Our Lady of Sorrows: The Immensity of Her Dolours Explained
"the more you try to describe Mary's sorrows, the more you realize they're actually indescribable"
If you've spent any time around the devotion to Our Lady of Sorrows, you've probably come across the word "immense" used to describe her grief. It's not just poetic flourish. In The Foot of the Cross; or, The Sorrows of Mary, Frederick William Faber devotes an entire section of his opening chapter to a single, focused question: just how great, exactly, were Mary's sorrows — and why?
This might sound like an odd thing to try to measure. But Faber takes it seriously, and his answer forms one of the theological cornerstones for understanding the Seven Sorrows of Our Lady. Let's walk through what he actually argues, step by step.
Why Mary's Sorrows Resist Description
Faber opens his section on "The Immensity of Our Lady's Dolours" with an admission: the more you try to describe Mary's sorrows, the more you realize they're actually indescribable. He compares it to standing at the edge of the ocean. From the shore, you see nothing but "a waste of waters with a white horizon on every side" — but that flat, featureless surface tells you nothing about the "multitudinous manifold life" teeming beneath it, the "fairy-like ocean-gardens," or the hidden "woods of purple" and "deep thickets of most golden green" below the waves (Faber, The Foot of the Cross, Ch. I, "The Immensity of Our Lady's Dolours").
That's Faber's whole point: what we can see and describe of Mary's grief — the seven sorrowful events themselves — is only the visible surface. The real depth of what she experienced, he argues, lies beneath what any of us can fully picture.
Four Reasons Faber Says Her Sorrow Was Immense
Rather than simply asserting that Mary's sorrow was great, Faber builds a careful case for why it had to be immense. Here are the four main threads of his argument.
1. Proportioned to Her Greatness as Mother of God
Faber reasons that if Mary's sorrow was to be "perfect" — meaning fitting and complete, given who she was — it had to match the scale of her own dignity. And her dignity, as the Mother of God, is about as high as a creature's dignity can go. He even cites St. Thomas Aquinas' teaching that "omnipotence itself could not contrive a greater greatness" than the dignity of the Divine Motherhood. If her greatness was effectively at the ceiling of what a creature could hold, Faber argues, her capacity for sorrow had to be proportioned to match it (Faber, Ch. I, "The Immensity of Our Lady's Dolours").
2. Proportioned to Her Sanctity
Faber also connects the depth of Mary's suffering to the depth of her holiness. He notes that the trials of the saints have always shown "an analogy with their holiness," matching it "in degree as well as" adapting "themselves to it in its kind." Since Mary's sanctity from the Immaculate Conception onward was beyond ordinary measurement, her sorrow — if it was to be meritorious and closely resemble her Son's own suffering — had to rise to match it.
3. Proportioned to Her Enlightenment
This is one of the more striking points Faber makes, and it's easy to overlook. He argues that knowledge sharpens grief. As he puts it, "knowledge always puts an edge on grief." Most of us, he observes, only half-understand our own misfortunes when they happen — some part of the mind is mercifully "deadened and dulled" by the shock. A child who loses a mother, he notes, doesn't grasp the full weight of that loss until years later.
Mary didn't have that mercy of partial understanding. Faber writes that her "whole being was flooded with light" — her intelligence and reason worked with "most consummate perfection," and she lived in what he calls "an atmosphere of supernatural air and light." That same clarity that made her holy also meant she understood the full horror of the Passion as it happened, with a completeness that Faber says came closer to Christ's own understanding of His suffering than anyone else's ever could (Faber, Ch. I, "The Immensity of Our Lady's Dolours").
4. Bound Up With the Redemption of the World
Finally, Faber points out that Mary's sorrows weren't simply a private grief happening alongside the Passion — they were, in his words, "mixed up with the Passion" by God's own ordinance, "added to our Lord's sufferings... with a most real and mysterious purpose." Mother and Son, he argues, could not be separated at any point in the Thirty-Three Years, "least of all... on Calvary, where God has joined them so markedly." That connection to the world's redemption gives her sorrows, in Faber's words, "a peculiar immensity of their own" (Faber, Ch. I, "The Immensity of Our Lady's Dolours").
