The unity of theology

The twentieth century witnessed a growing consensus among Protestant and Catholic theologians that the teaching and practice of theology had become fragmented and divided, with undesirable consequences for moral theology. Catholic moral theology from the Council of Trent until the Second Vatican Council became dominated by manuals, which ‘were written to train ordained clerics to hear confessions, and their focus was practical in nature, sin-oriented, individualistic, minimalist and legalistic’.Footnote ¹ Stanley Hauerwas highlights the close connection between the development of Catholic moral theology and the sacrament of confession, since ‘the primary concern of the confessional was with avoiding evil’.Footnote ² John Mahoney even argues that the practice of confessing sins (which was made obligatory for all the faithful at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215) was ‘the single most influential factor in the development of the practice and of the discipline of moral theology’.Footnote ³ This is because the obligation to confess created the need for clergy to learn how to hear confessions and how to teach the laity to confess their sins. The manuals proliferated to meet this need in seminaries, and the very narrow focus of these manuals was openly stated by their authors. As Thomas Slater, the author of one of the most widely read manuals in the twentieth century, wrote:

Referring to the basic precept of the natural law, to do good and avoid evil, Slater went on to define the task of the manuals as being exclusively concerned with avoiding evil. If one happened to be concerned about ‘the doing of the good, that is, Christian perfection’, or ‘if readers were looking to learn how to become better disciples, they should look elsewhere: to the manuals of ascetical, devotional, or mystical theology’.Footnote ⁵ The pastoral purpose of the manuals meant that they concentrated on ‘the fulfillment of specified duties’, so that the priest could determine which obligations and laws the penitent had transgressed in kind, gravity and number.Footnote ⁶ As a result, the manuals often had a strikingly juridical character, marked by an ‘absence of tracts on the Beatitudes and the virtues’.Footnote ⁷ They also lacked ‘a close relation between Christian faith and morality’.Footnote ⁸ The overreliance of the manualists on natural law meant that God would be mentioned often only as ‘the source of moral obligation’,Footnote ⁹ or as the author of the moral law knowable without the aid of revelation.Footnote ¹⁰ The dearth of spirituality in this kind of moral theology meant that the separate disciplines of ascetical and mystical theology developed independently and had a ‘tendency toward anti-intellectualism’, as one might find in the Imitation of Christ.Footnote ¹¹

Catholic moral theology after Trent contrasts strikingly with previous centuries. Hauerwas rightly points out that what we call ‘Christian ethics’ cannot be found in the writings of the early church; neither the Bible nor the church fathers make any clear distinction between Christian belief and ethics.Footnote ¹² This unified approach, which Paul Morrissey calls a ‘sapiential understanding of theology’, continued in the Middle Ages.Footnote ¹³ For example, in the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas the sections devoted to the moral life in the second part are ‘the continuation of his theological portrayal of God's extension of himself to man so that man might have a way to God’.Footnote ¹⁴

According to Morrissey, in the twentieth century several ressourcement Thomists, such as Marie-Dominique Chenu, Jean-Pierre Torrell and Serge-Thomas Bonino, strove to retrieve the medieval perspective of theology.Footnote ¹⁵ For the medievals, theology ‘as St. Thomas quite expressly understood it, is an organic whole, not artificially and as it were externally unified by an independent philosophy, but proceeding from the inner unity of God's revelation’.Footnote ¹⁶ William May writes that ‘[m]any contemporary authors emphasize the unity of theology and the inseparability of contemplative or dogmatic theology from moral theology’, and cites to that effect four publications from the past two decades.Footnote ¹⁷ This is echoed in a document about contemporary theology published recently by the International Theological Commission of the Catholic Church; it recognises the legitimacy of a plurality of theologies in modernity and yet, as a ‘criterion of Catholic theology’, it ‘insists on the unity of truth and therefore on the fundamental unity of theology itself’.Footnote ¹⁸

