Mary and the Trinity

[surritter]

I recently heard a litany where Mary was addressed as “Mother of the Creator.” While I’ve often heard “Mother of the Redeemer,” I have never heard the other title before.

Since the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all one (and since I’m a Catholic!), I have no issue with the title Mother of the Creator. But it brings up the question: Wouldn’t the same logic say that we can call her “Mother of the Holy Spirit”?

Yet that one doesn’t sound right – she is actually the Spouse of the Holy Spirit.

Can anyone help with the seeming incongruity of calling her Mother of two Persons of the Trinity but not the third?

 

[JimG]

Persons have mothers. Jesus is one Person with two natures. He is a divine person, but has both a human nature and a divine nature. Mary is his mother, since he was born of her. That doesn’t mean she created him, just that she is the mother. In fact, she is the only mother who was specifically chosen by her son to be his mother.

Persons have mothers–not natures. The Trinity is three Persons. It seems to me that Mary can be correctly said to be the mother of only one of the Persons–the second person of the Trinity.

When we call her Mother of God, we speak of her motherhood of Jesus, who in his divine nature is God.

If we speak of her as mother of the Creator, it would be in the sense that the Person of whom she is the mother–the second person of the Trinity–is a divine person who also possesses the One Divine nature of God. But it is better, I think, to preserve the distinction between Person and Nature.

 

[Robyn_p]

It doesn’t sound right to call Mary mother of the Holy Spirit because simply put, she’s not. I’ve never heard of that title of Mary, mother of the Creator either, but there’s a couple things here to keep in mind that might help clear things up.

1. Mary is only the mother of one Person of the Blessed Trinity, the Second, Jesus. She is not mother of either the Father or the Holy Spirit, since neither the Father nor the Holy Spirit became incarnate. We don’t want to fall into modalism, which doesn’t make any distinctions between the Persons of the Trinity. Only the Second Person of the Trinity became man.
2. It’s possible that when that litany called Mary the Mother of the Creator, it wasn’t trying to say that Mary was the Mother of the Father (which is a heresy, modalism) but perhaps it was being used as another title for Jesus. Jesus is revealed in Scripture to be the creator of the universe. (John 1:1-3, Colossians 1, etc…) If that was their intention, then it’s perfectly fine to call Mary, mother of the Creator, as long as by creator it means Jesus. But if they did mean the Father, then that’s an issue. We can never call her mother of the Father, because that’s not who she gave birth to, she gave birth to the Son.

Hope that made a little sense.

 

[Todd977]

Although the Father is often called the Creator, the Son and the Holy Spirit can also be called the Creator because Creation was the work of all three Persons of the Trinity.

Since the Virgin Mary was the mother of the Son and the Son was the Creator, the Virgin Mary was the mother of the Creator.

The idea that the Virgin Mary is the mother of the Creator also appears regularly in the Church’s Liturgy of the Hours. For instance, Antiphon 1 of the Psalmody of Evening Prayer I for the Common of the Blessed Virgin Mary is:
Blessed are you, O Virgin Mary, for you carried the Creator of the world in your womb.And Antiphon 2 is:
You are the mother of your Maker, yet you remain a virgin for ever.

 

[JerryZ]

I recently heard a litany where Mary was addressed as “Mother of the Creator.” While I’ve often heard “Mother of the Redeemer,” I have never heard the other title before.

Since the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all one (and since I’m a Catholic!), I have no issue with the title Mother of the Creator. But it brings up the question: Wouldn’t the same logic say that we can call her “Mother of the Holy Spirit”?

Yet that one doesn’t sound right – she is actually the Spouse of the Holy Spirit.

Can anyone help with the seeming incongruity of calling her Mother of two Persons of the Trinity but not the third?

Yes remember GOD is the infinite mistery and while there is but 1 GOD there are 3 persons and we experience them in distinct ways.
Jesus is the personal human experiece because HE IS human.
The Holy Spirit gives us strenght, inspiration and all the other virtues.
We worship GOD the father.

