Philosophy in Light of the Immaculate Conception

On Entering the Quest from Wonder to Wisdom

This is a repost of a piece I wrote on the last Feast of the Immaculate Conception, December 8, 2023. As the thoughts are hardly “time sensitive,” I thought I would share them with you again today, in case you didn’t see them, or in case you might find them worthwhile to ponder them again. I hope everyone enjoys a marvelous feast day of Our Lady! I’ll return to the theme of the arts and festivity later in the week.

Χαῖρε, κεχαριτωμένη (chaire, kecharitōmenē)

Ave, gratia plena

These words, the greeting of the Archangel Gabriel to Our Lady (Luke 1:28), given above in both Greek and Latin, inaugurate a fresh start to the human adventure, our adventure: the Quest for ultimate meaning and fulfillment.

A Quest, that is, for Truth and Love.

Pope Benedict XVI argues in his little book, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives, that the true meaning of the word chaire in Greek is not so much “Hail,” as it is translated in the Hail Mary, but “Rejoice!”

Gabriel has come to announce joy:

Rejoice, having been favored…having been graced.

If you’re keeping score at home, the Greek verb kecharitōmenē is a perfect passive participle, meant to emphasize that Our Lady, even before Gabriel arrives, has been favored.

(In his invented language of Quenya, as Holly Ordway explains in her marvelous piece, “Tolkien, ‘Beloved Bernadette,’ and the Immaculate Conception,” J.R.R. Tolkien renders the key verb in Luke 1:28 as quanta Eruanno. Eruanno means literally “of the gift of Eru” [God in Tolkien’s mythology] and quanta means “full,” with associations of “full to the brim.”)

The verb “having been favored” is a reference, though it took until 1854 for the Church to work out the formulation, to Our Lady’s Immaculate Conception: that from the moment of her conception she was without stain of original sin. How could this be? As Bishop Barron explains, drawing from Blessed John Duns Scotus,

“Mary is indeed redeemed by the grace of her Son, but since that grace exists outside of time, it can be applied in a way that transcends the ordinary rhythms of time. Therefore, Mary, by a kind of preemptive strike, was delivered by Christ’s grace from original sin.”

And so, our adventure begins afresh. Mary is the New Eve. Christ is the New Adam. Mankind is set upon a New Quest: to enter into the very life of the Trinity.

The goal of the Quest is described in the second reading from today’s Mass for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. Our goal now is to achieve a new mode of being: “to be holy and without blemish before him” (Ephesians 1:4).

St. Paul extrapolates on the theme: “In love he [the Father] destined us for adoption to himself through Jesus Christ, in accord with the favor of his will, for the praise and glory of his grace that he granted us in the beloved” (Ephesians 1:5-6).

Our Quest, in short, is to become adopted sons and daughters of our Father God.

A Fairy Story

It is a kind of fairy story. Tolkien, as Holly Ordway writes, had a great devotion to St. Bernadette Soubirous, to whom Our Lady appeared at Lourdes in 1858. For Tolkien, St. Bernadette’s story has “Every quality of a ‘fairy story,’ plus both truth and sanctity, an overwhelming mixture.” But St. Bernadette’s story is also meant to be ours. We are also intended to understand ourselves as living, with the help of Our Lady, a great adventure in quest of being “holy and without blemish before him.”

Pope Benedict XVI says that Gabriel’s Annunciation to Mary, and particularly his greeting, “Rejoice,” “marks the true beginning of the New Testament.” It is a fresh start for human beings, who had “fallen down.” In a beautiful Advent meditation called “The Tree of Life,” given not long after he had been created cardinal in 1977, Pope Benedict observes: “Again and again, we find ourselves unable interiorly to walk upright and to stand. Again and again, we fall down; we are not masters of our own lives; we are alienated; we are not free.”

The meaning of Advent and Christmas, by implication, is that, unless we recognize ourselves as not masters of our own lives, as alienated, as not free, then we cannot possibly succeed in our Quest. The deluded modern ideology of autonomy can only lead us down the wrong path. That grossly egoistic understanding of self-mastery and freedom cannot help us.

What can help us, the only thing that can help us, is a new vision. A new imagination. A new understanding of ourselves as children, wholly dependent upon our Father, but in that childlike dependency wholly carefree and full of the joy that Gabriel came to announce. “Unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3).

Children love fairy stories. But how much more exciting is it to learn that we are actually living in one?

“And we shouldn’t be here at all, if we’d known more about it before we started,” says Sam to Frodo on the way to Mount Doom (see the chapter “The Stairs of Cirith Ungol” in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings).

“But I suppose it’s often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of a sport, as you might say. But that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually—their paths were laid that way, as you put it.”

Here Sam experiences a moment of insight. An insight is the mind’s “sighting” of something that is essential, something that must be the case. What is Sam’s sighting? That his life has taken the form of an adventure story, a quest. This is what he “sees” as essential and necessary: that his life has taken on this peculiar narrative shape.

