The Immaculate Conception: A Development of Doctrine
by Joseph Rickaby, S.J.
|
For the third and final time this year, we present a lecture by the distinguished Jesuit Father Joseph Rickaby. His discussion of the Immaculate Conception in terms of development of doctrine is a fine occasion for us to see the importance of this concept in our religion and to avoid the simplistic pitfall of thinking that every aspect and emphasis of modern Catholic life has always been with us in precisely the form we know. It should be especially helpful in combating the insidious tendency—so prevalent in the English-speaking world and from which even traditional Catholics are by no means immune—of thinking every doctrine of the Church must be explicit in Scripture. This is a cardinal sin of Protestantism and the chief basis on which such Catholic tenets as purgatory and the Immaculate Conception are attacked. On the other hand, development of doctrine has nothing to do with the Second Vatican Council, which did not discuss doctrine at all, but rather introduced many innovations (such as the New Mass) which contribute to the erosion of faith. |
THE THEOLOGIANS who advised Pius IX in the definition of the Immaculate Conception, December 8, 1854, had two things to consider, the truth to be defined, and the definableness of the truth: for, as we shall see, not all religious truth is definable. If ever you are asked what the Immaculate Conception means, let me suggest this method of reply. Ask you inquirer if he has been baptized. When he says that he has, tell him that what was done for him at baptism was done for the Virgin Mary in the first instant of her human existence. The instant of his baptism was the first instant of his Christian life: Mary's Christian life began when her human existence began: she was, so to speak, created and christened together. Up to the time of his baptism your inquirer was in original sin: Mary never was in original sin, because no instant of her human life preceded the instant of her sanctification. He was sanctified in baptism: that is to say, he was made holy, and dedicated in a special manner to God; he was put into the state of grace; he was made a child of God, a member of Christ, a temple of the Holy Ghost, and heir to the vision of God in heaven. Mary was all this from the first. When he was baptized, Christ loved him and washed him from his sins in his blood (Apoc. 1.5); Christ so pre-eminently loved Mary that, whereas being a descendant of Adam she should have begun her existence in original sin and void of grace, He anticipated the work of baptism in her soul, and created it pure and full of grace, yet not pure otherwise than as we are made pure in His Blood, that is, by the merits of His passion. Christ is the Redeemer of all men, but particularly of the faithful (1 Tim. 4.10), and among the faithful of none so singularly as Mary. She owes more to His Saving Blood than any other mortal. She owes to it everything she has; and the more she has, the more she owes. Such is the truth, now defined, of the Immaculate Conception.
To a Catholic, the best proof of a truth being definable is the fact of the Church having defined it. To be definable, a truth must be part of the original revelation given by Christ to His Apostles for them to transmit to mankind in His name. It need not, however, be a part clearly and distinctly discernible, whether in the New Testament or in the record of primitive tradition preserved in the writings of the Fathers. Enough that it be latent there, provided it be there indeed. Guided by the Holy Ghost, the Church gradually brings to light the latent contents of revelation, renders explicit what was before implicit, develops that which existed in germ. A little consideration will show that no other way of revelation was possible without astounding miracles. Our Divine Savior told His Apostles a few hours before His death: I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot hear them now; but when he, the Spirit of truth, shall come, he will teach you all truth . . . and bring all things to your mind whatsoever I shall have said to you (John 16.12, 13; 14.26). On the day of Pentecost the Apostles received a luminous comprehension of the whole revelation of their Master, a comprehension in many respects superior to that of the wisest theologian of our day, yet in some directions probably not so scientifically complete. But then, in teaching their disciples, the Apostles found themselves confronted with the difficulty which had been their Divine Master's difficulty in teaching them (Mt. 15.16; Mk. 8.21; Lk. 24.25). Most of their converts were poor and illiterate persons (1 Cor. 1.26); and the few who were wise were wise the wrong way about, being full of opinions contrary to the Gospel. The Apostles bestowed on them, indeed, the gift of the Holy Ghost (Acts 8. 17; 10.44-47), yet not to such fullness of understanding as they themselves had received at Pentecost. This, then, was the difficulty. Christianity as a system, as a well-trained Catholic understands it now, was much too novel and far too vast for the converts made by the Apostles naturally to comprehend it. There remained the possibility of supernatural enlightenment wherever the Gospel was preached, reaching not to mere rudiments and essentials, but to the full development of the Gospel. Such enlightenment would have been a miracle on a vast and astounding scale. It is certain that no such miracle was wrought. The Apostles taught their catechumens as much Christianity as they were capable of understanding, and thereupon baptized them (cf. Acts 8.35-38), just as the Celtic and Roman missionaries did to our Saxon forefathers. Further, after baptism, they spoke wisdom among the perfect (1 Cor. 2.6), and put some of this wisdom in writing (Heb. 5.11-14). Yet certainly, neither in the Apostolic writings nor in the Apostolic oral teaching was all the wealth of the wisdom of Christ spread out to view. The treasure was delivered, as it were, in parcels and under integuments: the unrolling of it and the displaying of it was to be the work of the Church for many a day, even to the last age of the world.
