I have gradually – as a Catholic friend predicted years ago – acquired a great fondness and veneration for her whom Anglicans call the BVM and Orthodox the Theotokos. Mary, or Mariam/Myriam as was probably her actual name, is indeed, as the theologians say, the first and foremost in humanity’s response to the Saviour. Her reply to the alarming appearance of an Archangel in her spinning-room on an afternoon in March was “Be it unto me according to Thy word.” And with that, she set the tone for all of us.
She has, of course, become whatever the faithful want her to be: Our Lady of Sorrows, Our Lady Star of the Sea, and – a particular favourite of Pope Leon IV and of mine – Our Lady of Good Counsel. She is often easier to address than her Son, and one often feels that she is a kindly listener.
The veneration the Church accords her has resulted in some curious dogmata. Most recently (1950), her bodily Assumption into Heaven, celebrated on August 15. Perhaps the earliest was that of the Divine Motherhood (Ephesus, 431). Her freedom not only from personal sin but from Original Sin was proclaimed by Pius IX in 1854.
All these are far removed from our daily experience and concerns. Faced with them, even a faithful Catholic may shrug and say OK, why not? I feel the same way, though only if I agree not to think about them too closely. But the fourth – in history, the second – dogma halts me in my tracks. This is the dogma of her Perpetual Virginity, proclaimed by the Lateran Council in 649. It is because of this that Yeshua’s brothers and sisters, mentioned in Mark 6:3 – the brothers even by name: Ya’akov, Yosef, Yehuda and Shimon – had to be demoted to “close relatives” or “cousins”. This was clearly of the utmost importance. Why? Because, according to even the early Church Fathers, sexuality, even in holy marriage, was a “defilement” and thus, obviously, inapplicable to the Mother of Yeshua Meshiach. Him she had to conceive “without sin” by the Holy Spirit; but that was not enough: she had to continue her virginity lifelong.
In part, such “virgolatry” is a trait of Mediterranean culture. In most if not all of the countries surrounding that inland sea, women are seen as one of three avatars: virgin, mother or whore. Mothers are respected; but the Mother of Christ was above even such respect, hence virgin. Secondly, we see here also a remainder of Manicheism, which flourished in Europe from the second century on and was only slowly disappearing at the time of the Lateran Council. Its dualism, which saw flesh and matter as inherently evil, had a long underground life, reappearing in the Middle Ages with the Cathars and persisting, in one form or another, even to this day.
One sees, therefore, why the Council adopted such a position; however, it did not do so without at least some opposition. The main opponent was one Helvidius, of whom we know little, and that little only from the treatise that St Jerome wrote against him: De Virginitate Beatae Mariae, Adversus Helvidium. From Jerome’s citations, we can gather that Helvidius’s opinion was thoroughly commonsensical: he took Mark 6:3 seriously and maintained that Mary, while virgin at the time of Jesus’s birth, went on to have a normal family life with Joseph, giving birth to four more sons and at least a couple of daughters. Jerome berates him and insults him, and goes on to use elaborate arguments to suggest that Jesus’s brothers were cousins, that a “firstborn son” may just as well be an only son, and that not only did Mary remain virgin, but that Joseph himself was and remained virgin all his life. True, he says, marriage is an honourable state; but virginity is much to be preferred for those who would be holy, because while a virgin only wants to please God, a married woman must and does make an effort to please her husband before pleasing God. It is perhaps true that there have been holy women who were married; but in that case they were holy only when they had ceased to have sexual intercourse.
The Catholic Church finds it difficult if not impossible ever to alter a theological position it has adopted: hence, Mary’s perpetual virginity is still dogma. One does wonder how many Catholics actually believe it; but among Catholic laymen the counterpart to the Church’s rigidity is often a capacity -- not shared by, and always suprising to, Protestants – for cognitive dissonance: in other words, believing two incompatible things at the same time. Many years ago I heard on the radio an interview with some Irish working-class women about birth control. Do you practice birth control? the journalist asked. Of course we do, they replied. But you are Catholic, aren’t you? Oh yes, we are that. And the Church forbids birth control, doesn’t it? Oh sure, yes it does. Well, don’t you feel that there is a problem there? At which they burst out laughing and said, And why should we care what a bunch of old bachelors in Rome say?
I love to think of the Holy Family, and will write some more about that. Meanwhile, I am a Catholic, though not officially Roman, and I am an unashamed Helvidian, no matter what some Macho Mediterranean Manicheans foisted upon the Holy Church.
