The Eastern Orthodox Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, Part 2

"[The first part of this study] deals with the first known use of this title [viz., Mary as "prepurified"] during the patristic era, that of St. Gregory Nazianzen (c. 329 – c. 390), the Theologian. The teaching of St. Gregory on this title, clearly an immaculist one, was kept alive by many representatives of Byzantine theology during the medieval period. On this tradition depends the considerably more detailed exposition of the title in an immaculist sense by St. John Damascene (c. 675 – 749). His teaching on this title has notable links with St. Maximus Confessor and the Third Council of Constantinople (680) where the title appears to be a part of the ordinary Magisterium of the Church.* 

I am extremely eager to explore this last claim, and I think Fr. Kappes elaborates on it in this 2016 lecture, which I shall address in a separate post.

As a disciple of Scotus, the Martyr of Charity [viz., St. Maximilian M. Kolbe] stresses not only the "negative" definition of the Immaculate Conception: preserved from all stain of original sin from the first moment of conception, but more so the "positive" in pointing out how the name of Immaculate Conception is name of both the Mother of God and of the Holy Spirit, respectively the created and uncreated Immaculate Conception. This perfect union of wills: divine and human, in the Mother of God and of the Church through the operation of the Holy Spirit, makes possible that mysterious, maternal mediation by which the disjunctive transcendentals: infinite and finite, uncreated and created, are united in the Person of the Incarnate Word. This union, through the maternal mediation of the Immaculate, makes possible a sharing in the divine life of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, for those incorporated into the mystical Body of Christ by Baptism.* 

This latter synthesis is not only breathtaking in its own right, but resonates strongly with prior research I was conducting based on Fr. Donald J. Keefe's magnum opus, Covenantal Theology [also here, here, etc.]. As part of a large, ongoing "ressourcement" of books and research interests I engaged as far back as my college days, I look forward to seeing how much overlap there is indeed between "maternal mediation" of the "disjunctive tranascendentals" in Fr. Kappes's work and the theme of "One Flesh " (mia sarx) in Fr. Keefe's.

* from Fr. Peter Fehlner's preface to Fr. Kappes's The Immaculate Conception, pp. xviii-xx.