A common objection to Mary relates to her “fiat” in Luke 1, as well as the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. The claim is that Mary was unable to truly consent to the proposal carrying God’s Son.
Essentially, it states that if the importance of Mary is due to her willingness to accept God’s invitation to carry his Son, and the Catholic dogma of the Immaculate Conception is true that Mary was free from sin, then could she have really said no when God came to her? This would appear to invalidate “her” decision as not really hers. If the decision was never really hers, but God’s through her, then she no longer carries any basis for uniqueness, making the unique Catholic attributions superfluous and illogical.
Besides ignoring the historical, Patristic parallel to Mary, Eve, who also was immaculately conceived and yet was able to reject God’s will, this argument assumes a misunderstanding of how grace works. By virtue of being grace, a gift, grace cannot impose itself onto anyone. This especially includes the will.
Regardless of the means by which God does so, to condemn the basis of Christianity, God’s grace, as a mechanism for overpowering someone, especially the woman chosen to be Jesus’ mother, is an insult to the One whose essence, we believe, is love.
This common misconception of freedom puts our will against God’s will. It states that the more there exists of one, the less of the other. I have seen this misconception of freedom also applied to people in heaven, who apparently are less free because they cannot sin, and even applied to God, who is shackled by his perfect goodness and, therefore, not free to sin.
Freedom, like anything else that exists, has a formal cause and a final cause or purpose built into its nature. Christians have long recognized that freedom, because it is an operation of the will, is ordered toward goodness. Freedom works when it is used to seek or produce goodness.
A second important point about free will is that it is contingent. The physical limits to our freedom become evident when we try to fly. If our free will is contingent, then it exists, ultimately, only because of God’s will. Our will and God’s will are not two competitive realities. Human will, by its created, contingent nature, necessarily proceeds from God’s will. This means that our will also participates in God’s will to the degree that it conforms to God’s will.
Our will does not exist apart from God’s will, but works, is truly free, only when participating in God’s will. It still works in a limited sense when we reject God’s will and choose to sin, but this is because God has both an antecedent and a consequent will. The antecedent will is the primary thing that God desires. By creating and upholding our free will in the first place, God is willing that we be free to participate in or reject God’s consequent will, which is that we choose goodness. God will allow us, as a consequence, to reject goodness because this allowance is necessary for our will to be truly free.
As a brief aside, this means that although a person is always “free” to reject God’s will, which is what it means to sin, he exhibits greater freedom when he participates fully in God’s will, because God’s will created, and currently upholds and orders, that will for choosing goodness. A will that chooses goodness conforms more closely to its proper end, which makes it participate more fully in its cause, God’s will, making it more free.
One objection to this idea could be that it begs the question: the definition of goodness here is simply “doing God’s will,” and “God’s will” is “goodness.” However, in this circumstance, we are not saying it is good simply because God wills it—divine voluntarism—but that the actual final end of the will is goodness. Similarly, a hammer’s final end is hitting a nail. The hammer fulfills a metaphysical good by attaining its purpose. Separately, it is also true that God wills our ultimate good, which would be for a substance to participate in fulfilling its purpose.
Because God did not need to create us, or anything else, for that matter, this makes our free will a product of God’s grace. When we use our will, it is because grace is allowing it by upholding its existence. In fact, because it is God’s will that upholds our will, our will “works” better when it cooperates with God’s will. Similar to how gravity holds everything on earth in place, I work better when I cooperate with gravity. I am technically free to reject gravity and act against it to the degree that I can try to overpower it. Unfortunately for me, I would end up illustrating my inability to reject gravity in the very attempt.
When we use our will to not cooperate with God’s grace, it makes sense that we would call this sin.
Going back to Mary, if she was “full of grace,” as St. Gabriel calls her in Luke 1:28, then it would follow that her will was entirely free. Even those uncomfortable accepting the Immaculate Conception cannot deny that she is called, in that moment, full of grace, before the prospect of carrying God’s Son is proposed. If God’s grace is what frees someone, another prospect that no Christian should deny (see Rom. 3:24, 6:14; Gal. 5:1), then Mary’s fullness of grace could only make her more free to accept or reject God’s proposal. By cooperating with God’s will even further by accepting the invitation, Mary’s capacity for freedom expanded even more.
Like Eve, Mary was not only free to say no, but more free than any other human in history. This greater level of freedom is part of what made Adam and Eve’s sin so devastating. Like any sin, theirs was a free choice—it would not be a sin if it were not free—that enslaves.
Far from undermining Mary’s immaculate conception, her “yes” to this grave, literally awesome mission proves evidential for her immensity of grace.