Mary and the Victory over Evil - Fr. John Corbett, O.P.

tonight our topic is um our lady and the victory over evil and i want to focus on uh two dem in particular two theological dimensions of her victory over evil and her help that she provides to us in our victory over evil uh the first i want to talk about the first reality is simply holiness in itself you know what does it mean to be holy and then more particularly how is this reality of holiness and freedom from evil related to the doctrine of the immaculate conception the second reality that i would talk about tonight is simply the reality of death what does it mean to die and how does that reality of death related as it is to the mystery of evil tie into our lady giving birth in bethlehem and the answer to that question will only be made clear when we consider another birth that our lady underwent which was the birth of all her children on mount calvary these three mysteries are what i would speak to you tonight about we start with the mystery of holiness and its relationship to the immaculate conception the first victory anticipatory victory we might say given to our lady is given to our lady when she was privileged to be conceived without original sin now we should not overstate the difference between her conception and our own for example the fact that she was immaculately conceived did not mean that she was born with the preternatural privileges that belong to adam and eve in their prelapsarian state she was not born immune from death and she was not born immune from pain she had none of the preternatural gifts that graced adam and eve before the fall mary in fact was born into mortality and therefore born into pain just as we all of us are born into mortality and pain but we shouldn't understate the difference between her conception and ours either we might be tempted to do that we might for example be tempted to see in mary's conception free from original sin simply an early start into our own baptized condition so mary was conceived free from the stain of original sin good well we're not conceived free of the stain of original sin but then we are baptized and then and thus are we made free from original sin from the moment of our baptism we and mary share a grace condition she was born into the friendship of god while we come into friendship with god a few days later after our birth at baptism now is that really the difference between mary's condition and our own a few days that doesn't seem probable in fact that seems ridiculous we might say state the difference between her conception and our own in this way in her conception mary is radically holy in all of the dimensions of her person now we all of us have a long way to go before that's true of us let's look at what the word holy means holy means separate and unique it means being radically different the angels cry out holy holy holy is the lord god of hosts and if we were to translate that into english one way to do it might be to sing different unspeakably different ineffably different and uncommon with the world is the lord of hosts now if that's your idea then you can easily see how the the jewish people could get the idea that holiness means withdrawal from common use time is holy because it belongs exclusively to god space in a synagogue or church is uh holy because it's exclusively devoted to god utensils too buildings persons chalices vestments all of these things are withdrawn from common use this is what's really wrong with the idea of having a uh you know a common cup be served as a chalice and it forgets the idea that you're dealing with something radically holy see so time space utensils buildings persons who are withdrawn from common circulation and devoted to the separate and transcendent god are deemed to be holy now notice that this notion of holiness is not yet moral it's not a properly moral idea the notion of holiness is common to all religions but the tying of holiness to moral forms of goodness to specifically moral forms of goodness is israel's unique achievement how is this connection made it's made by the addition of the essential notion of oneness listen to the shama hear o israel the lord your god is one what does that mean oneness here has definite links with the notion of separation of which we have just spoken one means unique so here the prayer exhorts israel to relate to the lord as though he were the only god who existed treat god as the only god see but notice that oneness doesn't only mean uniqueness it means undividedness as well the saying is you shall love the lord your god with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength now what this rules out is the double-mindedness that is spoken of in psalm 12 where the psalm says falsehood they speak to another with lying lips and a double heart this being undivided in the self this undividedness of being is in fact a condition for approaching the temple for worship if you look at psalm 24 which is an entrance song into the sanctuary of the temple of jerusalem psalm 24 asks who shall ascend the mountain of the lord and who shall stand in his holy place he who has clean hands and a pure heart who does not lift up his soul to what is false and does not swear deceitfully drawing near in worship is allowed to the single-hearted and on the other hand cultic worship which conceals fraud is especially hateful to the lord because cultic worship especially signifies the condition of being of one heart and one mind but we're not like that the human heart is treacherous says jeremiah and who can understand it the human heart is irreparably double-minded and can only be rendered single again as an act of creation a new creation in fact psalm 51 says create in me a clean heart notice the word create it's almost as though we're talking about something ex nihilo my heart is a mess but you can make it clean and undivided jesus says that it is from this divided heart that all evil flows not from violations of external prohibitions he doesn't offer a solution for this for us except that it is his whole mission through his death and resurrection to make such wholeness available again now the point with mary is this his mother jesus's mother the church believes received such wholeness and singleness of heart from her birth and in anticipation of what her son would win for us all well the origin of our double-mindedness is of course traced to the fall original sin look at genesis 3 tonight when you