Ludwig Ott, commenting on the development of the Immaculate Conception, wrote the following about Eadmer:
At the beginning of the twelfth
century, the British monk Eadmer, a pupil of St. Anselm of Canterbury, and
Osbert of Clare, advocated the Immaculate (passive) Conception of Mary, that
is, her conception free from original sin. Eadmer wrote the first monograph on
this subject. (Ludwig Ott, Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma [St. Louis: B.
Herder Book Company, 1957], 201)
In
her 2016 book, Mother of Mercy, Bane of the Jews, Kati Ihnat wrote the
following about Eadmer and his work on the immaculate conception, De
conceptione Sanctae Mariae:
Eadmer’s attempt to answer the feast’s
detractors and establish a watertight case for its revival set aside the
apocryphal legends, and turned instead to current trends in theological
argument obviously inherited from Anselm. In so doing, Eadmer set out a radical
new understanding of Mary’s purity with the aim of demonstrating that Mary was
so glorious from the moment of her conception that it would be a dishonor not
to commemorate this event. Contrary to Anselm’s clearly articulated strategy of
arguing solely from first principles, Eadmer opened his De conceptionie
with references to biblical prophecy. The prophetic texts, many of which were used
for the liturgies of Marian feast days, foretold that Mary was destined for greatness
from the beginning of time, Eadmer contended. Isaiah, for example, announced
that the root of Jesse (Isa. 11:3) would produce a stem, Mary, form which would
emerge the flower, Jesus. How could the stalk that would ultimately nourish the
body of the Redeemer have been tainted? Biblical precedents were also
established when John the Baptist and Jeremiah were blessed in the womb, as the
scriptures recount; Mary could not have been any less son. Mary was the foundation
and temple, which the Holy Spirit itself inhabited. This made Mary’s conception
an unusual affair, given that she had been chosen by god not only to house him
but also to confer her own flesh to him. As Eadmer mused, “On this account, I
do not think that it would go against the faith for the simple sons of the
church to think the origins of such a conception so sublime, divine, and ineffable
that the human mind would not be able to reach an understanding of it.”
Despite his claims for its unknowable
nature, Eadmer went on to demonstrate that he had clear ideas about Mary’s conception
in De conceptione. He certainly acknowledged that his views was distinct
from anyone else’s prior to him:
If anyone shall say that she was not
altogether free from original sin (since it is very true that she was conceived
through the union of a man and a woman under the law), if that is the catholic opinion,
I do not wish by any means to dissent form the truth of the catholic and
universal church; nevertheless, when I consider, so far as I can with a certain
cloudiness of mind, the magnificence of the workings of divine power, I seem to
see that if there was anything of original sin in the procreation of the mother
of God and my own Lord, it belonged to the parents and not to the progeny.
Eadmer realized
that he was on shaky doctrinal ground in making this radical claim. Up until this point he had been discussing a
splendid, if incomprehensible, conception. Here, Eadmer took it a step further
in asserting that Mary was actually free from original sin at the moment of her
conception. De conceptione therefore contains the first-ever explicit
articulation of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary—one that
proclaimed her to be untainted not just by personal but also original sin. To illustrate
that he meant, Eadmer presented his famous example from the natural world: if
God had been able to make the chestnut, which comes out shiny and smooth from a
rough and prickly exterior without being blemished, what would have prevented
him from having Mary emerge, untouched by sin (including Adam’s) from the
sinful body of her mother? Eadmer then asked how it was that God had saved the
good angels from sinning while others had fallen, yet we are to believe that he
had not been able to make his own mother spotless. Mary is queen of heaven and
earth, above the angels, and her near equality with Christ makes it far more
suitable that God would have made her completely sinless. Since God was capable
of this, he must have made it happen; he wanted Mary to become his sinless
other, and because he wanted it to be so, so it was done. The church may not
have accepted this, but Eadmer’s argument derives from the fittingness of
it: it was most proper for Christ to have a mother who was cleansed from all
sin, and hence Mary must have been conceived without original sin.
As comes across clearly, Eadmer’s
proof for Mary’s Immaculate Conception draws heavily on the work of his mentor,
Anselm. Eadmer even reproduced Anselm’s argument for the Incarnation in a long section
of his De conceptione. Eadmer recognized that Anselm’s theory of the God-man’s
sinlessness relied on the fact that Christ had not been born by natural
processes but rather by divine intervention from a virgin, thereby disrupting the
pattern of natural law to which humanity is subject. As Anselm had admitted,
anyone born in this way would be free from original sin. (De virginali
conceptu, VIII) Eadmer took advantage of this fact. He appropriated
Anselm’s arguments for a sinless Christ and transposed them back a generation.
(De virginali conceptu, X) In so doing, Eadmer reasoned:
But when I reflect on the eminence of
God’s grace in you [Mary], just as I consider you to be not among all created
things but immeasurably above them, except for your son, so too do I think that
you were not subject to natural law in your conception as others are but were
completely freed by the power and operation of the divine from the addition of
any sin, in a way that is both singular and impenetrable to the human mind.
It is difficult to know what Eadmer
imagined by “not subject to natural law,” particularly given the doubts he expressed
about the apocryphal narratives; in some versions, the angelic annunciation is
treated as the moment of Mary’s conception, with no further involvement of
Joachim. Eadmer seems to have remained deliberately vague on this count, merely
reiterating Anselm’s arguments about Christ’s conception and applying them to
Mary.
