THE DIVINE MOTHERHOOD BY DOM ANSCAR VONIER, OSB
Chapter VI
THE HOLY THING THAT SHALL BE BORN OF MARY.
No one can fail to have his attention arrested by the unexpected turn of Gabriel s speech when he explains to Mary how she, the Virgin, is to become the Mother: "And therefore also the Holy
Thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God". It is beyond the shadow of a doubt that the Archangel used the neuter form of speech when speaking of the Offspring Mary was to expect. He did not say "The Holy One Who shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God", but "The Holy Thing". The original Greek has the neuter form, so has the Latin Vulgate, and the English Bible is an exact translation when it renders the sentence as quoted above.
There is wonderful emphasis and power in the angelic phrase. If Gabriel had said "the Holy One
Who shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God" it would have been a less efficacious way of bringing home to Mary, and through her to us, the fact that Mary’s Son would be more than man; she will be given a Child Who will be something beyond all human possibilities, something above all the human category of being, nay, something beyond all created personality. The Angel s choice of phrase, calling the result of the Holy Ghost s action a "Some thing", for such is virtually the meaning of Gabriel s words, is infinitely subtle, and was bound to arrest
Mary’s attention, as it does ours. The Angel s phrase makes it at once possible for us to throw aside all human limitations, all personal restrictions of a created order. Being a Holy Thing it may be a human or a divine being, a finite or an infinite being, but it is certainly a being of unusual perfection; it is a Holy Thing in virtue of the divine action on Mary; for it is in virtue of that divine action that it is a Holy Thing.
The hypothetical phrase "The Holy One Who shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of
God" would contain a difficulty; for it would, in a way, limit the meaning of the subject of the proposition. A Holy One to be born of a woman would of necessity be a human being; a Holy Thing to be born may be something unspeakably wonderful.
What will it be? The Angel says it at once: "It will be called the Son of God." Christian phraseology, following in this the Verbum caro factum est of St. John, prefers the expression "God was made man" to the expression "man was made God", as it renders more powerfully the truth that Mary’s Offspring was never anything but God; the infinitely mysterious Thing in Mary’s bosom, after the Angel s departure, was God. St. John s phrase, then, "The Word was made flesh", and Gabriel s phrase, : the Holy Thing that shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God", are kindred language; it indicates that at no division of time, however small, that adorable Thing Which was in Mary’s bosom could be called by any name except by the name of God; the Archangel s subtle phrase makes it clear that Mary is directly, and without any intermediary, the Mother of God.
We have seen in a previous chapter how Mary’s motherhood has, from its very nature, an infinite
extension, as Mary is the Mother of Jesus according to the totality of His career, according to His immortal nature and His everlasting kingdom; for a Son was promised to Mary Whose rule over creation would never have an end. There is another such infinitude implied in Mary’s motherhood: she is Mother according to the infinitely full vitalities of God’s effective power. Her motherhood was active under the overshadowing of the Most High in the production of an infinite Thing. Nothing but an in finite Thing could be the result of a motherhood thus active. Nothing is impossible to God in Whom all inferior causalities are contained as in the supreme and all-sufficient cause. It is in God’s power to cause man to be born of woman without the intervention of a human father. But in such an hypothesis we should have a maternity that would differ toto coelo from Mary’s maternity. It would be a miraculous maternity, but not an infinite maternity. The man born would be finite, mortal, merely human. Mary’s bosom produced an infinitely Holy, an eternal, a divine Thing, through the very laws of the divine vitalities that were operative in her when she conceived from the- Holy Ghost. It is the only instance in the whole realm of the natural and supernatural world, outside the Eucharistic mystery, where a finite thing, as was Mary’s life-blood, becomes the object of an act of God’s omnipotence with an infinite result as the term of such activity. The Holy Thing Which was produced is what It is in virtue of Mary’s maternity as much as in virtue of the power of the Holy Ghost. We must conclude, therefore, that maternity itself, in our Lady, was raised to a plane high enough to meet God’s creative paternity, when the Word was made flesh. Let us always bear in mind the great truth that our Lady s maternity was a most natural maternity in the sense that she fully responded to it, was not overwhelmed by it, that there was no gap between her and her Offspring; Christ came from her as her own dear Child, the Fruit of her own blessed womb. I am right, therefore, in asserting that Mary’s maternal function in the conception of Christ was raised to an incredibly high plane of vitality so as to make her maternity not only an instrumental, but a natural maternity. If Mary’s mission had been merely to minister the human element to the Word when He became flesh her maternity would have been an instrumental maternity; it would have existed just to serve a higher purpose. But Mary’s role is more than that; she is permanently the Mother of God, and her maternity is not a transient ministration, but an abiding dignity * that makes her share, in literal truth, with God the Father the parenthood of Jesus Christ.
