Countering Marian minimalism: Mary’s Conception as “heavenly illuminatrix”
By Karen Darantière | 4 December 2024
A radical form of Marian minimalism has seeped into many Catholic souls. A clear sign of this is the widespread tendency to minimise Mary’s understanding of the Word of God, which manifests itself in a novel interpretation of the finding of Jesus in the Temple (Lk 2:41–51). In response to Our Lady’s sorrowful outcry to her Son after having sought Him in anguish, Jesus responds that He must be about His Father’s affairs. Commenting on St Luke’s statement that, not understanding this word of her Son, Mary kept it in her Heart, an influential French author, Fabrice Hadjadj, widely read in Catholic circles throughout Europe, gives voice to this minimalist tendency by presenting Mary as “the model of the virtue” of faith, which is understood not as luminous, but as obscure:
“Mary does not stand before Revelation as before the clarity of a theorem … She walks in ignorance more than in knowledge. And she knows heartbreak more than delights: and a sword will pierce through your own soul, prophesies the old man Simeon … Her faith is all the more perfect as it throws her better into the incomprehensible … the Gospel declares: They did not understand the word he spoke to them. Mary does not understand the words of her Son. What distinguishes her from those whom the Son will say, quoting Isaiah, that they hear without understanding? Simply this: His mother kept all his words in her heart. The Word is a sword, her heart is the sheath. Where others close theirs, hers remains open so that the incomprehensible remains there with all its sharpness.”1
According to this author, faith, as exemplified by Mary, is a journey whose aim is unknowable. No understanding of the mystery of salvation illumines her mind, as clarity of faith is for him the object of derision. Her faith is exemplary, he claims, in that she understands that the Word cannot be understood, and cherishes this incomprehensible Word in her Heart.2 We are misled into believing that the sword plunged into her Heart by Simeon is the incomprehensibility of the Word, and that this is the source of her heart-rending sorrow. Moreover, her faith is equated with the infertile soil in which the Word does not take root. Yet, Jesus says to His disciples, “To you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God; but to the rest in parables, that seeing they may not see, and hearing may not understand.” (Lk 8:10) His disciples are given the grace “to know” the divine mysteries, so that the seed sown may spring forth and bear fruit, as opposed to the bad soil in which the seed withers before it can sprout. Surely, she who is “full of grace” understands the Word infinitely more than His disciples. Yet, she is compared to the infertile soil and allusion is made to a malediction God inflicts upon His unfaithful people, “Hearing, hear, and understand not: and see the vision, and know it not” (Is 6:9), the only difference, according to this novel interpretation, being that Mary cherishes what she hears without understanding. This comparison between the people cursed by God and Mary is scandalous.
This misinterpretation consists in unjustifiably extending the lack of understanding on the part of Our Lady in this instance to every instance. This involves a fallacy which Aristotle identifies as the passage from a relative to an absolute attribution, consisting in using in an absolute sense an attribute which is merely relative to one particular context.3 From this single episode, the Word of God is inferred to be universally incomprehensible. This underlying sophism goes thus:
Mary does not understand this word spoken by her Son.
Mary does not understand the words spoken by her Son (all of them).
The implicit conclusion is that, as she is our model, we too must treasure in our hearts words of which we understand nothing.
Thus, we pass from the particular (she does not understand this word) to the universal (she does not understand the words). If the Blessed Virgin is so ignorant of all things divine, what of ordinary humanity? The Word is incomprehensible to us far more than to her, because a weakness which is true of the greatest of saints is infinitely truer of the rest of humanity. We are misled into believing that we cannot comprehend God when He speaks, yet someone who speaks incomprehensibly manifestly speaks in vain. God’s attribute of incomprehensibility is abusively extended so as to envelop His Word in an impenetrable fog. To correct this fallacy, let us see how Mary’s faith is characterised by light, not by darkness, and how the depth of her understanding, not her ignorance, is the source of her sorrow.
The voice of Tradition resounds in praise of the luminosity of Mary’s faith. St Bernard says that she “penetrated, beyond all that one might conceive, the soundless abyss of divine wisdom.”4 St Jean Eudes affirms that “her ordinary occupation outside of prayer, according to St Augustine, St Ambrose and St Gregory of Nyssa, was the reading of Holy Scripture, which she understood perfectly through an infused light of the Holy Spirit.”5 On her sorrow at the loss of Jesus in the Temple, St Alphonsus of Liguori writes:
“He who is born blind is little sensible of the pain of being deprived of the light of day; but to him who has once had sight and enjoyed the light, it is a great sorrow to find himself deprived of it by blindness … The man who, illuminated with celestial light, has been made worthy to find by love the sweet presence of the highest good, oh God, how he mourns when he finds himself deprived of it!”
