I know that what I am asking is impossible. But in our time, as in every time, the impossible is the least that one can demand. —James Baldwin
The doctrine of the immaculate conception makes maddeningly difficult what seems to me a proper Marian dialectic, which is able at different moments to emphasize now the extent of her deification, by which she our greatest example, and now the extent of her inadequacy, by which we see the profundity of Christ’s self-humiliation.
3 January 2008 |
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Tags: Mariology
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Brian Hamilton-Vise is a Ph.D. student in moral theology at the University of Notre Dame, where his research is in the history of Christian political and economic thought. His side interests are in the development of negative theology and in recent political theory. Email him at bdhamilton@gmail.com.
The way that the Immaculate Conception is often explained – including by the Magisterium – certainly gives rise to the problem you mention. Mary is conceived without sin in order to provide a tabernacle worthy of the divine presence.
But the doctrine seems susceptible of another reading: Mary’s immaculate conception shows that humanity, even at its best, is undeserving of the Incarnation. That being born of the best that humanity has to offer is nonetheless a divine self-humiliation exposes the lie behind all human pretension to divinity.
Even at our best we do not deserve God – I offer this as an alternative interpretation of the Immaculate Conception.