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6.
The Virgin Birth
THAT
MARY CONCEIVED her Child virginally, no one of any account in the Church
ever doubted. That she remained a virgin throughout her dedicated life
with Joseph and ever after, only a few of the early theologians tried to
argue the Church into rejecting—in vain. They were promptly censured.
But a third feature of the doctrine, implicit in the acknowledged
permanence of Mary's virginity, took time to develop. It emerged under
the influence of the Holy Spirit gradually but surely into a full
understanding, which speaks out in the Christmas homily of Pope St. Leo
the Great: "Jesus Christ our Lord entered upon this earth. He came down
from his heavenly throne, not forsaking the glory of his Father, yet
begotten in a new order by a new nativity. . . . He was begotten by a new
birth, conceived by a virgin, born of a virgin without the cooperation of
a human father, without injury to the maternal virginity."
The italicized phrase simply means this. The
mother in giving birth suffered no more physical disturbance than a window
pane which lets through a burst of sunshine, or the wall of the Upper Room
when the risen Savior came through it to stand of a sudden in the midst of
the apostles who out of fear had locked the doors against a hostile
intrusion (Jn. 20:19). There are other similes available. The rich
researches into the prerogative bring them preferably out of Scripture.
At Ephesus, and again at Chalcedon, the
discussion never referred to the Son of God without bringing in his
mother, nor to her maternity without including her virginity. The latter
council in its primary concern with the humanity of Christ, and the former
in its preoccupation with Mary's divine motherhood, both made open
acknowledgment of her threefold virginity. The acknowledgment reflected
the mind of the Church. It had in it, besides, that vibrant interest
which the faithful felt toward the human mother of their God and which
they demonstrated in their outbursts of joy over the decisions of both
conclaves.
At either council it was the incidental
references to the triple distinction of Mary's virginity that invited, if
they did not coerce, a third council to form a definitive statement once
and for all. And that is what a third council did. It met at the Lateran
in 649 to give the authentic consensus of opinion the binding force of a
dogma. It crystallized the findings of patristic insight into the
serviceable triad, ante partum, in partu, post partum.
It declared the unalterable truth: that Mary the Ever-Virgin Mother of our
Lord Jesus Christ remained a Virgin before his birth, during his birth,
after his birth.
The mystery of the Virgin Birth should cause no
Manichaean uneasiness in any honest presentation of the facts. The truth
of it comes down to this: the eternal Son of God, conceived by the Holy
Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary, was then born of her without the
mother's usual pains of labor and, as has been said, without any bodily
disturbance at all. "The seal of her virginity," as St. John Chrysostom
words it, remained intact during and after the parturition. The
miraculous delivery did not break it. "The Lord's body," writes Pope St.
Gregory of the same miracle, emerged "through the closed portals of the
Virgin's womb."
St. Ephrem was quick to discern in Ezekiel a
reference to the undisturbed virginity of Mary. The prophet had beheld in
vision the gate of the sanctuary which faces east. "This gate," the Lord
God said to him, "shall remain shut; it shall not be opened, and no one
shall enter by it; for the Lord, the God of Israel, has entered by it;
therefore it shall remain shut" (Ezek. 44:2). Accordingly, in an
understanding of the metaphor which the Church has made her own, the
Messiah entered the world from a mother whom his birth did not physically
affect. St. Ephrem argues from the text the virginity of Mary not only at
childbirth but ever after.
This, to the naturalist's dismay, was no
natural event. But neither was the Divine Pregnancy in the first place.
Neither was Christ's breaking out of the tomb alive. By whose authority
has it become incongruous to associate the Omnipotent with miracles?
Another major prophet, long before Ezckiel,
told of the same miraculous childbirth. When Jovinian publicized his
denial of Mary's uninterrupted virginity, St. Ambrose and the synod of
Milan demanded of him a recantation. They set forth the true doctrine.
It is all in the record. The prophet Isaiah, their document reads, "did
not say a virgin would merely conceive; he said a virgin would give birth
as well." Then with a shift from one prophecy to the other: "Now what is
that gate of the sanctuary, that outer gate looking to the East, which
remains shut and no one, it says, shall pass through it save the God of
Israel alone? . . . This is blessed Mary." But Jovinian would not be
convinced. He refused to recant. His case went to the Holy See. Pope
St. Sircius excommunicated him.
