“With regard to created nature: Universal deification.
“With regard to personalities: Deification of their nature in Christ, and beatific union with the Trinity through their union with Christ by sanctification.
“God foresees the fall, and permits it in order to enhance these effects by redemption.”
We do not at all wonder at a reviewer in the Chicago Interior complimenting our author on “profound scholarship in Catholic theology.” “The book,” he says, “is bold to familiarity in describing with scientific particularity and clearness of outline the constitution of the Holy Trinity as defined by Catholic theologians.” We do, however, wonder that this writer, if a believer in revelation, should go on to compare Father De Concilio to a chemist analyzing “a pyrite of iron,” and still more that he should declare his “ideas as grossly anthropomorphic as it is possible to be”(!) Would this critic call the Bible anthropomorphic? He says nothing about our author’s theology of the Incarnation—unless he means to hit at that as “anthropomorphic.” It is precisely about the Incarnation that Protestants are utterly at sea. When the reviewer adds: “We can understand, after examining this book, the character of Catholic devotion to Mary as we never understood it before,” we are compelled to reply: “Then your understanding of it is a greater mistake than ever before, unless you have first come to realize the Catholic doctrine of the Incarnation with its bearings; and if that were the case you would avow it, for you could not remain a Protestant another hour.”
Let any Protestant of sufficient education read the first of these five books earnestly and prayerfully, and he will have to acknowledge that his hitherto Christianity, be it what it may, is divided toto cœlo from Catholic Christianity—the totum cœlum being precisely his lack of that “knowledge of Mary” which is inseparable from an intelligent belief in the Incarnation.
The Catholic student will be specially interested by the way in which Father De Concilio treats of Mary’s “co-operation.” She is set forth—and in a clearer light than ever before by any book in the English language—as the great “representative personality” of our race. It is in this capacity that she consents to the Incarnation and Redemption. “A God-Man was necessary to expiate for the sins of mankind. But that was not sufficient. According to the law of wisdom, mentioned in our last argument, God was ready to help human nature to that extent as to effect the Incarnation and produce the God-Man; but God required, also, that mankind should do all it could towards its own redemption. It could not give the God who was to divinize the acts of human nature; it could not actually effect the union between human nature and the divine person of the Word; but it could freely and deliberately offer the nature to be united for the express purpose and intent of suffering; and this offering could only be made by means of a representative human person fully conscious of the necessity of expiation, of the conditions required by it, and of the consequences resulting therefrom” (pp. 77, 78).
Again (pp. 78, 79): “The consent of Mary was required in the plan of God in order to elevate created personality to the highest possible dignity, and thus to fulfil the end which God had proposed to himself in exterior work.” This purpose, he goes on to say, was not completed by God “taking human nature to be his own nature, and to be God with him.” ... “Human personality does not exist in Christ, and receives no honor from him. There is one person in him, and that is divine.” ... “Mary, therefore (p. 80), fulfils the office of creation, and especially of created personality, in its most sovereign act—the act which this personality would have elicited in Jesus Christ, if it had been in him. Human nature, such as it was in Christ, could not give itself, because to give is a personal act, and God wished to carry to its utmost extremity the communication of goodness, that human nature should give itself in order to be made partaker of the responsibility and attribution of the effects of that mysterious union.”
Having thus shown the inestimable importance of Mary’s consent to the Incarnation, our author proceeds to point out “the extent or comprehensiveness” of that consent—to wit, that “in giving her consent to the Incarnation and redemption” she “not only agreed to become the Mother of Jesus Christ the Redeemer, ... but also to become a co-sufferer with him; so that Mary’s Compassion was to accompany, to go hand in hand with, Christ’s Passion, both being necessary for the redemption of mankind, according to the plan selected by God’s wisdom.”
Here is something new to us, but very delightful to discover, since it glorifies Our Blessed Lady so much more than the ordinary view of her Dolors. We knew that “she consented to undergo all the anguish and sorrow and martyrdom consequent upon her from the sacrifice and immolation of her divine Son,” and thus “join her Compassion to his Passion, in order to redeem mankind”; that, in this sense, she “consented to become the corredemptrix of the human race.” But it had not occurred to us that “all this, implied in her consent, was necessary as that consent itself.”
Our author here quotes Father Faber’s theory about Mary’s privilege of being “corredemptrix”—the term by which saints and doctors call her—and shows that the gifted Oratorian, in his exquisite book on Mary’s sorrows (The Foot of the Cross), “has not done justice to the subject.” He even quarrels with Faber’s “co-redemptress” as a “substitution” for the ancient “corredemptrix,” whereas it would appear but a translation—that is, as Faber uses it. We feel sure, too, that the English word may mean the full equivalent of the Latin. But, at all events, Father Faber’s theory is that Mary’s dolors were among the unnecessary sufferings of the Passion. “Indeed,” he says, “they were literally our Lord’s unnecessary sufferings.... Her co-operation with the Passion by means of her dolors is wanting, certainly, in that indispensable necessity which characterizes the co-operation of her maternity.” To this Father De Concilio remarks that Father Faber “had an incomplete idea of the office of Mary as to redemption,” and objects to the doctrine of “unnecessary sufferings” as “theologically inaccurate, to say the least.” “The Passion of Christ,” he says, “must be considered as a variety of sorrows co-ordained by the unity of the sacrifice—the beginning of which was the maternal womb, in which the Incarnate Word placed himself in the state of a victim, and the termination Calvary, where the grand holocaust was consummated.” And, after establishing this point, he proceeds to prove that Mary’s Compassion was “among the necessary elements of the redemption.” He brings to light, both from the Fathers and from reason, “a principle in the economy of our redemption,” whereby God had to supply, indeed, a means of infinite merit (through the Incarnation), but, equally, had to exact from humanity all that itself could do towards atonement. From this principle he deduces three consequences: