Tag Archives: Immaculate Conception

The New Eve and the Immaculate Conception

Apologetics, Bible, Church Fathers, Grace, Incarnation, Mary, , , , , ,

In a previous post, we mentioned how St. John gives us all we need to make the dogma of the Assumption of Our Lady explicit.  But this is not the only dogma that he gives us the foundation for.  He also helps us to ground the other controversial Marian dogma of the Immaculate Conception.

One of the things that makes Christianity unique among all the world religions is that it is grounded in history.  Its central premise is that the eternal and transcendent God took human flesh in a specific time and place and effected our salvation.  The Incarnation is a historic event that, because it occurred in the “fullness of time”, was not some haphazardly chosen moment, but one providentially decreed from the foundation of the world.  The events leading up to the Incarnation were meant to reveal God’s plan and toe prepare the way for it.  This means that these events, especially those detailed in the Old Testament, are charged with prophetic and theological meaning.  From this emerges the principle of typology which reveals the unity of salvation by moving from “type” to fulfillment in the “antitype”.  Because the movement is from prophecy to fulfillment it is always from lesser to greater.

Typology is not a trick biblical scholars apply to the bible but instead is a principle that is applied in the Bible itself.  The New Testament abounds in examples, but one in particular, because of its relationship at hand bears special mention—Christ as the New Adam (c.f. 1 Cor 15:45, Rom 5:12-21).  St. Paul is essentially alluding to the fact that Christ is the new and greater Adam, serving as a counter-image our first father in the flesh.  Although created by the infusion of God’s breath (i.e. the Holy Spirit), the first man failed in his test and brought sin and death into the world.  The Second Adam, who also was made flesh by the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit did not fail the test and defeated sin and death. 

The New Eve

In a very real sense this type-antitype relationship is the most fundamental of all because it is the first one used in the Bible.  The first thing that God does after the Fall, is to promise a New Adam, one who would crush the head of the serpent: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel” (Gn 3:15).  This promise however is not just for a New Adam, but also another “Woman” (Eve’s name given by Adam) who would serve as a New Eve.  The New Adam would be born of this woman’s seed (an allusion to the Virgin Birth since, biblically speaking, the seed always came from the man) and she and the Serpent would have a relationship of enmity.

This New Eve is revealed to us by St. John in his gospel, a theme that he makes rather explicit.  The beginning of John’s gospel would immediately evoke the beginning of Genesis as if what he is about to write about fulfills the Creation account found in Genesis.  Both open with “in the beginning” and both go on to depict days of creation and re-creation.  In John’s account we find the use of “next day” twice and then skips two days and starts again “on the third day”.  If you are counting, that gives us six days—“the beginning” (1), “the next day” (2), “the next day” (3) and “on the third day” (6).  And just like on the sixth day of creation, we are told on the sixth day of re-creation there is a marriage taking place.  We are told nothing about the bride and groom of that wedding, but only that Our Lord and His Mother are there (John 2:1).  We are then told of a conversation between the Mother and her Son in which He addresses her in a rather strange way—as “Woman”.  This address, combined with the parallels to Genesis, would call to mind both Eve and the promise of the New Eve.  This New Eve would, by her words, overturn the damage done by the words of the first Eve and set in motion the work of the New Adam in defeating the Serpent. 

This connection would already be pretty clear, but Our Lord wanted to make sure it was crystal clear when, hanging on the Cross, He once again addresses her as Woman (John 19:42).  This time He makes both the image and the vocation clear.  Just as Eve of old was the mother of all the living according to the flesh, the New Eve was to be the mother of all the living according to the Spirit.

Mary as the New Eve was not something hidden away in the Scriptures or a product of popular piety but something that dates back to the Apostolic age.  We find this as the first title that the Church Fathers gave her.  For example, St. Irenaeus whose favorite theme was re-creation or recapitulation used that title when he made account of the Apostolic preaching saying,

“And just as through a disobedient virgin man was stricken down and fell into death, so through the Virgin who was obedient to the Word of God man was reanimated and received life… For it was necessary that Adam should be recapitulated in Christ, that mortality might be swallowed up and overwhelmed by immortality; and Eve recapitulated in Mary, that a virgin should be a virgin’s intercessor,  and by a virgin’s obedience undo and put away the disobedience of a virgin.” 


