Marian Theology

More specifically, the Marian Theology of Hans Urs Von Bathasar, specifically as found in a particular essay of his. I wrote this for a class on Systematic Theology and Eschatology. I really like this paper. it might end up as the basis for my Master's Thesis. I left in the footnotes and Bibliography, although few of you will want to delve further into this. But I hope you enjoy reading it!

Hans Urs von Balthasar’s work “Mary in the Church’s Doctrine and Devotion” begins with a discussion of the Western and Eastern Churches regarding Mary. In the Western church, Mariology is seen by some as a threat to ecumenicalism; in the Eastern Church, tension would arise “only if we curtailed veneration of Mary.”[1] He states both sides would benefit by building a “deeper understanding of the place of Mary in God’s saving work” and the dignity that results from that place.[2]

Mary is spoken of more frequently and with more detail than any other woman of Scripture, and always appears as “intimately connected”[3] to Jesus, through the Incarnation, his childhood, public life, Passion, and the early Church. Von Balthasar states that if we were to take a deeper look at all the mentions of Mary scattered throughout Scripture, we would:

“see that they form a network of relationships whose individual elements – as in a hall of mirrors – endlessly illuminate, augment, and deepen one another.”[4]

Those mirrors reflect Mary at every stage, at every mention: Mary and Angel Gabriel; Mary and infant in Bethlehem; Mary and Simeon; Mary at Cana; Mary at the Cross; Mary and Apostles at Pentecost. Mary is part of the story of the Incarnation and our salvation, both Queen of Heaven and lowly handmaid. In those mirrors, she reflects the Light of the World. Her own words of the Magnificat show us this: “No one who acknowledges the authority of Scripture can defy the claim of this statement (he has regarded his handmaid) and promise (henceforth all generations will extol her).”[5]

Von Balthasar points out that this paradox is in accordance with Christianity: “After all, even the Lamb of God who sits victorious on his Father’s throne will for all eternity be the ‘Lamb that was slain’” (Rev 13:8)”[6]

The “apparent tension”[7] in Mariology is matched in Christology. Jesus told his disciples “I am the light of the world.”[8] He alone has a right to that title, yet he applies it to his disciples in Matthew 5:14. Light and darkness are also part of the conversion of Paul, “whose own light is first wholly extinguished on the road to Damascus so that Christ can ignite his own light in him and make it powerfully illumine the whole earth.”[9] Mary’s giving over her whole will to God brings her into the light, and instills her as a part of the light.

Von Balthasar discusses Mary as mother of Jesus from the modern perspective of the bond between mother and child. Ancient opinion saw the father as the only influence on a child, with the mother having a passive role. We now understand humans are “intrinsically ordered to ‘being with’ ... other men ... he awakens to self-consciousness only through other human beings, normally through his mother.”[10] Thus, it is by those infant interactions with his mother than a child becomes self-aware. This happens in infancy: “Long before the child learns to speak, a mute dialogue unfolds between mother and child on the basis of the ‘being with’ that is constitutive of every conscious human being.”[11]

Unless we wish to take the position that Jesus did not grow and develop as any other human child, which would be to deny his full humanity, we must acknowledge: “that even Jesus himself has above all his Mother to thank for his human self-consciousness”[12]

As von Balthasar states, this connection between mother and child highlights Mary’s “singular purity.”[13] Mary taught Jesus “the meaning and depths of Israel’s religion.”[14] Her Magnificat shows how deep her own heart was in that religion, especially as she reaches back to Abraham. That is not to say that Jesus had no insight of his own: “True, Jesus’ personal prayer and the indwelling Holy Spirit disclosed this mission to him with increasing depth. Nevertheless, the human contribution—principally Mary’s contribution—to this process must by no means be underestimated; this, too, would offend against the learning process of a normal human child.”[15]

Jesus, fully human and fully divine, learns from his mother as any child does, in addition to any insight he has from his own divinity. Von Balthasar concludes “the singular spiritual life of this child entitles us to infer a correspondingly singular spiritual life for his Mother.”[16]

Von Balthasar equates Mary’s Fiat with that of Abraham and Israel: “Scholars are united in affirming that Mary’s final answer to the angel and, through him, to God, “behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord, let it be to me according to your word”, is the finally fulfilled expression of the faith of Abraham and of Israel as a whole.”[17]

