"It is only the name of the Mother of God which contains the entire mystery of the economy of the Incarnation": this phrase by Saint John of Damascus, called in the East the "seal of the Fathers" ( De fide orthodoxa, l. III, c. 12: PG 94,1O29 C), reassumes the constant factor that emerges from the history of meditations of faith concerning Mary. The Virgin Mother, being totally relative to the mystery of the Word incarnate, is the full compendium of the Gospels and the real figure of the Church’s faith. The profound structure of the mystery of Mary really has the same structure as that of the Alliance and the discourse of faith that concerns her witnesses the "nexus mysteriorum", the intimate interlacing of mysteries in their reciprocity and in the profound unity that links them. In all meditations on the Virgin Mother there emerges a "law of totality": one cannot speak of Mary if not in relation to her Son and the integral economy of the fully manifest Redemption in Him; and, on the other hand, the same intensity that the relation of a Mother with her Son allows the totality of all that was accomplished in Him, by the creature, to reverberate in her. Hence one can say – with the Russian theologian Pavel Evdokimov – that Mary’s history is "the history of the world in compendium, its theology in one single word" and that she is "the living dogma, the truth of the realized creature" (Women and the salvation of the world, Jaca Book, Milan 1980, 54 e 216). "For Mary, who since her entry into salvation - affirms the Second Vatican Council - history unites in herself and re-echoes the greatest teachings of the faith as she is proclaimed and venerated, calls the faithful to her Son and His sacrifice and to the love of the Father" (Lumen Gentium 65). Mary defers to the entirety of the mystery and also reflects it within herself: in her the All appears in the fragments, as happens in beauty. Hence one says that she is Totally Beautiful, the Tota Pulchra. By applying coherently this "law of totality", this "path of beauty", the theological discourse on Mary can contemplate her as the woman, an icon of the Mystery (see my volume Mary, la donna icona del mistero. Saggio di mariologia simbolico-narrativa, Published by: San Paolo, Milan 1989. 2000⁴).

The reference to Mary as a woman intends to emphasize the historical truth of this young woman from the land of Israel who was provided with the opportunity to live through the extraordinary experience of becoming the mother of the Messiah. Although it is not possible to find in the Gospels Mary’s biography in the modern sense, the many testimonials of the sources, the irreducibility of some of the data that is fundamental to the world in which it was expressed (first among these the idea of the virginal conception) and the criteria of the continuity and homogeneity of the evangelical message in its entirety, allow one to discover a number of precise traits of her historical figure. The greatness of all that happened to her must not allow us to forget the humility of her condition, her daily hard work for her family in Nazareth, the obscure itinerary of faith which she followed, the conditioning received from the surrounding environment, her full and real femininity. Mary is not a myth, nor is she an abstraction, as shown by the deeply Jewish traits of her personality as a believer, who lived in the most elevated way both faith and messianic hope, experiencing within herself in an unheard of and amazing manner the accomplishment and the entirety of the new beginning. This woman was the place of the advent of God in the history of the world, without losing anything at all of the fullness of her humanity: Mary is not a universal case, but – exactly the contrary – she is the "Virgo singularis", an unrepeatable woman in her historicity, who the Eternal elected for the revelation of the Mystery. And it is from her Son, the "concrete Universal", the human norm and archetype, that the Mother receives, in her very singularity, in participating in the universality of the Eternal One’s redeeming plan, "blessed among all women" as "blessed is the fruit of thy womb", Jesus (see Luke 1,42).

It is this game of visible concreteness and invisible profoundness that makes one speak of Mary as an icon: following the example of the Paschal faith, witnessed in the New Testament, one can only really become close to Mary through the eyes of faith. Mary is an "icon" because it is in her that the dual movement, which every icon tends to transmit is offered: the descent and the ascent, the anthropology of God and the theology of mankind. In her the election of the Eternal, and the free consensus of faith in Him, both shine. As an "icon is the vision of things that are not seen" (Evdokimov), hence the Virgin Mother is the place of divine Presence, the "ark of the alliance", covered by the shadow of the Spirit (see Luke 1,35 and 39-45. 56), the Word’s holy abode for the life of mankind. And as an icon color and shape are necessary, because what the Bible says with words, the icon announces with colors and lines and represents it (See Council of. Constantinopolitano IV (879): DS 654), so the Mother of the Lord is the vehicle of the mystery that has become manifest in her, in the reality and the sobriety of the features, with which the Paschal tale of the origins represents it for us. To look at Mary the "icon" means therefore to orient oneself towards a discourse of faith surrounding her, solidly anchored to the biblical facts, and at the same time prepared to test the profoundness of this event in continuity with the constant believing tradition of the Church starting from its very first origins.

