In his commentary on the Song of Solomon, Alan of Lille (d. 1202/1203) wrote:
Tell me, you whom my soul loves. (Song 1:6)
This refers to the time of the passion, and [these] are the words of
the Virgin to Christ. When at the time of the Passion the disciples defected
from faith, the Virgin was not retreating from the stand of faith. She was
wondering then among whom she might be at peace through faith, whom she might
incorporate to herself, spiritually. (In Praise of the Virgin Mary, The
God-Bearer: Alan of Lille’s Concise Elucidation of the Song of Songs [trans.
Ann W. Astell; Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2025], 16)
The translator,
Ann W. Astell, provides us the following note:
Alan here expresses the commonly held belief in sola virgine—namely
the belief that the Virgin alone upheld the faith of the church in Christ’s
divinity at the time of his crucifixion and death. As the sole believer, she
effectively constituted the church on earth and sought others to join her in
the faith, incorporating them as members of the church and accepting them as
her children in Christ. Incorporation into the church as Christ’s Body includes
the idea of being in communion with Christ and Christians in faith and
sacrament. Because Mary gave a human body and a human nature to the Son at his
Incarnation, incorporation into the church as Christ’s Mystical Body is also an
incorporation into Mary, the Mother of God and Mother of the church.
Aswell, in this note,
also provides references to the works of Joseph Clifford Fenton and Jesse D.
Mann that further discuss the in sola virgine teaching.
Commenting on the
Mariology of Juan de Torquemada (Turrecremata) (1388-1468), Joseph Clifford
Fenton noted that:
The true Church of Jesus Christ recognizes in Mary's faith the
exemplar and the cause of that belief in God or acceptance of His message which
is to be found among the children of men. Mary's faith is the exemplar for the
virtue and the act of faith among men precisely because it is and it always
will have been the most perfect and laudable in the history of God's
supernatural kingdom. Other virtues, as, for instance, that of charity, existed
in the human nature of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and are to be found in Him in a
perfection utterly greater than that in which they exist in any other person.
Thus these virtues find their highest expression in Our Lord. The model or the
supreme embodiment of these virtues is to be found in Him rather than in any
other.
Such, however, is not the case with regard to the virtue of divine
faith. Because of the fact that He enjoyed the beatific vision, faith could
never exist in Our Lord's human nature. We must look elsewhere, then, for the
most perfect embodiment of this particular virtue. And, since the spiritual
perfection of Mary is ineffably higher than that of any other creature, the
highest perfection or intensity of divine faith is to be found in the earthly
life of Our Lady. Her faith is thus the exemplar or the model for the faith of
all men.
It must be understood also that Our Lady's faith is not only the
exemplar, but also in a very definite way the instrumental cause of faith and
of all the other supernatural benefits which have come to the human race
through the passion and death of Christ. It is a commonplace of Catholic
Mariology that it was precisely by her consent to the Incarnation that Mary
obtained the position in which she could function as the Mediatrix of all
graces, the position in which she could be said to be the instrumental cause of
the granting of the grace of faith and of all other graces to the children of
men. Yet, alluding precisely to this act of acceptance, St. Elizabeth
designated Our Lady as "beata quae credidisti."
Indeed, as St. Luke describes it in his Gospel, Our Lady's assent to
the Incarnation was an act of divine faith commanded, of course, by charity.
"Blessed art thou that hast believed," were the words St. Elizabeth
spoke to her. It is likewise important to note that the priest Zachary was
stricken with a temporary dumbness because he did not believe when the angel of
God brought a message to him. In both instances faith or belief was the
response demanded by God Himself from the persons to whom the angel carried His
communication.
Thus it was through an act of faith that Mary became the mother of
Christ, the Incarnate Word. By the selfsame act, she became the mother of
Christ in His mystical body, the Catholic Church. The faith of Mary was, in the
designs of God's providence, instrumental in bringing into existence the
society which is correctly designated as the congregatio fidelium. By
reason of this causality Mary is correctly and properly designated as the cause
and the basis of the Church's belief, as the defender of the faith. It is for
this cause that the Church hails her as the one "who alone has overcome
all heresies throughout the entire world."
. . .
One of the most interesting and enlightening sections of theological
teaching about Our Lady's faith and about her influence upon the faith of the
Catholic Church is to be found in the writings of the classical
ecclesiologists, from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. The great
Dominican Cardinal John de Turrecremata, teaching about the permanence or
indefectibility of the Church, held that during the period that intervened
between Our Lord's death and His resurrection the Blessed Virgin was the only creature
in whom the true faith of Christ was to be found in its entirety and purity.
. . .
