Image of God, Virginity and the Virgin Mary

The Virgin Mary can be considered an image of God because of how honored she is. she is almost as equal as God and Jesus. However, she is this honored because of her assumed chastity. She is the female image of God in some ways but she is only so because of her purity and virginity. The Virgin Mary is a complicated figure in the image of God discussion. In many ways, she represents this divine aspect of God (but it is only through her virginity) and in other ways she represents the distorted patriarchal image of God (because only white Women are considered pure). Paul Lakeland and Serene Jones argues that “. . . Mary is often characterized by her solidarity with the poor. She has been symbolic of many things including the perfect disciple, the idealized church, Christian obedience and the maternal dimension of God. Thus, her image has functioned in both liberating and oppressive ways for women in solidarity with women struggles and as an impossible ideal for everyday women.” [ Jesus Christ Karen Baker-Fletcher, Michelle A. Gonzalez, David H. Jensen, Joerg Rieger, Cynthia L. Rigby, Deanna A. Thompson( Chapter editor)Serene Jones, and Paul Lakeland. Constructive Theology : A Contemporary Approach To Classical Themes, With Cd-Rom,( Fortress Press, 2005), 168.] Many poor Roman Catholic women in the Caribbean, Latin America and other places honor Mary and identify with her. I know I still say the Hail Mary and ask the Virgin Mother for help even though I have broken with the Catholic Church for a very long time. However, the ideal of virginity and being chaste like Mary posed an impossible task for me because I could not be pure, nor I was a virginal.
Virginity has a patriarchal hold on women because it is surmised that through Eve all causes of sin and lust came into the world. By becoming virgins, they would emulate the Virgin Mary and hence become close to the image of God, but they only do so because of their purity. Irenaeus in his treatise Against Heresies contends that Eve’s disobedience was overcome by the Virgin Mary’s obedience, he states, “For what the virgin Eve bound through unbelief, this the Virgin Mary loosed through faith.”[ Irenaeus against Heresies, (Book III, Chapter 22), Translated by Alexander Roberts and William Rimbaud. From Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1. Edited by Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe. (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885.) Revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight.http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103322
] Because of the fall of man and that Eve was the cause of it, a woman was born of Eve’s sin and hence was allowed the chance to die to self and to transcend and have value and freedom by following the example of the Virgin Mary.
Yet, in the normativity of virginity, for those of us who pursue into becoming virgins can never be the mother of Christ. We can transcend our sex, become pure and holy by emulating Mary and overcoming the disobedience of Eve. In that way, we became the agents of the transformation that the church fathers said that was necessary for the world. I believe that the church fathers had to mature Christ for us women to “marry” Christ.
This idea of birthing Christ into the world is impossible and unnecessary because this redemptive work was accomplished through Mary. Therefore, it would have been impossible for us to achieve true virginity because we could never birth Jesus Christ. Patriarchal management of Christ required the Church Fathers to mature their representation of him from a baby or infant so women could be married to Christ. Such management of the image of Christ resulted in women unable to reach True Virginity as reflected in Mary. We will never hit that mark unless we transcend from this earthly body to the soul. If we transcend our sinful nature we will become male. As because of patriarchy the Image of God is male.
The Virgin Mary’s purity and virginity has horrible effects on women who are not white. Delores Williams in her book Sisters in the Wilderness says, The Virgin Mary as a social construct has stood for purity and innocence, which were qualities assigned to white women. Black women were constructed by white social mythology to be loose, immoral and incapable of either purity and innocence. Thus, the Virgin Mary can be a negative symbol for black women: too white and too false to represent what is an acceptably black female”[ Delores S. Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk, Anniversary ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books 2013, 159.]
I believe like Williams that black women and other women will not be benefit from the innocence and purity of Mary. The early church fathers implied that women must be pure to transcend to glory or to be the image of God. This implication that purity is needed to be an image of God is that Augustine and the other church fathers may not have thought women who were raped to be pure and hence they may not be the image of God. Women who were raped have their bodies corrupted and because the female body is sinful, they cannot hit the mark to become the image of God. It is safe to assumed this because women who have been raped in the ancient world specifically in ancient Israel were not considered persons c.f Deut 22: 28-29. Male bodies were considered superior than women bodies, which is evident on how the stressed on the virginity and purity of women. Hence women are not the image of God because of our bodies and we are accused of being sinful and lustful by the church fathers.
Outside of the tradition of the Virgin Mary being pure and innocent, if we are to read the scriptures concerning Mary including the birth narratives, Mary does not look pure and innocent. In the ancient Israel and in ancient Jewish religion Mary would have been considered loose and sinful because she was with child without being married. It is true that deity is the father however this culture and society does not know that God is the father of Jesus. In this respect, Mary is like how black women and minorities is viewed. Augustine if he was honest with himself probably would not have consider Mary as pure and hence not the image of God. Augustine and some of the early church fathers may not also not include rape victims or other women who are not pure. Granted it is not the woman’s fault, the fact that she is no longer pure can deemed that she is not made in the image of God.
Virginity was praised often by the church fathers, women found power in the church and were “closer” to God because of this. Virgins through bodily transcendence can experience God to the fullest. Virgins were compared with angels as reckoned to Gregory of Nyssa’s sister Macrina. Allusions are drawn between virgins and angels in The Life of Macrina. Women who retained their virginity and died to themselves were close to angels. Macrina, as noted by Gregory of Nyssa is transformed from her body of the earth to her holy body.
Gregory of Nyssa says, “it was if some angel had providentially taken on human shape, an angel who had no connection or familiarity of life in the flesh, and for whom a state of incapability of feeling pain was perfectly natural for the flesh did not drag her towards physical passions”. [ Caroline White. “Life of Macrina.” Lives of Roman Christian women. London: Penguin Books, 2010. 20-48. Print. Page 37 http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/gregory_macrina_1_life.htm%5D Angels are not God itself but are spirits and not necessarily have the fact that Macrina was considered to look like an angel is illustrating that her virginity and her purity has helped her to transcend to an image of God an angel. Angels are characterized as male in the biblical texts c.f Daniel 8:15–26, Luke 1:11–38, Daniel 10:13-21, Revelation 12. Thus, if the Virgin Mary is also part of that Image of God, she has done it because according to tradition she remained a virgin and became close to an angel. Many women cannot do that. While the veneration of Mother Mary is wonderful and somewhat progressive, the only way she is venerated within the church is because of her assumed chastity and purity. Most women can never be Mary and even Mary of church tradition probably is not the historical Mary. Hence the Image of God is distorted even with a female entity of it.

