Mater et Materia Dei

A meditation on the Theotokos

After yesterday’s feast in the Catholic (Novus Ordo) calendar, I have been meditating on what it means for Mary to be the Mother of God. The Latin word for mother is mater, which also lies at the root of the word for “matter,” materia. In ancient biology, the mother supplies the material element of the life of the offspring. In a manner of speaking, the matter of the offspring is itself the very matter of the mother: she is herself, in some way, the materia of her child. To be the mother of God thus implies that Mary supplied, nay she herself was, the materia, the matter, which was to be formed into the body of Jesus Christ. By being conceived within her, God formed her matter into his own. Mary was herself the very stuff out of which God (in human form) was made.

Matter is a receptacle of form. Aristotle uses the Greek term ὕλη for matter, but he compares it to Plato’s χώρα in the Timaeus. χώρα is also place/space, and matter is in some way compared to place as that which, being initially empty and formless, is formed by the things that occupy it. It receives form, and is thereby formed, occupied, filled up, by it. The womb is a receptacle, not merely in the sense of an external container, but in the sense of a place. Recall Nishida’s basho: it is that in which all determinate forms are enveloped and implaced — “conceived” and “inseminated.” It is the undetermined place that determines itself into the particular forms that are implaced in it. The womb of the mother itself is, in some way, that which is determined by the form of the child impregnated in her.

Thus, she is not only Theotokos but also Theotopos, the place of God; Theokhora, the receptacle or place of God; and Materia Dei, the matter of God, the stuff out of which God was made when God was made man. A properly Marian spirituality looks to Mary as the model of mystic virtue. To be a saint is to be like Mary, uttering her fiat in a great “Yes” to God’s request for her motherhood: saying “yes” to becoming the mother and the matter of God; agreeing to be formed by God, to let her body become the stuff out of which God was made. When the Church fathers say “God became man so that man might become God,” they mean something like this. In a way, these two movements are the same one: God becomes man insofar as man is the stuff out of which this “becoming God” is made. Like Mary, we are therefore called to offer our bodies, our whole being, to be formed by God, so that the whole of our human reality might “become God.” We are to become God by becoming “mothers” of God, or the matter of God, as Mary was. She is our perfect archetype because she it was who first and above all “became God” by agreeing to be his mother/matter, his place/receptacle.

To be mother/matter or place/receptacle is, as such, to be perfectly empty. When Mary pronounced her fiat she emptied herself, to become the place for God. A place must be empty before it is filled by something. Thus there is an implicit Marian dimension to Meister Eckhart’s Christmas sermons, which speak often of the birth of God within the soul. Eckhart seems preoccupied with the question of place: where in the soul is God born? Commenting on a passage from the Book of Wisdom, 18:14-15 — “14 For when peaceful stillness encompassed everything and the night in its swift course was half spent, 15 Your all-powerful word from heaven’s royal throne leapt into the doomed land,” — Eckhart writes:

Three things are to be noted here. The first is, where in the soul God the Father speaks His Word, where this birth takes place and where she is receptive of this act, for that can only be in the very purest, loftiest, subtlest part that the soil is capable of. . . Therefore the soul in which this birth is to take place must keep absolutely pure and must live in noble fashion, quiet collected and turned entirely inward, not running out through the five senses into the multiplicity of creatures, but all inturned and collected in the purest part — there is His place; He disdains anything less.

Eckhart goes on:

There is the silent ‘middle,’ for no creature ever entered there and no image, nor had the soul there any activity or understanding; therefore she is not aware there of any image, whether of herself or of any other creature.

What has struck me about this sermon is Eckhart’s very deliberate use of words relating to place: “place,” “where,” “there,” etc. He is also speaking, in the context of the whole sermon, of a womb, because he is speaking of the place of birth. He is also speaking of matter, insofar as he is speaking of the receptacle that is in itself unformed and formless, like prime matter, into which alone therefore God deigns to be born. The soul in whom God is to be born must thus live in accord with this purest, emptiest part of itself, in total receptivity and formlessness, abandoned entirely to the formation which God’s birth will wrought in it. This is the Marian way; this is Mary’s fiat. We are to become mothers of God, and thereby we become God; and God himself becomes — he comes to be — in us, such that he deigns to be made of our matter, or of our very selves as the material principle of his coming to be. We give birth to God, which is to say we offer our very being as a kind of material cause to be made into God.