More Beautiful Than The Sun: Mary Immaculate
By JAMES MONTI
Each year on the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, we hear at Mass the passage from the Book of Revelation that speaks of the “woman clothed with the sun” (Rev. 12:1), the Church presenting Mary to us in the mystery of her Immaculate Conception as clothed in the spotless and splendid light of absolute sinlessness. Yet this is not the only passage in the Bible where the Church has found Mary cast in this manner. For centuries, what was said in the Book of Wisdom concerning wisdom itself, personified as a woman “more beautiful than the sun,” has also been seen as a prophecy of the Blessed Virgin Mary:
“For she is a breath of the power of God, / and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty; / therefore nothing defiled gains entrance into her. / For she is a reflection of eternal light, / a spotless mirror of the working of God, / and an image of his goodness…in every generation she passes into holy souls / and makes them friends of God, and prophets…For she is more beautiful than the sun, / and excels every constellation of the stars. / Compared with the light she is found to be superior, / for it is succeeded by the night, / but against wisdom evil does not prevail. . . .
“I loved her and sought her from my youth, / and I desired to take her for my bride, / and I became enamoured of her beauty. / She glorifies her noble birth by living with God, / and the Lord of all loves her. . . . Therefore I determined to take her to live with me, / knowing that she would give me good counsel / and encouragement in cares and grief” (Wisdom 7:25-27, 29-30; 8:2-3, 9).
While it must be said that what the Sacred Scriptures have to say about wisdom applies first and foremost to Our Lord Himself as the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, the employment of a feminine personification in the Book of Wisdom attests that there is also a profound Marian dimension to be found in these words, a dimension that has deeply permeated the Church’s Marian imagery across the centuries.
In his work De laudibus beatae Mariae Virginis, the French medieval theologian Richard of Saint-Laurent (+ca. 1250) develops the Marian implications of the Wisdom imagery, including the analogy of wisdom as a spotless mirror:
“Mary herself is the mirror without spot to faithful souls, in which they ought to look continually….In her purity she has so excelled, that it is not possible to conceive [anything] greater under God” (De laudibus beatae Mariae Virginis, book 8, chapter 1, n. 8 — text in Auguste Borgnet and Emile Borgnet, editors, B. Alberti Magni, Ratisbonensis Episcopi, Ordinis Praedicatorum: Opera Omnia, volume 36, Paris, Louis Vives, 1898, p. 425 — note that Richard’s work was formerly attributed erroneously to St. Albert.)
As the above explanation of Richard suggests, much of what the Book of Wisdom says can be applied particularly to the mystery of the Immaculate Conception, as when it states that “nothing defiled gains entrance into her” and that “against wisdom evil does not prevail” (Wisdom 7:25, 30).
Drawing upon biblical imagery and comparisons not only from the Book of Wisdom but also the Song of Songs, the Book of Revelation and other scriptural passages, Richard likens the Blessed Virgin to the glory of the dawn, its white light signifying her holiness and its golden light reflecting her virginal purity, with the songs of birds at dawn representing men and angels singing the praises of Jesus and Mary.
The Church’s recognition of the close association between the description of the “woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under feet” from the Book of Revelation (Rev. 12:1) and the mystery of the Immaculate Conception can be attributed, at least in part, to Pope Sixtus IV (1471-1484), a Pontiff known to have spent many hours in prayer to our Lady, who promulgated as a highly indulgenced prayer the Immaculate Conception invocation Ave sanctissima Maria, Mater Dei (“Hail, most holy Mary, Mother of God”), with the specific condition that the supplicant was to offer this prayer before an image of the Blessed Virgin “in sole” (“in the sun”), i.e., an image based upon the Revelation description.
Over the two centuries that followed, depictions of Mary immersed in bright light and standing upon a crescent moon abounded. While many of these portray the Immaculate Virgin standing by herself, there are also Immaculate Conception images in which she holds the Christ Child. A particularly beautiful example of the latter is enshrined in the co-cathedral of the Most Holy Savior (Santissimo Salvatore) in Montalcino, Italy, a 1588 altarpiece painting of the Italian artist Francesco Vanni (1563-1610) entitled, The Immaculate Conception with the Holy Trinity. Here we find not only the moon beneath our Lady, but also twelve stars round about her head, likewise from the Book of Revelation (12:1), plus a small ornately framed mirror at the lower right, evoking the imagery from the Book of Wisdom.
