I have been thinking a lot about Mariology of late - at least since May, when I read a bit by Henri deLubac on Mary and the Church. Until fairly recently I tended to think of Marian devotion as a relatively unimportant part of the Church's life. It has always been important to my personal, private devotional life, but I thought that it really was only a private matter. I am beginning to change my mind.
Even Karl Barth observed that Mariology and Ecclesiology are directly correlated. It is part of catholic tradition to identify Mary with the Church. This is more than just a metaphor. It is true that Mary is only a member of the Church, but a member who stands for the whole in an irreducibly unique way. In some sense, every member of the Church has a unique role, but that is especially apparent in the person of Mary, because only one member is the Mother of God. When Jesus Christ took human flesh, he did not take on human flesh in general, he took flesh "of the virgin Mary his mother," a Jewish woman with a specific address somewhere in Nazareth of Galilee.
Mary's uniqueness is especially important. Marian doctrines are really doctrines about the incarnation. This is well known, and has been repeated many many times by Catholic apologists, but it bears repeating here. For example, Mary is called Mother of God, because otherwise Jesus is not God, and we are not saved.
Now granted, Mary had a unique function, but we may ask: So what? Isn't it the function, or office "Mother of God" which is really important, rather than the individual person Mary? Once Mary's gives birth to Jesus, there is really nothing more to say about her.
This, so far as I can tell, is the attitude of many who reject devotion to the Mary.
But I can think of no attitude more contrary to the meaning of the incarnation. To think that way about the economy of salvation, is to reduce persons to merely functional, interchangeable individuals of a set. Part of what the incarnation proves is that the particular and the individual matters to God. Persons are not ciphers, they cannot be reduced to their functions, and God does not deal in mere generalities -he most certainly does not save generalities - he deals with persons.
If Mary is reducible to a function, then so perhaps is her son. It is not just Jesus' function as atoning sacrifice which is important, it is his identity as the unique Son of God. Or perhaps the best way to put this is that function and person are inseparable. Jesus is an irreducibly unique person, and so is his Mother.
And the unique person Mary of Nazareth stands at the place of continuity between the old and new covenants. She is both Israel, and the Church. She is the first person to accept the coming of the Messiah, responding in faith to the word of God. There was a time when it could be said, quite literally, that Mary was the Church. Before anyone else, Mary accepted God's Word, and was saved by faith in Jesus Christ. She was the faithful remnant of Israel. She had the prophetic work of presenting the Word of God to the world, and she did it more perfectly than any prophet before her. She proclaimed God's word in the Magnificat, but she brought forth the only begotten Son who is the true Word of God.
She walked in faith beside her Son, and though she seems at time to have misunderstood him, she was among those who stayed with him to the last. She shared in his sufferings (I should note I do not mean to imply that Mary's sufferings added something to Christ's, nor do I accept the Roman Catholic doctrine that Mary is Coredemptrix. She shared her son's sufferings in the same way we all must if we also hope to share in his resurrection). In Mary's fruitful virginity we also see the greatest expression of God's work of bringing life from barrenness, a pattern seen in women like Sarah, Hannah and Elizabeth, but most perfectly in Mary. Mary's life, in short, recapitulates the whole life of the Church.
This only makes sense, of course, if you have a sacramental view of reality, in which individual objects become the places where greater spiritual realities are embodied and revealed. Mary stands for the Church in a way which is more than merely metaphorical or symbolic, but which is almost sacramental.
Mary's role as Mother of God places her in a unique relation to the Body of Christ, in every sense of that term. She is the one from whom he takes his humanity - the same humanity which saves us and to which we are united by baptism and Eucharist. If the Church is truly the Body of Christ, then Mary is also mother of the Church.
Of course, in a basic and utterly central way, all Christians are equal in Christ. But the equality we have in Christ does not mean that we do not have distinct roles. I think this is clear from the metaphor of the body which St. Paul uses to such great effect, and I think it is also part of what is going on in John's gospel when Jesus gives his Mother over to the care of the beloved disciple. In the shadow of the cross, Jesus is establishing his Church, and the church takes the form of a new families. And in families, people have different roles. Mary's role is that of mother, and by virtue of our membership in the Church, Mary is our mother, whether we acknowledge it or not.
Marian devotion shapes the way we think of the Church then, because we can look to Mary to understand how the Church should look. First of course, there is Mary's title of Virgin. Mary's virginity, as I already mentioned, seems to me to be the climax of a long drawn out theme in scripture. Sarah, Rachel, Hannah and Elizabeth gave birth from barrenness - God can create life where hope seems lost. But in Mary God's power is shown even more strikingly. In the case of the other women, childbirth was unlikely, but not quite impossible, but in the case of Mary God leaves no doubt that it is his power which brings life from barrenness.
If Mary is the exemplar of the Church, then it is this sort of fruitful virginity which is to characterize the Church's life. This of course, is the same truth which is also revealed in the cross. It is God's power to bring life from death.
If we really believe that Mary has a unique role in the Church, then so do other members of the body. The Church isn't just a democratic society in which every member is identical and interchangeable functionary, it is a family in which each member is unique and irreplaceable. I think this will also incline us towards a catholic view of Church order, in which there are necessarily orders in the Church.
