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Vasari, Le vite

 A mannerist painting 

In the background, pitch-dark clouds slowly open before the sunrise. The semi-circle of a wall leads the eye from the background to the fore, ending in a few steps. Although going downwards, the steps in effect prepare the elevation of the scene in which Jesus and Mary Magdalene meet. While Mary Magdalene leans forward, Jesus leans back, apparently in an attempt to avoid her touch. The movements keep the distance between the two figures intact, yet they reflect each other as in a dance. But while Mary Magdalene’s forward-leaning gesture lowers her figure by breaking it at the hips, Jesus’ figure, as he withdraws himself from Mary Magdalene’s touch, stretches upwards as he lifts his right foot to place his center of gravity on the left foot – as if her agitated gesture, her near-falling figure would find its end in Jesus’ raising body, his calm withdrawal. Mary Magdalene’s move is desperate, ready for a leap, and yet it is rooted in gravity; her figure breaks in the middle, her arms are wings of a bird. We don’t see her left forearm because it is behind Jesus’ back; we cannot know if she touches him. Jesus’ withdrawal, on the other hand, is subtle and condensed; with his left hand, he is holding a gardener’s axe, the handle of which disappears in his garment. The right hand is touching Mary Magdalene at her breast, or so it seems. The painting is a mannerist work by Jacopo Pontormo and it depicts one of the most often rehearsed scenes in the Western iconographic tradition: the encounter between Mary Magdalene and Jesus in the garden after his resurrection, better known as the Noli me tangere scene. In John’s Gospel, there is no indication that Jesus ever touches Mary Magdalene. There is only the warning that she should not touch him: a pre-emptive warning, or more likely a reaction to an already unfolding gesture; an ambiguity in the Greek text that resurfaces in Pontormo’s painting.

The Noli me tangere in John’s Gospel

There are, in fact, a number of unclear details in 20:14-17 in John’s Gospel. Mary Magdalene first turns (the verb is conversare in the Vulgata, strephein in the Greek) away from the empty tomb towards Jesus, but she thinks that he is the gardener and does not recognize him. Then Jesus asks her “Woman, why weepest thou? whom seekest thou?”

Mary Magdalene response is “Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away.” Jesus finally decides to reveal his identity by calling Mary Magdalene by her name – as though he recognized her only now. This apparently enacted recognition brings forth Mary’s own recognition of Jesus – she turns again and says, “Rabboni.” But wasn’t she already facing Jesus? When did she turn away from him? And why?

The whole scene is full of started but arrested movements, both actual physical movements and movements of recognition and revelation – but they all take place in oddly distorted space and time, as if their failures were a function of the distortion. The ambiguities peak when Jesus says: “Touch me not, for I am not yet ascended to my father” (the Vulgate has Noli me tangere nondum enim ascendi ad Patrem meum). What this “touch me not” really means is ambiguous in both versions; in the Greek me mou haptou the verb implies an action in progress (as if she were already touching him, or she were stretching her arm to touch him), but at the same time it is a verb that allows a more general, non-tactile reading (do not cling onto me, do not try to withhold me). In the Latin, there is a different kind of ambiguity: The verb here is nolere, not to wish – a common way of expressing negative commands, but with an implication of forbidding not only the action but also the desire: “do not desire to touch me.”

Exegesis

The linguistic ambiguities allow two different interpretations: one that explores the drama of gestures and tactility within the scene, and another that emphasizes the non-tactile, spiritual and moral implications of the Noli me tangere. From the latter, Calvin’s commentaries are instructive: he suggests that Mary Magdalene falls into the sin of idolatry when she keeps clinging onto Jesus’ corporeal body, instead of recognizing and turning towards his resurrected spiritual essence.

While this is a convincing theological interpretation, it is thoroughly exegetical in assigning a meaning to the scene by deciding in some of the main issues that the Noli me tangere brings into doubt. Both the existential/epistemological question of how Mary Magdalene could recognize the invisible within the visible, and the ontological question of what is visible and what is invisible are and remain questions within the scene – Calvin’s interpretation implies their answers instead of exploring their relevance as questions.

Temporality

But Calvin’s interpretation has the different merit of calling attention to the second part of Jesus’ warning: “for I am not yet ascended to my father.” If this second part is to suggest the temporality of the entire sentence, then the words mean: “Stop touching me now, for I am not yet ascended to my father.” Jesus’ words emphasize the un-kairotic moment of Mary Magdalene’s gesture and the desire behind the gesture: “right now, it is not timely for you to touch me.” But the warning, much as it clarifies the temporality of the scene, also adds to the surreality of it: not yet?

This fact could explain the Noli me tangere, much in the vein of Calvin’s exegetical account of it: Jesus knows that what Mary Magdalene sees is not his reality anymore. Therefore, instead of letting her touch him, he tells her of his future ascension and by implication his future reality.

