Mary

Mary (flourished beginning of the Christian era) was the mother of Jesus, venerated in the Christian church since the apostolic age and a favorite subject in Western art, music, and literature. Mary is known from biblical references, which are, however, too sparse to construct a coherent biography. The development of the doctrine of Mary can be traced through titles that have been ascribed to her in the history of the Christian communions—guarantee of the Incarnation, virgin mother, second Eve, mother of God, ever virgin, immaculate, and assumed into heaven. She has a number of feast days in various Christian traditions, several of which are holy days of obligation for Roman Catholics. Shrines to her that have become internationally famous as pilgrimage sites, where assorted miracles have supposedly occurred, include Our Lady of Fatima, Our Lady of Lourdes, Our Lady of Guadalupe, Our Lady of Loreto, and Our Lady of Medjugorje.

The New Testament account of her humility and obedience to the message of God have made her an exemplar for all ages of Christians. Out of the details supplied in the New Testament by the Gospels about the maid of Galilee, Christian piety and theology have constructed a picture of Mary that fulfills the prediction ascribed to her in the Magnificat (Luke 1:48): “Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed.”

Biblical references

The first mention of Mary is the story of the Annunciation, which reports that she was living in Nazareth and was betrothed to Joseph (Luke 1:26 ff.), and the last mention of her (Acts of the Apostles 1:14) includes her in the company of those who devoted themselves to prayer after the ascension of Jesus into heaven. She appears in the following incidents in the Gospels: the Annunciation; the Visitation with Elizabeth, her kinswoman and the mother of John the Baptist, the precursor of Jesus (Luke 1:39 ff.); the birth of Jesus and the presentation of him in the Temple (Luke 2:1 ff.); the coming of the Magi and the flight to Egypt (Matthew 2:1 ff.); the Passover visit to Jerusalem when Jesus was 12 years old (Luke 2:41 ff.); the marriage at Cana in Galilee, although her name is not used (John 2:1 ff.); the attempt to see Jesus while he was teaching (Mark 3:31 ff.); and the station at the cross, where, apparently widowed, she was entrusted to the disciple John (John 19:26 ff.).

Even if one takes these scenes as literal historical accounts, they do not add up to an integrated portrait of Mary. Only in the narratives of the Nativity and the Passion of Christ is her place a significant one: her acceptance of the privilege conferred on her in the Annunciation is the solemn prologue to the Christmas story, and, not only does she stand at the foot of the cross, but in the Easter story “the other Mary” who came to the tomb of Jesus (Matthew 28:1) is not she—according to traditional interpretations, because, having kept in her heart what he was to be, she knew that the body of Jesus would not be there. On the other hand, the three incidents that belong to the life of Jesus contain elements of a pronouncedly human character, perhaps even the suggestion that she did not fully understand Jesus’ true mission.

Since the early days of Christianity, however, the themes that these scenes symbolize have been the basis for thought and contemplation about Mary. Christian communions and theologians differ from one another in their interpretations of Mary principally on the basis of where they set the terminal point for such development and expansion—that is, where they maintain that the legitimate development of doctrine may be said to have ended. To a considerable degree, therefore, a historical survey of that development is also an introduction to the state of contemporary Christian thought about Mary.

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Dogmatic titles

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Probably the earliest allusion to Mary in Christian literature is the phrase “born of woman” in Galatians 4:4, which was written before any of the Gospels. As parallels such as Job 14:1 and Matthew 11:11 suggest, the phrase is a Hebraic way of speaking about the essential humanity of a person. When applied to Jesus, therefore, “born of woman” was intended to assert that he was a real man, in opposition to the attempt—later seen in various systems of gnosticism, a 2nd-century dualistic religion—to deny that he had had a completely human life; he was said by some gnostics to have passed through the body of Mary as light passes through a window. It seems unwarranted to read anything further into the phrase, as though “born of woman” necessarily implied “but not of a man and a woman.” Thus, the phrase made Mary the sign or the guarantee that the Son of God had truly been born as a man. For the ancient world, one human parent was necessary to assure that a person was genuinely human, and from the beginning the human mother of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, has been the one to provide this assurance. Some scholars have even maintained that the primary connotation of the phrase “born of the Virgin Mary” in the Apostles’ Creed was this same insistence by the church upon the authentic manhood of Jesus. That insistence has been the irreducible minimum in all the theories about Mary that have appeared in Christian history. Her role as mother takes precedence over any of the other roles assigned to her in devotion and in dogma. Those who deny the virgin birth usually claim to do so in the interest of true humanity, seeing a contradiction between the idea of Jesus as the human son of a human mother and the idea that he did not have a human father. Those who defend the virgin birth usually maintain that the true humanity was made possible when the Virgin Mary accepted her commission as the guarantee of the Incarnation (Luke 1:38): “Let it be with me according to your word.” This is the original source of the title co-redemptrix—indicating some participation with Christ in the redemption of humankind—assigned to Mary in Roman Catholic theology, though the term has come to connote a more active role by her; the precise nature of this participation is still a matter of controversy among Catholic theologians.

