A reflection for Saturday within the Fifteenth Week after Pentecost — Sanctissimi Nominis Beatæ Mariæ Virginis, III classis (12 September)
Four days ago the Church kept the birthday of the Blessed Virgin. Today, as a Jewish family would have done after the birth of a daughter, she gives the child her name and celebrates it. The Introit is the Vultum tuum of the Common of Our Lady: “All the rich among the people shall entreat thy countenance” (Ps. 44:13). But the feast itself turns on one clause of the Gospel, seven words that St. Luke sets down without emphasis and that the Church has never been able to pass over quietly: et nomen virginis Maria — “and the virgin’s name was Mary.”
Names, in Scripture, are not labels but disclosures. To know the name is to know something of the thing. And so the Church, having told us in Wednesday’s Epistle whence Mary came, asks us today what she is called, and what it means that we may call upon her.
I. The vine and the honeycomb
The Epistle (Ecclus. 24:23-31) is Wisdom speaking of herself, and the Church places the words in the mouth of the Mother of Wisdom incarnate. This is not a strained accommodation. The liturgy has always read the Sapiential books of Mary because what is said of Wisdom’s dwelling among men was fulfilled, in the order of the flesh, in the woman in whom Wisdom took a body. The passage is a cascade of images, and each one rewards attention.
“As the vine I have brought forth a pleasant odour: and my flowers are the fruit of honour and riches. I am the mother of fair love, and of fear, and of knowledge, and of holy hope.”
Ego quasi vitis fructificavi. Our Lord will say of Himself, “I am the true vine” (John 15:1). The Fathers, following the text of the liturgy, let the image work in both directions. Mary is the vine because she bore the Grape — the cluster which, as St. Augustine says of the Passion, was pressed in the winepress of the Cross so that the wine of the new covenant might flow. The flower of the vine is its fragrance before it is its fruit; and so the Church has read of Mary the Canticle’s flos campi and Isaias’s rod out of the root of Jesse from which a flower should rise (Is. 11:1). St. Jerome, commenting on that verse, will not let the two be separated: the rod is the Virgin, the flower is Christ. The vine of today’s Epistle is fruitful precisely because she is a vine that bore a single fruit, and that fruit was God.
Ego mater pulchræ dilectionis. Mother of fair love. St. Bernard, who is the doctor of this feast as St. Ambrose is of Wednesday’s, remarks that every love is not fair; there is a love that is disordered, and a love that is only fear dressed as devotion. The love of which Mary is mother is fair because it is the love of a mother for a Son who is her God — the only human affection in history that was, in its object, entirely without measure and entirely without excess.
Then the passage turns toward us:
“Come over to me, all ye that desire me, and be filled with my fruits. For my spirit is sweet above honey, and my inheritance above honey and the honeycomb. My memory is unto everlasting generations.”
Memoria mea in generationes sæculorum. This is the verse that makes the Epistle the Epistle of the Holy Name. Wisdom’s memory — the remembering of her, the naming of her — endures to all generations. The Magnificat will say the same thing in the first person: “for behold from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed” (Luke 1:48). The name Maria has been on more human lips than any other name but one, and the prophecy that this would be so was made by the girl herself in the hill country of Juda, before a single soul outside her cousin’s house had heard of her.
And then the paradox that St. Augustine and St. Gregory both love: “They that eat me, shall yet hunger: and they that drink me, shall yet thirst.” Earthly food ends hunger by satisfying it and then disgusting it; the things of God end hunger by enlarging it. St. Gregory the Great, on this verse, teaches that the delights of the soul, unlike those of the body, are desired when possessed and possessed when desired — the more one has of them, the more one wants. Devotion to Mary works in this way. No one has ever grown tired of the Hail Mary who has actually prayed it.
II. Missus est
The Gospel (Luke 1:26-38) is the Annunciation, and the Church reads it today not for the mystery of the Incarnation as such — that is the business of the twenty-fifth of March — but for the person to whom the angel was sent, and for her name.
St. Luke is a physician and a careful historian, and the Fathers notice his precision. He gives the month, the town, the angel’s name, the bridegroom’s name and lineage, and the Virgin’s name. St. Bernard, in his second homily Super Missus est, pauses over each detail and then, arriving at the name, says in effect: let us say a few words on this name too, for it is not given us without reason. Its meaning, he tells us, is star of the sea, and the interpretation fits the Virgin Mother exactly.
He is following a tradition older than himself. St. Jerome, in his book on Hebrew names, glossed Maria as stilla maris, a drop of the sea, and also as illuminatrix; the copyists and St. Isidore after him read stella, star, and the Church has kept the reading — not because the philology is certain but because the theology is. A star gives out its light and loses nothing; the Virgin brought forth her Son and lost nothing of her virginity. A star fixed over a dark sea is the one thing the sailor needs, and Bernard’s counsel is the most famous passage he ever wrote: whoever you are who feel yourself tossed by the storms of this world, do not take your eyes from the brightness of this star — in dangers, in straits, in doubts, think of Mary, call upon Mary. Let her name not leave your lips, nor leave your heart.
