CHAPTER V

THE VIRGIN-BIRTH

AND THE INCARNATION

AFTER THE FOURTH CENTURY

THE Gospel of the Infancy in the Church of the first centuries and later contributed no important motive to the conversion of the Roman Empire. So far as we know, it was generally received that Christ was born of the Virgin Mary; but no connection had yet been established between the circumstance of His birth and the doctrine of the Incarnation. There were some who denied His supernatural conception and birth. Thus Justin Martyr tells us there were those "who admit that He is Christ, while holding Him to be man of men; with whom I do not agree, nor would I, even though most of those who have the same opinions as myself should say so" ("Dial. cum Tryph.," 48). Cerinthus, the heretic, denied it, as did also the Ebionites. But the Gnostics for the most part accepted the Virgin-birth, they could make use of it in various ways to further their imaginative schemes; substituting "in" or "through" for

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"of " a virgin. a virgin. The Arians also believed in the Virgin-birth, for it quite suited their denial of Christ's complete humanity. The Virgin-birth therefore was no badge of orthodoxy or test of Catholicity.

But the main point is that it formed no vital part of the Church's message, as it had in the beginning no place in the apostolic preaching. The first sermons of Peter (Acts i. 15; ii. 14) omitted its mention, as also St. John and St. Paul were silent regarding it. The work of the apostles and of their successors was to present the mature Christ, the strong Christ, the man who had grown to perfection tested by temptation (Heb. v. 8), the captain of our salvation who learned obedience by the things He suffered. It was not the infant in His mother's arms who made the effective appeal to the old Roman world. The ancient Catholic Church was thinking of other things, preoccupied with the reality of God's existence and His control of the world, and with the mission of Christ to reveal the nature of God, and to establish His Kingdom in the world. Apologetic writers do not occupy themselves with defending the Virgin-birth; some allude to it, others do not, but all alike are supremely absorbed with the issues of the moral life which Christ embodied. In making Christ

K

known to the men of their age, as a man among men, while yet the incarnation of God, they accomplished that mightiest of tasks, - the con

version of the Roman Empire.

In the course of the fourth century a change set in a change so great as to amount to a revolution when its results became finally apparent. There are many elements in the process which wrought this revolution which cannot be even alluded to here; only the barest outlines can be mentioned. To put the situation in the largest, most general, way, the causes leading to the deterioration in Church life as well as in thought and in worship were the necessary evils involved in so great a victory as the Church had achieved, when, out of dire persecution, it emerged victorious and became the established religion of the empire under Constantine. A reaction immediately began against the worldliness wherein the Church was now involved, and more particularly a reaction from the vices which stained and defaced the pagan character. This led to the growing and ever more widely prevailing conviction that celibacy (virginity) was the one highest virtue, constituting the angelic life, the imitation of God. The effect of the great Council of Nicæa, which had proclaimed the

co-equality of Christ with the Father, induced a tendency to dwell more exclusively on the divinity of Christ than on His humanity. An able and distinguished bishop, Apollinaris of Laodicea, denied the complete humanity of Christ, holding that He possessed only a human body (σῶμα with ψυχὴ ἄλογος) and that the Divine mind had taken the place of the human mind or reason (o voûs). He was condemned as a heretic (A.D. 381), but, as the subsequent history showed, He was not forgotten, His argument carried weight, in reality He had only given expression to the tendency of His own and the following generations. His exact statement was avoided, but approximation was made to His teaching as far as words would allow.

Under these circumstances the Virgin Mary came to the forefront in the popular mind and in the writings of professed theologians. She now became known in common parlance as the Mother of God (EOTÓKos) and as "ever Virgin." It became a matter of faith to main

1 For the definition of the phrase "ever Virgin" (åεitap¤évos: semper virgo), which the Greek and Roman churches invariably add as a gloss to the clause in the Creed, "born of the Virgin Mary," cf. Augustine, “Ep. (137) ad Volus.," c. 8: "The body of the infant Jesus was brought forth from the womb of His mother, still a virgin, by the same power which afterwards introduced His

tain that she had no other children, reversing the opinion of the earlier Church, thenceforth designated as the Helvidian heresy. The Virgin-birth passed from an incident into a sacrosanct doctrine, to be held as essentially related to the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity, and without which they could not be maintained.

But all this could not have been apart from the strange concurrence with that feature of old heathen religion, which shows peoples as yearning after female deities. The worship of Isis, which had achieved wide popularity in the empire, was now transferred to Mary, and the transition of the heathens into the Church became easy and natural. Other female deities there were, popular in the East, - Demeter, Ceres, or great Diana of the Ephesians, and from these the worship now fell away to a better, more attractive substitute. Mary was now supplanting her Son; the Father and the Son retreat into the background of the people's consciousness; Mary reigns as

body, when He was a man, through the closed doors into the upper chamber." How rigidly Augustine connected this notion of the virginity in partu with the clause in the Creed, "born of the Virgin Mary," is evident from "Enchir.," c. 34, and also is it evident how wide his departure from the original sense of the Creed.