All three are GOD and Mary was the mother of the 2nd person.
Because Jesus IS God we can legitimatelly say “Mary Mother of GOD”.
So any title that justly belong to Jesus we can replace in “Mary Mother of ________”
She is not the mother of the Holy Spirit nor the Father since her interaction of motherhood was exclusive with Jesus.

Peace

 

[surritter]

Persons have mothers–not natures. The Trinity is three Persons. It seems to me that Mary can be correctly said to be the mother of only one of the Persons–the second person of the Trinity.

When we call her Mother of God, we speak of her motherhood of Jesus, who in his divine nature is God.

If we speak of her as mother of the Creator, it would be in the sense that the Person of whom she is the mother–the second person of the Trinity–is a divine person who also possesses the One Divine nature of God. But it is better, I think, to preserve the distinction between Person and Nature.

Thanks! But my question stems from the fact that Mary is indeed given the title Mother of the Creator.
See this article where Archbishop Gomez calls her Mother of the Creator:
satodayscatholic.com/GomezEng_010110.aspx

 

[JimG]

Thanks! But my question stems from the fact that Mary is indeed given the title Mother of the Creator.
See this article where Archbishop Gomez calls her Mother of the Creator:
satodayscatholic.com/GomezEng_010110.aspx

Archbishop Gomez’s column is somewhat poetic, but it is not wrong. Let me quote a bit of it:

“Mary is the mother of God! The mother of our creator. The first Christians called her Theotokos — “the bearer of God.” This is one of the great mysteries of our religion.”

The archbishop is not writing a detailed theological treatise here. He makes reference to Mary’s title of “Theotokos”—God bearer. Mary gave birth to Jesus, who in his person is the 2nd Person of the Trinity, who is God. And Persons, not natures, have mothers.

Recall that in John’s Gospel he says that “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things came into being, and apart from him nothing came to be.”

So it seems to me that in this passage, John is indeed attributing Creation to the Word, who is the Second Person of the Trinity.

I think it was Frank Sheed who mentions in his book “Theology for Beginners” that concerning God’s actions with respect to mankind, all three Persons act in unison, as they must, possessing only the one divine nature as a source of action.

(But note that salvation required atonement by a human being, and so the Word became man—and only one of the Persons of the Trinity has a human nature as well as a divine nature.)

In sum, I don’t really see any heterodoxy here, just a good deal of mystery, which if meditated on sufficiently, would require at least a book for its explication. And such books have been written.

 

[surritter]

So…

We can call Mary the Mother of the Redeemer.
We can call Mary the Mother of the Creator.
But we CAN’T call Mary the Mother of the Holy Spirit.

Maybe I’m being too much of a stickler, but doesn’t that disrupt something about the Trinity? That’s all I was getting at.

But thanks for your insights!

 

[JimG]

So…

We can call Mary the Mother of the Redeemer.
We can call Mary the Mother of the Creator.
But we CAN’T call Mary the Mother of the Holy Spirit.

Maybe I’m being too much of a stickler, but doesn’t that disrupt something about the Trinity? That’s all I was getting at.

But thanks for your insights!

Yes, we can call Mary the Mother of the Redeemer because the Redeemer is the Second Person of the Trinity, to whom she gave birth in his human nature.

We can call her mother of the Creator, if by that we refer to the Second Person of the Trinity, to whom we are attributing creation. (And we can do that because all Three Persons act in unity in the Creation of the Universe, and also because the gospel of John specifically attributes creation to the Word.)

We cannot call her mother of the Holy Spirit, because she did not give birth to the Person of the Holy Spirit. (Indeed she could not, since the Holy Spirit is pure spirit and has no human nature which might be subject to being born. Once again, it is Persons who have mothers. And she is mother of the Redeemer.

This is probably more than I should say without looking up the matter in a theological treatise. It is quite easy to fall into error when discussing the Trinity because the terms require precise definition.