Lady Wisdom

and the Mother of God:

...In Daughter Zion, Ratzinger also talks about the Wisdom texts of the Old Testament and the argument by some that they only warrant a Christological interpretation. He goes on to say, "After years of wholehearted agreement with this latter view, it is ever clearer to me that it actually misjudges what is most characteristic in those Wisdom texts" (25). What is characteristic about the Wisdom texts is that they tell of Yahweh’s love for his Bride, Israel. He goes on to say that in Hebrew and Greek "wisdom" is feminine, and likewise the Hebrew word for "Spirit" is also feminine. He insists that "this is no empty grammatical phenomenon in antiquity’s vivid awareness of language" (26). With this in mind, Ratzinger is able to assert that "the eradication of the Marian interpretation of sophiology ultimately leaves out an entire dimension of the biblical and Christian mystery" (27). He concludes his treatment on the place of Mariology in the Bible:

Thus we can now say that the figure of the woman is indispensable for the structure of biblical faith. She expresses the reality of creation as well as the fruitfulness of grace. The abstract outlines for the hope that God will turn toward his people receive, in the New Testament, a concrete, personal name in the figure of Jesus Christ. At the same moment, the figure of the woman, until then seen only typologically in Israel although provisionally personified by the great women of Israel, also emerges with a name: Mary. … To deny or reject the feminine aspect in belief, or, more concretely, the Marian aspect, leads finally to the negation of creation and the invalidation of grace. It leads to a picture of God’s omnipotence that reduces the creature to a mere masquerade and that also completely fails to understand the God of the Bible, who is characterized as being the creator and the God of the covenant—the God for whom the beloved’s punishment and rejection themselves become the passion of love, the cross (28)...