Wife of the Father
The seventh century Church Father, Saint John of Damascus seems to be the first to write of Mary as spouse of God the Father. In his treatise on the Assumption, he states that, "It was fitting that the spouse whom the Father had taken to himself, should live in the divine Mansions"5. Some medieval writers, such as Rupert of Deutz and Ubertino of Casale continued to use this image, as did Saint Lawrence of Brindisi 6. Mary's "espousal" to the First Person of the Trinity became a popular area of discussion in the Ecole Francaise, a seventeenth-century French school of theology/mariology 7. Jean-Jacques Olier, a member of this school, seems to have written on this topic more than any other writer
8. Here are some samples of his (somewhat exaggerated) views on this subject:
God the Father, as a holy and faithful husband, wants to unite the most holy Virgin to himself and give her the perfect possession of his Person, his treasures, his glory and all his goods" 9. For God the Father...wills that, in the mystery of the Incarnation, Mary should be his true and unique spouse, since he has destined her to be, with himself, the principle in the temporal generation of the Word, to do with him, in the Incarnation, what he does alone in eternity" 10.
(The Father) conceives for her all the affection of a spouse" 11
[5]Pius XII (1950) Munificentissimus Deus, 20.
[6]O'Carroll 333
[7]Hilda Graef, Mary: A History of Doctrine and Devotion (New York: Sheed, 1964): 31.
[8]O'Carroll 272.
[9]Graef 35.
[10]O'Carroll 272-3.
[11]Ibid 273.
