Mary Through the Centuries
Jaroslav Pelikan
Number of quotes: 36
Book ID: 148 Page: 29
Section: 5D
Three of the Gospels- Matthew, Mark, and John, but not Luke- did not speak in later chapters about “brethren” of Christ, as did apostle Paul. The apparently obvious and natural conclusion from this would seem to have been that after the miraculous conception of Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit, Mary and Joseph went on to have other children of their own.
Quote ID: 3203
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 148 Page: 48
Section: 3C1
The most important intellectual struggle of the first five centuries of Christian history- indeed the most important intellectual struggle in all of Christian history- took place in response to the question of whether the divine in Jesus Christ was identical with God the Creator.
Quote ID: 3204
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 148 Page: 55
Section: 2D2
Throughout history, and especially during the fourth and fifth centuries, the basic category for thinking about Mary was that of paradox: Virgin and Mother; Human Mother of One who is God, Theotokos.
Quote ID: 3205
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 148 Page: 56
Section: 2D2
In the fifth century, the fear of mingling the divine and human natures in the person of Christ led Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople, to stipulate that because it was only the human nature that had been born of her, Mary should be called not Theotokos, which gave the blasphemous impression that she had given birth to the divine nature itself and which therefore sounded like the title of the mother deities of paganism, but Christotokos, “the one who gave birth to Christ.”
Quote ID: 3206
Time Periods: 5
Book ID: 148 Page: 57
Section: 2D2
And, as he argued elsewhere, that is what she was on the icons: Theotokos and therefore the orthodox and God-pleasing substitute for the pagan worship of demons. At the same time, the defenders of the icons insisted that “when we worship her icon, we do not, in pagan fashion Hellēnikōs, regard her as a goddess thean but as the Theotokos.”That had come a long way even from the consideration of her as the Second Eve. It was probably the greatest quantum leap in the whole history of the language and thought about Mary, as we are considering it in this book. How and why could she have come so far so fast? At least three aspects of an answer to that historical question are suggested by the texts: the growth of the title Theotokos; in connection with the title, the rise of a liturgical observance called “the commemoration of Mary”; and, as a somewhat speculative explanation for both the title and the festival, the deepening perception that there was a need to identify some totally human person who was the crown of creation, once that was declared to be an inadequate identification for Jesus Christ as the eternal Son of God and Second Person of the Trinity.
Pastor John notes: John’s Note: John of Damascus
Quote ID: 3207
Time Periods: 345
Book ID: 148 Page: 57
Section: 2D2
The origins of the title Mother of God are obscure. In spite of the diligence of Hugo Rahner and others, there is no altogether incontestable evidence that it was used before the fourth century.
Quote ID: 3208
Time Periods: 345
Book ID: 148 Page: 62
Section: 3C1
The Arian heresy, in the words of Henry Gwatkin, “degraded the Lord of Saints to the level of his creatures.” What it ascribed to Christ was more than it was willing to ascribe to any of the saints but less than it ascribed to the supreme Deity.Pastor John notes: John’s Note: Amen!
Quote ID: 3209
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 148 Page: 63
Section: 3C1
According to the letter of the Arians to Alexander of Alexandria, the Logos was “a perfect creature of God, but not as one of the creatures,” since he was the creature through whom God had made all the other creatures; therefore the “superiority” of this creature over all the other creatures was that he had been created directly whereas they had been created through him.Pastor John notes: John’s Note: Amen
Quote ID: 3210
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 148 Page: 64
Section: 2D2,3C1
What we have seen so far in the Mariology of Athanasius would seem to indicate that, in a sense quite different from that implied by Harnack, “what the Arians had taught about Christ, the orthodox now taught about Mary,” so that these creaturely predicates did not belong to Jesus Christ, the Son of God, but to the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God.
Quote ID: 3211
Time Periods: 34567
Book ID: 148 Page: 67
Section: 2D2,2C
One of the most profound and most persistent roles of the Virgin Mary in history has been her function as a bridge builder to other traditions, other cultures, and other religions. From the Latin word for “bridge builder” care the term pontifex, a priestly title in Roman paganism. In the form pontifex maximus it became one of the terms in the cult of the divine Roman emperor, and for that reason it was disavowed by Christian emperors already in the fourth century. Not long thereafter it was taken up by Christian bishops and archbishops.
