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8 December 2013
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From ‘The Immaculate Conception’ by Velazquez
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Theology and Candles: Original Sin and Immaculate Conception
Philip Endean SJ
Philip Endean SJ is Professor of Spirituality at Centre Sèvres, Paris |
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The
Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception honours the doctrine that Mary
was conceived without original sin. Philip Endean SJ delves into the
mystery at the heart of this feast. What questions does it pose
about sin and the human condition, and can we answer these questions
with theology?
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In the early 1980s, the late and much loved Kevin Donovan SJ
went part-time on the faculty at Heythrop College in order
to become a parish priest in north London. The opening line of his first
lecture after the move ran: ‘Now that I’m working in a parish, I’m
coming to realise that theology is as important as candles.’
Just let that line sink in. It might mean that theology is
trivial, a waste of time; it could be suggesting that theology at its
best is an act of worship. The irony hints at how churchy activity
of any kind is always dealing with far more than it can really handle.
And yet the juxtaposition also jangles: life with candles and life
with high theology, as in different ways both Kevin and his students
were realising, do not quite fit together.
When we speak of Mary as conceived without original sin, we are
using a theological idea—original sin—to name a reality of faith more
naturally expressed by lighting a candle. And the theology does not
quite work.
Look at Pius IX’s 1854 Apostolic Constitution
, declaring that this long-established devotion was ‘a
doctrine revealed by God and therefore to be believed firmly and
constantly by all the faithful’. Pius begins by evoking ‘the lamentable
wretchedness of the entire human race which would have resulted from
the sin of Adam’. Then he tells the gospel story of Christ becoming
human, a member of that race.
Pius’s rhetorical skills—in ways that do not come through in
the standard English translation—enable him to dodge talking directly
about Jesus’s humanity, and indeed about Mary’s. What God prepares
is referred to, not as a female of the human species, but as a ‘Mother
in whom the Son of God would become incarnate … ever absolutely free
of all stain of sin, all fair and perfect’. Carefully, Pius and his
officials are steering round what in plain language could only
appear a contradiction: All humans are caught up in Adam’s sin; Mary is
human; but Mary is not caught up in sin.
Typically, devotion to Mary is candle stuff: you do not ask too many questions. Whether articulated throughsublimely beautiful
expressions of high culture
, or through more popular
, even mawkish
genres, it centres on feeling: ‘Lady, flow’r of everything
’; ‘ Virgin most pure, star of the sea/Pray for the wand’rer, pray for me
.’ Such veneration goes back early in the Church, at least to the Council of Ephesus (431)
, which proclaimed Mary as the theotokos—‘god-bearer’.
Then, translation into Latin gave us something warmer and even more
provocative: ‘mother of God’. Before we knew where we were, we were
caught up in de Maria numquam satis
: loosely, ‘nothing is too good for Mary’. In
Western Christianity at least, however, such Marian exuberance had to
live alongside another strong tradition, one driven more by theory and
the head. Shortly before the Council of Ephesus, and independently, St Augustine
was reflecting on the scope of Christ’s saving work, and its
relationship to our good behaviour. Starting from the practice of
infant baptism, he developed a theology of original sin. This was a
matter of logic: baptism is for the forgiveness of sins; we baptise
babies; babies cannot actually sin; therefore babies—however much we
want to coo at them—must be tainted by an inherited sin.
For Augustine, and many figures subsequently, original sin
affected Mary like everyone else. Perhaps because the Augustinian
teaching was so pessimistic about the general human condition
without Christ’s grace, a counterbalancing impulse about goodness
focused so strongly on Mary. At any rate, officialdom only
intervened when the tensions started causing problems.
Initially, these interventions were minimalist. In 1483, Sixtus IV
noted that certain Dominicans, while accepting a liturgy
centred on Mary’s conception, were claiming that it was heretical or
sinful to claim that this conception was ‘without the stain of
original sin’. Sixtus condemned this negative teaching, and encouraged
belief in the Immaculate Conception. But significantly, he stopped short
of a positive affirmation; the critics of the doctrine were merely
showing ‘irresponsible boldness’ rather than being wrong. Sixtus was
simply keeping options open: the matter had ‘not yet been decided by the
Roman Church and the Apostolic See’. For its part, the Council of Trent,
while reaffirming the effect of Adam’s sin on all humanity,
declared ‘that it is not its intention to include in this decree
dealing with original sin the Blessed and Immaculate Virgin Mary, Mother
of God’. On both these occasions, the Church’s teaching office was
recognising a logical problem and steering round it. And when Pius IX in
1854 finally declared the doctrine to be revealed by God, his
fulsome rhetoric, as we have already noted, avoided being explicit on
how the problem could be resolved. Maybe it was just a Vatican
variant on the proverbial marginal note to sermons: ‘argument weak,
shout louder’; maybe Pius, or one of his theologians, was pointing up
subtly the need for further theological work. Such official
codedness is an important skill of Church government.
