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O Virgin, Pure and Immaculate


Christian anthropology is based on two portions of the first chapter of Genesis: "And God saw everything that He had made and behold it was very good"(Gn 1:31), and when goodness seems to find its crowning manifestation in the making of man who is created in the image of God (c.f. Gn 1:27).

However, often this truth can be difficult to accept when we are reminded of how frequently we -and all those around us- stray from goodness in our daily lives. Sins ranging from such acts as murder, theft, and adultery to thoughts of wrath, envy, and lust are not hard to find in Adam's progeny. Does not man's tendency to think evil, do evil, be evil reign dominant in any attempt to define or assess his nature? Perhaps the Calvinists are correct in attributing total depravity to the very idea of man? Would it not be more accurate to call man wicked rather than good?

The Church responds to these questions in the negative, for she refuses to see man as anything less than the image of God by ignoring the first chapter of the Bible. For man, even in his fallen state, remains a moral agent who is perennially oriented back towards his origin which is found in God, who is goodness Itself. From God man has sprung and to God he is to return.

The doctrine that most emphatically expresses this divinely-centered focus of man's existence is the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. But before discussing the sinless conception and life of the Blessed Mother whom the Church (since at least the time of St. Irenaeus) has given the title of the "Second Eve," it is first necessary to look at that ideal Man, Jesus Christ, because "in Him we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28) and apart from Him we can do nothing (c.f. Jn15:5).

The church historian Jaroslav Pelikan calls attention to the fact that, from the time of St. Augustine in the 4th and 5th centuries, the Church has not dealt with the doctrine of Original Sin in depth without first having an encounter with the Person of Christ. It is the custom of theologians to first look to the human condition of sin and from there base all discussion of who man is and why he needs Christ as Savior from that prior perspective. Instead, Pelikan proposes: "The position of Jesus as the Son of God, the Logos, and the Cosmic Christ, had to be clarified first, before there could come a mature understanding of the human predicament. Rather than making the punishment fit the crime, Christian thought had to gauge the magnitude of the human crime by first taking measure of the one on whom the divine punishment of the cross had been imposed and thus (shifting to the original metaphor of salvation as health) making the diagnosis fit the prescription"(Jaroslav Pelikan, Jesus Through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture).

In other words, before man can see himself as fallen, he must first see a man who has not fallen and measure himself to that standard. He must see to what length that unfallen Man, Jesus the Christ, had to go to heal the breach between God and man in order to reestablish that seminal design by which God had made man. It is by being administered the medicine of Christ's life and death that man becomes truly aware of the sickness of his fallen state and is finally healed from it. In Christ, we witness the Second Adam who reveals the original vocation of the first Adam (and, in effect, the individual vocations of the First Adam's subsequent offspring). That is, we see man as destined to being a wholly good, obedient son to the Father. In the words of the Second Vatican Council: "Christ, the final Adam... fully reveals man to himself and makes his supreme calling clear" (Gaudium et Spes, 22). Only from this standpoint can a Christian anthropology be situated in which man's call is to partake of the divine nature (c.f. 2 Pt 1:4) by being grafted to the human nature of Christ, that ideal Man.

With such an optimistic view of man in place, the temptation arises to subscribe to Rousseau's view of man as a noble savage or maybe even Locke's blank-slate hypothesis. Both of these philosophies attribute to man an inherent goodness, or at least neutrality, which is only altered negatively or positively by a given situation an individual may find himself in. But the condition of man as presented by the Church is more complicated than that. It states that man is inherently good from his conception yet there is still a very real distortion in his orientation which inclines him towards evil. This bentness is so deep that not even a Pelagian view is seen as a sufficient solution that envisions man as capable of picking himself up from his bootstraps. It is only with the model of Christ before our eyes that we can see a retrospective and foreshadowing view of who man is meant to be and how he is to be restored.