Quote ID: 3212
Time Periods: 2345
Book ID: 148 Page: 78
Section: 2E1
The title “Black Madonna” acquired special significance when it came to be applied to the celebrated icon of Mary at Jasna Góra in the Polish city of Częstochowa, attributed to Saint Luke the icon painter, which is the most revered sacred image in Central Europe and the object of countless pilgrimages (see p. viii, above).
Quote ID: 3213
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 148 Page: 97/98
Section: 2D2
Augustine identified the Virgin Mary as “nostra tympanistria,” because, like Miriam before the children of Israel, she led the people of God and the angels of heaven in the praise of the Almighty. {3} And thousands of English-speaking Protestant congregations in this century-most of them without realizing that they were carrying on this typology of Miriam and Mary, and many without realizing that they were addressing Mary at all-have attributed to her a role as the adornment of worship and leader of the heavenly choir, in the words of John A.L. Riley’s hymn of 1906, “Ye Watchers and Ye Holy Ones”:O higher than the cherubim,
More glorious than the seraphim,
Lead their praises, Alleluia!
Thou Bearer of th’ eternal Word,
Most gracious, magnify the Lord, Alleluia!
. . . which was to say that when the angels of heaven, the cherubim and seraphim, praised God, they were led by one whom the Archangel Gabriel had hailed as “most gracious” ....
Quote ID: 3214
Time Periods: 03457
Book ID: 148 Page: 104
Section: 2D2
For Christ himself had said about John the Baptist: “Never has there appeared on earth a mother’s son greater than John the Baptist.”No mother’s son was greater than John the Baptist, but one mother’s daughter was greater than any mother’s son or daughter, namely, Mary the Mother of God, whom Gregory of Nyssa earlier in the same treatise called “Mary without stain [amiantos].”
Quote ID: 3215
Time Periods: 04
Book ID: 148 Page: 105
Section: 2D2
Anders Nygren saw the idea that “the human is raised up to the Divine” as one that the Greek church father Irenaeus shared “with Hellenistic piety generally.” And there were clear echoes of Hellenism in the Christian version of the doctrine.
Quote ID: 3216
Time Periods: 047
Book ID: 148 Page: 109
Section: 2D2
The Mother of God whom it was permissible to depict on an icon was the Queen of Heaven.Pastor John notes: John’s Note: Jeremiah
Quote ID: 3217
Time Periods: 01
Book ID: 148 Page: 113
Section: 2E2
Christian asceticism certainly predated Christianity.
Quote ID: 3218
Time Periods: 12
Book ID: 148 Page: 119
Section: 2D2
Jerome felt qualified to say: “I beseech my readers not to suppose that in praising virginity I have in the least disparaged matrimony, and separated the saints of the Old Testament from those of the New, that is to say, those who had wives and those who altogether refrained from embraces of women.” Nevertheless, Jerome did in fact go on to disparage matrimony- and women in general.….
The virgin’s aim is to appear less comely; she will wrong herself so as to hide her natural attractions. The married woman has the paint laid on before her mirror, and, to the insult of her Maker, strives to acquire something more than her natural beauty. Then comes the prattling of infants, the noisy household, children watching for her word and waiting for her kiss.
Quote ID: 3219
Time Periods: 5
Book ID: 148 Page: 125
Section: 2D2
During the High Middle Ages of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,….
The sheer number of references to her in poetry and prose, together with her ever-deepening prominence in the visual arts, would make it difficult not to agree with Otto von Simson’s judgment that “the age was indeed the age of the Virgin.”
….
If the systematic clarification of the title Mediatrix was the principal objective expression of Mariology and the chief theological contribution to the Christian teaching about Mary during this period.
Quote ID: 3220
Time Periods: 567
Book ID: 148 Page: 130
Section: 2D2,2C
As “the Queen of Angels, the ruling Lady of the world, and the Mother of him who purifies the world,” she could acquire such titles as these: Mother of Truth; Mother and Daughter of Humility; Mother of Christians; Mother of Peace; My Most Merciful Lady. She was also called, in a term reminiscent of Augustine, the City of God.….
What set the devotion and thought of this period apart from what preceded it was the growing emphasis on the office of Mary as Mediatrix. The title itself seems to have appeared first in Eastern theology, where she was addressed as “the Mediatrix of law and of grace.”
