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Mater Dolorosa, Mater Misericordiae
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
Extract
Here I want to offer an interpretation of one of the most striking but in some ways least congenial aspects of late medieval English (and European) piety. The late Middle Ages was one of the most exuberant and productive periods of Mariological devotion, which manifested itself in devotional treatises and prayers, in poetry, music and the visual arts. The theological content of much of this, however, is now looked on with some suspicion and incomprehension, and the extraordinary centrality of Mary in the religious consciousness of Christians in the period from Anselm to Luther would now be pretty generally attributed to a defective Christology. Thus the apparently almost desperate late medieval reliance on the Virgin Mary as intercesser, friend of sinners, Mother of Mercy, is often taken to have stemmed from a fear of Christ and a sense of his remoteness from sinful, frail humanity. Christ on the rainbow coming in judgement, the Rex Tremendae Majestatis of the Dies lrae, was the Rex Iustitiae who would weigh men and women by their actions, and before such a dreadful scrutiny, who could stand? The suffering, weak and tempted Christ of the Gethsemene narratives and the Epistle to the Hebrews, in the course of the great Christological debates of the fourth and fifth centuries, and in the millennium of missionary expansion that followed, had been divinised out of his humanity. Catholic Christology, while paying lip-service to that humanity, had succumbed to a practical Nestorianism.
Into the vacuum left by this process the longings of the collective Christian heart for an assurance that God was indeed compassionate, tender, understanding, human, forced the figure of Mary, and it was she, not Christ, who came to be addressed as Most Gracious Advocate, the Christian’s Life, Sweetness and Hope.
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- Aquinas Lecture 1988
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- Copyright © 1988 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Formerly used in the Roman rite, for example, as the Epistle for the feast of the Immaculate Conception; it is still an optional reading in the Common of the B.V.M.
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41 The Speculum, one of the principal popular vehicles for the spread of the devotion to the Mother of Mercy, also devotes a good deal of space to Mary as Mater Dolorosa, describing the extraordinary participation of Mary in her Son's sufferings. Yet the terms in which this unique compassion is described make it clear that we can and should emulate it. Thus a description of Mary's unique suffering resolves itself into a convention by which all Christians share her grief. The Mirour of Mans Salvacioun pp 159–161.
42 I take Julian to be conscious of the resonances of such phrases as ‘I thowte: “is any payne like this?”… there was no payne that might be suffrid leke to that sorow that I had to se him in payne’. Glassgoe, Marion (ed.) Julian of Norwich, A Revelation of Divine Love (University of Exeter 1976) p 20Google Scholar.
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