The Divine Motherhood by Dom Anscar Vonier, OSB - Chapter XIV (Final Chapter)

THE DIVINE MOTHERHOOD BY DOM ANSCAR VONIER, OSB

Chapter XIV

AN INVOCATION

True civilisation is easily tested by its attitude towards motherhood. There can be no real refinement of human feeling where man s heart is not full of delicacies for the dignity of motherhood; therefore there can be no true civilisation where motherhood is either shunned or degraded. If there is anything that belongs to the health of the nations that dwell upon the earth, it is a loving reverence for the burdens of human motherhood.

The very size of such a need ought to make it for us a thing of supreme reasonableness that

God has given to mankind divine motherhood. Great as the divine motherhood is, it is not too great for human need; the dangers and servitudes that beset human motherhood in this corrupt world are so terrible that there is a kind of reasonable proportionateness in God’s omnipotent act, when He made motherhood into a divine thing.

Christianity is truly the religion of birth. It starts with the eternal birth of its Head and Redeemer; it comes from the highest heavens to our earth through the birth from Mary the Virgin. It summarizes its whole spiritual power in the word birth: "Jesus answered, and said to him: Amen, amen I say to thee, unless a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. Nicodemus saith to him: How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother s womb, and be born again? Jesus answered: Amen, amen I say to thee, unless a man be born again of water and the Holy Ghost, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh, is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit, is spirit. Wonder not, that I said to thee you must be born again (John iii. 3 7). Christianity s moral power, Christianity s social contribution to the life of mankind is the sanctity and obligatoriness of the laws that govern the birth of man.

In Rome there is a shrine to the Madonna del Parto the Madonna of the Birth. Rome s instinct and Rome s language are always true; they denote a comprehension of divine things which has the characteristic of universality. The direct simplicity of such an invocation proves that in it the Christian man and woman have come very near to the Fountains of life. For me, the Madonna del Parto is a portion of that ever-blessed realm of thought whose outlines are given in the beginning of St. John’s Gospel: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him, and without him was made nothing that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men (John i. I 4).

Ever-blessed Mother of God, thy maternity fills my mind with raptures. Thou art the greatest mystery of life after the Triune God. Whence is this to me that the Mother of my Lord should beloved by me? But how could I fail to love this marvel of life? The Birth of the Word is eternal, unchanging; it was, it is, it always will be. The birth which is thine, O blessed Mother of God, I gaze upon it as I should gaze upon an immense lake on an island which the boundless sea holds encompassed from all sides: it is the birth of God surrounded by a more immense birth of God ; Thou art, O blessed Lady, the island containing the one and contained by the other. From thee, as from a point of vantage, I hope to contemplate tor ever the two Lives in Which the happiness of all created intellects lies, the Life that is born in eternity and the Life that was born in time.

There was a time when the world s evil did frighten my soul, when I looked upon it with scared eyes and an anguished heart, as if it were something mighty with power and substance in it. But from the day when I began to understand thy mother hood more clearly, and to love it more ardently, my soul has ever made merry over the idle efforts of the princes of darkness to cow man s spirits into timidity through their idle attempts at establishing a mendacious sovereignty of gloom. The Creator of the starry skies smiles sweetly at thee, Oh fairest of all women, and thou returnest His smile in triumphant peace, and I know that with God smiling at His sweet Mother the grim powers of evil are already defeated.

The Divine Motherhood by Dom Anscar Vonier, OSB - Chapter XIII

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.

The Divine Motherhood by Dom Anscar Vonier, OSB - Chapter XII

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.

The Divine Motherhood by Dom Anscar Vonier, OSB - Chapter XI

THE DIVINE MOTHERHOOD BY DOM ANSCAR VONIER, OSB

Chapter XI

HOPE AND WONDER IN THE DIVINE MOTHERHOOD.

It seems to be the general persuasion of the Church that the great mystery of the Incarnation took effect at the moment when the Angel left Mary, after she had said: "Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it done to me according to thy word!" The Angel departed from her then, not without having adored the God made flesh. It is true that Elizabeth, Mary’s cousin, when the latter visited her, still speaks of things that will come in the future: "Blessed art thou that hast believed, because those things shall be accomplished that were spoken to thee by the Lord" (Luke i. 45).

At the same time Elizabeth addresses Mary as one already blessed with the glories of motherhood: "Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the Fruit of thy womb." So there seems no room for doubt as to Mary’s blessed pregnancy, when she went to visit Elizabeth. It is necessary therefore to connect Elizabeth s prophecy with Gabriel s words as to the future greatness of the Child to be born, and to the throne of David, and to the eternal rule in the house of Jacob.