The position of Mary in the Apostolic Church was conspicuous, and her office was important. She is mentioned as chief of the band of holy women who assembled, along with the Apostles, to receive the Pentecostal Gift. Mary, I say, was chief of those holy women, widows, who became an institution in the Church, almost a secondary order of clergy (1 Tim. 5. 9-16). Mary was principal witness to the human nature of Jesus, as the Apostles were witnesses to His resurrection and thereby to His divinity. What witness of the Humanity of Our Savior so credible, so convincing, as the Mother who bore Him? For her St. Luke must have had the narrative of the first two chapters of his gospel. It is not surprising that as Mary was a conspicuous witness, so likewise she was a conspicuous object of revelation. Thus her virginity was the object of a revelation expressly contained in the Gospels (Mt. 1.25; Lk. 1.35). We have no such explicit testimony in Holy Writ to her perfect sinlessness. Yet passages are not wanting to convey that truth, not obviously and on the surface, but by exploration of their inner meaning under Church guidance. Most famous is Gen. 3.15, God's words to the serpent: I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed: she shall crush thy head. With the rationalist, who will see in this utterance nothing beyond recognition of a fact in natural history, that snake-bite is poisonous to man, and man kills poisonous snakes so far as he is able, our argument would lie on more fundamental points of religion than we are now discussing. The Christian will find a commentary on this passage of Genesis in Apoc. 12.1-6, when we read of the woman clothed with the sun, and the male child that is to rule the nations, and the dragon, the enemy of both. The male child, the seed of the woman, is evidently the Messiah. Messiah and His Mother are placed together as one power, opposed to the serpent or dragon, which is Satan (Apoc. 12.9). The enmity is thorough: there is nothing in common between the two opponents: there is all wickedness on one side arrayed against all innocence and justice on the other. But if Mary is thus to be closely identified with her Son, and put in utter opposition to Satan, Satan can never have had a hold upon her by sin: she must be throughout her existence all fair, beloved and no spot upon her; she must be full of grace from first to last: she must be, as the Greeks call her, hamiantos and panagia, "unstained," and "all-holy," not certainly in intensity and essence, for thus God alone is "all-holy," but in extension of time, i.e., "ever-holy." But to call Mary "ever-holy" is by implication to proclaim her Immaculate Conception.
For the various utterances of the Fathers regarding the Blessed Virgin, I would refer to Newman's celebrated reply to Pusey's Eirenicon. Doubtless, as he shows, there are a few expressions less in harmony, but the general tenor of what the Fathers say of Mary is accurately expressed in the words of St. Augustine: "Except the Virgin Mother, of whom, when we treat of sin, I wish absolutely to raise no question." Mary and sin are not to be mentioned together.
But no Father says in so many words that the Mother of God was preserved from original sin? Certainly not, and no wonder, for, till St. Augustine and his school arose in the fifth century, the doctrine of original sin was not explicitly formulated. To take St. John Chrysostom as a type of the Greek Fathers, he shows acquaintance with the doctrine, but no one who reads his comments on the fifth chapter of Romans will find there that precision which would be expected of a modern divinity student writing a full dissertation on the Fall of our First Parent. As Cardinal Franzelin shows in his treatise De Traditione, a doctrine is at first implicit and amorphous, then it is stated imperfectly and controverted: finally, out of the controversy arises clear statement and the possibility of authoritative definition. In the fifteenth century a worthy and good man, Cardinal de Turrecremata, wrote a book against the Immaculate Conception, which he presented to the Council of Basle. Turrecremata was quite right in part of his argument. The doctrine which he attacked was not the doctrine defined by Pius IX in 1854, but a doctrine which could hardly be held without heresy: it came to this, that Mary had no need of redemption, and actually was not redeemed by the Blood shed on Calvary, whereas Pius IX attributes Mary's preservation from original sin to the "singular grace and privilege of Almighty God, in view of the merits of Christ Jesus the Savior of Mankind."
