Unanimous recognition of Mary as "Mother of God", on earth as in heaven

The Holy Scriptures had prophesied the coming of a "Woman" (Gen 3:15) and a Virgin Mother (Is 7:14): "The young woman, pregnant and about to bear a child" (Mi 5:2) who will be called "Emmanuel", that is to say "God with us" (Is 7:14), "strong God" (Is 9:5), etc. At the dawn of the new times, Elizabeth, "filled with the Holy Spirit" (Lk 1:41), was the first to identify this "woman" with the Virgin Mary, whom she recognizes as "Mother of God": "And how does this happen to me, that the Mother of my Lord should come to me?" (Lk 1:43).

The title of Theotokos or Dei Genitrix, literally "She who begets God", commonly identified with Mater theou, "Mother of God" was solemnly confirmed at the Council of Ephesus in 431, after having been contested by Nestorius, the Patriarch of Constantinople at the time. This perfect formulation, which in fact speaks firstly of Jesus, her Son, "true God and true man", also sheds a very special light on the mystery of his Mother. Although Mary was a humble creature like us, she was elevated, as Saint Thomas Aquinas teaches, to "a certain infinite dignity, derived from the infinite good that is God". "The distance between the Mother of God and the servants of God is infinite", says Saint Bernard. This is in fact the most fundamental title of the Virgin Mary, which expresses very concisely and accurately the special and unique bond she has, for all eternity, with the Incarnate Word.

Representation of the Council of Ephesus, Notre-Dame de Fourvière in Lyon / © CC0

Reasons to believe:

Unanimous enthusiasm followed the dogmatic proclamation by the Council of Ephesus that Mary is "Mother of God": it was embraced and celebrated in all the apostolic Churches of East and West in the years and centuries that followed, generating countless prayers, icons, tributes, cathedrals, churches and shrines dedicated to the Theotokos, even by Martin Luther, who saw in Mary the "most precious jewel, whom you can never praise enough".

"From now on will all ages call me blessed" (Lk 1:48), the Virgin Mary herself prophesied, for "the Mighty One did wonders for me" (Lk 1:49) through this divine maternity accepted by his "humble handmaid" (Lk 1:48): and it indeed happened as Mary had foretold, in every century, in every Church and on every continent, for no creature has ever been so glorified on the face of the earth, as Saint Louis de Montfort pointed out in his Treatise on True Devotion (8 and 9).

Heaven has endorsed this title of "Mother of God" attributed to the Virgin Mary: there has never been any divine intervention to oppose or criticise this title. On the contrary, numerous apparitions, communications and revelations from God throughout the history of the Church have never ceased to magnify and encourage this truth and devotiont everywhere and always (the Akathist Hymn, Constantinople, Saint Mary Major, Le Puy-en-Velay, Guadalupe, Maria of Agreda, all the modern apparitions, etc.).

This is the case with Mount Athos, when the extraordinary words of the "Axion Estin" were miraculously given from Heaven: "It is truly worthy to praise you, holy Mother of God, ever blessed and immaculate, Mother of our God. You, more venerable than the Cherubim and incomparably more glorious than the Seraphim; who, without losing your virginity, gave birth to the Word of God; you, truly Mother of God, we magnify."

This extraordinary dogmatic title, "the foundation of all others" according to Benedict XVI, which honours the Virgin Mary more than any other creature, comes therefore from both God and men.

Summary:

This oldest Christian prayer, found on a 3rd-century papyrus in Egypt, says: "We take refuge in the shelter of your mercy, holy Mother of God. Listen to our prayers as we walk towards you". These astonishing words were written long before the Council of Ephesus (5th century).

But how can a created being be considered the Mother of the uncreated, eternal God? Faith teaches us that God made everything, and that no one made Him. How could one of His creatures be considered His mother? The proposition seems surprising, to say the least, and we need to explain how the first Christians understood and justified it.

