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Article
ST. ALBERT THE GREAT AND THE CONCEPTION OF MARY
by Martin J. Tracey
On any telling of the greatest story ever told, the Annunciation marks a dramatic climax.
And in the sixth month, the angel Gabriel was sent from God into a city of Galilee, called Nazareth, to a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin's name was Mary.
And the angel being come in, said unto her: Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.
In commenting on this passage in Luke's Gospel, St. Albert did not take the messenger of the Most High to be wasting words. The medieval bishop and doctor of the Church saw a mountain of meaning in Gabriel's simple salutation. A more prosaic medieval commentator might pass over "Ave!" as merely the Latin way of saying hello. Albert noticed something further: "ave" is "Eva" spelled backwards. Gabriel declares Mary a second Eve, bearer of a very different sort of fruit!
The view of Mary as a second Eve has deep roots. It is one of the favorite ways that the Greek Fathers talk about Our Lady. Other notions, like the idea that Mary led a life without sin, are equally venerable. Centuries of prayer and meditation stand between these initial efforts to plumb the deposit of faith and Pius IX's authoritative definition, in 1854, of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. St. Albert the Great played an important role in this development. However, as we shall see, he fell short of seeing that the Blessed Virgin Mary, "in the first instant of her conception, by a singular privilege and grace granted by God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Savior of the human race, was preserved exempt from all stain of original sin" (Ineffabilis Deus). St. Albert's error is instructive for understanding what is at stake in the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception.
Albertus Magnus
St. Albert's life spans the better part of the thirteenth century (1200?-1280). Widely admired for his wisdom and learning, he was known to his contemporaries as "Albertus Magnus": Albert the Great. Subsequent generations, impressed by the breadth of his learning, called him "Doctor universalis": Teacher of all subjects. He was also the teacher of a rather singular student, St. Thomas Aquinas, his "Dumb Ox" with a bellow for the ages.
St. Albert did study and teach a wide variety of subjects, though not always for angelic pupils. Around 1250, acting in religious obedience, he began the process of commenting the known works of Aristotle. St. Albert's attempt to make the Greek philosopher "intelligible to the Latins" filled twenty years of his life and almost twice as many volumes! As a commentator, St. Albert is no slave to the letter of Aristotle's texts. He uses them as a means of addressing intellectual problems of more immediate relevance to his day. He draws on Arabic, Byzantine and Greek traditions of commentary to do so. St. Albert's commentaries include extensive "digressions" in which he at times drops altogether the conceit of interpreting Aristotle. It helps to understand the latitude St. Albert saw in his role as a commentator to recall that he wrote self-standing treatises to "fill the gaps" in the Aristotelian corpus.
St. Albert is perhaps best remembered for his life-long interest in the order and operation of the natural world. It was in recognition of the discipline and godliness of this interest that Pius XII declared Albert patron saint of "students of the natural sciences" in his Apostolic Letter Ad Deum (16 December 1941). In fostering devotion to St. Albert, the Holy See hoped to improve "the sad state of affairs of our day when the latest advances of science are employed, unhappily, not for God's praise and man's salvation, but to visit the calamities of war even upon civilian centers and cities."
Latria toward St. Albert may be reserved to Catholics, but admiration for his intellect is not. Contemporary specialists in the history of science accord Albert the Great an important place in the rise of "the scientific method." He is said to have been among the first to have recognized the importance of observation and experiment for understanding natural phenomena. If certain scholars of Aristotle do not see Albert's commentaries as a helpful means of understanding the Stagirite, few medievalists deny the influence these commentaries exercised on generations of conscientious readers in centers of learning throughout Europe.
St. Albert and Our Lady
The assiduous natural scientist and scholar of ancient philosophy is not the personality-type we might most readily associate with an affective devotion to the Blessed Virgin. And yet St. Albert had such a devotion. If we did not know so from the prayers, hymns, and sequences he wrote in her memory, we could infer it from other works. As a medieval biographer notes, Albert can never bring himself, even in his driest academic writings, to refer to the Mother of God without appending some epithet, some pious ejaculation, reminding us of Our Lady's tenderness, sweetness and maternal love.
Some biographers report other evidence of the intimacy of St. Albert's relationship to Mary. The Blessed Virgin is said to have appeared to him on as many as four occasions. Mary counseled him to enter the Dominican order as a young man, and dissuaded him when he considered leaving it because -- students of theology will sympathize -- its program of study was destroying his faith! She appeared to St. Albert a third time in 1256, giving him the presence of mind needed to defeat in public debate that most cunning opponent of Dominican mendicancy, William of St. Amour. So the first three legends. Visitors of Cologne who have walked the short distance, looking eastward, from St. Albert's tomb in St. Andreas to Duns Scotus's in the Minoritenkirche, may begin to see what is true in a fourth: the Blessed Virgin and St. Albert, her instrument, are the chief architects of Cologne Cathedral!