The great Conception was an accomplished fact; the divine Birth was Mary’s certain and joyful hope; but as to the future greatness of the Child much was still obscure to her. Elizabeth s spirit, moved by the Holy Ghost, had leaped forward into futurity, and had seen the accomplishment of the wonderful things predicted to Mary. Mary’s faith as to the first portion of the angelic message was to be to her an assurance of the gradual accomplishment of the second part, the promissory part, of the same heavenly oracle. It is no doubt in connection with Christ’s eternal mission and its gradual development that there was wonder and astonishment in Mary’s mind at times. The central fact of the divine Sonship of Jesus was clear to her as the noontide light; but the way in which Christ’s great domination would be accomplished was not yet revealed to her. She believed in it firmly as she believed in the mystery which was already contained in her chaste bosom; the way of it, however, had not been made clear to her as the mode of the Incarnation itself had been made clear. St. Gabriel tells Mary how she is to become the Mother of God; but no explanations are given as to the great mystery of Christ’s sovereignty.

So it happened that Mary did not always understand when it was a question of Christ’s external influence, open or secret; she wondered with Joseph as to the meaning of it all. "And he said to them: How is it that you sought me? Did you not know that I must be about my Father's business? And they understood not the word that he spoke unto them" (Luke ii. 49 50). It cannot be doubted that little has been revealed to us concerning the ways and the times of Christ’s triumph and sovereignty, and what we know about Christ’s Person is immensely greater than what we know about His actual influence on mankind. The Mother of God herself seems to have received lights in the same proportion; her knowledge as to Christ’s Person was immense; her knowledge of the ways in which He would become the Ruler in the House of Jacob for ever seems to have been much less explicit. Here one may quote Christ’s words to the group of disciples that went up with Him to Mount Olivet, on the Ascension day. "They therefore who were come together asked him, saying: Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel? But he said to them: It is not for you to know the times or moments which the Father hath put in his own power; but you shall receive the power of the Holy Ghost coming upon you, and you shall be witnesses unto me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and Samaria, and even to the uttermost part of the earth" (Acts i. 68). There is given to the disciples a most explicit knowledge of Christ, of the Holy Ghost, of the specifically spiritual means that will save mankind; the knowledge of God’s external providence in shaping human events so as to make them subservient to the triumph of Christ’s grace is not bestowed on them in the same measure. Our

Lady has not been an exception to this dispensation, though we may admit in her case a much larger measure of vision of the future. Nothing compels us to believe that Christ’s external career was manifested to her at once, at an early stage; it unfolded itself to her eyes gradually; she wondered and suffered; but she could never suffer scandal, and she soon came to comprehend the fact, hidden for so long from the disciples, that Christ ought "to have suffered these things, and so to enter into his glory" (Luke xxiv. 26).

In the glorious song of her maternity, the Magnificat, the Mother of God renders in her own words, with the exultation of a supremely pure human heart, the burden of the message delivered by Gabriel. The song contains no dark anticipations, any more than did Gabriel s announcement. Her own maternity, her people s joy in the new king whom Gabriel had announced, such is the double theme of that immortal outpouring of a maiden s spirit.

The Lord had done great things to herself, and all generations shall call her blessed; but the thought of her fathers, of Abraham, never leaves her; the seed of Abraham is in her own virginal bosom. One might almost call Mary’s song a tribal hymn, the hymn of Israel, if one did not bear in mind the Messianic role of Abraham s race, and its privilege to make of the Incarnate God a perfect participant of the human nature, by bestowing upon Him the blood that is common to all those that are descended from Adam.

When Mary sings of her people, of Israel the servant of God, she does so not as all the Jewish singers had done, as Deborah and Anna had done; her song is the very heart of the incomparable new mystery, the Incarnation ; the great things done in her by Him Who is mighty, and Whose name is holy, are the promises made to Abraham, passed on from generation to generation, and now come to their perfect fulfilment in the "Seed", in the Holy Thing that is in her bosom, and she, Mary, stands between the generations of the promise and the generations of the reality, and she, the heiress of the blessings bestowed upon the patriarchs, will be the blessed one for all ages to come. Never did maternity embrace a greater sphere, and never had it been so personally, so supremely triumphant. Mary understood fully then the Incarnation in what might be called its life aspect; she understood the nature of the new life that was in her, and how life would come from her; but it is impossible for us to tell whether at that moment she knew clearly the other aspect of the same mystery, the great and agonizing death. She knew then that all generations would call her blessed, that she had been made the Mother of the living; but the scene of Calvary, when her crucified Son gave her to redeemed man, in the person of John, as his Mother, was no doubt, at that time, a mystery hidden from her eyes. St. John begins the narrative of Christ’s passion with the words : "Jesus, therefore, knowing all things that should come upon him, went forth and said to them: Whom seek ye?" (John xviii. 4.) This clear foreknowledge of His own career seems to have been the exclusive property of Christ ; He had such knowledge from His very infancy. Mary’s initiation into the mystery of Christ’s death and passion was no doubt progressive, and often she must have wondered what would be the next terrible thing she had to learn.

