www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life The Christian East & West Patriarch Bartholomew on the "Immaculate Conception"

What is �handed on� to us is the legacy of the Fall, i.e. death. Along with that impaired communion with God and an environment that is conducive to sin. We are born if you will in an environment of spiritual sickness. We do not have the imprint within us of a guilt or stain of sin, i.e. concupiscence. What the Patriarch rightly maintains is that the immaculate nature of the Theotokos is not because of some special action before her conception, but as the result of the life she lived. There is a vast difference there.

The same reason we continue to sin after baptism. Christ has risen and defeated death, but the ultimate fulfillment of creation has not occurred. We can escape the corruption and the legacy of the Fall if we choose, but it is still present. Baptism is also a dual natured sacrament, it is both burial and Christ and rising in him. It is death and new life all at once.

I was under the impression that Catholic children are not communed until several years after baptism.

One of the better, and relatively short writings on the subject can be found here. The Consequences of the Fall [home.it.net.au] by Bishop Kallistos Ware.

I enjoy talking, which is why I am here, and I think it�s good to understand both sides. The core issues are unbridgeable though, and the schism is going to be a permanent fixture of the church�s earthly existence. That I have no doubt of.

Andrew

Ecce Jason: My apologies, I was in a bit of a hurry when I responded and was certain I saw Cyril's name. Hopefully St. Theodoret can forgive me!

Yes, I agree with your distinction, as would any Latin who is well versed in their own traditions. Perhaps we are dealing with a problem in language not unlike the error in understanding that led to the schism with the so-called Monophysites. When the West uses "guilt", it does not necessarily imply a measure of personal guilt, as it can also imply the effects of a wrong when no personal wrong is necessarily present. For example, one can feel guilty for doing something harmless, even when you know it's harmless. That twist of sensation in no way indicates a true sense of wrong doing on the person having it, it simply "is".

Regardless, as a Latin, when I read the Patriarch's comments, I see that they could have easily been written by a Latin. Furthermore, this is not based on some "Spirit of Vatican II" re-working of Tradition, either, but from the perspective of someone who was not raised Catholic, but rather came to the faith from the outside by reading up on history from Abraham up to the modern day. My perspective isn't perfect, obviously, as I'm born in the modern day, but it's also not based on modern indoctrination; they could have been written at the time of the Council of Trent as well.

Just to quickly point out, Trent itself recognized a fluidity in the usage of sin and how it manifests, when it said:

Although it doesn't go into great detail, this does show that even the use of the word "sin" was not strictly defined.

God bless!

Do you mind clarifying that in light of this:

The sin brought hereditary corruption and not a hereditary legal responsibility or a hereditary moral stain.

What is the distinction between hereditary corruption, and hereditary moral stain in this sense? Hereditary is not a term generally used to describe an environment, but rather a specific circumstance passed directly from parent to child, by virtue of their relationship.

What I hear when I see this is that humans receive neither a debt, as in legal responsibility (your father stole from me, so now you owe me payment back), nor a moral stain (your father was a drunkard, so you're not allowed to play with my kids). In that sense, Latins would absolutely agree with the Patriarch. We are, by heredity, less than we were before the Fall, hence corruption, but we carry neither debt, nor a mark of moral judgement from our parents. If heredity here does not mean passed on from parent to child, then I simply don't understand and it makes a very poor translation into English.

I don't think this is entirely accurate, because the Patriarch does indicate that she was sanctified in a special way, special in the sense that she was sanctified without Baptism, which is the normal means of sanctification by my understanding. The real issue at hand is not whether she was sanctified without Baptism in the strict sense, as she clearly was since she was sanctified before Christ sent forth to "Baptise in the Spirit", but whether or not it happened at the moment of her conception or later, in this instance in the moment Christ came into her womb.

The issue of whether or not the sanctification removes from her a personal stain, or an inherited worldly corruption (whatever that entails, as it doesn't seem to be indicated in this article) is not really the focus at hand, as either understanding leads to the Calvinist objection that is being addressed here.

Before I address it, however, I will point out that the link you showed me of Bishop Ware's has the most brilliant explaination and description of concupiscence I've ever seen! In the paragraph describing the moral ramifications of original sin, Ware is exactly describing concupiscence, even citing the same verses of Romans! Concupiscence simply refers to the tendency of men since Adam to pursue evil appetites as opposed to the good. It has no implication in general Latin writing or theology of being a biological trait passed on as a gene would be. This might be worth while if you haven't read it already: concupiscence [newadvent.org] .

