HIS
VIRGIN MOTHER remains, when all else has been said, our finest proof that
the Christ Child was neither God nor Man to the exclusion of the other.
He was inseparably both. That Mary bore a normal infant, after nine
months of formation within her, proves to all but the heretical Docetist
his genuine humanity. That she conceived the Infant without losing her
virginity, once this doctrine is believed, proves his superhuman origin.
No other baby ever got into existence without the help of a human father.
The miracle of Mary's virginal motherhood, all
the earliest Creeds profess. That of the apostles, which carries their
name, has lost none of its ancient truths. Its revision in the sixth
century did not touch these. It has, like the Nicene and other set forms,
submitted to no demand of the heretic to remove any doctrine from its body
of truths. It holds them all sacred. If ever the Church had so revised
the text as to cancel out the virginity of the blessed mother, pretending
that she may have had additional children and did not necessarily have
Jesus by the Holy Spirit, it would have repudiated the apostles. But such
an outrage to their memory the Church did not and, being under divine
guidance, could not perpetrate.
The Apostles' Creed asserts to this day their
unalterable belief in Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, "who was
conceived by the Holy Spirit" and "born of the Virgin Mary." In
practically the same working the ancient Roman Rite for Baptism contains
the question, "Do you believe in Christ Jesus, the Son of God, who was
born by the Holy Spirit from the Virgin Mary?" St. Hippolytus quotes this
in proof of the antiquity of the doctrine. He quotes it in his
Apostolic Tradition.
The quibblers, who profess the Bible and yet
reject the virginal motherhood of Mary, are historically an insignificant
few. They need not concern us. Their foolhardiness in acclaiming the
sacred text while disclaiming its evidence defies understanding. They
cannot have paid attention to the angel Gabriel, who clearly explains how
Mary would become a mother and still remain a virgin. They contradict the
Virgin herself, who if anybody does ought to know.
The partial dissenters, by contrast, accept her
virginity before but not after the divine birthday. They have decided
that the doctrine terminates with that date, which is not a proper way to
commemorate Christmas. They quote several texts from the Gospels to their
imaginary satisfaction. They have misinterpreted them. Who, and by what
authority, decrees that they have? The Church, by the authority of
Christ. She has in her condemnation but followed the common verdict of
saint and scholar. Except for Helvidius, whom St. Jerome demolished, and
Bonosus, whom St. Ambrose repudiated, and Jovinian, whom St. Augustine
refuted, no serious Biblicist until Cajetan of the sixteenth century
contends that the mother in that blessed home of Nazareth had any other
children than the Son of God.
The first of the misunderstood texts in
question comes from St. Matthew. "Now the birth of Jesus Christ," it
runs, "took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to
Joseph before they came together she was found to be with child of the
Holy Spirit" (I:18). Reading which, the partialists are perfectly willing
to concede the virginity of the expectant mother. Her precious Burden,
they wouldn't have it otherwise, is of a supernatural conception. But at
the same time they read into the clause, "before they came together," a
supposition which they get out of their heads and not out of the words.
Since when does a coming together between man and woman have to mean what
these eclectics here say it must? They insist that the betrothed couple,
after a customary period of living apart, then began their life together
in the husband's home for the only possible purpose of breaking their
mutual promise to abide in chastity. The dissidents do not admit the
promise, to be sure. But the Church does. She dogmatically teaches it.
Such a promise, apt to draw the sneers of a
lascivious age, did not find the climate of Israel inimical. It surely
could not have seemed an anomaly to the Essenes of that day, who were
themselves pledged to chastity. It could not have been criticized as a
departure from the spirit of other high moments in the Old Testament.
Prior to his receiving the Decalogue from the Most High, Moses admonished
the people to prepare for the event by a period of sexual abstinence. All
the more strictly did the Law impose continence on the priests during the
long intervals of their liturgical services. Nor did David go free of the
regulations. When he petitioned Abilemech to bestow on him and his
companions the holy bread of the Presence, he was promptly informed: "If
only the young men have kept themselves from women." His assurance to the
priest that all had met the condition, that "of a truth women have been
kept from us," gained for the group the pious request (I Sam. 21:4-5).
Vows were an established practice in Israel.
Favorites of the Lord resorted to them under stress of circumstance, to
offer him a test of their loyalty, to show him a special reverence. Thus
Jacob vowed a tithe of his possessions, Jonah an offering of sacrifice.
