Jean Khoury

Summary: This article examines the place of the Virgin Mary within the act of faith, moving beyond a purely Scholastic causal analysis towards a fuller theology of her spiritual motherhood. Taking as its starting point the classical Thomistic account of the four causes of faith in which God alone is recognised as the efficient cause of belief, the article argues that this framework, while true, remains structurally incomplete unless it is set within the wider mystery of Mary as Mother of all the saints and Mother of the believer. Drawing on Lumen Gentium, Redemptoris Mater, and the Lucan narratives of the Visitation and Pentecost, it proposes that the Holy Spirit acts within Mary in a manner so sovereign, unobstructed and pure that her cooperation with Him, far from constituting a second and competing cause, is properly understood as a single, undivided movement of grace — united without confusion, and inseparable without fusion. On this basis, the article commends abandonment into Mary’s hands as a privileged path towards the purity of the act of faith, and situates her presence at the Visitation and at Pentecost as concrete scriptural warrants for this doctrine. Practical conclusions for spiritual direction and formation are offered.

Introduction

The Scholastic tradition, and St. Thomas Aquinas in particular, has bequeathed to theology a precise and indispensable vocabulary for analysing the act of faith according to the four causes inherited from Aristotle: the intellect as material cause, the revealing First Truth as formal cause, God acting through grace as efficient cause, and the beatific vision as final cause. This structure safeguards a crucial truth: that faith, however freely exercised by the believer, is in its deepest root a gift, caused immediately by God alone in the soul.

Yet a purely causal reading of this kind, precisely because it proceeds by careful distinction, risks leaving unsaid something that belongs to the very heart of the Christian mystery: that the believer never stands before God as an isolated individual, but always within the communion of saints, and within that communion, in a unique and privileged relation to Mary, the Mother of the Lord and Mother of all the redeemed. To speak with technical accuracy of efficient, formal, material and final causes is necessary; but it is not sufficient, unless it is completed by a properly mystical and maternal understanding of how grace actually reaches the soul.

This article sets out to hold both truths together without allowing the second to be reduced to, or eclipsed by, the first. It affirms, with the whole of Catholic tradition, that God alone is the immediate source of the act of faith. But it insists, with equal firmness, that this divine action does not by-pass Mary; rather, it habitually passes through her, because the Holy Spirit acts within her in a manner so sovereign and so unobstructed that her cooperation and His action form a single, undivided work of salvation. It is this non-separated synergy, and its consequence — abandonment into Mary’s hands as the path to the purity of faith — that forms the proper subject of the present study.

I. The Thomistic Framework: A True but Incomplete Account

St. Thomas’s analysis of the act of faith according to the four causes remains a permanent acquisition of theology. The intellect receives the truths proposed to it without seeing them directly; it assents not because it perceives evidence, but because it relies upon the authority of God who reveals — this is the formal cause. The very capacity to make this assent is not native to the intellect but is infused by God: faith is an habitus infusus, caused immediately by God alone in the soul, as Thomas affirms when he teaches that faith is a habit of mind by which eternal life is begun within us (Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 4, a. 1; q. 6, a. 1).

On this reading, Mary’s place within the act of faith can only be that of a secondary and dispositive cause: she may obtain grace, dispose the soul, and offer an exemplary form of receptivity, but she cannot, without theological imprecision, be named an efficient cause of belief, since this office belongs to God alone. Understood strictly according to Scholastic categories, this conclusion is correct and must be maintained.

The difficulty is not that this account is false, but that it is partial. It answers with rigour the question of who ultimately produces the act of faith, while leaving comparatively undeveloped the question of the concrete, personal, maternal economy through which that same divine action habitually reaches the believer. A theology of faith which stops at the four causes, however correctly analysed, has not yet said everything that the Catholic tradition wishes to say about how grace actually comes to us — namely, through Mary.

