Mary Through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture

By Jaroslav Pelikan

Yale University Press

267 pp.; $25

Among the myriad demands for liberty and freedom that engulf the contemporary world, it would be difficult to think of one that has fewer champions than the "liberty to obey." In a sweeping attack on the very notion of legitimate authority, our secular culture has impatiently repudiated the notion of obedience. Obedience stands condemned as a last vestige of the servitude that has enchained humanity, most notably women. The widespread distaste is forcefully captured in the word "liberation." Modern celebrations of liberation assume that any freedom worthy of the name must be infinite: In the name of what, for example, may one legitimately claim to limit freedom of speech or freedom of choice?

Christians should know better. For across denominations, Christian theology has consistently held that infinite freedom belongs only to God. As the great Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar put it: "No finite freedom can be freer from restrictions than when giving its consent to infinite freedom."

For Christians, the Virgin Mary, to whom Jaroslav Pelikan, a Lutheran and a premier church historian, devotes this learned and engaging book, ranks, if we except Jesus, as the leading human exemplar of faithful obedience. She responded to the Annunciation: "Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word" (Luke 1:38). The Gospels, apart from the Annunciation and Nativity narratives in Matthew and Luke, offer little information about Mary. She is glimpsed in John's gospel at the wedding at Cana and at the foot of the cross on Calvary, where Jesus willed her to the "disciple he had loved," saying, "Woman, behold, your son!" and, to the disciple, "Behold, your mother!" For the rest, she appears here and there, mostly in the company of other women, many also named Mary. In John's account of the wedding in Cana, she tells her son, "They have no wine," to which he responds, "O, woman, what have you to do with me?" She nonetheless tells the servants, "Do whatever he tells you." Thereafter she virtually disappears from the gospel texts and, to all intents and purposes, speaks not at all.

The paucity of explicit biblical references to Mary contrasts sharply with the vast, rich adulation that surrounds her whom Catholics call Our Blessed Mother. As Pelikan reminds us, throughout history, no prayer, with the exception of the Lord's Prayer, has been more frequently repeated than the Ave Maria. No woman's name, throughout the last 2,000 years, has been more frequently invoked, and probably none more frequently conferred upon girls. Assuredly, no woman has more frequently inspired the representations of artists, and it is likely that no woman has more frequently figured in poetry and prose or inspired more musical compositions. Above all, no woman has so stirred the popular imagination, and the enduring intensity of popular loyalty to her has always loomed large in the Catholic church's celebration of her. In the words of the title of Marina Warner's book, she truly ranks "alone of all her sex."

Pelikan proposes to explain the gap between the Gospels and Mariology, and his book explores the main names or qualities attributed to her: "full of grace," "the second Eve," "the Mother of God," "the Blessed Virgin," "the Mater Dolorosa" (the sorrowful Mother) and more. A thematic organization permits Pelikan to move back and forth across the centuries, interweaving discussions of the art and literature that endow Mary's formal attributes with, as it were, flesh and blood and provide reflections of the luminosity devotion to her has evoked. Readers should be delighted by the recognition and fresh understanding that Pelikan calls forth. Pelikan has this ability in abundance and, with it, the ability to veil explosive debates and troubling questions within a series of appreciative and graceful vignettes.

Significantly, Pelikan has chosen to write of Mary's place in the history of culture rather than of her place in the history of the Christian faith per se. The two nonetheless remain difficult to disentangle, not least because devotion to Mary has flourished in a Christian culture, but also because Pelikan's formidable scholarly reputation rests primarily upon his great work in the history of theology and Christian doctrine.3 As a result, theological and ecclesiological questions inform and shadow this book even though they do not overtly govern its organization.

The subordination of theological and ecclesiological concerns to the thematic paradigms--the emblematic representations of Mary--may occasionally confuse readers who seek a chronological history of Mary's place in Christianity. And the confusion risks being all the greater for Protestants, who do not attribute the same significance to her as Catholics do. Those for whom "Holy Mary, Mother of God . . . " rankles, who do not light candles or say novenas to implore her intercession, and who worship in churches that do not feature her representation may well remain hostile to a devotion that, to them, smacks of idolatry. For while Protestants believe in the virgin birth of Jesus, they do not believe in Mary's immaculate conception, much less in her bodily assumption into heaven, which Catholics accept as dogmas that follow from and confirm the Virgin Birth.