Hannah the dedication of her child to the service of God, and David the
efforts of his remaining life toward the building of a fit Temple for the
Most High. None of these merely promised; they were profoundly solemn
about it; they vowed. And if Judith, the patristically acclaimed
prototype of the Virgin Mary, did not strengthen her resolution to the
force of a vow, she none the less kept it. Pride of her nation, a
foremost beauty of the land whom "many desired to marry," the young widow
decided against a second marriage and would seem to owe not a little of
her people's admiration to her steadfast resolve to devote the remainder
of her one hundred and five years exclusively to the Lord (Jud. 16:21-23).
Judith only did what Mary did at a younger age,
before contracting a marriage at all. The text unmistakably shows her
mind already made up to forego the sexual privileges of a wife by the time
the angel invited her to be a different kind of mother. She was not
indifferent to the honor. Her eventual acceptance proves she was not,
once the angel had solved her difficulty. Simply, having given the Lord
her solemn word, she could not in conscience feel free to go back on it.
Her familiarity with the sacred writings of her people would of itself
constrain her. She who knew them intimately enough to be able to compose
her later Magnificat in a spontaneous outburst of gratitude, which
paraphrases into her own musings the idioms of the prophets and salient
words from Hannah's canticle, could not have been ignorant of God's
recorded warnings to the breaker of a solemn promise to him. "When you
make a vow to the Lord your God," she would accordingly remember, being of
a delicate conscience, "you shall not be slack to pay it; for the Lord
your God will surely require it of you, and it would be a sin in you"
(Deut. 23:21).
From all of which, it is reasonable quite as
much as traditional to conclude that at their betrothal Joseph agreed to
Mary's condition and was himself in favor of a virginal marriage. No
other interpretation can bring sense out of the facts. It explains his
acute anguish when the evidence of a default on her part confronted
Joseph. He couldn't understand it, knowing Mary to be the holiest of
maidens, but that didn't obliterate the evidence. What was he to do?
Holding sacred his side of the agreement and his religion's uncompromising
abhorrence of adultery, he had lost the desire to take the innocent
suspect into his home after the term of their betrothal would expire. Yet
one thing he shrank from doing out of his tender regard for the woman he
had hoped to companion through life ad gloriam Dei: he would not
expose her to the Law. There is the pathos of a tremendous heartbreak in
the simple words: "Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to
shame, resolved to send her away quietly" (Mt. 1:19).
It didn't take heaven long to rectify the
misunderstanding. Providence had been using Joseph for the holiest of
purposes: to establish him for all time the primary witness to his own and
Mary's inviolate chastity. He responded nobly. He fulfilled the
purpose. Now an angel, come from God, was telling him the astounding
truth: "Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary your wife, to that
which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit; she will bear a Son, and
you shall call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their
sins" (Mt. 1:20-21).
Never again for as long as he lived would
Joseph hear so welcome a glory of words. Their meaning made everything
instantaneously clear. Their brevity had power. They lifted his spirit,
all in a moment, from the nadir of despondency to the highest summit of
joy he had yet known. He would have to adjust as best he could to the
rare atmosphere of such elation. The carpenter of Nazareth was going to
live in it to his dying day.
St. Matthew under the prompting of the Holy
Spirit allowed the angel to finish his statement, recording every
beautiful word of it. But the evangelist had no intention of letting it
stand alone. He added to it another, in confirmation. Having quoted the
angel, he now quotes the prophet Isaiah. "All this took place," he
writes, "to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet: 'Behold a
virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, and his name shall be called
Emmanuel' (which means, God with us)."
St. Matthew in what he next says, to point up
the truth of the Virgin Birth, has been grossly misinterpreted through an
ignorance of the scriptural use of the word till. The preposition
in many a passage of the Old Testament can be seen from the context to
mean "during the whole time before" and nothing more. Thus, to cite a
parallel instance, the remark that the daughter of Saul had no child till
the day of her death does not intend to suggest that Michael delivered one
on that last day of her life or even, mirabile dictum, after it (2
Sam. 6:23).
When St. Paul exhorts Timothy to read Scripture
and preach and teach "till I come," the apostle does not expect the man to
stop doing all that after he has come (I Tim. 4:13). Surely the lover in
the song who begs his sweetheart to "pray each night for me till we meet
again" does not mean that, once they meet again, her prayer for him is to
cease from then on. No one in his senses would so interpret the words.