First, Saint Ignatius of Antioch (d. 107), the third bishop of Antioch after Saint Peter and Evodius and a direct disciple of Saint Peter and Saint John, reacted against the gnostics by stating loud and clear, in his letters to the Ephesians and the Smyrniotes, the two essential truths to be held: Jesus was born of Mary, and Jesus is God. Then Saint Justin, in his Apology, wrote around 155 AD that the Son of God was born. But it was St Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons between around 180 and 200, who, in Against Heresies, defended this revealed truth, then professed only by his two predecessors, with a rational discourse based on Sacred Scripture. Like Tertullian in 197 in his Apologeticum, Irenaeus rationally justified Mary's divine maternity on the basis of Revelation (i.e. Sacred Scripture and the oral tradition handed down by the Apostles and collected by the Church).

The testimonies of Origen, an Alexandrian exegete who died in 254, and of Pope Saint Felix I (d. 274) point in the same direction. The Byzantine historian Socrates of Constantinople even notes in his Ecclesiastical History (VII, 32) that, in a now-lost part of his commentary on St Paul's epistle to the Romans, Origen is said to have written about the Marian title of θεοτόκος, translated as "Mother of God" - literally "she who gave birth to God". We can therefore conclude that Mary's divine maternity was clearly affirmed in the summary of the Catholic faith that we call the Creed, referred to at that time as the "Symbol", even though the very term θεοτόκος was not commonly found in the works of ecclesiastical writers until the early fourth century.

Shortly afterwards, St Athanasius, Patriarch of Alexandria (d. 373), was the first, in the third of his Discourses against the Arians, to expound on the theological principle underlying the expression "Mother of God": since, he says, the bodily actions of Jesus Christ must also be attributed to the Word, the second person of the Holy Trinity, and since the body of the Word was made by Mary, it is true to say that the Word was born of Mary.

Saint Hilary, bishop of Poitiers (d. 367), Saint Cyril, bishop of Jerusalem (d. 386), Saint Gregory, bishop of Nazianzus (d. 390) and Saint Zeno, bishop of Verona (d. 390), followed suit. Saint Jerome (d. 421) calls Mary the "Mother of the Son of God" (On the Perpetual Virginity of the Blessed Virgin, 2). Saint Ambrose calls her "Mother of Christ according to the flesh" and "Mother of God" (On Virgins, II, 1, 10, 13), adding evocatively that "the Mother of the Lord, pregnant with the Word, is full of God" (Exposition of the Gospel according to Saint Luke, II, 26). In a homily for his congregation, Saint Augustine speaks of Mary as the "Mother of the Creator" (Sermons, ser. 186, 1). In a concise formula, he uses the expression "Creator of Mary and yet born of Mary" (ibid., ser. 187, 4); writes of the "Mother of the Almighty Son" (ibid., ser. 188, 4) and "Mother of the Son of the Most High"(ibid., ser. 51, 18). Comparing the conception of John the Baptist with that of Jesus, Saint Augustine states that Elizabeth conceived only a man, while Mary conceived God and a man. (ibid., ser. 289, 2).

How was Jesus born of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary? Saint Augustine explains that his human nature was united to the Word in the womb of Mary, so that human nature and the Word are but one Person in Jesus Christ (De Trinitate, XV, 26, and Sermons, ser. 189, 2 and 192, 3).

We know that Nestorius, who was Patriarch of Constantinople from 428 until the Council of Ephesus, where he was deposed on 11 July 431, opposed the title "Mother of God",wishing to replace it with "Mother of Christ". But the real father of Nestorianism was Theodore of Mopsuestis, Nestorius' teacher in Antioch. Rabboula, bishop of Edessa, who took part in the Council of Ephesus, wrote to St Cyril about him: "There appeared in the province of Cilicia a bishop by the name of Theodore, a skilful and eloquent orator, who preached from the pulpit the common doctrine, accepted by the people, and hid in his writings snares of perdition. At the head of some of his books, he threatened with anathema the reader who would show these writings to others. In the first place, he taught that the Blessed Virgin was not truly the Mother of God, because God the Word could not be born after the manner of man. This error, which until now had been concealed in the shadows, God by a just judgement allowed Nestorius to bring out in public, so that it would not grow stronger with time."

