Mary:
The Restoration of Woman
The Restoration of Woman
St Fulgentius has especially contemplated
the Blessed Virgin as ‘the restoration of woman’. He shows how she
passed through every state and office of her sex, that all might find a
model and a help in her, and that as the new Eve she might recover and
raise up the fallen state of woman.
This then has Mary done for woman as the
head and type of her sex. She has freed her from a state of bondage,
and has lifted her up from her degradation. On Eve the Almighty laid a
special curse: ‘I will multiply thy sorrows and thy conceptions; in
sorrow shalt thou bring forth children, and thou shalt be under thy
husband’s power, and he shall have dominion over thee’. Here is
indicated a severe yoke and bitter trials. For though man from the
beginning was the head, yet woman was ordained for his companion and
helpmate. But between the fall and the coming of the Gospel woman is
everywhere in a state of bondage and of servitude beneath the power of
man, and everywhere the wife is guarded with excessive jealousy. Even
in the old law polygamy is both permitted and practised by the holiest
men, and because of the hardness of men’s hearts, as our Lord himself
has said, divorce obtained a legal sanction; and to this day, beyond
the sphere of Christianity, woman is still in the condition of a slave.
What then has raised our mothers and our
sisters from so low and degraded a condition? Mary was given to us. In
her Eve was set free and made resplendent. All her daughters have shared
in the honour of this new Mother. Mary has brought grace and favour to
all women. They are reverenced through reverence for her; and when,
amongst a people of faith, woman calls for protection in her distress
and anguish, ‘For the honour of the Blessed Virgin’, she reveals the
foundation on which the respect due to her rests.
But Mary has delivered woman in a yet more
striking way: she has given honour to the state of virginity. She has
established it as a state of life by her example and her influence.
Woman is made free, because she has a choice of states: she may keep
her freedom to the Lord her God, or she may give it to a husband; and
this power of choice, which the grace of the Holy Spirit guides, has
given a dignity to woman which grows the more exalted in our minds the
more deeply we reflect upon it. She who in her youthful innocence
becomes the spouse of Christ and leads a life of divine and
contemplative love in the presence of God, and she who devotes herself
to the same Lord in His suffering members and becomes a sister of
charity, owes her happiness and dignity to Mary; and this holy state
has thrown a halo of sanctity and freedom around the entire lot of
woman, whilst she who gives herself to a husband has given so far more
precious a gift, as she might have been consecrated to God alone; and
when she becomes a mother she rejoices in a respect paid to her
maternity, which derives its dignity from the type of all mothers. This
wonderful restoration, as it arose with the uprising of the Church and
took its origin from the perfect Virgin and Mother, was more striking
then than now, since from long custom it looks like the natural order
of things.
Wherever the Church has been overwhelmed through worldliness and error, wherever Mary has ceased to influence, and tradition concerning her has become hesitating, there the reverence for woman has begun to retrograde.
