This progress in Mariolatry is strikingly reflected in the history of Christian art. 'The first pictures of the early Christian ages simply represent the woman. By-and-by we find outlines of the mother and the child. In an after-age the Son is sitting upon a throne, with the mother crowned, but sitting as yet below him. In an age still later, the crowned mother on a level with the Son. Later still, the mother on a throne above the Son. And lastly, a Romish picture represents the eternal Son in wrath, about to destroy the earth, and the Virgin Intercessor interposing, pleading, by significant attitude, her maternal rights, and redeeming the world from his vengeance. Such was, in fact, the progress of Virgin-worship. First the woman reverenced for the Son's sake; then the woman reverenced above the Son, and adored.'
(1) The idea of the perpetual Virginity of Mary was already current in the ante-Nicene age, and spread in close connection with the ascetic overestimate of celibacy, and the rise of monasticism. It has a powerful hold even over many Protestant minds, on grounds of religious propriety. Tertullian, who died about 220, still held that Mary bore children to Joseph after the birth of Christ. But towards the close of the fourth century the denial of her perpetual virginity (by the Antidicomarianites, by Helvidius and Jovinian) was already treated as a profane and indecent heresy by Epiphanius in the Greek, and Jerome in the Latin Church. Hence the hypothesis that the brethren and sisters of Jesus, so often mentioned in the Gospels, were either children of Joseph by a former marriage (Epiphanius), or only cousins of Jesus (Jerome). On the other hand, however, the same Epiphanius places among his eighty heresies the Mariolatry of the Collyridianæ, a company of women in Arabia, in the last part of the fourth century, who sacrificed to Mary little cakes or loaves of bread (kolluris, hence the name Kolluridianoi), and paid her divine honor with festive rites similar to those connected with the cult of Cybele, the magna mater deûm, in Arabia and Phrygia.
(2) The freedom of Mary from actual sin was first clearly taught in the fifth century by Augustine and Pelagius, who, notwithstanding their antagonism on the doctrines of sin and grace, agreed in this point, as they did also in their high estimate of asceticism and monasticism. Augustine, for the sake of Christ's honor, exempted Mary from willful contact with actual sin; [222] but he expressly included her in the fall of Adam and its hereditary consequences. [223] Pelagius, who denied hereditary sin, went further, and exempted Mary (with several other saints of the Old Testament) from sin altogether; [224] and, if he were not a condemned heretic, he might be quoted as the father of the modern dogma. [225] The view which came to prevail in the Catholic Church was that Mary, though conceived in sin, like David and all men, was sanctified in the womb, like Jeremiah (i. 5) and John the Baptist (Luke i. 15), and thus prepared to be the spotless receptacle for the Son of God and Saviour of mankind. Many, however, held that she was not fully sanctified till she conceived the Saviour by the Holy Ghost. The extravagant praise lavished on 'the Mother of God' by the Fathers after the defeat of Nestorianism (431), and the frequent epithets most holy and immaculate (panagia, immaculata and immaculatissima), refer only to her spotless purity of character after her sanctification, but not to her conception. [226] The Greek Church goes as far as the Roman in the practice of Mariolatry, but rejects the dogma of the Immaculate Conception as subversive of the Incarnation. [227]
(3) The third step, which exempts Mary from original sin as well, is of much later origin. It meets us first as a pious opinion in connection with the festival of the Conception of Mary, which was fixed upon Dec. 8, nine months before the older festival of her birth (celebrated Sept. 8). This festival was introduced by the Canons at Lyons in France, Dec. 8, 1139, and gradually spread into England and other countries. Although it was at first intended to be the festival of the Conception of the immaculate Mary, it concealed the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, since every ecclesiastical solemnity acknowledges the sanctity of its object.
For this reason, Bernard of Clairvaux, 'the honey-flowing doctor' doctor mellifluus), and greatest saint of his age, who, by a voice mightier than the Pope's, roused Europe to the second crusade, opposed the festival as a false honor to the royal Virgin, which she does not need, and as an unauthorized innovation, which was the mother of temerity, the sister of superstition, and the daughter of levity. [228] He urged against it that it was not sanctioned by the Roman Church. He rejected the opinion of the Immaculate Conception of Mary as contrary to tradition and derogatory to the dignity of Christ, the only sinless being, and asked the Canons of Lyons the pertinent question, 'Whence they discovered such a hidden fact? On the same ground they might appoint festivals for the conception of the parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents of Mary, and so on without end.' [229] It does not diminish, but rather increases (for the Romish stand-point) the weight of his protest, that he was himself an enthusiastic eulogist of Mary, and a believer in her sinless birth. He put her in this respect on a par with Jeremiah and John the Baptist. [230]
The same ground was taken substantially by the greatest schoolmen of the Middle Ages till the beginning of the fourteenth century: Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109), who closely followed Augustine; [231] Peter the Lombard, 'the Master of Sentences' (d. 1161); Alexander of Hales, 'the irrefragable doctor' (d. 1245); St. Bonaventura, 'the seraphic doctor' (d. 1274); Albertus Magnus, 'the wonderful doctor' (d. 1280); St. Thomas Aquinas, 'the angelic doctor' (d. 1274), and the very champion of orthodoxy, followed by the whole school of Thomists and the order of the Dominicans. St. Thomas taught that Mary was conceived from sinful flesh in the ordinary way, secundum carnis concupiscentiam ex commixtione maris, and was sanctified in the womb after the infusion of the soul (which is called the passive conception); for otherwise she would not have needed the redemption of Christ, and so Christ would not be the Saviour of all men. He distinguishes, however, three grades in the sanctification of the Blessed Virgin: first, the sanctificatio in