It is often argued that the fragmentation of the medieval approach was caused by the rise of nominalism in late scholasticism around the early fourteenth century.Footnote ¹⁹ However, Hauerwas is surely correct to claim that, although ‘not unimportant’, these developments of late mediaeval thought are not as significant as ‘the profound effect the Reformation had for shaping how Protestant and Catholic alike began to think about the Christian life’.Footnote ²⁰ The connection between doctrine and ethics fared no better in Protestantism. Regardless of the disagreements between Luther, Melanchthon and Calvin over the third use of the law, Protestantism was ‘haunted, as it were, by the threat of human pride in human works’.Footnote ²¹ Reacting against the ‘strikingly legalistic setting’ of late scholastic moral theology, Luther regarded good works to be only the fruit of our justification by faith and in service of our neighbour, without bearing any value or merit before God.Footnote ²² Calvin ‘developed ethical questions extensively’, but he and Luther suspected that the fulfilment of moral norms can foster works-righteousness and is ‘well adapted to fomenting and concealing a pharisaical hypocrisy’.Footnote ²³ Thus, Hauerwas claims that although ‘theological issues have always been at the forefront of Protestant ethical reflection’ (unlike the reliance of post-Tridentine Catholic moral theology on natural law), such reflection would often be carried out at a high degree of abstraction from the circumstances of the moral life.Footnote ²⁴ For example, although Luther ‘denounced covetousness in general terms’, when asked a specific question on usury, could offer no real guidance except to do as conscience demanded.Footnote ²⁵ If Protestants did engage with concrete behaviour, they did so in pastoral writings, which were ‘often not informed by explicit theological convictions’.Footnote ²⁶

If we look at the emergence of Christian ethics as a distinct discipline in Protestant seminaries in the United States during the twentieth century, on the one hand we find a determination to rediscover Christianity's ‘insistence on organic unity between religion and morality, theology and ethics’.Footnote ²⁷ This was especially true of those, such as Walter Rauschenbusch, involved with the Social Gospel movement, who sought to ‘mobilize the energy and power of the church for social renewal’ and for relief of the poor.Footnote ²⁸ Later ethicists were greatly influenced by Reinhold Niebuhr's Augustinian critique of the Social Gospellers’ optimistic views about how greatly the practices and institutions of fallen human beings could be made more just. But, as Hauerwas notes, Niebuhr (and others, such as James Gustafson) still kept the Social Gospel's assumption that the task of Christian ethics is about finding ‘the means for Christians to serve their societies, especially American society’, in the hope of making them more just.Footnote ²⁹ This understanding of the purpose of Christian ethics ‘allowed, and perhaps even encouraged, the separation of ethics from its religious roots’, because it led ethicists to prioritise the need to be intelligible to an increasingly pluralistic and secular society.Footnote ³⁰ As Christian ethicists came to believe that ‘they must translate their convictions into a nontheological idiom’, in order ‘to remain political actors’, the result was that it became increasingly difficult to see what, if anything, remained – or needed to remain – specifically Christian in their ethics.Footnote ³¹ Influenced by Schleiermacher and by liberal Protestantism's tendency to justify theological discourse by anthropology, and motivated by a desire to achieve social justice, Christian ethics became a discipline largely subservient to the same goods or norms recognised in philosophical ethics. For example, Gustafson argued that the Christian ethicist not only serves the Christian community but also ‘formulates principles and values that can guide the actions of persons who do not belong to the Christian community . . . In effect, the theologian moves from the particular Christian belief to a statement of their moral import in a more universal language.’Footnote ³² He thought that this translation into a universal language was possible because God's intentions were for the welfare of humanity and of creation as a whole, and ‘thus on most occasions the reasons that justify any moral act would justify the moral acts of Christians’.Footnote ³³ So, although the Social Gospel movement's intention was to recover the unity of Christian faith and ethics, in a paradoxical way it led later ethicists to weaken that very unity. This is because as the purpose of Christian ethics was determined by political or pastoral concerns rather than by doctrine, the connection between ethics and doctrine seemed to be either unimportant or a hindrance for Christians to be understood in a secular society.

