|
3.
Mother of God
THE
THREE deserve their fame. To have led the heavenly forces against Satan,
guided the chosen people through a difficult exodus, taken over the
management of the Church from Christ, were all lofty roles which Michael,
Moses and Peter carried out nobly. The truth remains, however, that a
Galilean girl by the time she had turned sixteen achieved a distinction
immeasurably beyond the combined sublimity of theirs. Her motherhood, in
comparison, rates supreme. "A higher office," writes a recent successor
of Peter, Pope Pius XII, "does not seem possible." His encyclical
Fulgens Corona does not slight the other prerogatives of Mary. It
praises them redundantly. Yet the thesis remains that "all the privileges
and graces, with which her soul and her life were endowed in so
extraordinary a manner and measure, seem to flow from this sublime
vocation of Mother of God as from a pure and hidden source."
It would require a perfect understanding of who
God is, which God alone can have, to appreciate to the full the honor of
being his mother. The mother herself, although she did foresee that
future generations would revere her, could not comprehend the magnitude of
her dignity. She had but a human mind. The only mother in history who
could in truth as well as tender pride call her Baby adorable had to leave
it to the Baby to appraise her own dignity.
He knew. He had with his eternal Father
prearranged her qualifications. In his divine Person there subsisted from
the moment of his conception two natures, united to it, yet each of them
distinct, not confused, not intermingled. The Christmas shepherds, in
reporting to Mary and Joseph the glory of their angelic vision and their
angelic message, broke no news to the Infant in the manger.
The prophet Isaiah had long ago called him by
the name Emmanuel, which in the literal sense of the word could only mean
that her Child whom Mary would show the shepherds on Christmas night would
be indeed their little God (Mt. 1:22-23). St. Augustine, in firm
agreement, draws a conclusion: "In no wise," he asserts, "can I suppose
that ignorance existed in that Infant, in whom the Word was made flesh to
dwell among us; nor can I suppose that the infirmity of mind belonged to
Christ as a Babe, which we see in other babes." Centuries after, John
Henry Newman discovered in his research at Oxford that the statement
reflected not only the conviction of a great theologian but also the
official teaching of the Church. "It is the doctrine of the Church," he
writes without hesitancy, "that Christ, as man, was perfect in his
knowledge from the first." Thus, as bearing out the doctrine, does the
Church interpret the prophet's reference to the newborn Savior: "And the
Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and
understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge"
(Is. 11:2).
The human knowledge of Christ, theology has
decided, admits of a threefold division. First of all, because of the
hypostatic union of his divine with his human nature, it was a beatific
knowledge, such as the blessed in heaven have, who see God. Clearly,
Jesus was speaking as man and of his beatific knowledge in the stinging
report: "If I glorify myself, my glory is nothing; it is the Father who
glorifies me, of whom you say that he is your God. But you have not known
him; I know him. If I said, I do not know him, I should be a liar like
you; but I do know him and keep his word" (Jn. 8:54-55).
Secondly, the human soul of Christ enjoyed from
his divinity an infused knowledge: an endowment not unlike that of the
angels which affords them an intuitive grasp of the secrets of creation,
the kind of understanding that does not require a tedious rationalizing
from sensory evidence. It has the answers at once. Nor did the little
Savior have to outgrow his infancy before receiving this intuitive
understanding. He was conceived with it. The shepherds, for all their
astonishment over the glories of Christmas night, could hardly have
realized the tremendous truth: that the Child, who lay so helpless in his
swaddling clothes and looked at them with such wondering eyes, already had
the mind to outwit his Father's magnificent angels.
The third kind of knowledge, to engage the
human mind of Christ, came from experience. It developed. It
accumulated, ever adding to its resource. Accordingly, the evangelist
writes of the growing Boy: "Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in
favor with God and man" (Lk. 2:52).
An illustration may not come amiss here. When
the Franciscans were establishing their missions along the California
coast, giving them such names as San Diego, San Jose, Santa Maria de los
Angeles, they were asked why they did not call one of the settlements
after their founder Francis. Promptly their superior, Junipero Serra,
replied in so many words: "We know from our map, given us by our
explorers, that farther north lies the most beautiful of harbors. As soon
as we reach its shore—that will be San Francisco." Reach it the
missionaries did; without their great leader, however; who had by then
departed this world for a happier destination. But the point is, their
coming upon the harbor did not give them knowledge of it. They already
had that. Seeing it only added a new dimension to their knowledge, a
sensory awareness of the harbor which they did not have before.
