Best,
Dan McClain

Sorry for the confusion. I was speaking in the context of Christ. By “Christ”, I mean the Word-made-flesh. So in order for God to save the world, that is, in the context of the Incarnation, the human will of Christ must conform to the divine will. The Incarnation entails synergism or else we will fall into monothelitism. I hope that clears up some things.

RE: “Dear Fr. Brown: Thanks for contributing to the conversation. I really enjoyed your thoughts on Mary as the spouse of the Holy Spirit, and what happens to Mary at her Annunciation proleptically figuring what happens to the Church at Pentecost.”

Where are Fr. Brown’s comments? I would like to read them. Thanks.

Thanks for contributing to the conversation. I really enjoyed your thoughts on Mary as the spouse of the Holy Spirit, and what happens to Mary at her Annunciation proleptically figuring what happens to the Church at Pentecost.

Dear Dan and Mary,

Thanks to both of you for your essay (Mary) and your commentary (Dan)—you’ve given us all much food for thought and have had the courage to address an issue that many would rather avoid than engage.

Dear Apolonio,

Thanks for your participation in the discussion as well!

Best wishes,
Cynthia

Re: “Lastly, the will of the Logos as human is still Christ’s will and one that we shouldn’t talk about as distinct in any way but formally from the divine element.”

Well, the human nature of Christ, we say in Theology, is accidental to his person.

It’s not essential for Christ to be human in order to be a person.

He’s a divine person for all eternity.

So, the human nature of Christ, while hypostatically joined in the person, is still accidental to His person so that we don’t say that He is a “human person”; no, he’s a divine person but he also has a human nature which puts him in a unique category.

Now, because he has two natures, he would then have two wills because the intellect and will reside in the nature.

So, the divine nature has an intellect and will that is divine. The human nature has an intellect and will that is human. Therefore, Christ (now, a regular human being doesn’t have this – he doesn’t have 2 intellects; he has one intellect and one will) is unique in that He has two natures in his person, he has two intellects and two wills.

Good discussion. Thanks. What an excellent essay. Forgive me for the format of these thoughts, but I’m just going to quote some things from Dan’s commentary, and share my thoughts. I suppose it’s the sloppiness that this medium (a blog comment) allows.

“But de Lubac’s notion of fulfillment does not look like the one-sided image of marriage with which Balthasar is working…”

Well, let’s not forget that “Christ became obedient unto death”. The submission is truly mutual. Christ submits himself to humiliation, torture, total abasement, and death for his bride – in order to give her life, joy, peace, fulfillment, which she appropriates in her submission of herself, body and soul, to him.

“Yet, the insinuation of Balthasar’s nuptial cosmo-ecclesiology is that there is something inferior or unfilled about the concept of “bride,” and conversely something superior about the concept of “husband.””

There is something superior, not about “the concept of ‘husband’” – but about the husband himself. There’s a danger of getting the typology backward. Human bridegrooms and brides are the type (the symbol), Christ and his Church are the antitype (the reality). As Paul put it: “I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family [patria] in heaven and on earth is named” (Ephesians 3.14-15).

And let’s not forget that we all stand before God, even the Lord himself in his humanity, gendered female. So the Body of Christ lies prone; so he is pierced. We all (men and women) become little “sponsae” by baptism, incorporation into the mystical Body, the one Bride.

Let’s also not forget that the subjugation and the abasement of Christ’s nuptial bed, the cross (“consummatum est”) is “…for our transgression… our iniquities” (Isaiah 53.5). That is to say, mutual submission looks like this within the domain of telluric corruption and sin. Put another way: “Is not this why you are wrong, that you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God? For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven” (Mark 12.24-25). Or again: submission means abnegation, and obedience servility, only within the context of the world’s brokenness.

As feminist critique, the nuptial ecclesiology drawn out by Moorman is imminently useful insofar as it betrays not the naïve submissiveness of Christian Brides, but the abusiveness of Bridegrooms. Rather than scrapping the whole system of sacramental type and antitype because of the abuse of women by men, why not hold Christian men to the standard of abasement-for-the-sake-of-their-wives implied by Augustine / von Balthasar / de Lubac / Moorman / the Gospel? Indeed this standard was made explicit by the announcement of the man to the woman (it ran only in that direction) in the Solemnization of Matrimony from the old Book of Common Prayer: “…with my body I thee worship, and with all my worldly goods I thee endow: In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.”

In other words: a coherent, Christian, feminist critique of matrimony, as it is too often manifest, would be that men do not worship (i.e. announce the worth / dignity of their brides) their brides with their lives, and do not endow them with all their worldly goods (all that they have and are). Christians might usefully bind men to the terms of the marital covenant, rather than absolving women from them. An abusive husband fails to live by the terms of the covenant in which he solemnly announces that his life is no longer his own, but that he now lives and dies for his wife. The Church has a vocation to remind husbands of this, and when they fail to listen, to insure the safety and integrity of their victim wives / children. In such a cases, the Church may helpfully remind wives and children that their husbands / fathers are not God, but mere typologies, and failed typologies insofar as they are abusers.

