There Is No Rose

The Mariology of the Catholic Church

Aidan Nichols

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781451484465
• eBook ISBN: 9781451494167
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Mary continues to be a source of theological interest and concern for Catholics and Protestants alike. For Catholics, Mariology was codified in a set of dogmas over the centuries; yet many Catholics remain unaware of the biblical, historical, and theological matrix that gave rise to the magisterial teaching. Protestants, with some exceptions, remain skeptical of Marianism in Catholic theology, viewing such as intrusions upon biblical doctrine and faith or unnecessary accretions threatening of sound Christian theology. Aidan Nichols, OP, attempts to address this "puzzlement" of Mary. Working through the biblical, patristic, and medieval sources, Nichols introduces readers to the robust scriptural and theological bases for the Church's celebration of Mary in its doctrine and liturgy, alongside the work of the Councils and the magisterium, to argue for the crucial relevance of Mary in the theological articulation of the gospel, the celebration and practice of the liturgy, and the sacramental life of the Church.

4

The Co-redemptrix

I mentioned in my opening chapter, à propos of Mary’s standing by the cross in the Gospel according to St. John, that theologies of Marian co-redemption come in two varieties: which we can term “minimalist’ and “maximalist.” The first kind, the minimalist one, which, leaving aside the disputed question of the word “co-redemptrix,” is non-controversial, locates Mary’s contribution to the redemption in her response to Gabriel at the Annunciation—drawing, then, for its scriptural basis on the Lucan infancy gospel (Luke 1:26–38). The second kind of theology of co-redemption, the maximalist version, is the trickier one. While not denying—rather, affirming—the co-redemptive significance of the Annunciation event, it ties the co-redemption climactically if not indeed essentially to Mary’s role in the drama of the cross—as portrayed in the Johannine passion narrative (John 19:25–27).

“Subjective” and “Objective” Theologies of Co-redemption

As we shall see, accounts of Mary’s contribution to the Atonement, and not simply to the incarnation, themselves fall into two main sorts, which can broadly be described as, respectively, objective and subjective in character. The subjective co-redemption-at-the-cross theme is closely linked to the topic of Mary’s role as dispenser of grace—itself more thoroughly attested in tradition, in both the Western and Eastern streams, though not for that reason more acceptable, necessarily, to classical Protestants. Subjective co-redemption can also be synthesized with the topic, more popular in our own day, of Mary and the church. On the subjective understanding of Mary’s contribution to the atonement, that contribution is restricted to a role in the transmission of the fruits of Christ’s sacrifice—whether that transmission be thought of as an exercise carried out within the heavenly communion of saints or by means of the earthly (yet certainly not for that reason purely natural) organism of the church, whose archetype the Virgin Mother is.

By contrast, for the objective theology of Marian co-redemption, our Lady’s role is not restricted to such transmission of the gains of the atonement to other human subjects (which is the sense of the word “subjective” in this context). Instead, her contribution enters into the overall constitution of Christ’s sacrifice as that sacrifice transpired in itself before God. This is a claim which, even in the Mariologically highly charged atmosphere of the 1940s and 50s, elicited no general consensus among Catholic theologians. Coming to a conclusion about it—broadly speaking, in its favor—will be the purpose of the present chapter.

I said that the distinction between a minimalizing and a maximalizing theology of the co-redemption turns, however, not mainly on this difference (subjective or objective?), because even a subjective theology of co-redemption, such as I just flagged up, is maximalizing when seen in an ecumenical context—as also, perhaps, when regarded against the background of the median or average Catholic theological consciousness in the post-conciliar epoch. To repeat: the distinction between a minimalizing and a maximalizing theology of the co-redemption turns principally on whether the co-redemption is linked to the Annunciation exclusively or to both the Annunciation and the cross.

The Relation of the Incarnation to the Passion

Much of the patristic material that has been adduced in favor of a maximalizing theology of co-redemption is, it must be confessed, ambiguous insofar as it is difficult to decide whether the writers concerned have the intention of pressing their case beyond the circumstances of Christ’s conception and birth to those of his passion and death as well. This is not a problem merely for those with Mariological questions to bring to the Fathers. It is a problem for patristic soteriology more widely. What do the Fathers mean when they describe the incarnation as a redemptive incarnation? Do they mean, firstly, redemptive in and of itself, irrespective of the Lord’s sacrificial death which was de facto its outcome? Or do they mean, secondly, redemptive insofar as, logically speaking, the incarnation was a necessary condition of that death, for clearly there could be no one to die on the cross unless that someone had first been born? Or do they mean thirdly and finally, that the incarnation was redemptive inasmuch as it was ordered, always and intrinsically, to the paschal mystery, so that all statements assigning redemptive value to the events of the incarnation—including, then, statements assigning co-redemptive value to acts contributing to the incarnation—require interpreting “staurologically,” that is, by reference to the cross?