Be all that as it may, Pius’s decision has been received and
accepted, at least within Roman Catholicism. It seems somehow right
that the early part of Advent should include a feast honouring
Mary—even if journalists and some churchgoers become confused and think
we are celebrating Jesus’s conception. The doctrine of original sin
has become difficult, not just because of the contradictions between its
main thrust and
Mary’s freedom from it (to say nothing of Jesus’s), but also
because of evolutionary theories, and a heightened sense of individual
moral responsibility. Moreover, ecumenical and feminist concerns
have tempered ultramontane Marian enthusiasms. Nevertheless, mainstream
Catholics seem broadly comfortable with celebrating Mary’s creation.
We look at the beautiful pictures; we hear the gospel of Mary’s
receiving the angel’s message; and we quietly ignore the nagging
questions arising about genetics. We light the candles anyway, and
set the theology aside.
Perhaps naming issues such as these is as much as an article
like this can sensibly do. The Church’s awareness of the mystery it
embodies is, after all, a work in progress. Maybe all we can say is
that celebrating Mary’s Immaculate Conception is a matter of collective
instinct that we do not fully understand.
Indeed so. Equally, however, we should not be content with such a
complacent strategy unless we really have no alternative. As far as
possible, we should be able to give an account of our hope, both to
our own integrity and to those who ask us. So let us try.
What do we in fact mean by ‘original sin’? Chesterton in his Orthodoxy
famously and waggishly claimed original sin to be
‘the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved’. Sin
was a fact, ‘a fact as practical as potatoes.’ What needed argument
was whether or not we could be ‘washed in miraculous waters’, whether we
could move beyond the Christian denial of ‘the present union between God and man’. There was no doubt that humanity ‘wanted washing’.
Confronting Chesterton is a risky, indeed churlish business.
Nevertheless he is stating as an obvious fact something which is far
from being so. For the fact which really is ‘as plain as potatoes’
is simply that life is often unsatisfactory. But self-evident mess falls
far short of the Christian mystery of sin. By calling the mess
‘sin’, we are making a statement of faith and hope: a statement that the
mess, all too real though it is, does not thwart God’s purpose. God
can deal with it. And this means we can let go of other ways of coping
with the mess: blaming ourselves, scapegoating others, compulsive
virtue, cynicism, or whatever.
When most of us cradle Christians first learnt the word ‘sin’,
it was probably in the context of our being naughty children. Not only
had we done something wrong, done damage, upset Mum; we had
committed a sin, we had offended God, and we needed to put things right with Him.
For all the familiarity here, nothing particularly Christian is yet
being said. Human cultures typically use God-language as a sanction
mechanism, an emotional blackmail making us feel awful when we do not
conform. Very easily the guilt feelings lose contact with objective right and wrong.
A certain sort of Catholicism was very good at this, obsessing
about doubtful issues of sexual morality, and remaining blind to major
issues of truth and justice. As a wise woman once told me,
‘Catholics know a great deal about guilt, and very little about sin’.
The Christian mystery of sin centres, not on questions of moral
right and wrong, but on something else: the outrageous faith and hope
that God can somehow put the mess right. Thus, any theologically
proper move from mess to sin opens up a perspective of hope. We cannot
sensibly talk about original sin at all unless we are prepared to imagine life without it. And it is that reality,
at least in its beginnings, which the gospel sets before us.
‘Original sin’ makes no sense unless there is a yet more original grace.
Our standard formula, ‘Mary conceived without original sin’
presents Mary in logically negative terms, as someone without a problem.
It starts from our difficulties, and takes them as a fixed basis
from which we can explore holiness as an exceptional absence. There is,
of course, a place for such thinking. Equally, Christianity has gone
wrong if such thinking is all we have. For Christianity is about nothing
if is not about our problematic selves being changed; as we
explore the reality of holiness it makes a difference to us. The real
conundrum is not one about how God can create a Jesus and Mary who do
not share our problematic state, but rather about how God’s goodness can co-exist with a problematic creation, one in which the good is lacking.
There is no theological answer to that question. Some
theologians have talked about ‘God respecting creaturely freedom’, but
not in any way that really works. St Ignatius’s presentation of sin in Spiritual Exercises centres,
not on a good confession, or an experience of forgiveness—still
less on any sort of explanation. Instead he tries to lead to a place
where we cry out in wonder:
How can it be that the world has carried on when there has been
so much resistance to God? Why has God not just given up or junked us
into Hell already?
Christianity does not answer these questions.
Instead it attests to a revelation: a revelation of divine goodness
keeping these unanswerable questions open, a goodness promising
hope, a goodness inviting us not really to understand but rather to join
in. The light shines in the darkness, a light which the darkness
cannot overpower, a light made manifest in Jesus and Mary without sin.
Theologies about how and why fail, but the light—and the candles—remain.
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