Yet the same century also included Protestants who sought to reintegrate moral theology into dogmatic theology. For example, Karl Barth claims that an understanding of ethics as independent and autonomous from revelation ‘coincides exactly with the conception of sin’.Footnote ³⁴ For him, theology is not a part of some greater activity, whether that be the civilising mission of the state university (as it was for Schleiermacher), or the pursuit of social justice and political change (as it was for the Christian ethicists mentioned above). Theology must be ‘the ground for all that we know and do’, and it serves primarily ‘the church's proclamation of Jesus Christ’.Footnote ³⁵ Thus moral theology cannot be said to serve any predetermined philosophical or secular notion of ethics, but rather it must be a part of the church's dogmatics in order to be the ‘confirmation of the truth of the grace of God as it is addressed to man’.Footnote ³⁶ According to Hauerwas, Barth's insistence on the dependence of ethics on ‘God's revelation in Christ’ entails that ‘there can be no “ethics” separate from theology, particularly when theology is understood as an activity of the church’.Footnote ³⁷

I shall not dwell on whether or not Barth or the ressourcement Thomists were successful in their efforts to reunite theology; nor will I focus on their proposed explanations about why this unity disintegrated. I have made this necessarily brief and incomplete overview to establish three claims: first, that there once was such a unified theology; second, that this unity was lost and a division between dogmatic and moral theology emerged in Catholic and Protestant theology; and third, that there has been a growing recognition of this division and a desire to overcome it in both traditions. In the next section my argument will turn to mariology to defend two claims: that the history of its development corroborates the persistence of this division in Catholic theology, and that mariology has been ignored by those theologians who have sought to overcome this division. In the final section, I shall then argue that mariology does nevertheless have a role to play in reuniting theology, because Marian dogmas reveal how moral theology ought to be based on certain key doctrines.

The unity of theology in mariological perspective

While mariology as a distinct part of theology has its origins in Baroque scholasticism, Mary occupied an important part in the teaching and preaching of the patristic period. Concerning the earlier part of this period, Gambero writes:

Having a clear and concrete understanding of the incarnation was especially pressing during this period, due to ‘an environment permeated by eclecticism and Gnosticism’ and the spread of various christological heresies (e.g. Docetism, Ebionitism, etc.).Footnote ³⁹ In this context, ‘the virginal birth of Jesus from Mary formed part of the central kerygma of primitive Christianity’ because it affirmed both the divine origin of Christ's person (against Ebionitism) and also his true humanity (against Docetism).Footnote ⁴⁰ This ‘confirms that, in the first centuries, the Church did not know any mariological doctrine separate from christological doctrine’.Footnote ⁴¹

Yet in the period during and after the Council of Ephesus in 431 theology about Mary began to flourish and set the pattern for all subsequent mariology until the late scholastic period. Cyril of Alexandria's defence of Mary's title Theotokos (‘mother of God’) against Nestorius, vindicated at Ephesus and reaffirmed at Chalcedon, led to ‘a sharp increase in the level of Marian doctrine and devotion’.Footnote ⁴² Ambrose ‘was the first to provide the classic formula that Mary is a type of the Church’,Footnote ⁴³ a distinctive feature of Western mariology,Footnote ⁴⁴ which Augustine developed by ‘placing Mary before the Church as her ideal image and as perfect member of the body of Christ’.Footnote ⁴⁵

Particularly in the later patristic period, there were many reflections on Mary's pre-eminent holiness and many ‘panegyrics directing the attention of Christians toward the moral figure of the Mother of the Lord’.Footnote ⁴⁶ A typical example would be the Venerable Bede who ‘follows the traditional Eve-Mary parallelism in opposing Mary's humility to Eve's pride, and . . . her life-giving obedience to the death that entered through Eve’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Mary is presented as ‘an example for monks and nuns, to whom she shows the way to the fatherland through humility and chastity, being wholly occupied with divine and despising earthly things’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Augustine considered Mary's faithful discipleship of Christ to be even more important than her status as his mother, noting that her virtues can be seen most of all in ‘the devotion and faithfulness with which the Virgin hears the word of God and puts it into practice’.Footnote ⁴⁹ In summary, after the dogmatic definition of Mary as mother of God, Mary ‘became, not only an object of admiration and exaltation, but also a model for imitation with regard to the Christian moral life’.Footnote ⁵⁰ This occurred naturally as there was as yet no distinction between dogmatic and moral theology.

