The Man, The Serpent, And The Woman
THE MAN, THE SERPENT,
AND THE WOMAN
The special prerogatives of St. Mary, the Virgo Virginum, are intimately involved in the doctrine of the Incarnation itself, with which these remarks began, and have already been dwelt upon above. As is well known, they were not fully recognized in the Catholic ritual till a late date, but they were not a new thing in the Church, or strange to her earlier teachers. St. Justin, St. Irenæus, and others, had distinctly laid it down, that she not only had an office, but bore a part, and was a voluntary agent, in the actual process of redemption, as Eve had been instrumental and responsible in Adam’s fall. They taught that, as the first woman might have foiled the Tempter and did not, so, if Mary had been disobedient or unbelieving on Gabriel’s message, the Divine Economy would have been frustrated. And certainly, the parallel between “the Mother of all living” and the Mother of the Redeemer may be gathered from a comparison of the first chapters of Scripture with the last.
It was noticed in another place, that the only passage where the serpent is directly identified with the evil spirit occurs in the twelfth chapter of the Revelation; now it is observable that the recognition, when made, is found in the course of a vision of a “woman clothed with the sun and the moon under her feet:” thus two women are brought into contrast with each other. Moreover, as it is said in the Apocalypse, “The dragon was wroth with the woman, and went about to make war with the remnant of her seed,” so is it prophesied in Genesis, “I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her Seed. He shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise His heel.” Also the enmity was to exist, not only between the Serpent and the Seed of the woman, but between the serpent and the woman herself; and here too there is a correspondence in the Apocalyptic vision. If then there is reason for thinking that this mystery at the close of the Scripture record answers to the mystery in the beginning of it, and that “the Woman” mentioned in both passages is one and the same, then she can be none other than St. Mary, thus introduced prophetically to our notice immediately on the transgression of Eve.
Here, however, we are not so much concerned to interpret Scripture as to examine the Fathers. Thus St. Justin says, “Eve, being a virgin and incorrupt, having conceived the word from the Serpent, bore disobedience and death; but Mary the Virgin, receiving faith and joy, when Gabriel the Angel evangelized her, answered, ‘Be it unto me according to thy word.’” And Tertullian says that, whereas Eve believed the Serpent, and Mary believed Gabriel, “the fault of Eve in believing, Mary by believing hath blotted out.” St. Irenæus speaks more explicitly: “As Eve,” he says …“becoming disobedient, became the cause of death to herself and to all mankind, so Mary too, having the predestined Man, and yet a Virgin, being obedient, became cause of salvation both to herself and to all mankind.” This becomes the received doctrine in the Post-nicene Church.
–Essay on the Development of Doctrine