Today is the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, a dogma the full implications of which are perhaps too little considered. From the first moment I heard it sung, I fell in love with the medieval chant Sancta et Immaculata, “Holy and Spotless Virgin.” Although the text is traditionally the Sixth Responsory of Christmas Matins, the chant furnishes a musical icon of this dogma.
The text of the chant, in English, is as follows:
R. O Mary, how holy and how spotless is thy virginity! I am too dull to praise thee!
* For thou hast borne in thy breast Him Whom the heavens cannot contain.
V. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.
R. For thou hast borne in thy breast Him Whom the heavens cannot contain.
V. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, * and to the Holy Ghost.
R. For thou hast borne in thy breast Him Whom the heavens cannot contain.
That music mysteriously takes its form from, and in, pain, is evident in the melodic line; its beauty is otherworldly, its sublime melismata wounding. The intermittent drone suggests the unutterable caverns of existence from which beauty arises, and which confound and overwhelm mortal life – a distant language barely perceptible and which one cannot adequately interpret.
The encyclical Ad Diem Illum Laetissimum, promulgated February 2, 1904 by St. Pius X, fifty years after the Apostolic Constitution of Pius IX declaring the Immaculate Conception as dogma, teaches that Mary’s was not only the prerogative of endowing the incarnate Christ with flesh, “of which material should be prepared the Victim for the salvation of men,” but also “the office of tending and nourishing that Victim, and at the appointed time presenting Him for the sacrifice.” Pius X attributes the words of the psalmist: “My life is consumed in sorrow and my years in groans” to Mother as well as to Son.
Our Holy Father Pope Francis – and this should not be missed – understands this inescapable connection between suffering and glory as operative even in the life of heaven. As he writes in Laudato si’, “Mary, the Mother who cared for Jesus, now cares with maternal affection and pain for this wounded world. Just as her pierced heart mourned the death of Jesus, so now she grieves for the sufferings of the crucified poor and for the creatures of this world laid waste by human power.”
Pope Pius IX, in his Apostolic Constitution Ineffabilis Deus, recounts that the Fathers proclaimed that Mary “was always united with God and joined to him by an eternal covenant; that she was never in darkness but always in light.” And yet this is a light which holds as a contrary only sin and most emphatically not suffering – suffering knowing neither rebellion nor bitterness, pain trans-suffused with an austere jubilation. Turning again to St. Pius X in Ad Diem Illum Laetissimum: “When the supreme hour of the Son came, beside the Cross of Jesus there stood Mary His Mother, not merely occupied in contemplating the cruel spectacle, but rejoicing that her Only Son was offered for the salvation of mankind, and so entirely participating in His Passion, that if it had been possible she would have gladly borne all the torments that her Son bore (S. Bonav. 1. Sent d. 48, ad Litt. dub. 4).” This sober exultation – human emotion as immaculate – is as an ultra-fine mist carried aloft on the chant.
Pius IX writes that “the conception of Mary is to be venerated as something extraordinary, wonderful, eminently holy, and different from the conception of all other human beings.” I am the Immaculate Conception: I read these words as a contingent expression of eternal begetting, a generative affirmation ever active and present, bearing the most profound interrelatedness (apart from the created nature of Christ) to the eternal simultaneity of God, having a discrete historical start-point, and yet original, “from the beginning,” setting Mary apart as uniquely “active” in an ontological sense, but according to the mode of creatures. As the Son is “the arm of the river’s infinite waters,” as we see in Thomas’s Commentary on the Sentences, so St. John of the Cross exalts the soul in divine union, of which Mary is highest exemplar:
You so overflow with [the knowledge of his graces and virtues] and are so engulfed in them that you are likewise the well of living waters that flow impetuously from Mount Lebanon (Sg. 4:15), that is, from God. You were made wonderfully joyful according to the whole harmonious composite of your soul and even your body, converted completely into a paradise divinely irrigated, so that the psalmist’s affirmation might also be fulfilled in you: The impetus of the river makes the city of God joyful.”