In that article you'll find that while it does describe concupiscence, it doesn't imply that it is some kind of genetic trait "passed on through conception by lust" as Augustine postulated at one time. Rather the definition is left rather open, leaving room for both the Augustinian view, and the Eastern view, and also the Thomistic view (which was generally prefered by the Latins). Also in the article it discusses where the Protestants took concupiscence and ran crazy with it, and for ease of reference I'll paste that section here:

As you can see, this is much more along the lines of what many Easterners think of when they hear Latins refer to the "guilt" of Original Sin, espescially the second point, but that was an invention by the Protestants, and is wildly heretical and has always been treated as such. I'll also point out that this article was written one hundred years ago, within the lifetime of the promulgation of the "Dogma of the Immaculate Conception".

As you can see, the big problem stems from point number two by the Protestants, which states that this inclination to do bad is actually a personal guilt in the person themself. Trent combated this by saying that Baptism removes all aspects of sin in the person, but the effects of sin (as Ware describes) remain (striking down point number three). This put things to rest for a little while, but it wasn't a complete answer. The Protestants continued with point number two, and noticing that Mary was never Baptised, at least not before Jesus was conceived in her womb, claimed that even with the definition of Trent, Mary was a "dirty vessel". They did not initially intend this as a strike against the divinity of Christ, but following their points above you can see where this will lead: a sinner Christ.

The Church now has two options: it can throw out St. Augustine's works all together, 1400 years after the fact, and call them heretical, or it can simply say dogmatically that, in Augustinian terms, Mary was preserved from the stains of original sin at the moment of conception (remember that Augustine believed that the very act of concieving a child through sexual means after the Fall could impart concupiscence). In doing this the Church was neither endorsing the Augustinian view (which it largely did not, and does not, hold as can be seen from the article, but did not view as heretical) nor ruling on the nature of other conceptions. It was merely fixing a very Protestant misrepresentation of a very Augustinian issue, heading off a very blasphemous conclusion about the nature of Christ.

Meanwhile, Augustine is left intact for those that want to safely follow his theological examinations, most Catholics can continue in their Thomistic view (of course using language specifically designed to confuse the Orthodox for generations to come ) or the Eastern view as the Eastern Catholics do (who have no need for the Immaculate Conception, as it doesn't deal with a theology that remotely interests them) and Protestants were once again relegated to the "heretics play pen" (TM) where they could set off their theological bombs with only themselves to harm. All the Church asks is that when playing with Augustine, don't run with knives

Now, as for your other statements:

Nope, only in the Latin Church, and then only by discipline, not due to any deep theological reasons. In fact, the Council of Trent explicitely permits it. Non-Latin Catholic children receive the Eucharist at baptism/confirmation, and are even permitted to receive in Latin Catholic churches. The history of this is actually rather interesting, and peculiar to the Latin Rite. I won't get into the history of it on this post, but I will say that the age of Communion in the Latin Church has flucuated as policies have changed.

This, I'm afraid, we'll have to disagree on, at least insofar as the gap being unbridgable. I do enjoy talking about these things regardless of disagreement, however. I do have one question, though, and I ask not to stir up any fire: do you consider the Catholic Church to have valid Sacraments, most espescially the Sacrament of Eucharist? I ask because of something I've been pondering lately.

God bless, and I apologize for such a wordy reply!

Jason:

Thanks. I've read Fr. Meyendorff's work. I guess I stumbled grammatically on the short phrase out of the total context. The whole sentence makes complete sense.

BOB

Hello all,

I have a question. His All Holiness Patriarch Bartholomew stated the following:

To me, this sounds like "Mary was good by her own power, and because of that was sanctified by God". So does that mean that the Orthodox believe that Mary was able to be sinless BEFORE God sanctified her? That seems to go against Paul's teaching about man's inability to keep the law without the grace of God. So how is it possible that Mary could have been perfect BEFORE God sanctified her?

I do believe that Mary was sinless, but was only able to be so because God specially graced her from the moment of conception. If God had not graced her at least before she was old enough to commit actual sin, I don't see how one can believe that she was able to be sinless under her own ability without going against Paul's teachings.

Am I simply misunderstanding him?

The use of heredity to discuss this is perhaps a poor choice of wording. I think the distinction is between being born in to a world where it is easy to fall in to sin, and being born with an imprint on the soul that makes you predisposed to sin. I believe the Blessed Augustine said we are born with a personal imperative to sin as a result of the Fall or something along those lines. That is a view the East would not share. We are not personally born disposed to sin, because the faculty to sin is not developed at that point, we are just born in to a world where it is likely we will fall in to sin. It is perhaps a fine distinction, but I think important.

