Mary, Seat of Wisdom

Mary Seat of Wisdom

We are all agreed, then, that her’s was the most gentle nature of us all; but this was no pious simpleton, not the simple & charming teenager presented in slushy ’70s Church songs. For the Gentle One rejoices in a plethora of titles drawing attention to the hundreds of aspects of human personality she presents to her Son for sanctification—not just gentleness & humility, but also human creativity & sexuality, spirituality & animality, & always, always human intelligence, wisdom and good judgement
Pope John Paul II taught in Veritatis Splendor (120) that Mary is above all a thinker: she ponders God’s words even when she does not understand them; indeed, for 9 months in her womb & 30 years in her house she pondered the Word itself (logos—the subject of all philosophy & intelligence). And this Word is one she could not possibly fathom for it is God’s own Wisdom become human; but she tells the world to accept that word: ‘do whatever he tells you’, she commands us as once she commanded the good folk of Cana.

Mary’s whole life is caught up in thoughts & words—we don’t know much about what she did, or what she felt but we know that she thought. First, she pondered what she did not understand, as the infancy narratives in Luke twice tell us. Then she is titled, most splendidly, Seat of Wisdom: truth was enthroned on her knee, as our statues of the Madonna show; truth taught her & she recognised this & followed it for her life on Earth & even into Heaven. And—too humbling to contemplate for long—truth himself was taught in His childhood by her.

Consider this: no human who has ever lived had more reason to be puzzled than did Mary, yet she never gives up on philosophy, and never gives up on the most difficult thinking any human has ever been asked to do: to appreciate that God has been conceived in her body. She does not understand the Annunciation at the time it occurs but (Luke 1: 29) she immediately sets herself the task of thrashing out what sort of message it is. What an inspiration! If we do not understand, we doubt; when His Mother did not understand, she set herself a programme of study!
Her entire life consists in events that astound her, events that astound the greatest minds in human history, yet she never stops trying to get to the bottom of it all. She is the model of every Christian philosopher—&, according to the present Pope, every person who retains the use of his mind is a philosopher of some sort, thus her thinking is a model for us all

Today I want to do three things, briefly: to look at different branches of philosophy in the light of Mary; to emphasise one of these—anthropology; and to ponder Fides et Ratio.

Logic & Language.

Her words are so few but so precious. Words surround her story: the first momentous event of her life is a word, an announcement or ‘annunciation’; the first word is the ‘ave’ which pious tradition loves to see as a reversal of ‘Eva’, the Latin for Eve. Quite sensibly—logically—she replies she cannot have a child for she is a virgin & she is then told the Holy Spirit wishes to be invited to make her pregnant, pregnant with God’s Word. The Word of God—literally, the text of the Scriptures she had known from girlhood—was to be accomplished in her body. No wonder she spent the remainder of her life in contemplation of holy words, seeking a way of making sense of them.

Metaphysics, Study of Reality.

The most important implication of Mary’s life for our grasp of ultimate reality is probably the Doctrine of Immaculate Conception. All descendants of the first human parents have bodies which show the effects of their sin - prone to excessive pain and weariness, illness, urges to wrongdoing that occur despite ourselves, fearful deaths - and these bodies tend to cause our souls too to suffer from these effects by desiring to sin more (disproportionately felt physical distress or disturbance leads to the desire to just give in, to take easy steps to get rid of these effects). The Church teaches the body transmits these effects to the soul at the moment at which body and soul first unite - at the moment at which human life begins.

Now, although the Virgin Mary’s body, like ours, suffered from these effects, at the moment at which her human life began, the Redeemer prevented the body from passing these effects on to her soul, and thus prevented her from desiring in any way to give in to the physical distresses and disturbances to which she, like us, was prone. As a result her pains, depressions, temptations etc. were no more indulged than, and grew to be no greater than, those of the pre-fallen Adam and Eve. What she tells us about ultimate reality then is what we could be, what we were meant to be, and what she now is
Epistemology, Theory of Knowledge. Mary was not infallible: she needed to learn by effort & she made mistakes, just like us. At least until Pentecost, a huge amount of the truth had not yet dawned on her: she believed, but she had not anything like full knowledge of the dogmas being realised through her & around her. She had unique access to truth but of course her own story is a part of the truth & it would not be until she arrived in Heaven, with a new chapter of her story begun, the divine vision granted, that she could see the truth in its full splendour.

Ethics Anthony Fisher O.P, has already dealt with this. I just want to add: Mary she had all the virtues—not just humility, goodness &the others usually credited to her, but also bravery, wisdom, justice, love etc. And she had them all in marvellous balance, i.e. she exercised her virtues wisely. Wisdom is the key to practicing all virtues & Mary is Seat of Wisdom. Also, Mary has vital role in the crusade for life: she is Queen of Life - her conception & pregnancy sanctified the beginnings of human life, her terrible vigil on Calvary’s hill sanctified its termination, & her glorious Assumption into heaven sanctifies all human hopes.

