Will the Anglicans Ever Figure it Out About the Blessed Mother?

I didn’t mean for it to be a response, but while putting together my post Mary, Protestant and Catholic the North American Anglican was busy with this topic with two posts:

• Mary in the Anglican Tradition by William Jenkins; and
• Another Look at St. Mary the Virgin in the Anglican Tradition by Richard Tarsitano, which is a response to the first

Let me make one serious observation before trying to sort things out: Tarsitano is right that the 1940 Hymnal (or any other hymnal) isn’t a good way to establish doctrine. I was raised on same and I can attest that some of the hymns are magnificent, but some of them are real duds. One of them turned up in another NAA piece The Confession–St. Peter’s Day, when Andrew Brashier cited “They Cast Their Nets in Galilee” (#437.) This hymn, underneath its pious tone, is one of the most sour assessments of Christian sacrifice ever penned, which may explain why George Conger prefers givebacks over renunciation. As I noted when I posted the album Frederick Gere and Milton Williams: The Winds of God, it is “my unfavourite hymn.”

With that out of the way, both of these posts leave the same impression: for a part of Christianity which is supposed to be based on reason, Scripture and tradition, the first two get the short shrift. I think that’s one reason why I swam the Tiber: in addition to the endless fence riding and Anglican fudge, most Episcopal divines were content to either appeal to the aesthetic or, as one of them put it more recently, “tinker with the Prayer Book.” Roman Catholicism, when it isn’t hindered by the likes of the last Occupant of the See of Peter, has answers, many right, some wrong, but answers.

In Mary, Protestant and Catholic the dissertation’s author does a good job looking at the issue from a Scriptural standpoint, which would advance the debate a good deal. I think we need to focus on two central issues to get to the bottom of this: why it was important for Jesus to be born of a virgin, and why we need an additional patronage in our heavenly relationships.

Let’s start with the first, and a good place to start is Aquinas (Summa, III q.28 a.1):

I answer that, We must confess simply that the Mother of Christ was a virgin in conceiving for to deny this belongs to the heresy of the Ebionites and Cerinthus, who held Christ to be a mere man, and maintained that He was born of both sexes.

It is fitting for four reasons that Christ should be born of a virgin. First, in order to maintain the dignity or the Father Who sent Him. For since Christ is the true and natural Son of God, it was not fitting that He should have another father than God: lest the dignity belonging to God be transferred to another.

Secondly, this was befitting to a property of the Son Himself, Who is sent. For He is the Word of God: and the word is conceived without any interior corruption: indeed, interior corruption is incompatible with perfect conception of the word. Since therefore flesh was so assumed by the Word of God, as to be the flesh of the Word of God, it was fitting that it also should be conceived without corruption of the mother.

Thirdly, this was befitting to the dignity of Christ’s humanity in which there could be no sin, since by it the sin of the world was taken away, according to John 1:29: “Behold the Lamb of God” (i.e. the Lamb without stain) “who taketh away the sin of the world.” Now it was not possible in a nature already corrupt, for flesh to be born from sexual intercourse without incurring the infection of original sin. Whence Augustine says (De Nup. et Concup. i): “In that union,” viz. the marriage of Mary and Joseph, “the nuptial intercourse alone was lacking: because in sinful flesh this could not be without fleshly concupiscence which arises from sin, and without which He wished to be conceived, Who was to be without sin.”

Fourthly, on account of the very end of Incarnation of Christ, which was that men might be born again as sons of God, “not of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:13), i.e. of the power of God, of which fact the very conception of Christ was to appear as an exemplar. Whence Augustine says (De Sanct. Virg.): “It behooved that our Head, by a notable miracle, should be born, after the flesh, of a virgin, that He might thereby signify that His members would be born, after the Spirit, of a virgin Church.”

Although Aquinas goes on to defend many typically Catholic positions on the Blessed Virgin (but not the Immaculate Conception) this is a good place to start. Neither of the NAA articles really tackle this issue with any kind of precision. It’s true that one thing the Reformation sought to achieve (and in England that was given a boost by the closing of the monasteries) was to get away from the idea that only celibate people were really full-on Christians. Our hypersexualised era–not unlike in some ways that into which Our Lord came–should give us more sympathy than it does with a society that wanted to get past sexual activity–with or without the goal of procreation–as the sine qua non of life. We for our part have allowed a Mormon-style “waist down religion” to creep into our churches. Neither of these extremes is justified by the New Testament, but the Virgin Birth was the first sign that we really were getting a new and better way.

This brings me to the second point: do we really need another intermediary between ourselves and God? This gets to the whole issue of Mary and the other saints as “patrons” delivering our requests as clients to our “Emperor.” The whole idea of patron saints and their intercession was a combination of two things: a concession to the polytheistic culture and an integration of Roman political concepts into the life of the Church. Especially with the latter I will offer the What the Britons Thought of Pelagius and Grace, especially relevant to those who see the Church of England as a continuation of the British church.

I think that the people of the “three-legged stool” of reason, tradition and Scripture need to make sure all three legs are in good shape, otherwise they will find themselves flat on the floor.