THE DIVINE MOTHERHOOD BY DOM ANSCAR VONIER, OSB
Chapter XII
THE SWEETNESS OF THE DIVINE MOTHERHOOD
There could be no greater danger for Christian truth than to neglect its majestic, its lofty aspect for the sake of the more sentimental elements in it. The smile of Christian truth is the smile of a queen, not the bubbling laughter of a child.
But such as it is, it is a wonderful smile, and one that enraptures the intellect as well as the heart.
The divine motherhood itself is a thing of wondrous majesty, an immense beacon of immaculate white light, penetrating, like a two-edged sword, into the intellect of man and angel. The divine motherhood is a glorious system of highest metaphysics well calculated to captivate the attention of the most searching and the most exact mind. Is there anything, for instance, after the Hypostatic Union itself that is more gratifying, more absorbing for the speculative mind than the doctrine of Christ’s birth in time, with Christ’s eternal birth going on in the unchangeable eternity of the Father? Yet this belongs to the very essence of the divine motherhood.
But sweetness comes out of the mouth of the Strong One. If Christian theology has its smile, the divine motherhood is that smile. Outside the clear vision of God nothing can reveal so vividly as does the divine motherhood that side of God to the contemplation of which the psalmist invites us when he says: "O, taste, and see that the Lord is sweet" (Ps. xxxiii. 9). So the attitude of the Catholic mind has always been this that it takes for granted, as a matter of course, that between our Lord and His blessed Mother there was a love of sweetness and tenderness such as the world has never witnessed before, and will never witness again. We feel instinctively that Mary was the greatest personal friend Jesus had here on earth and that between them there was such similarity of character as to make it into a friendship stronger than death. The passionate outpourings of love which make the Canticle of Canticles the highest expression of human sentiment we apply them all to Mary enamoured of her divine Son.
We call her the greatest of all the martyrs because from love she suffered more than any other human creature ever did. The tenderness of the divine Mother for the divine Infant no doubt appeals to all men; all men love the idea of the Madonna with her beautiful Babe. But it is an attitude that is properly, and, I might almost say, temperamentally Catholic to see the same tenderness of love exist between Mary and her Son at all the periods of Christ’s life, to think that there is the same virginal spirit of tenderest affection in the Pieta, which naturally we attribute to the Madonna. In their striking preference for the Pieta, the Mother of Dolours, our Catholic forefathers showed their Christian temperament; they knew instinctively that between
Jesus and His Mother the sweetness of Bethlehem never ceased, that it grew in strength and intensity as the two wonderful lives, the life of the Mother and the life of the Son, reached maturity and revealed their unsearchable depths.
It is a Catholic sentiment which is totally foreign to the Protestant. The Protestant has made capital out of Christ’s words at the wedding feast of Cana: "And Jesus saith to her: Woman, what is that to me and to thee? My hour is not yet come" (John ii. 4). For him these words colour
and cloud the whole relationship between Mother and Son. It is certainly astonishing to see what a role these words have played in an unfavourable sense in the whole of our Mariology ever since the Mother of God is not loved as a mother by the whole of Christendom. A Christendom that loves Mary takes it for granted that the words are no rift in the great love harmony between Jesus and Mary; it knows that such words could come from Jesus, still an infant at heart, loving His Mother then as He did when a child at Nazareth. The nature of the emphasis we lay on that text, or other texts of a similar turn, entirely depends on our initial sentiment about the relation that existed between Christ and His Mother. I think that no friendship ever existed that was like the friendship of Jesus and Mary ; even if there were verbal severity in Christ’s phrase, I take it that it had no such effect on Mary’s mind, as indeed it had not, as appears from the sequel of the same Gospel narrative. There was, either in Christ’s way of saying the words or in the deeper meaning of the words themselves, something that made them truly words of love and trust, a trust answered at once by Mary’s complete confidence: "His mother said to the waiters: whatsoever he shall say to you, do ye". Another man, starting with a very different attitude of mind, with a kind of jealousy of Mary’s spiritual preponderance, will see in the same words nothing less than a severe rebuke. His reading of this particular passage is coloured by a much darker mentality, the innate jealousies certain minds nourish against the excellency of that sweetest of all creatures, the ever-blessed Mother of God.