As great a source of spiritual consolation as Our Lady was for Albert, she was also a source of intellectual stimulation -- an impetus toward a deeper understanding of things. The speculative problems attending Mary's relationship to our Lord and her place within the economy of salvation occupied Albert's professional attention from his earliest days as a lecturer in theology at different Dominican houses of study within the German province.
St. Albert's first work, On the Nature of the Good, shows the kind of stimulus the person of Mary gave to his speculative thought. Albert concludes a treatise which begins with a consideration of "the good as a transcendental attribute of being" with a discussion of what the particular character of Our Lady's virginity discloses about the essence of virtue.
St. Albert's teaching about Mary is scattered throughout his writings. He did not write "Mariological" works per se. Indeed, he did not recognize "Mariology" as a sub-discipline of dogmatic theology. Nevertheless, he does make claims bearing on classical Mariological problems, e.g., about her Immaculate Conception, sinlessness, perpetual virginity, Bodily Assumption into heaven, her role as mediatrix, and the nature of the worship due her. St. Albert's studies of Mary, however, are always, in the last analysis, Christological. In a memorable metaphor, St. Albert likens Our Lady to a "window" opening out on the via crucis.
Until recently, St. Albert's contributions to Mariology were poorly understood. Misunderstanding arose, in part, from mistaken assumptions about St. Albert's authorship. Several long Mariological treatises were falsely attributed to the prolific Dominican. The falsity of these attributions was not recognized until this century. Even at the time of St. Albert's canonization in 1931, scholars still believed him to be the author of the Mariale, a work whose length and scope make it something of a medieval summa mariologica. Father Albert Fries, C.Ss.R., a member of the papally-sponsored commission established in the 1940s to prepare critical editions of Albert's authentic writings, argued persuasively against his authorship of the Mariale in 1954.
The Mariale does appear to have been a source for St. Albert in his own work. It is not, however, a work that St. Albert himself wrote or dictated. Father Fries showed this by illustrating how the Mariale's teaching on the Immaculate Conception differs from the teaching in other texts believed on very strong grounds to have been written by St. Albert. The same criterion excludes several other Mariological works traditionally attributed to Albertus Magnus, among them, the De laudibus beatae Mariae virginis, Biblia mariana, and Compendium super Ave Maria. Some of these texts do contain excerpts from authentically Albertine writings. Each, however, contains other material that in all likelihood is not his own.
Immaculate Conception
St. Albert, we observed, denies the doctrine of Immaculate Conception as Pius IX would define it. What then does he affirm, and what are his grounds for doing so? It may be helpful, before discussing St. Albert's views about Mary's conception, to consider what six subsequent centuries of guidance by the Holy Spirit have brought to light.
Immaculate Conception is not, of course, a claim about the way Mary conceived Jesus. Neither is it a claim about how St. Anne conceived Mary, at least in our ordinary sense of the word. It is actually a claim about the state of Mary's soul at the moment of its creation, a moment which Ineffabilis Deus speaks of as Mary's "passive conception."
The Blessed Mother came into the world as the result of the normal course of events between spouses. She was born, that is to say, of the love of Sts. Anne and Joachim. To say that Mary's conception was "spotless" or "immaculate" is to say nothing about the character of the conjugal act itself --as, for instance, that it was perfectly free of all disordered desire (or, at the risk of seeming flippant, that it took place on clean sheets!). It is only to say something about Mary's passive conception or ensoulment.
When Mary's soul was infused into the embryo in St. Anne's womb, it was perfectly free of the consequences of original sin. Sacred tradition teaches that there are three main consequences of original sin: death, the loss of complete mastery over our human passions, and the loss of sanctifying grace. The sacrament of baptism utterly removes the final defect, rendering the soul fit for God's life. The other consequences are more abiding; baptism is not sufficient to remove them. Medieval theologians had a term for the abiding spiritual residue of original sin. They called it the fomes concupiscentiae -- literally, the "kindling wood of disordered desire." Sts. Paul and Augustine articulated the nature of this disorder with special acuity: postlapsarian human beings suffer war within their very members. They have a diminished capacity to see the truth of things, and a real propensity to seek satisfaction in all but He in Whom human desire finds rest. This disorder within the soul is a kind of ever-present occasion of sin for human beings this side of eternity. Its mere presence in the human soul, however, does not in itself render human beings incapable of God's life, no more than does any simple occasion of sin.