Mary is the woman, icon of the Mystery: the divine plan of redemption, once hidden, but now revealed by Jesus Christ (see Rom 16,25; 1 Cor 2,7s; Eph 1,9; 3,3; 6,19; Col 1,25-27; 1 Tm 3,16), the glory hidden below the marks of history, the mystery implies at once the visibility of the events in which it takes place and the invisible profoundness of the divine work in which it is realized. As such, the mystery embraces the truth about God and the truth about mankind, created and redeemed by Him: and this truth is offered through He who is in one person "the way, the truth and the life" (John 14,6). According to the law of totality, Mary is entirely relative to the fullness of the mystery of the Word incarnate: the very scene of the annunciation, an intense anticipation of Easter, reveals the Trinity as the adored womb that welcomes the Holy Virgin, while simultaneously it manifests Mary as the womb for God. Embraced by the Father’s plan, Mary is covered by the shadow of the Spirit which makes her the mother of the eternal Son made man. A relationship of unique profoundness is established between Mary and the Trinity: "Redeemed by reason of the merits of her Son and united to Him by a close and indissoluble tie, she is endowed with the high office and dignity of being the Mother of the Son of God, by which account she is also the beloved daughter of the Father and the temple of the Holy Spirit. " (Lumen Gentium 53), Mary is "the sanctuary and the resting place of the Holy Trinity", as St. Louis M. Grignion of Montfort says (From the real devotion for the Holy Virgin, no. 5), the image or the icon of the divine Trinity.

The aspects of the unique Virgin-Mother-Bride are hence related to three other divine Persons: as far as the Virgin is concerned, Mary faces the Father as pure receptivity, and hence offers herself as an icon to He Who in eternity is pure receiving, pure allowing Himself to be loved, the Begotten, the Beloved, the Son. As the Mother of the Word Incarnate, Mary relates to Him in the gratuitousness of the gift, as the source of love that gives life, and is therefore the maternal icon of He Who started to love since the beginning of time and forever, and is pure source, pure giving, the Begetter, the eternal Lover, the Father. As the ark of the nuptial alliance between heaven and earth, the Bride in which the Eternal One unites in Himself history and fills it with the surprising novelty of His gift, Mary relate to the communion between the Father and the Son and also between Them and the world, and therefore offers herself as the icon of the Holy Spirit, who is eternal nuptials, a bond of infinite mercy and permanent aperture of God’s mystery to the history of mankind. The mystery itself of divine relations is hence mirrored in the Virgin Mother, the humble servant if the Omnipotent: the mark of the fullness of the life of God, one and Trine, comes to rest in the unity of her person.

The trinitarian communion is also reflected however in the mystery of the Church: an icon of the Trinity itself, ecclesial communion discovers within the adorable mystery its origin, its model and its homeland. The Church comes from the Trinity, which gives rise to the initiative of the Father and the missions of the Son and the Spirit; it moves towards the Trinity in the pilgrimage of history; it is structured following the image of the Trinity, in a sort of "pericoresi ecclesiological ", in which the diversity of the gifts and the services takes root in the unity of the Spirit and manifests it in the dialogue of communion. Mary as icon of the Trinity, the Church as icon of the Trinity, their relation cannot be anything but a symbolic identity, already sensed by the testimony of the original faith: Mary is The female Church, the daughter of the Zion of messianic times that has achieved its unthinkable accomplishment. The great tradition of the faith applies the same biblical symbols, alternatively or simultaneously, to the Church and to the Virgin: novella Eve, Paradise, Jacob’s Stairway, Ark of the Alliance... In the real figure of the Mother of the Lord, the Church contemplates its own mystery, not only because it finds in it the model of virginal faith, of maternal mercy and of the nuptial alliance, to which it is called, but also and profoundly because it recognizes in her its own archetype, the ideal figure of what it must be, the temple of the Spirit, mother of the children generated in the Son and Body of Him, the people of God, pilgrim of the faith on the paths of obedience to the Father. The Second Vatican Council, situating Mary in the mystery of Christ and the Church, has been able to acknowledge her together with St. Augustine as the "real mother of the limbs (of Christ... ) because she helped with her mercy the birth of the faithful in the Church, who are the limbs of that Body" (De Sancta Virgintate, 6: PL 4O,399). "Wherefore – adds the Council - she is hailed as a pre-eminent and singular member of the Church, and as its type and excellent exemplar in faith and charity. The Catholic Church, taught by the Holy Spirit, honors her with filial affection and piety as a most beloved." (Lumen Gentium 53). The Virgin-Mother-Bride, icon of God’s mystery, is therefore analogously the icon of the mystery of the Church: Mariology – understood in the light of the trinitarian revelation – is indissolubly joined to ecclesiology.

