PART I
CHAPTER 14
THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY
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I. Importance of the Subject
Listen
to the choir of New College, Oxford sing "Ave Cujus Conceptio" by Nicholas
Ludford. Music details HERE.
The Blessed Virgin Mary was the means by which the Word of God took human
nature, and therefore has a necessary place in the definition of the doctrine
of the Incarnation.
Although the definition of the Council of Ephesus
was not made to promote her honour, but to defend the Divine Nature of her
Son, it certainly had the effect of greatly increasing public devotion to
her.
Romanist theologians devote a large section of their dogmatic treatises
to "Mariology".
Orthodox theologians also think it very important, and the Orthodox delegation
at the Edinburgh Conference of 1937 insisted on introducing it among the
subjects before the Conference as having an important bearing on the reunion
of Christendom.
The divines and poets of the Church of England since the Reformation have
not shared the common dislike of the bestowal of special honour on the Lord's
Mother.
Thus George Herbert writes:
How well her name an ARMY doth present
In whom the Lord of Hosts did pitch His tent:
MARY
And
I would present
My vows to thee most gladly, blessed Maid
And Mother of my God, in my distress.
(See p.445.)
and Bishop Ken:
Heaven with triumphant songs her entrance graced;
Next to Himself her Son His Mother placed;
And here below, now she's of Heaven possessed,
All generations are to call her blest.
English Hymnal, No 217.
And William Wordsworth:
Our tainted nature's solitary boast.
How far this devotion can be carried without any departure from Anglican principles can be seen in that extraordinary book The Female Glory, by Anthony Stafford, a lay follower of Archbishop Laud.
1. The Two Dogmas: The Virgin Birth, and the Title Theoticos
The Anglican churches maintain the fundamental principle that nothing may
be taught as necessary to salvation but that which may be found in or proved
by Holy Scripture.
According to this principle there are two dogmas,
and only two,
which refer to the Blessed Virgin Mary;
and these two are binding on all members of the Church.
They are the dogma of the Virgin Birth,
that at the time of our Lord's birth His mother was a Virgin,
and He had no earthly father;
and the dogma that the Blessed Virgin is rightly called Theot?os,
accepted by the Council of Ephesus.
The first is based on the Gospels, St.Matt.1.20 and St. Luke 1.35;
the evidence for it will be given (in pp 108-115 of original book).
The second is a necessary deduction from St. John 1.14.
We accept it, not merely because the Council of Ephesus defined it, still
less because Pope Celestine confirmed that definition, but because the whole
Church has decided that the Council of Ephesus was right, and that what it
defined had always been the belief of the Church.
["Mother of our Lord and God Jesus Christ" (1549
Prayer Book). Convocation and Parliament in 1570 forbade teaching contrary
to the first four Councils. See also p. 86, note, and compare George
Herbert's line above, p. 71.]
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2. Value of the Cult of the Blessed Virgin
The love and reverence given by all Christians, until the Reformation, to
our Lord's Mother have been of the highest spiritual and moral value.
They
have inspired the ideal of chivalry towards all women.
They have supported
the teaching of St. Paul that in Christ men and women are equal.
They
have strengthened, as perhaps nothing else could have done, personal purity
and the ideal of the Christian home.
They are one of the most precious
parts of Christian tradition, and the sects that have cast them away have
suffered immeasurable loss.
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3. Importance of Distinguishing its Christian from its Pagan Elements
On the other hand, our duty to believe nothing which cannot be shown to
be true requires us to reject various beliefs about our Lord's Mother which
have become very widely spread.
The Anglican Communion is especially bound by this obligation
because it professes to teach nothing as necessary to salvation
but what can be proved from Scripture,
and because it has freed itself from the burden of medieval tradition
while retaining all dogmas that are really Scriptural and Catholic.
There is, I fear, no doubt that the worship of the Mother-Goddess, which
was the popular religion of most of the Mediterranean countries in heathen
times, was transferred to the Blessed Virgin.
