THE DIVINE MOTHERHOOD BY DOM ANSCAR VONIER, OSB
Chapter XIII
THE POWER OF THE DIVINE MOTHERHOOD
Catholic theological thought is all in favour of the greatness of the creature; it starts with the metaphysical assumption that it is God’s wonderful purpose to make the things He creates as great as possible, to make very great things indeed. With the psalmist the Catholic mind says instinctively when speaking to God: "Thou art the God that dost wonders" (Ps. Ixxvi. 15). God is wonderful not only in Himself, He is wonderful in His creatures; His creation, the thing that is outside Himself, is a source of endless wonderment to the truly Christian mind. Catholic theology has no jealousies for God’s glory that are unwarranted ; the greatness of the creature, far from throwing a long shadow on God’s glory, is, on the contrary, the brightest ray of God’s glory. Catholic theology, again, is far from all awkwardness of mind in locating respectively God’s greatness and the creature s greatness; the two greatnesses are a wonderful blending of two perfections, the infinite perfection and the finite perfection. The two perfections are never opposed to each other, but are sweetly wedded together into an adorable harmony. God’s interest is His creation, and the greater the creation is, the happier is the Catholic mind.
But Catholic theology goes one step further; it wants God’s creative, God’s productive power to be communicated to the finite creation as far as it is possible. Not only are we intensely happy to see God put outside Himself into a separate mode of existence things that so closely resemble Himself in splendour, but we know that God is not jealous of the very power that enables Him to do these marvels; He wants His creatures to have the same powers as far as finiteness - - the intrinsic condition of most created things allows it. The only thing God does not give away is the glory of His being the ultimate source of all perfection and all power. But power, power beyond measure and comprehension, power that stretches from end to end, He is willing to give. It is astonishing to read in our theology to what height created power of producing spiritual or natural effects does rise ; the making of a thing from nothingness, creatio ex nihilo, seems to be, according to Catholic theologians, the only clear case where created power is quite helpless. We love to see God surrounded by mighty creatures, by giants in mind and thought. Maior autem perfectio est, quod aliquid in se sit bonum, . et etiam sit aliis causa bonitatis, quam si esset solummodo in se bonum. Et ideo sic Deus gubernat res, ut quasdam aliarum in gubernando causas instituat; sicut si aliquis magister discipulos sues non solum scientes faceret, sed etiam aliorum doctores: "It is a greater degree of excellency for a being to be good in itself, and to be at the same time a cause of perfection to other beings, than to be merely good in itself. God then so rules all things that He makes certain beings to be causative in their turn in the ruling of the universe; so a good teacher will do more than to impart knowledge to his disciples, he will make them into teachers in their turn" (Summa i, q. 103, a. 6).
It is moreover a specifically Catholic attitude of mind to welcome created greatness and created power in the beings that have reason and free will, in the angels and in man. "God is wonderful in his saints, the God of Israel is he who will give power and strength to his people" (Ps. Ixvii. 36). It is in this point more than in any other mental attitude that the Catholic mind differs so radically from the Protestant mind. We Catholics find it most natural to see our saints and our angels doing the works of God, keeping the world from sinking into moral and physical chaos through their wonderful activities. Nor do we limit the powers of God’s friends to any special activity; their power of prayer, for instance, is only one of the many potencies that are in them. They are powerful in most direct, most efficacious ways, though their ways may be hidden from our mortal gaze.
These reflections of a general theological nature are not inappropriate at the end of my little treatise on the divine motherhood. Conscious or unconscious assimilation of the thoughts just enunciated constitutes Catholic devotion to the divine Mother, the Virgo potens, the powerful Virgin. Divine motherhood is an immense power in the world of grace, the greatest power, after the redemptive power of Christ. "Thou art beautiful, O my love, sweet and comely as Jerusalem, terrible as an army set in array" (Cant, of cant. vi. 3). These words, expressing at the same time greatest human endearment and most overwhelming sense of irresistible warlike power have been always applied to the blessed Mother of God by the Christian Liturgy. The idea of immense power in connection with divine motherhood is distinctly a most Catholic frame of mind. The very fact of the divine motherhood, the very fact of the second birth of the Son of God, is natural to the Catholic mind in virtue of that intellectual blend which I have just described. One might say that the divine motherhood is a particular application of the more universal truth that
God communicates power and life to His creature in infinitum.
