East and West: The Immaculate Conception

The Roman Catholic dogma of the Immaculate Conception — that Mary was preserved from all stain of original sin from the first instant of her conception — was defined by Pope Pius IX in 1854. The Orthodox Church does not receive it. This file sets out each position in its strongest form, names its proponents, and locates the disagreement where it really lies: not chiefly in how highly Mary is honored, but in the prior divergence between the Western doctrine of inherited original sin and the Eastern doctrine of ancestral sin. It is written from within the Orthodox Church (methodology §4.1): the Roman doctrine is reported accurately and in its strongest form, but as a teaching the Church has examined and not received — on the Church’s doctrine of ancestral sin there is no inherited guilt for a preservative conception to remove.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Roman Dogma, in Its Strongest Form

On 8 December 1854, in the apostolic constitution Ineffabilis Deus, Pope Pius IX solemnly defined as revealed dogma “that the most Blessed Virgin Mary, in the first instant of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege granted by Almighty God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the human race, was preserved free from all stain of original sin” (Pius IX, Ineffabilis Deus, 8 December 1854). Several features of this definition should be stated exactly, because Orthodox critiques sometimes attack a caricature:

The privilege is a preservation, not a self-standing purity: Mary is kept immune from original sin from the first instant of her existence, so that she never contracts it.
It is worked “in view of the merits of Jesus Christ.” The dogma explicitly makes Mary a redeemed creature — indeed the most perfectly redeemed, since she is saved by Christ preventively rather than after the fact. She is not exempt from the need for a Redeemer; she is redeemed in a higher mode.
It concerns original sin as the Latin tradition understands it — a real privation and hereditary condition contracted at conception — not her personal or actual sins, which Catholic teaching in any case denies she committed.

The dogma’s strongest theological warrant is the medieval solution of Blessed John Duns Scotus (c. 1266–1308), whose doctrine of prevenient redemption answered the standard objection that an immaculate conception would exclude Mary from Christ’s universal redemption. Scotus argued that it is a more perfect redemption to be preserved from falling into sin than to be rescued after falling; the perfect Mediator, in the most excellent instance, would redeem by prevention. Hence the celebrated formula summarizing his logic: potuit, decuit, ergo fecit — “God could do it, it was fitting, therefore He did it” (on Scotus’s argument see the standard accounts, e.g. the treatment in the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, s.v. “Immaculate Conception”).

The doctrine’s strength is also shown by the seriousness of its medieval opponents, which the Roman side does not conceal. St. Bernard of Clairvaux rebuked the canons of Lyons for introducing a feast of Mary’s Conception, holding that she was sanctified in the womb (as John the Baptist and Jeremiah were) but not conceived immaculately, since her conception itself was not holy (Bernard, Letter 174, To the Canons of Lyons). St. Thomas Aquinas likewise taught that the Virgin was sanctified after animation — after her soul was infused — and so contracted original sin for at least an instant before her cleansing, precisely to preserve the universality of Christ’s redemption (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 27, a. 2). The Roman position holds that Scotus’s distinction later resolved this difficulty and that the sensus fidelium and the liturgy carried the doctrine to its 1854 definition; a Dominican-Franciscan controversy raged for centuries in between. Presented at its best, the dogma is thus the mature outcome of a long Western reflection on how to honor the Mother of God within a robust doctrine of original sin and universal redemption.

The Teaching of the Orthodox Church

The Orthodox Church rejects the dogma of the Immaculate Conception — but the decisive point, without which the Orthodox objection is misread, is that it rejects it within a different doctrine of the fall. The disagreement is downstream of the divergence treated in Ancestral versus Original Sin.

The Latin West, following Augustine and later Anselm, developed a doctrine of original sin in which Adam’s descendants inherit not only mortality and a wounded nature but a real guilt (reatus) and a positive stain contracted at conception — a reading resting partly on the Latin rendering of Romans 5:12 (in quo omnes peccaverunt, “in whom all sinned”) against the Greek eph’ hō (“because” / “in that” all sinned). The East holds instead the doctrine of ancestral sin: what is inherited from Adam is death, corruption, and a nature turned toward sin — the consequences of the ancestral transgression — not the personal guilt of Adam’s act, which cannot be inherited (John Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, 2nd ed., New York: Fordham University Press, 1979, ch. on “Original Sin,” discussing Romans 5:12 and the eph’ hō question).