This in itself was a
great improvement, for it is clearly better to worship Blessed Mary than
to worship Isis or Demeter.
But many of the ideas, which have gathered
round the cult of Blessed Mary, belong to the Mother-Goddess rather than
to the Hebrew maiden of the Gospels.
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4. Traditional Beliefs
We know nothing whatever about the Blessed Virgin but what is told us in
the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles.
[The woman clothed with the sun in Rev.12 is probably
not the Blessed Virgin, but the Church of the Old Covenant.]
None of the legends about her has any historical value.
The oldest of them come from apocryphal gospels,
some of them written with a heretical purpose,
which no one regards as furnishing historical evidence on any other subject.
(i) The Presentation in the Temple
For instance, the well-known story of the Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple, commemorated by both the Greeks and Latins and portrayed in the gorgeous pictures of Tintoretto and Titian, is incredible, for it shows complete ignorance of the customs and outlook of the Jews.
(ii) The Perpetual Virginity
The Perpetual Virginity of the Blessed Virgin, the belief that she was
not only a virgin at the time of our Lord's birth, but continued to be a
virgin for the rest of her life, so that her marriage with St. Joseph was
only nominal, is a very ancient and almost universally held tradition.
[Tertullian
seems to be the only exception.]
The Church has always felt it highly
unsuitable that the Mother of the Eternal Word should have had any other
children.
The
"brethren of the Lord" treated Him as a younger rather than as
an elder brother (St. Mark 3.31: St. John 7.3), and it was to St. John, her
nephew,
[Salome, his mother, was the Blessed Virgin's
sister. St. Mark 15.41; St. John 19.25. Westcott and Bernard support this
deduction.]
that our Lord entrusted His Mother, which would have been strange if she
had had sons of her own (St. John 19.26).
For this reason it seems
highly probable that the tradition of the Church is true, that our Lord was
the only son of His Mother, and that His "brethren" were the sons
of St. Joseph by a former wife.
But the historical evidence for the
Perpetual Virginity is not sufficient for us to be able to regard it as a
dogma.
We cannot say: "It must have been so, therefore it was
so";
belief must be based on positive evidence.
(Medieval writers
added further elaborations, expressed by the well-known lines, "Forth
He came as light through glass", with which we need not concern ourselves
here.)
(iii) The Legend of the Assumption
The legend of the "Assumption" is part of a fourth-century romance,
which related how the Blessed Virgin died in the presence of the Apostles,
and was restored to life and carried up into heaven.
There is no real
evidence for the truth of this story, though it became generally accepted.
No
doubt God could have assumed the Blessed Virgin alive into heaven, but we
have no reason for believing that He did.
It is sometimes argued that
since Enoch and Elijah were assumed alive into heaven, our Lord's Mother
must have been assumed also, or else she would have received less honour
than they did.
Neither premise of this argument is sound.
We
must not presuppose that God must have acted in a particular way.
"It
must have been so, therefore it was so" implies that we know more of
God's purposes and methods than we do.
Besides, Enoch is a legendary
person who only appears in a genealogy in Genesis, and the story of the translation
of Elijah in II Kings 2, though a magnificent piece of literature, must be
regarded as legend rather than history.
We do not know when or by whom
it was written, and the collection of stories to which it belongs is more
like the medieval Lives of the Saints than any other part of the Bible.
If
it be said that belief in a beautiful legend does no harm,
we reply, first,
that to believe anything for which there is no evidence always does harm
by weakening our power to distinguish truth from error;
second, that to treat
the Assumption of our Lady as if it were as certain as the Ascension of our
Lord is to run the gravest risk of leading people to think that the Ascension
of our Lord, for which the evidence is sufficient, is as legendary as the
Assumption of our Lady.
The Assumption has never been made a dogma anywhere (though suggestions have
often been made that it should be raised to a dogma by the Pope), but no
member of the Roman Communion could deny it openly without "insolent
temerity".
