Sex and the Annunciation

May is Mary's month, so I'm refreshing a vintage millinerd.com post with some new insights and bibliography, while doubling down on my claim that Mary was a virgin, not a prude.

George HItchcock’s Annunciation at the Art Institute of Chicago (1887)

Contemporary reflection on the conception of the Second Person of the Trinity in the womb of Mary frequently suffers from a lack of theological imagination. Old timey feminists like Mary Daly, for example, denounced the Annunciation as rape; but have been thoroughly trounced on this point by contemporary Christian feminists (Greene-McCreight, Boss, Carnes, Peeler, et alia), indeed by Biblical scholars of even the feeblest competance, or really by anyone who can read. No wonder goddess feminism remains a dead end.

Others have inflexibly assumed the Annunciation to have been something like normal sex, forgetting (if they ever knew) that the tradition, Luther and Calvin included, has regarded the virginity of Mary before, during, and after the conception and birth of Christ as axiomatic (hence the traditional three stars on Mary's robe). If the incarnation had approximated actual sex, the Holy Spirit—who of course is beyond male or female biologically understood—would have needed to make use of Joseph. But Joseph was, as we know, left out, which perhaps helps explain his mopey, almost self-pitying countenance in traditional depictions of the nativity.

Detail of the sidelined Joseph in a traditional Russian Nativity icon (c. 1500)

Justin Martyr expresses the normative Christian claim: "[The Holy Spirit] came upon the virgin and overshadowed her, caused her to conceive, not by intercourse, but by power" (I Apology, 33). Tina Beattie encapsulates how this turned patriarchal paganism on its head:

Christianity thus achieves a double inversion of the pagan relationship between divinity and motherhood. It excludes the sex act which features in mythological couplings between women and the gods, but it also insists that a fully human mother gives birth to a fully human [G]od. The incarnation is therefore more supernatural and more natural than the human epiphanies of the pagan gods.

Sex, of course, can be holy, which is why Augustine (against his prudish Christian contemporaries) came around to admitting it to have been a supralapsarian, lustless enterprise. Still, we shouldn't think of the Annunciation as somehow reflective of sex as we know it, but we should think sex, at its most chaste, to be a distant reflection of the Annunciation. We need not therefore entirely oppose sexual metaphors when thinking of this event as much as we should transcend them. According to Raymond Brown, the Annunciation in the gospel of Luke “is not quasi-sexual as if God takes the place of a male principle in mating with Mary. There is more of a connotation of creativity... Mary is a virgin who has not known man, and therefore the child is totally God's work - a new creation” (314).

Detail of Filippo Lippi’s Annunciaton at London’s National Gallery (c. 1450)

Early Christians imagined the moment of Christ's conception in many ways, it occurred through Mary's ear in some cases, her eyes in others, sometimes directly (as illustrated above) to her womb. Far from being Gnostic refusals to fully embrace the body, these early accounts are right — all of them. What's more, they need to be fused together in a full-bodied understanding of union that fulfills and transcends sexual encounters as we know them. In his famous sermon on Mary's presentation in the temple, Gregory Palamas gets at the boggling immediacy of the event:

The Archangel was not foretelling the future by saying "The Lord is with thee", but was declaring what he saw happening invisibly at that time.... It was not an Angel that was to overshadow her, nor an Archangel, nor even the Cherubim and Seraphim, but the power of the Most High in Person. And what is more, the power of the Highest did not converse with her through a whirlwind and cloud, nor through darkness and fire, nor through a gentle breeze, as happened occasionally to others who were deemed worthy, but it directly overshadowed her virgin womb without any kind of disguise. There was nothing between the One overshadowing and the one overshadowed, not air, either earthly or heavenly, nor anything perceptible or beyond our perception. Obviously this was union, not overshadowing.

For all the merits of her work, Cynthia Bourgeault unfortunately perpetuates a tired trope by insisting (in an unhelpful endnote to her Magdalene book) that devotion to the Virgin Mary is “a mythological creation, it took root in an institution soil in which celibacy was the ascendant spiritual climate and in which human sexuality, particularly genital sexuality, was phobically regarded.” It is as if by calling Mary Virgin, we think of her as “unexperienced.” On the contrary, it is we who—not having experienced the Annunciation as Mary did—are the truly inexperienced ones.

Like Joseph, I wasn't there. But my hunch is that no human sexual activity, however appropriate and pleasurable, could come close to equaling the impossibly chaste union of the Annunciation. Hence, celibates who do not have sex are just as close—perhaps even closer—to fathoming the experience of the Virgin Mary. To review, the Annunciation does not approximate sex; sex, at its absolute best, approximates the Annunciation. And will always fall short.