Demonstration of Apostolic Preaching, 33

St. Irenaeus most certainly was qualified to give account of Apostolic preaching for he was a disciple of St. Polycarp who was a disciple of St. John.

Typology and the Immaculate Conception

With the type-antitype relationship firmly established we can make the link to the Immaculate Conception more explicit.  Recall that this relationship implies that the privileges given to Eve must in no way exceed the privileges given to Mary.  Eve was conceived without the stain of Original Sin, that is, she was conceived with the gift of sanctifying grace.  Mary then too must be conceived, at the very least, with the same privilege or else the type-antitype relationship falls apart.  St. John in canonizing Mary as the New Eve also, even if only in an implicit manner, declared the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception.

Using typology we can even go further when we factor in the revelation that the New Eve will be at enmity with the Serpent.  This term, enmity, means that the hatred will be so deeply seeded that she will never fall into his power.  And just as Eve received grace consonant with her mission to battle the Serpent and make her a “helper suitable” to the first Adam, so too the New Eve would receive a plentitude of grace to make her a suitable helper to the New Adam and His battle against the Serpent by making her immune to his weapon of sin.  The Hebrew term ezer kenegdo that we translate as “helpmate” or “helper suitable to him” implies both a similarity and a complementarity.  And just as God gave to Eve a share in Adam’s humanity, so God gives to the New Eve a share in His divinity, which we call sanctifying grace and a complentarity by which the New Eve gives her seed to His humanity.  She is to be a helpmate suitable to His mission as Redeemer by being like Him in a unique share in His divinity but still subject to His redemptive (or pre-demptive) act.  In short, the New Eve would need to be not only conceived in grace, but also to never have lost it through sin.

We can do no better than to conclude by quoting Saint John Henry Newman’s lucid summary of the connection between Eve and the Immaculate Conception:

“She [Mary] holds, as the Fathers teach us, that office in our restoration which Eve held in our fall:—now, in the first place, what were Eve’s endowments to enable her to enter upon her trial? She could not have stood against the wiles of the devil, though she was innocent and sinless, without the grant of a large grace…Now, taking this for granted, . . . I ask you, have you any intention to deny that Mary was as fully endowed as Eve? …If Eve was raised above human nature by that indwelling moral gift which we call grace, is it rash to say that Mary had even a greater grace? …And if Eve had this supernatural inward gift given her from the first moment of her personal existence, is it possible to deny that Mary too had this gift from the very first moment of her personal existence? I do not know how to resist this inference:—well, this is simply and literally the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception.”

Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching

Science and the Immaculate Conception

Creed, Grace, Incarnation, Mary, The Life of Jesus, Theology, ,

One of the most common mistakes that Catholics make regards what is actually celebrated during this week’s feast of the Immaculate Conception.  The general consensus is that it is a feast marking the Immaculate Conception of Jesus.  They this feast with the Feast of the Annunciation which marks the miraculous manner in which the Word took flesh in the womb of the Immaculate Conception.  One thing they are not wrong about however is that, while the feast centers on the circumstances and consequences of Our Lady’s singular grace, the Feast, like all things pertaining to Our Lady really is about Christ.

The Council of Chalcedon in 451 was called in response to the Monophysite heresy.  This heresy believed that the two natures of Christ were united such that they really became one, that is, the human was fully absorbed by the divine rendering only a single nature. Its backers proposed the metaphor that the divine nature was like an ocean and His human nature like a drop of water totally lost in the divinity.  This may seem to be unnecessary theological hairsplitting until we follow through to its logical conclusions.  First, with no true humanity, He would only appear to be human like some sort of vision or hologram.  Second, and more importantly, it meant that the humanity of Christ could not be a separate source of activity from the divinity.  He could not really suffer and die as a man and any appearance of those things would be only that, an appearance.

The Council, with the approval of St. Leo the Great, was quick to reject any trace of this and reaffirmed that Christ ss true God and true man, “perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity, the same truly God and truly man, composed of rational soul and body; consubstantial with the Father as to his divinity and consubstantial with us as to his humanity; ‘like us in all things but sin.’. He was begotten from the Father before all ages as to his divinity and in these last days, for us and for our salvation, was born as to his humanity of the virgin Mary, the Mother of God” (quoted in CCC 467).

