Towards an understanding of the Immaculate Conception
TOWARDS
AN UNDERSTANDING OF THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION
Mario
D’Couto
We have just celebrated the Feast of the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady and I just thought of taking the opportunity of sharing my thoughts, insights and reflections in regard to it. If you have read my previous blogpost/reflection, “The Rosary – Getting closer to Jesus through Mary” (if in case you have not read it, here is the link to it, https://insightsfromacommonman.blogspot.com/2022/10/the-rosary-getting-closer-to-jesus.html), I mentioned that for God, there is no past or future. Everything is eternally present to Him including the complete chain of events which will take place is foreseen by Him. It is by the divine will that Our Lady was chosen to fulfil a specific mission entrusted to Her by the Almighty and through this, it is obvious that this mission is a positive act on the part of God from all eternity. This predestination of Our Lady was absolutely a gratuitous act on the part of God which is to say that Our Lady did not merit this Maternity, of being the Mother of His Son of Her own accord. Rather She co-operated and accepted God’s will in choosing Her to be the Mother of His Son. This also implies that Our Lady’s Divine Maternity was the very source of all Her merit and hence could not be the object of merit on Her part which in turn implies that once God had decreed to make Our Lady the Mother of His Son, He gave Her the grace to merit that high degree of sanctity and purity which would render Her worthy to be the Mother of God.
Fr. Mike Schmitz in one of his reflections makes an
interesting observation about a famous Marian song which you may have probably
heard, “Mary did you know?” and while no doubt, it is a nice song (which
I also like), it has a small theological error in one part of the song. On a
personal note, I have played and sung this song many times but never once did I
realize nor did it strike me about this error and this error can be seen in the
first verse of the song,
“Mary,
did you know, that your Baby Boy, would one day walk on water?
Mary,
did you know, that your Baby Boy would save our sons and daughters?
Did
you know, that your Baby Boy has come to make you new?
This
Child that You delivered will soon deliver You.”
If you take a look at the last 2 lines of the above
verse, that’s where the error is because if were to accept it, it would then
imply that Our Lady was born like anybody else, with the stain of original sin
and therefore had to be redeemed by Christ after His birth, which obviously is
false. So while our separated brethren (the Protestants) would want to think of
Our Lady as no more than a mere ‘instrument’ to bring forth Our Blessed
Lord into this world, She is much more than that and that is what I plan to
explore in depth in this blogpost/reflection.
To understand the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady, we
need to go back to the Protoevangelium or the ‘First Gospel’ as found in
the book of Genesis (Genesis 3:15). If we go back to the early Christians, they
had a lively devotion to the Blessed Virgin and we find evidence of this in
their surviving literature and artwork and of course, in the New Testament,
which was their foundational document. While the Mariology (the study of Mary or
Our Lady) of the first 3 centuries was at a primitive stage of development
(comparing it to the later stages or even our own), it was perhaps more
consciously scriptural than many later expressions and more consistently
presented in the theological context of creation, fall, incarnation, and
redemption. So it sometimes can speak to us with greater clarity, immediacy and
force for Mary’s role makes no sense apart from its context in salvation
history; yet it is not incidental to God’s plan (which is to say that it was
not something that happened arbitrarily). It was specific; God chose to make
His redemptive act inconceivable without Her.
Hence as seen at the beginning of this
blogpost/reflection, Our Lady was already part of God’s plan from the very
beginning, chosen and foretold from the moment God created man and woman. In
fact, the early Christians understood Mary and Jesus to be a reprise of God’s
first creation. How do we know this or on what basis can we come to this
conclusion? St. Augustine would say that the New Testament is concealed in the
Old Testament and the Old Testament is revealed in the New Testament. In the
letter to the Hebrews, the Old Testament tabernacle and its rituals are
described as ‘types and shadows of heavenly realities’ (Hebrew 8:5). So what
is a ‘type’ or how do we define ‘type’ in this context? While the
word ‘type’ is usually associated with a particular ‘kind’ or ‘quality’,
in the context of our discussion, the word ‘type’ can also be used to
denote or understood as a real person, place, thing or event in the Old
Testament that foreshadows something greater in the New Testament. It is from ‘type’
that we get the word ‘typology’, the study of Christ’s foreshadowing in
the Old Testament [Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC), 128-130]. Hence when
we see St. Peter speaking about Noah and his family being saved through water,
it prefigures the sacrament of Baptism which saves us now (1 Peter 3:20-21).
Peter’s word translated as ‘prefigured’ is actually the Greek word for ‘typify’
or ‘to make a type’. St. Paul, for his part spoke of Adam as a type of
Jesus (Romans 5:14) and of Jesus as the new Adam (1 Corinthians 15:21-22,
45-49).
