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)