Patristic Texts Relevant to Co-redemption

Basically, so far as Marian co-redemption is concerned, in the patristic period we are dealing with a small number of texts that patently regard the redemptively collaborative role of Mary at the Annunciation as recreated at the foot of the cross, and a larger number of texts where such a projection forward of her Annunciation role to a similar role at the atonement is a matter of the speculative interpretation of later theologians—though we should note that the word “speculative” should not be taken to signify “ill-founded,” much less unfounded or untrue. If among my trio of possibilities for how to take patristic talk of a redemptive incarnation we are inclined to select the third—for which the incarnation event is only redemptive when seen as intrinsically ordered to the cross—we might in that case be inclined to give ambiguous testimonies to a maximalist theology of Marian co-redemption the benefit of the doubt.

Thus the French Jesuit Bertrand de Margerie, a scholar who was equally at home in biblical studies and the world of the Fathers, in an essay on “Marian Co-redemption in the Light of Patristics,” is willing to press into the service of co-redemptive maximalism a number of just such ambiguous texts from the sub-apostolic period—for instance, from Ignatius of Antioch and Melito of Sardis. So, for example, when in his Letter to the Ephesians Ignatius writes: “The prince of this world ignored the virginity of Mary, her childbirth, and the death of the Lord, three resounding mysteries that were accomplished in the silence of God,”^[1] de Margerie interprets as follows:

The dying Lord, acting in the silence of the Father, is the Son who caused the virginity of Mary. The resounding mystery . . . of the virginal motherhood of Mary, seems to be not only a condition, willed by the Father and the Son, of the saving death of the Lord on the Cross, but also a free co-operation with it, and even a privileged and unique co-operation in his redeeming death.^[2]

One would hardly draw this large inference from Ignatius’s laconic text unless one held that the incarnation is always and in all respects ordered to the cross.

Similarly, when in his On the Pasch Melito calls Christ “the voiceless Lamb, the Lamb who was slain, born of Mary, the kind ewe lamb . . . he it was who rose from the dead and raised man from the depths of the grave,”^[3] de Margerie comments, “[B]y qualifying Mary as the ewe lamb, Melito signifies her participation in the sacrifice of the Lamb of God”—a statement that finds some support from the editor of the Sources Chrétiennes edition of Melito’s On the Pasch when he remarks that in calling Mary the ewe lamb Melito inevitably summoned up the idea not only of purity but also of sacrifice.^[4] Melito probably had in mind Old Testament texts from Leviticus and the Book of Numbers about a ewe lamb sacrificially offered.^[5]

From patristic texts which, partly owing to their brevity, are hardly self-interpreting, to say the least, we can move on to the smaller constituency where something akin to the later doctrine of Mary’s co-redemptive role at the cross is unambiguously in mind. The best example is a passage from St. Ambrose’s commentary on the Gospel of Luke which the fourth-century doctor was evidently pleased with because he reproduces it virtually in its entirety in his letter to the church of Vercelli.^[6]

His mother was there also, the zeal of her charity making her scorn the danger. . . . While the apostles were in flight, she stood before the Cross, animated by sentiments worthy of the Mother of Christ. She contemplated with love the wounds of her Son, for she was less preoccupied with the death of her child than with the salvation of the world. Perhaps indeed, knowing that by the death of her Son the redemption of the world was worked, she hoped to be able by her own death-to-herself to contribute some little to what was accomplished for the profit of all.^[7]

That final (albeit tentative) statement lacks the precision of later theology but it can hardly be denied that it constitutes an example of what I am calling the maximalist objective view.

Between the ambivalent and rather cryptic (because over-brief) comments of Ignatius and Melito, and Ambrose’s fairly fully-fledged and clear account comes, both chronologically and theologically, the work of St. Irenaeus who represents an intermediate line of thinking which will eventually be of great importance for the co-redemption theme, and that is the doctrine of Mary as the New Eve. The parallelism between Eve and Mary which this doctrine posits runs as follows: by investigating the role of Eve at our creation and fall we can work out the role of Mary at our recreation and rehabilitation. St. Paul’s account of Christ as the New Adam, reestablishing humanity in grace by his saving action, did not explicitly speak of a New Eve—this is the lacuna Irenaeus fills,^[8] anticipated by Justin and followed by innumerable later Fathers, shapers of the ancient liturgies and the subsequent doctors.^[9] St. Paul’s comparison between the old Adam and the New Adam, in having recourse to the Book of Genesis so as to throw light on the nature of Christ’s saving work, implicitly contained a further comparison: one, namely, between the first and the Second Eve. The plan of redemption, as announced in th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Epigraph
• Table Of Contents
• Preface
• The Blessed Virgin Mary in the New Testament
• The Divine Motherhood
• The Immaculate Conception
• The Co-redemptrix
• The Assumption
• Mediatrix of Graces
• Our Lady and the Church
• An Excursus on Eastern Orthodox Theology and Marian Art
• Select Bibliography
• Index of Names