It is important to keep in mind that the types are
not fictional symbols but are rather literally true historical details. When St.
Paul interpreted the story of Abraham’s sons as ‘an allegory’ (Galatians 4:24)
for example, he was not suggesting that the story never really happened; he was
affirming it as history, but as history with a place in God’s plan, a history
whose meaning was clear only after its eventual fulfilment.
Typology unveils more than the person of Christ; it also
tells us about heaven, the Church, the Apostles, the Eucharist, the places of
Jesus’ birth and death and also Jesus’ Mother. From the first Christians, we
learn that the Jerusalem temple foreshadowed the heaven dwelling of the saints
in glory (2 Corinthians 5:1-2; Revelation 21:9-22); that Israel prefigured the
Church (Galatians 6:16); that the 12 Old Testament patriarchs prefigured the 12
New Testament Apostles (Luke 22:30) and that the Ark of the Covenant was a type
of the Blessed Virgin Mary (Revelation 11:19; 12:1-6, 13-17).
In addition to the Old Testament type explicitly discussed
in the New Testament, there are many more that are implicit but obvious.
For example, St. Joseph’s role in the early life of Jesus clearly follows the patriarch
Joseph’s role in the early life of Israel. The two men share the same name;
both are described as ‘righteous’ or ‘just’; both receive revelation
in dreams; both find themselves exiled to Egypt; and both arrive on the scene
in order to prepare the way for a great event – in the patriarch Joseph’s case,
the exodus led by Moses, the deliverer; in St. Joseph’ case, the redemption
brought about Jesus, the Redeemer.
We also see Marian types abound in the Old Testament. For
instance, we find Mary prefigured in Eve, the mother of all the living; in
Sarah, the wife of Abraham, who conceived her child miraculously; in the queen
mother of Israel’s monarchy, who interceded with the king of behalf of the people
of the land; and in many other places, in many other ways, we also see in the
lives of Hannah and Esther or the Ark of the Covenant where just as the ancient
ark was made to bear the old covenant, so the Virgin Mary was to bear
the New Covenant.
It is therefore that the early Christians considered the
beginning of Genesis as the Protoevangelium or the First Gospel (Genesis 3:15)
given that the story of creation and fall and its promise of redemption were so
Christological in nature and while this theme is explicit in the writings of
St. Paul and the Church Fathers, it can also be seen in the Gospels. For example, like Adam, Jesus was tested in the garden of Gethsemane (Matthew 26:36-46; John
18:1). Like Adam, Jesus was led to a ‘tree’, where He was stripped naked
(Matthew 27:31). Like Adam, He fell into the deep sleep of death, so that from His
side would come forth the New Eve (John 19:26-35; 1 John 5: 6-8), His Bride,
the Church.
Some modern day sceptics and probably even among many Protestant
theologians may come up with the critique that Catholics are just reading too
much into the Gospels and that we are just imposing medieval and modern doctrines
onto the Gospels which the Gospel writers themselves may have never dreamt
about. But that certainly is not the case.
For the sake of the argument, let’s assume that the
objections are valid and investigate the evidence from the writings of the
early Christians and the Fathers of the Church, beginning with the ones that
were the closest in time span to the Apostles, the 4 Gospel writers, Matthew
Mark, Luke and John. As we study their writings, we find they indeed speak of
the New Eve. Who did they say she was? Overwhelmingly, they identified her as
Mary.
The earliest surviving testimony to this can be seen in
St. Justin Martyr’s “Dialogue with Trypho”. Written around 160 A.D., the book
describes conversations that Justin had with a rabbi around 135 A.D. in
Ephesus, the city where Justin was instructed in the Christian faith. It’s also
been observed that Ephesus was also the city where the apostle John lived with
the Virgin Mary.
Justin’s doctrine of the New Eve resonates with that of
the apostle John Himself (the one who wrote the Gospel and the book of Revelation)
and may evidence of a Mariology developed by John as Bishop of Ephesus and
continued by his disciple in Justin’s day – which was little more than a
generation after his (the apostle John) death. Here’s a passage from the
writing of St. Justin Martyr that puts it in perspective,
“Christ became man by the
Virgin, in order that the disobedience that proceeded from the serpent might
receive its destruction in the same manner in which it derived its origin. For Eve,
who was a virgin and undefiled, having conceived the word of the serpent,
brought forth disobedience and death. But the Virgin Mary received faith and
joy when the angel Gabriel announced the good tidings to her that the Spirit of
the Lord would come upon Her and the power of the Most High would overshadow
Her: wherefore also the Holy Thing begotten of Her is the Son of God; and She
replied, ‘Be it done unto Me according to Your word’ (Luke 1:38). And by Her has
He been born, to whom we have proved so many Scriptures refer and by Whom God
destroys both the serpent and those angels and men who are like him.”