The necessity of both powers of operation, human and divine, are necessary for Christ’s sacrifice to be efficacious.  Remove either power and atonement becomes a sham.  Mankind incurred a great debt, so great that only God could pay it.  Justice must be served for the moral order of the universe to be restored.  In mercy, God takes the debt as if it is His own.

Christology and the Immaculate Conception

What does all this have to do with the Immaculate Conception?  As true man, Christ was “born of a woman” (Gal 4:4).  That is self-evident, but it also means His mother was a true mother.  And like all mothers, she supplied to Him her flesh and it was her blood that coursed through His veins.  Put in a more scientific manner, it was her ovum that was fertilized and that ovum became the building block of the human nature that was assumed by the Person of the Son.  She was truly His mother and not merely a surrogate or a human incubator.

Furthermore, we are told that the Son of God come in the flesh is “like us in all things but sin” (Heb 4:15), that is, neither original nor actual sin touched Him.  The impossibility of actual sin we all intuitively grasp, but we may not think about the fact that the human nature He inherited must also be free from original sin and its effects.   Original sin is not sin committed, but “sin” inherited.  It is passed down from our parents.  Since Our Lord had only one human parent, and she was truly His Mother and no mere surrogate, the flesh that Mary passed down to Him had to be free from original sin and its effects.

We begin to now see the logic of the Immaculate Conception as an explanation for the purity of His blood offering and His freedom from Original Sin.  We have ruled out the possibility that by some miraculous intervention the ovum that was to become a part of Our Lord’s human nature was altered at the moment of Conception.  Mary would no longer be His true mother.  But we have not yet seen why Our Lady must be free from the stain of Original Sin from the moment of her conception.  Why could it not be that she was sanctified at some other time?

When Pope Pius IX declared the dogma of the Immaculate Conception in 1854, he commented on the fact that it was “wholly fitting that so wonderful a mother should be ever resplendent with the glory of most sublime holiness and so completely free from all taint of original sin.”  In other words, he thought it was not theologically necessary, only fitting.  But there may be a certain biological necessity that would help us to see why this dogma is true.

How Science Supports the Immaculate Conception

Thanks to advances in the field of human embryology, we know that the flesh of Our Lord (in Mary’s oocytes) was actually formed at her conception. Although He takes her flesh at the Annunciation, but the actual flesh He takes to Himself (in the oocyte that matured into an egg) was present in Mary at her beginning.  Just as she carried it around after His birth, Mary was, in a very real sense, carrying around the flesh of Our Lord from the moment of her conception.

For the more scientifically minded, we know that at the moment of conception, although obviously not fully formed, the human person is self-directed and thus needs no outside intervention to develop assuming the proper environment.  That means that even if oogenesis occurs at the meiosis I stage of development, everything that is to be used for the formation of those germ cells is already present.  We should make sure that we see development as a continuous process, begun in a definitive direction at conception, and not a series of independent stages.  The stages are simply mental constructs to help us understand the development itself.

Science then would help to confirm that the Immaculate Conception is necessary, even if theology can only describe its fittingness.  Science is a path not just to facts but to wonder, a sure path to the Truth.  The dust from the earth shattering landing of the Son of God has yet to settle, leaving traces of Him everywhere we look.  Science is no threat to our devotion but a means of increasing it.

This realization can also help to increase our devotion in another way.  According to Josephus, the great Jewish historian, the restoration of the Second Temple of Zerubbabel began in the year 19BC.  This is the same year that tradition also says Our Lady was born.  That is, at the same time that Herod set out to rebuild the Temple, God began construction on the true Temple.  The cornerstones of the Temple of Our Lord’s body were laid at the moment of Our Lady’s Conception, of that truth science confirms.

As Friday’s Feast Day comes around, we can be sure that there will be many Catholics confused as to who the Immaculate Conception refers to; thinking it refers to Jesus’ conception and not Our Lady’s.  But they are not entirely wrong—Our Lady, in whom the true Temple was made, carried around the building blocks with her from the moment of her own conception.

Our Lady, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee!

