CHURCH

... Holy Mary, Mother of God ...

“We recognize
in Our Lady the
first vibration of
the strings of this
musical instrument which is the
reality of God”
(Fr Giussani, cf Traces no 6, 2003, p 2)
The constant
reference to the
figure of Mary–
Virgin and Mother
– is to show us the method chosen
by God for
communicating
Himself: God saves man through man.
In the early history of the Church,
there is a moment that marked a
crucial step
toward awareness
of this method:
the Council of
Ephesus, which
proclaimed Mary the “Mother
of God.”

The constant reference to the figure of Our Lady, Virgin and Mother of God, is extremely valuable as a method for living the Christian experience. Looking to and beseeching Her, who is “the first vibration of the strings of this musical instrument which is the reality of God” (Giussani, Traces, no 6, 2003) helps our awareness and freedom to open wide every day in the face of the objectivity of the presence of Christ, the Word made flesh.
The fact that a gaze trained on Mary is the method for deepening knowledge of the true humanity of the Person of the Son is impressively confirmed throughout the Tradition. Particularly significant is the solemn proclamation of Mary as Mother of God, made by the Council of Ephesus on June 22, 431. This third Ecumenical Council (after Nicaea in 325 and Constantinople in 381) is a fundamental milestone in the long, dramatic debate during the fourth and fifth centuries, when the terms of faith in Jesus Christ, true God and true man, were worked out more precisely, and which prepared the declaration of Chalcedon (451) on the unicity of the divine person of Christ and His two natures, divine and human.
The Council of Nicaea had defended the divinity of Christ (“of the same substance as the Father”), condemning Arius, who wanted to reduce Him to a mere creature, albeit an exceptional one. This decision, however, did not crush Arianism, which, with the support of the emperor, spread throughout the Church, so much so that it seemed on the point of prevailing. “The world, trembling, was amazed to find itself Arian,” cried St Jerome. The fight for the truth of the faith, carried out by a few great bishops (especially Athanasius in the East and Ambrose in the West), in communion with the Bishop of Rome, coincided with the struggle for the freedom of the Church from the emperor’s interference.
The enduring Arian heresy threatened the heart of the faith itself by reducing Jesus Christ to a moral issue. But this, paradoxically, forced the fathers to clarify and study more deeply the genuine terms of the Christian announcement concerning the Savior’s person and work of salvation. The result was not, as the well-known and still widespread rebuke of von Harnack would have it, the reduction of the existential force of the Gospel message to Hellenistic philosophical schemes. On the contrary, it was a question of explaining in adequate terms the claim of the all-embracing salvation by the person of Christ in the face of recurrent attempts to make it fit into worldly religious schemes. It was faithfulness and attachment to the original experience that determined the use of the words (and, when necessary, coining new ones), and not vice versa.
In the second half of the fourth century, the problem emerged of how the union and relation between the human and divine natures in the person of Christ should be understood. This was the context for the controversy Nestorius had to resolve in his community between those who wanted to attribute to Mary the title only of Anthropotokos, Mother of Man, and those who gave her the title of Theotokos, Mother of God.
In his attempt to reconcile the dispute, Nestorius proposed for Mary the title of Christotokos, Mother of Christ. The result was that the unicity of Christ was broken into two persons, one only human, the other divine, the Word, who dwelled in Christ as in a temple (the consequence is that Christ is the outcome of a purely moral or accidental union).
The fathers gathered together at the Council of Ephesus condemned Nestorius and solemnly proclaimed Mary’s divine motherhood: “It is not that first an ordinary man was generated by the Holy Virgin and then the Word descended on him, but that the Word was united with the flesh right in the mother’s womb, was born according to the flesh, accepting the birth of His flesh…. Therefore [the holy fathers] had no doubt in proclaiming the Holy Virgin to be Mother of God (Theotokos), Mother of God, not that the nature of the Word or His divinity received the beginning of its existence from the holy Virgin, but that, since the holy body, animated by a rational soul, which the Word of God united to Himself according to the hypostasis, was born from her, the Word is said to be born according to the flesh.” By this, it was reiterated that the divine person of the Word assumed human flesh right “in the mother’s womb.”
An important step was thus taken in the understanding of the terms of the faith in the mystery of Christ’s Incarnation, which twenty years later the Council of Chalcedon (October 22, 451) would make more precise by confessing that He is one sole Person, “one and the same Christ, Lord and Only begotten, to be acknowledged in two natures,” the divine and the human, without confusion, immutable, undivided, and inseparable.
Stefano Alberto