Day 2: The New Eve

The second day of the Immaculate Conception Novena turns to one of the most ancient Catholic Marian titles: Mary as the New Eve. The Catholic tradition has read the figure of Mary in counterpoint to the figure of Eve since the second century, and the dogma of the Immaculate Conception is, in many ways, the Catholic dogmatic articulation of this ancient typology.

Today's invocation

O Immaculate Virgin Mary, Mother of our Lord Jesus and our Mother... (the full opening prayer)

Today's meditation

Saint Irenaeus of Lyon (c. 130-c. 202), in his treatise Against Heresies (book 3, chapter 22), develops the Catholic typology of Mary as the New Eve at length. The argument runs: as Eve by her disobedience to God's command became the cause of death for herself and her descendants, so Mary by her obedience to the angelic announcement ("Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word", Luke 1:38) became the cause of salvation for herself and her descendants. "The knot of Eve's disobedience was loosed by the obedience of Mary; what the virgin Eve bound by her unbelief, the Virgin Mary loosed by her faith."¹

The Catholic typology requires that Mary be free from the original sin that came into the human family through Eve. If Mary had inherited original sin from her own conception, she could not have been the new beginning that the Lord intended; she would have been part of the fallen humanity that needed redemption rather than the Mother through whom the redemption came. The dogma of the Immaculate Conception is therefore the Catholic dogmatic completion of the New Eve typology: Mary, preserved from the inheritance of Eve's sin, is the truly new Eve, the woman in whom the human nature begins again.

This typology is the foundation of the Marian Undoer of Knots devotion (treated in the Mary Undoer of Knots Novena). The knot Eve tied is loosed by Mary; the knots of our particular lives, derivative of Eve's original knot, are loosed by Mary's continuing maternal intercession.

Today's intention

Today, in addition to your principal intention, ask the Immaculate Mother to be the New Eve in the specific situation of your life. Immaculate Virgin, you are the New Eve who undoes the knot of the first Eve. In the situation I have brought to you, undo the knots that Eve's sin has tied in my own life.

Reflection

The Catholic typology of Eve and Mary has practical consequences for the Catholic understanding of the Christian woman. Mary is, in this typology, the model of restored femininity: the woman as the Lord intended her from the creation, before Eve's fall, free from the disorder that sin introduced. The Catholic woman who looks to Mary as model finds in her not a list of behaviors to imitate but the ontological reality of the woman the Lord made her to be, recovered in Mary's preservation from sin and held out to every Christian woman as her own future identity.

The Catholic feminine genius (the phrase is from Pope Saint John Paul II's apostolic letter Mulieris Dignitatem of 1988) is grounded in this Marian theology. The woman who lives the Catholic life under Mary's patronage is gradually restored to the fullness of femininity that the Lord intended. The novena's second day is the appropriate Catholic moment to recover this Marian foundation of the Catholic woman's vocation.

Closing prayers

Pray three Hail Marys in honor of the Immaculate Conception.

O Mary, the New Eve, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.

Footnotes

1. Saint Irenaeus of Lyon, Adversus Haereses (Against Heresies, c. 180), book 3, chapter 22, paragraph 4. Pope Saint John Paul II, Mulieris Dignitatem (apostolic letter on the dignity and vocation of women, 15 August 1988). Available at vatican.va. ↩