-  THE  TITLE  THEOTOKOS  -  MOTHER  OF  GOD  -

We have already seen that Mary was written about in reverential terms during the second century of the Christian era. Christian authors developed their thinking about her over subsequent centuries, and by the time of the Council of Chalcedon (451), the main lines of Marian doctrine and devotion had been established. The teaching which was most important for subsequent Mariology is that which holds that she is correctly called 'Mother of God' or more accurately, 'Godbearer'.

The belief that the Virgin Mary is the Mother of God is the corollary of the belief that her son, Jesus Christ, is God incarnate. A central tenet of the Christian faith is the doctrine of the incarnation. This teaches that the Word of God, who is God himself, through whom all things were created, became a part of his own creation when he was conceived, gestated and born of the Virgin Mary. The Word of God is simultaneously the man Jesus of Nazareth because he has a human mother. Theologians have generally agreed that this is an indispensable article of the Christian faith, although the exact reasons for its importance have been disputed. One classical version, however, runs as follows.

God created the world in a state of goodness, as a work of grace (something freely given), but sin entered the world when humanity disobeyed the Lord God. This goodness and its loss through human rebellion has traditionally been told through the narrative in which Adam and Eve, the first man and woman, disobeyed God when they ate the forbidden fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, in the Garden of Eden, and were expelled to a life of hardship (Genesis 3). This first sin led to men and women being estranged from God, from one another and from the earth with which they struggle for the food, clothing and shelter that sustains them. In theological language, when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, the consequence was that nature fell from grace. That is to say, the world as it was created by God (the world of nature) lost some - though not all - of the glory and holiness with which it was originally endowed (that is, grace). This was caused by human sin, but its effect touches all other creatures as well.

What counts here, of course, is not the detail of the putative first ancestors of the human race, but the representative function that they have always performed. They stand for a humanity which knows that men and women live disordered lives, in which our relationships with God, with one another and with other creatures - minerals, plants and animals - are often harmful rather than joyful. As the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote in the nineteenth century: 

The world is charged with the grandeur of God....[but] all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil. Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

Yet simultaneously with this awareness that the world is awry, Adam and Eve, who once lived in Eden, represent men and women who know that the way the world is now is not how it has to be: indeed, they have confidence that this is not what God wills for it, and even now, that it is not the whole truth. As Hopkins continues: And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things. ( Hopkins 1963:27 )

The conception and birth of Christ from his mother Mary are cardinal moments in God's redemption of the world from the sin that generates the state of malaise. For God did not wish his creation to continue in its condition of suffering and estrangement from him, and he sent Jesus into the world to save it from sin and death. Jesus' own death - a violent death by crucifixion - was the only sacrifice which was sufficient to atone for the sins of the world, just as his resurrection from the dead, on the third day following his execution, was the only conquest that could restore humanity to its right relationship with God: that could overcome death itself. The resurrection constitutes the most fundamental tenet of the Christian faith, and Christ's resurrection and eternal life will be shared by all those who have been redeemed by him, when he returns in judgement on the Last Day and transforms the whole created order into a state of glory.

Now, the reason why the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus are able to have the redemptive significance which Christians attribute to them lies in Jesus' identity. For Jesus Christ is not only a human being who cooperates with the will of God for the redemption of the world: he is himself divine. Since it was Adam - and with him, all humanity - who sinned, it was necessary that a human being should make good what had been damaged. Yet humanity alone is not capable of restoring the world to that fullness of grace which comes from God alone. And so God redeemed the world by uniting himself to human nature in Jesus and working the world's redemption as God incarnate - that is, God made flesh.

We can be more specific on this point. In Christian teaching, the One God is also Trinity. That is, God is both single and triune, three 'persons' who are nonetheless one. Each person of the Trinity - the Father, the Son (or Word) and the Holy Spirit - is God, and all three persons are present in the action of any one of the three. Thus God the Father created the world through the eternal Word and in the power of the Holy Spirit; but this is a single action of the one God. In the created world, number is applied to bounded objects conceptualized as separate from one another - three rabbits, twelve currant buns, or two hundred carrots, for example. And if there are three, twelve or two hundred, then these are not simultaneously one. In God the Creator, however, there is no boundedness - no limit of any kind - and thus the contradiction between the single and the triune nature of the Godhead. The 'threeness' of the Deity is clearly something different from the threeness of the rabbits mentioned above. But this doctrine is too mysterious to be adequately grasped by human understanding, and for that very reason, mediation upon the Trinity provides a safeguard against imagining God to be our own, or any other, image. The doctrine of the Trinity is the guarantee that humanity cannot comprehend or manipulate the Deity, but must always stand in awe of the God who is before and beyond the boundaries which characterize the created order.