St. Augustine, who himself disputed Jovinian,
shared the growing conviction of the Church that the Christ Child in
taking birth of his mother caused her no inconvenience. He writes: "The
unhappy curse of Eve, 'In sorrow you shall bring forth children', in the
case of Mary ended, for she bore the Lord in joy." St. Peter Chrysologus,
for his part, returns to the serviceable metaphor: "The heavenly Guest,
the Inhabitant of heaven, so descended into the hospice of the womb that
he did not harm the enclosure of the body. He so departed from the abode
of the womb that the virginal gate did not open."
Next follows the testimony of Pope St. Leo the
Great. But first it should in gratitude be mentioned that before St.
Ambrose collected his earliest Marian writings into a single volume, which
he dedicated to his sister Marcellina, such stalwarts as St. Zeno of
Verona and St. Gergory of Nyssa had been insisting on the doctrine of the
Virgin Birth. There were others. That indeed De Virginibus ad
Marcellinam owes not a little to St. Athanasius, St. Ambrose would
never deny. The Holy Spirit did not want for pens to take down his
promptings in their scholarly cooperation.
What cannot but strike the student of these
great witnesses to the Faith, whom we reverently call the Fathers, is
their dominant holiness. Being so close to God, cultivating his intimacy,
they were the better disposed to the influence of his Holy Spirit. They
showed it. The shrewd wisdom of a Catherine of Siena, a Paschal Baylon,
neither of whom attended a high school, indicates a superior training.
But the Fathers had it both ways: as fine an education as the world of
their day could give them and, with it, a wealth spiritual insights not
obtainable from the world. Their sanctity, which included a willingness
to listen to the Holy Spirit, brought to their learning a new dimension
beyond the merits of the rarest academic degree. They deserve the
admiration they arouse.
Perish sooner the whole tribe of lesser
theologians, says Newman, than that "I should do aught but fall at their
feet in love and worship, whose image was continually before my eyes, and
whose words were ever in my ears and on my tongue." Now that is language
gone extravagant from a compulsion of gratitude. But the convert, who
under God owed his conversion to the Fathers, did not revise a word of it
in a subsequent edition. He certainly quoted the tribute in his
Apologia, in full. And in that tribute he signaled out for special
mention, for reasons dear to his heart, "the much-enduring Athanasius and
the majestic Leo."
The majestic Leo never showed himself worthier
of the epithet than in his letter to Patriarch Flavian of Constantinople
who had appealed to the Holy See against the heretic Eutyches. The
letter, dated June 13, 449, now grown famous enough to be referred to as
simply the Tome, states with a noble vivacity a noble truth: the
union of two natures in the one Person of the God-Man, with each nature
retaining its special character. Let the denier of our Lord's humanity
read the Scriptures and learn of Tradition "and he would not speak
nonsense, saying that the Word was made flesh in such a way that Christ,
born from the Virgin's womb, had a man's form, yet did not have the
reality of his mother's body." As if the living flesh were a mere
phantom! This insulted the mother, reducing her to an inadequacy who
could not produce a real child. And Pope St. Leo thundered back: "The
Lord Jesus Christ, born from a virgin's womb, does not have a nature
different from ours because his birth was an unusual one." How unusual it
was, uniquely so, the Tome had already explained in a firm avowal
of the double miracle: "She brought him forth without the loss of her
virginity, even as she conceived without its loss."
The statement, though incidental to the theme
of the Hypostatic Union, comes into its fluent development because it
belongs there. The genuine humanity of our Incarnate God, "wherein the
lowliness of man and the greatness of the divinity are mutually united,"
derives from his mother. She could not possibly be kept out of the
discussion, which was an embarrassment to Abbot Eutyches but a joy to Pope
Leo. His every mention of her had in it the holy glee of Christmas. And
while the Virgin Birth would have to wait for a later council to declare
it a dogma, it deserved to share with the other truths of the Tome
the acclaim of an immediate one.
For the letter, addressed to an archbishop for
the benefit of the whole Church, was written to be read aloud at the
Council of Chalcedon. And it was. The force of the logic enthralled the
assembly, driving home the article of faith: that Christ inherited a human
body from his virgin mother to go with his Divinity; else He would not be
called, as He must, the God-Man. On and on the phrases came in service of
the truth. In the repetitive but lively emphasis there was no letup. "To
say I and the Father are One, and to say The Father is greater
than I, are not both pertinent to the same nature." But if the
assertions presuppose two natures, the divine and the human, they are both
of the same Person. The I in both refers to a single Identity, the
divine Person of Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior.
