GOD IN SEARCH OF A MOTHER
Recently there has been much discussion…as to whether our theological understanding of God has not been too masculine to the detriment of the feminine. For our purpose here it can be said that Fatherhood, as Louis Bouyer has pointed out, belongs to God alone in His essence of absolute Source of Being. Only God is totally perfect, complete, independent and therefore He alone is Love, capable of sharing Himself in free gift. It is of the essence of creatures not to be their own source of being, but to be utterly dependent upon God as their Source. Even when a human being becomes a father, it is not of his essence to be always a father. But it is of the essence of human creatures to be dependent and therefore to be virginal in their barrenness and poverty. Their whole being cries out in complete potentiality to be fulfilled by another. Motherhood is receiving life from another and bringing this forth into a new creature. It is more in keeping with our human creatureliness to see motherhood as belonging to us, not to God.
The first woman, Eve, as the Greek Fathers constantly recall, was virgin that refused to be the dependent mother as God wished her to be. She refused to accept her dependence upon the Fatherhood of God. She was tempted: “You shall be like gods, knowing good and evil” (Gn 3:5). Sin is denying the Fatherhood of God, that all things come to us as gifts from His free, merciful love. It is refusing also to recognize the virginal-motherhood that is basic barrenness before God, crying out to receive His gifts of life and love.
God sought out the New Woman, Mary, to begin again a new creation. God would “recapitulate” His creation beginning with a woman who would freely consent to do what Eve refused to do: to be total woman, virgin and mother. She would be the climax of the Anawim, the Remnant of God, where God would slowly evolve His new people into the perfect archetype of the future Church. Mary is the fulfilled humanity in microcosmic fashion, that which the whole of humanity must eventually become by God’s Holy Spirit: the woman who is total dependence, absolute potential before God. She renounces her autonomy and accepts to be the poor servant of God. In this is Mary’s greatness and the greatness of every other human being.
A PATRISTIC VIEW OF MARY – NEW EVE
In Christian devotion to Mary there has always been a danger of making her divine motherhood a mere physical endowment instead of placing Mary and her self-determination to cooperate with Jesus Christ, the New Adam, into the whole drama of the history of salvation. By returning to the early Fathers of the Church and developing their concept of Mary as New Eve we can avoid such an error. She will not be a fourth member vying for divinity, but she will be the epitome of all that God has decreed mankind to be through cooperation with grace. Only by keeping in mind what Mary’s fiat meant in the whole picture of God’s merciful condescension to redeem us through Jesus Christ can we truly understand her divine motherhood and also prepare ourselves for a proper veneration of her as our mother and the model of the Universal Church.
The apologetic writer and martyr, Justin (+c. 165), is the first Father to employ this analogy of Mary as the New Eve. In his Dialogue with Trypho, after a long involved development of Isaiah 7:14, Justin makes his comparison:
Christ became man through the Virgin in order that disobedience which issued from the serpent might be destroyed in the same way in which it took its origin. In fact Eve was still an incorrupt virgin when she conceived in her womb the word which came to her from the serpent and she brought forth disobedience and death. On the contrary, it is in faith and joy that Mary the Virgin conceives when the Angel Gabriel announces to her … to which news she answers: ‘May it be done unto me according to your word: Thus through the intermediation of this Virgin He came into the world … through whom God would crush the serpent and others similar to him, angels and men, and who delivers from death those who return from their evil sentiments and believe in Him.
Here we see an analogy between Mary and Eve in its primitive state: a parallelism in God’s designs of effecting man’s redemption in a similar way as man’s spiritual destruction and death were brought about. Both are virgins who then give birth, one through disobedience to death while the other through faith and joy to Him who is the salvation of the human race. There is no attempt on his part to analyze in profundity the role of Mary in cooperating with the regeneration of men.
~ George A. Maloney, Mary: The Womb of God
