Regarding the virginity of Mary, there are some who argue that this is a latter day notion, the result of a gospel reference to the prophet Isaiah wherein he claims a “young woman” in the royal household will give birth, and that her child will save the royal line and power. The Jews of the diaspora translated their scriptures into Greek, the lingua franca of the age. That translation, the Septuagint, renders the Hebrew “young woman” into the Greek for “virgin”. If anything, this indicates the difficulty of trying in a translation to get all the parameters of nuance from one word into another. But, the argument that Matthew and Luke are labouring under an unknown extension of meaning because they are using a Greek version of Hebrew scripture cannot be sustained. Matthew points out that Joseph was planning to divorce Mary when he found her pregnant before they had had sexual relations, and specifically notes they did not have such relations before she gave birth to Jesus. Luke begins his genealogy of Jesus confessing it was commonly assumed Jesus was the son of Joseph. He then follows Joseph’s line of descent back to Adam–whom he calls also “the son of God”. Both are insistent the child in Mary is not the product of human copulation. This is plainly stated from the start in both gospels.
The point both men are making, as is John in his gospel, is not about the state of Mary’s organs or orifices, but about the ultimate meaningfulness of Jesus. The sole purpose of Gospel [a victory cry: “good news!”] is to proclaim Jesus as the Messiah, the Christ—that he is present on this earth as God’s designated presence, and therefore, not by any human contrivance, plan, or act. God’s presence, work, and efficacy in this world are made concrete, incarnate, by the power of God alone, although that power is never able to be manifest without human consent. Thus, Mary bows to God’s plan revealed in an announcement by the angel Gabriel, and Joseph agrees to forget a divorce in the light of an angel’s revelation to him of God’s intention. Therefore, from the perspective of his mission, Jesus is pure grace, gift, a something from beyond the efforts of men. That the “God and father” Jesus preaches comes to be named Love follows, for love, as anyone in love knows well, always appears as something beyond human engineering (dating sites and friend concocted blind dates not withstanding), a happenstance of good fortune smiling, the priceless gift that changes everything including self. It is this understanding, this valuation, of the All Holy as Love that reads back to name Jesus as God’s child. Love reveals itself as the gift of seeing, being able to see, the world in a different light.
There is no contradiction in claiming according to normative biology there was a copulation and the result was a son named Jesus, and confessing this Jesus revealed the idea of God in a new and transformative light as Love Itself and as such, the nurturer (father/parent) of humanity’s true spirit, thus, garnering for himself the title of Love’s visibility, tangibility, manifestation, Love’s active presence in this world, Love’s child incarnate. Gospel faith does not negate our concrete reality; it is meant to present that reality as a spiritual, a psychological, evaluation in narrative form. My having one day fallen in love can be traced according to my biological and psychological profiles, the chemistry going on in my body and my head. My falling in love is also something—to me, for me—something infinitely more than a chart of chemical and electro-magnetic reactions; it is a gift I shall treasure with all my heart into eternity. Why is there such controversy in applying the same truths to Jesus and his origins? Jesus, son of Mary, and Jesus, son of Joseph—both are statements according to “this world”. Jesus, son of God, is a confession that here we are peeping below the surface of the everyday world into the riches, the gifts, within the soul awaiting the ultimate revelations of the self and self-fulfillment. Faith is always paired with hope and love, as is knowledge with fact and science. They are two ways of beholding this life, not contradictory, but complimentary. One without the other keeps us from our “wholeness”. Together they keep us moving forward with purpose, vision, zest, and élan.
There are several considerations concerning the origins of Jesus and the inviolate nature of Mary that I wish to further mark.
From perhaps as early as the late 70s there were stories questioning Joseph’s fathering of Jesus. According to these tales Mary was either the victim of a sexual assault or a fornicator. Her pregnancy was an embarrassment necessitating an exile into Egypt and/or a move to Nazareth to escape, not Herod or his son, but wagging tongues. Considering the date at which such tales appear and the lack of any evidence for the factuality of their claims, they may well be polemical retorts against a literal interpretation of a virginal conception.