Sam achieves his sighting by connecting his and Frodo’s dire situation with that of the characters in the adventure stories he has heard and enjoyed his entire life. Sam’s insight must also be our insight, one that this Feast of the Immaculate Conception helps us achieve: Our life is an adventure story. The greatest story of them all.

Philosophy as Quest from Wonder to Wisdom

My favorite way of defining philosophy is to say that it is a Quest from Wonder to Wisdom. I capitalize the word “Quest” here because the Quest of philosophy is in some sense the same Quest to which human beings were invited at the Annunciation.

The Quest for a new mode of being—“to be holy and without blemish before him”—is fundamentally supernatural. It begins with God’s “mad” initiative: filling Our Lady’s human nature to the brim with grace. And through Our Lady’s acceptance of the Father’s invitation to bear the Word of God—fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum, “Be it done unto me according to thy word,” Luke 1:38—we are able ourselves to enjoy the grace of participating in the Quest. This grace comes in the form of a fellowship with Christ and all those redeemed by him, a fellowship enjoyed particularly in the sacraments and more particularly in the “lembas bread” of the Eucharist that enables us to bear the crosses of our journey.

Philosophy, however, only makes use of our natural powers. But these powers, of course, are themselves gifts of God, given to us to aid us in our Quest. They are another kind of “preemptive strike” of God’s favor.

In the broad sense, philosophy seeks to make sense out of the adventure that we accept by faith. But it does not begin its reflections with supernatural data. It begins with what we can know with our natural intelligence and proceeds from there.

The philosopher Josef Pieper attests that the philosophical act begins with a “shock.”

“The act of philosophizing, genuine poetry, any aesthetic encounter, in fact, as well as prayer, springs from some shock. And when such a shock is experienced, man senses the non-finality of this world of daily care; he transcends it, takes a step beyond it.”

Gabriel’s arrival gives Mary a most unusual and supernatural shock. But the shock that initiates philosophy is available to anyone willing to look at the world with fresh eyes. There is an “annunciation,” of sorts, whenever we transcend the world of daily care, the world of the doing mode if not the threat mode, and allow the world to become present to our natural intelligence.

The Poetic Mode

This mode of “presencing” can also be called the poetic mode.

The poetic mode is the mode of wonder, of curiosity. It is a mode of loving attention to a person, or to nature, or to God. It is in one sense a mode of passivity, as it is more a “taking in” of reality than a “doing something” with it.

Indeed, we enter the poetic mode whenever we put aside the to-do lists and the anxieties and surrender ourselves to the reality around us via our senses, our imagination, our memory, our emotions—and yes, too, our reason. But here our reason is not yet busy formulating abstract arguments. It is simply attending lovingly to what is there.

A walk on a sunny and mild December afternoon should be enough to get us into the poetic mode. Or coffee with a friend. Or a visit to an art museum. Or watching a film or listening to a piece of music. For Sam, it’s facing probable death. Life’s most precious moments demand that we enter the poetic mode: the birth or marriage of a child, the death of a parent, the graduation from college.

The poetic mode can also be entered in through play, through storytelling, through communal meals, through falling in love. Even if it’s just an afternoon walk, it is a mode of celebration, a “yes-saying,” as Pieper puts it, to the goodness of reality.

And when the world becomes present to us, we see it with fresh eyes. Our sense of wonder is piqued and our natural intelligence is poised to be “lit up” with understanding.

And what do we understand when we do understand? What wisdom is gained?

It could be that we finally see the vital importance of a question: What is the meaning of my life? How am I to go about finding this meaning? What should be the next episode in my adventure?

It could be that we see that what seemed true really is not—perhaps because our attempt to live the ideal of autonomy has led us into absurdities.

Or, it could be that we achieve insight, a sighting into what really is true, good, or beautiful.

Insight comes with being in the poetic mode. Our Lady was always in the poetic mode, living continuously in the loving presence of God and of her neighbor and of the wonders of creation. She was always a child at play in the “game” of God’s adventure, a mode of being which prepared her ultimately to “see” what God wanted to show her at the Annunciation.

Yet the shock of insight that comes from being in the poetic mode is only the beginning of philosophy. Just enough to get us moving on our way. Eventually, our Quest for Wisdom compels us to want to formulate our thoughts with greater precision and deeper insight. If all goes well, we will gain full-blown theoretical or scientific knowledge of what is essential to whatever subject we are immersed in.

Yet this more rigorous mode of inquiry is still always in service to the poetic mode. For at the end of a scientific or theoretical inquiry we always want to return to the poetic mode simply by lovingly contemplating, “chewing on,” the new insights we have achieved.

The Greek word for contemplation, theōria, is derived from a verb meaning “to see” or “to gaze at.” So the word is associated with attention, with taking something in, with the poetic mode. In fact, the ancient Greeks called the seating area where the audience watched tragedy and comedy the theatron, “the gazing place.” That is what the world becomes for us when we allow it to make its “annunciations”: a gazing place, a place of renewed vision—

An intimation of a glory that is unblemished, “immaculate.”    

*** The painting at the top of this post is an image of Henry Ossawa Tanner’s “The Annunciation” (1898), which hangs in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Pace Giotto, it is my favorite Annunciation scene.