In 1591 the great theologian of the Society of Jesus, Francis Suarez, published his Disputations in the Mysteries of the Life of Christ. The third Disputation deals with the Immaculate Conception. From it I quote the following sentences, a good exposition of the meaning of development of doctrine:
The situation may become such that, without any new and explicit revelation, the Church shall have sufficient motives for defining this truth (the Immaculate Conception) on the ground of an implicit and tacit revelation of God sufficiently set before her. Of her own authority, with the assistance of the Holy Ghost, the Church has often promulgated definitions in similar controverted matters, without any new and express revelation . . . For such definition it suffices that some supernatural truth be implicitly contained in Scripture or tradition, so that with the growth of a common consent in the Church—which is the means whereby the Holy Ghost often explains traditions or declares the sense of Scripture—the Church may finally be able to apply her definition, which definition has the force of a sort of revelation in our regard by reason of the infallible assistance of the Holy Ghost. That such is the rank of this truth may be readily shown thus: It is often indicated, as we have seen, in Scripture; it is handed down by the most ancient Fathers, and, as is believed, even from the Apostles; further, it is gradually finding acceptance with the universal consent of the Church, and that, as is believed, not without the motion of the Holy Ghost, who is teaching the Church by degrees that the fullness of the Virgin's grace is thus to be understood. This consent of the Church, then, may grow to such an extent as to enable the Church absolutely and simply to define the matter (Suarez, De mysteriis vitae Christi, disp. 3, sect. 6).
From this cautious and scholastic-minded Suarez we pass over an interval of some 250 years, to Newman's Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, written at Littlemore in 1845, and carried by its author, or rather carrying its author, into the fold of the Catholic Church. Suarez's words are an apt preface to the Essay on Development. When Liddon delivered, at Oxford in 1871, his Bampton Lectures on the Divinity of Christ, he was troubled by a difficulty growing out of Newman's Essay on Development. The difficulty took this form: the clear statement of the Divinity of Christ in the first Council of Nicea was a development from the less clear statements of the New Testament and of the ante-Nicene Fathers: by parity of reasoning, was not the definition of the Immaculate Conception also a development? Were not the opponents of Mary's privilege playing the part of the Arians, who rejected as a novelty in doctrine her Son's Divinity? Liddon I think succeeds in showing that the parity does not hold; that the texts for the Divinity of Christ in the New Testament are explicit and distinct beyond anything that can be alleged from the Bible in support of the Immaculate Conception. And no wonder, seeing that the Divinity of Christ is the foundation of Christianity. Liddon further argues that the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is no legitimate development of Christian revelation: indeed, under the influence of the old Protestant idea, that all articles of faith are expressly set down in Scripture, he almost goes the length of setting aside development altogether. These are his words:
What do we mean by a doctrinal development? Do we mean an explanation of an already existing idea or belief, presumably giving to that belief great precision or exactness in our own or other minds, but adding nothing whatever to its real area? Or do we mean the positive substantial growth of the belief itself, whether through an enlargement from within, just as the acorn develops into the oak, or through an accretion from without of new intellectual matter gathered round it, like the aggrandizement by which the infant colony develops into the powerful empire . . . . The recent definition [of the Immaculate Conception] appears to presuppose a Church which can do more than guard the ancient Faith, which is empowered to make actual additions to the number of revealed circumstances, which is the organ no less than the recipient of a continuous revelation.
Liddon evidently considers that the definition is an "addition," whether of the second or of the third kind; and he derisively quotes the words of Pius IX in the Ineffabilis (the Bull defining the Immaculate Conception), nihil addit, "the Church makes no addition" to the Deposit of Faith. Let us first set aside the third kind of addition, "by accretion from without, like the aggrandizement by which the infant colony, etc." There is addition and addition; and this addition "by accretion," is precisely the addition which Pius IX, equally with Canon Liddon, wished to exclude. There is no intrinsic reason why a colony should grow into an empire. That is an extraneous, fortuitous, and accident addition. Very different is the "substantial growth," the "enlargement from within," analogous to the process whereby "the acorn develops into the oak." Primitive revelation not only does receive "addition" of that sort, it even postulates it, it presupposes it, and would perish if it did not receive it, as an infant would perish if not getting its food. The word "addition," however, in this sense, is an ill-chosen word; we do not speak of the oak branches as an "addition" to the acorn, nor of the man's beard as an "addition" to the infant, because the acorn is potentially the oak with all its appurtenances, and the infant has in himself the promise and potency of the whole man. Therefore we say with Pius IX (Ecclesia) nihil addit, and we go on to say, as a gloss of our own, sed multa explicat: the Church adds nothing, but she develops much. She does not guard the ancient Faith as our ancestors guarded their hoard of coin, in a strong box. Coin is not "barren metal" in these commercial times. Still less are the dogmas of revelation barren metal, dead things. They live and thrive under the guardianship of the Church; they flourish and expand, but never change their identity. The Church is not the recipient of new revelations: she is the organ for the development of the faith once for all given to the Fathers (Jude 3).
Current Issue