There is (perhaps) trace evidence of this polemic in the Gospel according to John. This gospel reaches its final form around the end of the first century, thus, it is contemporaneous with the appearance of these tales. In chapter 8 there takes place a rather heated exchange between Jesus and “the Jews”—John’s own polemic.[i] Jesus accuses his hearers of not being true sons of Abraham for they do not do live up to his standard of fidelity. He foins their ways reveal them to be sons of the devil. They counter with an equally nasty volley. They tell him they are not bastards; they have a father, God. Within their words we can hear the hiss “Where is your father?”. The Johannine gospel always speaks on several levels, so the author is here having a thrust at the vacuous lack of understanding and moral propriety he finds the definiens of them that do not accept Jesus as the Christ, but it also supports the theory that by the end of the first century the virginity of Mary and the paternity of Jesus were being argued.
Certainly, when Mark wrote his gospel half a century before there was no issue in presenting Jesus as an ordinary man with brothers and sisters. As time moves on, the virginity of Mary no longer refers to her state at the point of conception as Matthew and Luke both have it, but to the birth itself and to her state forever thereafter. Thus, the references in scripture to Jesus’ brothers and sisters came to be interpreted as referencing “close relatives”, “cousins”. It needs to be underscored, however, that holy writ only speaks of a virginal conception; it has no idea about Mary being “ever virgin”. The concept of Mary as perpetually virginal is a projection into futurity hinged on two items: the adoption of Judaism’s code of priestly holiness, and the death of the ancient goddesses. Early in its existence Christianity came under the sway of a sacerdotal, a priestly, mind-set. Ministers of gospel become priests, the commemorative communal meal becomes a sacrifice, and Mary, because she was a vessel set aside and intimately touched by God, henceforth could not be touched by anything lesser. As Christianity rose to prominence, the cults of the great goddesses were suppressed. Christendom acted to infill the spiritual vacuum thereby created by presenting a new goddess, one both eternal mother and ever virgin. As her cult flourishes, Joseph comes to be spoken of as an ancient man, a doddering protector hand-picked by God to keep his son and his sacred vessel safe, someone who by age, grace, or disposition was beyond being tempted by sex. (I am rather surprised no one in this day has picked up on the idea of presenting him as a gay man wanting the safe cover of a “respectable” family life, and thereby consecrating gay parenting with scriptural warrant.)
As there was a projection of virginity into all future time, there followed a projection of inviolate nature into the past. Mary’s own conception becomes “immaculate”. That does not mean she was not born by carnal intercourse, but that from the first moment of her existence she was without original sin, that stain that appears on every soul at conception, that result of the first parents’ paradisiac failing. Certainly, there is nothing in scripture to secure such a notion of sin or Mary’s exemption from it. Both reside in the psychology of Augustine of Hippo.[ii] Augustine needed to make the soul of man a unity. Ancient ideas had in man several souls—a sentient soul (a plant-like power of animation), a concupiscent soul (an animal-like force of animation), and a rational soul (an intellectual force of animation). For the ancients, only the rational counted and was capable of eternity. But early Christianity valued body and soul in total unity, and the idea of the resurrection of the body was the perfect doctrinal picturing of this. Man was wholly man only as all parts, all aspects, were present and harmonized in their full glory. When Augustine took these three souls and added them together, he had before him man with a natural fault line—sentient and animal impulses raging against reason, and reason wanting to subjugate everything. For Augustine, this internal conflict in the psyche of man was a result of a fall from unity, a unity man obviously had when God made him, which he obviously lost when he disobeyed God in Paradise, and which he obviously now carries about in his nature until God puts it back in order. As the fault line appears as a result of disobedience to God it is named a sin, as the result of the first sin it is original sin.
Because Mary will be the vessel to carry the God-seed, she must be pure of any stain, and so by divine privilege and intervention, the stain of original sin passes her by, and her conception is “immaculate”. There is a problem with this. That which Augustine discriminatingly deciphers is the psyche of man, but he ties it to, not the natural processes of the psyche unfolding and seeking out its unity, but to an offence against the ultimate unity–the Holy One. He confusedly mixes psychological analysis with theological symbolism. Thus, that which he dubs original sin is simply part of the normative origin of being human. It does enclose a primitive declivity toward the apotheosis of “Me”, but cannot technically be called “sin”. It is the natural proclivity to break things open by asking “Why?”; the primal loss of innocence [literally: not-knowing]. It is the Self of the child emerging from not-knowing to the discovery of I/you, mine/yours, good/evil, right/wrong, positive/negative, etc., and therein and thereby being self-goaded on to reconcile them in the journey of life toward the end of reuniting these forces within into a new unity of comprehension re-constituting the original Self in a transcended state–wisdom. If this ability to psychologically dehisce and regenerate is absent in Mary, can she realistically be called human? For all the devotion intended, this makes of Mary an automaton. This is an example of religious symbolism carried to extremes, taken away from the realm of symbols and handed over to logic and logical extension where it belongs not. Here we behold a simple, ordinary, young woman, whose first-born son will turn to preaching a reform of Judaism and be crucified for so doing, transfigured by a patriarchal world into the prototypical and most glorious Stepford wife.
