by Michael Pakaluk.

When Mary visited Elizabeth, if you were present and had asked them, "Where is the Lord? Who is the Lord?" they both would have pointed at Mary's belly and said, "There He is. He is within Mary."

They understood their meeting, clearly, as a gathering of four persons. "And why is this granted to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?", Elizabeth asks. (Luke 1:43) It was not that Mary was to be a mother, but that she was already a mother, then, of the Lord, just as Elizabeth was already the mother, then, of John.

And yet each mother was also aware that she, with her living powers, was a kind of mediator for the little being she carried inside. Babies in the womb hear sounds. Newborn infants whose moms live near airports have no trouble in sleeping when a jet passes over, because they have been long accustomed to the sound.

And yet Luke takes pains to specify, and Elizabeth relays the fact also, that John leapt in her womb, not when John heard Mary's greeting, but rather when Elizabeth heard it. (verse 44)

This Prophet and Forerunner is apparently roused not by the Lord directly, but through Elizabeth, through Mary. Mary's greeting, the Lord's greeting; Elizabeth's hearing, John's hearing. For all that, it is not the "bodies" of Mary and Elizabeth that mediate, but rather the living powers of their souls, because the powers of hearing and of speaking are powers of life.

Thus, when Mary begins her Magnificat and says, in a literal rendering, "My soul is causing the Lord to grow greater," (as her language strictly says), she refers to the being within her. Of course she must, since the referent of "the Lord" could not have changed since Elizabeth's utterance.

For Elizabeth, "the Lord" meant the being in the womb of whom Mary was the mother, and then Mary, referring to this same "Lord," says that the living powers of her soul are nurturing His growth. That is, the Magnificat begins with Mary's testimony to God growing within her. (And since Scripture is inspired, look no further for a divine warrant for the title, Theotokos.)

I reject the common view that the first two verses of the Magnificat show "Semitic parallelism," that is, the Hebrew poetical device of saying the same thing twice with slight alterations. Why should they do so, when that device (look carefully!) appears nowhere else in the Magnificat?

Besides, "soul" (psuchē) and "spirit" (pneuma) are not to be assimilated. God and the Holy Angels are spirits, but God is not a soul, and angels are not disembodied souls. Souls enliven bodies; spirits are alive, rather, with spiritual and intellectual life. "What is born of flesh is flesh and what is born of spirit is spirit." (John 3: 6) But flesh bears flesh because of souls. Mary's "soul," then, is quite a different power from her "spirit."

If Mary in the first verse of the Magnificat declares that her soul is nurturing the enfleshed Lord within her, in the second verse, she serenely contemplates this reality within her, in her spirit, and exults in joy. Joy may be defined as pleasure in the recognition of a present, possessed good. Since God is her last end and happiness, she in truth is rejoicing that she possesses happiness.

She might have said, simply, "My spirit rejoices in the Lord." Yet she replaced this with "God my Savior." "Savior" she had learned from the angel, who said that her child's name would be "Jesus," which means "God saves." But it was her added touch to say "my" Savior, which shows that she knew that she too needed to be saved, and that she was saved "retroactively" - which the Church has always held, even when it was debated, over long centuries, whether Mary's salvation took place at the moment of her conception, or some time between then and when Jesus was conceived.

As for her referring to "the Lord" within her as also "God": this she shows that she, and Elizabeth too, had no doubt that this being growing within her was divine, as the angel had also said.

In the Mag...