Tag Archives: Marian Dogma

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

The Mediatrix of All Graces?

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Since Pope Pius XII declared the dogma of the Assumption in 1950, Marian devotees within the Church have been championing the cause of a fifth Marian dogma. namely Mary as Mediatrix of All Graces.  Whether or not a formal declaration comes soon, Tradition up and through the Second Vatican Council supports this as a definitive belief, although the particulars still need to be worked out.  Yet most people’s response to this is that it simply goes too far.  We may be willing to concede that she intercedes for us or that she is a mediatrix of grace in some ways, but the title of Mediatrix of All Graces tips the dogmatic scales towards Mariolotry.  But before rejecting it wholesale, we might examine exactly what this doctrine means.

A mediator, in the sense we are using it here, is one who stands between God and man, taking the gifts from God and distributing them to men.  Christ as Mediator, in strict justice, is able to take as much grace as He wants and distribute it to mankind as He sees fit.  One of the ways in which He does so is through secondary mediators.  These mediators no longer act in strict justice but instead as friends of Christ.  When Christ sought to heal the paralytic who encountered Peter and John, He did so through the mediation of Peter (Act 3:1-7).  This, of course, is but one example of many throughout all of history that continues even down to our day when Christians still perform miracles and priests become mediators of grace through the Sacraments.   In this very broad sense Scripture and common sense testify that Mary is a mediatrix (Note: mediatrix is just the feminine form of mediator, like waiter and waitress) in a unique and wholly unrivaled way.  But to go any further we must first set a foundation upon which the doctrine of Mary, Mediatrix of All Graces can be built.

The One Mediator

The cornerstone of such a foundation is necessarily built upon the stone that the builders rejected—Christ—“Who is the one mediator between God and man” (1Tim 2:5).  Anything that we say from this point forward can never diminish or overshadow that truth.  Mary may have been supreme and unique in her co-operation with Christ, but it was He Who was the primary operator.  Mary’s mediation is always sub-ordinated to Christ’s and not co-ordinated.  She may be the branch from which all the fruit grows, but He is the Tree.   He is the one mediator between God and man, but through the designs of Divine Providence chose His Mother to share uniquely in His mission as the source of all grace and in a very real sense made His distribution of grace dependent upon her.  Her role as co-operator in His redeeming mission was entirely unique, for He made Himself dependent upon her “[N]ot only because she consented to make sacrifice for the salvation of men possible, but also in the fact that she accepted the mission of protecting and nourishing the Lamb of sacrifice, and when the time came led Him to the altar of immolation…” (Pope St. Pius X Ad Diem Ilium).

It is because Mary was predestined to be the Mother of God that she received a fullness of grace.  This fullness is exceeded only by Christ’s sacred humanity; hypostatically united to the second Person of the Trinity.  She who is “full of grace” is the pre-eminent beneficiary of Him from Whose “fullness we have received grace upon grace” (Jn. 1:16).  Her fullness of grace and its cause, namely the divine indwelling of the Holy Spirit, makes the Spirit more operative in and through her than all the other saints combined.  We shall come back to this point shortly but it is worth noting that anything that any of the saints can do in the supernatural realm, Mary can do better.

If the source of Mary’s greatness comes from her mission as Mother of God then anything we say about her can only serve to glorify God rather than to eclipse Him.  Many object to the very idea of the Mediatrix of All Graces because it seems to turn her into a goddess.  And if we didn’t know better we might agree because it is such a supreme calling.  But in truth it is meant to reveal the greatness of God’s saving act.  So powerfully did Christ trample sin and death that He is able to elevate a mere creature to an almost full participation in the life of God.  Rather than diminishing the work of Christ, Mary as Mediatrix of All Graces, reveals it more fully.  “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed. We do know that when it is revealed we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is’ (1 John 3:2).  Mary’s heavenly life is the realization of this promise and the Church presents her as such in order to stoke the fires of our faith, hope and charity.

All Graces?

With the necessary foundation in place, we may now begin to build the house.  When we say that Mary is the Mediatrix of All Graces what we mean is not just that Mary obtains grace from God by her prayers but that she also transmits them to us by her actions.  We must first admit its possibility based on what was mentioned above.  If angels and saints can be secondary causes of grace then Mary can do so to a greater degree.  This “greater degree” is not just some graces, but all graces.  As Pope Leo XIII, building on a line of tradition that traces all the way back to the Fathers of the Church, says, “no grace is given to us except through Mary, such being the Divine Will” (Pope Leo XIII, Octobri Mense).  We must not see this however as eliminating all other secondary causes of grace or making them “tertiary” causes of grace.  Instead what this means is, say for something like the Sacraments, that she would obtain for us the grace of a good disposition to receive them. In other words we should see her as the mother who nurtures us with the milk of docility to the grace of the present moment.  She is not the cause of our holiness, but she works behind the scenes to set us to receive its increase.  In this way we say that all graces pass through her Immaculate hands.

Before concluding there is one final objection worth examining.  If Mary truly is the Mediatrix of All Graces, then why would there be any prayers that do not invoke her?  As should be clear by now this objection does not fully grasp what it means to say that she is mediatrix of all graces.  But it also confuses our prayer to her with her prayer to God.  This doctrine does not mean that no grace is given without our asking her, only that she plays such an intimate role in our interior life that no grace is given to us without her asking God for it.  In fact, the only reason why we do ask her and not go directly to God is because she gives more glory to God in the asking than we do.  As God’s most perfect creature, whose soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, her asking is more pleasing to God and becomes an offer He can’t refuse.  This is why she is Our Lady of Mercy and never Our Lady of Justice.