From this the Orthodox critique follows directly:

The dogma answers a question the East does not pose. If there is no inherited guilt or juridical stain contracted at conception, then there is nothing of that kind for a preservative “immaculate conception” to shield Mary from. As Vladimir Lossky put it, the Western dogma “seems to us at once superfluous and impossible” on Orthodox premises — superfluous because Orthodoxy does not hold the inherited guilt it would remedy (Vladimir Lossky, “Panagia,” in In the Image and Likeness of God, Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1974).
It severs Mary’s solidarity with the human race. The Orthodox concern, voiced by Lossky and others, is that to exempt Mary from the common ancestral condition from the first instant is to set her outside the race of Adam that she was called to represent, and outside the very solidarity in which the Incarnation heals humanity from within. She must be one of us — descended from Adam, subject to mortality — if in her the “yes” of humanity to God is to be truly humanity’s own (Lossky, “Panagia,” 1974).
She is saved by Christ as all are saved. Orthodoxy insists that Mary needed and received the redemption wrought by her Son like every other human being; her sanctification is by grace and by her own free cooperation, not by a metaphysical exemption prior to and independent of the general economy of salvation.

At the same time — and this must be stated with equal force — Orthodoxy affirms the Virgin’s supreme holiness and all-purity. She is Panagia, “All-Holy”; Achrantos, “Immaculate/Undefiled”; the hymnody calls her “more honorable than the Cherubim and beyond compare more glorious than the Seraphim.” Timothy (Kallistos) Ware states the balance exactly: Orthodoxy honors Mary as Panagia and does not accept the Roman dogma, “because the Orthodox conception of original (or ancestral) sin is different from that current in the west,” so that the problem the dogma solves does not arise in the same form (Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Church, new ed., London: Penguin, 1993, section on the Mother of God). The rejection is thus not a lowering of Mary but a different account of what her holiness is and how it is grounded.

The Precise Orthodox Account of Her Sinlessness — a Disputed Question

[Disputed: how exactly to describe Mary’s freedom from sin on Orthodox premises. (1) A widely held view affirms her personal sinlessness — that she committed no actual sin — while holding that she was conceived and born in the common ancestral condition, subject to mortality and the corruptible nature inherited from Adam, and glorified only through Christ. (2) Some, wary of any formulation approaching the Latin dogma, stress that even her freedom from actual sin is a fruit of grace and free synergy realized in her life, not a natural or conception-moment exemption, and are cautious about asserting absolute impeccability. (3) Sergius Bulgakov, in The Burning Bush (Russian Kupina Neopalimaya, 1927), develops a nuanced position that grants the Virgin a unique personal holiness and even reads the Orthodox veneration as answering the same intuition the Immaculate Conception tries to capture, while rejecting the Latin dogmatic form and its juridical premises — a stance criticized by some Orthodox as conceding too much. There is no single conciliar definition of the matter in Orthodoxy, and theologians differ; what is common ground is the rejection of Ineffabilis Deus as defined and the affirmation of her all-holiness.]

A Genuine Difference, Downstream of a Deeper One

The honest summary is that this is a real theological difference, not a mere misunderstanding, and that it is largely derivative: the two communions reach different verdicts on the Immaculate Conception because they already hold different doctrines of the fall (see Ancestral versus Original Sin). Historically the boundary was not always sharp. A number of Byzantine theologians — and later Orthodox writers under Latin scholastic influence, especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — used language about Mary’s conception that came close to Western formulations, and there was no early pan-Orthodox verdict against the idea as such. The Orthodox consensus crystallized into explicit rejection largely in reaction to the 1854 definition, when the Roman dogma made the underlying difference of frameworks unavoidable and Orthodox theologians articulated why, on their own doctrine of ancestral sin, they could not receive it (Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, 1979; Ware, The Orthodox Church, 1993).

This file does not stand outside the two communions as an arbiter; it speaks from within the Church. Rome, holding a doctrine of inherited original sin, defined Mary’s preservation from it as the most perfect fruit of redemption; the Orthodox Church, holding the doctrine of inherited ancestral corruption without inherited guilt, has never received that definition — it is superfluous, answers a mis-posed problem, and endangers Mary’s saving solidarity with the race she represents; and both traditions confess her, with one voice, as the all-holy Mother of God.

References

Pope Pius IX, Ineffabilis Deus (Apostolic Constitution defining the Immaculate Conception), 8 December 1854.
St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Letter 174, To the Canons of Lyons (on the feast of the Conception of Mary).
St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 27, a. 2 (on the sanctification of the Blessed Virgin).
On Duns Scotus’s doctrine of prevenient redemption (potuit, decuit, ergo fecit): F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone, eds., The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, s.v. “Immaculate Conception, The.”
Vladimir Lossky, “Panagia,” in In the Image and Likeness of God. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974.
John Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes, 2nd ed. New York: Fordham University Press, 1979 (esp. the treatment of original sin and Romans 5:12).
Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Church, new ed. London: Penguin, 1993 (on the Mother of God and the Immaculate Conception).
Sergius Bulgakov, The Burning Bush: On the Orthodox Veneration of the Mother of God (Kupina Neopalimaya, 1927), Eng. trans. T. A. Smith. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009.