Why the Immaculate Conception Matters

Mary,

Throughout the history of the Church, the challenge to orthodoxy of heretical teachings has always brought with it the fruit of a development in doctrine.  Nearly every dogmatic definition has come when a particular teaching was challenged.  At first glance however, the feast that we celebrate today, the Immaculate Conception, appears to be an exception to this rule.  As the 19th Century emerged, many in the Church called for a dogmatic definition of the privilege of the Immaculate Conception.  By the middle of the Century, Pope Pius IX began consulting theologians and convoked a “council in writing” asking bishops around the world about the possibility of its definition.  The response was overwhelmingly positive and in 1854, he issued the Bull Ineffabilis Deus which solemnly proclaimed that “We declare, pronounce, and define that the doctrine which holds that the most Blessed Virgin Mary, in the first instance of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege granted by Almighty God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Savior of the human race, was preserved free from all stain of original sin, is a doctrine revealed by God and therefore to be believed firmly and constantly by all the faithful.” Despite its relatively recent history and the elevation to a Feast Day and Holy Day of Obligation, the dogma of the Immaculate Conception is little understood today.

When Pius IX defined the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, he was merely declaring something that the Church has believed from the beginning.  It wasn’t as if he suddenly realized the Church believed this.  It was always believed, but without a direct challenge to its orthodoxy, the Churched lacked some of the necessary clarity to explain how it fit into the deposit of faith.  In other words, it was always a part of the deposit of faith—that which the Apostles left us—but how it connected to the other truths of the faith still needed to be worked out.

We find seeds of the Immaculate Conception throughout Salvation History, beginning with just after the Fall of Adam and Eve when God promised not to abandon mankind but that He would send them a new Adam and a new Eve (Gn 3:15).  The woman and her offspring (a prediction of the virgin birth) will gain ultimate victory over the Serpent by crushing his head and will enjoy enmity with the Evil One.  This enmity, according to John Paul II, is “a hostility expressly established by God, which has a unique importance, if we consider the problem of the Virgin’s personal holiness.  In order to be the irreconcilable enemy of the serpent and his offspring, Mary had to be free from the power of sin, and to be so from the first moment of her existence.”  In other words, enmity means that the devil could have no power over Mary at any point of her existence.

Likewise, we catch a glimpse of the Immaculate Conception during the Annunciation.  The angel Gabriel in his greeting addresses Mary as “full of grace.”  This strange greeting is the name that she possesses in the eyes of God.  The name that God gives is the essence of the person (like Peter being the rock upon which the Church was founded) and so Mary is truly the one who is full of grace.  The Greek word kecharitomene is often translated as “full of grace” but it is more nuanced than that.  It is in the passive participle and is more accurately translated as “made full of grace” to indicate the gift that God gave to the Virgin Mother.

With such strong Scriptural support for the Immaculate Conception, why did it take nearly 1800 years for the Church to declare it as binding dogma?  Using both the liturgy (the law of worship is the law of belief—lex orandi, lex credenda) and the writings of the Fathers of the first millennium it is clearly among the things that the Church believed.  But before it was to be defined, it needed to be better understood.

Ss Ann and Joachim with BVM

The first obstacle was coming to a deeper understanding of Original Sin.  Because of Adam’s transgression, Scripture speaks of all of us as “born in guilt, in sin my mother conceived me” (Ps 51:7).  But rather than seeing Original Sin as something merely tacked on to human nature, the Church came to understand it as a lack.  Specifically it is a lack of the seeds of eternal life or sanctifying grace.  The removal of sanctifying grace also brings with it other effects on human nature such as concupiscence.  In order for one to be “free from the stain of Original Sin” she would need to be conceived with sanctifying grace.

Providentially, we can begin to see what the Holy Spirit had in mind when He waited so long.  Nearly all the philosophical anthropology of man in the 18th and 19th C rejected the idea of Original Sin—it was society that somehow corrupted man, not something that is a result of his fallen state.  In other words, it became widely believed that every man was immaculately conceived.  By declaring that only one such human person was born that way, the Holy Spirit was speaking truth not just about Mary but about mankind.

Once the doctrine of Original Sin was better understood, the main theological problem that needed to be explained is related to St. Paul’s dictum that “all men have sinned” and in need “of the gift of justification come to reign in life through the one person Jesus Christ” (Romans 5:12,17).  What the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception was proposing was actually two things.  The first is that somehow Mary was exempt from the “all” men who have sinned.  Secondly it would also appear that because of this exemption, she was not in need of the “gift of justification.”

