Wednesday, February 2, 2022

Aidan Nichols on Mary being "Quasi-Flawless" in the Theology of the Earliest Christians

  

The Impression Left by Mary on the Primitive Church

The impression left by Mary on the nascent church was a quasi-flawless one. “Quasi”: that word too needs marking. The Gospels describe moments of tension or incomprehension between Mary and her Son—at the loss of Jesus in the temple in Luke, at the wedding feast at Cana in John, during the Galilaean phase of the public ministry in Mark—and these apparent “distancings,” as the twentieth-century Swiss dogmatician Hans Urs von Balthasar termed them (much typical Protestant Bible interpretation would use the rougher words “rebuff” or even “rejection”) raise obvious questions about the quality of Mary’s discipleship. In particular, exegetes in the Greek patristic tradition found it difficult to shake off Origen of Alexandria’s interpretation of the meaning of the “sword” which, in Simeon’s prophecy in Luke, was to pass through Mary’s soul on account of her child. Was the sword thrust, wondered Origen, a moral lapse on Mary’s part, a lapse highly pertinent to faith? (Origen, Homilies on Luke, XVII)

 

A number of early Greek writers, up to Cyril at least, take seriously the notion that Mary was guilty of a morally significant collapse of confidence in her Son, the climax of which collapse came on Calvary. (Basil the Great, Letters, 260, 9; Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on the Gospel of John, XII [on John 19:25]) This motif of Mary’s moral weakness led the Alexandrian school, of which, on exegetical issues, Origen was the master, to take a more skeptical line on Mary’s moral perfection than did some Antiochenes (among others). Thus the principal historian of attitudes to the immaculate conception in the Eastern tradition, the French Assumptionist Martin Jugie, considered that on this point St. Cyril, the great champion of Mary’s divine motherhood, was further away from the later defined faith of the church than was Nestorius. (For Jugie’s work, see Vitalien Laurent, “L’oeuvre scientifique du R. P. Martin Jugie,” Revue des études byzantines XI (1953): 7–18.) (Aidan Nichols, There is No Rose: The Mariology of the Catholic Church [Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 2015], 45-46)

 

Blog Archive