The history of the Church teaches
us something fundamental about Mariology: Mary’s
relation to Christ in virtue of the mystery of the
Incarnation links them inseparably. There has never
been, in fact, an important heresy concerning the heart
of the mystery of Christ, the Incarnation, which has not
also involved some grave error in regard to His Mother
Mary.
Many councils, ecumenical and local, have dealt with
articles of faith concerning the Incarnation and
Redemption. Two, however, are rightly regarded as having
exceptional importance for 1) a correct theological and
practical understanding of that central mystery of
faith, Jesus, and 2) for a correct answer to the
question: who is the Son of Man? These two are the
Councils of Ephesus in 431, and Chalcedon in 451, both
cities found in present-day Turkey, but then part of the
Eastern Roman Empire, at that time mostly Catholic.
Unfortunately, the statistical fact just cited does not
mean that among all the Eastern Catholics of the 5th
century there was doctrinal unity in replying to this
very question. This lack of unity would shortly give
rise to schism and heresy, and the eventual reduction of
the Church in that part of the world to the status of a
small minority in a sea of Islamism.
Doctrinal disunity and the quarrels consequent upon this
were not, in the 5th century, novel events in the
Christian world. These had arisen almost from the birth
of the Church, and in one way or another concerned Jesus
and Mary jointly. Those who erred concerning the
Messianic character of the Son of Mary—some considering
Jesus a mere man (the so-called Ebionites) and some
considering Jesus a phantom man (the so-called Docetists
or Phantomists)— also erred concerning the person and
role of Mary: the first group professing Her a woman no
different from any other; the latter group regarding Her
as a kind of virginal goddess, without any real maternal
activity in the proper sense. In the 4th century, the
crisis over the theories of Arius concerning the divine
Person of Jesus, and later over those of Macedonius
concerning the divinity of the Holy Spirit, were
resolved respectively in the first Council of Nicea
(325) and the first Council of Constantinople (381),
with the condemnation of these two heretics and the
imposition of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed on the
entire Church, still recited every Sunday during Holy
Mass.
While the great heresies of the 4th century set the
scene for those of the 5th, they did not deal directly
with the heart of the Incarnation, viz., the hypostatic
union, the very basis of our redemption. But when heresy
did touch that heart directly, it necessarily also
touched Mary. In a sense there can be no error
concerning the hypostatic union (and its consequences
for soteriology) except through an error concerning
Mary. In modern times, Card. Newman (The Glories of Mary
for the Sake of Her Son, in Discourses for Mixed
Congregations) expressed this most clearly: if one
wishes to be orthodox in Christology and soteriology,
one must be Marian. Contrariwise, if one wishes to
demean Christ, one must first minimize His Virgin
Mother. The Council of Ephesus was called in order to
deal with the problems posed by the preaching of the
Patriarch of Constantinople concerning Our Lady: was She
only the Mother of Christ, as the Patriarch Nestorius
insisted, or truly Mother of God, as tradition held?
Nestorius did not deny, as had Arius, the divinity of
the Son of God. He merely maintained that no creature
could be parent of a divine Person. Whom did the Virgin
beget? Nestorius replied: another man, another human
person, who subsequently formed as it were a single
personality in union with a divine person called the Son
of God.
The error of Nestorius was twofold: he identified
begetting with reproduction of a nature. Therefore,
first, since Mary could only reproduce a human nature,
She could only be the mother of a human person.
Therefore (and this is the second error), in Christ
there were in fact not one, but two persons, so
intimately united or allied as to seem one and the same
person in action. To defend his view, however, he had to
insist that Mary was not the Theotókos: God-bearer, Dei
Genetrix: Begetter of God, or Mother of my Lord
(Yahweh), as St. Elizabeth greeted Her (cf. Lk 1: 43),
but merely the Christotókos: Christ-bearer.
The position of Nestorius was very popular in his day,
as it still is among many influenced by what is known as
Pelagianism or naturalism. This is the heretical
tendency to confuse grace and free will, to make
holiness merely a matter of one’s natural initiative to
resist sin and practice virtue, and so define holiness
simply in terms of psychological maturity. In the theory
of Nestorius, the most that the Christ can do for us is
to give us good example, to encourage us, etc., to do
what is already in our power. The Nestorians would deny
that we depend on this Man, Who is literally God, to
find pardon and, still more, those supernatural aids or
graces without which we cannot find eternal salvation
and blessedness— in a word, a solution to the problems
represented by guilt and death. The truth, in
contemporary terms, is that Christ can raise us from
death, both in soul (the forgiveness of sin) and in body
(reunification of body and soul). Christ, the Son of
Mary—as Son identical with the divine Person Who is the
pre-existent Son of God—can work a miracle. The
Nestorian Christ, on the other hand, can only counsel.
This is the difference between addressing Mary as Mother
of God and not merely Mother of Christ: that a divine
Person, without ceasing to be divine, became what He was
not, namely a man, by being born of the Virgin Mary, is
the heart of the supernatural; whereas the mere Mother
of Christ of Nestorius was no different from any other
woman who bore a model hero. The mystery of the
Divine-Virginal Maternity both reveals and guarantees
the supernatural character of grace, and is the reason
we invoke Mary as Mother of grace, viz., of the
Incarnate Son of God. It is also a guarantee of the true
nature of motherhood, which is not primarily a
reproducer of nature, but a begetter of a person. In the
case of ordinary mothers, that person did not preexist
his procreation. In the case of Jesus, the Person
begotten pre-existed the begetting, but in no wise was
it impossible for Him to be begotten a second time of a
virgin Mother, for in this case the Father is the same
as in His (the Son’s) eternal generation.
We may ponder here the observation of St. Bonaventure:
whether we consider the hypostatic union or the virginal
maternity, we are face to face with a mysterious fact
totally beyond the powers of nature to effect and the
power of reason even to apprehend without the light of
faith. We behold here a conception-birth leaving the
mother’s virginity integral; we ponder the
conception-birth of a child who pre-existed his
historical beginning. This is what is meant in essence
by supernatural.
Theotókos is the sign or index of supernaturality, the
guarantee of hope in the sanctification of our souls,
the resurrection of our bodies and our glorious entrance
into the everlasting paradise of the Holy Trinity. The
Nestorian concept of the hypostatic union, as a kind of
alliance between two persons, left Christ simply another
natural phenomenon; and the condemnation of this
grievous error was a resounding reaffirmation of the
only basis of our hope in everlasting bliss. No wonder
generations of faithful have saluted Mary in the Salve
Regina as “our life, our sweetness and our hope.”
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