In what does this error consist? Was it an error concerning the Virgin Mary and her maternity? No, it was actually an inaccurate judgement about Christ, as a letter from Cyril of Alexandria, shows: "Theodore's works on the Incarnation contain blasphemies more unbearable than those of Nestorius. He is the father of Nestorian error." In fact, the bishops gathered in 553 for the Second Council of Constantinople (Fifth Ecumenical Council) rejected Theodore's opinion that there are two persons in Jesus Christ: he is is mistaken, they wrote, the one who "admits the one hypostasis of Our Lord Jesus Christ as if this implied the meaning of several hypostases, and tries by this means to introduce about the mystery of Christ two hypostases or two persons, and that after having introduced two persons, he speaks of one person according to dignity, honour or adoration, as Theodore and Nestorius wrote in their folly...."

Unlike Theodore and his pupil Nestorius, Christ's contemporaries - and the early theologians who followed them - never saw in Jesus Christ two persons, two selves, but rather a single person who spoke to them of the Kingdom of heaven, walked and ate with them and performed miracles. In Christ, there is no other subsistent subject - that is, no other person - than the divine Word, the second Person of the Holy Trinity, the eternal Son of the Father. It is therefore he who comes into existence according to this new nature for him, which is his human nature. It is the second Person of the Trinity who is born of Mary, in the flesh. Mary is therefore the mother, not of a humanity without a subject, but of this divine Person who is the Word. By giving birth to Him, Mary gives Him human existence. Through Mary, the Word becomes man, just as every child owes his life to his mother.

The consequence of the intimate union between human nature and the Person of the Son of God is what theology calls "communication of idioms": Everything said about one can be attributed to the other. The Incarnate Word is a man like us (a subject - divine in his case - possessing human nature); like us, he became man through a woman who, by giving him this nature, is truly his mother. By personally assuming this nature, the Word made it his own, just as he also made his own the woman who gave it to him, namely his mother. By taking on human nature, the Word raised it in himself to the divine. By choosing a mother, He introduced this woman into a state that no saint will ever be able to reach: He established her a world apart, from which flow all her other privileges, the greatest of which is her immaculate conception.

In short, Mary is not the Mother of the divinity: that assertion would not make sense. Nor is she the Mother of the Word according to the divinity, which would not make much sense either. She is the Mother of the Word according to humanity, because she enabled Him to exist in a human nature as any human mother does for her child.

This rich and extraordinary formulation, made explicit at Ephesus and in the rest of the Church's Tradition, has been unanimously accepted everywhere and has contributed to making the Virgin Mary the most praised creature in the world, as Saint Louis de Montfort notes in chapters 8 and 9 of his Treatise on True Devotion: "Every day, from one end of the earth to the other, in the highest heaven, in the deepest abyss, everything preaches, everything publishes the admirable Mary. The nine choirs of angels, men of all sexes, ages, conditions, religions, good and evil, even devils, are obliged to call her blessed, whether they like it or not, by the force of truth. All the angels in heaven cry out to her incessantly, as St Bonaventure says: Sancta, sancta, sancta Maria, Dei Genitrix et Virgo; and offer her millions of times every day the Angelic Salutation: Ave, Maria, etc., prostrating themselves before her, and asking her for the grace of receiving a command from her. Even St Michael, says St Augustine, though the prince of all the heavenly court, is the most zealous in giving her honor and having others give her all kinds of honours, always waiting to have the honour of going, at her word, to render service to one of her servants. The whole world is full of her glory, especially among Christians, where she is proclaimed the protector and guardian in many kingdoms, provinces, dioceses and cities. Many cathedrals are consecrated to God under her name. There is not a church without an altar in her honour; there is not a region or canton without one of her miraculous images, where all kinds of ills are cured and all kinds of good obtained. So many brotherhoods and congregations in her honour! So many religions under her name and protection! So many brothers and sisters of all brotherhoods and so many men and women religious of all religions who publish her praises and proclaim her mercies! There is not a little child who, in stammering the Hail Mary, does not praise her; there are hardly any sinners who, in their very hardness, do not have some spark of confidence in her; there is not even a devil in hell who, in fearing her, does not respect her".

