Mother of God

MOTHER OF GOD. A title given to St. Mary. In the fifth century there sprang up a fierce controversy as to the manner in which the divinity and humanity were united in Christ. Theodore of Mopsuesta, and, following him, Nestorius, Patriarch of Constantinople, explained the mystery by saying that a child was born like other children of men, and that subsequently the divinity united itself to Him. Christ, therefore, consisted of two persons, one human, one divine. The error that they made was in not distinguishing between persons and natures. Our Lord has two natures, divine and human, but they co-exist in one Person.

This truth was insisted on with over-great vehemency and violence by Cyril of Alexandria and the Council of Ephesus. Resolved to bring home their error to their adversaries, and to stamp it as heresy, the orthodox party adopted the word Theotokos, which Nestorius had already refused to accept, as a test of the true doctrine, just as the Council of Nicsca had adopted the word homoousios, or consubstantial, as a test whereby to try and to reject Arianism. The word Theotokos means, " She who brought forth Him who was at His birth God." The title was applied to the Lord’s mother, not at all with the purpose of doing honour to her—that was not thought of—but of maintaining the true doctrine respecting the unity of Person in Christ.

But the days were becoming evil. Since the gradual extinction of paganism, men had lost their horror of paying adoration to dead men and women, and the word Theotokos, becoming the watch word of Cyril’s party against Nestorianism, soon was misinterpreted and misapplied. Men forgot that it had been insisted on only to teach a truth regarding Christ’s Person, and looked upon it as a title of honour, devised by the Council, for St. Mary.

Already St. Mary had been venerated by Gnostics and Collyridians, who had composed the apocryphal gospels of the Birth and of the Death of Mary, and had offered her cakes in token of adoration. But the Church for four centuries had looked with detestation and contempt on these heretical books and practices. "The whole thing," said Bishop Epiphanius, "is foolish and strange and is a device and deceit of the devil. Let Mary be in honour. Let the Lord be worshipped" (Haer., lxxxix.). But, as a result of the Nestorian controversies, veneration of the Theotokos began to spring up within the Church also.

The loose translation of the word as "Mother of God," gives to the unlearned the idea that Christ in some way derived His divine as well as His human nature from her. The Madonna and Child became a symbol in art of Anti-Nestorian orthodoxy, and soon the mother overshadowed the Child.

So far was Christian sentiment perverted through a mistaken apprehension of the purpose of a word which in itself bad no superstitious or idolatrous meaning, that in the sixth century the Gnostic and Collyridian fables respecting St. Mary were brought bodily over into the Church, without protest or remonstrance, by Gregory of Tours, and from him were handed on to Andrew of Crete (a degenerate countryman of Epiphanius) in the seventh century, and again from him to John Damascene in the eighth century, after which they became the basis of what Lord Lindsay has called the "Christian mythology" of the Middle Ages.

This seems to have been the course by which the worship of St. Mary, recognised and condemned by the Church for four centuries as heretical, became the faith of the later Church—a worship which, increasing age by age, has grown to the portentous dimensions that we at present witness in the practice of the modern Roman and (in less degree) Greek Churches, and threatens to supersede, if it has not superseded, love and devotion to Christ as the Saviour and Redeemer, the Way, the Truth, and the Life, all which titles are attributed to St. Mary by the appointed Doctor of the Roman Church, St. Alfonso de’ Liguori, in his Glories of Mary. Leo XIII. was not a whit behind St. Alfonso in his devotion to her, and "Marian Congresses in Italy and France are day by day pushing her worship into wilder and wilder extremes. [Frederick Meyrick]

So far from Theotokos being identical in meaning with "Mother of God," the Liturgy of St. James (Neale, Greek Texts, p. 65), calls her ten Theotokon…kai metera tou Theou emon. Neale, in his supplementary volume of Translations, p. 55, indeed translates both phrases by the same words, and says in a footnote, " It is impossible in English, without tautology, to repeat the metera tou Theou emon after having already given the Theotokon." But that is "taking away the key of knowledge " with a vengeance. The "Office of the Prothesis," also given by Neale (Translations, 7th edit., p. 185), speaks of the "parents of God, Joachim and Anna;" were they also Theotokoi?

At first the Latin Church accepted the Greek word without translating it like "Amen," or "Jehovah." Pope Leo changed the word into Genetrix. Ephraim of Theopolis translated the phrase back again into Meter Theou, adding that "Leo was the first person to call Mary the Mother of God ; which none of the Fathers before him had done." The Roman edition of the Councils changed the word theotokos into the newly coined " Mother of God," and Baluzius the editor says apologetically, " Who doubts that this is a good interpretation ? " (Tyler's Worship of the Virgin, p. 319). [J. T. Tomlinson]