However, the divisions in Catholic theology after the late scholastic period meant that mariology became something confined to dogmatic theology or devotional literature, without any place in the emerging discipline of moral theology. Baroque scholasticism tended to follow the structure of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae by discussing mariology in the context of christology and the incarnation. As a typical example from the sixteenth century, Francisco Suárez's mariology ‘derives entirely from the doctrine of the divine motherhood’.Footnote ⁵¹ This was at least continuous with the patristic practice of situating mariology within christology. Neo-scholastics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were especially interested in the systematisation of mariology, as a sub-section of dogmatics, by explaining how ‘all her other titles follow from and are explained by’ Mary's divine maternity,Footnote ⁵² which was understood as ‘the fountain-head of all her other privileges’.Footnote ⁵³ Yet the increasingly subtle and complex theological discussion of these privileges (e.g. the definition of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception) meant that any consideration of the relevance or imitation of Mary in the ordinary Christian's moral life was marginalised. Mary's role in the lives of the faithful was confined to the soteriological value of her unique association with Christ's work of redemption and mediation of grace.

As I have mentioned above, a move to reunite moral and dogmatic theology can be discerned among Protestant and Catholic theologians during the past century. Yet these same theologians either did not consider mariology to be pertinent to this task, or their contributions to mariology persisted in keeping it within dogmatic theology, although they began to situate it more in ecclesiology than in christology. The decision made during the Second Vatican Council to include mariology as part of the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, instead of putting it into a separate document, represented the triumph of a new kind of mariology. Influenced by the ressourcement movement's ambition to return to the sources, it sought to fix mariology more firmly in the scriptural history of salvation, guided by the ‘ecclesio-typical’ mariology of the fathers, according to which Mary is considered to be the origin, exemplar and eschatological realisation of the church.Footnote ⁵⁴ Yet as Ratzinger writes, ‘[i]n practice the triumph of Church-centered mariology initially resulted in the collapse of all mariology whatsoever’.Footnote ⁵⁵

Those theologians who did not abandon mariology continued to develop the Vatican II's ecclesiological form of it. To give but one example, for Ratzinger ‘Mariology exercises an indispensable clarifying and deepening influence on the concept of the Church’Footnote ⁵⁶ and helps us to avoid an excessively ‘masculine, activist, and sociological’ ecclesiology.Footnote ⁵⁷ Yet Ratzinger and other ecclesio-typical mariologists such as Louis Bouyer rarely make any connection between Mary and moral theology, which leads them to have the tendency ‘to turn Mary into an abstraction somewhere in “salvation-history”, the essential mystery of the Church . . . or even “transcendent femininity”’.Footnote ⁵⁸ This is despite the fact that Ratzinger has also written about the need for a closer interrelation of faith and morals,Footnote ⁵⁹ and has criticised post-Tridentine moral theologians for being too detached from revelation.Footnote ⁶⁰ So, although the focus in mariology has shifted from christology to ecclesiology, its continued confinement within dogmatic theology indicates the degree to which a division between the two remains ingrained in the minds of modern theologians.

The importance of mariology for moral theology

In this final part of my paper I shall defend the importance of mariology for moral theology in order to argue that mariology can aid the desired reunion of dogmatic and moral theology.

Protestant theologians have sometimes been more perceptive than Catholics in recognising that, as Barth wrote, far from being a peripheral concern, ‘Catholic mariology is connected separately with all the rest of theology’.Footnote ⁶¹ To be sure, Barth did not view this as a positive feature of Catholic thought; quite the contrary: ‘In the doctrine and worship of Mary there is disclosed the one heresy of the Roman Catholic Church which explains all the rest’.Footnote ⁶² Specifically, Barth claimed that papal infallibility, sacraments and the ecclesiology and natural theology of Vatican I are all the consequences of mariology, because it is the answer to ‘the problem of creaturely co-operation in God's revelation and reconciliation . . . a spurious problem, the sole answer to which can be false doctrines’.Footnote ⁶³