So with the Christ Child. He foreknew what it
would be like to speak his first words, but not until he spoke them would
he have an experimental knowledge of the action. His young mind was ever
taking in new experiences from the outside world, so that experimentally
His human knowledge did indeed increase day by day. In this sense, and in
this sense alone, may the Incarnate Son of God be said to have learned.
As the Boy of twelve astonished the teachers in the Temple, so could the
Infant of Bethlehem have explained with the same effortless ease the
truths of his Father—had his little lips chosen to speak.
His kinds of knowledge derive from His being at
one and the same time, to use the scriptural terms, the Son of God and the
Son of Man. Surprisingly enough, it was His humanity and not His divinity
that the first heretics within the Church would reject. Those who saw him
walking about, and heard him answer their questions, and felt the warmth
of his sympathy or the irony in his rebukes, never for a moment thought
him a phantom. The Pharisees would have considered it a mark of insanity
to maintain that Mary's Son (whom they mistook for Joseph's as well) only
appeared to be and was not in reality a man. They would refuse Mary her
proudest title for the very opposite reason of the later Gnostics.
The refusal, of either side, follows the
erroneous premise that Christ did not have two natures, as the Church
teaches, but was restricted to one or the other. If he was not personally
God, Mary of course dare not be called the Mother of God. If his visible
body were a mere illusion and was not true flesh of hers, then she was not
really a mother at all. The title Mother of God therefore becomes
a touchstone of one's faith in the full doctrine. As St. John Damascene
remarks, "This name contains the whole mystery of the Incarnation."
The historic attempts to deprive Mary of the
title, by their attacks on either the divinity or the humanity of her Son,
or again on the oneness of His person, only stiffened the determination of
the Church to uphold it and of the faithful to use it. Spell it out in
whatever language, Theotókos, Mater Dei, Madre de Dios, Mother of God, the
Faithful everywhere have found the very sound a delight to the ear. It
flatters them. It reminds them of whose adopted brothers and sisters they
have become through a human mother. They gratefully address her
accordingly.
An invaluable papyrus leaf from the fourth century,
if not the third, holds an ancient prayer; how ancient no historian seems
to know; except that it was already then an established favorite on the
lips of the devout. Especially noticeable from the context, at the very
outset, appears the noble vocative Theotóke. A careful hand,
spelling out the letters, had borne down with loving strength on that
blessed name. The heavy emphasis defies the heretic who would nullify
it. The prayer begins, in translation to be sure, with words familiar to
us and dear to us from our own Memorare: "We fly to your
protection, O holy Mother of God."
The dated salutation refutes the assumption
that St. Athanasius, who deserves high praise for so much else, invented
the term Theotókos. His predecessor in the Alexandrian see,
Patriarch Alexander, had used it with force in the official deposition of
Arius even before the Council of Nicaea. St. Cyril of Jerusalem, with a
casualness that indicates a general acceptance of the term, refers in his
catechism to "the Virgin Mother of God." Then Eusebius in his Life of
Constantine relates that the emperor's saintly mother had the Cave of
Bethlehem elaborately decorated out of love and reverence for "the Mother
of God" in her blessed childbirth. "Clearly from earliest times," the
recent council had the historic sense to put on record, "the Blessed
Virgin Mary is honored under the title of Mother of God."
Of the hostile witnesses, there come to mind
two who particularly invite quoting. Julian the Apostate, in dismay over
what must have seemed to him an immemorial and irremediable custom, is
reported to have cried out: "You Christians never stop calling Mary the
Mother of God." Who does the reporting? No less trustworthy a
contemporary than St. Cyril of Alexandria.
The second adverse witness, though holding a
prestigious office in the Church, writes in all sympathy to heresiarch
Nestorius. In the letter Patriarch John of Antioch urges his friend to
yield to the pleading of Pope Celestine and to withdraw his attack on the
popular practice of referring to Mary as the Mother of God. "This title,"
states Patriarch John, after his vain research to find a lack of support
for it, "no one of the ecclesiastical doctors has ever rejected. Those
who use it are found to be numerous and especially renowned." In other
words, "You can't win, Nestorius, for the authorities of the present and
from far back are arrayed like a battalion against you. Give in!"
Nestorius did not give in. Nor, of course, did
he win. The truth prevailed.