have a chance it's the account of the temptation of adam and eve and their fall notice the serpent's line of attack what he invites eve to do is to doubt the goodness of god and doubting the goodness of god here means believing that god has his own agenda which is not necessarily ordered to the good of human beings god in fact has a needy love for the human rather than a purely self-giving love for the human being see that's the idea god if you want to put it this way wants to establish a co-dependent relationship anyway that's the idea that the devil sells this is a nurtured doubt in eve and then adam this is a welcome to mistrust and it's accompanied by a demand for autonomy which the serpent offers you shall be as gods he says knowing good and evil that is to say determining for yourselves what is good and evil this radical demand for autonomy is always born of suspicion and it is one of the chief and enduring effects of the fall on all the descendants of adam the effect of this is to freeze man's mind in suspicion and mistrust and for that reason the human person is forbidden to make images of god why well partly to avoid magic partly to avoid compromising the sovereignty of god who will appear where he will and when he will but also because any image of god that we would make in our present mental condition would only represent our fear hatred and mistrust of god adam says i heard you and i hid because i was afraid from this point on when we make representations of god they will represent our own reflection of our own fear and mistrust of ourselves and of our god the idea is that man is guilty and therefore god is vengeance seeking and since man is made to the image of god if man is vengeance seeking and twisted so god becomes monstrous the image of god and man is distorted and so man's sense of man as well as his sense of god becomes warped this lack of union with god this loss of this primordial relationship of trust in god is reflected in man's inner divisions saint augustine referred to this as the loss of original justice in original justice the mind was obedient to god and the passions of man were obedient to the mind of man with the fall men and women have been born into a condition of rebellion and the mind is frozen in mistrust of god and no longer knows him the passions are subsequently in a state of disobedience to the mind the good that i would do that i that i do not do says paul in saint paul in romans chapter seven this is what is known as the thumb as piccati the effective inflammation of sin put more colloquially the buttons that others can push in us our points of vulnerability augustine called them the kindlings of sin little shaving pieces of wood that are ever ready to burst into flame see this these effective inflammations of sin and our soul this remains after baptism it was not removed by baptism but it not only was this not present subsequently in mary it was never present in mary this the foam is uh the for the seeds of inflammation the in the effective inflammation of sin is never was never present in her and that is why she is from the beginning of a peace you know she has no need for self-deception and it's this inner unity this oneness that protects her from the possibility of sin because you know sin depends to some degree on self-deception and inner division and incoherence sin presupposes not being of a peace sin presupposes being in pieces and it causes going to pieces the extreme form of this of course the extreme form of not being of a peace is demonic possession what is your name jesus asked the demon it is legion he said for we are many there are many examples of this you could look at the doctors the nazi doctors in the concentration camps who considered themselves still even as they were doing medical experiments on human beings they didn't consider themselves torturers they considered themselves doctors why because they were healing a race you've got to be pretty far removed from ordinary forms of reason or sanity to be able to believe that and yet they did they so separated the evil from the rest of their lives and they spent much of their time not at the concentration camp cultivating good music love of children sunsets sentimental relationships with their pets lovely people what happened at work happened at another world see what is your name legion we are many very scary stuff now mary is not like this in her because of this surpassing grace there is a primordial trust in the truthfulness of god which was there from the beginning of her conception and this makes it possible for her to make an unqualified yes to god's offer of salvation she says it without reserve fiat oh let it be that's the optive mood which is not just a yeah okay kind of uh you wouldn't translate it by saying ah okay you'd translate it by saying oh yes yes yes yes yes you see it's much more enthusiastic and will and willing than that right she makes an unqualified yes to god from the bottom of her soul this means that she is entitled to worship at the temple in fact so total is her integrity that she becomes an archetype of the temple and is called the ark of the covenant now she sees herself as she is and has no need of self-deception and she sees us all of us as we are and she still has no need of self-deception she doesn't look at me and say oh there's my son what a great doctor of the church he'll one day be no sorry not gonna happen not like that look at my that wonderful person over there who's got no that she doesn't kid herself she's not delusional she loves us because she sees what's really there and what's really there is the goodness that god has really put into us and that will yet one day come to flower because god's grace is triumphant she sees that and loves us without any self-deception mothers sometimes kid themselves when it comes to their kids but not her she sees all the way through without sentimentality and with perfect hope she sees us as we are and loves us as we are because she sees our destiny and knows what it is we are called to mary is sometimes the victim of bad art because the holiness or integrity which is at the roots of her being is not easy to picture it's simple it's simplicity itself but it's not simple-mindedness simplicity is not a psychological profile it is a theological grace and it can exist coexist with many temperaments aristotle said it was hard to imagine the perfectly happy man well try imagining someone radically of a