The fact that we agree she remained sinless through her entire life is proof that she had no concupiscence. It is impossible to remain sinless without a special grace from God. To say that Mary was an ordinary person who remained sinless by her own power is absurd. Scriptures cry out against such ideas throughout.
Good points, Jo. What say you guys?
"If Mary is the New Eve, she was born sinless - meaning, she was born with God's presence within her. That is exactly the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. She was born with God's presence AND she was born without the stain of original sin (stain = effect of original sin, which is concupiscence)."
First, Mary is the New Eve, but she wasn't the Same Eve. Eve's created purpose was to become fully "a god", to paraphrase +Athanasius, and pass on that potentiality to her descendants. We are taught that by her sin, she cut off the possibility of attaining that created purpose because she become a bondswoman to death and that bondage, not by the way a punishment from God as the Baltimore Catechism would have it, was passed on to her descendants to this day. It was passed on to Mary just as it was to each of us. And each of us are conceived and born as "sinless" as Mary was. Mary, unlike the rest of us, the consensus patrum says, remained sinless (but we all know that not all The Fathers agreed with that)and she remained that way through a complete subjugation of her will to that of God which happened because of her particular response, cooperation or synergy if you will, to God's grace. To say this is not absurd at all. This could not, however, have resulted in theosis because no matter what, she was in bondage to death until her Son broke the bonds of death by His death, descent to the dead, the breaking of those bonds and His Resurrection. To say otherwise is to deny that Christ was her savior, which, so far as I know, no Father ever said. To say that she received a "superabundance" of grace, issues of the nature of that grace aside, is to deny that God's grace falls equally on all creation, which is, to say the least, a basic tenent of Orthodox Christianity.
Mary is indeed the New Eve, because she is The Most Holy Theotokos, through whom Christ entered the world and through whom our created potentiality again became attainable, having been lost to death through the sin of the First Eve.