Anthropology, Theory of the Person.

Christ sanctified the whole of human personhood by occupying & knowing every part of our nature. Mary’s wish is to point not to her own humanity but to her Son’s. However, her role in this is highly necessary too: even someone who believes Christ has saved the Universe can despair of believing he can save me but the fact of the Assumption - the fact that there is an animal, a creature like me, safe & in heaven - makes it thinkable that I too might be there.

One could go through the different parts of the person asking what Mary shows about each. On the body, her Assumption shows the created human body belongs in heaven, it is not ultimately an earth-bound thing. On the emotions she shows virginity does not mean coldness; real obedience does not mean automatically following orders but trying to understand what they mean; &, above all the emotions, real love, of everyone, guides all her appetites, fears, likes & dislikes. On the imagination, she undergoes the literally unimaginable but, together with the apostles, has sufficient imagination to grasp the implications of her Son’s words & deeds for setting up the early Ch & sacraments. On the intelligence, as I have claimed, the whole of her life was spent working out an understanding of Christian doctrine & ethics before these had been even remotely clarified by the leaders of the Church.

But perhaps most importantly, on the occasion of his presenting Redemptoris Mater to the world John Paul II described her as ‘the memory of the Ch’. Mary’s lineage, her family tree, is the Old Testament—full of saints & sinners, indeed the whole of human experience. Thus she contains within herself the whole history, the race-memory, of her people. The Old Testament was her education in humanity & holiness, her catechism; because of it she could begin a New Testament for the whole human race by hearing, accepting & agreeing to ponder God’s Most Holy Word. Remembering the promises made to her people (to Abraham & to his posterity for ever), she says ‘yes’, humbly & speedily but not automatically or instinctively. First she thinks & she reasons ‘this is best; this is why I was made’.
From that time on her life is a constant looking back to this moment & the other marvels that flowed from it, trying to weave for her memories the whole future tapestry of humanity, of which she is such a central part. After Christ’s death & at his insistence from the Cross she presented these memories to John, to the writers & first preachers of the Gospel itself. In heaven, today, her memory encompasses the pasts of all those for whom she pleads.
She is then truly the Church’s memory—the memory of the Old Testament which she brought to Christ’s conception, the memory of the New which she presented to St John & the Church, & the memory now in heaven of the twenty centuries since her Son’s Resurrection which she will present to Him on the day he comes to judge the universe.

Memory is also built into the way in which we approach her: her most popular devotion, the Rosary (whose triumph we celebrated on the day this lecture was given)—is her autobiography, the story of her Christian life from Annunciation to Coronation; we carry the memory of Mary in our pockets.
[I remember in Rome with Anthony Fisher last year discussing before Michelangelo’s Last Judgement the line ‘remind thy Son that he has paid the price of our iniquity’ in the Hail, Holy Queen. This line would be blasphemy if it were suggesting He might forget & so forgetfully damn a good man! But of course the hymn is not suggesting this, Mary is not assisting Christ’s memory with her own, but rather ‘re-minding’ him: repeating again & sharing in that of which he is already well ‘minded’, namely the joyous fact that He has done all that needs to be done & that none of the sheep need now be lost]

In his latest encyclical John Paul taught philosophy is for all people & all people are philosophers, whether they know this or not. There are philosophical systems constructed by professional philosophers but also philosophical debates taken part in by all folk—not professionally, but at critical times of their lives & their development. We all ask—especially at times of stress & distress—questions such as ‘Why am I here? Is there a God? Do we survive death? Is anything really true or is it all just opinion? Why do I feel so alone?’). The Holy Virgin was not a simpleton: she did not construct asystemof philosophy but she did spend her life as a contemplative, she spent it in philosophical & theological debate & through these she constructed what John Paul calls a ‘philosophy of life’—a philosophy of life which became the Catholic Church.

The Pope tells us no philosophy, not even St Thomas’s, is perfect because all philosophers, all human minds, have fallen—that is why there is no ‘official’ Cath philosophy. However, Mary did not fall, she was immaculate, so the philosophy by whichshe lived might be described as the Church’s official philosophy; in this sense she has the philosophy of which Catholic philosophers attempt to create pale reflections.

But one thing her philosophy & St Thomas Aquinas’s fallen one have in common is this: both acknowledge that without faith the knowledge of God & religion philosophy alone gives us is weak, immature & pale. Philosophy without faith has no place in the Catholic Church - but neither has faith without philosophy.

Mary reminds us that truth & wisdom, philo-sophia, are from God. It is because she gave shelter to the Infant God and went on to think about all this meant that she is the wisest woman who ever lived. Hence, the Pope finishes his masterly encyclical on philosophy by asking us once again to do as the Fathers did of old: to philosophari in Maria, to philosophise in Mary, to learn to love wisdom in her as she loved the wisdom in her. Most properly, & fittingly, is she hailed then as Queen of Doctors, Virgin Most Prudent, Seat of Wisdom, Cause of our Joy.