Tota Pulchra Es

Our Lady of the Gate of Dawn, Vilnius, Lithuania

Tota pulchra es, Maria,
et macula originalis non est in te.
Vestimentum tuum candidum quasi nix, et facies tua sicut sol.
Tota pulchra es, Maria,
et macula originalis non est in te.
Tu gloria Jerusalem, tu laetitia Israel, tu honorificentia populi nostri.
Tota pulchra es, Maria.

You are all beautiful, Mary,
and the original stain [of sin] is not in you.
Your clothing is white as snow, and your face is like the sun.
You are all beautiful, Mary,
and the original stain [of sin] is not in you.
You are the glory of Jerusalem, you are the joy of Israel, you give honour to our people.
You are all beautiful, Mary.

--traditional prayer to Mary, dating at least to the 4th century AD.


One of the things non-Catholics always get wrong about Catholicism is the Immaculate Conception. Typically, the uncatechised assume it refers to Jesus being conceived without sex. Wrong on two counts. It refers to Mary being conceived without original sin.

If Mary was conceived without original sin, as according to definitive Catholic dogma she was, that leads to certain other fascinating possibilities. Death came into the world through sin, for example--”the wages of sin is death.” If Mary was conceived without original sin, and never sinned personally, it follows that she never died. Hence the doctrine of the Assumption, that she ascended into heaven body and soul.

So far, so doctrinally certain.

The grotto at Lourdes. The inscription features Mary's first words to St. Bernadette, in the local dialect: "I am the Immaculate Conception."

But this also implies something else, suggested in the ancient prayer above. Nature fell with man. If Mary never fell, her physical nature also never fell. Her body, too, was the one one would have in Eden. Hence a body fit for heaven.

Unfallen, it would be a perfect body, as originally intended by God. This is what is suggested in the ancient prayer quoted above: her earthly clothing would be immaculate too, her face like the sun.

Would Mary not have been, therefore, necessarily, the perfection of feminine beauty?

After all, as Plato rightly points out, there are in out experience three transcendent values; three things that are divine and eternal, a priori values that give value to all else: the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

God, as supreme being, must necessarily be, by his nature, perfect truth, i.e., perfect reality or being, perfect good, i.e., all-good in a moral sense, and perfectly beautiful. We tend to forget the last, for some reason, but it is there from the beginning. “Too late, O ancient beauty, have I loved thee,” lamented St. Augustine.

Because God is perfectly good, anything he created must also be perfectly good, and perfectly beautiful. He would not create anything with a flaw. Therefore, his creation as well, in its own nature, would necessarily be good, and beautiful, prior to the fall of man. If not, as Descartes pointed out, God would not be perfectly good, and he is by definition.

The Assumption; from the National Museum of Catalan Art, Barcelona.

God's own beauty is a spiritual beauty, the beauty of the Logos: the beauty we experience in an elegant mathematical equation or logical deduction. God is spirit.

But Mary, as his one never-fallen creation, represents perfect physical beauty.

No wonder she is such a popular subject for visual artists. In principle, she is the ultimate subject for the visual arts.

Why is it, then, you may ask, that Mary is not famous for her beauty in the way Cleopatra or Helen of Troy were? Why is it that great wars were not fought over her, and a thousand ships launched? Why did successive Emperors not court her? Instead, she found at her door only an old carpenter from Nazareth. An old carpenter who was content never to have sex with her, in the end.

A good question. But consider this: for the past two thousand years, artists of all kinds have sought to portray her. Following the standard of the ancient prayer, they have as a matter of course sought to portray her as the most beautiful woman their imaginations and their craft could achieve.

And yet, how many men, gazing on a statue or a painting of Mary, have feelings of lust? How many think of her sexually?

A beautiful body is one thing. A beautiful body combined with a beautiful spirit, even implied, is something else. That enters the realm of art.

And that is one way to understand Mary: as the great Muse. She personifies what all art aspires to be: perfect physical beauty combined with perfect spiritual beauty.