Posted on 12/08/2009 5:13:09 PM PST by stfassisi
(T)he figure of the woman is indispensable for the structure of biblical faith. She expresses the reality of creation as well as the fruitfulness of grace. The abstract outlines for the hope that God will turn toward his people receive, in the New Testament, a concrete, personal name in the figure of Jesus Christ. At the same moment, the figure of the woman, until then seen only typologically in Israel although provisionally personified by the great women of Israel, also emerges with a name: Mary (1).
These words by Pope Benedict XVI, writing as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, describe the inseparable union between Jesus Christ and the Blessed Virgin Mary. For Mary is the perfect creature who mediates her Son and Creator, the God-man, into the world. Christ created His Mother immaculately to prepare her for her role as Co-redemptrix: the woman with the Redeemer. And precisely because Our Lord made His Mother and endowed her with a co-redemptive mission, we should look to Our Lady to gain a better understanding of Christ and His mission. "Mary has been the subject of close theological study on account of her essential reference to the Word of God and, in him and through him, to the history of salvation" (2). The starting point of all Mariology should be her relation to Christ. A proper Mariology leads to a proper Christology. We see this most evidently with the early heresies of the Church, such as the Nestorian heresy. It wasn’t until Nestorius denied that Mary was the Theotókos, that it was revealed that he denied Christ’s divinity as well. "(O)nly when it touches Mary and becomes Mariology is Christology itself as radical as the faith of the Church requires. The appearance of a truly Marian awareness serves as the touchstone indicating whether or not the christological substance is fully present" (3). In Mariology, Christology is defended!
On the road to Emmaus, two of the disciples were conversing when Jesus joined them. He opened up the Scriptures (meaning the Old Testament) to them and interpreted all "the things concerning himself" (4). Christ, Himself, gives us the example of how to do exegesis! We must look back to the Old Testament to understand what is happening in the New. Or as St. Augustine has said, "the New Testament is concealed in the Old, and the Old is revealed in the New." This is known as typology. The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines typology as "the discernment of persons, events, or things in the Old Testament which prefigured, and thus served as a ‘type’ (or prototype) of, the fulfillment of God’s plan in the person of Christ" (5). As we search the Old Testament for all things concerning Christ, likewise we must do the same with Mary. But can this be done? Is Mary really foretold in the Old Testament? Juan Luis Bastero tells us that some scholars believe that "Mary is to be found in all the Bible, at least indirectly, because if Christ is spoken of throughout the Bible, then, by virtue of the indissoluble union that obtains between Son and Mother, she too is spoken of there: Ubique de ispsa; if the Bible is the book of Christ, then it must also be the book of his Mother" (6). Mary herself acts as a hinge between the Old and New Testaments. "Wherever the unity of (the two) Testaments disintegrates, the place of a healthy Mariology is lost" (7). Thus, R. Le Deaut has rightly said, "Mariology cannot rest satisfied in regarding the Old Testament merely as a rich source of images applicable to the Virgin in an accommodated sense, more or less appropriate. The Old Testament contains a precise revelation about the Mother of the Messiah, even if it be in outline only. It is a revelation that appears in the New Testament, the fulfillment of the Old, and in the traditional interpretation of the Church" (8).
The Church Fathers knew all of this. They, who laid the foundation for the "traditional interpretation of the Church." St. John of Damascus (d. 750) said that Mary "was predestined in the eternal foreknowing counsel of God and she was prefigured by various figures and foretold by the Holy Spirit through the words of the prophets" (9). They used typology frequently in their biblical exegesis, searching for a defense against the Jews and heretics to show the truths about Mary, and thereby about Christ. The Fathers immersed themselves in the Old Testament to shed light on the truths of Christianity. Some of the Fathers, such as St. Jerome (d. 419), learned Hebrew in order to gain a better understanding. The Church Fathers developed a love affair with Scripture (10). This love of Scripture helped them defend the honor of their Queen and Mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary. "The fact that Mary is the Mother of the Redeemer is the ground on which is constructed the earliest Patristic thinking on Mary’s greatness, whether that thinking is expressed … in simple testimony to her virginal motherhood, or whether it focuses on the role of the new Eve in salvation history" (11). It is said that no one fights as hard as when they are defending their mother’s honor and the Fathers of the Church were no exception. They were constantly called to stand up for Mary’s honor, as she was slandered in frequent attempts to discredit Our Lord. In this article, I plan to show how the Fathers used the Old Testament, searching for Marian interpretations in order to defend Christ and Christianity against their adversaries. As always, the best place to start is in the beginning, the Book of Genesis.