As St. Irenaeus had with eloquence refuted the
Gnostics, and St. Athanasius the Arians, so in the fifth century did the
Holy Spirit have ready to offset the Nestorians another fighter for the
truth, St. Cyril of Alexandria. To appreciate the urgency of his need,
consider the grave scandal that brought him into action. His fellow
bishop of Constantinople sat upon his sanctuary throne at a liturgical
service while from the pulpit the priest Anastasius forbade the
congregation, in the name of the presiding patriarch, ever again to
entitle Mary "the Mother of God." Not that Nestorius did not believe in
the divine as well as the human nature of the Word made flesh; he believed
in his confused way in both; but he now introduced the heresy of two
persons to match the two natures. Call the Virgin Mary the mother of
Jesus Christ the Man to your heart's content, went his argument to the
people, but do not extent her motherhood further, for God the Son had no
mother.
The horrified people did not take such an
egregious insult to their faith quietly. There followed a scene: an
uprising and a walkout. And those who remained in the cathedral applauded
the heated retort on the part of a monk who, if only he had had the
strength, would have thrown the priest bodily out of the church. He
tried. Unbecoming a sanctuary? Yes, the heresy especially was. But the
presiding patriarch did not think so. He concentrated his fury upon the
orthodox monk whom he ordered into exile after a public flogging.
St. Cyril replied to Nestorius twice, mincing
no words. He expressed his state of shock. "I am astonished," runs his
theme, "that anyone can doubt whether the blessed virgin should be called
the Mother of God; for if our Lord Jesus Christ is God, the holy virgin
mother must be Mother of God." There are not two of him. There is one.
And she is his mother. "Not that the nature of the Divine Word had its
origin in Mary, but that in her was formed, and animated with a rational
soul, the sacred Body to which the Divine Word is personally united; and
hence we say that the Word was born according to the flesh. Thus, in the
natural order, though a mother has no part in the creation of the soul,
she is regarded and called a mother of the whole man and not of his body
alone." His body and soul make up a single identity, so that there are
not two persons but one. So it is with our Incarnate Savior. His divine
and human natures united in his Person remain one Christ Jesus.
St. Cyril had a wide choice of utterances from
our blessed Lord to rely upon. Never once in the Gospels did Christ, who
in word and deed revealed his two natures, speak as two persons. It was
"Young man, I say to you, arise," and not "the God in me" says so. He did
not ask the blind men before their instantaneous cure, "Do you believe my
divine omnipotence can do this?" No, it was simply, "Do you believe that
I am able to do this?" Dying on the cross, the Savior did not cry out
that his human nature thirsted. His words were, "I thirst." His divinity
worked miracles; his humanity needed to eat and drink and sleep; but the
"I" of his assertions, which admitted both natures, allowed no duality of
person. "The Father and I are one" and "The Father is greater than I" are
expressions of the same undivided Person.
Had St. Cyril not gone to the trouble of
expounding the doctrine at length, it is more than likely that Pope Leo
the Great could not afterwards have written with such an easy nicety of
phrase: "Whenever the only-begotten Son of God confesses himself to be
less than the Father, to whom he says he is equal, he demonstrates the
truth of both his natures; for the inequality proves his humanity and the
equality his divinity." But again, as St. Cyril reminded Nestorius and
St. Leo would remind Eutyches, his statements all bore the identity of one
and the same Second Person of the Blessed Trinity. Naturally, if her Son
was not exclusively a divine Person, Mary would have no right to the title
Theotókos. But He was! And to safeguard that truth of the Faith,
Cyril promptly referred his dispute with Nestorius to the Holy See
because, as he explains to Pope Celestine, "the ancient custom of the
Church requires that such things be communicated to Your Holiness." His
Holiness replied in sharp agreement, authorizing him to warn Nestorius in
the name of the Holy See to recant within ten days of his receiving the
ultimatum or else consider himself out of the Church. Nestorius, paying
no attention to his fellow patriarch, wrote instead to the Holy See.
The supreme pontiff then called together around
him a Roman synod to study the controversy in depth. It soon had its
answer. It issued a strong demand that the title Mother of God
must not be denied to Mary. But it remained for the Ecumenical Council of
Ephesus to put the final icing on the doctrine.
The council opened on June 22, 431, after a delay of
sixteen days to allow an important Nestorian to show up, which he did.
The invited heresiarch himself, though he had come to Ephesus, remained
away from the meetings. The first session was appropriately held in St.
Mary's Cathedral, during which the townspeople kept their interest focused
on this shrine of their beloved Patroness, the Mother of God. In the
absence of the papal delegation, not known to be on the way, Cyril was
called upon to assume the presidency. This he did, however, only after a
popular vote favored him because of his "filling the place of the most
holy and blessed Archbishop of the Roman Church, Celestine." He guided
the proceedings. First, the assembly recited the Nicene Creed, then a
lector read out to them Cyril's second letter to Nestorius, and then Pope
Celestine's doctrinal reply to Nestorius, and finally to the cries of
anathema the letter of Nestorius to Cyril.