Despite what would become Eadmer’s conviction,
Anselm did not consider it as anything but a hypothetical possibility that
someone other than Christ could escape original sin. (De virginali
conceptu, X) For his theory of redemption to function, all of humanity
had to be corrupted by original sin, and Christ must be the only human being
not to have had any trace of it; the distinction is rooted in Christ’s divinity,
and the need for a perfect man and perfect od to redeem an inherently corrupt
humanity. As such, Mary could not have been exempt from the sin that
afflicted the rest of the human race and was cleaned only through her faith in
the Incarnation . . . Although it is Boso who articulates this in the Cur
Deus Homo, Anselm does not himself deny it:
For, granted that the actual conception
of this man [i.e., Christ] was untainted and devoid of the sin of carnal
pleasure, the Virgin from whom he was taken was “conceived amid iniquities” and
her mother conceived her “in sin” (cf. psalms 51:6/50:7); and she was born with
original sin, since she sinned in Adam, “in whom all have sinned” (cf. Rom. 15:12).
(Cur Deus Homo, II.16)
From this it is
apparent that Anselm never upheld the doctrine of Mary’s Immaculate Conception. Had he held any store in the Apocrypha,
Anselm’s explanation to Mary’s conception would not doubt have been similar to
the one he gave to explain other miraculous births, such as that of John the
Baptist. In those cases, God miraculously put right a human nature that was
physically marred in other for aged or barren people to give birth naturally. (De
virginali conceptu, XVI) There is nothing in such a restoration of fertility
that eliminates original sin, and I suspect this is as far as Anselm would have
gone in acknowledging that Mary’s conception was in any way special.
Eadmer must have been aware of what
Anselm would have thought of his arguments. In fact, he shows explicit knowledge
of Anselm’s theory of Mary’s sinlessness through faith when he writes,
If it is the orthodox
position, then I do not deny it if someone asserts that the mother of God was stained
with original sin up until the annunciation of Christ, and believe that she was
cleansed by her faith in the angel, in accordance with what is said “by faith
does he cleanse their hearts” (Acts 15:9).
Nevertheless, a higher consideration tears my mind from this. For as I have
said, considering that the mother of God is above all things apart from God, I
protest that this radiant woman must be more sublime in the grace of God than
the apostles or anything else that is said to have been created outside of God
and his Son. Therefore, if I suggest that the beginning of her creation was in
some respects different from that of Adam’s offspring, I beg that no one turn
his face mockingly, and no one, I say, who is moved toward the mother of God by
a feeling of pure devotion and piety, which God gives, should be tempted to subvert
[what I have said], led by some animosity in his reasoning, unless there is for
certain something that is inherently contrary to the Christian faith.
Eadmer clearly realized
how far he was going in his defence of the unorthodox so much so that this
passage is absent from all but the first copy of De Conceptione. Eadmer just could not fathom how Mary,
superior as she was to other human beings, could have been subject to the same
sinful state as them. He acknowledged the fact that his theory makes Mary’s
origins seem greater than those of Christ himself: “If there is anything that
exceeds [the conception of Christ] and surpasses the human intellect, we ought
to think that this refers to the conception of the blessed Mary, for it seems
by reasonable argument that greater glory and more perfect dignity shone
divinely forth from it than from that of Christ our Lord.” Eadmer did not mean
here that Mary really surpassed Christ in the glory of her conception. He
explained that it might seem this way only because Christ’s conception was
announced by an angel and was made manifest by his taking on of human flesh for
all of humanity to witness. By comparison, Mary’s conception is still shrouded
in mystery, inaccessible to lowly human minds, although necessity dictates that
it was at the very least as sinless as her son’s. For Eadmer, Mary’s selection
as mother of God placed her in an utterly unique position above all of
humanity, and this distinction must have been present from the beginning.
For all that his assertions were
inspired by the wider interest in the problem of original sin expressed in the
works of Anselm, we must remember that Eadmer’s innovative and controversial
thinking emerged as a response to the attacks made against the celebration of
the Conception feast. It explains his polemical intent in defending both liturgy
and doctrine, for he concluded, “Let he who wants, consider this; let he who
wants prove with his own arguments; let he who wants to oppose what I have
said, do so. . . . I will not silence what I have written.” His defensive
attitude betrays knowledge of how groundbreaking yet precarious his case was.
Unable to draw support for the feast from the apocryphal writings or Anselm, Eadmer
still drew considerable inspiration from his teacher in creating a theological
case for the necessity of observing the feast day on the basis that Mary’s
conception was without parallel. This would only be possible if it differed
from all other human conceptions in lacking the contagion of original sin. In developing
his arguments following an Anselmian model, Eadmer appealed to reason rather
than tradition or precedent for the need to celebrate Mary’s conception. He
seemed to think that by proving beyond doubt that the event had been utterly
special and unique, no one could refuse to commemorate it liturgically. Liturgy
spurred on theology, as Eadmer’s desire to see the Conception feast reinstated compelled
him to produce one of the most daring and original claims about Mary in
Christian history. (Kati Ihnat, Mother of Mercy, Bane of the Jews: Devotion
to the Virgin Mary in Anglo-Norman England [Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2016], 66-70)