The Virgin Birth remains the principal link between the sparse evidence of the Gospels and full-blown Mariology. Both the Gospels of Matthew and Luke recount the virgin birth of Jesus, although Mark and John are silent, as is Paul. The early church, Pelikan notes, commonly accepted Mary's special place as "Christokos, 'the one who gave birth to Christ,'" but not until the Council of Ephesus in 431 did it proclaim her the Theotokos, the one who gave birth to God.

Pelikan's discussion of the proclamation of Mary's status as Theotokos exemplifies his method of analysis and, more important, one of his main arguments in the book as a whole. He insists upon the magnitude of the transformation that elevated Mary from her initial status as the second Eve to the Theotokos--"probably the greatest quantum leap in the whole history of the language and thought about Mary."

There is no sure evidence that "Mother of God" was used before the fourth century, and it was first used by Alexander of Alexandria, patron of Athanasius, whose doctrine triumphed over that of Arius at the Council of Nicea in 325 in the dispute over the relation between the human and the divine in the person of Jesus. The proclamation of Mary as Theotokos registered the Athanasian victory and solidified Christian orthodoxy. And Pelikan quotes John of Damascus's subsequent summary of the orthodox position:

Hence it is with justice and truth that we call Holy Mary Theotokos. For this name embraces the whole mystery of divine dispensation. . . . For if she who bore him is the Theotokos, assuredly he who was born of her is God and likewise also man. . . . The name [Theotokos] in truth signifies the one subsistence and the two natures and the two modes of generation of our Lord Jesus Christ.

At Ephesus and thereafter, notably in the papal pronunciations of Mary's immaculate conception and assumption, her glorification, as feminist theologians delight in charging, wonderfully served the purposes of the Catholic hierarchy. But the pronouncement at Ephesus testified to the influence of other forces as well. Ephesus, Pelikan reminds us, harbored a vibrant devotion to the Greek goddess Diana or Artemis, whose devotees had, four centuries earlier, according to the Acts of the Apostles, rioted against Saint Paul and the other apostles. And as subsequent developments in the medieval church confirm, popular devotion could foreshadow and even shape official positions. The title Mother of God seems to have enjoyed considerable popular currency before the bishops consecrated it at Ephesus. Indeed, their having chosen Ephesus as the appropriate site for its consecration may well reflect their willingness to follow where popular sentiment led and, if possible, divert it into the channels that at once buttressed orthodoxy within and converted pagans from without. Pelikan nonetheless avers that history "does not in any direct way corroborate" the identification of the proclamation of the Theotokos with the home of the cult of Diana, nor does history support "the facile modern theories about the 'mother goddesses' of Graeco-Roman paganism and their supposed significance for the development of Christian Mariology."

Popular devotion to Mary as Mother of God did not require and probably did not entail great theological sophistication, but proper understanding of the theological meaning of Theotokos cuts to the center of prevailing debates about the nature of Jesus as human and divine. During the previous century, Athanasius had pioneered in the development of the "communication of the properties"--the communicatio idiomatum--namely,

the principle that, as a consequence of the incarnation and of the union of the divine and the human nature in the one person of Jesus Christ, it was legitimate to predicate human properties of the Logos and divine properties of the man Jesus, for example, to speak of 'the blood of the Son of God' or "the blood of the Lord" or even . . . "the blood of God."

Athanasius rejected the propriety of ascribing change and exaltation to Jesus, the divine Logos, "who could not be changed and did not need to be exalted" and insisted that "his undergoing death in the flesh has not happened against the glory of his Godhead, but 'to the glory of God the Father.'"

Notwithstanding Athanasius's precocious formulation, not to mention the authority of the Nicene Creed, the debates persisted well into the fifth century and beyond. Pelikan, however, focuses upon their significance for the subsequent debates over the Theotokos, and he argues that in speaking of the Logos as "taking flesh of a Virgin, " Athanasius was following popular culture. Athanasius departed from popular culture in laying a theological rationale for Mary's status as Theotokos, but, for crucial theological reasons, he held fast to the core of the popular conviction.

