Thursday, June 17, 2021

Henry St. John Addressing the Deposit of Faith and Dogmas being "Implicit" therein such as the Immaculate Conception

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)