II. Mary’s Spiritual Motherhood: Not One Rank Among the Saints, but Mother of All

It is here that the properly Marian dimension of the question must be restored to its rightful place. Mary is not simply one exemplary figure among the saints, disposing souls towards grace in the same manner as any other holy intercessor. She is, by a title altogether her own, the Mother of all the saints and of each one individually. The Second Vatican Council teaches with deliberate strength that her motherhood in the order of grace continues without interruption until the eternal fulfilment of all the elect, and that she became for us a mother in that same order of grace (Lumen Gentium, 61–62).

St. John Paul II develops this teaching further, showing that Mary’s motherhood in the order of grace flows directly from her participation in the redemptive mission of her Son, and that it embraces each and every member of the Church without exception (Redemptoris Mater, 38, 47). Her motherhood is therefore not a function she performs alongside others within the communion of saints; it is a unique, universal and personal relationship of spiritual generation, extended to every soul that is born to the life of grace.

Nicodemus’s bewildered question — how can a man enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born? (John 3:4) — unwittingly points towards a mystery he could not yet grasp: that there is indeed a second birth, a birth according to the Spirit, and that this birth, like the first, is not motherless. As Christ took flesh in Mary’s womb by the power of the Holy Spirit, so the life of grace is formed within the believer through an analogous maternal mediation, exercised now not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit, by that same Mother.

III. The Holy Spirit Sovereign in Mary: A Theology of Non-Separated Synergy

The classical instinct to distinguish uncreated and created causality, so as never to confuse the action of God with the action of the creature, is a true and necessary safeguard of the mystery of grace. Yet this distinction, rightly maintained at the level of ontological principle, must not be allowed to fragment what is, at the level of lived, concrete holiness, a single and undivided operation.

Mary is, of all creatures, the one in whom this non-separation is realised most perfectly. The Council teaches that she is intimately united with her Son and associated with His saving work (Lumen Gentium, 53, 61); St. John Paul II speaks of a union of the Mother with her Son in the work of salvation that extends from the Incarnation to the Cross (Redemptoris Mater, 39). In her, and in her alone among mere creatures, the Holy Spirit acts without any resistance, without any obstacle, without the slightest interval between the divine motion and her human response.

It follows that, at the level of her lived holiness, one need not — indeed, one ought not — speak of two parallel or juxtaposed actions, as though God worked on one side and Mary cooperated at a certain distance on the other. There is one living economy of salvation, one single movement of the Spirit, in which Mary’s will is so entirely taken up, purified and conformed to the divine will that her cooperation is the very transparency of that divine action, not a rival or additional cause set beside it. United without confusion, and inseparable without fusion: this formula, drawn from the Christological grammar of Chalcedon and applied here analogically to Mary’s cooperation with the Spirit, allows the full unity of her holiness to be affirmed without dissolving the primacy that belongs to God alone as the source of all grace.

St. John of the Cross, speaking of the perfect souls says: “God alone moves the faculties of these souls to do those works which are meet, according to the will and ordinance of God, and they cannot be moved to do others; and thus the works and prayers of these souls are always effectual. Such were those of the most glorious Virgin Our Lady, who, being raised to this high estate from the beginning, had never the form of any creature imprinted in her soul, neither was moved by such, but her motion was always [moved] by the Holy Spirit.” (Ascent of Mount Carmel, III,2,10)

St. Louis de Montfort says: “Let us not imagine, then, as some misguided teachers do, that Mary being simply a creature would be a hindrance to union with the Creator.  Far from it, for it is no longer Mary who lives but Jesus Christ alone, God alone, who lives in her. Her transformation into God far surpasses that experienced by St. Paul and other saints, more than heaven surpasses the earth.” (The Secret of Mary [21.])

St. Louis de Montfort: “The difficulty, therefore, is to know how truly to find the divine Mary, in order to find all grace in abundance. God, being absolute master, can communicate by himself what he ordinarily communicates only through Mary; one cannot deny, without temerity, that he even does so sometimes; nevertheless, according to the order which divine Wisdom has established, he ordinarily communicates himself to men only through Mary in the order of grace, as St. Thomas says. One must, in order to ascend to him and to be united with him, make use of the same means which he made use of to descend to us, to make himself man and to communicate his graces to us; and this means is a true devotion to the Blessed Virgin.” (The Secret of Mary, [23.])