A three-fold hypothesis might make this point clearer still. We can think of a woman being made a mother by the direct productive act of God, as already said; in that case the offspring of that mother would not be divine, but human. Then there can be the conception in a woman s womb of a divine Person, as happened in the Incarnation, the woman being merely instrumental to the production of the body. In such a case it would be divine maternity in the most restricted physiological sense. Thirdly, there is the glorious possibility of perfect divine maternity with all the graces and privileges, with all the rights and splendours of one who shares to the full, with God the Father, the parenthood of the God Incarnate. Such is Mary’s maternity; such is the meaning of Elizabeth s salutation to Mary, or rather, the salutation of the Holy Ghost through the mouth of Elizabeth, when, full of the divine Spirit, she cried with a loud voice: "Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the Fruit of thy womb. And whence is this to me, that the Mother of my Lord should come to me?" (Luke i. 42 43.) Elizabeth was the first creature to call Mary the Mother of God ; she gave us the greatest word of the human language: Mother of God . The Archangel had said as much, but merely by implication ; Elizabeth, the happiest of human mothers, has the privilege of having spoken for the first time the word Mother of God. When, moreover, in the same breath she calls blessed the Mother and the Fruit of the Mother s womb, bestowing the same encomium on the two lives which were not yet separated, she gives us an additional ground for saying that Mary’s maternity had been raised to the divine plane of dignity and perfection, where one and the same blessedness holds Mother and Offspring wrapt in a matchless sanctity.
We may elucidate still further the nature of Mary’s share in the dignity of parenthood with regard to the Son of God, by asking ourselves how it comes that the Holy Ghost could never be called the father of Christ, though it was through the Holy Ghost s operation that the conception took place, whilst, on the other hand, Mary is to be called the Mother of Christ in all accuracy of language. Only one of the three Persons of the Trinity, the Eternal Father, is truly the Father of
Christ, and one other person only, Mary, is truly the Mother of Christ. The answer which St. Thomas Aquinas gives in his Summa to the query just formulated is eminently calculated to give us a deeper view of the share of Mary in Christ’s parentage. "Christ", says the great Doctor, "was. conceived from Mary the Virgin, who supplied the life-matter, in such wise as to produce similarity of kind, and therefore He is called her Son. On the other hand, Christ, in His human nature, was conceived from the Holy Ghost, as from the active principle, but not in such wise as to produce similarity of kind as a son is born from his father; and therefore Christ is not said to be the Son of the Holy Ghost" (Summa 3, q. 32, a. 3).
The reason why the Holy Ghost, through the operation in Mary’s womb, did not produce an Offspring in the similarity of kind, as does a human father, is given by St. Thomas in the same paragraph, and previously to the words just quoted. The Son of God, though becoming incarnate, existed before the Incarnation. In His own existence He had perfect similarity of nature and kind from the Eternal Father, the first Person of the Trinity. Therefore He was Son already, the Only-Begotten, of the Father. Becoming incarnate through the operation of the Holy Ghost could not make Him Son of the Holy Ghost, as such a relation of parentage already existed with the Father. But it made Him the Son truly of Mary, because Mary, and Mary alone, gave Him a true similarity of nature in humanity, as the Eternal Father, and the Eternal Father alone, had given Him similarity of nature in divinity, through the eternal filiation of the Word. The Eternal Father and Mary are the true parents of Jesus Christ. I am here paraphrasing the words of St. Thomas, but the doctrine is unmistakable. Mary’s motherhood will always be greater than the thought of the greatest thinker. We merely apprehend the outline of an ever-deepening circle of divine vitalities of the first order.