(iv) The Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception
The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception was proclaimed as a dogma by
Pope Pius IX in 1854.
This doctrine is sometimes confused by ignorant people with the Virgin Birth
from which it must be carefully distinguished.
The dogma of the Virgin Birth is the belief that our Lord was born of a Virgin,
which is taught in the Gospels, asserted in the Creeds, and accepted by all
orthodox Christians.
The dogma of the Immaculate Conception is the belief that our Lord's Mother
was without sin, original or actual, from the first moment of her existence,
which is unknown to Scripture and to the Fathers,
and is a medieval speculation not older than the eleventh century.
As we shall see later, St. Paul taught that man is born with a defect in
his spiritual nature.
This defect was called by later theologians "original sin".
St. Augustine went further and taught that it was not merely a defect, but
actual guilt due to the act of conception in fallen man, which could not
take place without sin.
All the Latin theologians of the Middle Ages accepted this teaching.
Some of them argued that our Lord's Mother could not have been separated
from Him by guilt even for a moment, and that therefore she must have been
excluded by a special Divine privilege from the guilt with which everyone
else (except, of course, her Divine Son) is conceived and born.
Here again we observe the argument "it must have been so, therefore
it was so".
Men could not have known such a fact by any ordinary evidence but only by
Divine revelation.
There is no trace of any such teaching in the New Testament.
On the contrary, St. Paul says,
All have sinned, and come short of the glory of God (Rom. 3:16).
The Fathers knew of no such doctrine.
They all teach that our Lord alone was without sin.
St. John Chrysostom (with other Fathers) even says that Blessed Mary sinned
when she interfered at the marriage of Cana so as to deserve rebuke (St.
John 2.3).
Whatever we may think of his interpretation, it at least shows that he did
not know of any belief that the Blessed Virgin was sinless, still less that
she was immaculately conceived.
St. Augustine, when teaching the sinfulness of mankind, refuses out of reverence
to include the Lord's Mother.
He does not say that she was sinless,
but he refuses to discuss the question.
It is a pity that his example
has not been universally followed.
Medieval divines held that the Blessed
Virgin was free from actual sin (in spite of the complete absence of evidence),
but the belief that she was immaculate when conceived and therefore free
also from original sin, was hotly disputed.
It was a novelty in the time of St. Bernard who condemned it as a "scandal",
and St. Thomas Aquinas also denied it,
though maintained by his rival, Duns Scotus.
The Dominicans, following their master St. Thomas, opposed it,
while the Franciscans supported it.
The former appealed to the visions of St. Catherine of Siena,
the latter to those of St. Birgitta of Sweden.
The Jesuits succeeded the Franciscans as the great supporters of this doctrine.
By means of their influence it spread throughout the Roman Communion,
and the opposition to it died away.
In 1848 Pope Pius IX, who had been driven from Rome by the republicans under
Mazzini and was in exile at Gaeta, vowed that if the Blessed Virgin would
restore him to his throne, he would make her immaculate conception a dogma.
On
his return to Rome he fulfilled his vow, and on December 8, 1854, the doctrine
of the Immaculate Conception was made a dogma necessary to salvation in the
Roman Communion.
When the Infallibility of the Pope was decreed by the Vatican Council in
1870,
a famous French preacher exclaimed,
Pius has said to Mary, Thou art immaculate!
Mary has replied to Pius, Thou art infallible!
Though the Mother of God is constantly spoken of in the Eastern Orthodox
service books as pure and immaculate, the Orthodox Church condemns the dogma
of the Immaculate Conception as heretical.
The English Church keeps the feast of the Conception on December 8 (though
Bishop Frere wished to remove it from the calendar), but teaches that Christ
alone was without sin (Article 15), though without any direct reference to
the Immaculate Conception.
The unedifying history of this question will be found in great detail in
Pusey's Second Eirenicon.