Mary’s Yes reaches back to creation. Although it does not and cannot negate the disobedience of Adam and Eve, it opens the door to the salvation of Israel, and to our own salvation. Abraham was obedient to the point of being willing to sacrifice his son in proof of his faith. Von Balthasar reminds us that: “Abraham had performed the sacrifice spiritually, even if he had not had to carry it out materially.”[18]

Abraham is given back his son without that blow falling. Mary faces the full, complete loss of her son; he dies before her, dies condemned as if a criminal. Her fiat takes her to the ultimate sacrifice of faith: “on the Cross, under which she stands, no angel intervenes to save, and she must give back to God her Son, the Son of the fulfillment, in darkness of faith that she cannot comprehend or penetrate.”[19]

We know that her son is to be returned to life in three days, and that she is to have a short time with him before he returns to his father in glory. Mary did not know that at the cross, just as she did not know that when she said Yes. “The Word of God who wills to take flesh in Mary needs a receptive Yes that is spoken with the whole person, spirit and body, with absolutely no (even unconscious) restrictions, that offers the entirety of human nature as a locus for the Incarnation.”[20]

Mary’s Yes is given with full faith. She held back nothing. We cannot know what she understood of what was to be when Gabriel spoke to her. But we do know her assent was fully given. She did not say yes with the thought that it would make her great; she said yes because it reflected God’s will. She did not think about what she was doing for God, but what God was doing for her. Whether somehow Gabriel showed her everything that was to come, all the pain she would face, or whether she understood only that God was asking her consent, she gave full and complete acquiescence: “If Mary’s Yes had contained even the shadow of a demurral, of a “so far and no farther”, a stain would have clung to her faith and the child could not have taken possession of the whole of human nature.”[21]

Mary’s Yes is her statement of complete faith and trust in God. Von Balthasar points out how the dogma of the Immaculate Conception draws from that yes: “For anyone affected in some way by original sin would be incapable of such a guileless openness to every disposition of God.”[22]

The Immaculate Conception does not mean that Mary was incapable of sin, nor does it lessen her free will. Adam and Eve were both created without stain of original sin, yet it is their sin that is so passed on to us. Mary, born without stain of original sin, the first since creation to not carry that stain, was also born with free will. She freely consented to God’s plan, totally and completely giving herself to God. Von Balthasar points out that the Annunciation is “not only wholly christological; it is wholly trinitarian as well. It is strikingly obvious that its structure amounts to a first revelation of God’s tri-unity.”[23]

He goes one to show how Gabriel refers to each of the three persons of the Trinity in addressing Mary, first offering a greeting of the Lord, which she would understand to be Yahweh; he then tells her she will bear the “Son of the Most High” who will be the Messiah, and that it will happen by the power of the Holy Spirit overshadowing her.[24] Von Balthasar reminds us that the birth of Jesus does not start a new faith; rather, “It is the Abrahamic faith of the Old Testament that is being fulfilled and, for this reason, raised to the experience of the Trinity. This experience must therefore be the starting point of a New Testament, ecclesial experience of faith, and this starting point must be given in the very existence of Mary herself. For this reason there is, parallel to the life of Jesus, a life of Mary. Starting from the intimacy of the chamber of Nazareth, she is educated by her Son into the role that is bestowed on her at the Cross: to be the archetype of the Church.”[25]

Mary’s Yes took her life in a direction she did not expect: she will give birth to a son – and thus to the Church. Mary was Jesus’ first teacher, but she is not his only source of knowledge: “it was not she but his own knowledge of the Father’s mission in the Holy Spirit that showed him who he was and what he had to do.[26]

Her student is the actual Master, and now begins to bring his mother to the fullness of her role: “it is the Son who educates the Mother for the greatness of his task, cultivating in her the maturity she needs to stand under the Cross and, finally, to receive, at prayer within the Church, the universal gift of the Holy Spirit.”[27]

Von Balthasar states this education “is a pitiless process.”[28] He characterizes all the interactions we have between the adult Jesus and his mother as “more or less brusque rejections,[29] as at the wedding at Cana: “When the wine failed, the mother of Jesus said to him, ‘They have no wine.’ And Jesus said to her, O woman, what have you to do with me? My hour has not yet come.”[30]