But that is the shoddy treatment accorded St. Matthew.
The evangelist does not put into his statement
anything beyond what it actually says: namely, that Joseph, having obeyed
the angel and taken Mary to his home, had no relations with her all
through those blessed months until the great birthday. The wrongheaded,
who argue from the text that he afterwards did have, betray an
insensitivity to a linguistic nicety and to the obvious intent of the
writer to throw emphasis on the supernatural conception of Christ the
Lord.
The same school of bunglers treat St. Luke no
better, showing an unsavory impartiality. They take one of his most
endearing announcements to torture the meaning into serving their errancy.
That "she gave birth to her first-born son and wrapped him in swaddling
clothes and laid him in a manger" does not in the least connote that the
mother would have a second child in due time (Lk. 2:7). To contend that
it does, in this context, is to miss the significance in Jewish law of the
term first-born. "Consecrate to me all the first-born," the Lord
instructs Moses; "whatever is the first to open the womb among the people
of Israel" (Ex. 13:2). But "the first," not a few correlative texts go to
the bother of explaining, is restricted to meaning a male offspring.
Accordingly, the first-born son in any Judaic family was always spoken of
as that, even though his mother would never have another child, since the
distinction not only made him special to the Lord but entitled him to
privileges known as his birthright. It is deplorable logic to conclude
that, because a first-born is so mentioned, there simply must follow a
brother or sister, if not more of each. As St. Jerome reminded Helvidius,
every only child is of necessity the first—and, it may as well be added,
the last.
Be that as it must, do not the evangelists
speak of Jesus as having brethren? As having brothers and sisters? They
do, beyond a doubt. "Is not this the carpenter," the natives of Nazareth
inquired of Jesus, "the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and
Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?" The quotation
comes from St. Mark (6:3). But let it not be forgotten that the word
brother in the Aramaic dialect of the time could mean either brother
or cousin, just as the word sisters could mean either sisters or
cousins. Always the given context must determine which.
As for James and Joses being blood brothers of
the Lord, be advised by the same evangelist that they are not. In a
subsequent verse he definitely refers to them as sons of another Mary than
the Mary who bore Jesus (Mk. 15:40). Moreover, the evangelist John writes
that these two Marys are sisters, which of course would make James and
Joses first cousins of the Lord (Jn. 19:25). Indeed, the so-called
brothers of a Masonic lodge are most of them not even tenth cousins.
As for the so-called sisters of the Lord, the
Church regards them just as emphatically not of the Holy Family.
True, one or the other among them may even have been an aunt, since the
term has a vague connotation. But their remote consanguinity should not
have disturbed them. For being a close blood relative of Jesus, on his
own assurance, did not count at all in determining his genuine intimates.
He said it to his immediate audience and to the ages, that his nearest of
kin are "those who hear the word of God and do it" (Lk. 8:21).
By which criterion, his blessed mother enjoys a
closeness to him which her maternity only confirms. She was, she is, she
always will be, of all the vast creation of angels and men, his dearest
favorite.
Taking our Lord on his word, we should have to
suppose that Mary the saint transcends in dignity Mary the mother. Her
holiness, unlike her maternity which she received once and for all,
required a constant and active cooperation with the Holy Spirit. And this
already showed to sharp advantage when the girl of teen age vowed her
everlasting virginity to the Most High, which even the prospect of the
sublimest motherhood could not induce her to retract, and which God did
not want her to retract. He chose the holiest of young women to conceive
and shape to humanity his only begotten Son, not in spite of her
virginity, but because of it. The angel knew he was addressing a virgin,
and knew she intended to remain one, when he greeted her with the highest
of all compliments.
It is interesting to follow the gradual
development of the Christian idea through the early centuries: that her
virginity fostered and promoted in Mary her profound sanctity. Following
the process, the sensitive might well sense the urgings of the Holy Spirit
behind those obedient pens which, in the hands of his patristic agents,
created word by word a vast treasury of insights. They, each in turn,
contributed to the resource from which three councils drew the wealth of
their great utterances. Who were these publicity agents for the Virgin
Mary? They form a distinguished company, whose names need only to be seen
to convince of their worth: St. Ignatius, St. Justin, St. Irenaeus,
Clement of Alexandria, Origen, St. Athanasius, St. Ephrem, St. Epiphanius,
St. Basil the Great, St. Gregory Nazianzen, St. John Chrysostom, St.
