Sunday, September 15, 2024

René Laurentin on Mary Being Explicitly said to be free of personal and original sin during the Pelagian Controversy

  

1. It is not possible to give an extended treatment of Pelagianism here. This heresy was a reaction against Manichean pessimism and took the form of an excessive optimism concerning the capabilities of human nature, to the detriment of the necessary role of grace. During the first phase of his controversy Pelagius argumentatively presented Augustine with the case of the Virgin “whom it is necessary to recognize as sinless.” Until then no one had expressed Mary’s holiness in such a clear-cut formula. In such heated argumentation there could have easily arisen the temptation to discuss the heretic’s thesis. Saint Augustine resolved the difficulty from the beginning with a genial touch. He granted the opponent’s statement, but gave it a wholly different meaning: this sanctity of hers was an exception, having God’s grace as its principle, and not free will alone.

 

2. Julian of Eclanum carried the conflict onto more delicate terrain in discussing the absence not of actual sin but of the sin of the human race. This Pelagian author was thus the first to deny explicitly that the Virgin Mary had ever been subject to the say of original sin. To Augustine he objected, “By the original condition [that you attribute to her] you give Mary herself over to the devil.” Augustine himself cites the famous objection as it must have been made to him. (Opus imperfectum adversus Julianum, 4, 122; PG 45: 1217)

 

Here the bishop of Hippo did not in reply show as masterly a touch as in the preceding controversy. He sought a way out with an ambiguous text. Looking back on his text, of course, it is possible to discern the two requirements of the tradition, namely, the universal need of redemption and Mary’s exceptional mode of redemption in being preserved from all sin. But subsequent authors for centuries to come were to see in Augustine's text a denial of the privilege of her Immaculate Conception. (René Laurentin, A Short Treatise on the Virgin Mary [6th ed.; trans. Charles Neumann; Washington, D. C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2022], 69-70, emphasis in bold added)

 

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