17th Century Anglican Marian Devotion: A meditation
upon the Conception of Mary
“Be it unto me according to thy word”
“Until they are good Marians, they shall never be good Christians” avowed Anthony Stafford in 1637, words which apply to every age of Christianity. We meet to honour the female glory of Mary, Virgin and Mother, through whom “salvation to all that will is nigh,” as the poet John Donne puts it, Christ being that “immensity cloistered in thy dear womb,” his conception the immediate consequence of her Annunciation. Yet her annunciation stands upon the necessity of her conception. We meet on the eve of the Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the week of the Second Sunday in Advent.
There is a certain paradox in this commemoration. On the week which is governed by the pageant of God’s Word Written in the form of the Scriptures we find this minor Holy Day which commemorates a completely non-biblical event, namely Mary’s conception. Yet, this minor commemoration has been in The Book of Common Prayer since 1549 and connects with an older doctrinal and devotional tradition of reflection about the role and place of Mary in the understanding of human redemption.
On one level, we could say it is all rather prosaic. For Mary to exist she had to be conceived. But that only heightens the question. Why the conception? Whether with or without the equally perplexing adjective of immaculate, meaning pure or spotless? Is this not all a bit much and whole lot removed from the biblical perspective? Well, it is outside the Scriptures but it belongs to a form of theological reasoning upon the Scriptures which, after all, have to be thought upon. They are given for our learning. The Conception of Mary belongs to the theological reflection upon the meaning of Christ’s Incarnation. This feast is part of a wonderful Anglican tradition of Marian devotion, but one that is governed by a clearly defined theological understanding.
Let’s be clear. There is no direct Scriptural basis for this feast. There are, on the other hand, a great number of legends and stories that have entered into the mindscape of the Church, both East and West, legends which fill in the gaps in imaginative ways, as it were. Notable among those are the stories of the meeting between Joachim and Anna at the golden gate in Jerusalem, the setting for Mary’s immaculate conception, a story which was frequently depicted in Christian art. But it is entirely a non-biblical story. Nonetheless, it speaks to a certain interest in the person of Mary in relation to Christ.
Though Mary does not appear that often in the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, she is present at certain doctrinally important moments: Christ’s nativity, his crucifixion, and at Pentecost. Theologically, she is critical for the understanding of the full, perfect and complete humanity of Jesus.
In 1854, the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception was promulgated by the Roman Catholic Church as a necessity of saving faith. Anglicans, whether they are attracted to the concept or repulsed by it, cannot regard the Immaculate Conception of Mary as an essential of the Faith for the simple reason that it is not properly grounded in Scripture. Which is not to say that Mary does not have a special role and place in doctrine and devotion. She does and in a way which constantly stresses the interplay and interrelation between Mary and Jesus.
All the feasts of Mary are keyed to the festivals of Christ. There is a wonderful doctrinal sensibility in which Protestants and Roman Catholics actually meet in relation to Mary. Luther, the great Father of Protestantism, in his sermon on the Magnificat in 1521, makes the following point. Mary does not want us to come to her but through her to Jesus. It is exactly the same sentiment as Ignatius of Loyola and the Jesuits, captured in one of their mottoes, per Mariam ad Jesum, through Mary to Jesus.
“The Femall Glory” is, I think, a wonderful phrase and yet, it is, actually, the title of a book by a pious, devout and theologically astute 17th century English layman, Anthony Stafford, who was the first, he thinks, to have “written in our vulgar tongue on this our Blessed Virgin.” Unique perhaps in its style, it was not unique in its ideas and thinking but belongs to the rich and lively tradition of Marian devotion in 17th century Anglican divinity. It embodies the distinctive qualities of classical Anglican divinity with its strong orthodox and doctrinal sensibility and its devotional focus and emphasis on the purity of Mary. The Femall Glory is an outstanding work of holy imagination but one which understands the subordination of the affective language of devotion and prayer to the language of essential doctrine and creedal affirmation.