But there is a significant problem with this explanation: only a few lines below this scene in John’s Gospel, Jesus lets Thomas touch his body. Since both scenes occur after the resurrection and before the ascension, it seems that Thomas touches the same body that Mary Magdalene was told not to touch; both scenes partake in the intermediate temporality between the physical and the metaphysical.

Crisis and farce

There must be, then, an even more singular temporality behind the “not yet” of the Noli me tangere: one that is more specific than the intermediate temporality between resurrection and ascension.

We usually focus on Mary Magdalene’s dilemma: what she can and cannot see, and what she can and cannot, should and should not believe. But before Mary Magdalene’s doubt even becomes present in the text, for a moment Jesus himself appears to hesitate. It is as though Jesus, the character that John usually depicts either as human or as divine had fallen out of his usual roles: the hesitation is not only “his” – it is his and representation’s in general.

John’s gospel is the most explicit in identifying Jesus with both the Messiah and the Son of God, the incarnate word; from the beginning (arche as logos) to the end (with the emphasis on Jesus as the son of God), Jesus’ life is a life from the divine to the human and in the end back to the divine. But in the Noli me tangere scene, he is not the Messiah and not the Son of God either, much less both simultaneously. Jesus’ appearance in the garden of his tomb should be a crisis of representation by any standards: the character that appears here lacks the protection of either of his roles. This potential crisis of representation, however, is in the Noli me tangere scene appropriated by the represented. What makes the Noli me tangere scene singular in the New Testament, is not merely the ontological singularity of the temporality in which it partakes, but rather the way Jesus’ character becomes one with the ensuing crisis of representation. Facing Mary Magdalene, Jesus does not immediately identify himself – instead, he assumes the identity that Mary Magdalene assigns to him, the first one that he receives. He becomes the gardener in the garden of his tomb, a striking reconfiguration of the first couple who were gardeners in Eden, in their womb. There is not enough time to appreciate the farcical aspect of this scene, to observe the way the crisis is turned into a farce. It is only a moment, and it immediately gives in to movements of revelation and recognition (“Mary!” and “Rabboni!”). But the revelation is misleading, and the recognition is misguided. The Jesus that Mary Magdalene knows by seeing, hearing, smelling and touching is not identical with the Jesus that she first recognizes by his voice, identifies by his sight, and wants to confirm by touch; revelation does not have anything to reveal, and recognition can only face the mystery. The Noli me tangere follows – the statement of the enigma, rather than its explanation.

The living mystery

Sustaining the mystery and accepting the enigma are at the core of Christianity. Their specific relevance to the Noli me tangere scene is confirmed by Jesus’s words to Thomas: “Blessed are those who believe without having seen.” But before assigning theological meaning to the enigma in terms of moral imperative, the Noli me tangere scene explores the enigma not as a fact but as a movement. It is within this process that Jesus in the Noli me tangere becomes one with the crisis of his own representation. The singular temporality of the scene is therefore neither historical nor ontological. The fact that touching is not timely is not a function of the rupture that Jesus’ death brought about between past and future.

Rather, the scene in general and the Noli me tangere in particular express Jesus’ own reaction to this in-between temporality: it is as if a character in a play had lost, for a moment, his mask, and asked the audience to turn their heads away until he finds it again. The analogy propels a further thought: is it possible that in the Noli me tangere scene, in this scene of hesitation and undecidedness Jesus reaches a self-sameness that does not occur anywhere else in the gospels? Is it possible that he can demand Mary Magdalene to believe in his divinity without allowing her to use her senses for one last time only because he has found himself, for a moment, in the gap between the senses and faith? And finally: would it be possible to imagine that therefore it is this scene that Jesus appears to be most identical with what he really is in John’s gospel – that is, with charin anti charitos, divine grace?

Grace and faith

The centrality of grace in Christianity has two main aspects. The first connects grace with faith, the second with redemption. The distinction between these two aspects is rather artificial but for my present purposes I want to focus on grace and faith. An emphasis on faith also appears in John’s gospel; the concluding words are “[b]ut these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name.” What might be the basis of faith – this is the question that the gospel is centered around. What might be the basis of faith, that is, the basis for believing in the invisible? It is the burden of grace to answer this question; or rather, the impossibility that is implied within the question is transposed upon the notion of grace. The impossibility of the question, then, is responsible for the paradox of grace: grace is supposed to negotiate between the visible and the invisible. It has to be part of the subjective and sensory experience, of aisthesis, in order to be a ground for faith. At the same time, it cannot belong to personal experience, and cannot be confirmed within aisthesis precisely because it is tied to the object of faith. Grace is the mediation between the physical and the metaphysical; it exists in the fissure between the two, appearing in sensory experience without letting itself be touched and coming from the metaphysical without letting itself be willed. To ask whether the Noli me tangere scene is more about grace than any other passage in the gospel goes beyond the limits of this paper; identified in John 1:16 as charin anti charitos (grace upon grace or grace for grace; gratiam pro gratia in the Vulgate), Jesus is grace throughout John’s gospel, and every further question about this identity has to confront the labyrinth of Christology. What we can ask instead is how grace appears in interpretations and representations of the Noli me tangere scene.