The Patriarchs words would seem to lend credence to your very last statement. Regardless, the Theotokos was not �cleansed� of Original Sin as defined by the West before her birth. She was sanctified, that is true, but she was a human was still subject to the effects of the Fall as we understand it. That is why we celebrate the Dormition of the Theotokos and believe it was after her death that she was assumed bodily in to heaven. Even she, for all her holiness, could not escape the overarching effect of what happened at the Fall.

Ghosty,

The only problem with this is that only persons can be guilty; natures cannot be "guilty." So it's difficult to describe the sin which affects nature as "guilt." But this problem may arise from the current understanding of "guilt," which you have suggested was not the Scholastic understanding at the time of the definition of Trent. If "guilt" implied only an effect on nature but not anything like a moral responsibility, then I don't see a problem with what you're saying. I don't think I have the problems that Andrew seems to be having with your position, anyway, but maybe that's because I'm missing something (admittedly, I haven't read through every detail of your interaction with him).

God bless,
Jason

Andrew,

Here's a question. As far as I understand it, after the Fall, human nature was such that it was corrupted, put under the reign of death, and was such that it cut off its connection with deifying grace. The Incarnation is what fixed that; the Person of the Logos came down from heaven and united His divinity with humanity, thereby restoring the connection necessary for deification. The Virgin, however, apparently received the presence of grace in a way that no one else was able to, before the Incarnation. Her humanity was allowed to connect with divinity in a way that no other was, prior to the Incarnation. Now, if one takes the "stain" of original sin to be the corruption and disease which inflicts our nature and results in the absence of the fullness deifying grace, and notes that the Theotokos was given this grace before the Incarnation, isn't there a way for understanding the Immaculate Conception from an Eastern perspective?

God bless,
Jason

Jason, no I don't think so for a few reasons.

I don't think it's settled at all that the Theotokos was "purified" before the Incarnation, because I don't think it's viewed as necessary that she would have been if she did not bear the stain or Original Sin. The effects of the Fall is the introduction of death, which she was still subject to. It's really still about a different understanding of Original Sin. Certainly she was sanctified by the grace of God and the action of her own free will, and she was pure in her sinless life. The dogma I believe as well states that she was purified at the time of her conception. So it locates with precision when this happened. I don't think the church would subscribe to that view either.

In the end the Immaculate Conception to me isn't so much "wrong", as it is a solution to a problem that does not exist. Were it a theological opinion, that would be one thing. It is not however, it's a dogma.

Andrew

Andrew,

You said: Fortunately, neither I nor the papal definition of the doctrine use the word "purified." All I was speaking of was the Theotokos' being reconnected or filled with grace prior to the Incarnation. I would wager that that much is a part of the undivided Tradition of the Church, not to mention (at least potentially) Scripture.

I don't think the only effects of the Fall were the introduction of death, though correct me if I'm wrong. Of course, that doesn't mean I'm saying that the effect is a moral guilt, either. What I'm saying is that the "death" that was introduced was also a spiritual death, in that humanity cut itself off from the fullness of deifying grace. Christ restored the union between divinity and humanity in the Incarnation. I am only suggesting that perhaps the Theotokos, as filled with grace in a special way before the Incarnation, may have been preserved from that aspect of spiritual death and was restored to connection with God's deifying grace in an intimate way in order that she could bear the Son of God in her womb.

I don't know if that captures the fullness of the doctrine or not; I'd like a Western Catholic to chime in. I will note, in fairness, that the decree says that the Virgin was preserved from all stain; but clearly she died a mortal death. So the question is what the "stain" consists of; if it consists of the corruption and separation from the fullness of deifying grace that I've suggested, then I think my view might work.

Thanks, and God bless,
Jason

I'll chime in a little bit, and see if I can help with anything.

First I want to ask a quick question:

If death is the cause of sin, and all have sinned because of death (Romans 5:12), then what is being spoken of in Romans 5:14 when it says that not all have personally sinned? I ask because this answer would be quite different in the Greek reading of the text being described here.

I also want to correct another point. The Latins do not translate "in whom", as in "in Adam all have sinned". Some ancient Latin Fathers read the Greek that way, but that is not how it was translated by St. Jerome, who was no slouch when it came to languages. That passage comes down to us as "mors pertransiit in quo omnes peccaverunt", which means "death (mors) transmitted (pertransiit) in the way (in quo) all (omnes) sinned (peccaverunt)." In plain English it means that "death is transmitted in that all have sinned. So it's not that the "because" applies to Adam, but that the "because" applies to sin.