Another great Father of the Church around this time who further
refined the Church’s understanding of Mary as the New Eve was St. Irenaeus of Lyons.
Irenaeus, too, could trace his pedigree as a disciple to the apostle John. Irenaeus
learned the faith from St. Polycarp of Smyrna, who himself took instruction
from John. Perhaps again, it was the influence of the Apostle John that led Irenaeus
to speak of Christ as the New Adam and Mary as the New Eve as he did in several
places.
This doctrine, in fact, was essential to one of Irenaeus’
central ideas: what he called creation’s recapitulation in Christ. Building
on St. Paul, he wrote that when Christ become incarnate and was made Man, He
recapitulated in Himself the long history of man, summing up and giving us salvation
in order that we might receive again in what we had lost in Adam which is the
image and likeness of God.
Like St. John, Irenaeus saw the important place of the
New Eve in this recapitulation as he explains, “The knot of Eve’s disobedience
was loosened by the obedience of Mary. The knot which the virgin Eve tied by
her unbelief, the Virgin Mary opened by Her belief”, thereby contrasting Mary’s
obedience with Eve’s disobedience. In a later book, he developed the idea
further in the following words, “If the former (Eve) disobeyed God, the latter
(Mary) was persuaded to obey God, so that the Virgin Mary become the advocate
of the virgin Eve. And thus, as the human race fell into bondage by means of a
virgin, so it is rescued by a Virgin.”
Finally, Irenaeus extends Mary’s maternity from Christ to
all Christians, as he speaks of her as a type of the Church. He describes Jesus’
birth as ‘the pure One opening purely that pure womb which regenerates men
unto God.” Thus we can say that Justin in Ephesus and Irenaeus in France
might both claim spiritual descent from the apostle John. John himself taught
from a mighty experience for he had lived for three years besides Jesus and
then in the following years, in the same home as the Virgin Mary. Cardinal John
Henry Newman would explain it in the following way, “If there is an apostle
on whom our eyes would be fixed, as likely to teach us about the Blessed Virgin,
it is St. John. To whom She was committed by Our Lord on the Cross – with whom,
as tradition goes, She lived at Ephesus till She was taken away. The anticipation
is confirmed; for, as I have said above, one of the earliest and fullest of our
informants concerning her dignity, as being the Second Eve, in Irenaeus, who
came to Lyons from Asia Minor and had been taught by the immediate disciples of
St. John.”
At the same time, there were others outside the apostle
John’s direct line of influence who say Mary as the New Eve. For example,
Tertullian, in North Africa at the beginning of the 3rd century A.D.
spoke of this reality with precision, “For it was while Eve was yet a virgin
that the ensnaring word had crept into her ear which was to build the edifice
of death. Into a virgin’s soul, in like manner, must be introduced that the
Word of God which was to raise the fabric of life so that what has been reduced
to ruin by this sex might by the self-same sex be recovered to salvation. As Eve
believed the serpent, so Mary believed the angel. The delinquency which the one
occasioned by believing, the other effaced by believing.”
The writings of St. Luke are another great gold mine of
Marian doctrine. It is Luke who tells the story of the angel’s annunciation to Mary,
of Mary’s visitation to Elizabeth, of the miraculous circumstances of Jesus’
birth, of the Virgin’s purification in the temple, of Her search for Her Son at
the age of 12 and of Her presence among the apostles at Pentecost.
St. Luke was a meticulous artist who would claim the
additional benefit of having the Holy Spirit as his co-author. Down through the
centuries, scholars have marvelled at the way Luke’s gospel subtly parallels
key texts of the Old Testament. One of the early examples is his narrative of
Mary’s visitation to Elizabeth.
Luke’s language seems to echo the account, in the second
book of Samuel, of David’s travels as he brought the Ark of the Covenant to
Jerusalem. Before we look into that, just to provide some context regarding the
visitation of Our Lady to Her cousin Elizabeth. In 1st century Jewish
standards, it was customary for the younger to greet the older and those with
lower status to great those in higher positions of honour (Exodus 18:7, Luke
7:36-50, 20:46). Elizabeth is the elder of the two. Moreover, she has honourable
family ties as a descendant of Israel’s first high priest, Aaron and as the
wife of Zechariah, who also was a priest in the temple (Luke 1:5). Having said
that, it would therefore seem but obvious that Our Lady should have greeted
Elizabeth but on the contrary, the opposite happens. Here’s where it gets
interesting.