Pius XII states we must “set forth the literal sense of Scripture.”[31] In context and taken through eyes of faith, Mary responds calmly: “Mary has this faith—this is made especially clear in the scene at Cana, in which she says without wavering, ‘Do whatever he tells you.’”[32]

Mary’s calmness may indicate that she understands that Jesus is continuing to teach her what she needs to know and do to fulfill her role. Von Balthasar gives another example from Mark 3, when Jesus is told his mother and brethren is outside and wishes to see him, and Jesus responds dismissively. This refusal to see Mary: “seems almost unbearable to us. ‘Here are my mother and my brethren! Whoever does the will of God is my brother, and sister, and mother’ (Mk 3:34-35). ... who understands his meaning? Did Mary herself understand it? We have to accompany Mary in spirit as she makes her way home and try to imagine her state of mind. The sword gnaws at her soul; she feels as if bereft of her inmost self, as if the point of her life has been drained away. Her faith, which at the beginning received so many sensible confirmations, is plunged into a dark night. It is as if the Son, who sends her no news about what he is doing, has run away from her, yet she cannot simply let him go away: she has to accompany him, full of dread, in her night of faith.”[33]

Von Balthasar’s description of Mary’s pain here is not from the scriptures. This dismissal by Jesus may be one of many swords which will pierce her, or she may understand Jesus’ words. Perhaps she thought of Simeon telling her “a sword will pierce through your own soul.”[34] Perhaps she never thought think the sword would be wielded by her Son. For Von Balthasar, Jesus acts this way for a reason: “But how else would she have become ready to stand by the Cross, where not only her Son’s earthly failure, but also his abandonment by the God who sends him is revealed. She must finally say Yes to this, too, because she consented a priori to her child’s whole destiny.”[35]

Mary lives out the Beatitudes. She is humble in spirit, accepting her role in salvation history. She is meek, looking not for earthly praise and position. Yet when she mourns, her comfort comes not from her Son, but from others: “And as if to fill her bitter chalice to the brim, the dying Son expressly abandons his Mother, withdrawing from her and foisting on her another son: ‘Woman, behold, your son’ (Jn 19:26). This gesture is usually understood primarily as evidencing Jesus’ concern about where his Mother will live after he is gone (in which case Mary obviously has no other biological children; otherwise it would be superfluous and inadmissible to commit her to the disciple of love). This must not, however, lead us to overlook a second motif: just as the Son is abandoned by the Father, so, too, he abandons his Mother, so that the two of them may be united in a common abandonment. Only thus does she become inwardly ready to take on ecclesial motherhood toward all of Jesus’ new brothers and sisters.[36]

At the foot of the cross, Mary’s public role is not that of the mother of the Savior; rather, she is the mother of the convicted criminal dying on a cross of shame. At the same time, she is the mother of the Savior and of the church which is about to come into existence.

Von Balthasar introduces Mary as the archetype of the Church: Mary our model, model of the Church. “The Son places Mary in the care of one of the apostles and thus inserts her into the apostolic Church. In so doing, he gives the Church her center or apex: an inimitable, yet ever-to-be-striven-for embodiment of the new community’s faith, a spotless, unrestricted Yes to the whole of God’s plan for the salvation of the world. In this center and apex, the Church is the bride “without spot or wrinkle”, the immaculata, as Paul expressly calls her (Eph 5:27), not only in the eternity to come, but already now.[37]

Mary does not have this position for her own grandeur; she has this position to inspire us and guide us toward her Son. She is the center we grow around; she always orients us to her Son and our eschatological goal. Mary is not divine, but by virtue of being indispensable to the Incarnation, she has, in a particular sense, a place in the trinitarian mystery: “she speaks her perfect ecclesial Yes to the person and work of her Son, who himself cannot be understood except as one of the divine Trinity.”[38]

Our participation in the life of the Church is perfected through Mary. We receive sacraments as our imperfect selves, and thus cannot obtain from them what the Immaculate Virgin can:

“Does any Christian really know what a sacrifice it is to offer the Father the Son as the world’s Redeemer after the Consecration? But those who contemplate Mary’s sacrificial gesture get a glimmer of why, despite all objections, we can and must describe the eucharistic celebration as a sacrifice (not of Christ alone, but also of the Church). And does any one of us really receive the Son in Holy Communion as perfectly as he offers himself? We are right to pray, “Look not on our sins, but on the faith of your Church”: on that perfect act of faith that was nowhere as undivided as in Mary.”[39]