“Mary in many ways could be described as the first fruit of the Church, demonstrating proleptic faith in her complete yes to the Christ-child…” and “How can she be both Christ’s mother and Christ’s bride?”

It might be helpful to remind ourselves that in the Church’s dogmatic economy, Mary is not the spouse of Christ, but the “Spouse of the Holy Spirit” (cf. Leo XIII in “Divinum illud”, May 9, 1897). As Gabriel put it: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called… the Son of God” (Luke 1.35). Mary can be the mother of the Son of God by being the Spouse of the Holy Spirit, by saying yes to the love of God in virtue of which the Father eternally begets the Son – that love being itself the Holy Spirit (cf. Thomas in “Compendium Theologiae” Part 1, Treatise 2, Chapter 219).

Holding Mary’s titles in tension is indeed difficult for unaided reason. Insofar as her role is a sublimation of herself to the divine economy (insofar, in other words, as the Holy Spirit comes upon her and the power of the Most High overshadows her), she becomes herself an object of faith, precisely by being an exemplar of faith (“be it unto me according to thy word”). It is really no less mysterious how it is that Christ is our Mother (we are reborn from the water flowing from his pierced side), our Brother, and the perfect image of our Father. The key is that Mary PROLEPTICALLY figures the Church in as much as what happens to her at the Annunciation (the Holy Spirit comes upon her), happens to the Church at Pentecost. The Church then becomes Mother, like Mary, by giving birth to us, as well as by “bearing” Christ to the Gentiles as Mary bore him to Israel.

Thanks again.

Thanks again for the exchange.

2) The way I understand obedience is the way Balthasar understood it. Remember, for him, “every true love has the inner form of a vow: it binds itself to the beloved and does so out of motives and in the spirit of love” (The Christian State of Love, 39). As for St. Paul, Balthasar sees Paul’s message of “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ” and “For as woman was made from man, so man is now born of woman” as key passages for his view that marriage is that of mutual submission and not one-sided. The difference between Christ and the Church is not that they are both obedient to each other, but their obedience, their love takes on a different form: Christ to make the Church holy and without blemish, and the Church as respect and reverent awe (cf. Mary for Today, 53-56, TD vol. 3). In fact, that man needs a “helper” makes Balthasar believe that Mary’s fiat on the cross is important to God’s economy of salvation (cf. The Moment of Christian Witness,38-49). The best way to understand the husband-wife relationship Balthasar presents is actually to see it from the standpoint of the New Adam and New Eve in Calvary where the fertility of their sorrows brings forth the Church. Here, we see “mortifying obedience” in its concreteness. And what biinds the New Adam and Eve is their faithfulness to God’s plan.

3) I did know that you were talking in the philosophical sense, but I’m not to sure if using necessity in the philosophical sense would be heretical or wrong with the way I used it. Of course with regards to logical necessity we have to say “no” to the notion that Christ does not exist apart from the Church. However, with regards to metaphysical necessity, I am not too sure. For, according to Kripkean semantics, we have to say that in every possible world that Christ (the man) exists, he is the son of Mary. I think we also have to say that in every possible world where Christ exists, he exists insofar as he has a human nature. Hence, there is synergy in Christ in all possible worlds he exists.

But I do get your worry and I did have to think hard before I did make that statement. If anything, it could refer to epistemic necessity rather than metaphysical necessity.

I do get your worry though and the fact that you raised it made me reflect on what Balthasar was really saying and ways we have to be careful in what we say.

By “in order for” I take it you don’t mean that God was logically required to do so but rather God freely chose to do so. Lastly, the will of the Logos as human is still Christ’s will and one that we shouldn’t talk about as distinct in any way but formally from the divine element. Incarnation, not synergism. You might think I’m being picky here, but this is a pretty fundamental issue you’re raising. Do we understand the Incarnation in light of philosophical tenets, or is there something going on in the Incarnation that even philosophy can’t grasp, namely that the Son of God can exist AS a human?

re: 3-4. Again, we’re talking past each other. You’re using “necessary” to describe the way in which God has chosen to redeem humanity, not in the philosophical or prolegomena sense which I was. I was merely cautioning you in your use of loaded terms. I think you can accomplish as much to say that God has chosen or made a covenant to work with humanity in a certain way via the incarnation. Or as Maximus says, God did not make the world perfect because he wanted to invite humanity to freely participate in perfecting the world with him.

Let me remind you that the context of the paper I was writing about skews the marital relationship to make the husband Christ and the wife the church. One is without sin, one is sinful. One stands as the redeemer, the other the redeemed. My concerns, again, or not with the model as such but with what I see as obvious ways in which this model has been distorted in order to force a certain kind of submission on wives because they need to by redeemed by their husbands through his authority. I’m certainly open to nuanced and generous readings of love and obedience in which both spouses stand in lovingly obedient relation to eachother. My worry is for an unbalanced relationship where the husband has an apriori preference.