We are told that the first question asked by the infant Thomas Aquinas was: ‘What is God?’ The pursuit of that question became his life's work; to it he gave all his energy and ability. Yet from the time of his earliest writings he had reached the conclusion that in this life he would never find the answer. ‘Nescimus', he will say—'We do not know.’ And he will repeat St John Damascene's ‘In Deo quid est, dicere impossible est —.'It is impossible to say of God what he is.’ St Thomas says this over and over again in his writings, from the earliest to the last. He insists not only that we do not know what God is—the essence, nature and ‘whatness’ of God—but also that we cannot know it: non possumus. He loves to repeat the assertion of the Mystical Theology of'the pseudo-Denys that the most perfect union with God is union with the utterly Unknown.

Faith and Worship, like Christian life itself, are principally concerned with mystery, the divine mysteries with which we are brought into contact through the Incarnation. It is no mere coincidence that both the Christian faith and the Christian liturgy are essentially bound up with the Christian mystery: and to go even further, the very mysteries of pagan cults apparently so foreign to any aspect of the Christian religion, are themselves related by essential ties to the faith and the worship of the Christian. We must first establish the connection between all these elements before we can see the importance of the life of faith in the life of worship.

When man is confronted by the real God he is at once presented with that which is all knowable and so infinite in its perfection as to be beyond his own capacity to know. The reality of the divine being is too intelligible for man, like the intensity of light that obscures the objects of vision.

Christianity comes to us with the claim to be the revelation of a mystery. Our Lord in the gospel speaks of the ‘mystery of the Kingdom of God': and declares that this has been made known to his disciples (Mark 4, 11). St Paul speaks of the gospel as a ‘revelation of the mystery, which in ages past was kept secret, but now has been made manifest and through the writings of the prophets has by the command of the everlasting God been made known to all the nations’ (Rom. 1, 4). Elsewhere he speaks of ‘the mystery which has been hidden from former ages and generations, but now has been made manifest’ (Col. i, 26): and again of ‘publishing to the world the plan of the mystery, which had been kept hidden from the beginning of time in the all-creating mind of God’ (Eph. 3,6). What, then, are we to understand by this mystery, and in what does its revelation consist?

The first and last of man's needs is his need of another person. Man and woman, child and mother, the simple fact of friendship—we are made that way; we are made for other persons. We are made for a life that is meant to be shared. It is not good for man to be alone.

And the pain of loneliness is more than an ache in your hand: something that hurts, but it will pass, it is not all of you. Loneliness is a hurt in the centre of your self: you are alone, and you long for another to share your need.

Man is made for another: but in the end that other is Cod. All love asks to be shared (that is what love means: a sharing, a giving-and- taking). And a selfish love is no love at all. So it is that God (who is love) supremely asks to be shared.

The Fatherhood of God is an idea that is far from exhaustive of God's nature. Alone it would isolate God from a vast part of our own nature.’ So wrote Dom Vonier, O.S.B. (in The Divine Motherhood, p. 90), and what he does not go on to say in so many words, though the idea is implicit in his book, is voiced by Fr Victor White, O.P., in his article on ‘The Scandal of the Assumption’ (Life of the Spirit, Nov.-Dec. 1950), when he says: ‘Perhaps it [the definition of the Assumption] will lead the Church to closer consideration and ultimate formulation of the deep mystery of the “Motherhood of God”. For by the Assumption Mary returns to her own eternal Source, and not she but God himself is the ultimate and eternal type of Motherhood, Womanhood, and even materiality.’ In what follows there Will be suggested, with much diffidence, one possible line of approach to a deeper understanding of this mystery.

To treat of the motherhood of the Blessed Virgin according to the Scriptures is as overwhelming a task as it would be to treat of Christ according to the Scriptures. For one whole half of the mystery of redemption, as set forth there, is summed up in the person of the Blessed Virgin. Under Christ, and in Christ, the Blessed Virgin plays in the work of the redemption a companion, complementary part to his; being the Eve to his Adam, the Woman answering to the (Son of) Man that he is. It is accepted that it is necessary, in order to appreciate the Scriptural witness to Christ, to study the Bible as a whole and in its full inspired weight of meaning. The same is true of the Blessed Virgin. It is not sufficient, in the Old Testament, to dwell on a number of the more explicitly prophetic texts, nor in the New Testament on the great scenes, say, of the Annunciation, Bethlehem, Cana, Calvary.

Thee God we praise. But to speak of this Godhead I dare not presume, for since I cannot prove, nor conceive thine hid works, that thou hast made in a creature, what should I say to the maker that is a creator? For all philosophers that have laboured in divers sentences, as in grammar, logic, rhetoric, music, astronomy, geometry, arithmetic, all, they proved by reason in their faculties, till they came to one point, that was called, prima causa. And here they stood still and could proceed no further. And that first causer, they said, might well be called a God. And so we, to the same first causer of all things, we say: Te Deum Laudamus. ‘Thee God we praise', that art so curious a maker of diversities of things. And Te dominum confitemur, ‘we knowledge thee', a lord that of everything art so wise a disposer and so noble a keeper.

In Ravenna, on a spring morning, it is easy to believe that the untroubled achievement of the early Christian mosaics reached a point of fidelity to the Christian mystery which was never to be matched again. The immense volume of medieval carving in the round, the seven centuries of religious painting in the West, the whole story from Duccio to Matisse: it would be fantastic to deny the religious meaning of such a Benedicite of the things of men's hands. But, confronted in Ravenna with the unique evidence (in the West, at least) of a representation of the Christian mystery that has known no later modification, here in the empty basilicas with nothing to interrupt the full impact of those eloquent walls, one is led to a simple acceptance.