Marian Devotion in the History of the Church

There are a number of different theologies of Mary in the New Testament, ranging from Luke who is most favorable to Paul who pays almost no attention to the figure of the Mother of Jesus.  Luke puts the prophecy into Mary's mouth that "henceforth all generations will call me blessed" and this text can be seen as indication that even in the primitive Church Mary occupied a very important place in the memory and praise of the Christian community.  Mary did not occupy this place without some conflict, however, as there are other scriptural quotes that push Mary a little to the side.  The famous exchange between Jesus and the anonymous voice in the crowd:

Blessed is the womb that bore you, and the breasts that nurse you.  No, blessed rather is the one who hears the word of God and puts it into practice [2]

may indicate some attempt to contextualize Mary's place of honor, acclaiming her not because of her maternity but because of her faithfulness.  A sharper text is when Jesus, with Mary and his family waiting outside the house to see him, asks:

Who is my mother?  Who are my brothers?   ... whoever does the will of God are brother and sister and mother to me... [3]

I am not a scripture scholar, and I cannot nuance this text as could a New Testament expert, but in this story Jesus chooses those who are attentive to his proclamation over his blood family, including his mother.  The Evangelists are not necessarily trying to denigrate the Blessed Mother, but they remind us that the spiritual bonds created by faith in Jesus are stronger than the bonds of blood, even the bond with his mother.

The only other point I want to make regarding Mary in the New Testament is that nowhere in the scriptures does it suggest that we should offer intercessory prayer to Mary.  This is not to say that praying to Mary to intercede on our behalf is wrong, quite the contrary.  This doctrine is drawn, as we shall see, from Tradition, the other source of revelation in our Catholic faith.

To look at the role of Mary in the primitive Church we want to examine how she was understood both in apocryphal books which were never accepted into the canon of scripture and how she was seen by the post-Apostolic church of the late second and third centuries. Realize that this will be the sketchiest of portrayals.

Contemporaneous with at least the later books but outside the New Testament, a tradition regarding the Virgin rapidly began to develop.  The apocryphal writings, especially the gnostic writings, often give a great emphasis to the Blessed Virgin.  The pseudo-evangelion of James supplies us with many of the details of the Blessed Virgin's life that are not in the New Testament but which we Catholics take for granted:  the names of her parents, her presentation in the temple when she was three, and the selection of Joseph to be her spouse.

One apocryphal text cited by Tavard, the Transitus Mariae of Pseudo-John -- I don't have a date for this but can presume that it is before the end of the second century -- tells us that before Mary died, Jesus granted her request that all who will call on her will be saved.  [4]  This is a remarkably important text because it witnesses to a very early tradition according Mary an intercessory or mediatory role.

This mediatory role for the Blessed Virgin was established in certain parts of the Church at a very early date and is explicitly witnessed to by an Egyptian papyrus that contains the prayer well knows to us all:  Sub tuum praesidium confugimus sancta Dei genitrix.  Tavard dates this papyrus to the early years of the second century, though some others put it to the end of the second century.  This is the earliest record of Marian intercession and in it is rooted the idea of Mary as Mediatrix.

At this point I need to make a digression because the theme of Mary as Mediatrix will run through this presentation and it creates a very important tension.  The New Testament presents us with the doctrine that Jesus is the only Mediator.  "For there is one mediator between God and men, Jesus Christ" [6] and "...who is our only savior.  The only high priest, advocate and intercessor before God." [7]  We see here an apparent tension between the two sources of revelation:  scripture and tradition.  Scripture tells us there is only one Mediator, Jesus Christ; tradition presents Mary as mediatrix.  There is a resolution which I will present later in this presentation.

Jaroslav Pelikan is one of the finest historians of dogma in the world.  He was a Lutheran, in a long family line of Lutheran pastors and theologians, and he has had a distinguished academic career at Yale.  He is author of the book, Mary Through the Centuries, and shortly after finishing this book, he was received into the Orthodox Church. Pelikan says in his book that one of the most profound and persistent roles of the Virgin Mary in history has been her function as a bridge builder.  [8]  The term bridge builder, by the way, is pontifex and it has priestly connotations as Pelikan admits. This raises up part of the shadow side of Mary as mediatrix.

The priesthood of Mary is not a new problem.  In fact the priesthood of Mary has provided theological tensions in the Church at several points in history, including this century.  Ecclesiastical authorities in the past have had to forbid the depiction of Mary in priestly vestments.  A fourth century bishop in the Church who catalogued heresies, Ephihanus, tells us of one heretical sect, the Collyridians who were a group of Christian women in Asia Minor who on certain days put out a chair and decorated it with a cloth, and offered bread to Mary and then all partook of the bread. According to Sally Cunneen the sect was condemned because the ritual associated priesthood with woman through Mary. [9]  This cult should not be viewed in isolation but in the context of other sects among the Churches of the first centuries, such as the Montanists, that provided a priestly role for women.  Little definitive work has been done in this era of Church history. There is a rich field for scholars to study the relationship between expanded roles for women and the place of the Blessed Virgin in the cult of various groups which the Church has judged to be heretical. 

