Tuesday’s discussion left many questions unanswered
regarding Mary’s parallelisms with Eve, Mary’s functions as the mother of Jesus,
and the purpose of Jesus’ conception in the flesh. I’d like to attempt responses
to these questions with closer analyses of the readings and by reflecting
on our discussion.
How are Mary and Eve essentially the same person? The two
were both born out of miracles: Eve was drawn from Adam’s rib, and Mary was
born by Immaculate Conception. Then while Eve begets humankind, Mary begets the
savior of humankind. We established as a class that Mary absolves the sin of
Eve by obeying the angel and begetting Christ who saves humanity, whereas Eve
disobeyed God and ate the forbidden fruit that damns us. But in trying to
understand why the parallel exists, we might be looking for an answer that does
not. It seems important to understand the significance of the qualities that
have interwoven these women in themselves.
Both Eve and Mary are virgins, Eve is a virgin when she is
tempted by the devil and causes original sin, Mary is when she gives birth to
Jesus who absolves man’s original sin. But unlike Eve, Mary is associated with the
word virgin, her epithet is the Virgin Mother. Because virginity is synonymous
with moral and spiritual purity, the use of the adjective virgin has both a
literal meaning to emphasize the miraculous conception of Jesus given a
physically virginal Mary, and a metaphorical one, to show that Mary represents holiness.
Eve’s corruption separates her from association with the term, despite her physically
virginal state while in Eden. In describing Mary’s birth, Jacobus translates
the angel who appears to Joachim as saying that because Mary will be born of Immaculate
Conception, she is “not the fruit of carnal desire but of the divine generosity”
(152). So the word virgin best encapsulates the qualities of Mary, she is
earthy proof of God’s miracles, and she embodies holiness since she was born from
the divine and soon begets the holiest one. Interestingly, the word virgin as a
symbol of a protective seal can also extend to understanding the womb both as
what encloses Jesus at his birth and his death. Ephram in Hymn 8 says “Sealed
was the grave which they entrusted with keeping the dead man. Virginal was the
womb that no man knew” (130). The use of virginity to describe Mary emphasizes that
Jesus was born the most pure, neither corrupted by man at birth, nor at death
despite suspicions that Jesus’ tomb had been unsealed by men.
Another thought we addressed was the possibility of Mary
having priesthood, given that Epiphanius of Salamis was adamantly against that
idea. He said “[Mary’s] womb became a temple, and by God’s kindness and an
awesome mystery was prepared to be the dwelling place of the Lord’s human
nature. But it was not God’s pleasure [that she be a priest]” (622). Ephram
also speaks of Mary being the Ark where the priest serves in Hymn 16.
Epiphanius then assumes that God did not choose Mary to be a priest because she
never administered baptisms, nor did the church ever include “eldresses” or “priestesses”
in their ordinance. But his interpretation of God’s will is too technical and
narrow; simply because the New Testament does not identify Mary as a priest by
label does not mean she is not a priest by qualification. Defenders of
Eiphanius’ argument might use the following logic: If Mary’s womb is the
temple, and Jesus is the high priest, therefore by Jesus being in Mary’s womb,
he is the high priest within the temple. Thus, with Jesus as the priest, Mary
cannot be both the temple and the priest; it would be paradoxical for her to be
in her own womb. But Mary is in every way qualified to be a priest and best exemplifies
one. If the main function of a priest is to serve the Lord, than no one else is
better suited to do so than Mary, who not only in Luke calls herself a “servant
of the Lord”, but also contains in her humble human body the Son of God, the creator
of all creation, one too grand for the heavens to hold. By conceiving Jesus,
she serves God in a way unsurpassable by any priest or other human being.