Barth is wholly correct to associate mariology with a certain understanding of the relation between grace and the human person, and it is principally this that mariology brings to moral theology. Thus I am not claiming that mariology can contribute to the casuistic examination of particular ethical issues (i.e. to what was called ‘special moral theology’ in the manualist tradition). William Finan attempts to do this in his article on the ‘Impact of Mariology on Christian Ethics’, where he argues that Marian dogma has relevance for such specific ethical issues as the defence of human dignity, particularly the dignity of unwed mothers and of the elderly.Footnote ⁶⁴ Whatever the merits of this approach, I shall instead argue that mariology can contribute to the doctrinal basis of our general understanding of the Christian moral life (i.e. to fundamental moral theology).

This will require us to go beyond a narrow definition of moral theology. Finan was certainly correct to claim that, if moral theology is understood to be ‘the reflection upon prescriptive norms for human activity’, as it had been understood by the manualists, then ‘[a]nyone coming from such a perspective will find very little help in Mariology’.Footnote ⁶⁵ As the ressourcement Thomists have also argued, we must have a more capacious understanding of moral theology that grounds its understanding of human nature and freedom on dogma, and gives the ‘New Law of grace its proper position’Footnote ⁶⁶ as ‘the truly significant principle of morality’.Footnote ⁶⁷ This will help us to avoid the mistake of the American Christian ethicists (i.e. Rauschenbusch, Gustafson, etc) who failed to emphasise the distinctiveness of the Christian moral life from a purely philosophical account of ethical behaviour.

A defining feature of Marian devotion and doctrine has been directed to her incomparable holiness, which ‘is not limited to her moral performance, though, to be sure, it includes it’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Since the manualist approach tended to focus on the evaluation of discrete actions, in relation to various laws and obligations, Pinckaers and other virtue ethicists have argued that post-Tridentine theologians have been less inclined to evaluate the morality of personal character (i.e. virtues or vices).Footnote ⁶⁹ However, the virtue ethicists often do not mention that this also led to a lack of attention to holiness or sanctifying grace in moral theology. Since the manualist school concentrated on the evaluation and avoidance of sin in the moral life, it often restricted its attention to actual grace (i.e. the momentary aid of God needed to avoid sin and carry out meritorious actions), with the result that sanctifying grace was ignored.

Not only was sanctifying grace predominant in the fathers (who often wrote about grace enabling us to participate in the nature and life of God), but it is also the aspect of grace that is brought to the foreground by mariology. For ‘it is manifest foremost in Mary’ that ‘[t]o have life only in and through the divine life and to be joined to the divine persons as spouse is the call of every soul’.Footnote ⁷⁰ As ‘an image of deification for every soul’, Mary shows that the Christian moral life depends on the reception of this sanctifying and divinising grace;Footnote ⁷¹ by means of it we are perfected and disposed to act supernaturally to reach the goal of knowing and loving God in the beatific vision. Once we recognise that ‘the only proper context for morals is grace’,Footnote ⁷² it follows that Christian morality cannot merely be ‘natural morality with some added trimmings’,Footnote ⁷³ nor can it merely be the fulfilment of what is human.Footnote ⁷⁴

Here one could object that the relevance of Mary for our own moral life is surely limited by her dissimilarity to us. For example, the Immaculate Conception could be interpreted as ‘a teaching that emphasizes Mary's exceptional character and thus her difference and distance from other men and women’.Footnote ⁷⁵ ‘Yet with this, as with other Marian doctrines, Mary's uniqueness points precisely to something that is true of all humanity and of all creation.’Footnote ⁷⁶ This is first because the consent that Mary gives to the incarnation at the annunciation ‘sets its seal on an authentic doctrine of creation’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Against ‘the mistaken view, according to which God is the sole agent’ acting upon a purely passive creation, mariology preserves our belief in ‘a creation which has been summoned and equipped by God to respond to him in freedom’.Footnote ⁷⁸ The drama of the moral life depends precisely on this integrity of creation before its creator, which makes ‘the interplay of divine and human freedom’ possible.Footnote ⁷⁹