Von Balthasar shows Mary’s unique role as both virgin and mother compares to the church:

“Because Mary and the Church are virginal, because both live only for union with Christ in the Holy Spirit, because both—to speak the language of the Old Testament—refuse adultery with idols or—to put it in contemporary language—resist the seduction of ideology, they are fruitful. Fruitful through God and his grace in them, through the loving and hoping faith with which they respond to this grace, through the gift of participation in God’s will to save all men. And thus the image of Mary’s mantle of grace can be applied in a certain sense to the virginal and maternal fruitfulness of the Church.”[40]

Von Balthasar reminds us that our pilgrim church on earth is made up of mankind, both saints and sinners alike, and reminding us that we freely confess ourselves as sinners. A church of sinners needs to look beyond this earthly realm for help, and so:

“The Church as we find her concretely is nowhere totally equal to her tasks, not even in the representatives of the ministerial office. For this reason, the Church is forced to look for help, above all to her Lord, but also to her own archetypal response to the Lord, to the one who alone was able to say an unconditional Yes. Mary remains a person whom we can pinpoint precisely in history, a person who was a member of the Church, who can therefore join all the members of the Church in responding to grace, and who can train them all to say Yes in the right way. But as a historical person she nonetheless remains the chosen one, the Virgin Mother of Christ who was taken out of the sinful context of all the children of Adam and placed at her Son’s side, so that together with him she could be all the more deeply in solidarity with all those to be redeemed.”[41]

Von Balthasar ends this doctrinal section telling us that together, Jesus and Mary:

“both illustrate vividly how God and man relate to each other in the covenant the eternal God wants to make with man: man has the pure grace of God to thank for his ability to correspond to God’s offer; but God, in his sovereign freedom, deigns to become dependent upon man insofar as he created man free and in the covenant of grace takes that created freedom seriously.”[42]

The second part of von Balthasar’s treatise, subtitled “Mary in the Church’s Devotion,”[43] tells us that to heed the Gospels, we must not only take Mary’s scenes seriously, but must also piece those scenes into a mosaic to fully see Mary: “... Marian piety, if it means to be Catholic, must not isolate itself; it must always be embedded in, and ordered to, Christ (and thus to the Trinity) and the Church.”[44]

We cannot have a full understanding of Mary outside of her relationship with her Son. We see this in Marian devotion, where Mary is asked not to grant us our prayer, but to intercede for us to God: “the prayers and pilgrims are fully aware of the overall dogmatic context; they feel themselves to be a part of the Church as she intercedes and implores grace; and they turn to the one whose intercessory power with God they—rightly—judge to be the highest.”[45]

Von Balthasar cautions us that while we venerate Mary, just as pious Jews of the Old Testament venerated the patriarchs, we must always be cautious to not confuse that veneration with “the adoration shown to God alone.”[46] In her humility, Mary, who is truly worthy of our veneration, turns us to God: “Mary shows her utterly unselfconscious awareness of this when in the Magnificat she extols the great deed that God has done to her, the deed all generations will acknowledge by calling her the blessed woman par excellence.”[47]

Von Balthasar discusses Pope Paul VI apostolic letter Marialis Cultus, which depicts Mary as “the model of true worship of God”[48], and states veneration of Mary: “must take its bearing from the Trinity, Christ, and the Church; it must have a firm biblical basis and thus be ecumenically acceptable; finally, it must also take into account the distinctive anthropological accents of the present.”[49] Mary’s true place in salvation history is one who, while not a member of the Trinity, has a particular connection to the Trinity and to her son:“The veneration of Mary is the surest and shortest way to get close to Christ in a concrete way.”[50]

Von Balthasar gives us examples of Marian prayers that lead us to her Son and to the mystery of our salvation. The first part of the Hail Mary is taken directly from Scripture; the second half includes her title of “Mother of God.” The Angelus intersperses short Scripture couplets and the Hail Mary. “Every Christian who prays the Angelus knows that the enfleshment of the Word concerns him just as immediately, that it also has to take place in him if he would bear the name of Christian.”[51]

Von Balthasar calls the Rosary “a prayer that weaves everything pertaining to the history of salvation into Marian prayer.”[52] This description of the Rosary is perhaps truer today than it was during von Balthasar’s lifetime, due to the addition of the Luminous Mysteries, which make present his public ministry.