Jerome, St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, St. Hilary, Pope St. Leo I, Pope St.
Gregory I, St. Zeno of Verona, St. Cyril of Jerusalem, St. Cyril of
Alexandria, St. Gregory of Nyssa, and in this or that place whoever else.
What amuses one, who loves these men for it, is
their incipient flare-up of temper when Mary's sacred virginity is so much
as questioned. Thus St. Basil serenely marvels over the miracle that "the
selfsame woman is virgin and mother: she abides in the holiness that is
virginity, and she is blest with the birth of a Child." But just let an
Arian ask for a hearing on the issue, as Eunomius does, and he receives
from the Bishop of Caesarea an impatient retort: "Lovers of Christ refuse
to lend an ear to the idea that the Mother of God ever ceased to be a
virgin." Similarly, Origen snaps off a rebuff: "No one whose mind on Mary
is sound would claim that she had any children save Jesus."
Never does Scripture, which names Jesus the Son
of Mary, name anyone else that. The early Church, from whom the New
Testament came, knew that she had no other child. Nor do the evangelists,
in recording the public life of Christ, ever refer to his widowed mother
as a widow—lest, perhaps, the term suggest the wrong idea. They knew,
with the early Church, of her perpetual virginity. They knew it from her
Divine Son, from his dying words, St. John quotes them.
While the breath of life still remained to him, Jesus
made the provision of a loving Son. His mother stood beneath His agony in
a grandeur of sorrow. They exchanged looks. Such memories, as no other
child and mother could to the same degree of intensity have known, were in
those looks. He turned his gaze to St. John. He spoke to the apostle,
entrusting to his tender care the creature dearer to him than all the
heaven of devoted angels. Would the dying Savior have done this, would he
have had to do this, if his mother had any children at home? Wouldn't
they, if there were any, have stood with her at the Cross? No mention is
made of their having done so. No mention could be made. They did not
exist.
The Blessed Mother had only the One. Isn't
that as it should be? Her sacred womb was no more meant for ordinary
childbearing than a chalice, consecrated to hold the Precious Blood, is to
be used ordinarily. It cannot but strike the student of history with the
immediacy of cause and effect, that precisely the deniers of Christ's
divinity are inclined to go on to the denial of his mother's virginity.
Since to them the Babe of Bethlehem was nothing more than a model human
being, and not at all in a class to himself, why should not his mother
follow the normal procedure of supplying him with brothers and sisters?
Helvidius, an avowed Arian, argued so. Eucomius of Cyzicum, another
Arian, did so even more irritably. But the great writers of the early
Church, one of whom is definitely known to have enjoyed visions of the
Virgin Mother and have conversed with her, reverse the argument. Since
Mary's Child was truly God, the sanctuary of her womb must remain closed
to intrusion. They regard it a Holy of Holies not to be violated. It is
too sacred for other use than what it knew. An additional, lesser birth
would profane the sanctuary.
St. Ambrose advances the argument further
still. The Virgin Mother must have full time, undistracted by the needs
of other children, to devote to her precious Son—of the Holy Trinity. She
must have the leisure to adore the eternity of One not yet a year old.
She must not be denied the opportunity to reflect long and often on the
omnipotence of a Baby who relied on her to feed him, lift him into his
crib, wash and clothe him. She must not be under an obligation to soothe
the cries of a younger infant when "her first-born," who created her and
sustained in her the breath of life, deserved her undisturbed
appreciation.
To Mary it was a favorite meditation: that hers
was God's only begotten Son. Never did she forget it, watching the Infant
grow into boyhood, waiting for the Child to take his first step or speak
his first word, listening with Joseph in the silence of a sacred home for
such words of wisdom as would afterwards astound the doctors in the
Temple. On the occasion the Divine Boy reminded her that he must be about
the work of his Father. Only too soon would the time come when, after
thirty years with her at Nazareth, he must leave. Her maternal heart
could not but feel the departure keenly. But she did not complain. God's
will was hers.
She had brought up an only Son, to have him die
for the children of men. And in the dying, knowing what a devoted mother
she had been to him, and that her lifelong devotion would now the better
qualify her to fulfill his behest, Jesus made it. He commissioned her to
be the Mother of them all.