Along with typology, the Church Fathers also employed what is known as recirculation. The basic idea of recirculation is that as the world was condemned by the participation of a man (Adam), a woman (Eve), and a tree (of the knowledge of good and evil); it would also be redeemed by the participation of a man (Christ the New Adam), a woman (Mary the New Eve), and a tree (the Cross). Genesis 3:15 provides the basis for this concept, when God says to the serpent, "I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel" (12). The Church Fathers unanimously saw the "woman" prophesied of here as none other than the Blessed Virgin Mary who gave birth to Christ, the conqueror of both Satan and death. John Henry Newman has asserted "that the truth about Mary as new Eve constitutes a rudimentary but extremely important Marian doctrine left to us by Christian antiquity. It is the first meditation on her and on her mission, the fullest profile of her, the view of her that has been handed down to us in the patristic writings" (13). A few of the notables include St. Justin Martyr (the great Apologist, d. 165), St. Irenaeus (the first Mariologist, d. 202) who said "By disobeying, Eve became the cause of death for herself and for the whole human race. In the same way Mary, though she also had a husband, was still a virgin, and by obeying, she became the cause of salvation for herself and for the whole human race" (14), and Pope St. Leo the Great (the great defender of the Church against heresies, d. 461). There is also St. Epiphanius of Salamis (d. 403) who said that this prophecy "received its true fulfillment when that holy and unique One came, born of Mary without work of man…" (15). Likewise, St. Augustine (d. 430) tells us that "Mary was included in Eve; yet it was only when Mary came, that we knew who Eve was" (16). And in a hymn of St. Ephrem the Syrian (d. 373) we find, "The Lord hath spoken it: Satan is cast out of heaven. And Mary has trodden on him who struck at the heel of Eve. And blessed be He, who by His birth has destroyed the foe!" (17) Elsewhere, St. Ephrem explains that "Because the serpent had struck Eve with his claw, the foot of Mary bruised him" (18). In his Quaestiones in Genesim, that great Spanish composer of Marian literature, St. Isidore of Seville (d. 636) gives a marvelous exegesis of Genesis 3:15:
The seed of the devil is a perverse suggestion; the seed of the woman is the fruit of a good work, by which the perverse suggestion of the devil is resisted. She will tread upon his head, because from the beginning she expels his perverse suggestions from her mind. He will strike at her heel, because until the end he will try to deceive her mind, which he was unable to deceive with his first suggestion. Some have understood the following expression in reference to the Virgin, from whom the Lord was born: "I will put enmity between you and the woman," since it was promised that the Savior was going to be born from her, in order to defeat the enemy and to destroy death, of which the enemy was the author. For they also understand the following as a reference to the fruit of Mary’s womb; namely, Christ: "She will tread upon your head, and you will strike at her heel." This means: You will attack him to kill him, but he (Christ), after you have been defeated, will rise again and tread upon your head which is death (19).
We see here in this exegesis the intimate union between the woman and her seed. Mary’s fiat at the Annunciation leads to the birth of the Savior, the one who "will rise again and tread upon … death." Mary’s fiat wasn’t just a "yes" to the Annunciation, but rather also a "yes" to the death of her Son on the Cross, where Mary would also be crucified spiritually and a sword would pierce her heart as well. The Church Fathers, in seeing Mary as the "woman" of Genesis 3:15, unearth the seed for the doctrine of Mary as Co-redemptrix and Mediatrix of All Graces. Co-redemptrix because she actively participates in the crushing of Satan’s head, and Mediatrix of All Graces because she mediated Christ into the world, who is the source of all grace. Nobody sums this doctrine up in relation to Genesis 3:15 better than that great master of Scripture, St. Jerome when he states: "Death came through Eve; life through Mary" (20).