A Sorrow of Its Own Kind, Not Just Its Own Degree
One subtlety Faber insists on is that Mary's sorrow isn't simply the biggest sorrow on a normal human scale — it's a different kind of sorrow altogether. He writes that "it is a question of kind as well as of degree," and that Mary's grief "was a kind of sorrow which has only certain affinities to any other kinds of sorrow." It's so unique, he says, that it's "simply without a name, except the name which the simple children of the Church call it by — the Dolours of Mary" (Faber, Ch. I, "The Immensity of Our Lady's Dolours").
This is why Faber, and the broader Catholic tradition following him, resists comparing Mary's sorrow directly to any single human loss, however severe. It's treated as something in its own category entirely.
Faber's Warning: Don't Turn This Into Mere Sentiment
It would be easy to read all of this and slide into pure emotion — tears for their own sake, or admiration of Mary's suffering as a kind of tragic beauty. Faber actually pushes back against that reading directly. He writes that if there's one area of devotion where "sentiment and feeling" should be banished, it's devotion to Mary, because sentiment has a way of turning "substance into fancy" and "solidity into prettiness" — making us doubt there's any real substance underneath at all.
His instruction is refreshingly practical: let the beauty of Mary's story move you "if it will," but don't go out of your way chasing the feeling. The goal isn't an emotional experience — it's "plain piety, and a downright increase of love of Mary, and of devotion to her Son" (Faber, Ch. I, "The Immensity of Our Lady's Dolours").
How the Immensity of Her Sorrow Connects to the Seven Sorrows of Our Lady
Everything above is Faber's groundwork before he even gets to the specific events that make up the Seven Sorrows of Our Lady:
The Prophecy of St. Simeon
The Flight into Egypt
The Three Days' Loss of Jesus in the Temple
Meeting Jesus Carrying the Cross
The Crucifixion
The Taking Down from the Cross
The Burial of Jesus
Once you understand that Mary's sorrow was proportioned to her greatness, her sanctity, her knowledge, and her role in the world's redemption, each of these seven moments takes on more theological weight. They aren't seven isolated sad scenes — they're seven distinct expressions of a grief Faber describes as genuinely immense, in the fullest sense of that word.
Why It's Worth Going Deeper
Faber's treatment of "immensity" isn't meant to leave readers overwhelmed or simply moved to tears — it's meant to be a doorway into a richer, more thoughtful devotion to Our Lady of Sorrows. If this exploration of the theology has caught your interest, the natural next step is to look at how the Church and centuries of the faithful have turned this theology into lived practice: through the Seven Sorrows themselves, the Chaplet of the Seven Sorrows, and the feast day set aside in her honor. There's a lot more here worth exploring.
FAQ: The Immensity of Our Lady's Dolours
Why does Faber say Mary's sorrows are "immense"? He argues her sorrow had to be proportioned to four things: her greatness as Mother of God, her sanctity, her supernatural enlightenment (knowledge that sharpened her grief), and her role in the redemption of the world alongside Christ.
What does the ocean metaphor mean? Faber compares the visible story of Mary's sorrows to the surface of the ocean — calm and simple to look at, but concealing enormous depth and life beneath that no description can fully capture.
Why does Faber say knowledge increases suffering? He argues that most people are partly shielded from the full weight of their own grief because they don't fully understand it right away. Mary, because of her supernatural clarity of mind, understood the Passion completely as it happened, without that natural buffer.
Is Mary's sorrow just an especially large version of ordinary grief? No — Faber is explicit that it's a difference of kind, not just degree. He describes it as a category of sorrow with no real name of its own, other than "the Dolours of Mary."
Does Faber want readers to just feel sad about this? No. He specifically warns against turning devotion to Mary into empty sentiment. His goal is "plain piety" — using this understanding to grow in genuine love of Mary and of Christ, not simply to be moved emotionally.
How does this relate to the Seven Sorrows of Our Lady? The idea of "immensity" is the theological foundation Faber lays before examining each of the seven specific sorrowful events individually, from Simeon's Prophecy through the Burial of Jesus.
Key Sources
Faber, Frederick William. The Foot of the Cross; or, The Sorrows of Mary. London: Thomas Richardson and Son, 1858. Chapter I, "The Martyrdom of Mary," Section I, "The Immensity of Our Lady's Dolours," including Faber's reference to St. Thomas Aquinas on the dignity of the Divine Motherhood.
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