Why the Western Orthodox Celebrate the Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary

A Contemporary Russian Icon of the Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary,

By Bp. Joseph (Ancient Church of the West)

Unlike the Roman Church, the Western Orthodox Church does not hold the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception as a dogma. While many great Western Saints, such as St. Ambrose and St. Augustine, argued for the idea of inherited sin and guilt, based upon an understanding of the impartation of the human soul through the human father’s blood (a view which insisted humanity’s eternal souls were a subdivided inheritance from Adam and thus ontologically tied back to his decisions, actions and curses in the Garden of Eden), the Eastern Church never agreed with this view, seeing each individual soul as a creation of God, granted at the moment of conception. While the West calls this Feast the "Feast of the Immaculate Conception", the East has always called it the "Feast of Conception of the Theotokos." Regardless, they are both celebrated on December 8th or 9th respectively, nine months before the "Feast of the Nativity of the Most Holy Theotokos" on September 8th. 

The East consistently teaches that a broken human nature was inherited by all children of Adam after the Fall. This is a tendency to sin, rather than an absolutely depraved “massa damnata” that is incapable of knowing or perceiving good or responding to God’s grace. We inherit this broken propensity for sin, and not the guilt of our parent's sins, thus preserving the biblical principle that a child should not be judged by the sins of its fathers. This does not mean that the East accepted the belief that humanity could earn salvation without God’s grace by making righteous decisions, so-called “Pelagianism”, but that the point of receiving this initiating grace comes at our conception and by the impartation of a human soul and a free will, rather than at some later stage of our human development. All humans are broken, but we all receive God’s initial grace to call us back to Himself. In the case of the Holy Virgin, she responded to that initial grace with obedience, and thus cooperated with God in the act of bringing the Messiah into the world. In all of the history of the world, this only happened once, and it is one of the reasons why we should be immensely grateful for God’s love towards us and the world-changing act of obedience that would, literally, become the Uncreated God’s found a willing door into the created cosmos, through which He would begin His divine work of reconciliation, restoration and re-creation. The obedience of the Blessed Virgin, even as a babe in her mother’s womb, would undo the disobedience of our Mother, Eve, and allow Christ to begin His work of saving her and us in the process! 

Because Western Orthodoxy dogmatically agrees with the East, while keeping the liturgical patrimonies of the West, we must disagree with the reason for the Immaculate Conception that Rome dogmatized at the First Vatican Council (along with the other things that they proclaimed, such as Papal Infallibility), which is the insistence that the Virgin Mary was born without the broken Adamic nature, the inherited guilt of the Fall, and a human nature that was divinely restored and preserved by God’s grace, so as to allow the Virgin Mary to be ontologically sinless against her own will. In the Western view, the Theotokos had no choice. In the Eastern understanding of the Holy Virgin’s nature, she was conceived in perfect freedom like all humans, gifted with the image of God, the Imago Dei, which is the ability to choose love and act in response to God’s creative will. The Blessed Virgin chose to respond to God’s grace through obedience rather than perpetuating Adam’s rebellion, without changing her nature or making her any different ontologically from the rest of humanity. 

St. Anna Holding the Theotokos, Who Holds Jesus Christ the Lord

So, while we agree with the Roman Church that the Blessed Virgin was sinless, preserved by God’s grace, we do not believe that she was fundamentally different from the rest of humanity, and, instead, represented all of humanity in the process of Christ’s incarnation, imparting to Christ a nature that is identical with ours, so that it is transformed and divinized by its perfect infilling with God’s divine nature, grace, and power in the undivided Person of Our Lord and Savior. This does not mean that the Theotokos did anything on her own. The desire, power and energy to do God’s will all came from God. What makes her unique is that she did not resist God. 

Therefore, this celebration of the Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary commemorates the part that Sts. Joachim and Anna played in conceiving God’s special, pre-ordained, world-transforming vessel for the Incarnation. Through pure and holy marital union, the undefiled marriage bed, they submitted to God’s will and brought about the Blessed Virgin, who fully inherited her humanity from her parents, which was gifted with an eternal soul by the work of God’s life-giving Holy Spirit, and was brought into the world to serve God’s salvific Covenant by loving and righteous parents. In conceiving this child, who, from the beginning of time was chosen by God’s foreknowledge and grace to bring God into the world, all of the saintly ancestors of Christ fulfilled the destiny of the Jewish People and brought the Holy Covenants that God made with Adam, Noah, Abraham and David to fruition. These all were manifest in the fullness of Christ’s Person, the Emmanuel, “God with Us”, and thus fulfilled all of the Law and the Prophets. 

This is a profound mystery and marvelous in our eyes. He who has ears to hear, let him hear! 

COLLECT

ALMIGHTY GOD, Who broke the bonds of barrenness, and heard the prayers of Saints Joachim and Anna, allowing them to conceive the Blessed Virigin Mary as the fruit of their holy matrimony; grant that we may, by the Power of Thy Holy Spirit, so obey Thy Commandments, that we may be like Thy Blessed Virgin and declare with her “So be it unto me, according to Thy will”; and that we might also cry for her heavenly intercession like the Holy Angel who greeted her and the conception of Our Lord - “Rejoice, O Full of Grace, the Lord is with You!” Through Jesus Christ Our Lord, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee, in the power of the Holy Ghost, ever One God, world without end. Amen! 

Sts. Joachim and Anna, pray for us! O Most Holy Theotokos, pray for the salvation of our souls!