utero, by which she was freed from the original guilt (culpa originalis); secondly, the sanctificatio in conceptu Domini, when the Holy Ghost overshadowed her, whereby she was totally purged (totaliter mundata) from the fuel or incentive to sin (fomes peccati); and, thirdly, the sanctificatio in morte, by which she was freed from all consequences of sin (liberata ab omni miseria). Of the festival of the Conception, he says that it was not observed, but tolerated by the Church of Rome, and, like the festival of the Assumption, was not to be entirely rejected (non totaliter reprobanda). [232] The University of Paris, which during the Middle Ages was regarded as the third power in Europe, gave the weight of its authority for a long time to the doctrine of the Maculate Conception. Even seven Popes are quoted on the same side, and among them three of the greatest, viz., Leo I. (who says that Christ alone was free from original sin, and that Mary obtained her purification through her conception of Christ), Gregory I., and Innocent III. [233]
But a change in favor of the opposite view was brought about, in the beginning of the fourteenth century, by Duns Scotus, 'the subtle doctor' (d. 1308), who attacked the system of St. Thomas and the Augustinian doctrine of original sin, who delighted in the most abstruse questions and the most intricate problems, to show the skill of his acute dialectics, and who could twist a disagreeable text into its opposite meaning. He was the first schoolman of distinction who advocated the Immaculate Conception, first at Oxford, though very cautiously, as a possible and probable fact. [234] He refuted, according to a doubtful tradition, the opposite theory, in a public disputation at Paris, with no less than two hundred arguments, and converted the University to his view. [235] At all events, he made it a distinctive tenet of his order.
Henceforward the Immaculate Conception became an apple of discord between rival schools of Thomists and Scotists, and the rival orders of the Dominicans and Franciscans. They charged each other with heresy, and even with mortal sin for holding the one view or the other. Visions, marvelous fictions, weeping pictures of Mary, and letters from heaven were called in to help the argument for or against a fact which no human being, not even Mary herself, can know without a divine revelation. Four Dominicans, who were discovered in a pious fraud against the Franciscan doctrine, were burned, by order of a papal court, in Berne, on the eve of the Reformation. The Swedish prophetess, St. Birgitte, was assured in a vision by the Mother of God that she was conceived without sin; while St. Catharine of Siena prophesied for the Dominicans that Mary was sanctified in the third hour after her conception. So near came the contending parties that the difference, though very important as a question of principle, was practically narrowed down to a question of a few hours. The Franciscan view gradually gained ground. The University of Paris, the Spanish nation, and the Council of Basle (1439) favored it. Pope Sixtus IV., himself a Franciscan, gave his sanction and blessing to the festival of the Immaculate Conception, but threatened with excommunication all those of both parties who branded the one or the other doctrine as a heresy and mortal sin, since the Roman Church had not yet decided the question (1476 and 1483).
The Council of Trent (June 17, 1546) confirmed this neutral position, but with a leaning to the Franciscan side, by adding to the dogma on original sin the caution that it was not intended 'to comprehend in this decree the blessed and immaculate Virgin Mary.' [236] Pius V. (1570), a Dominican, condemned Baius (De Bay, Professor at Louvain, and a forerunner of the Jansenists), who held that Mary had actual as well as original sin; but soon afterwards he ordered that the discussion of this delicate question should be confined to scholars in the Latin tongue, and not be brought to the pulpit or among the people. In the mean time the Franciscan doctrine was taken up and advocated with great zeal and energy by the Jesuits. At first they felt their way cautiously. Bellarmin declared the Immaculate Conception to be a pious and probable opinion, more probable than the opposite. In 1593 the fifth general assembly of the order directed its teachers to depart from St. Thomas in this article, and to defend the doctrine of Scotus, 'which was then more common and more accepted among theologians.' It is chiefly through their influence that it gained ground more and more, yet under constant opposition. Paul V. (1616) still left both parties the liberty to advocate their opinion; but a decree of the Congregation of the Holy Inquisition and Gregory XV. (1622) prohibited the publication of the doctrine that Mary was conceived in sin, and removed from the liturgy the word sanctification with reference to Mary. Then a new controversy arose as to the meaning of the term immaculate; whether it referred to the Virgin or to her conception? To make an end to all dispute, Alexander VII., urged on by the King of Spain, issued a constitution, Dec. 8, 1661, which recommends the Immaculate Conception, defining it almost in the identical words of the dogma of Pius IX. [237]
Nothing was left but the additional declaration that belief in this doctrine was necessary to salvation. 'From this time,' says Perrone, [238] 'every controversy and opposition to the mystery ceased, and the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception attained to full and quiet possession in the whole Catholic Church. No sincere Catholic ventured hereafter to utter even a sound against it, with the exception of some irreligious innovators, among whom Launoy occupies the first place, and, in these last years, George Hermes.' Thus he disposes of the powerful protest of Launoy, issued in 1676, fifteen years after the bull of Alexander VII., with irrefragable testimonies of Fathers and Popes; to which may be added the anonymous treatise 'Against Superstition,' written by Muratori, 1741, one of the most learned antiquarians and historians of the Roman Church. But Jansenism was crushed; Jesuitism, though suppressed for a while, was restored to greater power; Ultramontanism and Papal Absolutism made headway over the decay of independent learning and research; the voice of the ablest remaining Catholic scholars was unheeded; the submissiveness of the Bishops, and the ignorance, superstition, and indifference of the people united in securing the triumph of the dogma.