Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary

"Mary is a constant presence in all the different Christian religious traditions. She seems to be universally, genuinely popular. She is, in many ways, a headache for the church and for theologians. She gets very little reference in the Bible. She doesn’t get much of a look-in in the early church. The way I see it—and this emerges out of Miri’s book—is that there’s a certain set of challenges that arise out of the concept of Christ Incarnate, that is Christ as both human and God. This is a concept that emerges in the 1st or 2nd century and there’s disagreement among different Christian traditions. Eventually there is an authoritative understanding that Jesus was a god-man. As soon as you establish that as a fundamental premise of the faith, it raises all sorts of questions about Mary. What is her role in this? She gave birth to him but he’s a god and she’s mortal. How can that be? There are all sorts of logical problems that arise out of the god-man paradox that need to be dealt with. I still don’t think they’ve been dealt with because they are irreconcilable. But what it means is that Mary, amongst all the saints, is uniquely and pre-eminently standing at a junction between cultural and biological reproduction. She’s a mother and we all know how biological reproduction works. But, uniquely, she gave birth biologically without the physical process of conception. Culturally she’s also this one exception, who conceived by a different means. This introduces and opens the door for stories—and is somehow figured in the biggest story of all, the story of Jesus Christ. When you think about it that way, she’s a pivotal figure and you can’t escape from that. The great thing about Miri’s book is its beautiful, rich serving of an almost comprehensive reference—a cultural ethnography—of all the different ways that Mary has been imagined, of all the different kinds of fault-lines and paradoxes and contradictions that she sits at the very junction of; how different religious traditions, different communities, artists, churchmen, parishioners, through different material cultures, through different rituals, through different kinds of emotional experiences, have woven Mary into a Christian tradition. Yes. It starts off talking about the early sources—the lack of them. Many of them are apocryphal, they’re not officially recognised, there are different interpretations available. She’s Jewish but a Christian; she’s a virgin but she’s a mother; she’s mortal but she’s the mother of a god. In some ways, she’s the antidote to Eve, she redeems rather than betrays humanity. Where Eve pointed the way out of paradise, the Virgin Mary points the way back—to Jesus. There is the whole tradition in the Byzantine church of the Hodegetria: depictions of Mary holding Christ on her lap and pointing to him. She is the one who is the way to Jesus. I don’t think she’s ever been made a saint. She’s considered a saint and she appears in all kinds of theological discussions. Some church figures and theologians like a strong version of Mary, almost a fourth dimension to the Trinity. Others, who are considered heretical, such as Arius, would consider her to be not at all important and needs to be put back in her place. She appears in the Gospels but very fleetingly. She’s in the background of little aspects of Christ’s life but there’s no big role. She’s written in almost as a kind of a clause, an abstraction. In the early church, there is a big debate over what Mary is. One of the responses is she’s the ‘Theotokos,’ the ‘Godbearer’. Some of the heretics, or those who lost out in this debate, would argue that she can’t be, because she’s human: she’s the ‘Christotokos,’ the bearer of Christ, who is the human aspect of Jesus. That would appear to be a much more realistic and scaled down, sensible version of what Mary is. But the ‘theotokos’ is the one that wins through and gets asserted repeatedly at ecumenical councils. She acquires these titles and she gets a reputation as being a particularly special person to go to for help. When all other saints fail, she’ll help. She’ll redeem even the worst of sinners, even at the 11th hour. She is. Though there are Catholic theologians in the late Middle Ages trying to rein in this fanaticism about Mary. The Reformation introduces a much more domestic version of Mary. There’s still veneration for her, but they are seeing this great edifice of a corrupt Catholic church propped up by something for which there’s no Biblical, scriptural authority. We all like our mothers. That’s where we might start with this—regardless of what strict theological nuance we might interpret or load her up with. Mother figures are important to us all. That’s what makes her a popular figure, I think."