Ideas about virginity in the first three-quarters of the history of Christianity (1st to 16th centuries CE) came from the consideration of two questions, not too closely related: (a) how was (the mother of) Jesus to be understood? and (b) how should one live, pending the coming of the kingdom of God?
Christianity in its original Judaic matrix saw Mary as Israel, the Chosen People become one person, the one through whom YHWH visits his people, and her virginity is the equivalent of the separateness of the Jews. (The parallel to Mary in Islam is Muhammad, the one through whom the Word of God comes into the world, although in Islam the matter is shorn of its Judaic context, except for the retention of the unique Judaic notion of prophecy -- not a matter of predicting the future.)
In orthodox Christianity of late antiquity, arguments about the ontological status of Christ (which of course were about much else, as well) refracted onto Mary as theotokos -- "God-bearer" -- and tended to emphasize her virginity from a Greek philosophical standpoint.
Second,the ascetical movements that developed after Christianity became first legal and then official in the Roman Empire (from the 4th and 5th centuries) valued abstention from sex and marriage as they did abstinence in regard to food -- the denial of things good in themselves as a discipline in preparation for the coming kingdom of God. Celibacy (like fasting) was understood as a privation, but one that would be more than made up for when the pleasures of the world were transformed by the Aufhebung of the kingdom. (There is a quite marvelous book on the subject -- Peter Brown's *The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity*.)
Finally, in the last quarter of the history of Christianity the matter was complicated by the transformation in human relations occasioned by the appearance of new mode of production -- famously bound up, within Christianity, with the Reformation -- and the freezing of positions brought on by Reformation polemics. ("Mariolatry," BTW is a term from those polemics, "latria" being the worship due to God alone -- cf. idolatry.) But then the last 500 years have been unusual. --CGE
On Thu, 16 Jan 2003, joanna bujes wrote:
> ...I'm not sure that what is being worshipped is the "virgin" part of
> the woman; I think Mariolatry had more to do with worship of the
> "merciful mother."
>
> I myself never saw the point of virginity in any form; it always
> seemed to me that virtue (virtu) in action was much more
> difficult/challenging/interesting than the virtue of abstention.
> Perhaps some catholic on this list....could set me right :)
>
> Joanna
>
>