Quote ID: 3221
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 148 Page: 131
Section: 2D2
It was, however, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries that it achieved widespread acceptance. The title was a means of summarizing what had come to be seen as her twofold function: she was “the way by which the Savior came” to humanity in the incarnation and the redemption, and she was also the one “through whom we ascend to him who descended through her to us..., through whom we have access to the Son..., so that through her he who through her was given to us might take us up to himself.” The term Mediatrix referred to both of these aspects of Mary’s mediatorial position.….
Thus she had become “the gate of Paradise, which restored God to the world and opened heaven to us.”
Quote ID: 3222
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 148 Page: 131
Section: 2D2
“O woman marvelously unique and uniquely marvelous,” Anselm prayed, “through whom the elements are renewed, hell is redeemed, the demons are trampled under foot, humanity is saved, and angels are restored!” The reference to Mary’s restoration of the angels was an allusion to the idea that the number of the elect would make up for the number of the angels who had fallen; Mary was seen as the one through whom “not only a life once lost is returned to humanity, but also the beatitude of angelic sublimity is increased,” because through her participation in salvation the hosts of angels regained their full strength.Pastor John notes: John’s Note: What?
Quote ID: 3223
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 148 Page: 132/133
Section: 2C,2D2
Mary’s cooperation in the plan of salvation helped to explain the puzzling circumstance in the Gospel narratives, that after his resurrection Christ had not appeared first to his mother: “Why should he have appeared to her when she undoubtedly knew about the resurrection even before he suffered and rose?”….
This title Mediatrix, however, applied not only to Mary’s place in the history of salvation but also to her continuing position as intercessor between Christ and humanity.
….
The remembrance of Mary’s “ancient mercies” aroused in a believer the hope and confidence to “return to thee [Mary], and through thee to God the Father and to thy only Son,” so that it was possible to “demand salvation of thee [Mary].” The consummation of the believer’s glory was the awareness that Mary stood as the Mediatrix between him and her Son; in fact, God had chosen her for the specific task of pleading the cause of humanity before her Son. And so she was “the Mother of the kingdom of heaven, Mary, the Mother of God, my only refuge in every need.”
Quote ID: 3224
Time Periods: 47
Book ID: 148 Page: 134
Section: 2D2
It was perceived as an appropriate honor and an authentic expression of her position in the divine order when Mary was acclaimed as second in dignity only to God himself, who had taken up habitation in her. The ground of this dignity was the part she had taken in the redemption, more important than that of any other ordinary human being.
Quote ID: 3225
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 148 Page: 154
Section: 2D2
But even such Reformers as Martin Luther, who in 1525 protested vigorously against this iconoclasm, protested no less vigorously against what Luther called the “abominable idolatry grewliche Abgӧtterey” of Medieval Mariology, an idolatry that was, he said, “not praising Mary, but slandering her in the extreme and making an idol of her.”
Quote ID: 3226
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 148 Page: 154
Section: 2D2
Article XIX and XX of Ulrich Zwingli’s Sixty-Seven Articles of 1523 declared that because “Christ is the only Mediator between God and us,” it followed “that we do not need any mediator beyond this life but him.” For, in the words of the Heidelberg Catechism, “He is our Mediator.” Also quoting the words of the New Testament, “There is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.”
Quote ID: 3227
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 148 Page: 155
Section: 2B2
Article XXI of the Augsburg Confession of 1530, written by Luther’s colleague Philip Melanchthon, entitled “The Cult of the Saints,” reinforced this polemic by defining Christ as “the only high priest, advocate, and intercessor before God. He alone has promised to hear our prayers.” Although Melanchthon’s Apology of the Augsburg Confession did “grant that the saints in heaven pray for the church in general, as they prayed for the church universal while they were on earth,” that did not justify the practice of invoking them for particular needs.
Quote ID: 3228
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 148 Page: 155
Section: 2B2
Thus the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England of 1571 listed the “inuocation of Saintes” as the last in a list of “Romishe Doctrines” that were “a fonde foolish thing, vainly inuented, and grounded vpon no warrantie of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the worde of God.”
Quote ID: 3229
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 148 Page: 156
Section: 2E6
Luther asserted, “The legends or accounts of the saints which we had under the papacy were not written according to the pattern of Holy Scripture.” And elsewhere he expressed the wish: “Would to God that I had the time to cleanse the legends and examples, or that somebody else with a higher spirit would venture to do it; they are full, full of lies and deception.” Particularly deceptive, of course, were legends about biblical saints, and above all about Mary, for they crowded out the testimony of Scripture about the very qualities that had made them saints in the first place.
