Virgin Mary fits in perfectly with the relations of the Trinity, since she conceives without man the Son whom the Father begets without woman;[1] so that thus the Holy Virgin is a necessary, inherently requisite antithesis to the Father in the bosom of the Trinity. Moreover we have, if not in concreto and explicitly, yet in abstracto and implicitly, the feminine principle already in the Son. The Son is the mild, gentle, forgiving, conciliating being—the womanly sentiment of God. God, as the Father, is the generator, the active, the principle of masculine spontaneity; but the Son is begotten, without himself begetting, Deus genitus, the passive, suffering, receptive being; he receives his existence from the Father. The Son, as a Son, of course not as God, is dependent on the Father, subject to his authority. The Son is thus the feminine feeling of dependence in the Godhead; the Son implicitly urges upon us the need of a real feminine being.[2]
The son—I mean the natural, human son—considered as such, is an intermediate being between the masculine nature of the father and the feminine nature of the mother; he is, as it were, still half a man, half a woman, inasmuch as he has not the full, rigorous consciousness of independence which characterizes the man, and feels himself drawn rather to the mother than to the father. The love of the son to the mother is the first love of the masculine being for the feminine. The love of man to woman, the love of the youth for the maiden, receives its religious—its sole truly religious consecration in the love of the son to the mother; the son’s love for his mother is the first yearning of man towards woman—his first humbling of himself before her.
Necessarily, therefore, the idea of the Mother of God is associated with the idea of the Son of God,—the same heart that needed the one needed the other also. Where the Son is, the Mother cannot be absent; the Son is
- ↑ “Natus est de Patre semper et matre semel; de Patre sine sexu, de matre sine usu. Apud patrem quippe defuit concipientis uterus; apud matrem defuit seminantis amplexus.”—Augustinus (Serm. ad. Pop. p. 372, c. 1, Ed. Bened. Antw. 1701).
- ↑ In Jewish mysticism, God, according to one school, is a masculine, the Holy Spirit a feminine principle, out of whose intermixture arose the Son, and with him the world. Gfrörer, Jahrb., d. H. i. Abth. p. 332-34. The Herrnhuters also called the Holy Spirit the mother of the Saviour.
