Mary is the Cause of the World

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]A woman born thousands of years after creation is called the cause of everything that came before her. That's what St. Gregory Palamos says about the Virgin Mary. He calls her the cause of the benefits which preceded her. The cause of what came before her. That sounds impossible. A daughter causing her own ancestors. A creature causing creation. But St. Gregory isn't confused about how time works. He's pointing at something most of us have never been taught to see. That the end of a story gives the beginning its meaning. And that the one who comes second completes the one who came first. We already saw this with Adam and Eve. Eve is taken from Adam, but in receiving her, Adam becomes what he could never have been alone. The second one completes the first. Now, we just have to follow that logic all the way down. If the pattern holds, if the receiver really does give the giver his identity, then Mary isn't just one more figure in salvation history, she's the reason salvation history exists at all. She's the reason God created the world. God creates by speaking, let there be. And through his word, he gives the gift of his own life.

[00:01:24]But a gift isn't a gift until someone receives it. And a word always calls for a response. From the very first moment, creation is structured as a dialogue.

[00:01:35]And a dialogue isn't complete when the first person speaks. It becomes a dialogue when someone responds. And Mary's response, let it be done to me according to your word, is that answer.

[00:01:48]God says, let there be. Mary says, let it be. These are two sides of one mystery. The let there be of Genesis was always reaching toward the let it be of Nazareth. The earlier exists for the sake of the later. And when the later thing arrives, it doesn't just continue the story. It reveals what the story was about all along. This is what St. Gregory Palamos means. Mary is the telos, the goal, the purpose, the final cause towards which all of creation was ordered from its first moment. She's the one in whom God's creative word finally receives the response it was always calling for. She is the fulfillment. Her yes reaches backwards through history and gives [music] everything that came before her its meaning. The prophet spoke of her. The temple prefigured her.

[00:02:43]The whole story of Israel, election, exile, return was the long preparation of the soil from which she would spring.

[00:02:51]She's in Palamas's words, the theme of the prophets, the first among the apostles, the support of the martyrs, the platform of the teachers. She's the beginning, spring, and root of the hope stored up for us in heaven. Now, remember what we saw with Adam and Eve.

[00:03:08]The receiver isn't passive. Eve doesn't just appear. She's Adam's own self, given back to him as another whom he can love. Bone of my bone, self of myself.

[00:03:20]And in receiving her, Adam becomes himself. The receptive principle isn't inferior to the initiating one. It completes it. It gives the initiator his identity. Mary does the same thing, but at the scale of the entire cosmos because she receives the eternal and uncreated God himself. God is the ultimate initiator. He speaks the world into being. But what he creates is precisely a partner, a bride, a receiver who will freely answer his self-giving with her own. Mary is that receiver. She receives God's word so completely that the word becomes flesh in her womb. She doesn't just hear God's voice the way the earth hears let there be vegetation.

[00:04:09]She answers it with the totality of her personhood, her freedom and her love.

[00:04:15]And in answering she gives God something he willed to receive from the very beginning, a body.

[00:04:23]St. Nicholas of Koua writes that Mary turned the eye of God towards her and through her beauty she showed the beauty of human nature and thus she attracted the dispassionate God and he became man because of her. God, the one who attracts all things to himself and is moved by nothing, wills to be attracted to this woman in Nazareth. God becomes man because of her. Not because he lacked something, but because all of history was unfolding towards this moment, the moment when a human being would receive God so fully that he could dwell in his creation, become his creation. Mary gives God his body. The body laid in a manger. The body that breaks bread. The body nailed to a tree.

[00:05:13]The body that rises from the dead. That body comes from her.

[00:05:20]This is what it means to call her the new Eve. Remember what happened in the garden. God opened Adam's side, took part of it, and built it into a woman, a dwelling place, a living temple. Eve was the first structure God constructed from human nature to house his presence and complete his image. And Mary is the fulfillment of that pattern. She's the dwelling place God was building all along. The one in whom heaven and earth finally meet. The one in whom the infinite God is contained within finite flesh. The liturgy calls her more spacious than the heavens. That's not a poetic exaggeration. It's a precise theological claim. The heavens themselves exist in her because she's the one in whom creation reaches its purpose. The one in whom the whole cosmos is gathered up and offered back to the God who made it. The one who comes second is never merely secondary.

[00:06:22]She's the reason the first one gave himself at all. And in Mary, we see this in its fullest depth. A creature, not God, never God, who participates so deeply in God's own act that the world itself is mysteriously created through her. A quick word before we continue.

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[00:07:05]Back to the video.

[00:07:08]Creation is incarnation.

[00:07:11]Every act of creation is God pressing his infinity into the finite, entering what is not God so that what is not God can share in his life. This isn't something God did once and stopped. It's what he's always doing. The word of God, as Maximus the confessor says, wills always and in all things to accomplish the mystery of his embodiment. Every existing thing is a finite vessel of God's self-giving. Every created thing exists because God made space within his infinity for something that isn't him and then entered that space. Which means creation is only complete when God enters the word fully. when he takes on created nature, when the infinite God is wholly contained within finite flesh, and that happens in one place, the womb of the Virgin Mary. This is why her title matters so much, Theotocos, Godbearer, mother of God. She's a created human person. Not divine, not superhuman, but fully and entirely a creature. One who has entered into such a profound communion with her creator that she participates in his very creative power in his act of sharing his life with the world. In Mary, the effect has come to share in the causality of the cause. This is what divine humility looks like. God doesn't just create a world and visit it. He creates a world structured from its very foundations to receive him so fully that a creature can give him his own body. He builds creation so that it cannot reach its fulfillment without this act of creaturely cooperation. Without Mary's free yes, the infinite God could have done otherwise. He didn't need her, but he willed to need her. Because what he creates isn't a thing, but a relationship. And a relationship requires two who freely give themselves to each other. So, the creator receives his body from his creation. The unoriginate God receives a mother. The cause allows itself to be in a sense caused by its own effect. Mary's let it be done doesn't just respond to God's creative word. It enters into it. Her historical act spoken in a real room in a small town by a particular woman reverberates backward into the eternal let there be and is gathered into it as its eternally intended fulfillment.

[00:09:47]God's let there be light finds its completion in Mary's let it be done through which the light himself is made manifest in the flesh. And this brings us to something we can only touch on now as it deserves its own video. The mystery doesn't end with Mary giving Christ his body because that body is then given to us as the eukarist. On the cross, Christ's side is opened. Blood and water flow out. The eukarist, the church. And standing at the foot of the cross, present at the moment when the eucharistic mystery pours forth from the body she gave him, is Mary. She's there because the two mysteries can't be separated. The body we receive in Holy Communion is the body of Christ, the body he took from her. The flesh on the altar is the flesh she carried in her womb. The blood poured out is the blood she gave him. Every Eucharist is marological.

[00:10:45]Every time the bread becomes his flesh, it becomes the flesh she gave him. The mystery of the mother and the mystery of the altar are one mystery. What St. Maximus understood that creation was made to become the body of Christ finds its concrete reality here. Mary receives Christ into her body and becomes the theotocos. The church receives Christ into her body through the Eucharist and becomes his body. And finally, Christ receives all of creation as his body so that God might be as St. Paul says, "All in all, these are not three events.

[00:11:23]They're one mystery. The descent of uncreated power into creaturely openness. [music] The let there be of God met by the let it be of the creature. This is what creation was always for. And this is what the world is becoming.

[00:11:41]The Eucharist is where everything we've been building toward reaches its climax.

[00:11:45]What it means that God gave himself as food. what it means that we eat his life and become his body. And that's the topic of the next video available exclusively on Patreon.