One thing I find interesting in all of this, given my background and continuing study of Judaism, is that if Paul is saying that death leads to sin, he doesn't seem to be a very good Jew. That is odd considering his standing prior to converting.

In Judaism there are two moral inclinations [jewfaq.org] : yetzer tov (good inclination), and yetzer hara (bad inclination). Yetzer tov is the inclination towards spiritual things and prayer, and yetzer hara could be called the "animal impulse", the immediate sensual impulses of animal nature, i.e. eating, comfort, ect. These inclinations are not good and bad in the sense of good and evil, but rather "higher" and "lower", but yetzer hara tends to pull us away from yetzer tov, and therefore away from God, and is therefore called the "bad inclination" even though its impulses aren't always evil.

The thing about yetzer tov and yetzer hara is that they are inborn traits of humanity, something we possess by virtue of being human, both animal and spiritual. Adam and Eve both possessed yetzer tov, and yetzer hara, but in the Fall they spurned yetzer tov in favor of yetzer hara and reaped the consequences of it, including death, manual labor, and pains of child-birth. More importantly, Jewish thought of the time of Christ assigned the impurity of heart to all of Adam's descendants by virtue of them being descended from Adam (though not necessarily by virtue of Adam's sin, as that would come from Christian understanding). This is made most clear by the Jewish apocryphal work of the second century A.D., the Fourth Book of Ezra, which reads:

If Paul was saying that death causes people to sin, he was stepping very, very far away from traditional Semitic thought indeed! This isn't to say that he certainly wasn't speaking in the manner you claim, but it would be exceptionally odd for a Jew of the time, or any time, to do so. This also isn't to say that the Augustinian conception of Original Sin, or the erroneous Protestant-Augustinian view, is the Jewish one.

Furthermore, other things that Paul says lead me to believe that he held to the Jewish conceptions of yetzer tov and yetzer hara. For example Ephesians 2:3, Galatians 5:16-26, and Romans 7:21-25. Incidently, these passages exactly describe concupiscence in the Latin understanding: a yearning of the flesh against the soul, that is intrinsic to the human being, which also describes yetzer hara. The Latins also explicitely state that concupiscence in its pure sense is not true personal sin (and they even anathemize those who claim otherwise, like the ProtAugustants, as stated at Trent:

The apparent Orthodox idea that this impulse comes from environmental changes, rather than internal aspects of the human, are completely foreign to all generations of Jewish thought, and seem contrary to the actual writings of Paul that describe an internal conflict.

Another point to remember is that, in Scripture, death is always the consequence of sin. This is most notable with the Fall, when death was known as the consequence of transgressing God's Law. Death does not lead one to sin, but stands as the consequence for those who transgress God's commands, as shown time and time again through both the Tanakh and the New Testament. Making sin the consequence of death seems to be putting the cart WAY before the horse.

So, to conclude this lengthy ramble, the Catholic Church concludes that humanity was created with an "animal impulse", it is naturally present in humanity. The "unleashing" of this impulse, called concupiscence, is a result of the sin of Adam, that cast aside the Original Justice that helped to subject concupiscence to reason. Basically, by spurning reason in favor of concupiscence, Adam deprived humanity of a specific grace of God, a grace that is renewed with the Sacraments. This is the Thomistic view of Original Sin and concupiscence, which has dominated the Latin Church at least since the time of Aquinas.

The Protestants, on the other hand, are uniquely Augustinian in their view, and they distort Augustine in such a way as to lead to the "permanent personal guilt" concept that is erroneously believed by some in the East to be the definative Latin conception. On the contrary, however, it was formally anathemized at Trent.

God bless!

But then again. If his All Holiness or Orthodoxy aren't infallible, how can we know he is right!
In fact how do we know then if Christianity is right?
Stephanos I

The infallibility of neither the Orthodox nor the Catholics come into question given the explination I've provided, unless you were refering to someone elses post, in which case I apologize.

Peace be with you.

Jason

There are probably some fundamental aspects to this that perhaps go beyond my ability to answer. Yes certainly the Fall brought about a fundamental breach between the communion of God and man and that the Incarnation (and ultimately the Reurrection) bridged this divide. Certainly God�s grace was not absent from the world prior to the Incarnation however it would seem to me, just as the fundamental goodness of man (the image of God) was damaged but not destroyed. Grace it would seem to me must be an uncreated aspect of God, present from all time and not a later creation.

Andrew

Ghosty,

May I first, in humility, give a word of caution and ask that, for the Orthodox view of original sin, you turn to books rather than us. Here, we are unable to provide every nuance on the doctrine, and you risk being misinformed. In particular, if you can get ahold of it, try to find John Romanides' book The Ancestral Sin. Also, online you can find a very helpful article of his that was printed in the St. Vladimir's Seminary Quarterly: Original Sin According to St. Paul [romanity.org] . That article ougth to address your concerns much better than any of us.

Now, onto more substantive stuff:

This is part of the reason I recommend reading books; only one aspect of the potential Greek reading has been described here. The majority do read the Greek phrase eph ho as "because," but there is an open question as to what the "because" applies to. Some read it as: "death spread to all men because all men have sinned." On this reading, apparently, we all share in the sin of Adam according to our natures, in that we inherit the "sickness" from him, and as a result we all die. This is very close to the reading I think you've been giving to the passage, which is why I haven't tended to have a problem with your reading. There are also other questions about this text that may relate to your later questions. The Greek tense for "sinned," according to one of my Bible commentaries (Word Pictures in the New Testament), is the "constative (summary) aorist active indicative," which apparently serves the purpose of "gathering up in this one tense the history of the race." So when the text says that "all sinned," it doesn't necessarily have to be read as "every single individual ever" (some saints in the OT are described as being "perfect," I think), but rather as a general collective statement about mankind. There's the additional fact that the word for "all" does not always seem to necessarily mean "every single one," but I'll just point that out and not say much further about it.

As to your translation of St. Jerome's Latin, I find it problematic (and yes, I do know Latin). Here's the text of his Latin, most of which you also cite:

et ita in omnes homines mors pertransiit in quo omnes peccaverunt.

The classic way of rendering this is: "and thus onto all men death passed in which [or, in whom] all have sinned" (check your Bibles, for example, including the Douay-Rheims). The Latin word, quo, is in the ablative case; when the preposition in is followed by the ablative case, it means "in, on, or among." Furthermore, quo is a masculine (or neuter) relative pronoun, typically meaning "who, which, or that." Thus, I'm not sure why you render it as "in the way that." Quo can mean something like "to the end that," or "in order that," but this is not the standard meaning, and is (as far as I know) certainly not the meaning when it is preceded by the preposition in, because that would likely result in a redundancy to the effect of something like "in to the end that," or "on in order that." The typical translation of in quo is "in whom" or "in which," where quo is a masculine (or neuter) pronoun in the ablative case, referring back to some prior masculine (or neuter) noun.

And that's precisely where the second problem arises. If quo is a relative pronoun, which it seems to be, then in the Latin it cannot refer to death (mors) because the Latin word for "death" is feminine. The most likely Latin noun prior to it which matches its gender is the "unum hominem" (one man, i.e., Adam) earlier in the passage. And thus it turns out reading as that all men sinned in Adam, which is the idea that Augustine took up and ran with.

You also say: May I respectfully submit that you have taken one aspect of what we've said here and run with it? Paul, and we along with him (read the article and the book I suggested, you'll see), agree that it's often (and initially, in the case of Adam and Eve, is) the other way around: sin leads to death as a consequence; it is sin that unleashed death into the world, not death that caused Adam and Eve to sin. However, once death is unleashed, it is also okay to say that death causes sin, in a sort of vicious circle. This is perhaps part of the reason why we needed Christ to free us, since the circle is so vicious. There's no disagreement with Judaism here, as far as your point here goes.

Also, we (or at least I) agree that there are other consequences of sin besides death, such as a corruption of our nature that leads to concupiscence and that sort of thing. So I don't feel there's a need for me to touch on those things here. No one believes that impulses only come from environmental factors and not from internal aspects of diseased human nature.

Oh, one thing I forgot to elaborate upon. You asked how Romans 5:14 can say that not all have sinned when we're saying that all have sinned because of death. Well, part of what I mentioned above about what "all" refers to might deal with this. Also, part of what I said about the different understandings of "because" might deal with it too (as some took it to mean that all shared in sin according to their diseased nature, although not as a form of personal sin/guilt). So, I think that works out but ends up putting us closely in agreement. In fact, Ghosty, I think you and I are more or less arguing for the same thing. What's your view of Romans 5:14 and so on?

Thanks, and God bless,
Jason