Nothing is more natural to us than to give the Mother of God those very titles which we give to
God our Redeemer: Salve, Regina, Mater misericordiae, vita, dulcedo et spes nostra. We call her the Mother of mercy, we call her life, we call her sweetness, we call her our hope without any limitation of meaning because we cannot see any limits to her greatness and power, though we know that there are limits, somewhere; but the limits, wherever they may be, will never be reached by another creature, exploring, as it were, Mary’s spiritual potency. In theory we know that Christ is to us the Author of mercy, that He is to us Life, Sweetness and Hope in a higher, nay, in an infinitely higher sense than Mary is. But this distinction we never need make in our practical devotion because the height of Mary’s spiritual stature will never be measured by man and angel. Adoration is due to God exclusively for this one reason that He is the ultimate source and cause of all things. Whatever is not ultimate cause and source of all things cannot be adored. We Catholics in practice make this the only reservation with the Mother of God.
If there be limits to her greatness those limits are not within our purview. Christ’s redemption, being the act of God, is the ultimate cause and source of all grace ; like creation it is a title on God’s part for adoration. Mary’s power in the supernatural order of redemption has again for us this one limitation : she is not the ultimate source and cause of the redemptive grace.
We think of no other limits with regard to her in our practical devotion.
There is another consideration which may greatly help us in understanding the nature of the effective influence which the divine motherhood must exert forever in the spiritual world.
We speak of the natural and the supernatural order too easily as of abstractions. The two orders are essentially two sets of rational beings, or anyhow, a set of rational beings endowed with two different classes of mental qualities. The supernatural order, to confine our attention to that order for the moment, is anything but an abstract ideal, a mere theory, or even a series of phenomena. The supernatural order is essentially a set of rational beings in whom the higher life, the participation of God’s life, is realized, and, as it were, personified. Christ, the Son of God made man, is the central figure of the supernatural order, being, in His own Person, grace and truth. The supernatural order consists of the living, rational creatures who, with Christ, share in the life of God. With a view to making the supernatural order great and wonderful, with a view to making it the jewel and crown of His whole creation, God makes great in grace those living creatures in whom that lofty thing, the divine Life, flows and throbs. So we need not be surprised to find individual, rational creatures raised up so high through their participation of the divine Life. Divine motherhood is essentially this, that a rational creature, in this case a human creature, has been admitted to the greatest possible participation of the divine Life, after the Hypostatic Union. Mary, indeed, is a great, powerful, supernatural person, and to set any limits to the possibilities of her effective influence in the world of spirits is to restrict, arbitrarily, what God has made greater than all human thought. We know where the created differs from the Uncreated. But we do not know where are the limits to the spiritual powers of one who shares divine Life to the extent of being the Mother of God. I might say that the burden of finding the limits of Mary’s spiritual powers rests with us if we want to find limits. God has put before our eyes in the divine motherhood a creature not of limits but of grace beyond man s comprehension; limits, with Mary’s spiritual estate, are very much after- thoughts; they are not suggested by what we know of her grace. We Catholics are satisfied with the radical difference between a creature and the Creator. But as for setting boundaries to the spiritual powers of the Mother of God, nothing in our mentality invites us to do so. The real distinction between the created and Uncreated lies not directly in this that one is finite and the other is infinite; in higher metaphysics and in higher theology finitude and infinitude are in a way something less than the deeper fact that a being has all it has from itself, or from another. To have its being from Itself, and to be the cause and source of all other beings is truly the exclusive characteristic of the Uncreated ; it is infinite therefore in every sense, as a result of this radical self-sufficiency. But in higher theology we do not necessarily begrudge the creature infinitude, if infinitude be compatible with the fact that it comes from Another, from the First Cause of all things. So we admit that there may be true infinitude in a creature at least in a given direction, though it could never be an infinitude in every respect.
So we say generally that the divine motherhood is an infinite dignity, a thing that has no limits in excellency of relationship with God. We do not say that Mary is a being that is infinite, but we say that in Mary there is something which is truly infinite : her dignity as the Mother of God.
The great master of Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, has the following delightful phrase in a commentary on the Annunciation portion of the Gospel: Filius infinitat matris bonitatem, infinita
bonitas in fructu infinitam quandam adhuc ostendit in arbore bonitatem. Rendered freely the passage says that Mary’s Son gives infinitude to His Mother s excellency, there being also in the tree which produces the fruit some of that infinite perfection which belongs properly to the fruit.
In practice the Catholic Church looks upon the Mother of God as being an unbounded power in the realm of grace; she is considered as the Mother of the redeemed on account of the universality of her grace; in virtue of her divine motherhood Mary is simply the vastest, the most efficient, the most universal supernatural power in heaven and on earth, outside the Three Divine Persons.
