The Assumption: A Feast of Doctrinal Development

Why debate what the development of doctrine looked like in distant eras of Church history when we have three instances in front of us, two of which were seen and commented upon by that great Saint of Development, John Henry Newman?

By “right in front of us,” I mean the extended present of the Church’s self-consciousness, which reaches back to Pius IX’s definition of the Immaculate Conception in 1854, the First Vatican Council’s definition of papal infallibility in 1870, and Pius XII’s definition of the Assumption in 1950.

These are three examples of the Church developing its doctrine.  That is why today’s Feast may be viewed not simply as teaching a truth, that Mary was assumed body and soul into heaven, but also as exemplifying a truth about what development amounts to.

More than examples, they are paradigms, that is, examples which serve as standards.  We hear a lot from some clerics about “paradigm shifts” in the Church’s teaching. These men are using “paradigm” in Thomas Kuhn’s sense of a conceptual framework.  When one such paradigm is replaced by another, Kuhn said, there is no continuity between the older and the newer frameworks.  What Newton meant by “force,” for instance, is not the same as what Einstein meant by “force,” although the words are the same.

But the older and original meaning of a paradigm is an example that serves as a standard, such as when (perhaps) you learned amo, amas, amat as a paradigm of first conjugation verbs in Latin.  “You want to construe laudamus?”  The teacher says, “Look to your paradigm.”

These paradigms of development point to sameness, not difference, in the Church’s teaching.  They teach that the crucial move in development is not “we used to believe this, but now we believe this,” but rather, “we see that we have believed this all along.”

To develop, in the first instance, is to define explicitly and sharply what was held implicitly and, to some extent, inchoately.  It is to make uniform what was left in rough form, and it is to make binding on all what formerly was held in the manner of a loose “consensus.” In the second instance, it is to become clear that one doctrine, not yet defined, has belonged to the same family as others, already defined.

In a letter to J.D. Dalgairns on January 22, 1855, Newman says that he has received a copy of Pope Pius IX’s Bull on the Immaculate Conception. He quotes the key words in Latin (here in translation), underlining some: “We declare, pronounce, and define that the doctrine which holds that the most Blessed Virgin Mary, in the first instance of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege granted by Almighty God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Savior of the human race, was preserved free from all stain of original sin, is a doctrine revealed by God and therefore to be believed firmly and constantly by all the faithful.”

He says that the words seem to leave open precisely how she was so preserved: he does not think the definition endorses Scotus’s view that the work of the Redemption was applied to Mary retroactively.  And then he adds, “It is remarkable that the Bull does not define the doctrine, but defines that it is revealed, and therefore of faith.”

That is to say, all that the pope does is transfer a truth from “believed” to “needing to be believed.”  In various places he says that he finds, when he reflects upon the matter, that he has always believed this truth: “it really does seem to me bound up in the doctrine of the Fathers, that Mary is the second Eve,” he writes in his Letter to Pusey.

Newman’s problem becomes, then, to explain why Anglican Christians of goodwill do not, likewise, already hold it. He finds two reasons.

The first is that they confuse active and passive conception: the doctrine is not that Anne conceived Mary in a way that would not have passed on Original Sin (active immaculate conception, a heresy), but rather that Original Sin would have been passed on to Mary, except for a singular grace (passive immaculate conception, orthodoxy).

The second is that they fail to see that the doctrine is embedded in a family of truths which they already hold: “they consider it a substantive self-dependent doctrine more than we do.” And they do this because they think of Original Sin as changing human nature, so that to say that Mary lacked it is as if to divinize her. (to Arthur Osborne Alleyne, 15 June 1860)

Newman’s approach to papal infallibility was the same.  He wrote to a friend, just a few days after the fact, that the Council’s definition “expresses what, as an opinion, I have ever held myself with a host of other Catholics.” (to O’Neill Daunt, 7 August 1870)

Pope Pius XII spoke as Newman did in defining the Assumption. The Church has received from Christ the commission “of preserving the revealed truths pure and entire throughout every age, in such a way that it presents them undefiled, adding nothing to them and taking nothing away from them.”  He quotes Vatican I: “the Holy Spirit was not promised to the successors of Peter in such a way that, by his revelation, they might manifest new doctrine;” rather, the Spirit assists the Pope in safeguarding the deposit of faith.

If, in a “development,” what is defined is already believed, what is the point of defining it?  To display a truth better, and to protect against contrary errors.  But, perhaps mainly, because when we love something ardently, we want to bind ourselves to it.   True lovers don’t want simply to remain in love but rather to oblige themselves to love each other forever.  They want it to become wrong to fail to love.

That is why Pius XII rejoiced that he could “adorn the brow of God’s Virgin Mother with this brilliant gem, and to leave a monument more enduring than bronze of our own most fervent love for the Mother of God.”