The Immaculate Conception

Mary and Jesus, from an altarpiece in

the Church of Santa Maria del Carmine

Florence, Italy

Well, triggered by the word “prevenient” in the new translation for the feast of the Immaculate Conception, we have been looking at original sin in order to better understand how the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception developed.  It is a fairly late doctrine and despite its being infallibly defined we will see that it cannot claim, at least historically, to have been part of the Tradition handed down from the Apostles.  
     As I mentioned in my previous post, while the idea of original sin can be traced back through Augustine to even earlier patristic sources, it is a theological concept that never developed in the Christian East and is unknown in Orthodox and Eastern Catholic sources.  Without a concept of original sin, there is no doctrine of the Immaculate Conception because the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is that Mary was conceived in her mother’s womb without the original sin that has affected the rest of the human family.  Mary is unique in this regard.  The Church says that she was saved from original sin through the merits of the death and resurrection of her Divine son even though that passion, death, and resurrection had not yet taken place in time: hence “prevenient.”  Although the Eastern Churches did not celebrate Mary’s Immaculate Conception they did celebrate her conception, affixing the date  (originally) to December 9—nine months (minus one day) before the feast of her birth.  In the same way the Church celebrated the conception of her Son nine months before the Church celebrates his birth.  (March 25^th is nine months before December 25^th.)  These are the only two “conceptions” I know of being celebrated in the Church calendar.  The feast of Mary’s Conception originated in the Church of Syria (which included the Holy Land) in about the sixth century but soon was celebrated throughout Eastern Christianity. 
       How did the feast come to the West?  Scholars agree that it was the Normans who introduced the feast to the Western Church.  In the eleventh century Normans conquered Sicily and Southern Italy where the Church, at that time,  followed the Greek Rite rather than the Western Latin Rites.  It was probably at this time that the Normans became familiar with the feast of the Conception of Mary.  There was a problem though in the west.  Western theologians, including Augustine, saw that Mary was, like the rest of us, conceived in original sin.  How can we celebrate a sinful conception?  (Remember the East, not believing in original sin, saw no sin in the conception.)  Immediately a theological debate broke out.  Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, a great devotee of the Blessed Virgin insisted that she, like us, was conceived in original sin.  Saint Thomas would pick this up and affirm that Mary was conceived in sin.  The Franciscans and Carmelites however, came to Mary’s defense and insisted that she had been spared original sin in order to prepare her for being the Mother of Jesus.  The debate raged through the Middle Ages.  When Pope Sixtus IV put the feast of Mary’s Conception on the universal calendar in the fifteenth century it was simply called the Conception of the Virgin.  The Dominican Pope, Saint Pius V, in revising the Roman Calendar also simply called it “The Conception of the Virgin.”  In Franciscan and Carmelite Churches, and several dioceses, however, it was called “The Immaculate Conception.” 
       The doctrine remained an open question for centuries with Catholics free to believe that Mary suffered the consequences of original sin or that she had been preserved from it by a special dispensation of “prevenient” grace.  In much the same way, while Catholics today must believe that Mary was assumed body and soul at the end of her earthly life, we are free to believe that she died or that she did not die before her assumption.  The matter is undefined.  In regard to the Immaculate Conception,  however, Pope Pius IX closed the issue in 1854 by defining the doctrine that Mary was conceived without sin through a dispensation on the merits of her Son’s passion, death, and Resurrection.  Thus today this is a defined dogma for the Church, though the Eastern Churches—the various rites that comprise the Eastern Churches in union with Rome as well as the Orthodox Churches, sort of nod their heads in ambiguous assent and go on their way thinking that we westerners argue over the darnedest things.  And perhaps we do. 

Original Sin: Is There Anything New Under the Sun?

Saint Ambrose of Milan,

mentor of Saint Augustine

Yesterday I wrote on the subject of prevenient grace as the prayer over the gifts in the new translation made a reference to it, but it might be worth our while to take a look at the history of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception.  It is curious because the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception  is only held in the Western Church and not shared in the East (including those Churches which are in Communion with Rome)  which celebrates the conception of the Virgin but, because it has a very different understanding of original sin,  avoids the issue of Mary’s being conceived without (original) sin.  The Eastern Churches pass over the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception in silence—not denying it but also not teaching it.  They hold that Mary was sinless but do not attribute this to her not having been conceived subject to original sin.  As I just pointed out, the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is dependent on one’s understanding of original sin. 
       Saint Augustine is usually “blamed” for introducing the concept of original sin into Catholic (and Protestant) theology, and this explains why the doctrine is held in the Western Church where Augustine is a major figure and not in the Churches of the East where his influence is minimal.  In fact, however, while Augustine devoted considerable paper and ink to the subject of original sin, he inherited the doctrine, at least in seminal form, from earlier Church Fathers such as Iranaeus, Tertullian, Cyprian of Carthage, and Ambrose who saw in the disobedience of Adam the origins of human rebellion against God.  One of the reasons this doctrine of original sin never “ took off” in the East is that in the early Patristic era (the second through the fifth centuries) the Eastern Churches had more of a challenge from the Gnostic heresies that tended to grossly overstress the role and power of evil and that forced Eastern theologians to stay focused on the essential goodness of God’s Creation.  To admit that human nature is somehow essentially flawed, even by the inherited effects of Adam’s sin, would have played into the hands of the sin-obsessed Gnostics.  Of course Augustine had himself belonged to a Gnostic sect and while he rejected Manicheanism even before his conversion to Christianity, he was far more given to reflect on the dark side of human nature than most, indeed any, of the earlier Church Fathers.  Augustine took the tradition of an inherited sinfulness that had come down from Tertullian through Ambrose and runs with it, developing a very negative anthropology in which the human person is enthralled by Adam’s disobedience and only by grace regains the freedom of the will.  Augustine came into conflict with a Roman priest by the name of Pelagius who argued that the human will is essentially free and able to choose between sin and grace.  This positivist view of human nature and the consequent superfluity of grace was more than Augustine could bear.  He knew from experience—his experience—the evil that lurks within the human heart.  (Sort of like “The Shadow” of old-time radio fame.)    The Church would come down on Augustine’s side—they had to as he was (and still is) the most prolific theologian in the history of the Church and lays the foundation for all subsequent Western Theology—thought in practice we Catholics have a tendency to slide into Pelagianism which is what triggers our attraction to “salvation by works.”  Anyway, as I have said, Augustine taught that the human person has inherited a nature that, while created good, is inherently flawed by the disobedience of our first parents and that this flaw, rooted in human concupiscence, is passed down from father to child through the act of sexual intercourse by which the child is begotten.  This is not to say that Augustine understands concupiscence exclusively in sexual terms.  Augustine gets a bad rap for being anti-sex while in fact he is just about anti-everything, one of those persons who believe that if something is at all enjoyable it must be sinful.  By the way, I am a big fan of Augustine and think that he is the greatest mind in the history of Christian thought so I am not slamming him but the fact of the matter is that he has an incredibly negative understanding—not necessarily wrong, just incredibly negative—of human nature. And then, if human nature is so corrupted by sin, the problem becomes how could the Blessed Mother be tainted by this human nature?  How indeed?   That is the conundrum the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception was formulated to resolve.