. . . according to Turrecremata, there was a time during which the
actual Church militant consisted solely in the Blessed Virgin herself. He
mentions with manifest approval the dictum of Durandus, according to whom the
last candle in the tenebrae ceremonies "signifies the faith of
Christ, which remained in the Virgin alone, through whom afterwards all of the
faithful have been instructed and enlightened." (Joseph Clifford Fenton, “The Function of Our Lady’s Faith in the
Catholic Church,” Marian
Studies 1, no. 13 [1950]: 138-39, 140, 141)
In her essay,
Jesse D. Mann wrote the following:
Few ideas are as closely associated with the fourteenth-century
English Franciscan William of Ockham (d. 1347) as the notion that “the faith
did not remain solely with the Virgin” (Non in sola Virgine tunc remansit
fides) or that the true church could subsist in a single person. This view,
sometimes referred to as “remnant ecclesiology” and occasionally seen as a
consequence of Ockham’s nominalism, occurs repeatedly in the friar’s writings,
most notably in his influential Dialogus. At least two times in that
lengthy work, Ockham linked his “remnant ecclesiology” to a specific instance
of popular Marian devotion. For example, in Dialogus 1.2.25, he wrote,
“They say that if only one should dissent, then such a truth should not be
accepted, because the entire faith of the church can exist in one individual,
just as the entire faith of the church remained solely in the Blessed Virgin at
the time of Christ’s passion.” And, again in Dialogus 1.5.23, “some say
that the faith of the church could remain even in the laity; indeed certain
ones say that it could even be preserved in women, just as it was preserved
solely in Christ’s mother at the time of his passion.”
Of course, as these examples themselves suggest, the idea that Mary
alone preserved the faith during Christ’s Passion clearly antedated Ockham and
the fourteenth century. According to Karl Binder, this tradition grew out of
the parallel between Mary and Eve drawn by patristic authors such as Justin
Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Ambrose, and Augustine. For just as Eve was
instrumental in humanity’s fall, Mary, the model of faith, was instrumental in
humanity’s redemption; and just as Eve was the mother of all, Mary was the
mother of all Christians. Relatedly, many of these same patristic authors also
drew a parallel between Mary and the church. Ambrose, for example, not only saw
in Mary a “type” of the church (typus ecclesiae), but also identified
her faith with that of the church itself. Similar notions can be found in
Augustine and in the Greek fathers, as well.
. . .
Odo of Ourscamp (d. 1171) seems to have been the first to combine
these elements expressly. In his Quaestiones (c. 1160), Odo wrote, “shaken by
the passion, Mary Magdelene, along with the disciples, lost her faith; [and] we
believe that the Lord’s mother alone was immune from their incredulity.”
Subsequent authors such as Phillip the Chancellor (d. 1236) and Caesarius of
Heisterbach (d. 1240) stated the “in the virgin alone” (in sola Virgine)
theme even more explicitly and also added several new elements to the
tradition. To wit, in his Summa de bono, Phillip wrote: “thus they say
that the church existed solely in the Virgin whose faith endured during the
Passion; and it is for this reason, they say, that she is commemorated on
Saturday.” Likewise, Caesarius noted in his Exposiuncula cum addimento
that “Saturday is rightly specially dedicated to her and designated for her
veneration [for] the immoveable pillar of the catholic faith remained in her
alone....... In that time [i.e., during Christ’s Passion] the Virgin alone
stayed firm in the faith, indeed she alone was then the church.”
. . .
It is not difficult to see how the problems relating to the in sola
Virgine theme anticipated the polemics between Protestants and Catholics in the
sixteenth century. Schüssler, for example, has noted that Segovia’s refutation
of “remnant” ecclesiology anticipated many Roman Catholic arguments against
Luther and others, and that, on this point at least, Baselean conciliarism was
fundamentally “more Catholic” than has often been acknowledged. Not only was
this the case with the larger theological issues, but even in the specific
instance of the in sola Virgine theme, Segovia’s position anticipated many
arguments advanced by sixteenth-century Catholic polemicists such as Melchior
Cano (d. 1560), Robert Bellarmine (d. 1621), and especially Dominic Bañez (d.
1604), who criticized the in sola Virgine theme as prejudicial to the
hierarchical church. Even if, by the sixteenth century, the conciliar movement
had lost momentum, opposition along conciliarist lines to the idea that the
entire church or faith could survive in a single individual—even the mother of
God—remained. (Jesse D. Mann, “A Conciliarist’s Opposition to a Popular Marian
Devotion,” in The Church, the Councils, and Reform: The Legacy of the
Fifteenth Century, ed Gerald Christianson, Thomas M. Izbicki, and
Christopher Bellitto [Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America
Press, 2008], 212-13, 214, 224-25)