IV. Abandonment to Mary as the Path to the Purity of the Act of Faith

From this non-separated synergy, a concrete spiritual consequence follows: if the Holy Spirit is sovereign, unobstructed and pure in Mary as He is nowhere else among creatures, then abandonment into her hands is the surest and most direct way of exposing oneself to His pure action. To entrust oneself to Mary is not to introduce a further intermediary between the soul and God, still less a rival to the Spirit’s freedom; it is to place oneself deliberately within the one created space where that same Spirit already acts without hindrance.

This is not a devotional embellishment added to the theological structure of faith from outside; it is the practical, existential form that the doctrine of Mary’s universal spiritual motherhood necessarily takes in the life of the believer. Since God Himself has willed to give us Mary, the New Eve, as the place of gestation of the new humanity, to resist this gift, or to attempt to approach the Spirit independently of her, would be to set oneself against the very economy that God has established. Abandonment to Mary is therefore not one path among several equally valid ones; it is the connatural path, willed by God, for allowing the Holy Spirit’s action within the soul to be as pure, as unobstructed and as fruitful as it is within her own.

The purity in question here is not a purity of technical causal structure — that has already been safeguarded by the recognition that God alone is the ultimate source of grace — but a purity of reception: the more completely the believer’s own resistances, self-will and disordered ways of acting are surrendered into Mary’s hands, the more freely the Spirit who is sovereign in her can also become sovereign, in the same manner, within the believer.

St. Louis de Montfort: “Pray and act always with something of that pure faith which Mary showed when on earth, and which she will share with you as time goes on.  Poor little slave, let your sovereign Queen enjoy the clear sight of God, the raptures, delights, satisfactions and riches of heaven.  Content yourself with a pure faith, which is accompanied by repugnance, distractions, weariness and dryness.  Let your prayer be: “To whatever Mary my Queen does in heaven, I say Amen, so be it.”  We cannot do better than this for the time being.” (The Secret of Mary, [51)

V. The Visitation and Pentecost: Mary at the Heart of the Communication of the Spirit

Scripture itself places Mary at the two great narrative moments in which the Holy Spirit is communicated most visibly in the New Testament, and in both cases her presence is not incidental but constitutive of the event.

At the Visitation, it is precisely upon Mary’s arrival and greeting that Elizabeth is filled with the Holy Spirit and the child leaps in her womb (Luke 1:41). The outpouring of the Spirit upon Elizabeth and upon John the Baptist occurs through Mary’s presence, in a manner that Luke’s narrative construction makes unmistakable: she who already bears the Word incarnate within her becomes, by that very fact, the bearer of the Spirit to others.

At Pentecost, Mary is again present, gathered with the apostles in the upper room in constant prayer as they await the promised outpouring (Acts 1:14), immediately before the whole company is filled with the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:4). The Church’s birth in the Spirit thus takes place with Mary at its centre, not as a passive bystander but as the praying heart of the nascent community, the one in whom the Church’s own receptivity to the Spirit finds its perfect and pre-existing model.

These two scenes are not merely edifying historical details; read together, they constitute a genuine scriptural warrant for the doctrine that Mary is habitually associated with the communication of the Holy Spirit to others, and that her presence disposes and accompanies that communication in a manner altogether her own.

St. Louis de Montfort says: “The Holy Spirit espoused Mary and produced his greatest work, the incarnate Word, in her, by her and through her. He has never disowned her and so he continues to produce every day, in a mysterious but very real manner, the souls of the elect in her and through her.” (The Secret of Mary, [13.] 7)

St. Louis de Montfort: “1° In giving ourselves to Jesus through Mary’s hands, we imitate God the Father, who gave us his only Son through Mary, and who imparts his graces to us only through Mary.  Likewise we imitate God the Son, who by giving us his example for us to follow, inspires us to go to him using the same means he used in coming to us, that is, through Mary.  Again, we imitate the Holy Spirit, who bestows his graces and gifts upon us only through Mary. “Is it not fitting,” remarks St. Bernard, “that grace should return to its author by the same channel that conveyed it to us?” (The Secret of Mary, [35])

VI. “Pray for Us Sinners”: Mary’s Prayer as Fire

The Church’s own daily prayer confirms this doctrine in the simplest possible terms: “pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.” This petition presupposes that Mary’s intercession is not merely one prayer added to the countless prayers of the other saints, but a prayer of a wholly singular efficacy, because she who is Immaculate offers to God a will and a heart in which sin has never introduced the least resistance to grace.

