The Marian Dimension of Christian Love
I have been working through Rowan Williams’s book Looking East in Winter (Bloomsbury, 2021). A central focus is his sympathetic reading of the ascetical tradition of Eastern Orthodoxy, especially in the texts of the influential Philokalia. Some of the language of that tradition verges on a dualistic hatred of the embodied world. However, Williams argues that its core is a challenge to egotism: to the ways in which we allow our self-directed passions and obsessions to stand between us and reality. True knowledge, grounded in the sensing body, responds to what is, and does not reduce reality to a backdrop or tool for our controlling projects and plans.
Given my veneration of Mary, I was interested to read the chapter on the ‘Marian aspect of Christian love’ in the work of Orthodox saint Mother Maria Skobstova (1891-1945 – she died in Ravensbruck concentration camp).
Mother Maria challenges the idea that Christian love is exclusively about a matter of individual choice, an active taking-on of Christ’s selflessness. The stress on what is voluntary does not do justice to what love is, to the reality it responds to.
The Marian dimension does this. It affirms the necessity of love, the web of relationships within which we always already find ourselves entangled. Marian love is one of solidarity with the suffering of all flesh – the recognition of a shared vulnerability which precedes conscious choice.
The risk is once again associating the Marian – and the feminine – with passivity, while leaving active free choice to the men. The tradition’s constant affirmation of the need for Mary to consent to the incarnation should warn against this.
That said, I think Mother Maria touches on something vital: a true acknowledgement of what it is for love to be free cannot mean it is a matter of subjective choice alone. Love, by its nature, cannot ‘keep its options open’; if it breaks down, and decisions must be made to end a relationship, there has to be a process of re-learning to see the world, and what is real. A process that is often painful, and always weighty.
To echo Simone Weil, love has gravity. So, it is interesting that Mother Maria associates Mary with the ‘holy earth’, with the necessity of our material solidarity with all flesh. I think there is a profound mystery here about Mary’s sharing in the life and suffering of Christ, as all humanity, all creation is drawn into the offering he makes. In this sense – and not for reasons of absurd or arbitrary inflation of Mary’s role – the title redemptorix makes some sense. Mary teaches us the visceral challenge of giving birth to a truly inclusive love.
As Williams puts it: ‘We are called to take up the cross, certainly; but to take up the cross and follow Christ is, for the Christian, not a question of taking inspiration from a great teacher or exemplar but of sacramental identification with Christ. Christ’s Body, into which we are baptized, is a body born of Mary, and as such it is itself, as a fleshly body, implicated in the interconnection of the material world, the “holy earth,” so that it is connected with all human suffering.’ (221)