By far the most voluminous narratives about Mary in the New Testament are the infancy stories in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. In their present form, both accounts make a point of asserting that Jesus was conceived in the womb of Mary without any human agency (Matthew 1:18 ff.; Luke 1:34 ff.), yet the many textual variants in Matthew 1:16, some of them with the words “Joseph begat Jesus,” have caused some scholars to question whether such an assertion was part of Matthew’s original account. The passages in Matthew and in Luke seem to be the only references to the matter in the New Testament. The Apostle Paul nowhere mentions it; The Gospel According to Mark begins with Jesus as an adult, and The Gospel According to John, which begins with his prehistorical existence, does not allude to the virgin birth, unless a variant of John 1:13 that reads “…who was born” rather than “…who were born” is followed. Matthew does not attach any theological significance to the miracle, but it is possible that the words of the angel in Luke 1:35 are intended to connect the holiness of the child with the virginity of the mother. In postbiblical Christian literature the most voluminous discussions of Mary have been those dealing with her virginity. On the basis of the New Testament, it was the unanimous teaching of all the orthodox Fathers of the Church that Mary conceived Jesus with her virginity unimpaired, a teaching enshrined in the early Christian creeds and concurred in by the 16th-century reformers as well as by most Protestant churches and believers since the Reformation.

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One of the interpretations of the person and work of Jesus Christ in the New Testament is the formulation of parallels between him and Adam: “for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ” (1 Corinthians 15:22). Decisive in the parallel is the contrast between the disobedience of Adam, by which sin came into the world, and the obedience of Christ, by which salvation from sin was accomplished (Romans 5:12–19). Whether or not the story of the Annunciation in the first chapter of the Gospel According to Luke is intended to suggest a similar parallel between Eve and Mary, this did soon become a theme of Christian reflection. Writing at about the end of the 2nd century, the Church Father St. Irenaeus elaborated the parallel between Eve, who, as a virgin, had disobeyed the word of God, and Mary, who, also as a virgin, had obeyed it:

for Adam had necessarily to be restored in Christ, that mortality be absorbed in immortality, and Eve in Mary, that a virgin, become the advocate of a virgin, should undo and destroy virginal disobedience by virginal obedience.

Irenaeus did not argue the point; he seems rather to have taken the parallel for granted, and this may indicate that it was not his own invention but belonged to tradition, for which he had a high respect. In any case, the parallel did ascribe to Mary and to her obedience an active share in the redemption of the human race: all had died in Adam, but Eve had participated in the sin that brought this on; all were saved in Christ, but Mary had participated in the life that made this possible.

The first widespread theological controversy over Mary had to do with the propriety of applying to her the title of Theotokos, meaning “God-bearer” or “mother of God.” The title seems to have arisen in devotional usage, probably in Alexandria, sometime in the 3rd or 4th century; it was a logical deduction from the doctrine of the full deity of Christ, which was established as a dogma during the 4th century, and those who defended that dogma were also the ones who drew the inference. Perhaps, as the 19th-century English theologian John Henry Cardinal Newman supposed, the determination of the Council of Nicaea in 325 that Christ was not merely the highest of creatures but belonged on the divine side of the line between Creator and creature was even responsible for the rapid growth of devotion and speculation attached to Mary as the highest of creatures. By the end of the 4th century, the Theotokos had successfully established itself in various sections of the church. Because it seemed to him that the supporters of the title were blurring the distinction between the divine and the human in Christ, Nestorius, the patriarch of Constantinople, objected to its use, preferring the less explicit title Christotokos, meaning “Christ-bearer” or “mother of Christ.” Along with other aspects of his teaching, Nestorius’s objections were condemned at the Council of Ephesus in 431.

