In some senses, this essay is the fruit of a biblical theology that stretches back a couple of decades. Studying biblical typology predates my love of theology, liturgy, or really anything other than Christ himself. In another sense though, this is my effort to remove Marian ideas from the exclusive sphere of Roman Catholic thought where other Christians, particularly Anglicans, are often wont to simply compare our views with those of Rome either in the affirmative or in the negative. I do not want this to simply be a paper that affirms “Rome believes in a version of the immaculate conception, that most Anglicans do not.” Or, that “along with Rome, Anglicans believe the Virginal Birth of our Lord.” Rather, my desire was to see if latent within Anglican authorities could be discovered a cohesive body of doctrine and piety that did not require external referent for comparision. But, of course, the fractions within traditional Anglicanism and her wise but diverse personalities, often make it difficult to say there is a singular view of any subject. Therefore, instead of cherry-picking this forbear or that as authoritative on Marian piety or doctrine, I instead take those documents which are fundamental to our identity: the Book of Common Prayer and the hymnals approved for use in worship; the Hymnal 1940 and the Book of Common Praise 2017.
Given the centrality of the Apostles’ and Nicene creeds to our worship, it makes sense to begin with their claim that Jesus was born of a Virgin. If one considers the Apostles’ Creed to be a daughter creed of the Old Roman Creed as I think is demonstrable, it is fair to say we join Christians dating back to at least 175 A.D. in explicitly affirming that Mary became miraculously pregnant with Jesus due to the operation of the Holy Spirit. And while I do wish to use primarily the Book of Common Prayer and Hymnal in this essay, it must be noted that this is the plain language of Matthew and Luke as well as Article II of the 39 articles. It is an essential of the Faith. Anglican hymnody declares the virginity of Mary with frequency. From Canticle II of the Te Deum to the Christmas section of the hymnals, there is no shortage of references. What is not particularly clear though is why she is a virgin. An oft supposed reason is that it frees her divine Son from any stain of sin thus setting the stage for his perfect sacrifice. Yet I am unable to find a single instance in our worship where this point is made even opaquely and certainly not with any degree of clarity. Mary’s virginity is not identified as the cause of Christ’s sinlessness. Nor is that secondary interpretation, meritorious though it might also be, that Mary’s virginity spawned her deep devotion to Jesus-an idea illustrated by phrases like “Mary kept all these things in her heard and pondered them,”[1]-easily identified. Rather, the principal reason given for her virginity is to expound the Divine Nature of Christ. This is perhaps best attested by the 2nd verse of Adeste Fideles, itself a creedal fragment of sorts.
God of God, Light of Light
Lo! He abhors not the Virgin’s womb.
Very God, Begotten not Created.
Or, if you prefer, Wesley’s verse:
Late in time, behold him come
Offspring of the Virgin’s womb
Veiled in flesh the Godhead see
Hail th’incarnate Deity.
Both texts point to the Divine genesis of the whole affair. As there is no earthly father, the only plausible explanation is that God himself effected the Incarnation of his Son by the operation of the Holy Spirit. Thus, the emphasis on Mary’s Virginity presupposes in Anglican thought and devotion, the union of the Two Natures in a Single Person. In this way, our tradition has expressed the Virginity spoken of in the Creed as necessary to salvation.
A closely related concept then to her Virginity is the dogma expounded by the 3rd ecumenical council held at Ephesus. Mary is, indeed, the Theotokos. While the temptation may ever exist to immediately backtrack and saw what this obviously cannot mean, Anglican have and should continue to loudly trumpet this truth without apology. The 19th century Anglican poet, Christina Rosetti, wrote in her beautiful little hymn “In the Bleak Midwinter” the following lines:
Our God, heaven cannot hold him, nor earth sustain
Heaven and earth shall flee away, when he comes to reign.
In the bleak midwinter, a stable place sufficed
The Lord God Incarnate, Jesus Christ.Angels and archangels, may have gathered there
Cherubim and Seraphim, thronged the air.
But his mother only, in her maiden bliss
Worshiped the Beloved, with a Kiss.
Rosetti’s text could not be clearer. She twice identifies the Christ as God the Son and then turns her vision to Mary-his worshipping mother. Her adoration of her Son, indicates that he is God enfleshed and continues the Anglican affirmation that the importance of Mary’s virginity is the insistence on the dual natures of Jesus Christ.
