...There came an end to those gory altars and all that slaughter. But it was not a tissue of elevated thoughts that replaced them. Rather, an angel appeared to a woman and said, “Hail!” What we now had, far from the summons away from the physical realm that high-minded men might have wished, was gynecology, obstetrics, and a birth. Whatever we may imagine about the spiritual rhapsody that might have attended this angelic visitation to the Virgin, the one thing we know to have occurred was a conception. The Virgin’s womb teemed.
It was embarrassing to the religious mind. It proved a scandal. The whole ensuing story bothered and even enraged religious men, and it has continued to do so.
…If we are speaking of the great train of all who have gone before us in the Faith—patriarchs, prophets, kings, apostles, evangelists, martyrs, fathers, doctors, confessors, bishops, virgins, widows, and infants, then Mary unquestionably stands in the place of preeminence by virtue of her unique role in the drama of Redemption. Whereas all these others bore witness to the Word, she bore the Word. In no other mortal figure do we see the mystery of Redemption so richly revealed. God took up his abode in her flesh. Nay, we may say more. God the Word received His human flesh from the gift of the Virgin. Mystery of mysteries: this divine humility that will, as Creator, receive Its very flesh from Its creature. Pattern of all charity, that will place Itself in debt to Its debtors; the Everlasting Son content to call this woman Mother, who herself was hailed by Dante as figlia del tuo figlio, daughter of your Son.
The Virgin is the great archetype of what God looks for when He comes to us. “Be it unto me according to thy word,” she said, whereas, our first parents said in effect, “Be it unto me according to my word.” Her humility and obedience—“Behold the handmaid of the Lord!” are synonymous with her exaltation. “Hail!” said the angel Gabriel. “Highly favored! Blessed art thou among women.” Her cousin Elisabeth hailed her with a similar courtesy, awestruck that the mother of the Lord should deign to visit her.
Homage to Mary
Why all these courtesies? Was the angel inaugurating a greatly mistaken piety? Was Elisabeth overzealous? Would these greetings not seem to deflect our attention from God, who alone is to receive our worship? Has not that angelic greeting proved to be the fountainhead of a whole cult that has supplanted the worship of Christ Himself?
Millions of Christians who honor this most highly favored Lady do seem to hold her Son in almost paralytic awe, as though He were a sultan or khan whose name must hardly be uttered, from sheer fear. Their prayers and devotions imply that she is, somehow, more gracious, more understanding, more bountiful, and more lovely than her Son. To the extent that this is true, devotion has gone awry.
The antidote has impoverished millions of other Christians. A parsimonious notion of God’s glory has been one result of the revulsion felt by so many over the honor paid to Mary, as though to say, If God alone is all-glorious, then no one else is glorious at all. No exaltation may be admitted for any other creature, since this would endanger the exclusive prerogative of God.
But this is to imagine a paltry court. What king surrounds himself with warped, dwarfish, worthless creatures? The more glorious the king, the more glorious are the titles and honors he bestows. The plumes, cockades, coronets, diadems, mantles, and rosettes that deck his retinue testify to one thing alone, his own majesty and munificence. He is a very great king, to have figures of such immense dignity in his train, or even better, to have raised them to such dignity. These great lords and ladies, mantled and crowned with the highest possible honor and rank are, precisely, his vassals. This glittering array is his court! All glory to him and, in him, glory and honor to these others.
We know all of this from reading about the courts of great kings in our own history. We also know it of God, who is attended by creatures of such burning splendor that we can scarcely imagine them: angels, archangels, virtues, thrones, dominations, princedoms, powers, and then the terrible cherubim, and finally the seraphim themselves. Who knows what all of this is? It is the host of immortals.
This does not exhaust the court of the Lord, however. In this throng are creatures who, beyond imagination, bear a dignity excelling that of the immortals. These are the ones of whom alone it is said that they were made in God’s image. This is not said even of the seraphim. What it might mean no one knows yet, but it is a dignity mantling them alone.
Even beyond this, the mantle of their flesh is the mantle taken by God Himself at His Incarnation. Most glorious mantle—no ermine, no purple, no cloth of gold, no robe of angelic light can match it.
And not only this, we are taught by the apostle Paul that these creatures, redeemed from their own fall into wretchedness, are now crowned and made to reign with Christ Himself. Glory piled upon glory. What songs will celebrate the glory of this multitude? What acclamations will answer to its splendor? Figures of immense dignity appear among them: Adam, Eve, Enoch, Abraham, Moses, Deborah, Elijah, and countless others.
The Blessed Virgin
There is one whose dignity is shared by no other. She is a woman, the humblest of them all. No empress, prophetess, or conqueror she, only the handmaid of the Lord. But in her exaltation we see the divine magnanimity, which has regarded the lowliness of His handmaiden and has exalted the humble and meek. In her we learn of God who brings to nothing the pride of the great and sends the rich away empty. “Magnificat!” she sings, and “Hail!” we answer, in the joyful courtesies of heaven.
The Christian piety that has been afraid almost to name, much less to hail, the Virgin and to join the angel Gabriel and Elisabeth in according blessing and exaltation to her is a piety that has impoverished itself. Stalwart for the glory of God alone, it has been afraid to see the amplitude of that glory, which brims and overflows and splashes outward in a surging golden tide, gilding everything that it touches. Saint Francis had an eye for this and exulted in everything made by God, hailing even the sun and the moon and the fire as brothers and sisters, in a poetic overflow of charity. In contrast to this, the punctilious insistence that nothing be exalted and glorified except God alone begins to seem parsimonious.
We are taught by Scripture that nothing may be worshiped but God alone. The ancient Church has always taught this, reserving for God alone the honor known as latria. But, below this worship paid to the Most High, there is a whole scale of exultation and exaltation that rejoices in the plenitude of the divine glory and leaps to hail every creature in whom that glory is seen...
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