peace and grace god is purely intelligible in himself but not to our minds and mary is simple with the simplicity analogous to god's and we simply don't know what to do with that she loves us in a very mysterious way but the immaculate conception you see allows her to see without distortion and it makes it impossible for her to hide from love that's why she can see and face everything now this is a grace given in advance of the event of the cross and resurrection but it's still caused by the cross and resurrection it was in anticipation of the merits of jesus christ that she was given this privilege dominicans historically had great difficulty with the idea of the immaculate conception aquinas himself didn't accept it because it seemed to imply that mary was not in need of redemption how could this be well it's the glory of don scotus to see that it is in fact a greater mercy to never have gone wrong than to be righted after first having gone wrong she is the archetype of humanity as god intended it to be and she is a prophecy of what one day we will all be so she shows us in her own person the restored image of god she is our mother she is the ark of the covenant she is the dwelling place of god she is radically of a peace she is radically holy and this is why she can communicate this grace are an analogous grace to us the immaculate conception made possible and fitting the virgin's acceptance of god's offer she had no mistrust she was open to god's word to a degree not possible for sons and daughters of adam she indeed conceived the word in her body because she first conceived him in her heart and this offer culminates in bethlehem with the birth of christ the birth is virginal and has the significance of total self-giving and total fruitfulness a total surrender to god the church teaches from a position of emptiness can herald the new creation church teaches that mary remained a virgin before during and after the act of giving birth for our purposes the troublesome part is the middle one which is mary's virginity and giving birth to christ we remember that one of the sufferings inherited because of original sin is that of a child bearing pains the lord said to eve in 3 16 i will intensify the pangs of your child bearing in pain shall you bring forth children now since mary was free from original sin by her immaculate conception she would consequently be free of pain and burying a child and this seemed to entail a miraculous birth pope leo the great said she brought him forth without loss of virginity even as she conceived him without its lost the fathers compared the birth of the lord to him miraculously appearing from the tomb or behind the locked door some fathers use the analogy of the birth of our lord to a ray of sun shining through a glass as the glass is unaltered by the ray so was mary by the birth of our lord medieval theologians seemed to have universally agreed that the virgin did not suffer labor pains at the miraculous birth of christ as the new eve who redeems us from the sins of the first woman mary is exempt from the curse that condemned eve to bear children in great pain correspondingly nativity scenes don't show extreme physical distress mary's never portrayed as suffering agony in her birth of the savior but and this is important mary becomes a mother again a second time this time on calvary my own idea is this if i were to put it in a sentence on calvary mary died in childbirth to make this clear i need to talk about death in general and then the death of jesus then having done this i can talk about the death of mary the principal concern for a theology of death are to really and here i'm going with father carl rauner and his uh towards the theology of death he says the principal concern for a theology of death is to relate death as a universal human phenomena to the mystery of sin on the one hand and to the redemptive mystery of the death of jesus on the other the handbook definition of death as the separation of soul and body while correct says too little for a theologian and likewise although there is a connection between sin and death it is far from adequate to see death merely as a punishment for sin death for human beings is not something that happens to persons from outside rahner says it is a distinctively human act related to the peculiar nature of human existence as the final moment of a free personal history death is seen as a decisive act of human freedom in which a person can either accept or reject the mystery of god and thereby put the final seal on his or her personal history and destiny if we could endlessly revise who we are if we could reinvent ourselves for all eternity there would be no real self there we would be free to be everything but our real self and so if we can't define ourselves definitively at the point of death there would be no real freedom carl rauner argued that it is not the mere fact of death that is caused by sin but the present way in which we experience death as a mystery of darkness and threat if sin distorts and darkens all our experience in life it is consistent that that it darkens and distorts our final experience and death for both rahner and the pres and the holy father the free act by which we give ourselves over into the hands of god's love and mercy is the central mystery of the theology of death it is the way believers enter into the dying of christ seen in this way the basic mystery of death is already anticipated throughout life and the little dine by which we give ourselves over to god in charity jesus dies on the cross saying abba and he dies saying forgive them this is the seal of his freedom and it is done in solidarity with us in great pain his human and this is the way we over he overcomes evil his humanity is perfected or transformed so that it becomes the apt instrument to communicate divinity in the mode in which it was handed over his humanity was perfected as high priest and as intercessor he dies as priest and so he's raised up as priests as with jesus so with mary did mary in fact die there is uncertainty about her physical death and the in the catholic church as i understand it uh it hasn't come up definitively to say she did or did not physically die but if death is on the level of both nature and person and involves a definitive exercise of freedom mary would have died spiritually before she died physically where did this happen she handed herself first over to the father and her fiat spoken to