Born of the Virgin Mary (1)

By Mgr Olympe-Philippe Gerbet   |   26 March 2025

yThe venerable Bishop of Perpignan in Occitania, France, Mgr Olympe-Philippe Gerbet (1798–1864), is distinguished for his contribution to Catholic philosophy and theology. In his own lifetime, even before his episcopal consecration, his writings were acknowledged to be “among the most beautiful and suave pages that ever honoured religious literature” (Sainte-Beuve). As bishop, his pastoral instruction “On diverse errors of the present time” (1860) would go on to lay the foundation of Pope Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors (1864) and, by extension, the whole bulwark of Catholic Tradition in the Modernist crisis unleashed in the century and a half since.

This is the first in a series of articles taken from a text of Mgr Gerbet, appearing in English for the first time. This extract is cited by M. l’abbé Gagey in his notes on the third article of the Apostles’ Creed in the Catechism of the Council of Trent, Vol 1 (1911).

The union of man with God: behold the intimate essence, behold the beginning, middle and end of religion. This union works in two ways: either God descends towards man, or He raises man up towards Himself. The descent of God to humanity has its final and most sublime end in the Incarnation; the raising up of man towards God ends in apotheosis. The Incarnation is realised in Christ; apotheosis is accomplished in the members of Christ: in the saints, with Mary at their head.

Mary is the completely regenerated woman, the heavenly Eve into whom the earthly and culpable Eve is absorbed in a glorious transfiguration. Mary’s apotheosis marks the beginning of the era of woman’s emancipation.

It has been rightly remarked that the original anathema has weighed more especially on women than on men, even though Eve, in listening to the words of seduction, sinned far less by malice of heart than by mobility of spirit, according to St Ambrose. But she went from seduced to seducer, introducing evil into the earthly realm by corrupting primordial and universal man, who enclosed within himself the whole human race. Ancient idolatry was born through her: her imperious caprice was, for Adam, an idol whose cult he substituted for the adoration of the divine will in the sanctuary of his conscience; whence came, for the woman, a greater part in the sufferings which form the long penance of humanity. For having made herself adored by the man, she became his slave; during the period of waiting which preceded the coming of Christ, the public and private servitude of women — the servitude of opinion, legislation and custom which pitilessly stamped their triple seal upon her — was generally the cornerstone of what we call the social order, as it continues to be in all countries which have not received anew the law which liberates the world.

Christianity, which radically attacked slavery by its doctrine of the divine fraternity of all men, combatted the slavery of women by its dogma of the divine maternity of Mary. How could the daughters of Eve remain slaves of the fallen Adam now that the rehabilitated Eve, the new mother of the living, had become the Queen of Angels? … Man had weighed his sceptre on the head of his companion for forty centuries, but he put it aside on the day that he knelt before the altar of Mary. He put it aside with gratitude because his oppression of woman was his own degradation; thus he was delivered from his own tyranny.

The rehabilitation of women, which is so closely linked to the cult of Mary, has singularly profound harmonies with the mysteries that this cult encloses. Mary being the very type of woman in the order of regeneration, as Eve had been the very type of woman in the order of degeneration, what was accomplished in Mary, with the cooperation of her will, for the reparation of human nature, was also accomplished, on a lower level, in the regeneration of women in the empire of Christianity.

The primitive crime had been, under one aspect, a crime of pride. Why hath God forbidden you? For what day soever you shall eat of this fruit you shall be as Gods, knowing good and evil. Thus there was an annunciation of the mysteries of death that the angel of darkness veiled under a deceitful promise of a divine rebirth, just as later there was an annunciation of the mystery of life made to Mary by the angel of light, the mystery of divine life hidden under the veil of a human birth. The pride of Eve, which appropriated the words of revolt by consenting to them, was expiated by the infinite submission and supreme humility of the response of Mary: Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it done to me according to thy word.

The primitive crime had been, under another aspect, a crime of voluptuousness, because the woman saw that the tree was good to eat, and fair to the eyes, and delightful to behold: and she took of the fruit thereof; words which indicate, in whatever manner one interprets them, that the attraction of the senses predominated, placing the soul under the yoke of the body. Just as the remedy for pride lies in submission, the remedy for voluptuousness is found in voluntary suffering animated by charity: the suffering of another that charity makes its own in order to relieve it. Mary expiated the fault of the voluptuary Eve by her intimate participation in the dolours of Christ, and through them, in the dolours of the whole of humanity. The first act of expiation is represented in the feast of the Annunciation (25 March), and the second in the feast of Our Lady of Compassion (Friday in Passion Week and 15 September).

Once the expiation is completed, the ancient Eve is destroyed and the new Eve is formed; degeneration gives way to glorification, whose monument and symbol are the feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary (15 August).

These three feasts reproduce therefore the three fundamental moments in which, by the cooperation of the human will of Mary with divine action, the formation of the heavenly Eve, Mother of Christian Women, is completed. And to these three typical moments correspond three degrees, three solemn phases of the rehabilitation of women. This rehabilitation too, in its own way, has its annunciation, its compassion and its assumption.

This series will continue next week with Born of the Virgin Mary (2)

See also: On the vocation and mission of Catholic priests by Mgr Olympe-Philippe Gerbet