Contrary to popular belief, Protestants do not all deny the greatness and importance of the Virgin Mary. Marthin Luther, in his "Commentary on the Magnificat", wrote these words that Catholics and Orthodox can agree with: "May the sweet Mother of God herself obtain for me the spirit of wisdom so that I may expound and explain this canticle of Mary. God help me [...] For these 'great things' that God did for her cannot be expressed or measured. That is why we sum up all her honour in a single word, when we call her "Mother of God"; in speaking of her, in addressing her, no one can say anything greater, even if he possessed as many languages as there are leaves and grasses, stars in the sky and sand in the sea. We must examine with profound recollection what it means to be the Mother of God [...] She is the most precious jewel, never praised enough."

In unison with the Church on earth, Heaven also celebrates and proclaims that Mary is "Mother of God". God has never voiced his opposition or criticised this title. On the contrary, numerous apparitions, communications and revelations from God throughout the history of the Church have continually validated it and encouraged it, throughout history (the Akathist Hymn, Constantinople, Saint Mary Major, Le Puy-en-Velay, Guadalupe, Maria of Agreda, all the modern apparitions, etc.).

This is particularly the case of Mount Athos, when the extraordinary words of the "Axion Estin" were miraculously given from Heaven: "It is truly worthy to praise you, holy Mother of God, ever blessed and immaculate, Mother of our God. You, more venerable than the Cherubim and incomparably more glorious than the Seraphim; who, without losing your virginity, gave birth to the Word of God; you, truly Mother of God, we magnify."

This extraordinary dogmatic title, "the foundation of all others" according to Benedict XVI, which honours the Virgin Mary more than any other creature, comes therefore from both God and men.

Olivier Bonnassies, based on the extensive documentation provided by Father Vincent-Marie Thomas, Doctor of Philosophy

Beyond reasons to believe:

As the oldest known Christian prayer, found on a 3rd-century papyrus in Egypt, invites us to do, we should confidently entrust ourselves to the Virgin Mary: "We take refuge in the shelter of your mercy, holy Mother of God. Hear our prayers as we walk towards you."

Going further:

Behold Your Mother: A Biblical and Historical Defense of the Marian Doctrines by Tim Staple, Catholic Answers Press (July 30, 2017)

More information:

Pius XI, encyclical letter Lux Veritatis 25 December 1931, for the fifteenth centenary of the Council of Ephesus.
S. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, ^IIIa pars, question 35, article 4: "Is the Blessed Virgin to be called the Mother of God?" and also question 2, art. 2: "Was the union of the Incarnate Word made in the person?"
Article on the oldest manuscript of the Sub tuum preserved in the John Rylands Library of the University of Manchester, supplemented by an article by Roberta Mazza, of the same university, published in the Journal for the Study of the New Testament, volume 42, tome 1, Sept. 2019, pp. 46-57. See also the website of the Schola Sainte-Cécile which, after a summary of the historical data, presents some considerations of musical history concerning the interpretation of the antiphon.
Jesus and the Jewish Roots of Mary: Unveiling the Mother of the Messiah Hardcover by Brant James Pitre, Image; Later prt. edition (October 30, 2018)
Hail, Holy Queen: The Mother of God in the Word of God by Scott Hahn, Image; Reprint edition (September 19, 2006)