Without this Christo-centric hope, we are doomed to think that sin is essential to being human, for we tend to see it as inextricable to our lives. But, regardless of the lived experience of sin in us, the Orthodox theologian Fr. John Manoussakis is compelled to ask: "Is sin natural for humans? Is humanity's original state, as it was intended by its Creator, that which we know after the fall? If we answer these questions in the affirmative then everything is lost. Not only have we condemned humanity to sin, but we render divine grace, repentance, forgiveness, and salvation not only superfluous but monstrous. For if sin is part and parcel of being human, then our salvation implies nothing less than the undoing of our humanity, the abuse of humanity into becoming something else, something that we not only are not but also cannot be: sinless"(John Panteleimon Manoussakis, For the Unity of All: Contributions to the Theological Dialogue between East and West ).

Lest man lose hope that the recovery of his original state (i.e. salvation, health, wholeness) goes against his nature or that this recovery is simply impossible for anyone inferior to the second Person of the Trinity, revelation puts forth before our eyes she who- though being a creature herself- is immersed in communion with Him who is to be her Son- from the beginning of her existence and throughout the duration of her life. It is as if Mary was to be the beginning of the end of sin's reign over humanity. Even though all had sinned and fallen short of the glory of God (c.f. Rom 3:23), she would prove to be the "one traitress, by a noble treason to the sinful compact of her race, offered freely the only human help God deigned to use when He came to recover the allegiance of His rebels"(Msgr. Ronald Knox, as quoted in Ronald Knox as Apologist: Wit, Laughter, and the Popish Creed).

Indeed, with what greater sense could the words of Scripture be applied to her beyond all others: "You are the exaltation of Jerusalem, you are the great glory of Israel, you are the great pride of our nation"(Judith 15:9) for sin does not have power over you! For Mary is the promise given to men that the call to be untouched by the power of sin is meant for each of us if only we cling to that divine life, which we call grace.

Tolkien's mysterious figure of Tom Bombadil (c.f. The Lord of the Rings Part I: The Fellowship of the Ring) comes to reality in the person of Mary for just as jolly old Tom was the only creature who walked about Middle-earth uninfluenced by the power of the Ring, so too is Mary wholly uninfluenced by the allurements of evil in this our world where all others are "under the power of sin" (Rm 3:9). No greater hope can man have than to see a simple maiden from a lowly village, who, by her lifelong fiat to the Father, is utterly independent from that which is not of God. By being so connected to God, this humble woman is able to crush the serpent's head who at one time crushed humanity between his teeth.

Nevertheless, in spite of the angel Gabriel saluting Mary with high praise as being "full of grace" (c.f Lk 1:28), and in spite of the evangelist Luke alluding to her being the new ark of the Covenant before whom John the Baptist leapt for joy at the sound of her greeting (c.f. Lk 1:41, 2 Sm 6), and in spite of henceforth all future generations calling her blessed (c.f. Lk 1:48), and in spite of she being both the sign of Ahaz as the "virgin who shall conceive and bear a son" (Is 7:14) and the woman "clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet (Rv 12:1), we hear it often retorted that the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception cannot be true, for the Apostle says: "'None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands, no one seeks for God. All have turned aside, together they have gone wrong; no one does good, not even one" (Rm 3:10-12).

However, it must be responded that St. Paul is referencing two almost identical Psalms (Ps 14:1-3 and 53:1-3) when he says this and that two things ought to be kept in mind while reading these passages: 1. The psalmist begins both these psalms with a reference to the fool who "says in his heart, 'There is no God'" thus implying the statements of being corrupt, abominable, and no good (c.f. verse 1) are qualifications of the fool in his foolishness and not humanity in general. 2. But even if they are to be considered universal statements exempting no one in a literalist fashion, the psalmist concludes both Psalms in hope: "O that deliverance for Israel would come out of Zion! When the Lord restores the fortunes of His people, Jacob shall rejoice, Israel shall be glad" (Ps 14:7 and c.f. Ps 53:6). By thus ending each of these Psalms, the psalmist already knew that humanity's fallen state of corruption might not reign indefinitely but would have an end when deliverance would come.

Thus, the question arises: how does Mary partake of that deliverance if the Deliverer had not yet come at the time of her conception? One might just as well answer this in the same way he might answer this question which comes prior in the chronology of God's unfolding work: how did Adam come when there were no one before him?