Mary is also simply a human creature when facing God: a real creature, of course, a singular and unique woman, and yet the interlocutor of a dialogue with the Eternal, that has all the characteristics of the dialogue of the creation and of redemption. Over her descends the shadow of the Spirit, a reminder of the first creation, when "the Spirit of God moved over the waters" (Gen 1,2); in her the figure of the original woman seems to be evoked (see Gen 3,15 and the use John makes of the word "woman" for indicating Mary); she is the "servant of the Lord", who is blessed for "believing the message that was brought to thee from the Lord" (Luke 1,45), the humble one, on whom the Omnipotent turned His eyes, creating great things in her (see Luke 1,48s). Hence, "blessed among women" (Luke 1,42), "all generations will count me blessed" (Luke 1,48). In the Virgin’s ‘yes’ there shines the masterpiece of God’s creation, the dignity of the creature, made capable in the economy of grace to freely ascribe her freedom to the Eternal One’s plan and therefore becoming in a certain sense one of God’s helpers. The Lord, who elects Mary and receives her consent in the faith, totally abandoning herself to Him, is not mankind’s competitor, but the Eternal One who has created us in a freedom without us, for love, and Who for this same love will not redeem us in our absence and without our free consent. The anthropology of God is equal in the Virgin Mother to the theology of mankind: the movement of descent produces a movement of ascent; God elects and gratuitously calls, mankind, elected and called, answers in the freedom and gratuitousness of assent. This anthropology of God – revealed in the annunciation and capable of manifesting fully what was the Eternal One’s plan from the very first morning of the world – carries within itself the mark of the three-persons of God’s life: The Virgin, the figure of reception of the Son, is the believer, who in her faith listens, welcomes, consents; the Mother, the figure representing the Father’s overabundant generosity, generates life, and in mercy provides, offers, transmits; the Bride, figure of the nuptial aspect of the Spirit, is the living creature of hope, who knows how to unite the present of mankind with the future of God’s promise. Faith, love and hope reflect in the figure of Mary the profoundness of the assent to the trinitarian initiative and the mark that this very initiative impresses indelibly in her. The Virgin Mother offers herself as an icon of mankind according to God’s plan, believing, hopeful and loving, an icon itself of the Trinity that created and redeemed mankind and to whose redeeming work it is called to consent within the freedom and the generosity of this gift.

Mary is the image of created and redeemed mankind not in spite of but rather because of her real femininity: it is not the abstract human which is manifest in her, but the feminine human in the real intensity of being the Virgin-Mother-Bride. As written by John Paul II, "the figure of Mary of Nazareth sheds light on womanhood as such by the very fact that God, in the sublime event of the Incarnation of his Son, entrusted himself to the ministry, the free and active ministry of a woman." (Redemptoris Mater, 46). In her, what is human appears in its original and not to be renounced intensity, constituted by the reciprocity of the two poles: the feminine and the masculine. Here also it is the "law of totality" that rules: the polarity refers to all. "The woman is another "I" in a common humanity. - John Paul II also affirms (Apostolic Letter Mulieris dignitatem dated 15.08.1988, nos. 6 and 7) - In the "unity of the two", man and woman are called from the beginning not only to exist "side by side" or "together", but they are also called to exist mutually "one for the other.". The creation of Adam (a collective word in Hebrew) is the creation of the original human being as man-woman, in the totalità of the beginning that defers to the totality of the end, where there is ‘no more male and female, you are all one person in Jesus Christ’ " (Gal 3,28). "Not that, in the Lord’s service, man has his place apart from woman, or woman hers apart from man, woman takes her origin from man, man equally comes to birth through woman. And indeed all things have their origin in God" (l Cor 11,11s). Due to her exceptional closeness to the new and perfect man, Jesus, the Son of God and Her own Son, Mary reflects in herself, in her real and full femininity, la totality of all that is human in her original and final unity. In her the feminine is not an alternative or the antithesis of the masculine; on the contrary, it is a profound revelation in its very being and in the reciprocity it lives in and to which it refers. Mary, entirely in relation to Christ, lives in this totality, integrating her femininity with the fullness of a new humanity: hence, contemplating her in the truth of her being a woman means rediscovering within her the femininity of all humanity, the feminine that reveals because of the reciprocity and integration with the masculine, and that in itself allows the features of the Lord’s new creature to appear. The Virgin’s fruitful reception, certainly not passive, the Mother’s pure generosity, a form of the gratuitousness received from the Father and donated to mankind, the reciprocity of the Bride, with her lift of freeing and anticipating alliance, reveal not only the femininity of the woman, but also the femininity of humanity, the dimensions that every human being must integrate in himself so as to be entirely fulfilled according to God’s plan.

The question of faith in Mary, starting from the "law of totality", can then invoke with awareness the Virgin Mother acknowledging in her the coordinates of the entire "mysterium salutis". The "logos" of faith becomes "hymnos", in the loving and faithful confession that inspired Dante’s poetry at the beginning of the last Canticle (XXXIII) of the Paradise: