Immaculate Misconceptions

Barbin and Fradd. Source: YouTube.

During a recent episode of Pints With Aquinas, host Matt Fradd interviewed a Franciscan friar named Josemaria M. Barbin. They spent a good while talking about a Catholic saint named Maximilian Kolbe and his theories about the Immaculate Conception. These theories are (to put it mildly) problematic. Fradd even expressed his apprehension towards the friar’s views. 

I’m sure many of our Catholic friends are in the same boat. They probably felt uncomfortable listening to Barbin explain Kolbe’s theology, but weren’t sure why. They may be interested to know that Orthodox Christians have long felt similar misgivings about Roman mariology.

Before I go any further, however, I’d like to say that I have a tremendous amount of respect for Matt Fradd. I was a guest on his show a few years ago, before my conversion to Orthodoxy. He was an absolute gentleman when I told him I was becoming Orthodox. Hopefully this goes without saying, but nothing I write here is meant as an attack on him personally.

Now, let’s begin by summarizing Barbin's argument.

According to Barbin, “The Immaculate Conception, as St. Maximilian Kolbe would say, is the mystery of her person. There is only one Immaculate Conception: the Blessed Virgin Mary. " He then goes on to expound on Kolbe’s theology:

He says that we know by faith that there are two eternal processions from the Father. The father eternally begets the Son. The Father and Son eternally spirate the Holy Spirit. And what he does is he hones in on the second eternal procession. Then he says, “Father and Son are divine persons, so we can call that spiration a conception. The Father and Son are perfect, so that spiration can be called immaculate.”

Barbin then concludes:

The Immaculate Conception. She is the spouse of the Holy Spirit. And [Kolbe] says, “That title, as good as it is, is so weak to express that ineffable union.” He actually says, it’s a quasi-Incarnation of the Holy Spirit! ... What is that implying? It implies that the Holy Spirit—who is, as St. Louis de Montfert said, unfruitful in the life of God. Why? Because there’s no other persons who proceed from him—is fruitful outside God only in the blessed Virgin Mary.

Fradd admits to being unnerved by the conversation but then offers his own spin on the concept:

So from all eternity, the Father gives Himself to the Son, the Son gives Himself to the Father. The Holy Spirit—we can use the language of conception, right? The immaculate conception. And in time, we have this trinity of sorts. Not the Holy Trinity, but a different trinity of sorts, where the Holy Spirit gives himself to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Mary receives this, gives it back, as it were. And from this we have Jesus Christ.

He then sums the idea up thus: “Father/Son brings about the Holy Spirit, and then Holy Spirit/Mary, brings about the Incarnation.”

Orthodox readers will immediately see the problem with this view. But how do we express our concerns to our Catholic friends?

I would begin by pointing out that this new error is born of a much older error: the “Double Procession of the Holy Spirit,” also known as the filioque.

According to Barbin, the relationship between Mary and the Holy Spirit is said to (supposed) paraellel between the Father and the Son. Yet this only works if we have this idea that the Spirit proceeds from both Persons at once. And indeed, Barbin is working from the Roman Catholic Council of Florence, which declares that the Holy Spirit "proceeds eternally from both as from one principle and through one spiration."

By contrast, the Orthodox Church hold to the traditional trinitarianism of the Cappadocian Fathers, where the Father is the arche anarchos ("Principle without principle")—the sole peghe ("source") of the Son and the Spirit. And so, to us, the idea that the Father and the Son “conceive” the Holy Spirit is blasphemous. In his Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit, St. Photius the Great condemns the filioque for precisely this reason: it creates a dynamic between God the Father and God the Son that can only be described as incestuous.

What’s interesting is that the Latin apologists of St. Photius’s age rejected this critique as absurd and insulting. They claimed that no one would dare to suggest that the Father and the Son conceive the Holy Spirit together. And yet here we are.

All of that is to say, the (supposed) parallel between the Holy Trinity and this "other trinity" breaks down if we hold to the ancient teachings of those great fourth-century Church Fathers: Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus.

Then we have this suggestion that Mary is a “quasi-Incarnation” of the Holy Spirit. It should be obvious why that’s wrong, but let’s spell it out just in case.

As we said, theosis means “becoming by grace what God is by nature.” That is, we become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). The key word there is partakers, or “participators.” God shares His divinity with us; it’s not proper to us, as human beings.

Indeed, there is only one human being who is “properly” divine: Jesus Christ. This is why we refer to His conception as the Incarnation. Something that pre-exists, i.e., the Divine Logos, is in caro. He literally "takes flesh."

Barbin said, “The Immaculate Conception… is the mystery of [Mary’s] person.” Likewise, the Incarnation is the mystery of Christ’s Person. And the Lord doesn’t merely partake in God’s divine nature: He is fully God, just as he is fully man. This is the Person of Jesus Christ.

So, for Mary to be an incarnation of the Holy Spirit (“quasi-” or otherwise), this would necessarily refer to her person. It would mean that she does not merely partake of the divine nature. Rather, it suggests that divinity is proper to her nature—that she is a divine person.

This conclusion is heavily implied by Barbin’s earlier comment. We know that Christ is ontologically unique, in that He is both fully God and fully man. Barbin acknowledges that Mary, too, is ontologically unique when he says, “There is only one Immaculate Conception: the Blessed Virgin Mary.” And, as we said, he associates this unique ontology to her relationship with the Holy Spirit.

To be fair, Barbin says he “does not mean that she is the incarnation of the Holy Spirit. That’s why that ‘quasi’ is very important. Because if you take that out, it’s heresy. But that quasi safeguards that [distinction].” Yet just because he claims it’s safeguarded, that doesn't make it so.

Think of those heresies which claim that Jesus is only a “quasi-incarnation” of God the Son—be it Arianism, Ebionism, Nestorianism, or what have you. If any of these dynamics were applied to the Mother of God, would they not be heretical? Could we say, for instance, that Mary is a creature of similar substance (homoiousios) to God? Or that the Holy Spirit adopts Mary into His divine Person? Or that He co-occupies her mortal person?

Again, what could the “quasi” possibly do to prevent Kolbe's view from being heretical?

It’s worth pointing out that St. John of San Francisco was deeply troubled by this Catholic dogma of the Immaculate Conception: the belief that, by a special movement of grace, Mary was preserved from original sin. In his book Orthodox Veneration of the Mother of God, St. John wrote that, for Catholics, Mary is now “placed side by side with Christ Himself and is exalted to an equality with God.”

Orthodox saints—John, Photius, and others—have long warned that Roman Catholic theology would continue to "evolve" further and further away from Apostolic and Patristic Orthodoxy. In their own time, they were often seen as extreme, even uncharitable. Today, we see the truth: their warnings were downright prophetic.

It can be difficult to say this to our Catholic friends. But we must remeber what St. Paul says: "Speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into Him who is the head" (Eph. 14:15)—that is, Christ.

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