Pope Leo, through his lector, was telling the
assembly nothing new to their faith. They had heard it all before. They
remembered the unforgettable presentation of St. Cyril at Ephesus only
twenty years before. But they had never heard the human side of the
Incarnation, in union with the divine, better expressed. The magnetic
force of a great personality, which would assuage Attila and his
barbarians at the outskirts of Rome, was now lifting the morale of another
kind of audience to a pitch of elation. No sooner had the lector finished
with the Pope's final prayer of hope (that "he who erred may be saved
through the condemnation of his heretical ideas") than the more than five
hundred bishops rose to their feet in a thunderous response. The
dignitaries, being of a robust faith, were not abashed at their triumphal
outcry: "This is the belief of the Fathers! This is the belief of the
Apostles! So do we too, all of us, believe! All who are orthodox believe
the same! Anathema to him who does not believe it! Peter has spoken to
us through Leo."
Eager to put the finishing touch to the
doctrine as enunciated at Chalcedon, Pope St. Martin convoked the Lateran
Council of 649 in order to have it define Mary's threefold virginity. It
did, with an anathema upon those who deny it. At Constantinople in 680,
the Sixth Ecumenical Council under the guidance of Pope St. Agatho
reinforced the Lateran definition. The action only goes to show once
again, that the Holy See does not fail its trust.
In appraising the doctrines of Christ, it
cannot but uphold the honors due His mother. When another new sect openly
denied both her divine maternity and her virginity, Pope Paul IV in a
communiqué to the world declared it a fallacy to say that "the Blessed
Virgin Mary is not truly the Mother of God and that she did not always
retain the integrity of her virginity, before his birth, during his birth,
and ever after his birth." Finally, to make assurance trebly sure, the
Council of Trent reassured the dogma that "Jesus Christ came forth from
his mother's womb without injury to her maternal virginity, which was the
work of the Holy Spirit, who so favored the mother in the conception and
birth of her Son that he imparted fecundity to her while at the same time
preserving her perpetual virginity."
Our own Pope Paul VI, in accord with a noble
tradition, never fails to defend Mary's prerogatives against the threats
of the day. "There have been voices," he warned a weekly audience on
November 30, 1966, "which attempt to distort fundamental doctrines clearly
professed by the Church of God—for example, the virginity of Our Lady."
He was referring to those lecturers who say the formulas of faith cannot
possibly mean at present what they first meant. That is blatant
historicism, which the Holy Father felt in duty bound to condemn.
Applying such a false method of reasoning to
the Virgin Birth, the relativist might accordingly plead that the whole
idea was at the time the best way for getting people to realize the
exceptional importance of Jesus on earth, but that now the evolving
process of consciousness has taken a different view. Nonsense! The
doctrine is based on a double fact, and if it was once true that Mary
conceived virginally and gave birth virginally, it remains true. An event
cannot gradually not have been.
Beware of such talk, warns the Holy See, as
would insinuate "that dogmatic formulas cannot signify the truth in a
determinate way, but can only offer changeable approximations to it, which
to a certain extent distort or alter it." Do not heed, in other words,
the glib of tongue who would debase whatever fixed truth of the Faith to a
will-o-the-wisp fluctuation that is ever there but ever eludes. The
carefully worded document "In Defense of Catholic Doctrine against Certain
Errors of the Present Day," which the Vatican issued on July 5, 1973,
might well have carried the subtitle: "Beware of False Prophets!"
It will always have been true, and is credible
to the faithful in no matter what age they live: that their Savior was
conceived of a virgin, born of a virgin, who was still a virgin when her
days on earth ended. Her virginity becomes the Mother of God. It sets
off her supreme prerogative to best effect. It gives her motherhood
distinction, raises it to an incomparability, no other maternity came of
the Holy Spirit. On the subject St. Augustine writes with an admiration
he always has for the greatest of mothers: "He, who was made of her, had
made her what she was: a virgin who conceives, a virgin with child, a
virgin delivered of child, a virgin ever virgin."
The Incarnate Son of God had to be born of a
virgin. How else? His Father was not of this world. |