Overshadowed by the Spirit, Mary is Mediatrix

I quoted from Bulgakov some posts ago; I now continue with a fitting extract for the day of Pentecost, a rich panoply of intense theological contemplation concerning Holy Mary, Mother of God, Vessel of the Holy Ghost, as image of the Church, as Mediatrix, Advocate and associate with Christ's Sacrifice:

Mary as the personal habitation of the Holy Spirit is in truth the true personal expression of the Church, the heart of the Church of which Christ is the Head.  Overshadowed by the Holy Spirit, she becomes the Mother of God, brings forth the Logos, and in and through her this divine motherhood belongs to the whole Church: the Logos born of the Virgin is also born in the souls of the faithful, for every Christian soul has a part in the divine motherhood of the Mother-Church, Theotokos (cf. St Augustine).  The Church and Mary each bear the same relation alike to Christ and Christians.  It would be impossible to say in so many words that Mary is the Church, and yet it may be said that the Church is represented by Mary, in so far as in her person all the attributes of the Church find their personal, final, and most perfect embodiment.

The Mother of God has no need of prayer for herself, for as deified she is in possession of all things.  As the glory of God and the glory of the world, as the manifested love of God for the world and the manifested love of the world for God, in her prayer she glorifies God [cf. her Magnificat].  Her own prayer is glorification, eternally realized love, flaming and triumphant in its perfect joy—God's own love for himself in his creation.  But as the foremost representative of the world and of all creation, the Mother of God offers also a prayer which is not her own, and yet is hers as the prayer of all creation.  She gives wings to its prayer; raising it to the throne of God, she gives it power; she is the intercessor raising her hands to God as a high-priestess (orante [a pray-er]) and overshadowing the world with her veil.  The Mother of God is the praying Church itself in its personal embodiment, and in this sense she is the universal Mother, defender and guardian.  She is personal, incarnate mercy and pity for the world in its creaturely shortcomings and sinful distortion.  Being now absolutely free from these shortcomings and from the power of sin, she is the sunlit summit of the world, for she still belongs to it.  The saints and the prayers of the saints surround this summit like a bright cloud and draw near to it.  But even the angelic world and the greatest saints are separated from the Mother of God both by her perfect holiness and by her deification, that is, by the fact that in her creaturely shortcomings are completely overcome [though the angels and saints are likewise hallowed and deified, "star differeth from star in glory" - her holiness is greater by far than that of all others]: her own gracious life is the life of the Holy Spirit dwelling in her, and her vicarious life is the life of the whole created world to which she belongs.  It is in this that her mediatory significance lies: she brings to her Son, the world's Saviour, the world which he has saved; its salvation is realized in and through her, and nothing in the world takes place apart from her.  She has given flesh to her Son and she is herself the God-bearing flesh through which the flesh of the world is brought to him for salvation.  In her submission to God's will she has spiritually sacrificed her Son's life to God, and as she stood by the cross she was silently continuing to say that which she had said once and forever: 'Behold the handmaid of the Lord.'

We must take the last step in following this line of thought and admit that the outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon all flesh takes place with the participation of the Mother of God, who for that reason was present at Pentecost.  The central place she occupies in the Church precludes the possibility of anything in the life of the Church happening apart from her and not through her.  Owing to her significance as the havitation of the Holy Spirit, the action of the Holy Spirit in the creature involves her co-operation.

— from S.N. Bulgakov, The Burning Bush (Kupina Nepolimaya) (1927), quoted, translated from the end of pp. 183-8 and from pp. 203-6 in the original Russian, in A Bulgakov Anthology, J. Pain & N. Zernov, edd. (London: SPCK, 1976), 95-6.  [The notes in square brackets are my own.]

Ethiopian Excess

Most embarrassingly, owing to an incident some centuries back when a Jesuit was briefly Patriarch of Ethiopia and tried to forcibly Romanize his horrified flock, the nickname for Catholics in Ethiopia is "Enemies of Mary"!

What in Catholicism seemed so anti-Marian?  Well, consider the monastic dispute between the Tigrenses (monks of Tigre) and Dabra-libanenses (monks of Dabra-Lebanon?)...  (I am relying on Gordillo's Compendium Theologiæ Orientalis (Rome, 1950), so forgive me for imperfectly rendering his Latin.)

The first-named votaries denied Our Lady the worship of latria (thanks be), and adhered to the formula "To the Theotokos honour and glory agrees, and to her Son worship agrees" – a formula known for short as "and to her Son", wa-la-Waldâ.  The second group, however, preferred instead to say "To the Theotokos, together with her Son, worship agrees" (!) – or "together with her Son", za-mysla Waldâ, for short.  Thanks be to God, Who thus preserved the Ethiopians from entire Mariolatry, King John IV ruled in favour of the first opinion.  It is distressing, though, that matters ever came to such a pass.

Such ignorant error is only comparable to the Coptic error of the middle ages that made confessing to a thurible (!) an acceptable substitute for the Sacrament of Confession...

