By Pauper Peregrinus

Fr. Yves Congar (1904-95), an erudite if problematic French Dominican, once remarked to an Anglican bishop at the University of Cambridge who was criticizing the dogma of the Immaculate Conception: “But it is England’s great gift to the Catholica [Catholic world]!” What did he mean?

From the earliest times, Christians have been convinced of the unique holiness of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Speaking under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, St. Elizabeth cried out: Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb! When he came to define the Immaculate Conception, Pope Pius IX personally insisted that this scriptural verse be included in the bull of definition, and it is not hard to see why. St. Elizabeth’s words already suggest the unique “communion of blessedness” between Jesus and Mary: His divinity covered her like a cloak, so that no taint of Adam’s curse would touch her.

Greek-speaking Catholics, from the early days of the Church until now, have always honored Mary with the title of Panagia: all-holy Lady. Among Syrian writers, St. Ephraim, a doctor of the Church who was born around 306, addressed Christ with these words: “Only you and your Mother are more beautiful than everything. For on you, O Lord, there is no mark, neither is there any stain in your Mother.” A little later, in the west, St. Ambrose referred to our Lady as “a virgin who by grace is untouched by any stain of sin.” The current of devotion met an obstacle, however, with the coming of the Pelagian heresy in the early 400’s. Pelagius and his allies taught that men had the innate power to avoid all faults, a belief that led them to deny original sin. The Church’s doctors, especially St. Augustine, reacted by insisting upon the reality of this hereditary flaw in the human race. But the Pelagians retorted: “You claim that all men but Christ must inevitably commit sins, since they all inherit Adam’s sin. But what about the mother of the Lord?”

St. Augustine contented himself with knocking the question away. He already had enough to do! “In regard to the holy virgin Mary,” he said, “for the honor of our Lord, I want no question at all to be raised when we speak of sin” (On Nature and Grace, 42). But he did not enter deeply into the special question of Mary’s relation to original sin, leaving it rather to be untangled by posterity.

The Pelagian controversy left its mark upon the Church, especially in the west, and delayed the universal acceptance among the learned of the Immaculate Conception. At the same time, it ensured that the question would be thoroughly discussed, so that the final definition when it came would be precise.

As the words of Fr. Congar suggest, England had a special part to play in the triumph of the doctrine. There is some evidence that a feast of Mary’s conception was already being celebrated in that country by the 9th century. It is certain that it was celebrated there by around 1060, although a few years later, after the invasion of William the Conqueror, the over-zealous Norman bishops would suppress it as a novelty.

The Normans could not suppress theological reflection, however. Just before they invaded, a child was born in England who was given the name Eadmer. He became a monk in the Benedictine abbey of Canterbury, and a disciple of the great St. Anselm. St. Anselm had written: “It was fitting that the Virgin should shine with a purity than which under God no greater can be conceived.” Eadmer developed this thought, and became the first theologian to teach our Lady’s Immaculate Conception in clear terms, in a short work called On the conception of holy Mary.

He offers various “arguments of fittingness” for the doctrine. For example, St. John the Baptist is believed to have been sanctified before birth, though not at conception: and would not God wish to do something still greater for His own mother? Again, he writes: “when the other angels sinned, God preserved the good angels from sin; and was he not able to preserve a woman, who was soon to become his mother, from sharing the sins of others?” Eadmer is aware that the question of the Immaculate Conception has not yet been settled by the authority of the Church, but he himself, he declares, will not change his conviction of its truth, unless somebody can show him something still more worthy of the Virgin.

Across the English Channel, however, St. Bernard was hesitating. Writing in 1140 to the canons of Lyon, he asks them why they have begun to celebrate the feast of our Lady’s conception. He knows well, he says, that “her life was protected immune from all sin,” but he does not understand how her conception can have been free from Adam’s influence, given that it took place in the usual way. He tells them that they had better limit themselves to those feasts of the Blessed Virgin that have been handed down, though he professes himself ready to submit to the judgment of some wiser man, and in particular to be corrected by the Roman church if need be.