Now why was Jesus
conceived in the flesh rather than appear on Earth as Adam did in Genesis, and
why he was born through the Virgin Mother Mary? One other reason that Jesus is
conceived in the flesh might be to fulfill the prophecy of his kingship over
man. It is crucial to Jesus’ genealogy that he was a direct descendant of David,
the first king. Ephram writes in Hymn 2, “The line reached You and stood still,
for you are the Son of David, and there is no other”. In his connection to kings
by blood, he solidified his place as the final and most important king in the
line of succession that began with David. He had to be conceived by Mary, a
descendant of David, and his lineage was legitimized by Mary’s betrothal to Joseph,
who was also a descendant of David. I think another reason for his earthly
conception is that we see the magnitude of his power in the fact that his
creation is powerful enough to create himself in human form. There simply needs
to be a physical manifestation of God’s capacity for creation, and that is seen
most viscerally, most effectively through the imagery of a mother and her womb
holding God’s son. Then the act of kenosis, of humbling himself by
surrendering his powers as God and replacing them with man’s helplessness gives
him the ability to sacrifice himself, now as a human, for the salvation of the
race. As for anticipating his departure from Earth and his followers, there
also needs to be a temple, a holy place where Jesus resonates spiritually long
after his death and resurrection. The temple as a holy place was begotten simultaneously
along with the birth of Jesus as the Savior from the womb of the Virgin Mary.
The question of Mary’s priesthood is an interesting one, and – as the author noted – Mary in some ways could be thought of as the ideal priestess in that she is not only depicted as the temple for Christ but also as a handmaiden or servant of the lord. Personally, I likewise find this interpretation rather compelling despite Epiphanius’ somewhat narrow objections.
ReplyDeleteOne argument I found a bit less convincing was the latter reason given for Jesus’ birth by the Virgin Mary. On one hand, it’s true that it fulfills scriptural prophesies as the King of Man from the line of David. However, the idea that the virgin birth is necessary to display “magnitude of his power in the fact that his creation is powerful enough to create himself in human form” – for me – seems to follow from the virgin birth, but it is not the reason for it. That is to say, through the virgin birth we can see his power and his humility in emptying himself of that power by becoming human. As I have understood it, the main reason why he was born through Mary was so he could share in humanity to be a perfect sacrifice for humankind, and the author does make this point later on in the paragraph. However, this line of reasoning seems to put the cart a bit before the horse on how it claims the act of kenosis follows from the need for a physically manifestation of God’s capacity for creation.
-LDD
You've posed a number of interesting questions here, which open the doors for a lot of fruitful further analysis. So many questions, in fact, that I'd wish you had focused on one or two in particular in more detail. I especially liked your exploration of the parallels between Eve and Mary, and the distinction between physical and spiritual virginity which you draw. However, it might be wise to take more care around the margins of your argument, as some questionable statements call into question what you're arguing as a whole. For example, are Eve and Mary really "essentially the same person"? Is it not precisely their differences which make the parallel between them so striking? Similarly is Mary Immaculately Conceived because of her virginity? The way you've described it appears that the "virginity" (in the spiritual sense) that led to Mary's miraculous conception was on the part of Joachim and Anna. Later thinkers will argue that Mary was miraculously conceived as a consequence of her "fiat", her acceptance of God's mission for her, a sort of before-the-fact consequence of the Incarnation, and it is perhaps in this sense that her virginity caused the Immaculate Conception. This, of course, leads to even more questions and interesting areas of investigation.
ReplyDeleteCause and effect are all intricately bound up here, as the previous comments note. What causes what? We talked in class about the way in which the early Christians attempted to defend their interpretation of Isaiah 7:14: as they argued, a "young woman" giving birth would not be a sign in the way that a "virgin" giving birth would. So, by this reasoning, Mary has to be a virgin because otherwise her giving birth to Jesus would not be the sign they were looking for. In this sense, the virgin birth is necessary only if it is the sign that was promised; everything else is an argument after the fact of accepting this sign. RLFB
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree with you that Epiphanius is severely limiting his conception of what it means to be a priest; it is clear that he is speaking from a Christian tradition rather than an Old Testament one in his discussion of priests performing rites like baptism, communion, etc. I also agree that key to the portrayal of Mary as a priest is Luke’s description of her as the “servant of the Lord” (or, rather, her description of herself within the gospel of Luke). I would argue that Luke himself would have been working from an Old Testament tradition of what priesthood means and, if we also take this view, Mary as a priest makes a lot of sense. If Epiphanius disagrees, maybe it is because he is pretty well locked into the necessary interpretation of a patriarchal society. Perhaps the problem isn’t so much that the tradition does not support the idea of Mary as a priest but rather that, because Mary is female, it is for Epiphanius intrinsically impossible for her to ever be a priest. Besides that, if he is to confirm this idea that Mary is a priest, it weakens his diatribe against the female priests he so rails against. Maybe the effect is in fact the cause in this case.
ReplyDeleteRL