Finally, I believe that we can used the Virgin Mary and reinterpret her for the use of black women and other minority women. Delores Williams expresses a somewhat of a similar stand, “By removing their sexist lens, black theologians can see that though incarnation is traditionally associated with the self-disclosure of God in Jesus Christ, incarnation also involves God’s self-disclosure in a woman: Mary. The angel Gabriel tells her “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Highest will overshadow you, therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God” (Luke 1.36). Translated in African American heritage from traditional African religions, one can say, The Spirit mounted Mary.” The word was made flesh in Mary’s body. Incarnation, in a womanist understanding of it in the Christian testament, can be regarded as a continuum of the manifestation of the divine spirit beginning with Mary, becoming an abundance in Jesus and later overflowing into the life of the church.”[ Delores S Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk. Anniversary ed. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013. 149]

How do we change the notion that the Image of God is male? If the Image of God includes a female aspect, how can we progress from the idea that this female aspect has to be pure, a virgin and chaste? To do that we must change the language of patriarchy and understand that the Image of God is complex and complicated and that women do have to birth the Christ and be forever a virgin to be part of the Image. Even the historical Mary was not this and even if she was because I and many other women could never birth Christ, this standard is impossible to reach and we must consider victims of rape, who did not have a choice in deciding whether or not we are pure. I still honor Mary as the divine aspect of God but I do not honor her the way the church does. She is not the Virgin Mary to me but she is Mother Mary, a mother, a caregiver, a nurturer not some unreachable chaste, virgin and pure goddess.

Jesus Christ Karen Baker-Fletcher, Michelle A. Gonzalez, David H. Jensen, Joerg Rieger, Cynthia L. Rigby, Deanna A. Thompson( Chapter editor)Serene Jones, and Paul Lakeland. Constructive Theology : A Contemporary Approach To Classical Themes, With Cd-Rom,( Fortress Press, 2005), 168.

Irenaeus against Heresies, (Book III, Chapter 22), Translated by Alexander Roberts and William Rimbaud. From Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1. Edited by Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe. (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885.) Revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight.http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103322

Delores S. Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk, Anniversary ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books 2013, 159.
Caroline White. “Life of Macrina.” Lives of Roman Christian women. London: Penguin Books, 2010. 20-48. Print. Page 37
http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/gregory_macrina_1_life.htm
Delores S Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk. Anniversary ed. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013. 149