gabriel that fiat bore fruit and bethlehem she gave birth to the savior as i said the tradition teaches that this birth was painless since birth pangs are among the penalties that accompany those touched by original sin but the tradition also says that she became a mother again on calvary and there underwent birth pangs she had to surrender to the father and his plan for his son's sacrificial death on the cross and this surrender also involved accepting the beloved disciple as her son john and mary are at the foot of the cross seeing that all things accompli were accomplished jesus saw the disciple and said son behold your mother and looking at his mother he said woman behold your son that was had to be a renunciation and a terrible loss for mary a consolation of course but also a great loss because it underscores the loss of the presence of her true son jesus himself john however great a disciple he is could never replace him but she was called on to accept this according to the wisdom of the father and accept this she did but in a way it killed her as jesus died in an act of priestly intercession so he was raised up in the act of priestly intercession as we die so are we raised up as well and the parallel with mary is clear and accepting john she was required to die to self in the act of giving birth to the beloved disciple who is representative of all disciples and that's how she's raised up christ mediates divine life to us specifically as a priest mary also mediates divine life to us in our own proper way because she's our mother she mediates the grace maternally she mediates grace by giving birth to us as disciples that's her mediation as our mother she does so in total dependence upon her son but she does so truly she is called the mother of god and can well be called the mother of all grace so that's what i basically wanted to communicate tonight that mary is overcomes the mystery of evil in her own fiat and by giving birth to us as her children she allows us to share by participation in that grace her yes to god her son's yes to the father can become our yes as well she can mediate that to us if we trust her as our mother okay well thank you very much father corbett that was uh a delightful presentation we have actually a lot of questions uh coming to us through uh the various chat platforms from zoom and youtube uh so our first question tonight comes from morgan whitmer and morgan asks this uh through youtube father can you explain further how mary's preparati preservation from sin is different from adam and eve's pre-lapserian state so adam and eve before the fall versus mary's preservation from sin i think it's magic i think it has to do with destiny final causes are real causes so i think that it's part of the decree of predestination the father sees her and he knows what she is for she's created uh for this specific kind of openness as mother of the second mother of the human race so i think that and adam and eve were not created for that purpose so i think that the final destiny of adam and eve as the first adam and eve is different from the destiny of the second one and the the grace is shaped to a destiny great thank you very much for that uh so we have another question this is from um this is perhaps a more difficult question for you father uh this is from patricia coming through zoom father corbett did i misinterpret your statement that saint thomas aquinas did not accept mary's immaculate conception is that correct i think so how did saint thomas become a saint would be would he not rather be considered a heretic no he'd rather be considered a state saint thomas says that saint thomas never says that a mere theological error qualifies you as a heretic you have to do more than that you have to earn it you have to willfully persist in a teaching that the church has condemned so uh there's an obstinacy in involved in heresy which would is never involved in a mere material theological error great well we have a few more questions here um kathy coming to us through zoom asks this uh father you've mentioned the fall a lot uh would you claim that this took place literally as we read it in genesis one or two uh was it allegorical was there some other account for it and if it's allegorical then can you explain how we inherit the effects of original sin well i think the the the account here is i don't think it's literal but i don't think it's allegorical either an allegory stands for something you see of which you already have a good idea you know the flower represents purity the the waterbrook resembles uh represents the chaos in life and so on and so forth allegory is kind of a one for one uh representation of something that we already understand here we're in waters that we frankly don't understand we do know this that there however remotely in the past is humanoid creatures for first at some point became capable of thought and capable of choice until that time they were in a sphere of protected innocence where they could not sin but somewhere in the along the line a rational soul was infused and that was uh it enabled them to recognize a fundamental choice for for what was good and a fundamental a possibility of a fundamental choice rejecting that and the the loss of innocence happened there what did that look like historically where did it happen were they articulate i don't know i don't know but i think that there is there is a a single origin for the human race and it did involve the gift of intelligence and freedom and the abuse of those gifts i would say that but i wouldn't be able to tell you when where how what it looked like or whether it conformed literally to the pattern shown us in genesis i think the pattern is closer something to myth i don't know that i mean what's was there for example a real paradise was there ever a real state where they were free from death i hesitate to answer that i don't know uh i'm inclined to doubt it but i yield to dogmatic theologians who are better versed in this than i am for example father legg might be able to be uh more usefully uh consulted on that topic uh well i don't know if that's true but i can ask you i can ask you another question you're on the hot seat tonight so we'll we'll let you uh continue to feel them another question here this is also again from morgan coming to us through youtube did the blessed virgin mary suffer temptation in the same way that we do and how can you account for that um i do not well our lord