He explains that this dolour was the greatest of all, as in the others Mary had Jesus with her, and he adds that “Mary well understood the cause and end of the other dolours, namely, the redemption of the world, the divine will; but in this she did not know the cause of the absence of her Son.”6 Our Lady’s sorrow in this unprecedented deprivation is all the greater that her oneness of mind and will with her Son is profound. Our Lady’s inability to comprehend His absence is an exception rather than the rule, as she understood the reason for the other sorrows, namely, the salvation of mankind. The source of her suffering is precisely her understanding, not any supposed ignorance. This suffering she endured was for the sake of saving souls in perfect union with her Son. The more one knows, the more one may love, and the more one may love in suffering for the sake of the salvation of souls.
St John Eudes affirms that Our Lady was infused with wondrous knowledge at her Conception: “Mary means enlightened and enlightening, and not without cause. For little Mary is so full of light from the first moment of her life that she knows the Creator and creatures, as well as all the things which must be shunned and all those which must be done.”7 He states that “the luminous Heart of the most wise Virgin was so filled with its radiance, … that she had a very perfect knowledge of the divine Essence, of the divine perfections and of the ineffable mystery of the most holy Trinity; and that she even saw God in His essence and in His divine persons, at the moment of her Immaculate Conception.”8 Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange OP confirms this view: “She is, as the Litanies say, the Seat of Wisdom, the Queen of Doctors … She too had an eminent and wonderfully simple knowledge of what the Scriptures said of the Messiah, the Incarnation, and the Redemption.”9
What a stark contrast between the wisdom of the Marian saints and the present-day minimalism! Insisting on Mary’s ignorance is a hallmark of modernism,10 whereas the saints teach that she possessed a sublime understanding of the divine mysteries. All the wisdom of all the saints and angels combined could not compare with the divinely infused wisdom Our Lady was granted at her Conception. This view is in keeping with Our Lady’s central role in salvation history, by which she knowingly and willingly participated in Christ’s redemptive sacrifice, as the New Eve united with the New Adam in saving mankind, He through His Passion and she through her Compassion. Contrarily, the current obscuring of Mary’s understanding leads to a depreciating of her essence and her action according to God’s design. If she was so ignorant, how could she have participated knowingly and willingly in Christ’s redemptive sacrifice? How could she be Co-Redemptrix?
St Bonaventure writes, “There is no doubt, as St Jerome remarks, that whatever is worthily said of Our Blessed Mother redounds wholly to the praise and glory of God.”11 Likewise, there is no doubt that whatever is unworthily said of Mary tarnishes the lustre of God’s glory. The insistence on the supposed ignorance of Mary is a sign that the prevailing agnostic worldview has infiltrated Catholic souls. Unsurprisingly, this is accompanied by a tendency to absolutise the attribute of God’s incomprehensibility which, instead of inspiring awe, dims God’s grandeur in those minds which fall prey to this falsity. Let us invoke our “heavenly illuminatrix”12 so that she may dispel this darkness and envelop all in her celestial luminosity.
- Fabrice Hadjadj, La foi des démons, ou l’athéisme dépassé (Editions Salvator, Paris, 2009; republished by Albin Michel, 2011) pp 282–283. ↩︎
- Another skewed portrayal of Mary “not as an idolised goddess”, but as a simple woman, “very close to us”, advancing “painfully” in “her pilgrimage of faith”, with its “nights” and “temptations”, as “she embarked into the unknown with no support other than the Word of God”, can be found in L’Évangile de Marie by Georgette Blaquière (Editions des Béatitudes, latest edition 2023), a bestseller among Catholics imbued with the prevailing modernism. ↩︎
- Aristotle, On Sophistical Refutations, ch 5. The same sophism is exemplified by Plato in Euthydemus, 298 e. ↩︎
- St Bernard, XII Prerogatives of the Blessed Virgin Mary, n° 3. ↩︎
- St Jean Eudes, Le Cœur admirable de la très sacrée Mère de Dieu, Book I, Chapter IV. ↩︎
- St Alphonsus of Liguori, The glories of Mary, Reflection on the Third Dolour: of the loss of Jesus in the temple. ↩︎
- St Jean Eudes, L’Enfance admirable de la très sainte Mère de Dieu, Third Part , Chapter 7. ↩︎
- St Jean Eudes, Le Cœur admirable de la très sacrée Mère de Dieu, Book I, Chapter IV. ↩︎
- Fr Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange OP, La Mère du Sauveur et notre vie intérieure (Editions saint Rémi, Cadillac, 2004) : 49–50. ↩︎
- Modernism “maintains that Christian dogma is historically contingent, continuously evolving, ultimately inexpressible in rational formulae” (Bishop Athanasius Schneider, Flee from Heresy [Sophia Institute Press, New Hampshire, 2024] p 58). We have gone from ever-evolving dogma to no dogma, as God’s Revelation is understood as being “inexpressible in rational formulae”; presenting Mary as the model of faith, precisely for the fact that she treasured the incomprehensible Word in Her Heart, is expressive of this ultimate form of modernism. ↩︎
- St Bonaventure, Mirror of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Prologue. ↩︎
- St Bonaventure, Hymn in honour of Mary after the model of the Te Deum. ↩︎