Prompted by the baby (John the Baptist) leaping in her
womb, Elizabeth bestows on Our Lady extraordinary accolades that reveal Our Lady
to be one of the most important people in the Bible whom God would involve in His
plan of salvation as we find it written in the Gospel of St. Luke, “She
acclaimed with a loud cry, ‘Blessed are you among women and blessed is the
fruit of Your womb! And why is this granted to me, that the Mother of my Lord should
come to me?’” (Luke 1:42) How did she know this?
St. Luke tells us that Elizabeth was ‘filled with the
Holy Spirit’. Phrases like this in the Bible are used to describe a person who
is given prophetic insight (Luke 1:41; 1 Samuel 10:10; 2 Samuel 23:2; Ezekiel
11:5; 2 Kings 2:9-16). Thus it is through the prompting of the Holy Spirit that Elizabeth praises Our Lady, hailing Her as ‘blessed among women’, as ‘the
Mother of my Lord’ and as ‘She who believed that there would be a fulfilment of
what was spoken to Her form the Lord’ (Luke 1:42-45)
Coming back to the incident where David brings back the
Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem as found in the second book of Samuel, the
story begins as David ‘arose and went’ (2 Samuel 6:2) which we find similar in
Luke’s account of the visitation: Mary ‘arose and went’ (Luke 1:39). In their journeys,
both Mary and David proceeded to the hill country of Judah. David acknowledges
his unworthiness with the words, “How can the ark of the Lord come to me?” (2 Samuel
6:9) words we find echoed as Mary approaches her kinswoman Elizabeth, “Why is
this granted me that the Mother of my Lord should come Me?” Note here that the
sentence is almost verbatim except that the word ‘ark’ is replaced by ‘mother’.
We read further that David ‘danced’ for joy in the presence of the ark (2
Samuel 6:14,16) and we find a similar expression used to describe the leaping
of the child within Elizabeth’s womb as Mary approached (Luke 1:44). Finally,
the ark remained in the hill country for 3 months (2 Samuel 6:11), the same
amount of time Mary spent with Elizabeth (Luke 1:56).
Thus, having said that, we could perhaps ask the
question, was Luke, in his own quiet way, pointing or showing Our Lady to be
the ark of New Covenant? I guess the answer is obvious for the evidence is too
strong to explain credibly in any other way. To elaborate further, we must also
understand what made the ark so holy. It wasn’t the acacia wood or the gold ornaments.
Nor was it the carved figure of angels. What made the ark holy was what it
contained. Inside the golden box were the 10 commandments, the Word of God inscribed
by the finger of God; the manna, the miracle bread sent by God to feed His people
in the wilderness and the priestly rod of Aaron.
Whatever made the ark holy made Mary even holier. If the first
ark contained the Word of God in stone, Mary’s body contained the Word of God enfleshed.
If the first ark contained the miraculous bread form heaven, Mary’s body
contained the very Bread of Life that conquers death forever. If the first ark
contained the rod of the long – ago ancestral priest, Mary’s body contained the
divine person of the eternal priest, Jesus Christ (when understood in this context,
the book of Revelation makes perfect sense as we find from Revelation 11:19 to
12:1-18). This kind of interpretation would not be possible if Our Lady had not
lived or existed as Cardinal Newman would put it, “The holy apostle (John)
would not have spoken of the Church under this particular image unless there had
existed the Blessed Virgin Mary who was exalted on high and the object of veneration
of all the faithful.” The primary meaning therefore must belong to the individual,
the historical person, the Blessed Virgin Mary, who at once became Mother to
Christ and also to the members of His Body, the Church.
From all that has been said, we can therefore infer that this
is hardly a medieval or a modern innovation in reading the gospel. Rather it is
an ancient and sacred tradition that has been handed over to us by the
Apostles, down through the ages that have been taught to us by St. Justin, St. Irenaeus,
Tertullian, St. Augustine, St. John Damascene, St. Thomas Aquinas and others.
There are two ways by which a person can be saved, namely,
by intervention and prevention. For instance, some people are saved after years
of drug addiction by intervention or rehabilitation. Many others, however, are
saved from addiction because they are spared the temptation: they are raised in
good homes and kept out of harm’s way. In the same way, Mary was uniquely saved
from all sin by preservation but it was God who did the saving (as seen in the
beginning of this blogpost/reflection; She was chosen to be the Mother of God).
Hence we don’t honour and venerate Our Lady instead of God but rather our honour
and veneration of Our Lady is itself an expression of our love and devotion for
God. Besides, Our Lady would never do anything like that for Her constant
thought and exhortation to each of us is just this, “Do whatever He tells
you” (John 2:5). Putting all these together, I think we have good evidence
to support that Our Lady was not just a ‘mere instrument’ to bring forth
Our Blessed Lord into this world but was chosen for a specific mission which is
why the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady makes perfect sense and cannot be
thought of otherwise.