(I can think of some Traddies who'd just love an excuse to take up the latter!)

Kolbe and Bulgakov

Further to what I noted below about daring ideas in Mariology, it is instructive to compare the similar Marian insights of the martyr St Maximilian Mary Kolbe, O.F.M. (1894-1941) and Archpriest Sergei Nicolayevich Bulgakov (1871-1944), a not uncontroversial Russian Orthodox theologian.

Now Kolbe, with holy daring, wrote that Our Lady is almost the incarnation of the Holy Ghost.  He framed most arrestingly the thought that she was so guided and governed by God's Spirit as to be in moral union with Him, though she and the Paraclete remained two separate persons: which is more or less what Nestorius asserted of Jesus Christ as being a very holy man in moral union with the Person of the Eternal Word.

(Indeed, living a life suffused by the Holy Spirit is what the saints are called to, as St Philip Neri rather alarmingly demonstrated...)

Rather than quote Kolbe at length (his opinions about the Immaculata can easily be googled), I pass on to quote a representative passage from the less-easily-accessible writings of Bulgakov, which he introduces by saying "We must... be perfectly clear about the theological implications and the dogmatic meaning of venerating her who is called 'more honourable than the Cherubim and incomparably more glorious than the Seraphim'" (quoting the famous Megalynarion sung in the Divine Liturgy):

There is no personal, human incarnation of the third Person of the Trinity. But although the third Person is not personally incarnated as a human being in the same sense as the Son of God was, there is that one human, created personality which is the vessel filled by the Holy Spirit. She so completely surrendered her human, personal life as to make it transparent to the Holy Spirit, testifying about herself, 'Behold he handmaid of the Lord.' This being — the Blessed Virgin — is not the personal incarnation of the Holy Spirit but becomes his personal, living receptacle, an absolutely Spirit-bearing creature [Pneumatophoros?], a Spirit-bearing human being. For although there is no personal incarnation of the Spirit, there may be such a thing as personal Spirit-bearing, in which a created personality is completely surrendered in its createdness and is, as it were, dissolved in the Holy Spirit. This interpretation [sic; lege 'interpenetration'?] by the Spirit amounts to a change of kind. The Virgin is wholly deified, full of grace, 'a living temple of God'. Such a Spirit-bearing personality radically differs from the God-man, for she is a creature, but she differs as radically from the creation in its createdness, for she is raised and united to the divine life. And through this spiritualization is realized the image of God in man. It must therefore be admitted that in heaven the human figure of the Mother of God, together with that of the God-man Jesus, jointly manifest the integral pattern of man. The ikon of our Lady and her Child, the Logos and the creature receiving him and filled with the Holy Spirit, in indivisible unity forms the pattern of man in his integrity. The God-man and the Spirit-bearer, the Son and the Mother, manifesting the revelation of the Father through the Word and the Spirit, manifest the fullness of God's copy in man, or, the other way round, of the pattern of man in God.

— from S.N. Bulgakov, The Burning Bush (Kupina Nepolimaya) (1927), quoted, translated from the end of pp. 137-142 in the original Russian, in A Bulgakov Anthology, J. Pain & N. Zernov, edd. (London: SPCK, 1976), 92.  [The notes in square brackets are my own.]

Bulgakov's doctrine was roundly criticized by the Orthodox in the 1930's as most problematic; he was charged with making Our Lady into a goddess, a Fourth Hypostasis, and so forth; notoriously, in one passage in The Burning Bush, he called her "a creature, but also no longer a creature".  Given the three-way split of the Russian Orthodox jurisdictions in the diaspora then, there is some suspicion of politicking and intrigue in the accusations of heresy directed against him.

I also find it ridiculous that the Orthodox, of all Christians, would condemn a man for taking deification (theosis) so seriously, indeed, finding it in its logical apex in the Mother of God.  He clearly says that the Holy Ghost does not have a personal incarnation; he "rightly divides the word of truth"; he exalts Holy Mary as the Pneumatophoros in truth – to quote a Catholic source in entire agreement with this, one of the official catechetical texts prepared by the Theological-Historical Commission for the Great Jubilee, entitled The Holy Spirit: Lord and Giver of Life, "Mary is the pneumatophoros (bearer of the Spirit) to the highest degree".

The same source approvingly quotes from two Byzantine writers who seem to anticipate Bulgakov: "Mary from the beginning was united with the Spirit... her participation in the Spirit became a participation in being", wrote Theophanes of Nicæa; and the great Nicolas Cabasilas wrote that Mary had a "spiritualized body, that is, one transformed by the Spirit".

As once with the mystical paradoxes of Angelus Silesius (1624-1677) in his Cherubimic Wanderer, Bulgakov's holy effusions I think are unfairly dealt with when read suspiciously: I believe him orthodox insofar as these passages go.  Then again, I am not conversant with the depths of his "sophiology", his doctrinal focus on Sophia, the Wisdom of God...  (Not that he referred to Sophia in the New Age feminist manner of course!)