So, to be more precise about the incarnation: since the One God is also Trinity, it was the eternal Word - or Son - of God, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, who became flesh in Mary's womb for the salvation of the world. Thus the means by human flesh, with all its sensual pleasures and pains, that the Creator should be one which a creature, as an embryo in a woman's entrails; that he who is eternal should take on transience, like the earth whose substance is shared by human flesh (Genesis 2:7); that he who is immortal should take on immortality, and that he should indeed suffer and die for the sake of his creation.

One of the greatest exponents of the theology of the incarnation is the fifth-century bishop Cyril of Alexandria (d. 444). Cyril teaches that the Word of God was conceived in Mary's womb in order to consecrate the human race from our very beginnings - that because God himself has been conceived in a woman's body, all human conception may now be sanctified. ('Third Letter of Cyril to Nestorius', from the documents of the Council of Ephesus (431), in Tanner SJ 1990:58) And because the immortal God united himself to human flesh even in death, he accomplished 'the incorruptibility and imperishability of the flesh... first of all in his own body', as we see in his resurrection from the dead, but also for the whole human race. By uniting himself to human death in Christ, God who is immortal overcame death itself and thus enabled all flesh to be 'set... beyond death and corruption'. (St, Cyril of Alexandria 1995:57) 'In short, he took what was ours to be his very own so that we might have all that was his.' (Ibid,:59)

So Jesus' unique salvific power derives from his identity as both true God and true man, and for this reason Mary is essential to the Christian account of God and creation. For in the union of God and humanity, it is Mary who imparts the humanity. This belief is expressed in the teaching that Mary conceived Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit when she was still a virgin. (Luke 1:26-38). Eternally begotten of God the Father, Christ was conceived and born on earth of his mother Mary. For this reason she is called by the paradoxical title of Theotokos, a Greek term meaning 'Godbearer' or 'Mother of God'. Indeed, it was in order to explain and defend this title for Mary that Saint Cyril of Alexandria wrote his Christology. God, of course, does not have a beginning: God is from all eternity, with no origin - no parent - outside Godself. But how else are Christians to express the wonder of the incarnation, whereby God and humanity are perfectly united, if not by the assertion that the human woman who is the mother of Christ is, by that token, the Mother of God? Furthermore, the Catholic, Orthodox and ancient Eastern churches have invariably held that Mary gave her free assent to the conception of Christ. If she had not consented to Gabriel's message, then the world's redemption would not have come about in precisely the manner in which it did: the redeemer would not have been the Jesus of Nazareth who in fact is God incarnate. So Mary is not only a physical but also a moral, agent in the world's salvation.

The title Theotokos - the one who conceived or gave birth to God - is not without its difficulties, however, and it was in order to counter objections to this title that Saint Cyril of Alexandria formulated his explanation of it. Saint Cyril came from the oldest school of Christian theology, that of Alexandria, in Egypt. To understand the relationship that exists between the divinity and the humanity of Christ, Alexandrian theologians before Saint Cyril had discussed the question, 'Did the Word of God die on the cross?' It should be immediately clear that there cannot be a simple 'yes' or 'no' answer to this. After all, since the Word of God is eternal, it seems incorrect to say that he died. Yet, as we have seen above, the doctrine of salvation demands that the human Christ's salvific work of life, death and resurrection should have been accomplished also by God. The technical solution to this conundrum was to say, "In this humanity, the Word of God died on the cross; in his divinity, the Word of God did not die.' The subject of both the dying and the non-dying is the same Word of God. Thus it is appropriate to say, "The Word of God died on the cross'. And more than this, Alexandrian theologians held that if one would not affirm this truth, then one had not properly grasped the reality of the incarnation, which, since it is the perfect union of God and humanity, entails that everything that can truly be attributed to Christ's humanity can also be attributed to his divinity, and vice versa. This principal is called the communicatio idiomatum, or 'communication of properties' (that is, between Christ's divinity and his humanity). - There is one exception to this principle, namely the statement, 'The Word of God was created.' This was not used by the Alexandrian theologians (and has not been used in 'mainstream' Christian theology since that time) because that formula had been specifically rejected at the Council of Nicaea (325), in opposition to the Arian, who held that the Word of God in his divinity had been created by God the Father. -  

