The great ambition of the Virgin Mary
The French playwright, Molière, once wrote that “la grande ambition de la femme est d’inspirer l’amour” (the great ambition of a woman is to inspire love). In his play, Le Sicilien ou l’Amour peintre, this phrase carried a tone of satire, both reflecting and satirizing French courtly love, which was very much in vogue during the height of the Ancien régime. It has long been said that “the value of a woman is her beauty”, and when Molière penned his line, he was addressing a society in which a woman’s worth was measured by the admiration she could elicit. Beauty and virtue were both social currencies, and the theater often mocked their delicate balance.
In Christendom, the Virgin Mary represents a counter-tradition of femininity, a radical inversion of worldly female ambition noted by Molière. Her greatness lies precisely in her humility. Mary does not seek to inspire love through self-display, but through the art of self-emptying. Her ambition, if anyone can truly call it that, is to “magnify the Lord” (Luke 1:46), and not herself. The contradiction is plain; in pointing away from herself to the true source of all things, she becomes the most beloved woman in human history. In renouncing prominence, she becomes prominent.
There is a profound irony here that would not be lost on Molière himself. The woman whom her own contemporaries would least expect to be an object of such admiration. The poor, unlettered girl from the backwater Galilean village of Nazareth becomes the figure who awakens love in the hearts of countless generations. Painters, poets, and pilgrims have sought her image not because she was the personification of some temporal beauty, a Greco-Roman goddess poised in some melodramatic way, but because Mary reflected something other than herself, something that made her the object of veneration. She resonates because she holds within her the innate presence of that divine beauty. Her influence, extending across the centuries, is a quiet proof that quiet love and devotion is not induced by vanity but by the presence and vision of God. To “inspire love,” in Mary’s sense, is to lead others toward the source of love itself, what Dante, in the end of his magnum opus, poignantly called “that love which moves the Sun and other stars” (Paradiso, 33:145).
The Virgin Mary both fulfills and subverts Molière’s famous aphorism. Her life inspires love, but it is not the fleeting, salacious love commonly found in our own world, or the affection of courtly desire present in Molière’s. It is a love purified of possessiveness, one that elevates rather than consumes. In a world that often reduces women to the power of their physical beauty, Mary reveals a power of a different kind: the capacity to transform love into grace. Her presence in Christian devotion has always been that of intercession and maternal empathy, the heart that understands every human sorrow. Biblically, she is the woman at the foot of the Cross on Golgotha, whose compassion mirrors God’s own great love for humanity. Just the same, in the annals of medieval art, she is the universal mother who holds the weight of the world’s suffering in her own weary arms. The love she inspires is not self-directed, but always points beyond herself: to God, to the good, to the other.
If Molière’s aphorism reflects the social mirror of his own age, the Virgin Mary offers the eternal corrective to every age. The ambition to inspire love is not misplaced, but misdirected when it seeks admiration rather than communion. In Mary, “the ambition of woman” is both fully realized and wholly sanctified: she inspires love that heals, reconciles, and renews. Unlike most objects of veneration, her greatness is not in being loved, but in teaching others to love. She shows that a woman’s vocation, and indeed every human vocation, is to become a vessel of God’s love, to make the heart visible in an otherwise heartless world.
In Christendom, the Virgin Mary represents a counter-tradition of femininity, a radical inversion of worldly female ambition noted by Molière. Her greatness lies precisely in her humility. Mary does not seek to inspire love through self-display, but through the art of self-emptying. Her ambition, if anyone can truly call it that, is to “magnify the Lord” (Luke 1:46), and not herself. The contradiction is plain; in pointing away from herself to the true source of all things, she becomes the most beloved woman in human history. In renouncing prominence, she becomes prominent.
There is a profound irony here that would not be lost on Molière himself. The woman whom her own contemporaries would least expect to be an object of such admiration. The poor, unlettered girl from the backwater Galilean village of Nazareth becomes the figure who awakens love in the hearts of countless generations. Painters, poets, and pilgrims have sought her image not because she was the personification of some temporal beauty, a Greco-Roman goddess poised in some melodramatic way, but because Mary reflected something other than herself, something that made her the object of veneration. She resonates because she holds within her the innate presence of that divine beauty. Her influence, extending across the centuries, is a quiet proof that quiet love and devotion is not induced by vanity but by the presence and vision of God. To “inspire love,” in Mary’s sense, is to lead others toward the source of love itself, what Dante, in the end of his magnum opus, poignantly called “that love which moves the Sun and other stars” (Paradiso, 33:145).
The Virgin Mary both fulfills and subverts Molière’s famous aphorism. Her life inspires love, but it is not the fleeting, salacious love commonly found in our own world, or the affection of courtly desire present in Molière’s. It is a love purified of possessiveness, one that elevates rather than consumes. In a world that often reduces women to the power of their physical beauty, Mary reveals a power of a different kind: the capacity to transform love into grace. Her presence in Christian devotion has always been that of intercession and maternal empathy, the heart that understands every human sorrow. Biblically, she is the woman at the foot of the Cross on Golgotha, whose compassion mirrors God’s own great love for humanity. Just the same, in the annals of medieval art, she is the universal mother who holds the weight of the world’s suffering in her own weary arms. The love she inspires is not self-directed, but always points beyond herself: to God, to the good, to the other.
If Molière’s aphorism reflects the social mirror of his own age, the Virgin Mary offers the eternal corrective to every age. The ambition to inspire love is not misplaced, but misdirected when it seeks admiration rather than communion. In Mary, “the ambition of woman” is both fully realized and wholly sanctified: she inspires love that heals, reconciles, and renews. Unlike most objects of veneration, her greatness is not in being loved, but in teaching others to love. She shows that a woman’s vocation, and indeed every human vocation, is to become a vessel of God’s love, to make the heart visible in an otherwise heartless world.
26-30, F