Of the many speakers to be heard from in the
course of the day, none could match the eloquence of the presiding
genius. At ready intervals through morning and afternoon he expounded the
mystery of the hypostatic union, with a wealth of quotations from St.
Athanasius, and with a finesse only Pope Leo would excel. By the time the
tireless Cyril ended his final summation the Fathers were fully content to
close the first session and to concede to their president the distinction
of "Doctor of the Incarnation." He merited it. He had done a week's work
in a day.
At the second session in the Episcopal
residence, on July 11, the council had still another name for Cyril,
hailing him "the new Paul", while calling Pope Celestine "Guardian of the
Faith." The three papal legates, now in attendance, heartily approved.
Before their arrival the council had done something else of significance
which they approved. It had sent messengers with its anathema to
Nestorius who had returned to Constantinople. When he refused to let them
into his residence, they fastened the condemnation to the front door. The
citizens who saw it did not resent the action. They applauded. The
faithful here, above all places, had had their fill of their archbishop's
headstrong contention that the Child born of the Virgin Mary cannot be
God.
The most prominent feature of the council
through its seven sessions would have to be its Marian definition, along
with its document in ridicule of the Nestorian attempt to divide the Son
of God into two beings. St. Irenaeus had long ago taken the prophet on
his word to declare that "Christ, born of Mary, is Emmanuel or God with
us." Now the council, to the immense relief of its delegates and the
faithful everywhere decreed with the binding force of a dogma: "If anyone
does not profess that Emmanuel is truly God and that the holy Virgin is
therefore the Mother of God, since she gave birth in the flesh to the Word
of God made flesh, let him be anathema."
There are those in our day who think that
Nestorius was misunderstood, as they say, "in a war of words." The facts
do not bear them out. In the last work from his pen, his Liber
Heraclidis, the heresiarch does grant that Mary may be called Mother
of God in a sense. But then when he starts to explain his "in a sense" it
can be readily seen that he quibbles and that he still rejects the basic
doctrine of the hypostatic union, so fervently proposed at Ephesus and
defined at Chalcedon and reaffirmed at the Third Council of
Constantinople. "This extremely proud man," is what Pope Pius XI calls
the recalcitrant who to the end refused St. Cyril's kindly plea to
recant. "It should be clear to all," the encyclical Lux Veritatis
goes on to say, "that Nestorius really preached heretical doctrines, that
the Patriarch of Alexandria was a strenuous defender of the Catholic
faith, and that Pope Celestine together with the Council of Ephesus
guarded the ancient doctrine and the supreme authority of the Holy See."
The Nestorian controversy a mere war of words?
Don't you ever believe it. The contestants on either side did not. Words
stand for ideas. The Nestorians by their very refusal to submit to the
decrees of the council supply all the proof we need, that they understood
only too well what its theological niceties meant and, by the same token,
what their own contradictions meant.
So did the citizenry of Ephesus know. They
understood the significance of the issue. They had been hearing from the
Constantinople Patriarch against their better judgment, until they were
sick of him at heart, that Mary's highest prerogative must be denied her.
It was already evening when the word got to them on the street, which
touched off in them their wild reaction of relief. They went frantic with
joy.
They cheered the delegates coming out of the
cathedral and episcopal residence. They were there as a huge reception
committee. They formed groups who, "full of rejoicing," to quote
historian John Chapman, "escorted the fathers to their houses with torches
and incense." It was triumphalism, which the weak of faith can only envy
or decry but never comprehend since they have no such inner strength of
conviction to exhibit. There was dancing in the streets, and singing, and
parading, to the honor and glory of the Mother of God. The night had
become holy.
And the word that came oftenest to their lips
that night and sounded the best to their ears was the name of the defeated
heresy had tried to take from them: Theotókos. To commemorate the
great council which brought about such jubilee, Pope Pius XI did more than
publish his encyclical in 1931, the fifteenth centennial of Ephesus. He
hired the ablest workmen to restore the crumbling mosaic that had been
fixed as a memorial into the arch of St. Mary Major's in Rome shortly
after the council. The exquisite mosaic, having again its pristine
luster, bears the cherished name of both Child and Mother in a single
word, the word that became a slogan to the merry Ephesian crowds on the
night of June 22, 431.
But the name in any other language than Greek
would look as appealing and sound as dear. It certainly does in English,
its three words requiring not a syllable more to pronounce. Look at
them. Say them. Repeat them the oftener the better. Let their meaning
illumine the mind, rejoice the heart. Mother of God!
|