The Catholic attitude is the natural attitude; it simply is the outcome of the whole doctrinal system of the Incarnation. A sinless Mother, a virgin Mother, a Son Who is God’s Only-Begotten, everything that is holiest and highest, what could it produce, asks the Catholic, except love, tenderness, sweetness of the most marvellous kind, between the Mother and the Son? Why should there be anything but perfect love; what possible element is there that might prevent the two ever-blessed persons, Christ and Mary, from tasting to the full the cup of created love?
So we take it for granted that the life of Jesus with Mary at Nazareth was the happiest human life in the history of mankind. It is perhaps one of the most marvellous features of the Christian faith to admit that the immense life of the Incarnate Son of God could be contained within the limits of an ordinary human existence, the life of the carpenter of Nazareth: "Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary?" (Mark vi. 3.) Contrary to all the usual imaginings of the human mind, we have in the Incarnation the element of the marvellous, of the superhuman in the highest degree, combined with the most absolute ordinariness of conditions of existence. Christian faith lives on the conviction that it was possible for the immense, the infinite life that was in Jesus of Nazareth to be fully active, nay, to have full scope, during the thirty years of the ordinary domestic life under Mary’s roof.
So we admit likewise, as an intuition of the heart, as well as of the mind, that the immense love, the superhuman tenderness of the Mater amabilis had unrestricted exercise in the daily contact of a pure home. There was not, there could not be, the least incident, the least movement which was not replete with divine sweetness of love during the many years when Jesus lived with Mary. It is in that intercourse with the Son of God that Mary’s absolute sinlessness becomes a positive, a living thing, as it means the power of communing with infinite sanctity without a blush, without a tremor, but, on the contrary, with the natural effusiveness of a beautiful mother.
Catholic love for the Mother of God shows a praiseworthy sense of the artistic by its reluctance to ask for elaborate details of the life at Nazareth. We know that at Nazareth there dwells a life that is not of man s experience, hardly of man s comprehension. Is there anybody here on earth who knows what real love is, who could draw a picture of two lives of superhuman intensity finding, in their very intensity, a most complete blending of all their movements, affections, aspirations?
Let me watch from the hill-top over Nazareth a woman going down to the well with the pitcher poised on her head, with a boy of fifteen at her side. I know that between the two there is a love such as is not found among the spirits that dwell before the throne of God. But I know, too, that I am not entitled to see more lest I die of wonderment. Human intercourse is so well described by St. Augustine, in one of his sermons: "Why do we all labour? Is it not because we are all mortal men, easily broken, weak, carrying earthen vessels which make strait room for each other?" Of such existence we have the sad and constant experience. How the Mater amabilis dwelled with Him to Whom the prophet gives the name of Admirabilis is to a great extent a mystery, a part of the vaster mystery of Christ’s two-fold birth.
It is evident that the Catholic view of the divine motherhood, as feebly portrayed in this chapter, must make a tremendous difference in our mental attitude towards the character of the Incarnation, nay, towards the character of God. The element of amiability could never be excluded from a view of God and God’s dealings in minds where there is that great relish of the sweetness of God’s character. The Fatherhood of God is an idea that is far from exhaustive of God’s nature. Alone it would isolate God from a vast part of our own nature. In the sweetness of the divine motherhood there is revealed to us something of God that is not contained directly in the idea of the divine Fatherhood, and nothing will ever replace in man s mind the wonderful influence of the faith in Mary’s love. Intellects devoid of that faith will never understand the true character of the God Incarnate; their Christianity will always be the cold sun of the winter day instead of the life-giving mellowness of the sun in spring.
