Virgo Potens

Chapter I The Martyrdom of Mary (continued) I.—The Immensity of Our Lady's Dolors (continued) Her dolors may also be called immense, because of the proportions which they bore to other things in her; for even immensity must have proportions in its way. If she was to sorrow perfectly,—if after Jesus, and beccause of Jesus, she was to have a pre-eminence of sorrow,—then her sorrows must be proportioned to her greatness. But she was the Mother of God! Who will take the altitude of that greatness? St. Thomas tried to do so, and said that omnipotence itself could not contrive a greater greatness. It had done its utmost, though it has no utmost, when it had imagined and effected the dignity of the Divine Motherhood. What are we to a saint, or a saint to the highest angel, or the highest angel to Mary? Perhaps we are nearer—it is to be suspected that we are much nearer—to Michael or Raphael, than they are to Mary; yet it is weary even for a strong mind to think how far off we are from those tremendous intelligences and uncomprehended sanctities. Yet a sorrow proportioned to our capacities, and even indulgently measured to our grace, can be something so terrific that it makes us dizzy to think of what God might will about us. And then, what can those spirits bear, and yet perish not, who have left the world wrongly, and fallen out of time when there was no root of eternity within them? Their strength is laden now in their hopeless home, yet not overladen; and who thinks of their burden without forthwith hiding his thoughts in God, lest something should happen to him, he knows not what? Yet Mary's soul was as immortal, as indestructible, as their spirits, and stronger far; and her body was miraculously supported by the same omnipotence which confers an imperishable resurrection. Nay, it was perhaps the same blessed Sacrament unconsumed within her, and in all of us the seed of a glorious resurrection, which was the miracle that kept her standing and alive at the foot of the bleeding Cross. What then must that sorrow have been which was proportioned to her greatness, to the greatness of the Mother of God, to her vast strength to bear, to her manifold capability of suffering? If we pause and think, we shall see how little our thinking comes to. ~ Frederick William Faber, D.D., The Foot of the Cross (1857)

Chapter I The Martyrdom of Mary (continued) I.—The Immensity of Our Lady's Dolors (continued) He is her Son, and such a Son, and in so marvellous a way her Son. He is her treasure and her all. What a fund of mystery—keen, quick, deadly, unequalled—was there in that sight! And yet there was far more than that. There was His Divine Nature. We talk of mothers making idols of their sons; that is, worshipping them, turning them from creatures into creators, regarding them as truly their last end and true beatitude, so giving their hearts to them as they have no right to give them to any one but God. This Mary could not do, and yet in another sense might well do. For Jesus could be no idol, and yet must of necessity be worshipped as the Eternal God. None saw this as Mary did. No angel worshipped Him with such sublimely abject adoration as she did. No saint, not even the dear Magdalen, ever hung over His feet with such mortal yearning, with such human fondness. Yes! He is God,—she saw that through the darkness of the eclipse. But then the blood,—the spittings, the earth stains, the unseemly scars, the livid, many-colored bruises,—what did all that mean on a Person only and eternally divine? It is vain to think of giving a name to such misery as then flooded her soul. Jesus, the joy of the martyrs, is the executioner of His mother. Twice over, to say the least, if not a third time also, did He crucify her: once by His Human Nature, once by His Divine, if indeed Body and Soul did not make two crucifixions from the Human Nature only. No martyrdom was ever like to this. No given number of martyrdoms approach to a comparison with it. It is a sum of sorrow which material units, ever so many added together, ever so often multiplied, do not go to form. It is a question of kind as well as of degree; and hers was a kind of sorrow which has only certain affinities to any other kinds of sorrow, and is simply without a name, except the name which the simple children of the Church call it by, the Dolors of Mary. ~ Frederick William Faber, D.D., The Foot of the Cross (1857)

Chapter I The Martyrdom of Mary (continued) I.—The Immensity of Our Lady's Dolors (continued) Moreover, in the case of the martyrs, they had long looked at their flesh as their enemy and their hinderance on the heavenward road. They had punished it, mortified it, cruelly kept it under, until they had come to regard it with a kind of holy hatred. Hers was sinless. It was the marvellous mine, the purest, sublimest matter that the world knew, out of which our Lord's Sacred Flesh and Precious Blood had been obtained, and she could know nothing of that exulting revenge with which heroic sanctity triumphs in the sufferings of the flesh. But what is the grand support of the martyrs in their tortures? It is that their minds are full of light and radiance. It is that their inward eye is bent on Jesus, by whose beauty and glory they are fortified. It is this which puts out the fires, or makes them pleasant as the flapping of the warm wind in spring. It is this which makes the scourges fall so soft and smooth, and causes the lash to cheer like wine. It is this which makes the sharpness of the steel so dull to the divided flesh and wounded fibres. What is within them is stronger than that which is without them. It is not that their agonies are not real, but that they are tempered, counteracted, almost metamorphosed, by the succors which their soul supplies, from the influx of grace and love wherewith their generous Master is at that moment filling them to overflowing. But where is Mary to look, with her soul's eye, for consolation? Nay, her soul's eye must look where her body's eye is fixed already. It is bent on Jesus; and it is that very sight which is her torture. She sees His Human Nature; and she is the mother, the mother beyond all other mothers, loving as never mother loved before, as all mothers together could not love, if they might compact their myriad loves into one intensest nameless act. ~ Frederick William Faber, D.D., The Foot of the Cross (1857)

