Mary Immaculate and the Holy Spirit

Our Lady’s Coronation as Queen of Heaven

According to St. Maximilian Kolbe, the Virgin Mary is, in a sense, the creaturely personification of the Holy Spirit because she is the created Immaculate Conception while He is the uncreated Immaculate Conception. Ever since looking into Catholicism more seriously this idea has intrigued me because of how much it coheres with certain threads in Sacred Scripture. 

When God created man in His own image, He said the following: “let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (Gen 1:26). Although some have argued that the plurality being invoked here is a reference to the divine council rather than God Himself, the text does not allow for such an interpretation. This is because “our image” is clearly equated with “His own image… the image of God” (Gen 1:27). Mankind is not made in the image of any divine being other than God, and so the controversial “let us” in this passage must be something true of the Lord Himself. Indeed, plurality (of sorts) being ascribed to God also makes perfect sense in context. Mankind was made as the “image” of God, that is, to resemble or look like Him in some way, and man was also made as a unity in plurality: one divine image in male and female. This is made clear by Genesis 1:27’s seamless transition between, “in the image of God He created him, male and female He created them.” Thus, if mankind is a unity of nature in a plurality of persons, and we somehow resemble the Lord Himself, then it’s only natural to conclude that God is also some kind of unity of nature in a plurality of persons. 

I bring this up because understanding the doctrine of the Trinity in light of its image in mankind further unlocks the beauty of the Catholic doctrines of the Filioque and the Immaculate Conception. Consider, if mankind resembles the Blessed Trinity by existing as male and female, why are there only two persons in this image? Where is the third? I believe the answer lies in ‭‭Genesis‬ ‭2‬:‭24, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” The man and the woman are to come together as one, and as a result of this union, the third person, a child, emerges. This creates a perfect mirror of the ad intra life of the Trinity: the Father and the Son enter into an eternal loving embrace, and as a result of this union, the Holy Spirit proceeds from both Persons (Filioque). As St. Augustine taught, the Spirit is the personal “bond of love” between the Father and the Son, just as a child is the personal bond of love between a husband and his wife. 

With this in mind, it’s easy to see why St. Kolbe concluded that the Holy Spirit is the “uncreated Immaculate Conception.” The Spirit is eternally “conceived” by the Father and the Son in the Godhead. Of course, since this is a divine “conception,” it’s the most pure and immaculate conception that has ever or will ever exist. The fact that our Lady was likewise conceived in a pure and immaculate manner, then, means that she was created to be the creaturely image of the Holy Spirit. Hence, in her own immaculate Child-bearing of the Lord Jesus Christ, it was the uncreated Immaculate Conception Himself who “overshadowed” her in order to make this possible. The Holy Spirit is the one who’s often depicted as conceiving new life in creation precisely because His life is eternally “conceived” by the Father and the Son. As such, just as our Blessed Mother images the Spirit by her conception without sin, so too does she image Him by participating in His power of conceiving the Life of All. Indeed, this fact is what led St. Kolbe to further identify our Lady as the “spouse of the Holy Spirit,” an idea that also has some interesting connections with Scripture. 

Soon after the first Mother of All Living (Eve) was promised that she would bear a child who would crush the head of the Serpent (Gen 3:15), it seems that she was under the impression that this promise would be fulfilled immediately. In Genesis 4:1, we’re told about Eve’s conception of her first child Cain, and she says something rather interesting: “I have gotten a man with the Lord.” Although many translations will render this, “I have gotten a man with the help of the Lord,” the text plainly says, “I have gotten a man with the Lord,” קָנִ֥יתִי אִ֖ישׁ אֶת־ יְהוָֽה. In other words, although Adam was clearly the one who impregnated Eve, Eve herself viewed this child as somehow being conceived by the Lord God. As mentioned, this is likely because Eve thought that God’s promise would be fulfilled immediately, and that Cain would be the one to crush the head of the Serpent… obviously that’s not what happened.

However, even though Eve was wrong about her conception of Cain crushing the head of the Serpent, she nonetheless pointed towards the woman in whom this promise would actually be fulfilled, our Lady. Just as Eve portrayed the Lord as her divine Spouse in her conception of Cain, so does Mary actually become the Lord’s spouse by conceiving a child with the Holy Spirit! Make no mistake, there were absolutely no carnal relations between our Virgin Mother and the Holy Spirit, perish the thought! Rather, the created and uncreated Immaculate Conceptions entered into such a perfect spiritual union that it could not help but bring forth the Life of All, our Lord, God, and Savior Jesus Christ, by whose Name alone we’re saved. As St. Kolbe teaches, Holy Mary is thus unique among creatures in her relationship to the Blessed Trinity. She is the Daughter of the Father, the Mother of the Son, and the Spouse of the Holy Spirit.