Woman and Serpent – Take 2 (4)

Dwight: It’s a curious thing to find Pope Pius IX and Martin Luther on the same side, but I think you overstate the case of Thomas Aquinas. Due to Thomas’s thirteenth-century understanding of human conception, he reasoned that Mary was sanctified not at her conception, but at the point that her soul was infused into her body. In fact Thomas believes not only that Mary was sinless, but also that her perfection began before her birth, and before she had personally committed any actual sin.

The same applies to the objections of other Catholic popes and theologians.

David: Not exactly.  The objections of Bernard of Clairvaux were a bit different from Thomas Aquinas’s.  Bernard was very devoted to Mary, and thought that Mary was sinless at birth, but he nonetheless objected to the celebration of the newly introduced Feast of the Immaculate Conception on the grounds that it was, in his view,

a false honor to the royal Virgin, which she does not need, and … an unauthorized innovation, which was the mother of temerity, the sister of superstition, and the daughter of levity….  He rejected the opinion of the Immaculate Conception of Mary as contrary to tradition and derogatory to the dignity of Christ, the only sinless being, and asked the [proponents of the doctrine] …, “Whence they discovered such a hidden fact?  On the same ground they might appoint festivals of the conception of the parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents of Mary, and so on without end.”

Bernard’s objections are similar to those of the Eastern Orthodox, most of whom reject the Immaculate Conception because “[t]hey feel it to be unnecessary; … it seems to separate Mary from the rest of the descendants of Adam, putting her in a completely different class from all the other righteous men and women of the Old Testament.”

Dwight: Of course it is possible to discover Catholic teachers who disagree about the fine points. It is through theological debate that the Church comes to understand, define and defend the truth.  There may be disagreement on the details, but neither the Orthodox nor Bernard nor Thomas is disputing the essence of the doctrine, that is, Mary’s sinlessness.

You may well find instances of Catholic leaders disputing this doctrine before it was dogmatically defined, but you won’t find them or the Eastern Orthodox actually supporting the Evangelical view. From the wider perspective, therefore, we have to ask which is the later distortion of the historic faith—the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, which is totally congruent with the beliefs of the early church or the Evangelical view which denies Mary’s perfection altogether.

David: I admit that from the fifth century on, my view is all but un-heard of, until after the Reformation.  Your position would have more persuasive force for me, though, if the Church’s dogma stopped where that consensus ends—i.e., at Mary’s sinlessness.  But by defining as dogma a refinement of doctrine that some of the Church’s own heroes resisted shows that this doctrinal development is regulated not by what is ancient and Apostolic, but by something else—a Marian fascination that is hard to understand because it is so alien to my own spirituality. Continue Reading