Quote ID: 3230
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 148 Page: 191
Section: 2D2
Augustine had listed the great saints of the Old and New Testaments, who had nevertheless been sinners. Then he continued: “We must make an exception of the holy Virgin Mary, concerning whom I wish to raise no question when it touches the subject of sins, out of honor to the Lord. For from him we know what abundance of grace for overcoming sin in every particular ad vincendum omni ex parte peccatum was conferred upon her who had the merit to conceive and bear him who undoubtedly had no sin.”
Quote ID: 3231
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 148 Page: 192
Section: 2D2
During the High Middle Ages no one spoke more articulately or eloquently about Mary than one of the great preachers of Christian history, Bernard of Clairvaux.….
Bernard was adamant. In his famous Epistle 174, addressed to the canons of the cathedral of Lyons, he insisted: “If it is appropriate to say what the church believes and if what she believes is true, then I say that the glorious [Virgin] conceived by the Holy Spirit, but was not also herself conceived this way. I say that she gave birth as a virgin, but not that she was born of a virgin.
….
Quote ID: 3232
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 148 Page: 193
Section: 2D2
Yet, the virgin birth of Christ from one who had herself been conceived and born in sin did not seem to resolve the question of how he could be sinless in his birth if his mother was not.….
But Bernard also added the important stipulation that he was prepared to defer to the judgement of Rome on the entire question.
Quote ID: 3233
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 148 Page: 195
Section: 2D2
The most formidable argument that Bernard of Clairvaux and then Thomas Aquinas, as well as their later followers, had directed against the immaculate conception of Mary was the charge that if she had been conceived without original sin, she did not need redemption- which would detract from “the dignity of Christ as the Universal Savior of all.”
Quote ID: 3234
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 148 Page: 197
Section: 2D2
Jean Gerson took the affirmation the rest of the way, paraphrasing the Apostles’ Creed in Middle French: “I believe that in the sacrament of baptism God grants, to every creature who is worthy of receiving it, pardon from original sin, in which every person born of a mother has been conceived, with the sole exceptions of our Savior Jesus Christ and his glorious Virgin Mother.”
Quote ID: 3235
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 148 Page: 199
Section: 2D2
That would not come until 8 December 1854, with the bull Ineffabilis Deus of Pope Pius IX, which declared: “The doctrine which holds that the Most Blessed Virgin Mary was preserved from all stain of original sin in the first instant of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege of Almighty God, in consideration of the merits of Jesus Christ, Savior of the human race, has been revealed by God and must, therefore, firmly and constantly be believed by all the faithful.” And less than four years later, on 25 March 1858, at the French village of Lourdes in the Pyrenees, a “lovely lady” appeared to the peasant girl, Bernadette Soubiroux, and announced, in the vernacular dialect: “I am the Immaculate Conception.”
Quote ID: 3236
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 148 Page: 201
Section: 2D2
Nevertheless, one event in the history of Mary at the precise middle of the twentieth century, together with its aftermath, demands inclusion as the final- or, at any rate, the most recent- stage in that history: the issuance, on 1 November 1950, of the papal bull Munificentissimus Deus. In this solemn proclamation, which presumably carried the stamp of the papal infallibility decreed by the First Vatican Council, the belief in the bodily assumption of the Virgin Mary, long held to be true among the faithful and by theologians, was promulgated as a dogma of the Roman Catholic church by Pope Pius XII: “that the immaculate Mother of God, Mary Semper Virgo, when the course of her earthly….
Quote ID: 3237
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 148 Page: 204
Section: 2D2
life was run, was assumed in body and soul to heavenly glory.” Thus it became obligatory in 1950 for Roman Catholics to believe and teach that, as the Spanish Marian mystic sister María de Jesús de Agreda had said in her Life of the Virgin Mary already in 1670, Mary “was elevated to the right hand of the Son and the true God, and situated at the same royal throne of the Most Blessed Trinity, whither neither men nor angels nor seraphs have before attained, nor will ever attain for all eternity. This is the highest and the most excellent privilege of our Queen and Lady: to be at the same throne as the divine Persons and to have a place in it, as Empress, when all the rest of humanity are only servants and ministers of the supreme King.”
Quote ID: 3238
Time Periods: 7
End of quotes