Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/618

Rh 590 A E Y [THE VIRGIN. Galilee, at the village of Nazareth. Of her parentage nothing is recorded in any extant historical document of the 1st century, for the genealogy in Luke iii. (cf. i. 27) is manifestly that of Joseph. In early life she became the wife of JOSEPH (q.v.) and also the mother of our Lord (see JESUS l ) ; that she afterwards had other children is a natural inference from Matt. i. 25, which the evangelists, who frequently allude to &quot; the brethren of the Lord,&quot; are at no pains to obviate. The few incidents mentioned in Scripture regarding her show that she followed our Lord to the very close of His earthly career with unfailing motherliness, but the &quot; Magnificat &quot; assigned to her in Luke i. is the only passage which would distinctly imply on her part a high prophetic appreciation of His divine mission. She was present at the crucifixion, where she was commended by Jesus to the care of the apostle John, (John xix. 26, 27), Joseph having apparently died before this time. (It would be idle to inquire why &quot; the brethren of the Lord,&quot; who, whatever their relationship to Mary, must at least have been nearer than John, were ignored in this arrangement.) Mary is mentioned in Acts i. 14 as having been among those who continued in prayer along with the apostles at Jerusalem during the interval between the ascension and pentecost. There is no allusion in the New Testament to the time or place of her death. The subsequent growth of ecclesiastical tradition and belief regarding Mary will be traced most conveniently under the separate heads of (1) her perpetual virginity, (2) her absolute sinlessness, (3) her peculiar relation to the Godhead, which specially fits her for successful intercession on behalf of mankind. Her Perpetual Virginity. This doctrine, as has already been pointed out, was, to say the least, of no importance in the eyes of the evangelists, and so far as extant writings go there is no evidence of its having been anywhere taught within the pale of the catholic church of the first three centuries. On the contrary, to Tertullian the fact of Mary s marriage after the birth of Christ is a useful argu ment for the reality of the Incarnation against Gnostic notions, and Origen relies upon the references to the Lord s brethren as disproving the Docetism with which he had to contend. The det7rap$ena, though very ancient, is in reality a doctrine of non-catholic origin, and first occurs in a work proscribed by the earliest papal Index Librorum Prohibi- torum (attributed to Gelasius) as heretical, the so-called Protevangelium Jacobi, written, it is generally admitted, within the 2d century. According to this very early source, which seems to have formed the basis of the later Liber de Infantia Marine, et Christi Salvatoris and Evan- fjdium de Nativitate Marine, the name of Mary s father was Joachim (in the Liber de Infantia a shepherd of the tribe of Judah, living in Jerusalem) ; he had long been married to Anna her mother, whose continued childlessness had become a cause of much humiliation and sorrow to them both. The birth of a daughter was at last angelically predicted to each parent separately. From her third to her twelfth year &quot; Mary was in the temple as if she were a dove that dwelt there, and she received food from, the hand of an angel.&quot; When she became of nubile age a guardian was sought for her by the priests among the widowers of Israel &quot; lest she should defile the sanctuary of the Lord&quot;; and Joseph, an elderly man with a family, was indicated for this charge by a miraculous token. Some time afterwards the annunciation took place; when the 1 Vol. xiii. 656 sq., where (p. 659) sufficient reference is made to the coarse view of this event taken by the later hostile Judaism (a view supposed by some to be alluded to even in John viii. 41). We learn from Origen that the story about the soldier Pan th era (UavQ^pa) was already upheld by Celsus. The Ebiomtes and other heretical sects, as is well known, maintained the paternity of Joseph. Virgin s pregnancy was discovered, Joseph and she were brought before the high priest, and, though asserting their innocence in all sincerity, were acquitted only after they had been tried with &quot; the water of the ordeal of the Lord&quot; (Numb. v. 11). Numerous details regarding the birth at Bethlehem are then given. The perpetual physical virginity of Mary, naively insisted upon in thia apocryphon, is alluded to only with a half belief and a &quot;some say&quot; by Clement of Alexandria (Strom., vii. 16), but became of much importance to the leaders of the church in the 4th century, as for example to Ambrose, who sees in Ezek. xliv. 1-3 a prophetic indica tion of so great a mystery. 2 Those who continued to believe that Mary, after the miraculous birth of Jesus, had become the mother of other children by Joseph came accordingly to be spoken of as her enemies, Antidicoma- rianitas (Epiphanius) or Antidicomaritce (Augustine), and the first-mentioned author devotes a whole chapter (chap. 78) of his great work upon heresies to their con futation. For holding the same view Bonosus of Sardica was condemned by the -synod of Capua in 391. To Jerome the perpetual virginity not only of Mary but even of Joseph appeared of so much consequence that while a young man he wrote (387) the long and vehement tract Against Helvidius, in which he was the first to broach the theory (which has since gained wide currency) that the brethren of our Lord were children neither of Mary by her husband, nor of Joseph by a former marriage, but of another Mary, sister to the Virgin and wife of Clopas or Alphteus. At last the epithet of del 7rap$eVos was authoritatively applied to the Virgin by the council of Chalcedon in 451, and the doctrine implied has ever since been an undisputed point of orthodoxy both in the Eastern and in the Western church, some even seeking to hold the Anglican Church committed to it on account of the general declaration (in the Homilies) of concurrence in the decisions of the first four general councils. Her Absolute Sinlessness. VfhiQ much of the apocryphal literature of the early sects in which she is repeatedly spoken of as &quot;undefiled before God&quot; would seem to encourage some such doctrine as this, many passages from the acknowledged fathers of the church could be cited to show that it was originally quite unknown to Catholicism. Even Augustine repeatedly asserts that she was born in original sin (De Gen. ad lit., x. 18) ; and the locus daxsicus regarding her possible immunity from actual transgression, on which the subsequent doctrine of Lombardus and his commentators was based, is simply an extremely guarded passage (De Nat. et Grat., chap. 36) in which, while con tradicting the assertion of Pelagius that many had lived free from sin, he wishes exception to be made in favour of &quot; the holy Virgin Mary, of whom out of honour to the Lord I wish no question to be made where sins are treated of, for how do we know what mode of grace wholly to conquer sin may have been bestowed upon her who was found meet to conceive and bear Him of whom it is certain that He had no sin.&quot; A writer so late as Anselm (Cur Devis Homo, ii. 16) declares that &quot;the Virgin herself whence He (Christ) was assumed was conceived in iniquity, and in sin did her mother conceive her, and with original sin was she born, because she too sinned in Adam in whom all sinned,&quot; and the same view was expressed by Damian. The growth of the modern Roman doctrine of the immaculate conception from the time in the 12th century when the canons of Lyons sought to institute a festival in honour of her &quot;holy con ception,&quot; and were remonstrated with by Bernard, has been already sketched elsewhere (see IMMACULATE CONCEPTION). 2 De Inst. Virg., .&quot; quaj est hfec porta nisi Maria? . . . per qiiara Christus intravit in hunc mundum, quando virginal! fusus est partu et genitalia virginitatis claustra non solvit.&quot;