She Kept All Things In Her Heart
SHE KEPT ALL THINGS
IN HER HEART
Let those who deny that the Son is from the Father by nature and proper to His substance, deny also that He took true human flesh of Mary Ever-Virgin. —St. Athanasius
I have said in a note on the word in the Aurea Catena, that the word “till” need not imply a termination at a certain point of time, but may be given as information up to a certain point from which onwards there is already no doubt. Supposing an Evangelist thought the very notion shocking that Joseph should have considered the Blessed Virgin as his wife, after he was witness of her bearing the Son of God, he would only say that the vision had its effect upon him up to that date, when the idea was monstrous. If one said of a profligate, that, in consequence of some awful warning, he had said a prayer for grace every night up to the time of his conversion, no one would gather thence that he left off praying on being converted. “Michal the daughter of Saul had no child to the day of her death;” had she children after it? …
It is at first strange that these instances of special exemptions should be named by early writers, without our Lady also being mentioned; or rather it would be strange, unless we bore in mind how little is said of her at all by Scripture or the Fathers up to the Council of Ephesus, A.D. 431. It would seem as if, till our Lord’s glory called for it, it required an effort for the reverent devotion of the Church to speak much about her or to make her the subject of popular preaching; but, when by her manifestation a right faith in her Divine Son was to be secured, then the Church was to be guided in a contrary course. It must be recollected that there was a disciplina arcani in the first centuries, and, if it was exercised, as far as might be, as regards the Holy Trinity and the Eucharist, so would it be as regards the Blessed Virgin.
The meaning and practical results of deep-seated religious reverence were far better understood in the primitive times than now, when the infidelity of the world has corrupted the Church. Now, we allow ourselves publicly to canvass the most solemn truths in a careless or fiercely argumentative way. Truths, which it is as useless as it is unseemly to discuss before men, as being attainable only by the sober and watchful, by slow degrees, with dependence on the Giver of wisdom, and with strict obedience to the light which has already been granted. Then, they would scarcely express in writing, what now is not only preached to the mixed crowds who frequent our churches, but circulated in prints among all ranks and classes of the unclean and the profane, and pressed upon all who choose to purchase. Nay, so perplexed is the present state of things, that the Church is obliged to change her course of acting, after the spirit of the alteration made at Nicæa, and unwillingly to take part in the theological discussions of the day, as a man crushes venomous creatures of necessity, powerful to do it, but loathing the employment. …
The silence of Scripture about the Blessed Virgin in its narrative of the Resurrection is illustrative. “Here perhaps,” I say, “we learn a lesson from the deep silence which Scripture observes concerning the Blessed Virgin after the Resurrection; as if she, who was too pure and holy a flower to be more than seen here on earth, even during the season of her Son’s humiliation, was altogether drawn by the Angels into paradise on His Resurrection.”
–Select Treatises of St. Athanasius, vol. II.