It only needs to be said that the dogma of the Immaculate Conception is contrary
to Holy Scripture and to the universal teaching of the whole ancient Church,
and of the whole modern Church outside the Roman Communion;
that there is no evidence whatever for its truth;
that it does not support the doctrines of the Christian faith, but if regarded
as a dogma, weakens them since the strength of a chain is its weakest link;
and that unless we accept the teaching of St. Augustine on original guilt,
which is not supported by Scripture or the teaching of the Greek Fathers,
and for that reason is extremely difficult to accept, the doctrine of the
Immaculate Conception is not so much untrue as meaningless. Original
sin is a defect of the will, and we do not know that an unborn child has
got a will.
(v) Extravagant Opinions
Besides these beliefs which are dogmatic, or almost dogmatic, in the Roman
Communion, there is an immense mass of widely held opinions about the Blessed
Virgin;
for instance, that as our Lord is the Head of the Church, our Lady
is the Neck, so that prayers to Him must go through her (a belief specially
commended by Pope Pius X in his letter to the Society of the Rosary;
[The only reasonable objection to the use of the Rosary is that
it makes the legendary Assumption and Coronation of our Lady equal to the
great mysteries of the Faith. The conversion of the nations and the
return of Christ in glory might well take their place.])
that the
Mother of God can command her Divine Son to do her bidding;
that whereas
He is the King of justice, she is the Queen of mercy, and is therefore
more willing to hear our prayers than He is;
and other ideas still more
extravagant.
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5. The Blessed Virgin as the Second Eve
It is a relief to turn from these fantasies to a belief that, though not
found in Holy Scripture and therefore not a dogma, can be traced to the Apostolic
Fathers, and seems to be a legitimate deduction from the teaching of the
Gospel.
When the angel announced to Blessed Mary
the honour that God was about to bestow on her,
she was not forced to accept it.
Her will was free, and she might have refused it.
But by the words,
Behold the handmaid of the Lord;
be it unto me according to thy word,
she accepted the offer
and thereby became the means through which the Word became Man
and the redemption of the world was effected.
She is therefore called the Second Eve, for as according to the story in
Genesis, Adam's fall, which led to the ruin of mankind, was caused by Eve,
so the Incarnation of our Lord, the Second Adam (Rom. 5.19; I Cor.15.45),
was brought about by the obedience of Blessed Mary.
In this sense, and in this sense only, she may be called our Co-Redemptrix.
This is the reason for the special honour and love given to the Lord's Mother
by all Christian churches.
She is everywhere regarded as the first of saints,
[This is recognized by the English Church in the Prayer
of Consecration in the 1549 Prayer Book, and in the Commemoration of the
Faithful Departed (1928).]
and the most honoured of all human beings because nearest to her Son.
"O blessed Mary," said Bishop Hall, "he cannot honour thee
too much who does not deify thee."
Devotion to Blessed Mary is more properly expressed in poetry than in dogma.
What shall we call thee, O highly favoured one?
exclaims a Greek liturgical hymn:
The sky; for thou didst make the Sun of righteousness to rise.
A garden (παράδειδον); for thou didst cause to shoot forth the Flower of incorruption.
Maiden; for thou didst remain uncorrupt.
Holy Mother; for thou heldest in thy holy arms the Son, the God of all.
Canon Stuckey Coles, in his well known hymn, places the Mother of God exactly in the position assigned to her by orthodox belief:
Praise, O Mary, praise the Father:
Praise thy Saviour and thy Son;
Praise the everlasting Spirit
Who hath made thee Ark and Throne.
O'er all creatures high exalted,
Lowly praise the Three in One.
English Hymnal, No.218.
Note The common Latin devotion, "Hail, Mary, full of grace",
is misleading.
What the Angel Gabriel said to her was,
Hail, thou that art highly favoured (κεχαριτωμένη),
which is not the same as "full of grace" (gratia plena).