Not everyone was convinced by this letter, even though it came from so great a saint. Back in England, a monk called Nicholas of St. Albans went so far as to say that St. Bernard had pierced Mary’s soul for the second time. Clearly, feelings were running high.

The question was discussed but not satisfactorily resolved during the following century, by such luminaries as St. Albert, St. Bonaventure, and St. Thomas Aquinas. While all these men naturally desired to attribute every excellence to our Lady, they suffered the same scruple as St. Bernard, and feared lest they should exempt her from redeemed mankind. Christ, after all, is the Redeemer of the whole race without exception.

The Franciscans in England found the way forward. A certain Friar William, from Ware in Hertfordshire, is supposed to have said of the Immaculate Conception, potuit, decuit, ergo fecit: “God was able to, it was fitting, therefore He did it.” As such, it was less an argument than an aphorism: but John Duns Scotus (d. 1308), who is thought to have been a pupil of this same William, went into the question with his usual subtlety, and was finally able to answer the objections of earlier theologians. Teaching at the University of Oxford, Friar John argued that within a single moment of time, there can still be a kind of “before and after,” not temporal but causal. In this sense, each human soul precedes both the state of sin and the state of grace, since a soul must “first” exist “before” it can be in either one state or the other.

The Blessed Virgin, he argued, descended from Adam by a natural process and therefore would have contracted original sin if the grace of God had not been given to her in the first moment of her conception. She is therefore redeemed, but in a unique way; by prevention, rather than by cure. Scotus argues that this explanation, far from detracting from the honor due to Christ, enhances it, since it attributes to Christ the most perfect form of redemption. “A most perfect mediator,” he writes, “must have the most perfect possible act of mediation,” and “it is a more excellent benefit to preserve someone from evil than to permit them to fall into evil and afterwards to deliver them.” 650 years later, in his encyclical Fulgens Corona, Pope Pius XII would echo this thought, declaring that the Lord redeemed Mary “in a certain most perfect manner.” Although the theologians would continue to discuss the question, and sometimes warmly, the explanation of Duns Scotus, so profoundly in keeping with the instinct of the Catholic people, enabled the truth of the Immaculate Conception to be ever more widely proclaimed with the passing of the years. Many universities, beginning with the Sorbonne in Paris in 1497, made acceptance of this doctrine into a condition for graduation, and early Jesuits such as St. Peter Canisius and St. Robert Bellarmine included it in their catechisms. Finally, on December 8, 1854, Pope Pius IX, enthroned in the basilica of St. Peter and surrounded by bishops and cardinals, solemnly defined that the doctrine which holds that the Blessed Virgin Mary, by a unique privilege of God, in view of the foreseen merits of Christ, was immune from all guilt of original sin from the first moment of her conception, is a truth revealed by God and thus to be held firmly by all Christians.

Meanwhile, what of England? She had gone into schism, alas, three hundred years before. But just before the papal definition, God had raised up the greatest of modern English converts, John Henry Newman. He would write a noble vindication of the dogma. His erstwhile colleague in the Anglican church, Edward Pusey, had attacked the Immaculate Conception as a departure from the faith of the early Church. Newman, in a justly celebrated Letter to Pusey, shows that the reverse is true. The fundamental belief of the early Church about our Lady was that she is a new Eve. But as the first Eve was created in a state of grace, so also was the second. “She, who was to co-operate in the redemption of the world … was not less endowed with power from on high, than she who, given as a help-mate for her husband, did in the event but co-operate with him for its ruin.” He finished his lengthy letter on December 7, 1865, with some words that were meant not for Pusey alone, but for all his compatriots outside the Fold: “May that bright and gently Lady, the Blessed Virgin Mary, overcome you with her sweetness, and revenge herself on her foes by interceding effectually for their conversion!”

 

TITLE IMAGE: Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, The Immaculate Conception (1767-1769), Madrid, Museo del Prado.