Mary's Incorruptibility

Martyrdom of St. Hippolytus

St. Hippolytus

Dialogue, I

The ark which was made of incorruptible timber (Ex. 15:10) was the Savior. The ark symbolized the tabernacle of His body, which was impervious to decay and engendered no sinful corruption...The Lord was sinless, because, in His humanity, He was fashioned out of the incorruptible wood, that is, out of the Virgin and the Holy Ghost, lined within and without as with the purest gold of the Word of God.

[The Ark of the Covenant, as type and figure of Christ, leads Hippolytus to associate the sinless-ness of Christ with that of His Mother, a characteristic form in which the Immaculate Conception is expressed in the early Church. The passage will be used as well to witness to the incorruptibility of Mary's body, the basis for the dogma of the Assumption.]

Unknown

Author

AB-Philosophy undergraduate at Notre Dame of Marbel University.