With Constantine's victory and the peace of the Church came the opportunity for the Church to unite in defining its faith.  It took the Church from the fourth through the sixth centuries to clarify its understanding of the relationship of divinity and humanity in Jesus Christ. In the end, the Church found that the clearest way to define the Son was to talk about the Mother and so Mary was given a central position in the dogmas of the Church.  Mary became far more than a historical disciple of her son, she became a symbol of the orthodoxy.  This quality was portrayed not only in the verbal formulations of the councils, but in the development and use of icons in Christian worship.

The first of the great councils was Nicea and that council has given us the Creed we still use in the liturgy.  It took the Church another three centuries to hammer out its understanding of the relationship of God and humanity as personified in Jesus.  Perhaps the most significant step in this process was in 431 when the Council of Ephesus declared Mary to be Theotokos, a term that means the "birth-given of God," she who bore God in her womb.

This is a remarkable doctrine and its ramifications are boggling but we must remember that this title and doctrine were designed to tell us not about Mary, but about Jesus. The doctrine is a symbol of the unique union of two natures in the one person, Jesus Christ.  At Ephesus, and at the subsequent councils of Chalcedon and Constantinople II the Church was not trying to define who Mary is, but who her son is.  George Tavard writes:

Christian Mariology is little more than a long paragraph in Christology.  It is in both cases the mission of the son that determines the spiritual relationship between the mother and the son.  [10]

From the time that images were introduced into Christian worship, Mary's image had been not only a popular depiction but one that has been central to keeping the Church faithful to its doctrinal faith.  When Pelikan writes that the face of Mary is the best face through which to view the face of Christ he does not mean this literally as in a portrait, but rather that Mary is the model of the disciple.  If you want to see a Christlike face, look to Mary.

Icons of Mary were used from the fifth through the twelfth centuries to guarantee orthodoxy regarding the humanity of Christ against those who would exaggerate his divinity. [11]  The iconic tradition was not smooth; in the eighth century the Eastern Church was torn by a controversy regarding icons and many of the early icons were destroyed.  Although the conflict was pretty much limited to the Eastern Church -- where the tradition of images was much stronger -- it had repercussions in the West as well.  To those for whom the divinity of Christ achieved an exaggerated importance, the remembrance of his human form, much less the reminder that he had a human mother, was an embarrassment and they wished no depiction of an incarnate deity or his human mother.

In the development of the iconic tradition -- and this includes the Western sculpture tradition as well as the paintings and mosaics common to both East and West -- this phase is marked by the invariable depiction of the Blessed Virgin holding her son.  The son, though a child, is depicted with the eyes (and therefore wisdom) of an adult and is most often holding a book as if ready to expound teaching.  The child is clearly no mere infant, but the Incarnate Word.  (Some icons do not depict Mary as holding the child, but show the child visible in her womb.  He is always, however, the Incarnate Word, and she is always Theotokos.)

The apex of the iconic tradition in the Western Church came in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Depictions of Christ and the saints, but most particularly of the Blessed Virgin Mary, ranged from mosaics in Sicilian cathedrals to sculptures in French abbeys to wall paintings in Norwegian stave churches to crude bas-reliefs in Irish monasteries. Pelikan explains the popularity of the Virgin's image as it is represented by two of the great literary figures of the High Middle Ages.

For Bernard of Clairvaux and Dante Alighieri to speak about the face of the Virgin Mary as the one through which to view the face of Jesus Christ, through which in turn the face of God was visible.  [12]

Mary shows us Jesus even as Jesus shows us the Father; Mary mediates Christ to us even as Christ mediates the Father.  The key difference, of course, is that the mediation of Mary is not indispensable in our approach to Jesus, but we cannot approach the Father except through Jesus. More will be said about the relationship of these two mediations later.

To backtrack a little regarding the iconic tradition, icons -- including sculptures -- had never played the central role in the Western Church of late antiquity and the early and central Middle Ages that they did in the Eastern Church.  For one thing, the Western Church did not have the same doctrinal controversies that made icons as necessary in the East.  For another, and far more practical, the West did not have the financial resources necessary for widespread artistic expression from the sixth through the twelfth centuries that did the East.  Wealth in the West was both more limited and more concentrated, and so too was art until the commercial revivals that accompanied the crusades.

