else. She took the opposite approach: did a lot, said and wrote nothing about it. After the Nazis occupied Paris in 1939, Davy remained in the city and taught courses on mysticism at the École pratique des hautes études, but clandestinely. She turned the chalet of a wealthy couple she befriended into a hiding place for American and British airmen. She hid resistance paperwork in the altar of a University parish, to which she had a key as an active leader in the Catholic student group. Davy once hid in the basement of a bakery and was smuggled back home into her apartment in an ambulance by friends. And as a scholar, against the xenophobes and the fascists dreaming of Christian homogeneity as Europe’s real roots, Davy taught Christian medievalism as always heterodox, always in conversation with non-Christian neighbors. To answer Aryan theologians who aimed to purge Judaism from an imagined Christian purity, Davy began research that materialized in a postwar course she taught right after the war, “The influence of Jewish thought on the theory of creation in twelfth-century philosophy and theology.” Davy’s research and teaching paved the way for her 1946 participation in the international Emergency Conference on Anti-Semitism at the Swiss village of Seelisberg. Davy was the only woman on the committee to work specifically with Christian churches on anti-Semitism at the convention.
As a scholar of medieval mysticism, Davy joined her colleagues, Jesuits and Dominicans, in the ressourcement movement. Like them, she believed in the power of ancient spiritual texts to redeem life. But Davy’s tone was different. Jesuits like Henri de Lubac and Jean Daniélou were brilliant, undoubtedly, but they were so bonded with the sources they studied, and so careful of Church hierarchy, that there is a cautiousness, a watchfulness to their writing. While they were unlikely to critique any of the Christian sources they studied, Davy was more willing to talk openly about topics that were taboo in the 1940s and 1950s, years before Vatican II—such as anti-Judaism in works of Christian mysticism and the role of monks in fomenting violence during the Crusades. Davy had little trouble acknowledging the darkness in the Christian tradition at the same time as she poured over its beauty, its poetics, and its mysticism, which she loved.
More than that, when Davy reached for the ressourcement material, there is a rare spark. She loved the monks she studied just as the ressourcement theologians did: “We wish to present,” Davy wrote in her introduction to one of her books on Bernard of Clairvaux, “a human person, not a stylized doctrine, but a living one.” She adds one caveat: “Our only regret is not having been able to speak better of a person who has been, for a long time, our best friend.” As much as she loved him, she also found Bernard maddening, violent, possessive, and short-sighted, and she wrote openly about his shortcomings. Of the famous journal Dieu Vivant [Living God], many noted scholars of religion published in at the time, like Louis Massignon, Martin Buber, and Jean Daniélou, Davy said there was so much infighting that it would be better named Dieu mort-né [Stillborn God]. She wrote what she thought, with a haunting brilliance but also with a fearless sense of humor.
Like many women who wrote on religion in the early twentieth century, she initially tended to publish furtively, initials only: MM Davy. Encountering her early works, translations and texts, it would be impossible to know this was a woman who was working alongside so many male theologians discovering, uncovering, translating, analyzing, publishing these long-buried sources in Christian history. But she gradually asserted herself (though sometimes confusingly, Marie Madeleine and sometimes Marie Magdeleine) and eventually wore her scholarly authority more comfortably. Daniélou was a good friend, and de Lubac and Chenu supported her work. Though her name rarely surfaces in ressourcement discussions or Catholic intellectual history, Davy gives us an example of someone engaging ressourcement from the margins. She was unafraid of pointing out problems of the authors she worked on.
Yet, for Davy, intellectual life was much more than exposing the shortcomings in texts or people. Despite their imperfections, mystical texts, she often said, were worth keeping alive in modernity—particularly in periods of authoritarianisms and violence—because they offer glimpses of other possibilities. They point to a love so radical and so vast that they can be an antidote to the world’s unfathomable barbarities. They were texts that refused stagnation and ossification in a world that insists on settled identities, fixities, and borders, and they pointed to realms of love, wisdom, gentleness, transformation, growth, and flights of imagination. She was an intellectual in a time much like our own, when horror seemed to follow horror, one panic after another. Her theological vision doesn’t exactly offer hope or consolation, but her work and life gesture to a kind of intellectual life that holds both critique and devotion together at once. It is an antidote to both cynicism and easy optimism, and it seems, from where I stand, like something extraordinary.
Brenna Moore is Associate Professor of Theology at Fordham University. She discusses Marie Magdeleine Davy in chapters 3 and 4 of her new book, Kindred Spirits: Friendship and Resistance at the Edges of Modern Catholicism.