And for all this, the conception of Mary did not contradict the order of nature. A scandalized piety sought to locate Mary’s sanctification in an event subsequent to her conception. Pius IX – and the Church with him – stands firm against such timidity. In the Immaculate Conception, marriage itself is supremely ennobled. Who but the parents of Mary most perfectly observed the exhortation to fruitfulness recorded in Genesis, thus undermining the curse even before the Fall? And in Mary herself, maternity is transformed, beyond all imagining: From Ineffabilis Deus: “[S]he would triumph utterly over the ancient serpent. To her did the Father will to give his only-begotten Son – the Son whom, equal to the Father and begotten by him, the Father loves from his heart – and to give this Son in such a way that he would be the one and the same common Son of God the Father and of the Blessed Virgin Mary.”
Pius IX goes on to say of Mary that she “would possess that fullness of holy innocence and sanctity than which, under God, one cannot even imagine anything greater, and which, outside of God, no mind can succeed in comprehending fully” – a perfection to exhaust the resources of the angelic intellect. It strikes me that, just as the created nature of Christ cannot comprehend the Word, so God has ordained this correlate within the created order itself.
And yet, the earthly life of Mary was one of growth and upward striving. Master theologian Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, from Christian Perfection and Contemplation:
[T]he progress of charity in the Blessed Virgin, who was preserved from every stain of sin, was continual in this life. It was not even interrupted by sleep, for the infused knowledge which she had received in the superior part of her soul was always on the alert and her meritorious acts did not cease, any more than the beating of her heart. The initial plenitude of grace, which she had received from the instant of her immaculate conception, was thus multiplied by every act of charity, each one more intense than the preceding, and incessantly multiplied according to a marvelous progression which we could never calculate.
While we cannot comprehend the sanctity of the Virgin, she has modelled for us the fully energetic co-creative quest envisioned for us by God. Ratzinger defines eros as “that openness of man that compels him to transcend again and again the limits of the merely knowable and to move toward the eternal.”
Returning to Garrigou-Lagrange:
What a prodigious acceleration in the progress of divine love takes place when there is nothing in the soul to arrest its growth! Reason is overawed in the presence of this masterpiece of God. Is it credible? Indeed, so much so that if we look about us, we find even in the material world a semblance of this wonderful law of the spiritual life; namely, every material body falling freely in space takes on a uniformly accelerated movement, the speed of which grows in proportion to the time of the fall.
These prodigious accelerations we discern in the flowing verses of the “Holy and Spotless Virgin” chant.
In the chant, we hear rationality, and we hear the love that draws us on. Again, Ratzinger – its application to Mary is unmistakable: “But where knowledge and love are united in an Eros ordered to the eternal, there the sobriety of the rational illumines love; there the rational receives fecundity and warmth from the depths of the Spirit in whom truth and love are one.”
Pope Pius IX praises the Virgin as “ark and house of holiness which Eternal Wisdom built, and as that Queen who, abounding in delights and leaning on her Beloved, came forth from the mouth of the Most High, entirely perfect, beautiful, most dear to God and never stained with the least blemish.” His successor Pius X matches him in poetry: “[T]he Virgin Most Clement rises before our eyes like a rainbow, as the arbiter of peace between God and man.”
As I behold the full size replica of the Guadalupe image in my living room in now dying candle light, I cede the last word to our Holy Father, Pope Francis, again from Laudato si’: “Completely transfigured, she now lives with Jesus, and all creatures sing of her fairness. She is the Woman, clothed in the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars (Rev. 12:1). Carried up into heaven, she is the Mother and Queen of all creation. In her glorified body, together with the Risen Christ, part of creation has reached the fullness of its beauty.”
Image: The Immaculate Conception. By Peter Paul Rubens – Museo del Prado, Madrid, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37192051
V. J. Tarantino is co-founder of Sacred Beauty, a Private Association of the Faithful in the Diocese of Bridgeport. She has studied ancient and Medieval metaphysics and has devoted her adult life to the service of liturgy (study of liturgical texts and norms, the cultivation of sacred elocution, musical performance and composition, the beautification of sacred space, and the organization and direction of public Eucharistic Adoration) and to immersion in the writings of the Doctors of the Church and of recent Popes. Her writing can be found at https://questionsdisputedandotherwise.substack.com/
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