Touched by the untouchable

The first detail that differentiates Pontormo’s painting from the iconographic tradition is its sky, an apparently growing patch of light surrounded by black clouds. Although iconographically Jesus’ resurrection is associated with the daybreak, in this case it is hard to decide if it is the night slowly giving in to the daybreak, or the stormy sky is clearing out. The darkness is too dark to be the dark of the clouds only, but it has too much form, fragmented but decipherable shape to be just the homogenous dark of the night. Likewise, the rising light is too light, too white; it pierces through the clouds in a way that seems to open them for another order of reality.

From this drama of the background a wall or a fence leads to the little elevation on which the encounter takes place, cutting across the valley that separates this theatrical stage from the background. The semi-circle of the fence begins far in the background, but because of the perspective, it is actually very close to Jesus’ head. From there, it draws a semi-circle that eventually leads to Mary Magdalene’s hips. Behind it, the wall disappears, only to reappear, now in the shape of a few steps that conclude the wall, between the two characters. The complex, slightly serpentine shape of the fence thus rearranges the relationships within the painting in complex ways: As a mere phenomenon, as it appears to the eye, it connects the figures of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, albeit in an hyperbolically mediated way, drawing a semi-circle around them rather then connecting them with a straight line. But once the eye reorganizes space according to the assumed principles of perspective, the wall appears to be precisely in between the two figures, cutting the space of the painting into two halves. Then, Mary Magdalene’s figure, her near-leaping upper body cuts across the wall, so that the two bodies, hers and Jesus’, together constitute a frame for the few steps between them.

Thus the dance of the two figures in the forefront is assisted by the no less complex movements that take place in the background, and which in turn are complicated by their additional movement between the perceived and the conceptual: seeing this scene requires a constant back-and-forth movement between the phenomenal and the noumenal, a constant readjustment of what we see and what we think we see with respect to each other.

The perfectly balanced, but in its balance extremely fragile and dynamic choreography of the two figures, together with the dark, other-worldly colors of both their garments and their environment create an odd atmosphere for the painting: it is difficult to decide whether the unreality that hovers in the scene comes from the fact that it is so artificial, staged, enacted, theatrical to a degree of being almost parodistic, or on the contrary, it is because of the extreme spirituality, the unleashed expressivity that appears both in the contrast between Mary Magdalene and Jesus and in the contrast between the dark and the light in the background.

Still, the painting’s most daring detail is the fact that in this version Jesus appears to touch Mary. It is this touch that may shock the spectator out of her wandering between the perceptual and the conceptual. Jesus’ touch is singularly concrete and unexpected. The apparent eroticism of the scene, only heightened by Jesus’ moving away from Mary Magdalene while seemingly touching her as if he touched her only to keep her away from himself – all this could amount to a farcical reiteration of Noli me tangere, and indeed a blasphemous farce of it.

Yet as I tried to show above, the very same farcical element is not absent from the Noli me tangere scene in John’s gospel either. The farcical is adjacent to the critical, to the crisis of representation; and it is by appropriating and incorporating the crisis with the help of the farcical that Jesus’ character emerges in the scene as the paradoxical movement of grace, that is, the intangible movement that appears in the realm of the physical but belongs to the sphere of the metaphysical.

A similar movement appears now in the painting. The drama of representation is intensified to the point of being a farce: Mary Magdalene’s arms, assuming the position of a wing, the left arm stretching behind Jesus’ back and thus disappearing, seem to spontaneously expose her breast. The gesture is the exact opposite of many Noli me tangere paintings that represent Mary Magdalene with hands being closed in front of her breast as she begins to pray. In a violent figura serpentinata, Mary Magdalene’s torso and legs are flattened parallel to the picture plane but each in the opposite direction, perhaps to signal the two physical conversions that the evangelist describes in the Gospel. The pathos of Mary Magdalene’s desperation is countered by Jesus’ calm; he leans back and at the same time appears to touch Mary Magdalene’s breast.

But within this climax of crisis and farce, a chaos of contrasts, the gaze slowly gives in to the attraction of the hand that, inquisitive and yet careful stands in the center of the scene surrounded by all the complex movements of lines and colors around it. In this instant, the hand gathers in itself Mary Madgalena’s whole experience. The experience is that of grace: in the very instant of revealing his own intangibility, Jesus appears to touch Mary Magdalene. And while the painting’s exploration of the scene’s “gestureal” layers thus goes beyond the actual Noli me tangere scene as it appears in John’s Gospel, it never loses sight of John’s theology, for the meaning of Noli me tangere is exactly this: “believe without seeing, without being able to touch, and you may be touched.”