Picking up on the theme of Mary worshipping Jesus, one of the great types of Mary in the Old Testament is Miriam, sister of Moses. In the 15th chapter of Exodus, after the downfall of the Egyptian army at the Red Sea, the children of Israel sing a song, led by Moses. But at verse twenty, when it seems the song of triumph and victory has ended, Miriam takes up a timbrel and begins to lead the women in music and dance, and echoes the strains of the song already sung “Sing ye to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously, the horse and his rider he has thrown into the sea.”[2] In Psalm 68, Augustine finds Mary to be our chief tympanist, the woman who leads the song of God’s faithful people, when David writes, “the singers go before, the minstrels follow after, in the midst of the damsels playing with timbrels.”[3] While Ralph Vaughan Williams and Percy Dearmer are known as the chief editors of the English Church Hymnal of 1906, the chairman of the editorial board, was a man named John Riley-yet another devout Anglican. While not a household name, many Anglicans have sung his beloved hymn “Ye Watchers and Ye Holy Ones” which clearly identifies Mary as the pinnacle of creation in the lines
O higher than the Cherubim,
More glorious than the Seraphim
Lead their praises, Alleluia.
Thou bearer of the Eternal Word
Most gracious, Magnify the Lord
Aside from drawing heavily on the school of interpretation that Mary is the New Testament’s Miriam leading the praises of all God’s people, Riley and over a century’s worth of Anglicans, have confessed that Mary’s standing in the created order is unparalleled. The idea that Mary leads in heaven’s worship is also seen in Joseph Bromehead’s little hymn “Jerusalem, My Happy Home” whose fourth verse reads: “Our Lady sings Magnificat, with tune surpassing sweet; and all the Virgins bear their part, sitting about her feet.” The combination of Mary as New Miriam and her elevated status help Anglicans flesh out Elizabeth’s words “Blessed are you among women”[4] and the echo in Mary’s own Magnificat, “from henceforth shall all generations call me blessed.”[5]
Both Riley and Bromehead allude to the great Marian hymn from Luke chapter 1 with the language of “magnify” and “magnificat”. But that canticle is utilized in its fulness when Anglicans pray the Evening Office. Psalms 92 and 98 may be used as optional Old Testament responses in some modern versions of the Book of Common Prayer, but a brief perusal of the 1549 edition of the BCP demonstrates that only the Magnificat may be utilized. As Thomas Cranmer engaged in reform of the Breviary and heavily utilized the work of the Spanish Cardinal Quinones, a central and fixed pattern appears to Anglican Evensong: Psalm, Old Testament Lesson, Canticle, New Testament Lesson, and Canticle. It was Cranmer’s goal to have scripture read in a continuous fashion, a chapter at a time until whole books were completed. The congregations of England were to be immersed in the Old and New Testaments. And what would they come to know as the hinge between the two? The song of, and by extension, the Person of the Virgin Mary. Indeed the lines, “he remembering his mercy hath holpen his servant Israel, as he promised to our forefathers, to Abraham and his seed forever,”[6] concisely summarizes what her conception of Messiah means: God has been faithful. He prepared the Virgin and her womb, as we will see in a hymn shortly, in his eternal counsel. And it is through this chosen vessel of grace that the promises made to Abraham and all of the Old Testament saints come true. The very placement of this canticle between Old and New Lessons demonstrate Mary as the essential link between testaments. The Lord himself institutes the New Testament, but he cannot do it without the maiden of Nazareth.
Earlier, we considered why Mary had to be a Virgin. At the time it was noted that despite the expansive corpus of hymns mentioning her as such, there was little related to the idea, often associated with Ambrose of Milan, that virginal conception preserved the Lord free from Original Sin and Corruption. We are forced now to return to this idea because of the language of the Collect for Christmas day. There we read the following: “Almighty God, who hast given us thy only-begotten Son to take our nature upon him, and as at this time to be born of a pure Virgin.” The modifier on the word “Virgin” forces us to consider a couple of possibilities. First, that this is simply Cranmer’s way of doubly-emphasizing the virginity of Mary. Secondly, perhaps Cranmer is saying that Mary is not only virginal, but also devoid of any desire to be otherwise. Thirdly, Cranmer is saying something about Mary’s nature and subsequently the nature of Christ. To the first point, there can be virtually no question that Cranmer’s command of the English language would have prevented extraneous adjectives. The second possibility does not account for the betrothal to Joseph. Indeed, it sounds much more like a reading of perpetual virginity: something the Book of Common Prayer and the Hymnal do not speak to in any way explicitly.[7] The third possibility is the most radical yet perhaps the one with the greatest number of witnesses. Colin Podmore, writing for Forward in Faith, observes that the 2005 document on Mary, Grace and Hope in Christ, catalogued a reticence on the part of 16th century English reformers to affirm that Mary was a sinner. And this is not at all relegated to the 16th century but in the 17th is picked up in the poetry of Bishop Thomas Ken.