The Divine Motherhood by Dom Anscar Vonier, OSB - Chapter X

THE DIVINE MOTHERHOOD BY DOM ANSCAR VONIER, OSB

Chapter X

THE HUMAN MESSENGER OF THE DIVINE MOTHERHOOD

In St. Gabriel’s great message there is a complete absence of any allusion to Christ’s human career with its terrible conclusion. The Angel speaks of the eternal, unchanging glories of the Child that will be born of Mary; of the sufferings and the death that were to be the condition of that glory there is not the remotest mention. It was the office of the heavenly messenger to announce to Mary the full, the eternal nature of her motherhood, and the temporary, earthly eclipse of that great glory was not a necessary part of his message; Mary’s maternity is everlasting, indestructible, above all things and before all things; the Angel that came from the serene regions of everlasting life had the announcement of an everlasting event, not of a transient act.

It was reserved to a human being, to an old man, to complete the great gospel of the divine motherhood, and Simeon, the just man, who has known human life and who is nearing the end of his own days, speaks the second portion of that evangel of love and tenderness, Mary’s maternity. Gabriel, the Archangel, and Simeon, the old man, pour out from their minds what the Spirit of God had put there : the great secret of a mother who is at the same time the Mother of God and the Mother of One Who is to die on the Cross like a criminal.

Gabriel’s message is quite exclusive; it contains nothing except the idea of Sonship, divine and human. The Child Whom Mary is to call Jesus is the Son of God and the Son of David, and the eternal kingship of the Child is the result of that double Sonship; the coming down of the Holy

Ghost upon Mary, and the overshadowing of her person through the power of the Most High are explanations of that double Sonship, and they reconcile virginity and motherhood. Gabriel then is the messenger of the divine motherhood in its strictest acceptation. The Angel departs after having spoken in human terms "the mystery which hath been hidden from all eternity in God who created all things" (Eph. ii. 9); the mystery of the divine motherhood. Christ’s work and Christ’s mission Mary is not told yet. Joseph, Mary’s spouse, is the first to hear something of the secondary mystery, the work of redemption to be carried out by Mary’s Son. The primary mystery, the divine Sonship itself, is Mary’s personal and exclusive secret. "Joseph, son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife, for that which is conceived in her, is of the Holy Ghost. And she shall bring forth a son : and thou shalt call his name Jesus. For he shall save his people from their sins" (Matt. i. 20 21). To Simeon further light is bestowed on the immense temporal mission of the Child, and he sings the great Nunc dimittis, the glorious hymn of the role of Mary’s Son here on earth, in time as opposed to eternity. "He (Simeon) also took him into his arms, and blessed God, and said : now thou dost dismiss thy servant, O Lord, according to thy word, in peace, because my eyes have seen thy salvation, which thou hast prepared before the face of all peoples: a light to the revelation of the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel" (Luke ii. 2832).

The Evangelist adds that the Child s "father and mother were wondering at those things which were spoken concerning him". This confirms what has just been said about the exclusive nature of the message delivered by Gabriel; Mary had heard nothing of Christ’s temporal mission; Joseph had received the indefinite announcement of the redemption of the Jewish people from their sins. But Simeon in his ecstasies breaks down all the barriers : the whole world is to come under the powerful influence of the Child; all peoples, and, Oh! new message of grace ! the Gentiles will live in the light of the countenance of that little One.

From the Child, Simeon turns to the Mother, and here he completes Gabriel’s message, in a most unexpected way. The holy man scans the features of the beautiful Child; there, in the light of God, he sees the lines of a terrible fate. Did he see the Cross? Most likely not; but he saw enough to make his noble heart go out to the sweetest of all creatures standing before him in the full joy of an incomparably pure maternity. "And Simeon blessed them, and said to Mary his Mother: Behold this Child is set for the fall, and for the resurrection of many in Israel, and for a sign which shall be contradicted. And thy own soul a sword shall pierce, that, out of many hearts, thoughts may be revealed (Luke ii. 34 35).

The divine motherhood is complete now. It implies greatest sorrow as well as greatest joy. No such message was given to Elizabeth, John s mother. Elizabeth s son was destined to be put to death by the lowest of human beings, the corrupt creatures of an infamous court. It was a human destiny, a noble ending to a Nazarene s austere life.