himself experienced temptation the the uh the gospels tell us that he was tempted in the wilderness by satan so if he did i'm sure she must have been as well but there's a difficult there's a theological difficulty in affirming that the lord was tempted and that because that would mean an evil possibility had some positive allure for him which would mean that his appetites were disordered in some way so so i so he couldn't have been tempted in the way that i am i look at something evil and i say oh my that's attractive you know because i'm partly bent or if you give someone get someone there who's not bent who's totally of a peace then it's harder to be tempted in that way that that doesn't mean that they're not under trial it just means that it's their trial doesn't come from distorted appetites now what is that like i don't know i'll wait till i have undistorted appetites and then i'll be able to tell you but i don't think that mary would have been tempted to say petty jealousy for example why is elizabeth getting all the attention it's my turn no i don't think that that would have crossed her mind ever well let me ask a kind of a follow-up on this and it's related to what you said uh about the concentration camp guard yeah so you made the uh you made it you gave an example to a a concentration camp guard who uh is still you know goes home and plays with his children and uh listens to music maybe even makes music he's nice to his neighbors he's uh he might be very polite um and and yet at the same time he's engaged in these in these awful acts and there's perhaps a part of him that has started to distance himself from the evil that he's doing um can you uh well speak for a moment about the the different way that uh well how grace integrates the person and which we would see in the blessed virgin mary versus what happens in us with sin and that kind of disintegration well um i would say starting with us i would say uh that this is why in the discussions of the spiritual life you always begin you're talking about general stages of the spiritual life you always begin with the purgative because what happens with holiness what happens is that you really start to come together this can be that this is by no means always pleasant uh it because you see all of the the creatures that you've got hidden in your basement start coming up into your living room and start ordering drinks you know you you thought you'd suppress them or gotten rid of them and here they are appearing you know jung called it the shadow side so when you try to become holy life becomes suddenly very difficult and you become aware of all kinds of infirmities this is not an evil thing this is a good thing it's your disorder is coming forward into light to be healed now this wouldn't have happened in the same way with mary but i think that she would have simply grown her capacities would have expanded and she would have grown in love for god and also grown grown in a healthy or a life-giving sorrow for the sins of the world jesus said blessed are those who mourn and that the the mourning there has to do with those who mourn for the sad state of god's people god did not want this for this people he wants them to mirror his own holiness she would have seen the unholiness around her and it would have caused her grief but not distortion we are distorted by our grief and she's able to take it straight you know and that involves enduring sin but not taking it personally enduring sin but not being discarded disfigured by its scars enduring evil but not becoming bitter her patience at the cross would show that you know and the face of obscenity the human race killing god's own son and her own beloved child and she's not hysterical she is she's serene you know she's able to look at this with acceptance and compassion how does she do that that there's a grace there beyond my ken marvelous well uh let me ask one i think we have time for one more question uh and this comes from anne through zoom but i'm gonna add uh to ann's question and kind of combine it with one of my own so this is her question isn't pain any pain including childbirth and death uh just the part of being human insofar as we all have nerve endings and so forth even jesus died and felt both physical and emotional pain so why not marry and so that's ann's question let me uh just add to that i once gave a homily um on the uh the miraculous birth of christ so that is at christmas that jesus uh is born without mary uh experiencing labor pains for example as you mentioned um and one uh person in the in the congregation was actually really offended by this idea yeah because i thought uh it sort of denigrated the web who exaggerated everybody else yeah that's right so could you speak about about that well i i didn't i remember i said about mary that she wasn't born her privilege of being immaculately conceived did not exempt her from tiredness nerve endings uh upset uh strain and she would have undergone all those things but she would have undergone them with integration and a or an inner peace that we would be missing but those conditions would still be there um most part and then well isn't isn't uh pain simply a part of the human condition it is but it's not thank god a final part of the human condition that is to say it it exists now and it serves even on a biological level a function that or alerts us to danger or injury so uh yes that's all true but it's not a definitive state here's where christian eschatology comes into play uh our pains are destined to be overcome that they that they're not the final word the dust the pain that is a presenter of death and the death that we die is not the final word we're destined or put on track to a glorious body you know resurrection which transcends present limitation now that's faith language and i could not really describe what's that like the best i could do now is just be being comfortable after a long day you know it's inadequate i said that our imaginations are unable to cope with the singleness of the blessed virgin mary the same way our imagination aren't really capable of conceiving of a post-pain state that is not being numb you know or intoxicated with excitement somehow it's none of those things and yet it's the fulfillment of every dream we won't know what it's like until we see it

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Length: 45min 54sec (2754 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 09 2020