This is not to say, however, that there were no images in the West.  There were -- and there always had been.  There are, for example, three annunciation scenes that survive in the catacombs of Rome.  [13] Art in the Western Church, before the eighth century however, tended to be more commemorative than either devotional or dogmatic.  That is to say that the art commemorated events and reminded the viewer of the basic stories in salvation history:  the Annunciation, the institution of the Eucharist, the Resurrection.  In the eighth century, especially in Italy and then later up through the Carolinigan and Ottonian empires, the influence of the Greek refugees from the iconoclastic controversies in the East came to be felt. Dogmatic icons, especially that of the Theotokos, became more common as expressions of the faith of the Church. Finally by the twelfth century a very common depiction of the Virgin was her seated in glory at the right hand of her son, receiving from him her crown.

In the thirteenth century images became more devotional than dogmatic.  The low Christology of the period with its emphasis on the humanity of Christ made the nativity and the crucifixion the most popular themes in art. In the former, Mary was no longer holding the child, but kneeling in adoration before her son -- who was no longer the visible Word with the Eyes of Wisdom, but whose divinity was hidden from the human eyes beneath a child like any other.   In the later, Mary was standing at the foot of the cross gazing in uncomprehending sorrow as the son for whom she had had such hopes dies.  Both these images touched the people of the period very deeply and art began to take on an affective and devotional dimension where the heart of Mary somehow spoke to the heart of the believer.  Doctrinal integrity was no longer the first object of the image, at least in the West; religious experience was its goal.

The Western Church has long had an ambiguous relationship with orthodox doctrine.  On the one hand we are willing to define it to the point where Mystery is destroyed by interminable clarifications.  On the other hand, we force-fit orthodoxy's foot into the narrow shoe of our subjective preferences; that is to say that many of us in the West are not above using selected pieces of orthodoxy to reinforce our emotional -- and often somewhat heterodox -- convictions. She is in many ways the chief symbol of the faith of the Church; she must not be manipulated to satisfy our personal spiritual fantasies.

The earliest recorded vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary was to St. Gregory the Wonderworker in the middle of the third century.  It is witnessed to by a very early tradition, allegedly coming from Gregory's brother, Saint Basil.  For us the idea of a vision is all but synonymous with the Blessed Mother, but this was not always so.  Visions previous to that of Saint Gregory were most often of Christ or of angels. Even in the Middle Ages and into the sixteenth century, among visionaries such as Angela of Foligno, Brigit of Sweden, Julian of Norwich, Teresa of Avila and others, Christ is most often the center of the visionary experience.  In fact, visions of Mary were not nearly as popular as those of several saints, particularly St. Catherine and St. Michael. Nevertheless, there certainly were recorded visions of the Blessed Virgin, especially to male religious such as Bernard of Clairvaux.

Before we go further, we need a word of caution about vision.  Tavard reminds us in regard to visions that the Church does not vouch for the authenticity of the vision, only the orthodoxy of the message.  I would like to refresh your memory of the quote which I cited at the beginning of this presentation:

Approval of a doctrine as correct is one thing, approval of visions as authentic facts is another.  Doctrine and piety are endorsed by authority, but apparitions and other extraordinary happenings in the lives of visionaries are not thereby guaranteed. [14]

Rene Laurentin, the leading scholar of Marian apparitions, echoes this sentiment:

The Church is very prudent with regard to apparitions, and accords them a low status because they are signs which reach us through our senses and are subject to the illusions of subjectivity.  [15]

This in turn reflects the teaching of our great Carmelite doctors of the Church, Saints Teresa and John of the Cross.  Teresa felt visions were unimportant because of their "sensual nature." Saint John of the Cross, in the Ascent of Mount Carmel, is even more blunt and states that visions should be ignored.  John was particularly concerned because his experience as a spiritual director showed him how visions were almost invariably the product not of grace but of a self-centered imagination, or even worse, of diabolical influence.  Their warnings should still be heeded and the best advice regarding visions, at least until they receive appropriate ecclesiastical approval, is to ignore them.

I would like to mention two medieval visions in the Dominican traditional that I think influenced the Carmelites and probably played a role in the evolution of stories surrounding the scapular vision.  The first of these visions is the tradition regarding the Blessed Virgin Mary giving the rosary to St. Dominic.  The story that the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to Saint Dominic and gave him the rosary is no longer considered historically credible.  [16]  A far more important vision for its possible influence on the story of the scapular vision is the habit vision of one of Dominic's early disciples, Reginald.

Carmelite historian, Father Richard Copsey, a friar of the British province and member of the Carmelite Institute in Rome, in a manuscript accepted for publication in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History, states his belief that this vision provides a context for the vision to Saint Simon Stock.  According to this very early Dominican story, Reginald had been planning on joining a religious order but did not know which one.  He dreamed of the Blessed Virgin one night and she showed him a white habit and black mantle, telling him:  this will be your habit.  The following day, Reginald saw Dominicans for the first time and they were wearing the habit shown him in the dream.  The Dominicans took this story and used it to show how Mary had "given" them their habit.