Friday, January 1, 2021

Aidan Nichols on Aquinas and the Immaculate Conception

 

 

At the time of composing his remarks on the first book of Lombard’s Sentences, Aquinas appears to have taught the Immaculate Conception doctrine—as a theological opinion, of course, not as dogma (that status would not come into view until the mid-nineteenth century). Mary, he thought, had been ‘immune from original and actual sin’. Assuming Thomas made this assertion unconditionally, he soon changed his mind. By the time he reached Lombard’s fourth book, he had come to qualify this understanding. Mary had not been thus graced from the first moment of her existence. She was not freed from original sin at the time of her conception but after the ‘animation’ of her body, its rational ensoulment—at whatever point that might be thought to have occurred in her mother’s womb. (Thomas’ conviction that the human conceptus is not at first sufficiently organized to receive the rational soul would remain a major disincentive to Immaculist ideas.) The tendency to even venial sin was thereby suspended in Mary. But that tendency was not yet eliminated at root. Such root-and-branch purification from evil would be the work of grace at the Annunciation, as a condition of her conception of the Word. Finally, at her Assumption, Mary would be liberated from the last punishment original sin brings in its train, namely death. But Thomas merely notes in passing Mary’s glorification. It bears no immediate relation to his proper subject in this section of his ‘Writing’, for his real topic is the Incarnation . . . Anxieties about his position on the Immaculate Conception issue—not least in the Dominican Order which felt bound by both his theological inheritance and the demands of Marian piety—tended to obscure this wider picture. In his commentary on Galatians Thomas declares with Ecclesiastes (7:29) that he has ‘found a man in a thousand’, namely Christ who is without sin. He has not, however, found a woman anywhere of whom it could be said that she was ‘totally immune from sin’. Those sixteenth-century editions of his works which interpolated into his commentary on Galatians at this point a saving clause (‘except the most pure Virgin Mary, worthy of all praise’) were not only, considered as deceptions, vain.60 They were also, if the overall balance of his Mariology is in view, superfluous. He did not accept the theology of Mary’s original righteousness as that theology was presented in his time. Had the later medieval representation of the doctrine been available to him, so far as its soteriological content was concerned, he would doubtless have rallied to it. More difficult is the anthropological question of Mary’s conception as the beginning of her personhood. Treating the rational animation of the embryo at the moment of conception as an exceptional privilege enjoyed by Christ is not so satisfactory as the alternative account, found at certain high points in the tradition of the Greek Fathers, which would take the example of Christ as, rather, the light in which all anthropology is seen. (Aidan Nichols, "The Mariology of St. Thomas," in Thomas G. Weinandy, Daniel A. Keating, and John P. Yocum, eds., Aquinas on Doctrine: A Critical Introduction [London; T&T Clark, 2004], 242–243, 257-58)

 

Further Reading


Answering Tim Staples on Patristic Mariology and the Immaculate Conception