St. Peter Chrysologus, preaching on this same Gospel at Ravenna in the fifth century, draws out another sense. Maria in Hebrew, he says, is Domina in Latin — Lady. The angel therefore addresses her as one addresses a sovereign, so that the fear proper to a servant may depart from the mother of the Lord, and she who was to bear the Ruler of all might be greeted with the title of authority from the moment of her assent. The Church’s habit of calling her Our Lady is not a courtesy of the Middle Ages. It is the meaning of her name.
St. Ambrose, in his commentary on St. Luke, guards the scene from two opposite misreadings. Mary’s Quomodo fiet istud — “how shall this be done?” — is not the doubt of Zachary, who asked for a sign and was struck dumb. Zachary doubted whether; Mary asked how. She did not question the promise but inquired into its manner, and this, Ambrose says, is the mark of a faith that is also a mind. And her silence afterward, her not running to tell what she had heard, is the modesty of a virgin who would have the work of God shown by its fruit rather than by her word. St. Augustine completes the portrait with a sentence the whole tradition has repeated: she conceived Christ in her mind before she conceived Him in her womb — prius concepit mente quam ventre — because the Fiat of faith preceded the Incarnation in the flesh and was its condition.
And St. Irenaeus, earlier than all of them, sets the scene in the frame of the whole economy of salvation: the knot that Eve tied by her disobedience, Mary loosed by her obedience; what the virgin Eve bound by unbelief, the Virgin Mary set free by faith. The Fiat is the untying.
III. Why the twelfth of September
The feast has a history, and it belongs to the Epistle. Devotion to the Holy Name of Mary was kept locally in Spain from the early sixteenth century, at Cuenca, and spread slowly. It became a feast of the universal Church in 1683, and the reason was a battle.
In that year the armies of the Sultan lay before Vienna, and the city was days from falling. On the eleventh of September the relieving army under John Sobieski, King of Poland, reached the heights of the Kahlenberg; the Capuchin Blessed Marco d’Aviano offered Mass on the morning of the twelfth, and the King served it; and by evening the siege of the Turks was broken and Europe was not to be Ottoman. Sobieski’s report to the Pope adapted Caesar’s: Venimus, vidimus, Deus vicit — we came, we saw, God conquered. The King had gone into battle invoking the name of Mary; and Innocent XI, in thanksgiving, extended the feast of her Holy Name to the whole Latin Church. St. Pius X fixed it on the anniversary itself, the twelfth of September, where it stands in the traditional calendar today.
Qui audit me, non confundetur — he that hearkeneth to me shall not be confounded. The Church has taken the promise of the Epistle to apply to those who call upon this name in extremity, and she has historical reasons for her confidence.
The Collect asks for exactly this: that Thy faithful, who rejoice under the name and protection of the most holy Virgin Mary, may by her loving intercession be delivered from all evils on earth and be found worthy to come to everlasting joys in heaven. The name and the protection are joined in a single phrase. To bear the name is to be under the mantle.
IV. A word for practice
There is a temptation, in an age that has lost the sense of names, to treat all this as sentiment — a lovely word, a lovely woman, a lovely feeling. The Fathers will not have it. The name is a disclosure of a reality: that God chose a creature to be Domina, Lady over the household of His Son, and that He has willed her memory to endure to all generations so that all generations might have someone to call. St. Bernard’s counsel is practical to the point of bluntness. In the storm, call upon Mary. Not “think about Marian doctrine.” Say the name.
Three practical steps for this feast:
First, take the Holy Name of Mary onto your lips as a habitual aspiration, as the saints have taken the Holy Name of Jesus. The single word Maria, said interiorly at the moment of temptation, distraction, or fear, is a whole prayer. St. Bernard’s respice stellam, voca Mariam — look to the star, call on Mary — was meant to be done, not admired.
Second, examine yourself on the manner of your asking. Do you ask God whether, like Zachary, requiring a sign before you will believe He can do what He has said? Or do you ask how, like Mary, taking the promise as settled and inquiring only into your part in it? The difference is the difference between a bargaining faith and a virginal one.
Third, say the Hail Mary today as though for the first time — slowly, attending to the fact that its first half is the Gospel of this Mass, the greeting of Gabriel and of Elizabeth, and that in praying it you are speaking the very words with which heaven addressed her.
Suggested prayer: the Collect of the day, or the short invocation the Church has indulgenced — Cor Mariæ dulcissimum, esto salus mea. “Sweetest Heart of Mary, be my salvation.” Or simply, and often: Maria.
Suggested devotion: the Ave maris stella at evening, and the First Joyful Mystery of the Rosary, attending to the moment the angel speaks her name.
If you wish to go deeper, this feast opens onto two of our paths. The Spiritual Practices and Devotions path treats devotion to the Blessed Virgin in its classical forms — the Rosary, the Little Office, and the interior habit of invocation that St. Bernard describes — and why the Church regards it not as an ornament of the faith but as an ordinary means of perseverance. The Church History path takes up 1683 and the age of the Turkish wars, in which the Rosary, Lepanto, and Vienna belong together, and shows how a feast of the calendar can be the memorial of a deliverance.
Sanctum Nomen Mariæ, sit benedictum in sæcula. Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis.