www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life The Christian East & West Immaculate conception - eastern view?

Although the Western popular piety/rational is still that, the canons reflect allowing a great interval between birth and baptism if the parents lack of faith leaves little or no hope the baby will be brought up practicing the faith:
Canon 868 §1 For an infant to be baptized licitly: 2° there must be a founded hope that the infant will be brought up in the Catholic religion; if such hope is altogether lacking, the baptism is to be delayed according to the prescripts of particular law after the parents have been advised about the reason.

So, pardon my ingnorance i read the thread but i feel confused , if i get it right the Eastern say that the Blessed Mother was purified but not immaculate conception?
And what about the infant baptism i didnt get it...

I was thought in a franciscan school so i know what the Latin Catholic think... but not the East :(:(

The Eastern Churches believe that Mary Theotokos was preserved from sin throughout her life. For the East, though, all sin is personal--there is no such thing as an inherited stain of sin, let alone guilt. What we inherit from Adam is usually called the "ancestral curse"--that is to say, mortality. We believe that because of mortality, man developed instincts for self preservation that in turn develop into unhealthy "passions", in which the desires of the flesh override and domination the soul and the spirit, leading, inevitably, to sinful thoughts, words and deeds.

Thus, Mary, who indeed fell asleep ("Dormition") in the flesh before her bodily assumption into heaven was, from our perspective, prone to the ancestral curse--yet we also teach that Mary was without sin, therefore Mary shared the same human nature as the rest of mankind, and her preservation from sin was due entirely to the divine grace and her full cooperation with it.

That said, the liturgical texts seem to imply that, in some way, Mary's sinlessness was not quite the same as her Son's. Consider the famous hymn sung at Pascha:


or, from the funeral service for the departed:


If we had to conclude, then, we could say that Mary was sinless by grace while Christ was sinless by nature, and that Mary's sinlessness is a result of her perfect theosis, so that she is a full sharer in the divine nature. She is thus, as the texts of the Feast of the Dormition say, the guarantor of our resurrection and our theosis, our full and bodily admission into the Kingdom of God.

Thank you... This is clear...
This means in baptism we are sons and daughters of Christ not to remove the frist sin but to free us from the curse?!?!

In baptism we die with Christ and are reborn anew in Christ; we "put on Christ", so that we might become partakers of the divine nature. But theosis is a process, not an event, and it requires our active cooperation with the indwelling gift of the Holy Spirit that we might grow in Christ. The curse of our mortality is not removed; we die in the flesh still, but out death is now, thanks to Christ's resurrection and our baptism into Christ, is no longer permanent separation from God, but a sleep before we are raised from the tomb into glorified bodies in a restored creation.

Baptism, because it involves rebirth, washes away all actual sins. Infants have no sins to wash away, so their baptism is intended to open the path of theosis to them.

In the Eastern Christian understanding of anthropology, none of is born into a "state of sin", therefore there is no stain of sin to wash away. In that sense--not having any inherited sinful nature--we are all "conceived immaculately", but only Mary managed to remain without sin throughout her life, protected by divine grace.

For Eastern Christians, then, the doctrine of the immaculate conception is not "wrong", it's just irrelevant, given our understanding of human nature.

For Western Christians, though, "original sin" has always meant the inheritance of a sinful nature (at times, it even meant a share in Adam's guilt, although that was a minority opinion). Interestingly, this view was never a bone of contention between the Eastern and Western Churches, each of which was willing to let the other speculate freely on the matter.

To medieval Western theologians, the inheritability of sin seemed to imply there was no way Jesus could be without sin, without denying his human nature. The doctrine of the immaculate conception, therefore, is not about Mary but about Christ--how to preserve his full humanity in conjunction with his sinlessness. They did so by positing that Mary was somehow preserved from the stain of original sin, which had to have happened at the moment of conception, in order to fit neatly into Western anthropology.

But, if you are an Eastern Christian, as I said, it just isn't relevant. That's not to say an Eastern Christian could not hold the doctrine as a theologumenon. Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware) has said so repeatedly. The key is not teaching it as a "dogma", since it reflects the Tradition and theology of only one particular Church, and requires assumptions that are also alien to the Traditions of the Eastern Church--though not inherently heretical unless one is willing to go through Romanidian contortions to make it so.

The main Orthodox objection to the immaculate conception, therefore, is no longer the theology of it, but the manner in which it was promulgated and the insistence that it is a "universal" dogma of the Church.

His All-Holiness Patriarch Bartholomew, in an interview with the Italian Catholic Journal "30 Days" still sees it as a dogmatic problem.

Patriarch Bartholomew on the Immaculate Conception [orthodoxytoday.org]

He's picking nits and misstating the Latin position. It's interesting that the heavy lifters of Orthodox theology--Metropolitan John of Pergamon, Father John Ericksson, Dmitrue Staniloe, Metropolitan Kallistos, etc.--do not see it as dogmatic.

Would quite appreciate seeing the statements you have in mind from Met Zizioulas, Fr John Ericksson and Fr Dmitrie Staniloe.

Bishop Kallistos does not deserve too much weight from the faithful since he seems to have commenced a kind of personal journey and is in the process of changing his previous positions on things such as the Immaculate Conception and the ordination of women. He says that the Immaculate Conception has erroneous elements and then suggests that it could be accepted as a theologoumenon. But why would any Orthodox accept any belief which has erroneous elements? That does not seem logical to me.

The most reliable and authoritative source of doctrine in the Orthodox Church is its liturgical deposit and its iconography. These, not individual statements from individual saints or fathers or bishops, represent the consensus patrum. The liturgical deposist is the authoritative crystallisation of the Traditon and the patristic teaching.

The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is lacking in the Marian feastdays and liturgical deposit in both the Orthodox and the Eastern Catholic Churches.

The Latin Church does not commemorate the Baptism at the Jordan at Theophany. The Eastern Churches do not commemorate the Visitation of the Magi. Should the Latins adopt our practice, or should we adopt theirs, or should the Tradition of each Church be maintained because each has developed its own unique "vocabulary" for dealing with the mysteries of salvation?

"Calling to remembrance our all-holy, immaculate, most blessed, and glorious Lady Theotokos and ever-Virgin Mary with all the Saints, let us entrust ourselves and each other, and all our life unto Christ our God."

I would say that the eastern Churches liturgy does mention that the Holy Theotokos is Immaculate, maybe we don't in the East expand on it as much as the western Church but the idea is there in our Liturgy. Just a thought.

A more accurate translation would be "all-pure". "Immaculate" literally means "without stain (im+macula)". As the term, in Latin theology, directly implies "stain of original sin", the use of the word implicitly assumes the Latin position. On the other hand, "all-pure" is theologically neutral: Mary was without sin, just how this was accomplished remains a deep mystery.

It is interesting that no less a figure than Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (in one of his letters) opposed the introduction of the feast of the Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, because he saw it as an illegitimate innovation. He argued from the premise that human sexuality is inherently sinful and that therefore no union between man and woman, and therefore no human conception, can be free of sin. Still, in this at least even Saint Bernard has been overruled by the subsequent teaching of the Catholic Church.

I see the letter is already on the Forum

https://www.byzcath.org/forums/ubbthreads.php/topics/261531/1

But in this, Bernard was doing no more than reiterating what had been the consistent Western position since the third century (and probably earlier). The Eastern Churches always had a more positive view of human sexuality, and never equated the sexual act with the transmission of sin. This can be seen in early discussions of the sacrament of marriage, which in the West was seen principally as necessary for procreation and as a means of legitimizing sexual relations. On the other hand, the Greek Fathers speak more positively of marriage as a sacrament symbolizing the relationship of Christ and the Church. I doubt that you would find much in the Western Fathers echoing Chrysostom's observation that "the nuptial chamber can be as holy as the monk's cell".

Taking this as given, it must be noted that the Eastern and Western Churches were well aware of their different attitudes towards sex, marriage, and, at a more fundamental level, anthropology and the effects of Adam's sin. Despite this, they did not view these differences as sufficient to justify the breaking of communion. Neither condemned the teaching of the other, neither elevated its teaching to the level of "universal dogma" (that had to wait for the medieval period, when both Churches were alienated from one another), but rather were content to respect each other's Tradition--and the differences in nuance and expression that these entailed.