The Spiritual Meaning of Mary’s Perpetual Virginity:
A Social-Critical Commentary
Bradley Jersak
in conversation with David Goa
THE “PERPETUAL VIRGINITY OF MARY”
The “perpetual virginity of Mary” is one of the major Marian dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church, claiming that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was a virgin ante partum, in partu, et post partum—before, during, and after the birth of Christ.
The tradition appears as early as 120 A.D. in a document called The Protoevangelium of James [4,7], which details Mary’s childhood, time in the temple, betrothal to the elder Joseph, and establishes a backstory for her ‘ever-virginity.’
The church fathers affirmed this last detail of the narrative, embedding it in the tradition through their works across the first centuries. Cf. Origen, Commentary on Matthew 2:17; Hilary of Poitiers, Commentary on Matthew 1:4; Athanasius, Discourses Against the Arians 2:70; Epiphanius of Salamis, Medicine Chest Against All Heresies 78:6; Jerome, Against Helvidius: The Perpetual Virginity of Mary 19, 21; Didymus the Blind, The Trinity 3:4; Ambrose of Milan, Letters 63:111; Augustine, Holy Virginity 4:4, Sermons 186:1, Heresies 56; Cyril of Alexandria, Against Those Who Do Not Wish to Confess That the Holy Virgin is the Mother of God, 4; Leo I, Sermons 22:2.
For modernists (especially Bible-only Protestants) and postmoderns, it is easy to dismiss and disdain the perpetual virginity of Mary, especially when we’ve seen it used as a magical idealization that undermines her humanity, the sanctity of women's bodies, childbirth, sexuality, etc. When misappropriated in that way (maybe even very early), the perpetual virginity of Mary stands to gnosticize Mary, and women, and sex, and in fact, is also very anti-men if we think carefully about what it's saying.
Further, this Latin preoccupation with her literal-magical virginity gets tied to their ancient blunders on original sin (via Augustine) and more recent corollary mistakes (e.g., the immaculate conception of Mary), an entanglement that I believe paints them into an unfortunate corner.
A SOCIAL-CRITICAL INTERPRETATION
But I also want to take a more nuanced read—a spiritual and social-critical understanding—of the tradition. The early church taught Mary’s perpetual virginity (1) inside pseudo-James’ broader theological-mythical narrative (part of her betrothal to Joseph as an elder guardian of the girl raised in the temple until puberty) and (2) for what might be important theological or anthropological reasons (for them), even if the Protoevangelium wasn't factually historical (an altogether untroubling mystery for Orthodox Christians). That is, the presentation of Mary to the temple, for example, we proclaim and celebrate to be true, but without a necessary commitment to it being factual.
I might have been tempted to say the same of the virgin birth (a la my friend Pete Enns), except that I’m inclined to see the Gospels presentation of the virgin birth as a foundational, historical, Christological event: the Incarnation of the Son of God. The virgin birth is a statement about the hypostatic union of Christ’s divine and human natures, begotten of the Father in eternity and born to a human woman in time.
The follow-up question then, is not so much whether Mary's hymen was ever broken, but rather, what truth is being preserved in the *imagery* of her perpetual virginity? Was it actually necessary? Why did they think so? Instead of trying to figure those questions out from scratch or doing another deep dive into the fathers, I called my godfather, David Goa, whose insights I must credit while not blaming him for heresies I may introduce.
VIRGINITY AS UNDIVIDED FULLNESS
David Goa first of all asks, “What is the meaning [not the definition] of virginity?” He regards virginity as a powerful prophetic Jewish-Christian symbol that resists the persistent cultural notion that a woman's identity as a human is framed by her relationship to a man—to her father or to her husband. And that to lose either could mean (let’s imagine 80% odds) that she might end up as a 'woman of the night' or the victim of 'unbidden favors.' This was (and is) a cruel social condition that continues today, especially if you watch what happens to Indigenous women who are alienated from the First Nations community and move into the cities of Canada.