To explain the exemption, we must first acknowledge that the Supreme Authority has the power to offer exemptions to universal laws in particular cases.  So that when St. Paul says that all men have sinned, he is acknowledging a universal law and like all universal laws there can be exceptions.  The Immaculate Conception means that Mary is the singular exception to this law.  This is why the Church has always seen in Esther a type of Mary.  She alone among all the Jews was to escape the edict of King Ahasuerus that all the Jews in his kingdom must be killed.

If Mary was without Original Sin then it seems on the surface that she did not need a Redeemer either.  This question was the most difficult to address because as a true daughter of Adam, she was still in need of justification.  To explain this, Blessed Duns Scotus developed the idea of her redemption being preventative rather than restorative.  He said that “The Perfect Redeemer, must in some case, have done the work of redemption most perfectly, which would not be, unless there is some person, at least, in whose regard, the wrath of God was anticipated and not merely appeased.”

Blessed Duns Scotus is saying two very important things here.  First is that there are two ways of “saving” someone from falling into a hole.  The first is to rescue them once they are in the hole.  The second is to keep them from falling in beforehand.  He also says that a perfect deliverer would have done both.  A more perfect redeemer is the one who not only rescues mankind from the effects of sin once they are in them but also preserves from falling altogether.

This approach to explaining doctrine is a favorite of St. Thomas and he calls it “fittingness.”  I have also found it a powerful tool to use in order to open Christians (Catholic and non-Catholic) up to important theological truths.  With respect to the Immaculate Conception, it is fitting that Our Lord’s act of Redemption is so powerful that it could redeem at least one member of the human race before she fell.  It also points out how everything we believe about Mary points back to Jesus.  To take away the Immaculate Conception is ultimately taking away the greatness of Jesus’ redemptive act.

The Second Vatican Council reaffirmed this teaching about Mary saying, “Redeemed by reason of the merits of her Son and united to Him by a close and indissoluble tie, she is endowed with the high office and dignity of being the Mother of the Son of God” (Lumen Gentium, 53).  But in the fallout from the Council there has been a movement to de-dogmatize the Immaculate Conception in an attempt to be more “ecumenical.”  The argument goes that belief about the Immaculate Conception is not necessary for salvation so therefore it is relatively unimportant.is based on a false understanding of the idea of hierarchy of truths.

The Catechism says that “In Catholic doctrine there exists an order or hierarchy of truths, since they vary in their relation to the foundation of the Christian faith” (CCC 90).  Cardinal Schönborn in his introduction to the Catechism is quick to point out that “the ‘hierarchy of truth’ does not mean ‘a principle of subtraction,’ as if faith could be reduced to some ‘essentials’ whereas the ‘rest’ is left free or even dismissed as not significant. The ‘hierarchy of truth . . . is a principle of organic structure.’ It should not be confused with the degrees of certainty; it simply means that the different truths of faith are ‘organized’ around a center.”  In other words, the idea of a hierarchy of truths is that there are certain beliefs around which all other beliefs orbit.  These other beliefs support the belief in the core truth.

The truth around which the Immaculate Conception orbits is the true humanity of Jesus.  In order for the Son to become man, He must take on human flesh and be born of a woman (Gal 4:4).  This means that in order for Mary to be a true mother, she must provide Jesus with all that a mother normally gives to her children, namely her flesh.  What happens if her flesh is fallen?  Then Jesus too would inherit a fallen human nature which is an impossibility for God.  God could not take to Himself something that was sinful.  Yes, He could miraculously intervene but then the flesh no longer comes from the woman and she is not a true mother—just an incubator.  But the One who was like us in all things but sin, is a true man and like all men born of a woman.  All of this makes clear why the Immaculate Conception matters—it protects the true humanity of Jesus.  Take away what we believe about Mary and our faith in Jesus begins to crumble.

The Deposit of Faith is truly a seamless garment—tug at any string, no matter how seemingly inconsequential it is, and it falls apart.  Tug the string of the Immaculate Conception and the garment of our faith will be left in tatters.