Another place in the book of Genesis that the Church Fathers saw a prefiguring of Mary, which unfortunately is widely overlooked by modern scholars, is Genesis 49:9. In the RSV:CE, following St. Jerome’s Vulgate, the verse reads:
Judah is a lion’s whelp; from the prey, my son, you have gone up. He stooped down, he couched as a lion, and as a lioness; who dares rouse him up (21)?Yet, many of the Fathers do not translate the Hebrew word labi (another word for lion) the way Jerome does, who has it rendered as leaena (lioness in Latin). Due to the nature and constraints of this article, we cannot focus on this except in passing, and instead we will be looking at the translation that the majority of the Fathers use (a lion’s whelp or cub), and the interpretations that arise from such a translation (22). However, before we look to see what the Church Fathers have to say, we must briefly note another translation issue. The phrase, "from the prey" is rendered in the Septuagint as ek blastou meaning "from a sprout" or "from a shoot." The LXX translation led many of the Fathers to look at Genesis 49:9 alongside Isaiah 11:1 which reads:
There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.
This leads to not only a greater Christological interpretation for the Fathers, but as we shall see, a Mariological one as well. One of the earliest Fathers to see the connection between these two verses was St. Hippolytus (d. 235). In his exegesis, he shows that these verses foretell the Incarnation and the virgin birth:
By saying "lion" and "lion’s whelp," he (Jacob) has clearly pointed toward the two persons: that of the Father and that of the Son. He said, "From a shoot, my son, you have gone up" in order to show the generation of Christ according to the flesh. Christ, after his Incarnation, being conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin, sprouted in her, and like a flower and a pleasant perfume, once he went out of that womb into the world, he appeared visibly. On the other hand, by saying "whelp of the lion" he indicates Christ’s generation according to the spirit, through which he appears to come directly from God, as he has shown him like a king born of a king. However, he has not remained silent about his generation according to the flesh but says clearly, "From a shoot, my son, you have gone up." Isaiah says, "And there shall come forth a rod out of the root of Jesse, and a blossom shall come up from it." The root of Jesse was the stump of the patriarchs, like a root planted in the ground, and the rod coming out of it was Mary, because she was from the house and the family of David. The blossom that had come up from the rod was Christ, the one that Jacob had prophesied by saying, "From a shoot, my son, you have gone up" (23).
St. Ambrose (d. 397) also sees Jacob showing that Christ comes from the Father and that the Father and the Son are one and the same. He goes on to say:Moreover, he represented the Son’s Incarnation in a wonderful fashion when he said, "From my seed you have come up to me." For Christ sprouted in the womb of the virgin like a shrub upon the earth; like a flower of good fragrance, He was sent forth in the splendor of the new light and came up from His mother’s vitals for the redemption of the entire world. Just so, Isaiah says, "There shall come forth a rod out of the root of Jesse and a flower shall come up out of the root." The root is the household of the Jews, the rod is Mary, the flower of Mary is Christ. She is rightly called a rod, for she is of royal lineage, of the house and family of David. Her flower is Christ, who destroyed the stench of worldly pollution and poured out the fragrance of eternal life (24).
Rufinus of Aquileia (d. 410) focuses on Gen 49:9 and the whelp rising from the shoot and its use for the defense of the virgin birth:
(T)his whelp rises from the shoot: he was born from the Virgin, not from a seed but from a shoot. So Christ was born without sexual intercourse with a man and without the natural seed, like a bough or a branch. In this manner the reality of the assumption of the flesh from the Virgin is clearly demonstrated, and the contact with human or natural seed is excluded in the holy shoot (25).
St. Jerome adds concerning Isaiah 11:1, "The shoot is the Mother of the Lord, simple, pure, and sincere, who was not joined to any seed coming from without"(26). St. Leo the Great continues, "In this shoot, undoubtedly, the Blessed Virgin Mary was foretold, who descended from the line of Jesse and of David. Made fertile by the Holy Spirit, she brought forth a new flower of human flesh from her maternal womb, while still remaining a virgin in giving birth" (27). Likewise, St. Maximus of Turin (d. 466) and St. John of Damascus give the same Marian interpretation to Isaiah 11:1.