But lest we place too much emphasis on a secondary document from the early 21st century or fall into the trap of consulting what may be an isolated Anglican Divine, let’s return to the rest of the Christmas collect. “Grant that we being regenerate, and made thy children by adoption and grace, may daily be renewed by thy Holy Spirit; through the same our Lord Jesus Christ, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the same Spirit, ever one God, world without end. Amen. Massey Sheperd, I believe rightly notes, that the petition of this collect is remarkably similar to the language used in prayer after Baptism: “We yield these hearty thanks, most merciful Father, that it hath pleased thee to regenerate this Child with thy Holy Spirit, to receive him for thine own child by adoption.” The main thrust of the collect is the comparison between Christ’s eternal sonship and our adopted status by Baptism. But the word “pure” as moniker for Mary, Sheperd believes, is derived from the language of Hebrews 10:22 “our bodies washed with pure water”. Meaning the status we are given by Baptism and its pure waters is the status Mary has without it. How far this is to be pushed is difficult to discern. But built into this singular word does seem to be a hint of how Christ’s human nature was assumed from the Virgin and it was not infected with sin. To this understanding, I would affix the 2nd verse of the Christmas carol “Es ist ein Ros Entsprungen”. Where many protestant hymnals translate this verse “Isaiah ‘twas foretold it, the rose I have in mind/with Mary we behold him, the Virgin mother kind,” the 1940 hymnal and the 2017 following it, translate the same German phrase “This rose tree blossom laden, whereof Isaiah spake/is Mary spotless maiden, who mothered for our sake.” To be sure, there are separate words for pure and spotless in German. The German word used in the original text is the word for “pure”, not “spotless”. Which makes this rendering all of the more intriguing as a possible commentary on the collect. The meter and poetry of the text would have been perfect with this rendering “is Mary purest maiden.” But spotless calls to mind the phrase from the proper preface for Christmas day “and that without spot of sin” which, though a clear reference to Christ in the preface, is grounds for considering that the “spotless” of the carol is indeed a reference to sinless. There then exists within Anglicanism acknowledgement of the distinct possibility that Mary is without stain of sin, though the means by which she is saved, or whether we speak only of actual or original sins or both, remain unsaid.
Mary is also given prominence in the calendar of the Anglican Church. No one other than our Lord is given more than one feast day. Mary is given at least two, in the Annunciation and Purification, and it could be argued two others in Christmas and in the third week of Epiphany. Other than Paul, there is simply no other New Testament character accorded such prominence in the 1662 propers. What may be inferred from this, though general, is the high station she takes in our celebrations: decidedly beneath her Son, but more intimately connected with him than anyone else. And so we highlight her in our tradition, as the Pure Virgin, the Mother of God, the indispensable link between Old and New Testament, the Leader of the Church’s praises, and ultimately, to borrow the phrasing of Commonwealth era minister Thomas Traherne, she is the “most glorious of all thy creatures. The most perfect of all thy works…the daughter of the Eternal Father and the Mother of the Eternal Son.”
What of it? While some Anglicans join Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians in a robust Marian piety, this is not the norm. In its absence, is there anything that can be made of these truths? Yes! Especially in light of traditional Anglicanism’s insistence on a male only priesthood, it is important to focus on the role of women. Women, who we often proclaim as equal to men in dignity but possessing differing qualifications and vocations, are sometimes still vastly undervalued. They are lauded for completing Martha-like tasks of hospitality in and around the church (as well they should be!). But sometimes it seems the value stops there. The consideration of Mary not only helps demonstrate the vital importance of motherhood as vocation but helps us to remember that it is a woman who stands at the apex of creation. It is not only in the calling of many women into his inner circle, nor in the providential act of making a woman the first witness of the Resurrection, but it is in Word becoming Flesh in the womb of the Blessed Virgin that women are elevated by Christ and the Christian faith to a place of proper dignity and accorded the honor they deserve. Anglicans, by remembering who Mary is, revel in the full splendor of truth; recall that “the mighty one has magnified [her]; and, rightly proclaim the importance of the feminine in the Christian faith.
Notes
- Luke 2:19 ↑
- Ex. 15:20-21 ↑
- Ps. 68:25 ↑
- Luke 1:42 ↑
- Luke 1:48 ↑
- Luke 1:55 ↑
- While this author sees no problem with the doctrine of Mary’s perpetual virginity, it is difficult to understand how the rest of the Book of Common Prayer as well as the hymnal could be silent on this if that was Cranmer’s intention in the adjective “pure”. ↑
