Mary, Mother of God

It is objected that Mary cannot be called Mother of God. God is eternal, without beginning or mother; Mary, it is said, is the mother of the man Jesus, not of the divinity. The Church confesses her nonetheless as Mother of God, and this title states first a truth about Christ.

A mother begets a person

A mother brings into the world someone, a person, and not a nature. One never says of a woman that she is the mother of a humanity or of an intelligence: she is the mother of a particular being, of the one she has carried and borne. What she transmits is the nature; the one she begets is a person.

And this person is God

Now the person Mary conceived is the eternal Son of God, the Word who took flesh in her: “The Word became flesh.” John 1:14 The one she carried in her womb is true God and true man, one single person in two natures. Elizabeth greets her already as the mother of her Lord: “How is it granted me that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” Luke 1:43 And the Apostle refers this birth to God himself: “God sent his Son, born of a woman.” Galatians 4:4

What is said of the person

From this unity follows a rule of language that the Church calls the communication of idioms. The idioms are the properties of each nature; and since Christ is one single person, what belongs to one or the other of his natures is attributed to that one person, under whatever name one designates him. One can therefore say in truth that the Son of God was born, suffered and died, although to be born and to die belong to his human nature alone: it is the same who acts and undergoes in both. The rule bears on the person, not on the nature taken apart: one says that God was born, because the one who was born is God, without thereby saying that the divinity was born, for it is without beginning. Scripture already speaks thus, attributing to God what was accomplished in the flesh: it says that men crucified “the Lord of glory,” 1 Corinthians 2:8 and that God acquired the Church “with his own blood.” Acts 20:28 By this same rule, Mary, who conceived and bore this person according to his human nature, is truly Mother of God, and not the mother of the man Jesus alone.

Without being the source of the divinity

The title therefore encloses no confusion. Mary does not give her Son his divine being, but his human nature: it is in her and from her that God became man. She is Mother of God because the one she bears is God, not because she would be the source of his divinity.

A title that defends Christ

To refuse this name would amount to separating in Jesus two subjects: the man whom Mary would have borne, and the God who would remain foreign to him. This is what Nestorius taught, and what the Council of Ephesus rejected in 431 by proclaiming Mary Theotokos, a Greek word meaning the one who bears God. The title preserves the unity of Christ: the one Mary brought into the world is one single person, and that person is God.