It is through the intervention of God that He chose to create Adam out of nothing, so too it was through the intervention of God that He chose to preserve Mary pure in His image by the fullness of His grace at the moment her existence began. For Mary's salvation is a unique one in which she was not lifted from the pit of Original Sin after falling in but was prevented from falling in it to begin with. The exceptional quality of Mary's salvation is found in the early timing of her rescue and in the long-lasting persistence the effect of divine grace had in her. But, in the end, not because of her own merit was she given this gift, "lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power"(1 Cor 1:17), but because the mysterious plan of God chose that the existence of fallen Eve "made necessary the coming of Mary just as night must be followed by day"(Henri Daniel-Rops, The Book of Mary).

Later in his letter to the Romans, Paul makes mention of the expiation by Christ's blood that brings about our redemption (c.f. Rm 3:24-25). It is by keeping this in mind that we can see the suitableness of God's intervention in the life of Mary. For it is in Christ's all-pure, all-innocent blood that man is redeemed. It is in His blood, as it was given to drink in sacrament (c.f. Jn 6:53, Lk 22:20, 1 Cor 11:25) and as it was shed in His passion (c.f. Lk 22:44, Jn 19:34) that man is saved. But, it must also be remembered that Christ received the body through which His most precious blood would flow from his mother. For nine months His mother's body and blood gave life to His own. And just as Eve had come from the side of Adam in the first creation (c.f. Gn 2:21-23), in the second creation, the Father has seen fit to recreate the world by reversing the process- now the new Adam has come from the side of the new Eve! Hear the words of St. Irenaeus in the 2nd century: "What was bound could not be untied without a reversal of the process of entanglement. The first bonds had to be untied by the second, so that the second might set free the first" (Against the Heresies, Book III).

Bearing in mind this intimate relationship between mother and Son as the second Adam and the second Eve, ought we to think it unjust or blasphemous that this woman be considered sinless, she who had such a central role in our own redemption as being the Handmaid of the Lord, the Spouse of Holy Spirit, and the Mother of God? It is as if God had previously chosen to do something new in in bringing forth light when there was universal darkness (c.f. Gn 1:1-3) and now He had again chosen to do something new by bringing forth innocence when there was universal guilt. By doing this, God had jumpstarted the process in which man might become regenerate by becoming a brother to the First-born and a son to the Father. In the Immaculate Conception, He was simply priming the pump He was soon planning to use to reintroduce the flow of His grace in the dead corpse of fallen humanity. When "the time had fully come," the pump was ready to be turned on and He could finally "send forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law so that we might receive adoption as sons" (Gal 4:4-5).

Sin cannot have the final say with humanity. As Christians we must hold fast to this truth because in it lies our own very purpose, our end in being free to know and love God in an unobstructed union with Him. The possibility of our own achieving this primordial vocation shared by all men is found actualized in the sinless life of Mary who herself "belongs to Christ more than to Adam" (Joseph Ratzinger, God and the World). Ultimately, without belief in the Immaculate Conception, Christ's command to be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect (c.f. Mt 5:48) shows itself to be an untenable command given by a God who demands more of us than we can give. On the contrary, we see in the life of Mary that we too can, by the power of the Holy Spirit bring about "the perfect accomplishment of the good" (St. John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor).

As Pascal put it, "man is not worthy of God, but he is not incapable of being made worthy"(Blaise Pascal, Pensees, # 510) if, it may be added, God so chooses. Fortunately, He did choose this once in the life of Mary and many times more in us by our own baptisms. Thus, man must no longer be so comfortable with sin and imperfection so as to let it redefine who he is. The presence of evil in man, far from having any monopoly on his identity must be recognized for what it is: an aberration, a failure to live up to what was God's original and still very real call to be molded in His all-pure image.

Mary's life exposes this failure, but not without also offering the light that comes from saying "Thy will be done" in all things and in all moments. Thanks be to God for giving us the Blessed Virgin Mary as our model that shows us nothing is impossible with God insofar as His grace has the final say on our existence.



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