Von Balthasar calls Mary’s Fiat “the perfect human echo”[53] of Jesus’ own submission to the will of the Father, reminding us that Mary’s Yes makes the Incarnation possible:

“The center of Mary’s Yes lies in the very center of the Son, but it does not disappear into it.... Christ’s Yes and Mary’s Yes are fully intertwined."[54] When we venerate and imitate Mary, we venerate and imitate the very model of Christian perfection.

Finally, von Balthasar discusses Mary’s place in the Communion of Saints. Mary is the Mother of the Church, yet she is also our sister; Queen of Heaven yet member of the Communion of Saints. Each of us, as members of the communion of saints, have a connection to Mary: “Mary, as the purest of all creatures, irradiates what is her own least of all. Everyone within the communion of saints has something Marian about him.”[55]

Von Balthasar discusses various Marian apparitions, which have occurred throughout Church history. As he points out, since the beginning in the nineteenth century, Mary has stepped “forward in an especially emphatic way.”[56] For example, at Lourdes:

“It astonishes us that the ‘beautiful lady’ gives the simple child a sort of self-definition that the child does not understand at all but constantly repeats to everyone she meets: ‘I am the Immaculate Conception.’[57]

The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception had been solemnly defined just a few years previously. Von Balthasar points out that it may appear to be out of character for Mary to bring attention to herself in this way, but we must realize: “Mary’s humility is not that of the contrite sinner; rather, it is a blithe, unselfconscious, childlike humility that would never get the idea that anything she had was her property instead of God’s gift.”[58]

Mary does not declare herself the Immaculate Conception to praise herself, but to praise God for that gift. Von Balthasar says: “she shows herself and defines herself at the archetypal Church, whose form we have to take as our pattern.[59]

With our eyes on our goal of the beatific vision, we do well to follow that pattern.

To defined Mariology’s place in theology, we must refine our definition of theology beyond the broad study of God. Donum Veritatis states that “the object of theology is the Truth which is the living God and His plan for salvation revealed in Jesus Christ.”[60] With that in mind, it is easy to see that we cannot fully discuss salvation history without discussing Mary. Any discussion of Mary is a discussion of faith: “Little is told us in Scripture concerning the Blessed Virgin, but there is one grace of which the Evangelists make her the pattern, in a few simple sentences, of Faith.”[61]

Athanasius also shows us the Mary is at the center: “Therefore God the Word Himself is Christ from Mary, God and Man; not some other Christ but One and the Same; He before ages from the Father, He too in the last times from the Virgin....”[62]

Mary’s place in salvation history certainly places Mariology as an integral locus of theology. Von Balthasar refers to Mariology’s place in theology: “Now, New Testament revelation is definitive in an eschatological sense. Accordingly, both aspects mentioned here, doctrine and devotion, must themselves have a kernel of definitiveness, and the history of Mariology and Marian devotion unequivocally confirms that this kernel does in fact exist.”[63]

Mary’s life is one of perfectly submitting her will to God. Her Fiat is itself an ultimate example of the theological virtues of faith, hope and cruciform love. The apostles chose Judas’ replacement from: “one of the men who accompanied us during all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John until the day he was taken up from us.”[64]

Mary, for her part, may not have walked with them all of those same days, but she is a part of Christ’s journey, from the Incarnation through the Ascension. In many ways, Mariology brings us to Christology. Von Balthasar expresses states this: “This quality of Mary's Yes is wholly a function of the requirements of Christology.”[65]

A few sentences later, he makes an additional argument, one that points to the Christological significance of the Virgin Birth: “Her virginity, on the other hand, guarantees a christological fact: Jesus acknowledges only one Father, the one in heaven, as his own. This becomes evident from the response he gives as a twelve-year old child in the Temple ("Behold, your father and I have been looking for you anxiously"; "Did you not know that I must be in my Father's house?" [Lk 2:49]). No man can have two fathers, as Tertullian pithily and accurately says; therefore, the Mother has to be a virgin.”[66]