Chapter I The Martyrdom of Mary (continued) I.—The Immensity of Our Lady's Dolors (continued) The first thing, then, which strikes us about our Lady’s dolors is their immensity, not in its literal meaning, but in the sense in which we commonly use it with reference to created things. It is to her sorrows that the Church applies those words of Jeremias,* O all ye that pass by the way, attend, and see if there be any sorrow like to my sorrow. To what shall I compare thee, and to what shall I liken thee, O daughter of Jerusalem? To what shall I equal thee, that I may comfort thee, O Virgin daughter of Sion? for great as the sea is thy broken heartedness: who shall heal thee? Mary's love is spoken of as that which many waters could not quench. In like manner the saints and doctors of the Church have spoken of the greatness of her sorrows. St. Anselm** says, Whatever cruelty was exercised upon the bodies of the martyrs was light, or rather it was as nothing, compared to the cruelty of Mary's passion. St. Bernardine of Siena*** says that so great was the dolor of the Blessed Virgin that if it was subdivided and parcelled out among all creatures capable of suffering, they would perish instantly. An angel**** revealed to St. Bridget that if our Lord had not miraculously supported His Mother, it would not have been possible for her to live through her martyrdom. It would be easy to multiply similar passages, both from the revelations of the saints and the writings of the doctors of the Church. But the immensity of Mary's dolors is especially shown in this, that they exceeded all martyrdom. Not only was there never any martyr, however prolonged and complicated his tortures may have been, who equalled her in suffering; but the united agonies of all the martyrs, variety and intensity all duly allowed for, did not approach to the anguish of her martyrdom. No thoughtful man will ever speak lightly of the mystery of bodily pain. Possibly in that respect his own experience may have shamed him into wisdom. It was in a great measure through bodily pain that the world was redeemed; and is it not mainly by the same process that we ourselves are being sanctified at this hour? It is the unerring justice of God which places on the heads of the martyrs that peculiar crown which belongs to those who, in the heroism of physical endurance, have laid down their lives for Christ. But even in respect of corporeal anguish Mary exceeded the martyrs. Her whole being was drenched with bitterness. The swords in her soul reached to every nerve and fibre in her frame, and we can hardly doubt but that her sinless body, with its exquisite perfections, was delicately framed for suffering beyond all others but that of her Son. ~ Frederick William Faber, D.D., The Foot of the Cross (1857) * Lament. i. and ii. ** De excell. Virg. cap.5. *** Ap Novatum i 359. Also Sinischalchi, Preface to his Dolori di Maria, p.xx. **** In sermone angelico ap Revelat. S. Birgittae, c. 17.

Chapter I The Martyrdom of Mary (continued) I.—The Immensity of Our Lady's Dolors When we think how we can best describe our Lady's dolors, it gradually dawns upon us that they are in fact indescribable. We see but the outside show of them, and there are no adequate figures by which even that can be represented. He who looks over the wide Atlantic sees a waste of waters with a white horizon on every side; but that waste of waters tells nothing either of the multitudinous manifold life which it contains within its bosom, nor of the fairy-like ocean-gardens of vivid, painted weeds, its woods of purple, deep thickets of most golden green, grottoes of fantastic rock with tufted palmlike yellow trees overhanging, and the blue water flowing all round, parklike vistas of glossy, spotted, arborescent herbs, or leagues on leagues of rose-colored forests teeming with strange, beautiful, heretofore unimaginable life. So is it with the sea of sorrows which rolls over the secret depths of the Immaculate Heart of the Mother of God. What we see is amazing, yet it hardly indicates what is below. How then shall we say what her woes are like? Holy men have tried to do so, and they have done it by calling her the co-redemptress of the world, and speaking of her sorrows as they blended with the Precious Blood, and the two made but one sacrifice for the sins of the world. There is a deep truth, and a most substantial one, hidden under these great words, and yet they may easily be understood in a sense in which they would not be true. They are the expressions of an excellent devotion, striving to assist the feebleness of our understandings to a true conception of Mary's grandeurs. They are accuracies, not exaggerations. Yet they need cautious wording and careful explanation. We shall consider them in the ninth chapter; and in the rest of the treatise we shall travel to our end by some other road, not only because we dare not trust ourselves to such a method of procedure, but also because it is against our habits and predilections and in matters of devotion what does not come natural is not persuasive. We will prefer therefore to approximate to our subject, inevitably falling short, rather than to overshoot it, making things indistinct by too strong a light, and dissatisfying by a feeling of unreality like a sunset in the hands of an unskilful painter. We shall come at last to the same end, in a manner which is not only most fitted to our own in firmity, but also most calculated to win the confidence of our readers. ~ Frederick William Faber, D.D., The Foot of the Cross (1857)

