At the Battle of Nicopolis in 1396 the Knights of Jean de Vienne faced a much larger Ottoman force. Bearing a standard of the Blessed Mother, de Vienne led his men into battle. As the fighting intensified, the 55-year-old was felled by an arrow to the chest. Slowly rising, he raised the banner to roars from his Crusader Army. Then a second arrow pierced the Admiral of France’s side, sending him to the ground. A third time he raised the banner of the Blessed Virgin and threw himself into the fray. So devoted was the veteran soldier that six times he fell and six times he raised the standard before succumbing to his wounds.
Despite a reputation for docility, Mary’s intercession in wartime dates back to the siege of Constantinople in 626. Thwarting an invading army with prayer, the Patriarch Sergius led processions around the battlements of the city toting a holy relic—the Maphorion—the veil of Mary. At the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, devotion to the Queen of Victory reached its zenith when Catholic naval vessels were outnumbered by a Muslim fleet. Sailing at the Ottomans in the shape of a Cross, the Italians flew flags of the Virgin Mary and won. Attributing the victory to the Mother of God, Pope Pius V instituted the Feast of Our Lady of Victory.
How did the clement, loving, and sweet Virgin Mary come to assume a martial aspect? Revered for her domestic devotion at the Annunciation, the manger, and at the foot of the cross, the Blessed Mother seems far removed from the violence of war. But there is a prophecy in Genesis that undergirds the theology of the Militia Immaculata.
“I will put enmities between thee and the woman, and thy seed and her seed: she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel.” (Gen. 3:15)
Known as the protoevangelium, this Biblical passage reveals God’s first promise to his people. It declares hostilities between a snake and a woman. It’s a preview of a larger battle in the Book of Revelation between a dragon and the Queen of Heaven. It assures the faithful that the seed of woman will crush the serpent; that the Child of Mary will defeat Satan.
“And the dragon stood before the woman who was about to bear a child, that he might devour her child when she brought it forth.” (Rev. 12:4)
The Book of Revelation describes a war in heaven. The dragon seeks to plunder, impoverish, and ultimately devour the promised Messiah. The Queen of Heaven is a fortress of defiance. Pregnant and seemingly in peril, she’s at the peak of her powers. Confronted by an overwhelming foe, Mary doesn’t shrink; she fights back by delivering the Savior of the World unscathed. Instructed by God’s promise in Genesis 3:15, Catholic art and liturgy celebrate the Mother of God’s saving act in Revelation 12 as crushing the serpent’s head.
Embodying the characteristics of both a brave knight and a fair lady, the dragon-slaying Eternal Virgin is not a gender-bending modern convention. Like her Son, she embodies paradoxical narratives and traits. The Virgin Birth and the Immaculate Conception. The Ascension and the Assumption. The New Adam and the New Eve. And like her Son she is a sign of contradiction that upon closer inspection reveals a higher truth. God speaks the language of paradox to humble the haughty. In this contradictory spirit, the predictable hierarchies are toppled, transforming a humble handmaiden into a winning warrior queen with her foot on the head of a snake.
If this manifestation of traditionally masculine aggression creates discomfort, it’s only because we have forgotten that true spiritual motherhood is inherently militant. Its unselfishness activates an eternal counter-offensive. By bringing new life into a fallen world, a woman defies a bloodthirsty dragon.
In liturgical art, the two most significant images of the Church, the Crèche and the Cross, appear antithetical. The ideal of Mother and Child celebrates a beginning, a joyous birth and a maternal bond. The Crucifixion laments death and the injustice of a violent world. But through paradox, we can unite these seemingly disparate accounts and draw forth a deeper understanding. The pangs of birth bring new life from blood and water amidst the throes of a woman’s sacrificial love. The suffering of Christ on the cross includes blood and water from wounds that make the world new.
Motherhood is at the center of every Marian paradox. In 431 the Catholic Church convened the Council of Ephesus in what is now modern-day Turkey. At the time the idol Artemis dominated local religious culture. According to early Church Fathers, making pilgrimage to Ephesus meant participation in ecstatic festivals that featured the sexual favors of shrine prostitutes and the divinations of eunuchs and sibyls. At Ephesus, mass infanticide was practiced in designated public spaces where children were heaped in piles to die of exposure.
It was here that the Catholic Church entered a deeper dialogue with God’s creation. At the Council of Ephesus, Mary was declared the “Mother of God,” changing the spiritual course of Western civilization. In the exact city where the great, multi-breasted Artemis had been worshiped for a thousand years, the Catholic Church rejected crude caricatures of female biology. The dark, predatory demands of the old temples were shattered. A bountiful harvest bargained from a false god lost its power. Christianity elevated the future-oriented mother-son bond as the primary male-female relationship, sending a message to the fertility cults around the Mediterranean—cults that broke the natural bonds of mother and son by the practice of child sacrifice. Trading the fetishes of the cult for the joys of family, the Church Fathers invested a heretofore unrecognized authority in women. By declaring Mary Theotokos, the bishops effectively dethroned the distant, transactional magic of the temple and exchanged it for the tender reality of a mother raising a child.
The term “Mother of God” is a paradox. Why would the Creator of the Universe need to be born of woman? To humble the haughty who can’t abide the high coming from the low. Transforming the believer’s relationship with the divine, the Church unlocked the civilization-building impulse of the West. Between 500 and 1500 AD, hospitals, universities, and magnificent cathedrals sprouted across Christendom. Uplifting the family unit harnessed the human potential to explore, catalogue, and create. By raising the responsibilities of motherhood to the status of the divine, the Catholic Church unleashed a powerful procreative force.
The creation of “woman” was the Father’s final feat in Eden. Mary is God’s greatest creature, fully human—the summit of that finishing act brought to its perfection. Yet the New Eve is far from one-dimensional. Through the power of paradox a pregnant teen becomes a mighty warrior queen who slays a dragon. Contradicting the cult of Artemis, a humble handmaid remakes the feminine mystique. And every image of Mother and Child comes closer to the Cross.
Image from Wikimedia Commons