Von Balthasar makes good use of scripture in this work, but his subject requires delving into other categories of truth. For example, he moves beyond specifically defined truths and Tradition to consider the modern viewpoint of a mother’s influence on her child. However, he never uses this new information in a way that contradicts the known truths. He fulfills Griffiths’ description of theology’s act of being “self-consciously and intentionally responsive”[67] to the Word of God. Von Balthasar fully conforms to Pseudo-Dionysius’ statement that “with our minds made prudent and holy, we offer worship to that which lies hidden beyond thought and beyond being,”[68]

Von Balthasar makes clear that while we venerate Mary as Mother and Queen, we do not worship her: “Veneration of a human being must in no way be confused with the adoration shown to God alone”[69]

Feingold states “The formal object of theology is God insofar as He is known through Revelation and reason, but theology also considers all of creation insofar as it is created by God, governed through His providence, and called to return to Him in the sanctification of men and society.”[70] When we consider Mary in this context, we see that how integrated she is in the object of theology. She is not God. Like all of us, she is a creature made by God, yet she is apart from us by virtue of her Immaculate Conception. She is Mother of God, by virtue of her Fiat and by her role in the Incarnation. She is for us our link between our humanity and her Son. Mariology and Christology are in many ways companion branches of theology. However, as Feingold further states: “God’s Revelation allows our knowledge of Him to penetrate to His intimate life and to His gratuitous acts in salvation history.”[71]

We could not know the Incarnation had it not been divinely revealed. We would not know of Mary’s place in the Incarnation had it not been divinely revealed. As Aquinas states, sacred doctrine: “is speculative rather than practical because it is more concerned with divine things than with human acts....”[72]

This, then, is where we reach the limit of Mariology, for we cannot speak of Mary without speaking of the Incarnation, and we cannot speak of the Incarnation without speaking of God. Von Balthasar specifically tells us that Christ and the triune God are at the center of Christian truths, “whereas Mary belongs on the side of the graced creature.”[73] Mary is not the center, but is our model for the theological virtues. Aquinas states that “a virtue is said to be theological from having God for the object to which it adheres,[74]” and it is proper to hope for eternal happiness both for ourselves and others. Aquinas says “absolutely speaking, faith precedes hope.[75]” Mary shows perfect faith, for else why would she be chosen to be the Mother of God? Her hope for eternal happiness encompasses all of mankind, as she assents to the will of God and becomes part of the mystery of the Incarnation. She shows us cruciform love as she follows her Son on his journey to the cross.

Von Balthasar discusses the tension between those who fear Mariology “threatens the hierarchy of Christian truths”[76] and those who say “of Mary never enough.”[77] The difference in attitude between the Eastern and Western Churches is an example of how different theological backgrounds and beliefs shape us. In his Regensburg Address, Pope Benedict XVI discusses Professor Theodore Khoury’s report of a dialog between the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian, regarding the truth of Christianity and Islam. The Emperor disagreed with the Persian on an issue. Pope Benedict quotes Khoury: “For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent.” [78]

While each found the other’s position to be incorrect, they each spoke correctly within their own theological backgrounds and beliefs. Similarly, the Eastern and Western Churches may approach to Mary differently, but neither is incorrect, as their differences do not approach the level of dogmatic difference. However, as Feingold reminds us, Dei Verbum asserts that the authors of the bible “put in writing everything He [God] wanted and only what He wanted.”[79] The Bible is our true and complete source of God’s self-revelation. God chose to reveal Mary’s role in the Incarnation. We must remember that, although Mary is not equal to God, she is to be held in high esteem. The Western Church might think the Eastern Church praises her too much, but to take the position that veneration of Mary takes away from the worship of God ignores Mary’s own understanding of her position, which, as von Balthasar reminds us, she herself sets forth for us in her Magnificat.

We find Marian characterizations in New Testament descriptions of how we should live as Christians. One example is 1 Corinthians 1, which is often thought of simply as a romantic reading for weddings. Taken on a superficial level, it is a lovely description of what spousal love ought to look like of how actions are meaningless without love; it has an eschatological bend: “At present we see indistinctly, as in a mirror, but then face to face. At present I know partially; then I shall know fully, as I am fully known.”[80]

Speaking in tongues or having the gift of prophecy are nothing unless combined with love. Mary, in her love for and obedience to God, shows us how we should apply this text to our own love of God. Mary completely gave herself to God’s will: “If Mary's Yes had contained even the shadow of a demurral, of a "so far and no farther", a stain would have clung to her faith and the child could not have taken possession of the whole of human nature.”[81]

Mary’s Fiat shows her complete love, complete faith, and complete hope in God, as she freely turns her life over to Him. Von Balthasar gives us a work of beauty, comprised of integrity, harmony, and proportionality. He speaks both of the objective component of theology, The Faith, and the subjective, responsive component which is our own faith. He does not veer from established truths; he brings his own viewpoint, but does not bring us outside the truth. It views heaven as our horizon and is formed in and by love.

