Doing my Dominican Duty: providing historical/intellectual ammo for any struggle you might have with fundamentalist relatives over the holidays!
The Solemnity of the Mary, Mother of God, celebrates the decision taken at the Council of Ephesus
(431) against the teaching of the Patriarch, Nestorius, who held that a
human person could not be said to have given birth to God. The
Patriarch of Alexander, Cyril, argued that Mary, as the chosen
instrument of the Incarnation, conceived and gave birth to the Word,
Jesus, fully human and fully divine, one person with two natures. Mary,
then, is properly understood to be “Theotokos,” God-bearer.
Cyril wrote (in part) to Nestorius:
"And
since the holy Virgin brought forth corporally God made one with flesh
according to nature, for this reason we also call her Mother of God, not
as if the nature of the Word had the beginning of its existence from
the flesh.
For In the
beginning was the Word, and the Word was God, and the Word was with
God, and he is the Maker of the ages, coeternal with the Father, and
Creator of all; but, as we have already said, since he united to himself
hypostatically human nature from her womb, also he subjected himself to
birth as man, not as needing necessarily in his own nature birth in
time and in these last times of the world, but in order that he might
bless the beginning of our existence, and that that which sent the
earthly bodies of our whole race to death, might lose its power for the
future by his being born of a woman in the flesh. And this: In sorrow
you shall bring forth children, being removed through him, he showed the
truth of that spoken by the prophet, Strong death swallowed them up,
and again God has wiped away every tear from off all faces. For this
cause also we say that he attended, having been called, and also
blessed, the marriage in Cana of Galilee, with his holy Apostles in
accordance with the economy. We have been taught to hold these things by
the holy Apostles and Evangelists, and all the God-inspired Scriptures,
and in the true confessions of the blessed Fathers."
Cyril published twelve anathemas
against Nestorius. Cyril's letters and his anathemas became the
primary texts from which the council fathers drew up their canons for
the council.
The first anathema reads: “If
anyone will not confess that the Emmanuel is very God, and that
therefore the Holy Virgin is the Mother of God (Θεοτόκος), inasmuch as
in the flesh she bore the Word of God made flesh [as it is written, The
Word was made flesh] let him be anathema.”
The fifth anathema reads: “If
anyone shall dare to say that the Christ is a Theophorus [that is,
God-bearing] man and not rather that he is very God, as an only Son
through nature, because the Word was made flesh, and has a share in
flesh and blood as we do: let him be anathema.”
As is the
case with all Marian dogma and doctrine, we are immediately directed
back to Christ as our Lord and Savior. No Marian dogma or doctrine is
declared or defined in isolation from Christ. She is always understood
to be an exemplar for the Church and a sign through which we come to a
more perfect union with Christ. Though our Blessed Mother is rightly
revered and venerated, she is never worshiped as if she were divine.
She is rightly understood as the Mediatrix of All Graces in so far as
she mediated, through her own body, the conception and birth of Christ,
who is Grace Himself. In no sense are we to understand our Blessed
Mother as the source of grace. Rather, she was and is a conduit through
which we benefit from the only mediation between God and man, Christ.
In her immaculate conception and assumption into heaven, our Blessed
Mother is herself a beneficiary of Christ's grace. As such, she cannot
be the source of our blessedness, our giftedness in Christ.
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