There Is No Rose: The Mariology of the Catholic Church

Please give my Amazon review a helpful vote - https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3QKSJ2KTR7PP1?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_srp

As a Catholic, I am not very Marian.

I certainly know and pray the Hail Mary. I know and accept that Mary is the Theotokos, the Mother of God, as defined by the Third Ecumenical Council at Ephesus. I have no problem with the doctrines of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption of Mary, but I draw the line before Co-Redemptrix and Mediatrix. Marian spirituality has not been a substantial portion of my spiritual life.

This book has gotten me rethinking my laissez faire attitude.

The author, Aidan Nichols, systematically walked me through the Marian doctrines, explaining how each one fit in and presupposed other doctrines, building up logically from the undisputed Marian facts to the doctrines that I considered to be out of bounds. Thus, we start with greeting of the angel:

“The usual English translation in Catholic Bibles influenced by the (Latin) Vulgate text of Scripture is “Hail, full of grace,” but far from being an overly maximalist translation (as much Protestant exegesis once assumed), investigation of how the Greek Fathers and the Byzantine liturgical tradition understood those two keywords has stimulated philologists to look at them more carefully and to find their Latin (and thus English Catholic) rendering, if anything, insufficiently enthusiastic.”

And:

“The other key term in the opening of the angelic salutation, kecharitômenê, is also theologically pregnant, even more so than the Vulgate's gratia plena, “full of grace,” would suggest. As philologists have pointed out, the verb from which this adjective is formed belongs to a family of Greek verbs all of which have the ending omicron omega, oô, verbs that have in common the expressing of causal action. The best translation, accordingly, is, “You who have already been transformed by grace.” That is a pointer to what the Catholic dogmatic tradition will come to call the “immaculate conception.” It is a point perceived in sura 19 of the Koran: “The angel said, “O Mary, indeed God has favoured you and made you immaculate, and chosen you from all the women of the world.'”

It seems to require a high level of obtuseness to think that this greeting has no theological significance.

And there are other things in the text that make you wonder if the minimalist interpretation makes sense. As Nichols asks, what was Mary doing at the cross? Why does Luke record a prophecy about Mary that “a sword shall pierce your soul” as if implying that Mary would suffer in some special way at the Passion, certainly because of her motherhood, but more than merely as a mother, since, otherwise, why mention in it?

The Holy authors of the Gospels never wrote anything that merely had a surface meaning. There is always depth in the holy text.

In the course of his explanation, Nichols offers the following:

“In the terms favored by the subsequent Thomist tradition, Mary, uniquely of all human persons, inhabits the hypostatic order, the order of the Trinitarian persons themselves, and not just the order of grace—the gift of a share by knowledge and love in the divine life. A better way to put this would be to say that it is in Mary's belonging to the hypostatic order that she possesses her unique mode of inhabiting the order of grace. But then the question at once presents itself: could one so placed not be uniquely sanctified? Could she fail to have an incomparable degree of moral and spiritual perfection?”

and:

“In the second chapter we saw that the most important of the Marian doctrines, and the first to be defined, was the divine motherhood: Mary is the Theotokos as proclaimed at Ephesus in St. Cyril's great moment of triumph. So Kilian Healey's essay quite properly begins here. In “The Assumption among Mary's Privileges,” Healey considers how to evaluate the relation of assumption belief to the divine motherhood understood as, in his words, “not only the physical act of conception and generation of the Son of God, but the supernatural and meritorious consent which preceded [that] conception and the consequent quasi-infinite dignity that necessarily accompanied it”—a quasi-infinite dignity (the phrase echoes words of Thomas in the Prima Pars) which in Thomist Mariology, building as this does on a Cyrilline Christology, has its explanation in the way Mary at the Annunciation entered the hypostatic order and not just the order of grace, since at that moment it began to be true of her person that she was directly related to one of the Trinitarian hypostases themselves.”

Nichols makes the point that while a minimalist view of Mary's role in salvation history focuses on the Incarnation, a maximalist view of Mary includes the Passion as part of Mary's involvement in salvation history. Thus, why was Mary at Calvary? Why is there a prophecy of a sword piercing Mary's heart? The answer is that Mary entered into the hypostatic union - the union of the persons of God - because she was directly related to one of those persons - it was her flesh that provided the flesh of the Incarnation. Moreover, believers generally believe that God sanctifies that which God comes into contact with. Since Mary bore God for nine months, and her flesh became God's flesh, this sanctification is of a unique order.

So, what was Mary doing at Calvary? She was joining in Christ's suffering.

The interesting thing about Christianity is how it insists that humanity is involved in the salvation of humanity. Christ was both humanity and divinity and Christ's perfect obedience redeemed humanity. Under this model, it seems that God wants to associate mankind with God's action of salvation. The maximalist approach to Mary's involvement seems logically consistent with this understanding.

Obviously, this view will be horrifying to those who insist that Mary was a mere “vessel,” randomly selected as a kind of incubator, and then discarded as a sinful, flawed woman, but that view seems to depict a horrifying view of God.

This maximalist understanding is consistent with the doctrine of hyperdulia. I am presently reading Aquinas's Summa Theologica, II-II, Q. 81 (Religion) and 106 (Gratitude). Aquinas views both religion and gratitude as elements of justice. Justice, in turn, is giving to someone else what they are due. Religion involves justice because God is entitled to the highest honor one can offer another - worship. Those less than God - parents and respected mentors - are also entitled to honor, but not worship (which is typified by sacrifice.) Gratitude is the virtue that responds to a gift graciously given.

Conversations about Mary often turn on what honor she is due. Protestants who have the “mere vessel” attitude are willing to acknowledge the biblical injunction that “all generations will call me blessed,” but “blessed” here means “lucky” as in “lucky to have won a lottery for no particular reason.”

On the other hand, if Mary is part of the hypostatic order and she united her suffering with Christ's at the passion because she was part of the hypostatic order, then justice requires that the rest of humanity positively owes something to Mary. Humanity owes something to Mary, in any event, if her role was merely limited to the Incarnation. In fact, humanity owes more to Mary than to any merely human person in all of history.

Justice, therefore, means that we owe gratitude and honor to Mary in a way that is not owed to any other human.

In short, this book got me thinking in a new and fruitful way about the Mother of God.