This principal is called the communicatio idiomatum therefore entailed the possibility of saying, 'Mary gave birth to God', and so it was this principle which was used to justify honouring her with the title 'Godbearer'. However, a group of theologians who are sometimes called 'Antiochene', because many of them had been trained in the theological school of Antioch, opposed calling Mary the 'Godbearer'; and it was the dispute over this title which led to the calling of the Council of Ephesus in 431. - This is discussed in detail in Richard price, 'Theotokos', in this volume (56-63). A somewhat different assessment of the council is offered in Stephen J. Shoemaker, 'Marian Liturgies and Devotion in Early Christianity', also in this volume (130-45). -   

The main objector was Nestorius, Bishop of Constantinople, and one of his concerns was the title Theotokos implied that God had a beginning - as if he were a pagan god, or some other created being. The Word of God, he insisted, was eternal, and therefore without a beginning. Nestorius did not doubt that Christ was truly both divine and human, but Mary, he said, was the mother of Christ's humanity, not his divinity. But this concern was symptomatic of a more fundamental difference of approach between Nestorius and Cyril. Cyril subscribed to a Christology that is sometimes called Logos/sarx, or 'Word/flesh', Christology, because it flows from the verse in John 1, 'And the Word became flesh...' This Christology emphasizes the total union of the divine Word with the flesh of Christ, and holds that Christians in turn are sanctified because of their own union with Christ in the flesh. Cyril held that this union could be accomplished most fully by receiving the elements of the Eucharist - the body of Christ. Mary was therefore the mother of the Word made flesh.

Nestorius, on the other hand, held to a school of Christological doctrine that is sometimes called Logos/anthropos, or 'Word/human.' According to this understanding, it is important to emphasize that the Word of God was united not only to Christ's flesh - since this may mislead people into thinking that his divinity took the place occupied by the soul in other human beings - but that God was united to a whole human being, body and soul. Accordingly, Nestorius emphasized the importance of the imitation of Christ in one's actions, rather than just the sacramental reception of his body, for attaining the goal of the Christian life. Where Nestorius and the Antiochenes taught a strongly historical Christology, which focused on the life of Jesus as found in the Gospels, Cyril and the Alexandrians taught a much more cosmic Christology, focusing on the union of God with the whole of humanity and creation.

The main weakness of Nestorius's position was that it could not account adequately for the union of divinity in Christ, and gave the impression that the divinity and humanity were in some way stuck together without being properly united. If Mary did not give birth to God, then how and when did the Word of God unite himself to Christ's humanity? Crucially, of course, Nestorius's objection to the title Theotokos - to the assertion that Mary bore God - held equally well in the case of Christ's death: for just as God has no beginning, so he also has no end. And if we cannot say that the eternal Word of God died on the cross, then how is humanity redeemed? Cyril, by contrast, argued that the child to whom Mary gave birth was the one in whom 'the Word was flesh', and this made it clear that, in Christ, the two could not be separated.

Having said this, we should also note that when the Theotokos was victorious at the Council of Ephesus, and Nestorius was condemned as a heretic, Cyril may have been the general who won the war, but he did not win every battle in it. Where he had originally argued that there was only one nature in Christ, he eventually concealed Nestorius's point that Christ's humanity and divinity should indeed be considered as two natures. This formulation, together with the clear assertion that the child whom Mary bore was the one in whom these natures were united, provided the foundation for the Christology formula of the Council of Chalcedon (451), that Christ was 'one Person [that is, the Word of God] in two natures [divine and human]'. This Christology is that which is still held by the Catholic Church, and by most Orthodox and Protestant churches.

Edited by Sarah Jane Boss - MARY THE COMPLETE RESOURCE - 

BIBLIOGRAPHY - Boss, Sarah Jane (2004) Mary, London: Continuum. Hopkins, Gerard Manley (1963) Poems and Prose, ed. W. H. Gardner, Harmondsworth: Penguin., St. Cyril of Alexandria (1995) On the unity of Christ, trans. John Anthony McGuckin, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press. Tanner SJ, Norman P. (ed.) (1990) Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 1, London: Sheed & Ward, and Washington: Georgetown University Press.