But the Mother of God had a maternity which was inseparable from God’s highest attribute, truth. She was to suffer from the opposition between truth and falsehood, between light and darkness: "But now you seek to kill me, a man who have spoken the truth to you, which I have heard of God. This Abraham did not" (John viii. 40). This is the way Christ, in the fulness of His Manhood, addresses the Jewish rulers. He thus gives us the clearest comment on the words of Simeon. To rule in the house of Jacob for ever was one of the essentials of the divine Sonship in Gabriel’s message to Mary. The bitter opposition of that house of Jacob was Mary’s first great trial of soul, when she followed her Son in His public life. There must be something evil in the heart of her own people, something horribly dark which she had not suspected. Out of many hearts thoughts were being constantly revealed which ought not to belong to the family of Abraham: "This Abraham did not."

The matchless power of truth that was in Jesus, provoked the hatred of a race of so-called religious men who had falsified in their own conscience and in the conscience of their fellow Jews the very idea of God. "It is my Father that glorifieth me, of whom you say that he is your God. And you have not known him, but I know him. And if I shall say that I know him not, I shall be like to you, a liar. But I do know him, and do keep his word. Abraham your father rejoiced that he might see my day : he saw it, and was glad" (John viii. 5456). These words, which are a sequel to the words just quoted, express better than anything the drastic conflict of ideals between Christ and the men who boasted of their descent from Abraham. Both in virtue of her own divine motherhood, she being the Mother of the One Who came full of grace and truth, and in virtue of her being the repository of all the promises made to Abraham and his seed, Mary’s heart was to be pierced with a sword, and her divine motherhood led to a sorrow such as no woman has ever known.

Mary’s motherhood never knew the physical pains that are the inseparable conditions of all maternity since the Fall. She was entirely free from the law which God put upon Eve: "In sorrow shalt thou bring forth children" (Gen. iii. 16). St.Thomas says, speaking of Christ’s birth, that in that birth there was no kind of pain, as there was no diminution of virginal integrity; but there was in that birth the greatest possible pleasure from this that the Man God was born into the world: Sed fuit ibi maxima iucunditas ex hoc quod homo Deus est natus in mundum (Summa 3, q. 35, a. 6). Nor does it appeal to the theological mind to insinuate that perhaps such pains of childbirth, if they had been allowed to take place, might have contributed towards the fulness of redemption ; for why should not Christ be born in pain as He was to die in pain? Would it not add to the perfection of the great sacrifice of Christ’s sorrows to have the sorrow of His birth added to the sorrows of His death ? Dolores parientis matris non pertinebant ad Christum, qui pro peccatis nostris satisfacere veniebat, says St. Thomas in the article of the Summa just quoted.

The pains of His Mother in childbirth had nothing to do with Christ’s mission Who came to make satisfaction for our sins; such pains would have been entirely outside Himself; they have nothing to do with His own sacrifice. But the sorrows predicted by Simeon were to be of a different nature; they depended completely on Christ’s sorrows, they were an echo of Christ’s sorrows, and Mary’s motherhood has been the most sorrowful of all motherhoods because she was truly the Mother of the One Whom the prophet calls the "Man of sorrows" (Is. liii. 3). Just as Catholic thought instinctively recoils from the notion that there might have been pain in the birth of Christ, so Catholic thought is full of the immense atoning value of Mary’s sorrows in conjunction with her Son s rejection by His own people. I said in a previous chapter that Mary’s maternity was more than an instrumental maternity; Mary shares to its full extent, with the Eternal Father, the parentage of the Incarnate Son of God; she has all the rights, privileges, honours of a parent, as well as all the love and tenderness of a parent; as the parent of the Son of God she was admitted into the secrets of the awful spiritual drama that led to the fall of many in Israel, that led to the Cross. Mary did not suffer in her physical parenthood; but in her moral parenthood the sufferings went as far as the parenthood itself. It was not the body, but the soul of that parent that was to make the supreme sacrifice: "And thy own soul a sword shall pierce".

Gabriel had spoken to Mary of her Child s right over the throne of David : "The Lord shall give unto him the throne of David his father." Mary, in her own Canticle, the Magnificat, had sung with such enthusiasm Israel s privilege through the mystery that was in her: "He hath received Israel his servant, being mindful of his mercy." But Mary was also destined to hear Israel cry out, in a wild outburst of hatred of Jesus: "His blood be upon us and upon our children!" There is in Mary’s sorrow something patriarchal, something that could only be felt by a soul in intimate contact with the immensities of God’s judgments over mankind.