Our salvation is Jesus Christ, true God and true man. Mary is the pure source of Christ’s true humanity and as such is the bearer of his divinity into the world. At the heart of Anglican Marian devotion is the strong orthodoxy of the Council of Chalcedon in 451AD which gave theological coherence to the scriptural images of Mary in the economy of salvation by calling her Theotokos, the Mother of God. She is the Mother of God, not because she is the source of Christ’s divinity, which as creature she cannot be, but because she is the chosen vessel, pure and prepared by the grace of God, by which Christ becomes man without ceasing to be God, distinguishing, as Stafford puts it, “betweene the Mother of God and the Mother of the Godhead; the first of which she truly is, the latt’r she is not.
There is a kind of parallelism with respect to Christ and Mary. His conception, her conception; her nativity, his nativity; his Resurrection; her assumption; his presentation, her purification and so on. The feasts of Mary are all the feasts of Christ. This is an important feature of the Anglican witness to Mary.
It is all about the mystery of the Incarnation, “that the Union of both natures, God and Man, being in Christ, she must, by strong consequence, bring forth both God and Man.” The measure of Chalcedon governs the devotional discourse of Anglican divinity.
The Anglican Divines of the 17th century celebrate the purity of Mary because of the purity of Christ. Only as pure can he freely bear the impurities of our sins which make us less than ourselves, less than fully human. Only as pure can he restore us to the truth of ourselves in God. Only as pure can he show us the Father and show us to the Father. It is the point that is made in the proper preface for Christmas and for the Annunciation in The Book of Common Prayer in which Christ, it is prayed, “was made very man of the substance of the Virgin Mary his mother; and that without spot of sin, to make us clean from all sin.” Any compromising of the terms of this discourse of doctrinal prayer would be a loss of orthodoxy.
Christ is the eternal son of God, “that pure one,” as Irenaeus puts it, “opening purely that pure womb which regenerates men unto God and which he himself made pure.” “Behold,” says Mary, “the handmaid of the Lord”. What do we behold in her? We behold the female glory.
But what is that female glory? The female glory, as Stafford makes clear, is the glory of our humanity. We behold the truth of our humanity in her who is the source of Christ’s true humanity. Stafford’s treatise contains An Epistle to the Feminine Reader that “here you may learn to transforme your ugly vices, into as amiable Vertues”; and An Epistle to the Masculine Reader, “requiring your Imitation, whose meanest Perfection farre excels all your so long vaunted masculine merits”. Such is the universality of its orthodoxy.
Her pure openness to the will of God is not a matter of passivity but signals true humanity’s active engagement with God. Mary, after all, asks the question, “how shall this be seeing as I know not a man?”, lest there be any ambiguity about the uniqueness and the mystery of the Incarnation. Lancelot Andrewes is especially clear, too, that for Mary “to conceive is more than to receive. It is so to receive as we yield somewhat of our own also. A vessel is not said to conceive the liquor that is put into it. Why? Because it yieldeth nothing from itself. The Blessed Virgin … [gave] of her own substance.”
It means being defined by the Word of God and not simply by the discourse of our world and day. It means being defined by the grace of God and not simply by the circumstances and experiences of our lives. It means being defined by the theological Word which must engage the discourse of our own world and day without simply being collapsed into it. Otherwise it is not the Word. Such are the challenges for contemporary Christianity. Corporately and individually, through her “whom no man can honour too much that makes her not God,” as John Donne puts it, we may discover again the essential Marian qualities of the Church, namely, our being with Christ through our active attentiveness to his Word proclaimed and his Sacraments celebrated.
For then, we, too, shall be highly favoured, and never “at any time more fully than in the blessed Sacrament to which we are now a-going”, as Mark Frank so eloquently puts it.
There he is strangely with us, highly favours us, exceedingly blesses us; there we are all made blessed Marys, and become mothers, sisters, and brothers of our Lord, whilst we hear his word, and conceive it in us; whilst we believe him who is the Word, and receive him too into us.
But only if we will be good Marians who say what Mary says:
“Be it unto me according to thy word”
Fr. David Curry
Eve of the Feast of the Conception of the BVM
December 7th, 2010