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)