Henry Moore’s Madonna

1250 words, 5 minute read

It has to be the most depicted subject in all of Western art: Mary, the Mother of God, holding her infant son, Baby Jesus. Think about it. Could there be a more emotive moment across the entire scope of human experience?

There are two things we can say with certainty about the extensive ‘Madonna & Child’ corpus: (1) the works exhibit striking structural similarity; and (2) every work is different. Each piece explores the common theme with its own unique emotional register. No two Madonnas and no two Infants react the same – to the moment, to each other, or to their dimly felt destinies.

The Mother of Christ is alternately pictured as adoring, nurturing, wondering, hoping, worrying, lamenting, grieving or suffering. Jesus is pictured as a new born, a wee babe, a toddler, or a youngster. Jesus’ features range from soft and infantile to angular, mature, and sometimes even sclerotic. Am I looking at a 6 month old or a 60 year old? Depends on the artist. 

Next time you’re in London, don’t fail to swing by St. Paul’s to take in Henry Moore’s famous sculpture, Mother and Child. What? You’re in London now? You live in London? Well…I think the church is still open.

Your first trip to St. Paul’s? Prepare to be overwhelmed. But as you catch a glimpse of Moore’s masterpiece, ask yourself, “Am I looking at a verse from a 1st century Christian Gospel, or a fragment of Anaximander’s 6th century BCE philosophy…or both?” 

Either way, Henry Moore, one of the 20th century’s greatest sculptors and a self-professed non-believer, has delivered a statement of Christian theology every bit as unambiguous as the Nicene Creed.

In Moore’s work, mother and child emerge together from an undifferentiated block of marble. It is the emergence of the child that reveals the mother and it is the emergence of the mother that reveals the child. Neither emerges from the block solo, untethered, or without the other. 

Mary’s militant Magnificat (Luke 1: 46 - 55) assumes an essential role in Moore’s concept of the Nativity. His Mother and Child is not your everyday ‘Madonna of the Shepherds and the Sheep’. Moore’s marble presents something as momentous as the virgin birth of the Son of God as you’d expect –  as a violent process in which pure potentiality unwinds, albeit stubbornly, to reveal its fundamental truth: Incarnation! 

Implicit in Moore’s vision of Nativity is the interdependence of transcendence and immanence, divinity and humanity. Mother and Child perfectly captures the intersection of two perpendicular realms.

Who but God would dare to create a truly independent universe, guided by its own ‘free will’ - a universe with a ‘mind of its own’? The parents among us know how difficult it can be to give our children the autonomy they need to grow. Not so God: Fiat lux! There it is, one and done! World created, emancipated, and we didn’t even have to go to court.

Nor did God have any 2^nd thoughts: “He saw that it was good.” The Book of Job makes it clear that God regretted nothing in his Creation, not even Behemoth and Leviathan, two legendary Old Testament ‘monsters’. 

Nor did it take long for God to reap the harvest of his naivete. Lucifer rebelled against him right out of the chute and ‘6 days later’ Adam (i.e. mankind) did the same. God made the world, but the world makes its own bed, and for the most part at least, God lets the world lie in that bed, undisturbed. 

In physics, we speak of Efficient Causation: one billiard ball strikes another causing the second ball to move in a particular direction with a particular momentum. In metaphysics, we speak of Final Causation: Amy studied so that she would pass her exams. In theology, we speak of another type of causation: Causa Sui (self-causation). 

But Moore presents a different ontology: Mother and Child speaks of Mutual Causation, aka bootstrapping. And thank God for Moore! Our modern, Indo-European (IE) languages lack the syntax (Middle Voice)needed to conduct such a conversation.

Henry Moore takes us backstage, beyond the reach of Plato and Aristotle, Kant and Hegel, into the rarefied company of Anaximander, the 6th century BCE grandfather of Western philosophy, and Martin Buber, a prominent 20th century existentialist.

“(Coming to be) they give each other reck” – Anaximander Fragment.  

“At the foundation is relationship” – Martin Buber, I and Thou.

A proper diagram in the context of Christian syntax would consist of just a single arrow with two heads, pointing in opposite directions, suggesting that it is the relationship itself that has ontological priority over the related entities: A  ↔  B.

The lover and the loved are one. The lover sees himself in his neighbor. Lover and neighbor form an indissoluble dyad. There is no lover without a neighbor; there is no ‘neighbor’ without a lover. 

Perhaps the reason that Christianity has fallen out of favor as a cosmology is that its inherently middle voice ontology cannot be readily expressed in contemporary IE grammar. We have traded our ancient, natural language for a more functional but less expressive dialect; we have swapped Ovid for IKEA. 

Our language has lost its ability to talk about ultimate things in a way that resonates with our deepest experience. So, we turn to painting, sculpture, and musical composition to express our spiritual intuitions. 

Let’s explore theology more deeply. Henry Moore’s Mother and Child represents Mary in her “Mother of God” avatar. We have heard this epithet so often that we may fail to grasp the incredible import of these three simple words. Mother of God! Mater Dei in Latin.

If God is “maker of…all things visible and invisible” (as the Nicene Creed tells us), then how could God have a mother? Clearly Mary, the mother of Jesus, is a product of God’s created world (and a rather recent product at that); how could she therefore be God’s mother?

In the language of first and third person pronouns, subjective and objective cases, active and passive voices, efficient and final causes, she could not! But that is not the syntax of Christianity and, in my opinion at least, it is not how the world works.

In the Christian world view, God encompasses spacetime. Eternal, God is both the origin of all that will ever be (“Alpha”) and the summation of all that will ever have been (“Omega”). But even more astoundingly, God is also an element, a quantum, in the world itself.

God, who made the world, is also ‘made’ by the world via Mary. By the power of the Holy Spirit, God enters the space-time continuum, the historical universe. He enters between the Alpha and the Omega…but he already includes both the Alpha and the Omega in his nature. Incarnation turns Being inside out!

In Christian topology, it is just as true to say that the part (Christ) contains the whole as it is to say that the whole contains the part (Jesus). Metaphorically, Jesus compares the Kingdom of Heaven to a mustard seed (the smallest of all seeds known at that time); historically, Jesus enters the world as a baby, the child of displaced parents. 

At the time of his birth, and perhaps throughout his early years, Jesus was literally homeless, a refugee, possibly ‘undocumented’. He is a most unlikely candidate for secular kingship, much less cosmic sovereignty. But just as the mustard seed grows into a tree that shelters all birds, so the baby Jesus “grows” into the parousia which is the ultimate unification of all things.

Mary’s ‘Mother of God’ epithet beautifully exemplifies the cosmic process of mutual causation. It is nothing less than this that Henry Moore captures in Mother and Child. And that’s Christianity!

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Henry Moore’s Mother and Child theme distills the bond between parent and infant into powerful, simplified forms that feel both tender and monumental. By reducing the figures to sweeping curves and solid masses, Moore turns an intimate relationship into a timeless symbol of protection and emotional connection.