Born of the Virgin Mary (3)
By Mgr Olympe-Philippe Gerbet | 9 April 2025
This article follows Born of the Virgin Mary (1) and (2).
Companion and image of the man in the ministering of the truth, guide and model of the man in the ministering of charity: such is the woman as Christianity has made her; such are the two bases of her glorification, even on earth, since the mystery of the Assumption is already operating in her here and now. To be convinced of this, it is enough to compare the state of abjection, of physical and moral captivity to which she was reduced among the most brilliant peoples and in the most renowned ages of the ancient world to the marvellous transfiguration that she owes to Christianity. In the Assumption, the character of the heavenly soul of the Blessed Virgin Mary produces a transformation in her earthly body, which puts on the qualities of heavenly bodies: incorruptibility, clarity and agility. This change will only be accomplished for the daughters of Mary on the day of the Resurrection, but it has already begun to be reflected in their social condition, as the body — the earthly body — of their spiritual life.
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This rehabilitation, which we have seen has such close links to the cult of the Virgin Mary, was threatened in the first centuries of Christianity by sects which disputed Mary’s title of Mother of God. A universal council was assembled to preserve it. If this turbulent matter was upheld in its most fundamental relation to the Incarnation of the Word, it was also upheld in its subordinate relation to the social miracle of the condition of Christian women. The divine character with which Christianity had marked their brow was obscured the day that the name of the Mother of God was omitted from the Creed: the Morning Star could not be eclipsed without forever casting a fatal shadow on their destiny.
Their fate faced great dangers in the middle ages, in the era of the crusades. Europe, armed and headed for Asia, was to encounter there the spectacle of Muslim customs and the religion of the senses. It might have brought back strange ideas and unheard of threats and temptations. It was precisely at this time that devotion to the Virgin Mary was animated with a new fervour, and there was something clearly providential in this. The great man of this time, whose thundering voice precipitated the peoples toward Syria, found notes of indescribable sweetness to sing Mary’s praises, and thousands of souls responded to his persuasive words and mystical chants. It was as if a light from on high had been revealed to St Bernard at the moment when Christianity would find itself exposed to the fascination of the ancient serpent of the east; when it was necessary to reawaken with all speed the enthusiasm for the divine Virgin who had crushed it, and to oppose the seduction of impurity with the chaste magic of her cult.
In our own days, the serpent has whispered in the ear of women some of those words that Eve heard when Satan swore to her that she was woman liberated; they are told that the knowledge of good and evil will finally be revealed to them, that the imitation of brutes contained for them the secret to transform themselves into divinities; they are promised an infernal apotheosis in a future Eden. These guilty extravagances have not exercised a great power of seduction. Women understand where they lead. They understand, with that intelligence of heart which outstrips the slower processes of reasoning, that no real progress is possible other than by the way paved by Christianity; that their future, if they stray far from this way, will be a retrograde one — not only towards pagan morals but towards something worse; that there is nothing but disappointment, servitude and disgrace outside the mysteries, at once severe and sweet, which give them Mary for Mother.
O Mary, I offer you these lines that I have written on the day of your Immaculate Conception; I offer them to you and, at the same time, beg you to pardon me for them! I sense that your cult enfolds marvels more divine than those which my uncouth pen can trace. I have only contemplated the lower part — the earthly effects of this cult; but the heights, which touch on the secrets of heaven, remain shrouded in my ignorance. O Mother of men! you are, according to an ancient and holy locution, the eldest Daughter of the Creator, whose brow is hidden among the stars, while the fringes of your robe trail on the earth. I leave it to those whose gaze is purer than mine to interpret the twelve stars that crown your head. But I, poor narrator of your most humble glories, have tried only to show how the daughters of Eve, by touching the hem of your mysterious garment, have received an emanation of these perfumes of which the Spouse of the Canticle of Canticles speaks.
Others will say it much better than I, because the harp of Sion will be given to them; and the time is coming when Christian poetry, in the fervour of its resurrection, will tell of you things that neither the stained-glass windows of our old cathedrals, nor the Virgins of Raphael, nor the chords of Pergolesi have told. … This poetry will sing the mysteries of life and death, of ancient sorrow and future joys; because you have the secret of these things and their intimate harmony. O Mother of sorrow and of benediction, pure is the incense and fair are the flowers whose petals fall from the hands of virgins onto the paving stones of our churches, but higher than the perfume of flowers and incense rises the voice of every soul that feels straitened by this earth, that has the premonition of a world more beautiful, that wishes to breathe infinity, that encloses in the depths of all its chants a hidden prayer. It reaches to you, there where you see stars bloom under your feet like flowers of light in the limitless fields of space, and all creation swing like an eternal thurible.
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