Because she is Immaculate, her prayer possesses, by participation, something of the very properties of the Holy Spirit who is sovereign within her: it is entirely purifying, entirely consuming of whatever in the soul opposes God, entirely oriented towards the Father through the Son. To say that her prayer is Fire is to say, in the language of the mystics, that it does not merely ask for grace from without but communicates, in its very utterance, something of the burning purity of the Spirit who prays within her and through her.

It is for this reason that recourse to Mary’s intercession, so constant in the piety of the Church, is not a lesser or merely popular form of prayer, to be set aside by those who seek theological or mystical depth. It is, on the contrary, one of the most direct ways of exposing the soul to the very Fire of the Spirit who dwells in her without measure.

Practical Conclusions

For those engaged in spiritual formation and spiritual direction, several concrete orientations follow from the foregoing.

The first practical conclusion is that the believer should not treat Marian devotion as optional decoration. If Mary is truly Mother in the order of grace, then relationship with her belongs to the full shape of Christian life. The act of consecration or entrustment to Mary should be proposed to souls not as an optional devotional addition, but as a connatural and privileged means of exposing oneself to the pure and unobstructed action of the Holy Spirit. It disposes the soul to receive grace in the same manner (without resistance) in which Mary herself receives it.

The second is that abandonment to Mary should be understood as a school of faith. It is not primarily a matter of multiplying devotions, but of learning her interior attitude before God: silence, receptivity, obedience, humility, faith, hope, love and total consent. Formation in the spiritual life should habitually associate growth in docility to the Holy Spirit with growth in filial abandonment to Mary, presenting the two not as parallel or competing paths, but as two expressions of a single movement of the soul towards God.

The third is that the act of faith should be made in a Marian manner. One may consciously ask to believe not according to one’s own restless and divided mode, but according to Mary’s purity of heart. This means renouncing control, impatience, spiritual self-reliance, and the need to master divine mysteries.

The fourth is that prayer to Mary is in fact always implicitly ordered towards the Holy Spirit. Authentic Marian abandonment does not stop at Mary as an isolated figure. It enters into her docility so that the Spirit may form Christ in the believer. In the accompaniment of souls seeking the purification of their act of faith — particularly those labouring under scruples, self-will, or excessive reliance on their own spiritual effort — directors may fruitfully propose abandonment into Mary’s hands as a concrete remedy, precisely because it removes the soul’s own resistances from between itself and the Spirit’s action.

The fifth, the invocation of Mary’s intercession, and especially the simple petition “pray for us sinners,” should be restored, in preaching and in spiritual accompaniment, to its proper theological depth: not a lesser prayer for the untheological, but a direct participation in the purifying Fire of the Spirit who is sovereign in her.

The sixth is that Mary’s presence at the Visitation and Pentecost should shape Christian expectation. Where Mary is welcomed, the soul may expect a deeper openness to the Holy Spirit, a more joyful recognition of Christ, and a more ecclesial form of mission.

A simple prayer expresses this movement:

“Mary, Mother of faith, receive me into your hands. Teach me to believe as you believed, to receive the Word as you received Him, and to abandon myself to the Holy Spirit who acts in you with perfect freedom. Form in me a pure, humble, and fruitful act of faith. Amen.”

