Conversely, there is always the danger, in writing, of dwelling so long on one particular thought, and those that follow on its heels, that you feel as though you’re vanishing into the whirlpool of its metaphysics.

The best that I hope for, in anything I write, is that the leaps I make, between one thought and the next, are not so disparate that the ‘ground’ of the one thought is out of sight of the ‘ground’ of the other.

Which isn’t to say that the sequence of my thoughts, or the thread of my associations, and their logic, is always clear and unassailable.

Maybe it has nothing to do with her, or little to do with her, I don’t know. Most likely it has something to do with her, in my mind, otherwise I wouldn’t have ended up talking about it as a consequence of talking about her.

One wonders, probably, what any of this has to do with Our Lady.

Though maybe, also, it is always operating in us, to some extent; so that to say it “begins” would not be quite right either.

I suppose I describe it as ‘tyrannical’ only because it absorbs us so completely, when it begins to operate in us. Perhaps I’d do better to say that it monopolizes us when we employ it, because it must monopolize us; because such is its design.

To the contrary, as a facet of the human person, the intellect is a good that draws its substance from the image of God in which we are ‘made’.

Of course, when it is involved in some task, or the figuring out of some problem, the intellect is not ‘tyrannical’ in character — that is not quite what I mean.

In this sense the intellect is amoral; a process of nature, a consequence of evolution.

I mean that, in its default mode, it is self-directed, autonomous, a mechanism whose purpose is to abandon itself to its own functions.

I say “tyrannically” because that is how the intellect does operate, in the absence of the moderating influence of our conscience.

People who are not religious often suppose that to be religious one must suppress one’s intellect, or critical apparatus, and accept without question everything one is told by those to whom one has granted, say, ecclesial authority, when really what one must do, at least in Catholicism, is learn how to modulate one’s intellect in such a way that it does not operate tyrannically, or unilaterally, but in concert with one’s faith, without which there is no expression of true or ‘living’ virtue.

This is understandable to an extent, though by ‘understandable’ I don’t mean wise, or correct. I mean only that the reaction, on the part of skeptics and nonbelievers, to an aspect of the faith that will almost always be imperfectly expressed (and even at times appear to be sullied by its association with corruption in the Church), is, while erroneous, not inexplicable or surprising.

Some will be bored by the notion of her, or even find it laughable, if not objectionable. Others will view her as one element among many in what is now often referred to as a ‘fairy story’, and an ‘unscientific’ way of looking at things.

Of course, not every individual will want to think of her this way, especially not the many in the world for whom such a figure as Mary (along with the rest of the Christian story) will seem irrelevant at best.

I myself think of her most frequently as Our Lady, because I like how encompassing that title is, how it would include all of us in the circle of her attention, while asking us to regard her with reverence and discretion.

Another of her titles is the Theotokos, which is Greek for ‘God-bearer’, and which thus functions as a counterpoint to the simplicity of the name ‘Mary’, insofar as it emphasizes her association with the divine rather than her humanness (though it in no way diminishes her humanness, but rather persists alongside it).

To refer to her by her simple name of Mary, for instance, as the writers of the Gospels do, seems to me to emphasize her ordinariness, her humbleness, and her familiarity to us, while to refer to her as the ‘Virgin Mary’ is to emphasize her sanctity and purity (and perhaps even the paradoxical or miraculous consequences with which she is associated, in terms of the Incarnation).

On the other hand, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it makes no difference what title I use to refer to her, or that her designations are without significance, for they are significant, even if their variations in meaning are subtle.