In addition (and I will have to see if I can find precisely where Barth said this) as Barth pointed out, where there is Marian devotion, synergism follows. Mary is the symbol, and the instance of humanity cooperating with God for salvation. Her choice of obedience undoes Eve's choice of disobedience. Meditating on Mary's life, we are likely to come to a synergistic view of salvation.
There is a great deal more to say about Mary and the Church, but I am not going to try and list all of it now. For one thing, we could go through the whole Magnificat, looking at exactly how Mary describes herself; her humility and lowliness are major themes. Also, there is what seems to be her characteristic activity of contemplation, of keeping all the things she sees in the life of her son, and pondering them in her heart. We can ask what it means for the Church to "treasure up all these things and keep them in her heart?" (Luke 2:19, paraphrased).
And of course, it is still worth asking, what form devotion to Mary should take. It is one thing to meditate on the lives of the saints, and another to invoke the saints, asking for their intercession. Perhaps we could restrict our Marian devotion to simply thinking about Mary - not actually speaking to Mary. I doubt this approach is plausible though. If we believe that Mary is our mother, then it would be a very strange family in which the children only thought fondly of their mother, but never spoke to her. This would be odd, because to know another person means more than just knowing about them; it means having a living relationship with them, communicating with them, empathizing with them, and having an interest in them precisely as another person, as a "thou" to be addressed.
If, as I have suggested in this post, it is important for the life of the Church that we be conscious of the Blessed Virgin as a person, that awareness must somehow grounded in a living relationship with her.
That's interesting, Paul. I still don't think I agree that Mary as mother of the church is a necessary inference from the church as the Body of Christ. After all, the latter is a metaphor, even if it is a metaphor that explains the reality of incorporation into Jesus, and into his humanity and person. Or perhaps you can convince me why I should think of it as more than a metaphor? Though, in any case, I believe in the intercession of the saints on other grounds and have some sort of Marian piety/devotion because I think she pwns in intercession land. And I do think you are right that intercession only makes sense in the context of a living relationship.
ReplyDeleteThanks for commenting Seretha. You may be right that I make to much of the image of the body, although personally I am still inclined to think that it is more than a metaphor - perhaps because of the close link that St. Paul draws between the Body of Christ in the Eucharist and the body of Christ in the Church. I will have to think about that some more. And I agree that Mary pwns in the intercession department :)
ReplyDeletePaul, thanks for these reflections on Mary. Having your thoughts digested and presented in blog form is a great resource! I don't agree with all of your conclusions (I'm not on board with speaking to any of the deceased of the church, at least not pre-resurrection), but I love the idea of Mary as synecdoche vis-a-vis the church, as proto-disciple, as paradigmatic of Christian faithfulness.
ReplyDeleteWith regard to Mary as the Mother of the Body of Christ, which is the Church:
ReplyDeleteThere's a good way to reason about this. Full disclosure: as Paul knows, I'm Catholic. But in some things I think we can use a common method from common principles. Here's one way I can think of, off the top of my head:
In what way are we baptized? Into a state of pre-lapsarian perfection? No, because Heaven is more than pre-lapsarian in its good; it is the possession of God Himself, the "pearl of great price", in knowledge and love. Were it only the perfection of the first parents to which we would have been restored, we would not need "so great a Redeemer" such as the one we were in fact given for the "happy fault." Rather, it is into something more than that which was created perfectly human. It is, in fact, into the deepest and most intimate participation which humanity can have in God through the humanity of Christ as a Mediator. Who, without being God the Son Himself, is the icon of redeemed humanity as we speak about it here? Only Mary can claim that title; as generatrix of the hypostasis of Christ, she can claim the title of Mother of God; cause of the cause of all, she is consequently cause of all (De Koninck, Ego Sapientia) and therefore Mother of all in precisely the same way that she is the Mother of God. Yet she is Mother of God because she is Mother of the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity (the whole hypostasis) of Christ; moreover, it is by that very humanity God assumed, crucified, that we have been saved.
Indeed, by His very death and resurrection we are given a new life, and a life wherein He is the head; therefore, as He is the head to us who are the members, animated by His very life in the Sacrament of His own Person given to us, so Mary is the Mother of the Church as Mother of that very Person.
Nevertheless, she is still more unique in this, that, "figlia del tuo figlio", Mary remains a created human being and a secondary, contingent one; while, at the same time, she is the Queen of the very Angels, who in the normal course of ontology would have been closest to God but for the scandal of the Incarnation. Perhaps, indeed, this character of the Incarnation, of the Divine Son being born to a merely human mother, and consequentially her being put above the brightest of the angels, is an insight into the fall of Satan.
As the icon of redeemed humanity, the exemplar who, herself, has the character of a personal final cause in our redemption (because by her privilege as Mother of God she is the Mirror of Justice (Litany of Loreto), and Justice, Who is God, wills Justice) Mary is the one who has most truly "put on Christ"; indeed, she has put on Christ in such an exemplary way that to speak of Christ is in a way (secondary but undiminished in intensity) to speak about His Mother.
I realize this might sound like idolatry to those who have difficulty making distinctions, but I trust that everyone here is sharp enough to make them or charitable enough to give me the benefit of assuming piety. :-)