Various corollaries could be deduced from the New Testament’s assertion of Mary’s virginity in the conception of Jesus, including the doctrine that she had remained a virgin in the course of his birth (the virginitas in partu) and the doctrine that she had remained a virgin after his birth and until the end of her life (the virginitas post partum). The Apostles’ Creed appears to teach at least the virginitas in partu when it says “born of the Virgin Mary.” Although this teaching about how Mary gave birth to Jesus occurs for the first time in the 2nd-century apocryphal, or noncanonical, Protevangelium of James, its origins and evolution are not easy to trace, and Roman Catholic and Protestant historians have come to contradictory conclusions. The growth of the ascetic ideal in the church helped to give support to this view of Mary as the model of the ever virgin. The doctrine is neither asserted nor denied but is simply ignored in the New Testament, and Old Testament passages adduced in support of it by Church Fathers (such as Ezekiel 44:2 and Song of Solomon 4:12) were probably convincing only to those who had already accepted the doctrine.

As the doctrine of the perpetual virginity of Mary implied an integral purity of body and soul, so, in the opinion of many theologians, she was also free of other sins. Attempting to prove the universality of sin against Pelagius (whose teaching was condemned as heretical by the Christian church but who did maintain the sinlessness of Mary), St. Augustine, the great theologian and bishop from northern Africa, spoke for the Western church when he wrote:

We must except the holy Virgin Mary. Out of respect for the Lord, I do not intend to raise a single question on the subject of sin. After all, how do we know what abundance of grace was granted to her who had the merit to conceive and bring forth him who was unquestionably without sin?

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It was, however, the distinction between original sin (i.e., the sin that all people are born with) and actual sin (i.e., the sins that people commit during their lives), firmly established in Western theology by the same Augustine, that eventually compelled a further clarification of what the sinlessness of Mary meant. Certain Eastern theologians in the 4th and 5th centuries were willing to attribute actual sins to her, but most theologians in both East and West came to accept the view that she never did anything sinful, a view that found expression even among the 16th-century reformers. But was she free from original sin as well? And if so, how? St. Thomas Aquinas, the most important medieval theologian in the West, took a representative position when he taught that her conception was tarnished, as was that of all humans, but that God suppressed and ultimately extinguished original sin in her, apparently before she was born. This position, however, was opposed by the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, systematized by Duns Scotus, a 13th-century British Scholastic theologian, and finally defined as Roman Catholic dogma by Pope Pius IX in 1854. According to this dogma, Mary not only was pure in her life and in her birth but

at the first instant of her conception was preserved immaculate from all stain of original sin, by the singular grace and privilege granted her by Almighty God, through the merits of Christ Jesus, Saviour of mankind.

When the Immaculate Conception was promulgated, petitions began coming to the Vatican for a definition regarding the Assumption of the Virgin into heaven, as this was believed by Roman Catholics and celebrated in the Feast of the Assumption. During the century that followed, more than eight million persons signed such petitions, yet Rome hesitated because the doctrine was difficult to define on the basis of Scripture and early witnesses to the Christian tradition. No account of the place and circumstances of Mary’s death was universally accepted in the church (although paintings depicting her “dormition,” or “falling asleep,” in the ancient Ionian city of Ephesus were quite common); no burial place was acknowledged (although there was a grave in Jerusalem that was said to be hers); and no miracles were credited to relics of her body (although the physical remains of far lesser saints had performed many). Such arguments from silence, however, did not suffice to establish a dogma, and, on the positive side, even the earliest doctrinal and liturgical testimony in support of the idea had appeared relatively late in history. Finally, in 1950 Pope Pius XII made the dogma official, declaring that “the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, when the course of her earthly life was run, was assumed in body and soul to heavenly glory.”