St. Louis de Montfort says:

“My dear friend, be sure that if you remain faithful to the interior and exterior practices of this devotion which I will point out, the following effects will be produced in your soul: […] Mary will share her faith with you. Her faith on earth was stronger than that of all the patriarchs, prophets, apostles and saints. Now that she is reigning in heaven she no longer has this faith, since she sees everything clearly in God by the light of glory. However, with the consent of almighty God she did not lose it when entering heaven. She has preserved it for her faithful servants in the Church militant. Therefore the more you gain the friendship of this noble Queen and faithful Virgin the more you will be inspired by faith in your daily life. It will cause you to depend less upon sensible and extraordinary feelings. For it is a lively faith animated by love enabling you to do everything from no other motive than that of pure love. It is a firm faith, unshakable as a rock, prompting you to remain firm and steadfast in the midst of storms and tempests. It is an active and probing faith which like some mysterious pass-key admits you into the mysteries of Jesus Christ and of man’s final destiny and into the very heart of God himself. It is a courageous faith, which inspires you to undertake and carry out without hesitation great things for God and the salvation of souls. Lastly, this faith will be your flaming torch, your very life with God, your secret fund of divine Wisdom, and an all-powerful weapon for you to enlighten those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death. It inflames those who are lukewarm and need the gold of fervent love. It restores life to those who are dead through sin. It moves and transforms hearts of marble and cedars of Lebanon by gentle and convincing argument. Finally, this faith will strengthen you to resist the devil and the other enemies of salvation.” (True Devotion 213-214)

Conclusion

The Thomistic analysis of the four causes of faith remains theologically necessary and must never be abandoned: God alone is the efficient cause of the act of faith, and no creature, however exalted, may be substituted for Him in that office. But this true and necessary distinction, held at the level of causal principle, does not exhaust what the Catholic tradition confesses about the concrete economy through which grace actually reaches the soul.

Mary, Mother of all the saints and Mother of each believer individually, is the creature in whom the Holy Spirit acts most sovereignly, most purely and without the least obstacle. Her cooperation with Him, precisely because it is so entirely transparent, must be understood not as a second cause competing with the first, but as the created space, willed by God Himself, in which His grace habitually becomes accessible to us in its greatest purity. The Visitation and Pentecost stand as Scripture’s own witness to this truth, and the Church’s daily prayer, “pray for us sinners,” confesses it in the simplest of words.

To abandon oneself into Mary’s hands is therefore not to add a further step between the soul and God; it is to allow oneself to be drawn into the very place where the Holy Spirit already reigns without resistance, so that the same purity of docility that is hers without measure may, by her maternal mediation, become, however imperfectly, our own.

The act of faith is a supernatural assent to the Word of God. But this assent is not formed in isolation. It belongs to the one living economy of salvation in which the Holy Spirit acts through the maternal mystery of Mary.

Mary is not merely a saint among saints. She is the Mother of the Word incarnate, the New Eve, the Mother of believers, and the supreme created place of receptivity to the Holy Spirit. In her, faith reaches its purest created expression. In her, the Word is received without resistance. In her, the Spirit acts with sovereign freedom.

For this reason, abandonment to Mary is not a distraction from the purity of faith. It is one of its deepest paths. The believer who enters Mary’s hands does not move away from God, but into the very form by which God chose to come to us. To be formed by Mary is to be educated in the pure yes of faith; and to live in that yes is to allow the Holy Spirit to form Christ in us.

Bibliography

Second Vatican Council, Lumen Gentium, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church (1964), chapter VIII, nn. 53, 61–62.

John Paul II, Redemptoris Mater, Encyclical Letter on the Blessed Virgin Mary in the Life of the Pilgrim Church (1987), nn. 38–39, 47.

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Secunda Secundae, qq. 1, 4, 6.

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Prima Secundae, q. 109, a. 1.

The Holy Bible, Gospel according to St Luke 1:38, 1:41; Gospel according to St John 3:4; Acts of the Apostles 1:14, 2:4; Letter to the Hebrews 11:1.

The Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Hail Mary (“Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners…”), as prayed in the liturgical and devotional tradition of the Church.

St. John of the Cross, “Ascent of Mount Carmel”, Book II.

St. Grignon de Montfort: “The Secret of Mary”(English/French)   In Pdf, Important Book

St. Louis Marie Grignon de Montfort “True Devotion to Mary”.  In Pdf Important Book

The Interior Life of Mary According To Monsieur Olier