the only begotten of the Father, but the Mother is the concomitant of the Son. The Son is a substitute for the Mother to the Father, but not so the Father to the Son. To the Son the Mother is indispensable; the heart of the Son is the heart of the Mother. Why did God become man only through woman? Could not the Almighty have appeared as a man amongst men in another manner—immediately? Why did the Son betake himself to the bosom of the Mother?[1] For what other reason, than because the Son is the yearning after the Mother, because his womanly, tender heart, found a corresponding expression only in a feminine body? It is true that the Son, as a natural man, dwells only temporarily in the shrine of this body, but the impressions which he here receives are inextinguishable; the Mother is never out of the mind and heart of the Son. If then the worship of the Son of God is no idolatry, the worship of the Mother of God is no idolatry. If herein we perceive the love of God to us, that he gave us his only begotten Son, i.e., that which was dearest to him, for our salvation,—we can perceive this love still better when we find in God the beating of a mother’s heart. The highest and deepest love is the mother’s love. The father consoles himself for the loss of his son; he has a stoical principle within him. The mother, on the contrary, is inconsolable; she is the sorrowing element, that which cannot be indemnified—the true in love.
Where faith in the Mother of God sinks, there also sinks faith in the Son of God, and in God as the Father. The Father is a truth only where the Mother is a truth. Love is in and by itself essentially feminine in its nature. The belief in the love of God is the belief in the feminine principle as divine.[2] Love apart from living nature is an anomaly, a phantom. Behold in love the holy necessity and depth of Nature!
Protestantism has set aside the Mother of God; but this deposition of woman has been severely avenged.[3] The arms
- ↑ “For it could not have been difficult or impossible to God to bring His Son into the world without a mother; but it was his will to use the woman for that end.”—Luther (T. ii. p. 348).
- ↑ see note 7 (Wikisource contributor note)
- ↑ In the Concordienbuch, Erklär. Art. 8, and in the Apol. of the Augsburg Confession, Mary is nevertheless still called the “Blessed Virgin, who was truly the mother of God, and yet remained a virgin,”—“worthy of all honour.”