Chapter I The Martyrdom of Mary (continued) But, before we ask St. John the Evangelist to hold us by the hand, and go down with us into the depths of that broken heart, which he, the saint of the Sacred Heart, knew better than others, we must take a general view of our Blessed Lady's dolors, just as we familiarize ourselves with the general outlines of the geography of a country before we endeavor to master its details. There are seven points, on which it is necessary for us to have some information, before we can study with advantage the separate mysteries of her surpassing sorrow. We must know, as far at least as lies in our power, the immensity of her dolors, why God permitted them, what were the fountains of them, and what their characteristics, how it was that she could rejoice in them, in what way the Church puts them before us, and what should be the spirit of our devotion to them. These are questions which need answering; and the answers to them, however imperfect, will serve as a sort of introduction to the subject. ~ Frederick William Faber, D.D., The Foot of the Cross (1857)

Chapter I The Martyrdom of Mary (continued) The Woman clothed with the Sun will be wrapped round and round with the bright darkness of that same terrible destiny, which He vouchsafed first to appoint and then to accept as the great law of His Incarnation. We must be prepared to find Mary’s dolors beyond the reach of our imagination, above the possibility of our description. We can only gaze upon them with such instruments as faith and love supply, and note the beauty and the strangeness of many phenomena which we can only imperfectly comprehend. Especially can we thus increase our devotion to the Passion, many unknown regions of which are momentarily lighted up for us by the contact of her dolors, just as in the occultation of Jupiter, the luminous, tearlike planet, as it touches the dark portion of the moon, scatters a momentary line of light along the unseen edge, like a revelation, and then by its disappearance proves the reality of that which we cannot see. ~ Frederick William Faber, D.D., The Foot of the Cross (1857)

Chapter I The Martyrdom of Mary (continued) It can plainly be no wonder, if she shall suffer more than any one but Himself. The immensity of her sorrows will neither be a distress nor a surprise to us, but rather the obvious conclusion from all we know of the grand mystery of the Incarnation. The amount of her sufferings will be the index of the magnificence of His love for her. The depth of her pains will come the nearest of all things to fathom the abyss of her love for Him. Her far-rolling sea of sorrow will measure the grandeur of her holiness. The loftiness of her divine Maternity will raise her dolors close up to His gracious Passion. Her sinlessness will almost seem to enclose it within the same life-giving law of expiation. Her union with Him will render her Compassion inseparable from His Passion, even while for a thousand reasons it is so manifestly distinguishable from it. ~ Frederick William Faber, D.D., The Foot of the Cross (1857)

Chapter I The Martyrdom of Mary (continued) The same law has environed the martyrs of all ages. Their passions have been living shadows of the great Passion, and the blood they shed mingled its kindred stream with the Precious Blood of their Redeemer, the King of Martyrs. So with the saints. Whether they have been bishops or doctors, virgins or matrons, seculars or religious, unusual love and unusual grace have always reached them in the shape of unusual trial and unusual suffering. They too must be drawn into the cloud, and they will come out of it with their faces shining, because they have seen, and seen closely, the Face of the Crucified. It is so in its measure with all the elect. They must stand at least within the fringes of the dark cloud, or it must overshadow them in transit, perhaps more than once, in order to secure the salvation of their souls by giving them at least an adequate likeness to their Lord. What, then, must we think of His Mother, who came nighest to Him of all? ~ Frederick William Faber, D.D., The Foot of the Cross (1857)

Chapter I The Martyrdom of Mary (continued) This same law of suffering, which belongs to Jesus, touches all who come nigh Him, and in proportion to their holiness, envelops them, and claims them wholly for itself. The Holy Innocents were, in the counsels of God, simply our Lord's contemporaries, but that is similitude enough to plunge them in a sea of suffering, and for His sake their fresh lives must bleed away in their distracted mother's arms, to be followed by eternal crowns and palms: a happy merchandise, a huge fortune swiftly made, and then so marvellously secured! The same law wound itself round each of the apostles, upon whom the indescribably blessed choice of the Incarnate Word had fallen. It was a cross to Peter and his brother, a sword to Paul, hard stones to James, the flaying-knife to Bartholomew, and the boiling oil and the long years of wearisome delay to John. But, in whatever shape it came outwardly, inwardly it was always suffering. It went with them into all lands. It overshadowed them in all vicissitudes. It walked with them along the Roman roads, as if it was their guardian angel; it strode by the side of their uneasy galleys on the stormy waters of the Mediterranean. They were apostles. They must be like their Lord. They must enter into the cloud, and the darkness of the eclipse must fall upon them on the top of some Calvary or other, from Rome to Bactria, from Spain to Hindostan. ~ Frederick William Faber, D.D., The Foot of the Cross (1857)