The full import of his position on Mary emerged with stark clarity from his debates with the Arians and the neo-Docetists, whom he charged with outdoing the Arians in impiety and heresy and against whom he argued that "if the Logos is of one essence with the body, that renders superfluous the commemoration and the office of Mary." And against Maximus, he again argued that, had the Logos simply become man as a necessary consequence of his nature, "the commemoration of Mary would be superfluous." Thus, time and again, Athanasius returned to the main point: Mary provided the sure guarantee of the simultaneous humanity and divinity of Jesus Christ.

Although the debates over the Theotokos have been overshadowed by those of the Protestant Reformation, the promulgation of the dogmas of the immaculate conception (1854) and the bodily assumption (1950), and official validation of the Virgin Mary's apparitions, they remain arguably as important today as in their own time and assuredly remain emblematic of subsequent debates. Pelikan appreciatively details some of the richest features of the development of Mariology during the Middle Ages and in the Eastern Church, drawing heavily upon examples from art and literature, especially Dante's Paradiso.

These were the years during which the image of Mary as Mater Dolorosa and as Mediatrix took shape, in which great cathedrals were built in her honor, and in which artists lovingly evoked her features in paint, glass, and stone. As at Ephesus, a swell of popular sentiment floated her to the center of Christian consciousness, prompting a rich flowering of devotion.

The Reformation, in its repudiation of the widespread devotion to saints, sharply attacked Mariology, denouncing it as rank Mariolatry. Pelikan opens his main chapter on the Protestant view of Mary with G. K. Chesterton's observation that when a great faith disappears, "its sublime aspects go first: the Puritans rejected the worship of the Virgin Mary but went on burning witches." Noting that the aphorism is both true and false, Pelikan insists that the Reformation did not uniformly lead to a repudiation of Mary's special status as the mother of God. And he approvingly reminds us that even after the Reformation, Protestant culture continued to recognize Mary, notably in hymns, but also in poetry and some art, such as Dürer's woodcut The Virgin and Two Angels, and Goethe's Faust, which he discusses at some length. But he also acknowledges that even Luther, who did not approve of the worst iconoclastic rampages, protested the "abominable idolatry" of Mary, which, in his view, demeaned and slandered her by turning her into an idol.

The Reformers differed significantly in their response to Mary, but all started from the position that Mariology represented a diversion from, if not an attack on, the unique authority of Scripture.

Withal, Pelikan insists, the Reformers remained orthodox in their teachings on the Virgin Birth, and, he adds, many, notably Luther, retained a touchingly warm personal devotion to her. But they reinterpreted her in the light of their own main principles: "sola Scriptura, sola gratia, and above all sola fide" as the embodiment of the qualities of love, obedience, and faith, "the totally human Maid of Nazareth, a peasant girl snatched by the initiative of God from her ordinary life to take her great and historic part in the drama of salvation."

As a Lutheran who seemingly harbors a genuine fondness for the Blessed Mother, Pelikan remains touchingly loath to concede that the Reformation effectively tolled the death knell of devotion to her in Protestant culture. But, then, neither does he show much interest in exploring the modern evolution of many Protestant denominations toward a growing celebration of individualism, including a growing theological emphasis upon the humanity of Jesus Christ at the expense of his divinity. Understandably, those questions play a more important role in his Jesus Through the Centuries, which we might view as the other panel of a diptych.

At the opening of Jesus Through the Centuries, Pelikan evokes the teaching from Hebrews 13:8-9, "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and for ever. Do not be led away by strange and diverse teachings," which he follows closely with the observation that, from the historical perspective, "it is not sameness but kaleidoscopic variety that is its [the image of Jesus] most conspicuous feature." And, in conclusion, he notes that "as respect for the organized church has declined, reverence for Jesus has grown." Juxtaposed, these two assertions hint that we have moved into an era in which Jesus has garnered prestige as the repository of innumerable human aspirations in the spirit of "to each his (or her) own." Pelikan suggests that this Jesus has emerged from "a curious blend of these currents of religious faith and scholarship with the no less powerful influences of skepticism and religious relativism," and that today, through this "universality-with-particularity" he now belongs not so much to the churches as to the world.

(First of two parts; click here to read Part 2)

Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc/Books and Culture magazine.

May/June, Vol. 3, No. 3, Page 3

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