In an essay entitled “Letter to a Recent Convert,” Catholic Henry St. John addressed the question of the Deposit of Faith and how some dogmas such as the Immaculate Conception and Bodily Assumption were “implicit” therein:
You were taught
during your instructions that the whole Faith was given by Our Lord to the
Apostles and that the Church which He founded upon them was to guard and teach
that Faith, but had no power to add to it . . . It is of course quite unthinkable
that the Pope (or as I should prefer to say, the Church, because we must never
get into the way of thinking that there are two infallibilites; there is only
one, that of the Church though it has various modes of expression) can exercise
infallibility in faith and morals by adding new truths to what is called the
original deposit. To claim that would be in direct contradiction of everything
the Church has ever said about herself . . . a truth may be “in the deposit” explicitly,
as the Virgin Birth was from the very beginning, or implicitly, as the
Immaculate Conception was before it became explicit and was defined. When we
say that a truth is implicit and in the deposit of Faith we mean that it is
contained, unperceived by the faithful, in some other truth which is
held explicitly. In process of time by a deepening of insight in the faithful,
which is the work of the Holy Spirit in the Mystical Body of Christ, what was
formerly implicit comes to be implicit in another . . . we may take the
Immaculate Conception as another case in point. We have no means of knowing
whether the Apostles had any idea of it. Neither they nor Our Lady herself
could have known it except by revelation, and there is no evidence in Scripture
or Tradition that Our Lord told them. It is however clear that very early
in the mind of the Church, dwelling on the words of the Angel Gabriel to Our
Lady, “Hail! Full of grace,” and on her response to God’s message saw her as
absolutely pure and sinless—the absolute opposite of evil. This is the basis of
the primitive teaching about Our Lady as the second Eve, found in St. Irenaeus,
so closely related by tradition with St. John himself, and in St. Justin
Martyr. The foundations of this doctrine are firmly laid in Scripture and it
contains by implication the complete truth of Our Lady’s position in the
economy of redemption and grace, as it has been drawn out by the mind of the
Church through the centuries. During this process controversies arose among
theologians as to the exact nature of original sin and as to how Our Lady could
be both sinless and redeemed. Subsequently as a joint result of devotion and
controversy, by the guidance of the Holy Spirit, a deeper insight into how this
could be was reached and the doctrine of her sinless conception was certified as
a fact by the supreme magisterium of the Church.
So it seems to me
with the Assumption. Did the Apostles know of the fact? They may have, but
if they did there is a complete lack of evidence of it. No trace of the
tradition occurs in any ecclesiastical writer until the fifth century, and
if it existed in an explicit form from apostolic days it is difficult to
explain an economy so profound and so lasting. The legends which immediately
sprang up around belief in it when this appears are apocryphal and no detail of
them is historically reliable. But what is certain is that in the course of
history Our Lady’s place in the economy of redemption, her mediatory and
intercessory office, and the implications of her active cooperation in bringing
about the Incarnation have become progressively more deeply realized in the
Church’s consciousness. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries particularly she
has seen with greatly increased clarity that sound faith in the Incarnation
itself is indissolubly bound up with belief in Our Lady’s high place in the
economy of grace. Why did the Church insist so strongly on her perpetual
virginity? Because Catholic instinct, the product of the theological virtues
and the gifts of the Holy Ghost in Christ’s Mystical Body, taught the faithful
that to attack that was in the end to attack the Incarnation. Why did the
Church come to insist more and more on her complete sinlessness? (The theological
controversy was an interlude.) Because Catholic instinct realized that to deny
her sinlessness and total exemption from the dominion of sin would lead to the
denial of her virginity and in the end to denial of the Incarnation itself.
Why, finally, did belief in the Assumption become universal in East and West at
a comparatively early date? (the legendary element was consequent on, and not
antecedent to, belief in the fact.) Because Catholic instinct early saw with deepening
insight that incorruption was the fitting concomitant of sinlessness in her
from whose flesh God Himself drew the flesh of His human nature, and that in
consequence this privilege had been granted to God’s Mother. And so knowledge
of her Assumption comes to strengthen faith in her sinlessness, just as faith
in her sinlessness and absolute purity is a bulwark of a defense to true and
strong faith in the Incarnation of her Son. (Henry St. John, “A Letter to a
Recent Convert,” in Stanley G. Mathews, ed., Queen of the Universe: An
Anthology on the Assumption and Queenship of Mary [Saint Meinrad, Ind.:
Grail Publications, 1957], 88-94, here, pp. 88-89, 92-93; emphasis in bold
added)