The idea that Mary's soul was free of the effects of original sin -- and most especially, of the fomes concupiscentiae -- was born of a much older one: that of Mary's innocence of all personal sin. As the Fathers liked to argue, only the holiest of temples, the sanctum sanctorum, is fit to give shelter to God incarnate. Only a sinless human being is fit to be the "God-bearer," Theotokos, Deipara. Mary's sinlessness is often presented as a necessary corollary to two basic social truths: the glory of a child reflects honor on its parents, and the shame of a parent brings disgrace upon a child. The Virgin's sinlessness, that is to say, "builds a fence" around the sinlessness of Christ. The Fathers of the church recognized the need to avoid casting even an oblique shadow on the Son of God, the one who is like us in all things but sin.
St. Albert, of course, never intended to cast such a shadow. This explains his insistence that Mary was perfectly free of the effects of original sin as an adult, at the moment of Christ's conception. St. Albert does appear, however, to have wanted to view Mary's sanctification as a kind of process, a sort of habituation. Over several faultless years of freely-chosen charity, Mary acquired, with God's grace, that perfect purity making her a worthy vessel of God's Son.
St. Albert allowed for certain exceptions to the ordinary course of events even in this step-wise sanctification of Mary's soul. Thus, he speaks of a special cleansing of Mary's soul in St. Anne's womb, freeing her of what he calls "subjective responsibility" for the sin of Adam. She was not, however, freed of its after-effect, the fomes concupiscentiae. Mary's special "baptism in the womb" only began a process of sanctification which was brought to completion at the moment when the Holy Spirit overshadowed her.
Why did St. Albert hesitate to affirm that, from the moment of her conception, Mary was free from all stain of original sin? Like many medieval theologians, he worried that such an affirmation would diminish the universality of the need for redemption. St. Albert didn't want to make it seem as though Mary didn't need Christ to ransom her from the debt of sin. Now, the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, properly understood, in no way implies this. The intervening centuries strengthen us in speaking sharply: one ought to distinguish between "bearing the stain of original sin" and "sharing, as a member of the human race, in responsibility for the sin of our first parents."
Someone to look up to?
If modern believers have misgivings about the immaculateness of Mary's conception, they are not likely to follow from a theology of redemption. A friend of mine helped me to see a more common reason why some believers balk at the concept of the Immaculate Conception: they believe that the doctrine dehumanizes Mary. To believe that her soul was created differently from our own, he argued, such that she never suffered that "war within one's members" of which all adult Christians are veterans, is to divest her of her humanity. She looses her power to move us, for we can no longer "identify" with her. What merit is there to her life of love if she lived it all so easily?
No short answer would satisfy my friend. If we found a quiet moment one evening, I would tell him over beer that I think he misunderstands what it is that is worth loving and admiring about people.
Everyone is moved by the conquest of adversity. But it is never the adversity itself that draws us to such heroes. It is the beauty, truth and goodness of who they are, what they do. Those people who, thanks to habit or disposition, do not have to struggle much to master base inclinations are the better and not the worse for this. The very belief that this element of their excellence makes them "less human" is the symptom of a real dehumanization, one that left unchecked, dims our hope and shakes our faith. It is the dark side of one man's "We're all human," to his friend's confession, "I got drunk last night."
Dehumanization often walks hand-in-hand with false solidarity -- one in which people affirm one another in their acceptance of misery. No one is better than we are; everyone has these desires. The truth of the matter is that the Lord's chosen have them less and less, and the Mother of God never knew them.
Now, St. Albert's confusion is not as gloomy as all this. I have little doubt that he ever despaired that the glory of God is a human being fully alive, or that he mistook the sober sense in which this is true. Mary in her Immaculate Conception is the promise of full humanity. She is Eve in reverse. It was to this Virgin that St. Albert, in full voice, sang:
Nascitur ex virgine From a virgin is born
sine viri semine without the seed of man
verus sol iustitiae, the true Sun of Justice,
natus sine crimine. born without offense.
Laudemus in virgine, Let us praise the virgin
quod produxit libere for she freely brought forth
nobis regem gloriae. the King of Glory for us.
Iacet in praesepio, He lay in a manger
cuius natalicio at whose time of birth
mundus floret gaudio. the world abounds with joy.
Ergo nostra concio, May our assembly
omni plena gaudio, full of every joy
nunc et sine termino now and without end
benedicat Domino. bless the Lord!
Bibliographical note:
Students interested in St. Albert's Mariology should begin with Albert Fries, C.Ss.R., Die Gedanken des heiligen Albertus Magnus über die Gottesmutter, Thomistische Studien VII, Fribourg, Switzerland: Paulusverlag, 1958. The superlative closing chapter of this volume has guided my essay.
Fries makes very convincing but by no means incontestable arguments for the inauthenticity of certain texts long ascribed to St. Albert in Die unter dem Namen des Albertus Magnus überlieferten mariologischen Schriften, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie des Mittelalters, Band XXXVII, Heft 4, Münster: Aschendorff, 1954.