Against this, 'virginity' becomes a social-prophetic statement of a woman’s human integrity, of undividedness, of fullness, of plethora (from the New Testament πλεθω (pletho). Specifically, it insists that women participate fully, in and of themselves, in the pleroma of their humanity, without reference to a male. Their human identity and integrity are as great as that of any man.
Goa pointed out that this social-critical element is one of the most extraordinary teachings to come out of the early church, anchored firmly in the Gospels, where we only see women (except for John) at the Cross, first at the tomb, and not numbered with the unfaithful disciples. When we read the Gospels, we’re confronted with stories around the Mother of Christ, or the Magdalene, Mary of Bethany, the woman at the well (St. Photina), and more. This would surprise us more if we recognized that no other ancient text demonstrates so clearly how women play this role or are treated in this way. In what way? In the fullness of what it is to be a human woman. Virginity then, according to David, is a statement that this fullness is not contingent on the ‘covering’ of a male (not even Joseph).
According to Goa, the first monasteries were established for and by women, places where women had glimpsed the liberating spiritual sense of virginity. Not that they were all virgins in some medical sense, but that they recognized the pleroma of their humanity before Christ, independent of a father or husband’s chattel ownership. So, we remember this rich statement from the woman at the well: "Let me show you a man who knows who I am." This understanding of ‘virginity’ was a liberating “NO!” to patriarchal bondage.
In that light, "virgin" does not essentially mean hymen intact; it means plethora, fullness, integrity. But instead, the doctrine of perpetual virginity, especially in Latin Catholicism, became hymen-obsessive. Among many devotees of ‘Our Lady of Guadalupe,’ even the birth of Christ could not have happened from between Mary’s legs!
Thus, perpetual virginity became a theological appendix. That is, like the bodily appendix, you can trace the evolution of its richer early use to a later, literalized, even prurient form that is no longer meaningful. But here's another and more beautiful vision:
FULLNESS OF COMMUNION
If two people love each other and if their lovemaking is communion, have they actually lost something? Or have they simply expressed their fullness in communion? I wouldn’t say this to your average Orthodox layperson, but if James’ creative reconstruction is entirely fictional and the Theotokos and Joseph ever did make love, then it was complete, full, and in that sense, every time was the first time. There was no division in it, no alienation.
What a contrast to the way division permeates our ugliest language about sex: "Wham, bam, thank you ma'am," "a piece of ass," or the crassest notions of ‘fucking.’ I don’t mean to be course here: I’m saying that all this awful language is about alienation. David describes that horrible experience of desire for someone (and maybe their desire for you), then expressing that desire sexually, ... and immediately afterward feeling alienated, unsatisfied, reduced to ‘lousy sex.’ From this experience, we can say the opposite of virginity is not the rupture of the hymen. The opposite of virginity is alienating intercourse, for men and women alike, because the centre of these matters is alienation versus communion—that which is life-giving versus that which deepens our darkness.
Our Christian way of saying this is that all of us are called to have the fullness of communion in everything we do and most assuredly in visceral communion. It is to say that men and women can have communion, expressed sexually, with each other in love and in joy—en-joyment—which doesn't diminish either partner’s plethora but adds to their fullness. Otherwise, it is estrangement, and it is sin (it misses the mark of union), even in the marriage bed.
On the other hand, if there is any historical reality to Mary’s perpetual virginity (as the tradition suggests), I would not regard virginity as dehumanizing to Mary any more than I do in Jesus or any other virgin—frequently shamed as nothing more than a sick byproduct of purity culture). If there is any truth that Joseph was an older man called to safeguard her as the temple had, then the scandal of her pregnancy makes even more sense to me. Or if Mary used her agency to remain a virgin, let’s not oversteer the conversation. Just as I reject the idea that literal virginity makes us more holy, so also, I reject the implication that literal virginity makes anyone less human. And in either case, we’ve missed the real point of virginity altogether.
In conclusion, the prophetic point of Mary's perpetual virginity is, finally, NOT a theology of the hymen (a foul idea!). It is part of our spiritual theology around our human fullness, present to us IN communion—in all of our communions—including those given the beauty of lovemaking.
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