One of the most striking aspects of this portrait is its depiction of our Lady’s utter supremacy over the infernal Enemy of mankind. As the Christ Child happily clings to His Mother in her arms, with God the Father and the Holy Spirit hovering above, Mary with a casual glance downward gingerly steps upon the grotesque gaping jaws of Satan in the guise of a serpent, crushing him as nonchalantly as if she were just kicking a pebble out of her way. Here we see the monstrous pride of him who with his tail had “swept down a third of the stars of heaven” to Earth (Rev. 12:4) trampled underfoot by the gentle tread of a radiant young maiden in a bright pink dress — Satan’s ultimate humiliation.
The Annunciation has always been rightly seen as the definitive moment of our Lady’s reception of and assent to her vocation as Virgin Mother of our Lord. Yet for Mary there was another moment of vocation discernment that preceded this one, a moment not directly described in the Gospels but implicitly referenced in her reply to the Angel Gabriel, “How shalt this be done, because I know not man?” (Luke 1:34 — Douay-Rheims translation).
It concerns the moment when Mary resolved to consecrate her virginity to God, to remain a virgin forever. Unlike her calling to the Divine Motherhood in which an angel appeared to her, this prior calling to perpetual virginity she would have received in the same manner that we receive our callings to a vocation, a calling discerned in the depths of the heart. And it would have come as a blossom arising from her Immaculate Conception, a soul of inviolate innocence from the moment of her conception freely choosing a life of inviolate virginity.
In keeping with an ancient tradition recorded as early as the fifth century in the writings of St. Jerome (+420), our Lady has been seen and depicted in sacred art as a fervent reader of the Sacred Scriptures, evinced by the numerous portrayals of her with a book at the moment of the Annunciation. Richard of Saint-Laurent describes her as a veritable “archive of the Scriptures” (De laudibus beatae Mariae Virginis, book 9, chapter 2, n. 1, in Borgnet, p. 427), for she is believed to have immersed herself in the Sacred Scriptures.
Even if our Lady did not actually engage in reading, she surely could have learned the words of the Prophets and the Psalms orally, pondering them in her heart as she would later do in contemplating the events concerning her Divine Son.
It is in this context that we can venture a reverent guess or two as to how Mary came to discern her calling to virginity. Perhaps it was in these words from the Song of Songs that she heard the voice of God inviting her to be His totally beloved spouse:
“Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away; / for lo, the winter is past, / the rain is over and gone. / The flowers appear on the earth, / the time of singing has come….O my dove, in the clefts of the rock, in the covert of the cliff, / let me see your face, let me hear your voice, / for your voice is sweet, and your face is comely” (Song 2:10-12, 14).
Or perhaps the Blessed Virgin first came to recognize God’s plan for her in these words from Psalm 45:
“Hear, O daughter, consider, and incline your ear; / forget your people and your father’s house; / and the king will desire your beauty. / Since he is your lord, bow to him. . . . The princess is decked in her chamber with gold-woven robes; / in many-coloured robes she is led to the king, / with her virgin companions, her escort, in her train” (Psalm 45:10-11, 14).
The Mother Of The Word
In the afore-cited passage from the Song of Songs, which was often applied by medieval exegetes to the Mother of God, the bridegroom praises the beauty of the face of his bride. One artist after another has striven to give the Blessed Virgin the most beautiful and resplendent face that their craft could achieve. Richard of Saint-Laurent makes a very telling comparison regarding the face of our Lady, citing how the face of Moses shone after conversing directly with God, as related in chapter 34 of the Book of Exodus:
“When Moses came down from Mount Sinai. . . . Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God. And when Aaron and all the people of Israel saw Moses, behold, the skin of his face shone, and they were afraid to come near him” (Exodus 34:29-30).
Richard concludes, “If therefore the face of the Prophet [Moses] appeared so beautiful from the company of the discourse of the Lord, what do you think of the face of the Mother of the Word Himself?” (De laudibus beatae Mariae Virginis, book 5, chapter 2, n. 1, in Borgnet, p. 280). Implicit in Richard’s comparison is that a radiance similar to that of Moses would have come upon the face of Mary from looking upon the Christ Child.
In her highly valuable 2018 study of medieval devotion to our Lady, the historian Rachel Fulton Brown observes, “. . . the face of the Virgin must have shone when she gazed upon her Son, the Lord” (Rachel Fulton Brown, Mary & the Art of Prayer: The Hours of the Virgin in Medieval Christian Life and Thought, New York, Columbia University Press, 2018, p. 244).
May the eyes of her who gazed upon the Christ Child fix her loving gaze upon us as we strive to reach the Heavenly Jerusalem!