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[1] Hans Ur von Balthasar, "Mary In The Church's Doctrine And Devotion", in Mary The Church At The Source (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005), 99 [2] Ibid, 100. [3] Ibid, 100. [4] Ibid, 100. [5] Ibid, 100. [6] Ibid, 100-101. [7] Ibid, 101. [8] John 8:12 (Revised Standard Version, 2nd Catholic Edition). [9] von Balthasar, 101. [10] Ibid, 102. [11] Ibid, 103. [12] Ibid, 103. [13] Ibid, 103. [14] Ibid, 103. [15] Ibid, 103. [16] Ibid, 104. [17] Ibid, 104. [18] Ibid, 104. [19] Ibid, 104. [20] Ibid, 104. [21] Ibid, 105. [22] Ibid, 105. [23] Ibid, 106. [24] Ibid, 106. [25] Ibid, 107. [26] Ibid, 107. [27] Ibid, 107. [28] Ibid, 107. [29] Ibid, 107. [30] John 2:4. [31] Lawrence Feingold, Faith Comes From What Is Heard (repr., Steubenville, Ohio: Emmaus Academic, 2017), 342. [32] von Balthasar, 108. [33] Ibid, 108-109. [34] Luke 2:35. [35] von Balthasar, 109. [36] Ibid, 109-110. [37] Ibid, 110. [38] Ibid, 111. [39] Ibid, 112. [40] Ibid, 112. [41] Ibid, 113-114. [42] Ibid, 114. [43] Ibid, 114. [44] Ibid, 115. [45] Ibid, 115. [46] Ibid, 116. [47] Ibid, 116. [48] Ibid 116. [49] Ibid, 117. [50] Ibid, 117. [51] Ibid, 118. [52] Ibid, 118. [53] Ibid, 119. [54] Ibid, 119 -120. [55] Ibid, 122. [56] Ibid, 122. [57] Ibid, 122. [58] Ibid, 123. [59] Ibid, 123. [60] Donum Veritatis, p 8 http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/ rc_con_cfaith _doc_19900524_theologian-vocation_en.html. [61] John Henry Newman, Fifteen Sermons (repr., Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), p 312. [62] Athanasius. Discourse IV, Four Discourses Against the Arians. Fathers, Church. The Complete Ante-Nicene, Nicene and Post-Nicene Collection of Early Church Fathers: Cross-Linked to the Bible (p. 2785). Amazon.com. Kindle Edition. [63] von Balthasar, 101. [64] Acts 1:21-22. [65] von Balthasar, 105. [66] Ibid, 105. [67] Paul J. Griffiths, "Theological Disagreement: What It Is & How To Do It", (Lecture, repr., San Diego, CA, 2014). p 3. [68] Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Colm Luibheid and Paul Rorem, The Complete Works (repr., New York: Paulist, 1987). 589B. [69] von Balthasar, 116. [70] Feingold, 123. [71] Ibid, 93. [72] St. Thomas Aquinas, "SUMMA THEOLOGIAE: The Nature and Extent of Sacred Doctrine (Prima Pars, Q. 1)", Newadvent.Org, 2020, https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1001.htm. [73] von Balthasar, 99. [74] St. Thomas Aquinas, "SUMMA THEOLOGIAE: Hope, Considered in Itself (Secunda Secundae Partis, Q. 17, A. 6)", Newadvent.Org, 2020, https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3017.htm. [75] Ibid. [76] von Balthasar 99. [77] Ibid [78] "Apostolic Journey to München, Altötting And Regensburg: Meeting with The Representatives of Science in The Aula Magna of The University of Regensburg (September 12, 2006) | BENEDICT XVI", Vatican.Va, 2006, http://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/speeches/2006/september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20060912_university-regensburg.html. [79] Feingold, 331. [80] 1Cor 13:12. [81] von Balthasar 105