Mary not only possesses a freedom unimpaired and no different from ours, but even the uniqueness of her holiness still bears relevance for us, because she has ‘to a fuller degree what each soul is called to possess’.Footnote ⁸⁰ As John Henry Newman wrote, ‘There is no difference in kind between her and us, though an inconceivable difference of degree.’Footnote ⁸¹ She has set the pattern for us. Like her, we are drawn to God, ‘not necessitated, much less violently forced’,Footnote ⁸² so that if we interpose no obstacle, we ‘become by grace what the only-begotten Son of God is by nature’, namely a son or daughter of God.Footnote ⁸³

So mariology not only protects the integrity of human nature by showing how our freedom is not overpowered but rather empowered by grace, but it also ensures that we correctly grasp the supernatural goal to which the Christian moral life is aiming. For if grace sets in motion the supernatural moral life, the dogma concerning Mary's bodily assumption at the end of her life shows us the ultimate goal to which this gracious life is aiming. Attention to this goal is another key part of dogma that has been missing from much of manualist moral theology.Footnote ⁸⁴

Although none of us can hope to be bodily assumed into heavenly glory immediately after death, still the assumption ‘is a token, and the first fulfilment, of God's desire to give glory to all humanity’ in their composite reality of body and soul.Footnote ⁸⁵ Thus it is a sure support against any dualism, or what Maritain called angelism, which would see the self as distinct from and free to manipulate the body and the external world.Footnote ⁸⁶ This mistake has been identified by some as being at the root of many moral and bio-ethical problems.Footnote ⁸⁷ The assumption also prevents us from understanding our ultimate end (union with God in the beatific vision) in a manner that detracts or forgets about our naturally embodied, fleshly existence. As Thomas wrote, although the beatific union consists essentially in an intellectual act of the soul, the natural conjunction of body and soul means that this act is not prevented but rather perfected by the reunion with the body in the post-resurrection state.Footnote ⁸⁸

Finally, the importance of grace for the moral life, as shown by Mary, can help us ‘to reorient moral theology in light of the New Law of the Gospel’, as Pinckaers has persuasively recommended to us.Footnote ⁸⁹ This recommendation refers to Thomas’ highly original teaching about the new law, which remained largely ignored or misunderstood for centuries by his interpreters. Thomas’ claim that the new law does not add any new precepts to the natural law was interpreted by the manualists, as evidence that the ‘Christian faith did not add any new content to the moral life that went beyond the natural law’.Footnote ⁹⁰ Yet this was actually a misinterpretation caused by the manualists’ focus on legal obligations, for according to Thomas the new law is nothing less than the activity of the Holy Spirit operating through charity in the faithful.Footnote ⁹¹ Among Thomas' contemporaries, many saw the new law as being an external law just like the Decalogue because it relies on the written text of the Gospels. Thomas instead argues that the written texts (chiefly to the Sermon on the Mount) are secondary, because they dispose us either to receive, or to be directed by, the grace of the Holy Spirit.Footnote ⁹² There are other external instruments of the new law, such as the sacraments, which either establish or augment this grace. But uniquely ‘the New Law is a law internal to the human person, although it has its origins externally, in God’.Footnote ⁹³ Thus, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, made possible by sanctifying grace, impels the Christian from within to seek the perfection of charity, according to the New Testament's understanding of it.

Since by sanctifying grace we become adopted children of the Father, our behaviour ought to go beyond what is demanded by the imperatives of the Decalogue and the natural law. Thus the new law adds no new precepts nor abrogates any of them, but it does add the counsels of poverty, chastity and obedience, because, by the freedom and spontaneity of the children of God, ‘[t]hese counsels call for our own personal initiative’,Footnote ⁹⁴ so that we may ‘advance more smoothly and speedily along the path to the perfection of charity’.Footnote ⁹⁵ It is in these counsels that the perfection of Mary's and of our own moral lives is to be found. Her poverty, chastity and obedience, in all of their material and spiritual aspects, were both the condition and the supreme manifestation of her holiness. Therefore, the example of Mary indicates that the perfection of our charity by grace in the Christian moral life is guided according to the standard of the new law of the gospel.