I have no problem with the great symbol of a virginal conception—the inexplicable, the miraculous, the surprisingly wonderful happens all about us, and to so speak of love’s power over us, within us, and for-us in such a picturing is an elegant rendering of a truth. Let there be no doubt: I honour the icon and the truth of the icon scripture presents as much as I abhor their defacement in senseless, sentimentalized speculation. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph deserve better, and spiritually, such distortions work against our ability to fully integrate body and soul, for the sacred icons we hold before us are the images we aspire to be.
A postscript on practicalities: The above considerations are not much ado about items erudite and esoteric. Our age is becoming more attuned to the fact we need to approach reality in a more holistic, a more spiritual, manner, that the functionality of this world is about more than a bottom line on an accounting spread sheet. Our planetary environment is undergoing a radical shift generating not merely geographic problems but injustices. Technologically, we have the abilities to amend these; spiritually, psychologically, we shun the undertaking of the requisite adjustments and sacrifices. We must face the fact that we need to be more spiritual about our approach to reality, and that we need also to be more realistic about our approach to spirituality.[iii] If true spirituality is a growing in wisdom and graciousness, we must know it will at times be a labourious journey that has no room for sentimental platitudes and religious superficialities, that it has no room to accommodate the violent, xenophobic, shallow, and reactionary lack of discernment of fundamentalisms–be they religious, cultural, or political. Little minds and little hearts are as destructive of us and this planet as are rising waters and temperatures. The well-being of this world in all its parts hangs on the realistic management, the economics, of all things “visible and invisible”, both the incarnates and the iconic.
[i] Cf: A Great Divorce, Part 7, and Part 8 (July 2013)
[ii] Cf: Occidental Ideas, Part 8: Beginnings (February 2014)
[iii] A note to secularists: To the Western secularists who think our Christian inspired and sustained ideals of humanism, democracy, and the equality of rights for women, children, indigenous peoples, the elderly, the ill, the dying, the gay, the transgendered, et al. are forever entrenched, look to history and the globe. These “accomplishments” have tried numerous times to flower and failed. These “advances” are enjoyed and upheld by a very small segment of the world’s population—mostly in Europe and parts of the Americas. In most places—in much of Africa, the Middle East, Russia, Asia, and considerable parts of North and South America–they are in whole or part despised, denigrated, or derided. Our values are not universal, indeed, their contrary is held by the majority. It is a vanity to muse that our economic and political prominence can ensure these values are exempt from becoming endangered or extinct.
To them that hold Christmas, Easter, and the other religious feasts, and their attendant stories, their “pictures” of our psychic life matter not, that they are merely fabled relics of times past best put to rest, I remind you these are the very items of cult that have made this culture, the encoded portrayals of the subliminal psychic valuations of life that have created humanism, egalitarianism, and democracy and allowed them space to evolve. They may well require some reformation and restoration, for religious institutions have often abused them, and society has poorly and too slowly implemented their visions of the primacy of love and the equality of all, but they cannot be ignored as irrelevant. Just as surely as the popular disinterest in the cultic icons of Apollo, Venus and their colleagues brought the Greco-Roman culture with its many aspects of broad-mindedness to an end, so too the loss of these Christian icons to our daily life will atrophy this culture until it fades away and another come to fill the vacuum. Perhaps it is the case that our world has matured to being “religion-less”. If that be true, and humanism, egalitarianism, and democracy are the adult children of these visions, their inspirational beginnings cannot be forgotten or ignored, for like the family to whom we gather in festive seasons, we still need visit on occasion and treasure them always for they are our roots. We may yet learn to so re-treasure, or one day we will need ask with Yeats: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”–for one, indeed, shall, and will its father be Love, its family all humankind, all equals?
A fable of a child’s birth made us and it may also save us.