The Divine Motherhood of the Virgin Mary

  

In Eastern traditions, the Virgin Mary is known in Greek as "Theotokus," which literally translates to "Mother of God." Yesterday, I read an explanation on EWTN about this. It explains that any mother's motherhood encompasses our entire being; that is, even though we are both body and soul, we don't have one mother for our body and another for our soul. Similarly, Mary, having given birth to the Son of God, who is both true God and true man, Jesus, is the mother of his entire being, and consequently, she is the Mother of God.

Here is a translation of the explanation given by James Cardinal Gibbons, Archbishop of Baltimore from 1877 to 1921. It was published by EWTN in English in an email message about a novena that I received (this is a version translated back from the translation in Spanish and may differ from the original):

When we call the Blessed Virgin Mary the Mother of God, we affirm our belief in two things: First, that her Son, Jesus Christ, is truly man; otherwise, she would not be a mother. Second, that He is truly God; otherwise, she would not be the Mother of God.



In other words, we affirm that the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, the Word of God, who in His divine nature is eternally begotten of the Father and consubstantial with Him, was begotten again in the fullness of time by being born of the Virgin, thus taking upon Himself, from her womb, a human nature of the same substance as His own.


But it can be said that the Blessed Virgin Mary is not the Mother of the Divinity. She had no part, and could not have had any part, in the generation of the Word of God, because that generation is eternal; her motherhood is temporal. He is her Creator; she is His creature. Make of her, if you will, the Mother of the man Jesus or even of the human nature of the Son of God, but not the Mother of God.


I will answer this objection by posing a question. Did the mother who bore us have any part in the production of our soul? Was this noblest part of our being not the work of God alone? Yet, who would for a moment dream of saying "the mother of my body" and not "my mother"?


The comparison teaches us that the terms father and son, mother and child, refer to persons and not to the parts or elements of which persons are composed. Therefore, no one says, "the mother of my body," "the mother of my soul"; but in every respect, "my mother," the mother of me who lives and breathes, thinks and acts, one in my personality, even though uniting in her a soul created directly by God and a material body derived directly from the maternal womb.

Likewise, insofar as the sublime mystery of the Incarnation can be reflected in the natural order, the Blessed Virgin, under the shadow of the Holy Spirit, communicating to the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity, as mothers do, a true human nature of the same substance as her own, is therefore truly and genuinely His Mother. It is in this sense that the title of Mother of God, denied by Nestorius, was reclaimed for her by the General Council of Ephesus in 431; in this sense, and in no other, has the Church called her by that title.