> A matter as fraught as the place of virginity in (especially Catholic)
> Christianity probably has to do with a number of disciplines (notably
> psychoanalysis) but perhaps less directly to with theology than it might
> seem.
I don't get the reference to psychoanalysis, but I'll skip that. The Virgin is only not to do with theology if that is something conceived of as some single doctrinal moment. Debating the place and nature of the Virgin is part of the process of forming the Catholic church, the Christian bible, and so on, is the subject of centuries of theological debate. Why would you say that is not about theology?
> 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?
But a) is what defines the nature of the Christian god for this debate becuase the pivotal word-made-flesh and redemption narratives rely both on the choice and the body of the Virgin and on Christ's relation to her. I grant you this is a contentious set of statements for Catholic theology, but they're not really mine, more a summary of very old debates that can't go away without giving up most of the canon.
> 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.)
That's quite right, although it simplifies early texts on and about the virgin (which is fair enough, it's an email), but this was never a tenable version of the Virgin for the Christian church, which both incoorporated elements of non- hebraic "virgins" into the very important localisation of its early practices and developed its own Christian explanations for the relation between the figure of Israel and the Virgin.
> 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.
This is a good example, because theotokos was massively contentious because for some it erased the divinity of the Virgin and made her a vessel only and for others it made her godlike because mortal flesh could not bear God -- that was only possible for Christ.
> 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*.)
Yes, but celibacy and virginity were differentiated and were differently understood with reference to men and women. The Virgin was often in fact not held to be an adequate image of celibacy because she was a special case and because at this point the other children of Mary were almost canonical, I could check the dates at which James was finally excluded as the brother of Jesus rather than jsut a brother in Christ if I had my library which I still bloody don't. Maybe you know.
> 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
I can't recall a date for "mariolatry" but I think it's quite late but yet as a polemical debate reprises debates around the separation of the Roman and Greek churches. I don't know this book though, thanks.
Catherine
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