Symbol and metaphor enlighten us

In these last few columns, I have been wrestling with imagination and metaphor in order to rise from a blinkered theological fundamentalism, which inevitably breeds violence.

I offer as example of the latter the highly recommended textbook of Father B.H. Merkelbach, O.P. a former professor at the Pontifical Athenaeum Angelicum in Rome, which I attended for my theological degree. This excerpt treating the virginity of Mary, is my translation from the Spanish edition of 1954.

"Mary's virginity includes: the material virginity of her body, or the integrity of her flesh, without wounding or causing an violation of her genital organs and without any carnal delight; the integral virginity of her senses, or immunity from movements of bodily concupiscence and venereal pleasure in such a way that she did not feel anything less chaste."

Mary remained a virgin during the birth of Jesus "because she bore her son without violating, breaking, perforating or ripping the seal of her virginity."

"Mary conceived and bore without violation or wounding of her body in such a way that her body was no less unharmed than if there had been no conception of birth; which is a great miracle against the law of nature. Since a man, naturally, in impregnating a woman must injure her body. He perforates it, penetrates and stains it. In the same way, the exiting of the baby from its mother's womb necessitates the rupture of the mother's body. Yet, nevertheless, the Most Holy Virgin experienced a true birth, because the child was born in the same way as the rest of humans. That is, just as Christ miraculously issued from the closed and sealed tomb without breaking the stone ... so also he passed through the body of the Most Holy Virgin Without wounding it."

This is what we seminarians were taught by a respected priest-professor. If we so much as questioned, let alone disputed aspects of its content, we would have failed our teaching degree, which is valid at pontifical universities and seminaries throughout the world. In addition, we would have been denied priestly ordination and forthwith sent packing in disgrace.

The following years of personal experience along with the vast and healthy changes brought in by the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) helped to open the eyes of many of us to the perversion of human sexuality taught by Merkelbach and his kind. We came to reject their body-soul dualism glorified by the tell-tale disease of bachelor psychosis that took unholy delight in describing sexual intercourse in such vile and violent terms piled on top of one another: "violating, breaking, perforating, ripping, staining, injuring and wounding."

But this virus of violence has not yet been exorcised among us though the crudity of the rhetoric has been quietly shelved. It lurks in dark corners of clericalism and remains as theological justification for a materialistic belief in Mary's "perpetual virginity" as well as a bulwark of support for priestly celibacy and barrier against the ordination of women.

The fatal amalgam of sexual envy and fear that curdles the psyche has deep roots. Hear Athanasius, Doctor of the Church (c. 370 C.E.), who writes that the body of a virgin or continent widow "is contaminated by a man, as also worldly habits befoul both the soul and the body of a chaste woman, who can then be holy neither in body nor in spirit." Or his third century predecessor St. Methodius writing in his symposium that virgins are true martyrs "because they had the courage all their lives not to shrink from the Olympian contest of chastity."

How can we reconcile this long-taught contempt for the body with the foundational Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, "the Word made flesh, whereby "God became human so that humans may become God?"

As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger has noted, "according to the faith of the church the Sonship of Jesus does not rest on the fact that Jesus had no human father; the doctrine of Jesus' divinity would not be affected if Jesus had been the product of a normal human marriage. For the Sonship of which faith speaks is not a biological but an ontological fact, an event not in time, but in God's eternity."

Our faith will be enlightened by a return to symbol and metaphor. And a rejection of the fundamentalism I heard in the fifties.

Father James R. Roberts writes from Burnaby, B.C.

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