God has one Only-Begotten Son by nature. By grace, he has called a multitude to participate in the Divine Sonship, and thus become his children, so that the Son of God “might be the first-born amongst many brethren.” The Divine Word, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, become incarnate, is the only-Begotten of Mary according to His Human nature. He is the only child born of her physically, the only being to whom she communicated her most pure flesh and blood. Jesus was the Only-begotton of the Father according to Divine generation. He as the only-begotten of Mary according to human generation.

The first false conception is that of a purely superficial union constituted by the temporary inhibition of the divinity in the humanity of Christ.  This was the idea of certain heretics of the first centuries of Christianity.  For them, Jesus was nothing more than a man upon whom the Spirit of God descended at the moment of the Baptism in the Jordan and from whom this Spirit went out shortly before the Passion, leaving the man Jesus to suffer and to die.  In this theory, Mary was the mother of a man who was destined to be the temporary dwelling of God, but she was not the Mother of God, and this is false.

To understand what we mean by the divine maternity, we must understand – as well as is possible when we are concerned with a mystery – the union of two natures, the Divine and the human, in the person of Jesus Christ.  For the sake of greater exactness, before we give the Catholic conception of this mystery, we will mention two inexact ideas which we meet in the history of dogma, in the following posts.

Despite the claims of Nestorius in the fifth century and the accusations which certain protestants and rationalists make against us even today, the title Mother of God does not signify and never has signified in the minds of the faithful, that we consider Mary as Mother of the divinity, or as some for of goddess after the manner of the goddesses of mythology.  We affirm that Mary is the Mother of God, not that she is Mother of a person who is God, and not Mother of that person inasmuch as He is God.