In the Fathers search for Old Testament prophecies that told of Mary’s virgin birth, Genesis 49:9 wasn’t the only verse they used. In fact, no other verse compares with Isaiah 7:14 in the amount of ink used in defense of Mary’s virginity! The Fathers looked to the prophecy from Isaiah as the key text pointing to Christ as the Messiah. However, they encountered much opposition from the Jews who disagreed with the early Christians interpretation of the word almah as "virgin." In their denial of Jesus as the Messiah, the Jews argued that almah meant nothing other than "young woman" and thus was not proof of Jesus’ birth from Mary as a virgin. It was probably because St. Matthew tells us in his gospel that Christ’s birth is a direct fulfillment of Isaiah 7:14 that the Church Fathers put all their effort in defense of this Old Testament verse. Whatever, the case, the Fathers certainly showed forth their love for the Mother in employing and protecting Isaiah 7:14 as a truly Christian prophecy. St. Justin Martyr explains why the virgin birth was foretold by Isaiah:
He said, "Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they will call his name, God with us." Through the prophetic spirit God announced beforehand that things which are unimaginable and believed to be impossible for human beings would take place, in order that when it occurred it would be believed and received by faith because it had been promised. In order to ensure that someone does not accuse us of saying the same things as the poets, who say that Zeus came to women for sexual pleasure, we will explain the words of this prophecy clearly. The phrase "behold, the virgin shall conceive" means that the virgin would conceive without intercourse. If she had in fact had intercourse with someone, she would not have been a virgin. God’s power came on the virgin, overshadowed her and caused her to conceive while she remained a virgin (28).
St. Augustine also reminds us that the person being born was God Himself!
So do not let it surprise you, unbelieving soul, whoever you are, do not let it strike you as impossible that a virgin should give birth, and in giving birth remain a virgin. Realize that it was God who was born, and you will not be surprised at a virgin giving birth (29).
He also adds:
You will not doubt, therefore, the motherhood of a virgin if you want to believe the nativity of a God who does not relinquish the government of the universe and comes in flesh among human beings; who bestows fecundity on his mother yet does not diminish her integrity (30).
St. Augustine here employs an almost Scotus-like (or rather pre-Scotus-like) explanation. With God all things are possible. Should we be surprised then that God chose to be born as a man in a manner absolutely unique to all mankind? Certainly not! It was fitting for God to be born man from a womb that was pure and virginal; a womb that henceforth would be the holiest womb of all. The virginal womb that held God within it for nine months is kept virginal by miraculous means performed by the very baby that made the womb His dwelling. St. Maximus of Turin, in a beautiful Christmas sermon using Isaiah 7:14, expresses the fittingness of the mystery of Mary’s virginity before, during, and after the birth of Christ:
Christ, the salvation of all things, then, is born—He who the prophets testified is the king of the nations. He is born of a virgin, as Isaiah declares …. The manner of His birth proves the truth about the Lord: a virgin conceived without knowing a man; her belly was filled, having been touched by no embrace; and her chaste womb received the Holy Spirit, whom her pure members preserved and her unsullied body carried. Behold the miracle of the mother of the Lord! She is a virgin when she conceives, a virgin when she brings forth, a virgin after birth. What glorious virginity! What splendid fruitfulness! The world’s goodness is born and there is no pain of childbirth. The womb is emptied, a child is brought forth, and still virginity is not violated. For it was fitting that, when God was born, the value of chastity should increase, and that one who was untouched should not be violated by His coming—He who came to heal what was injured—and that bodily purity should not be harmed by Him who bestows virginity on those who have been baptized and had formerly been unchaste. The child who has been born, then, is placed in a crib. This is God’s first dwelling place, and the ruler of heaven does not disdain these straitened circumstances—He whose home was the virginal womb. Clearly Mary was a fit habitation for Christ not because of the nature of her body but because of the grace of her virginity (31).
We see with Maximus, that Christ being born of Mary’s virginal womb did not diminish her virginity in any way, but rather sanctified her womb. Mary truly became the Temple of the Holy Spirit with God dwelling within her.
With Proclus of Constantinople (d. 446), we see a new tact taken with the defense of Mary’s virginity. Here he enters into an imaginary conversation with the Blessed Mother and has her defending herself:
But I also want to question the Virgin against the unbelieving Jews. Tell me, O Virgin, who made you a mother before marriage? How did you become a mother, yet remain a virgin? Persuade the Jews that a Virgin gave birth; close the mouths of the unbelievers. She, with authority, answers me thus: Why do the Jews marvel that a Virgin gave birth, seeing that they do not marvel when a dry branch produces a shoot, against nature? They see the branch, without roots, flowering indoors, and do not ask how or why it happened; instead, they are always asking questions about me! "Behold, the Virgin shall conceive in her womb and bear a son" (32).
And yet with all these wonderful arguments showing how Isaiah 7:14 applied to Our Lady, the Jews continued to resist. For them, the prophecy said "young woman" and not "virgin." They also claimed that Isaiah was referring to the wife of Ahaz and not Mary. Let us see what the Fathers have to say in reply. First up, we will hear from the great Cappadocian Father St. Basil of Caesar