I’ve been reading a little bit about the Virgin Birth, in light of the discussions provoked recently by the new Nativity movie. I have not seen the movie yet, but I have for a long time been interested in questions concerning the Virgin Birth, and so this new flash of interest in the topic intrigued me. The question I have been pondering concerns the degree to which Our Lord was miraculously born.

There is a long and formidable tradition of people who say that he was not born in the natural way. The early Fathers seem mostly to have been of the opinion that the birth of Christ was miraculous, not only for the fact that it happened, but also in the way that it happened; not only was his birth was painless, but it also happened through some supernatural means not described in the Gospel. In an entry on the Virgin Birth, Catholic Encyclopedia suggests, “that the supernatural influence of the Holy Ghost extended to the birth of Jesus Christ, not merely preserving Mary’s integrity, but also causing Christ’s birth or external generation to reflect his eternal birth from the Father in this, that “the Light from Light” proceeded from his mother’s womb as a light shed on the world; that the “power of the Most High” passed through the barriers of nature without injuring them; that “the body of the Word” formed by the Holy Ghost penetrated another body after the manner of spirits.” I believe the Council of Trent made a similar suggestion.

As I understand it, all of these arguments stem from the dogma of Our Lady’s perpetual virginity. If a vaginal birth would render her non-virginal, then obviously, Our Lord could not have been born in that way. However, the Church has not, so far as I know, ever defined virginity per se, and we might be inclined to quibble with the definition that would have seemed most natural to the early Fathers. It has been medically documented that a woman can be born without a hymen, or, alternatively, that it can be broken through strenuous activity of various kinds. I suspect most of us would be disinclined to say that a woman born without a hymen was never at any time virginal. (And indeed, if we did say that, it would have rather interesting implications for the teaching so treasured by Iosephus, that all are in some way called to a life of virginity for God’s sake.) Most of us are probably more inclined to define virgin as one who has not engaged in the marital act. But if that is our understanding, then it seems we might be we might also have to reject the argument that probably formed the basis for most of the early Fathers’ views about Our Lord’s supernatural birth.

When it comes to the painlessness of the birth, other arguments come into play. Since the pains of childbirth were a punishment for original sin, it has been said that Our Lady, cleansed as she was from original sin, must also have been exempt from the normal pains that accompany childbirth. In addition, Isaiah 66:7 can be cited as a prophecy of the manner of Our Lord’s birth: “Before she travailed, she brought forth; before her pain came, she was delivered of a man child.” It is not unreasonable to suppose that this is a prophecy relating to the birth of Jesus Christ and that that birth was therefore literally painless.

I confess that I have nothing much to say about the Isaiah passage except that I can almost never make much of what Isaiah says. Anyway, his meaning in the passage as a whole is certainly less than crystal clear. As regards the argument from original sin, it certainly seems right to say that Our Lady did not deserve the pains of childbirth, as other women, in some mysterious sense, perhaps do. Timothy tells us that women are redeemed through childbearing; obviously Our Lady needed no such redemption. But that would not by itself imply that she felt no pain, only that pain was not necessary for this reason. We Catholics tend to think that the other “wages” of original sin — that there should be enmity between the woman and the serpent — did apply to the Blessed Mother. I think we should remember, too, that she suffered a great many things that she didn’t deserve, as did Our Lord, for our sakes. I can’t see that this particular pain would be more unjust than any of the other pains she had to bear. Our Lord was willing to suffer agonies he did not deserve in order that we might be redeemed, and a terrible event thus becomes at the same time wonderful (perhaps “awful” captures both meanings nicely.) Similarly, might Our Lady not have been willing to bear pains she did not deserve, in order that Our Lord might truly be said to be born of woman, not in some strange, ethereal sense, but in the perfectly ordinary sense of that term? There seem, in fact, to be very delightful parallels here between the New Adam and the New Eve, if indeed Our Lady travailed like other women in birth. Her Son would let the full force of the punishment for man’s original sin fall upon his innocent head, and thereby would vanquish it. But she, in a smaller way, might have innocently suffered the pain that Eve’s error brought upon womankind, and in so doing, she gave her people the child who could erase that error for good.

Now, I have already conceded that the weight of tradition is against the supposition that Our Lord might have been born vaginally, though as I have said, I do not think this can be considered de fide so long as there is ambiguity about what perpetual virginity would imply. But I must admit also that for me, the Christmas story goes rather flat if Our Lord was really born in some painless twinkling of light or ghostly passing through matter. Such a delivery might be amazingly wonderful, but only in some way that ordinary people cannot understand at all. The poignancy of the story comes chiefly from the mysterious and intimate infusion of the divine into a scene that is very recognizably human: a couple having a child. But pain and effort are quite obviously integral elements of that experience as we understand it.

The beautiful narration of St. Luke loses much of its power if the physical facts of childbearing as we know it are all subtracted from the equation. Consider, for example, the question of location. We are told that the child was laid in a manger because there was “no room for them in the inn.” Tradition holds that the divine child was born in a stable (though in the Holy Land they suppose that it was a cave) and we feel intense compassion for this couple, forced to bear their child in a barn! Surely at least a roof could have been afforded to the blessed lady, so that she might have decent shelter in her difficult task? But if the birth is supposed to be entirely unlike a natural birth, it suddenly becomes hard to get much imaginative grip on the situation. We feel scarcely more identification with the child-bearing Mary and Joseph than we would if the couple had been asked to open a portal to an alter-universe and receive the blessed child from there. What would be the most appropriate place for such an event? I just don’t know at all; for a natural birth, it is best to find a private and comfortable place where the mother’s physical needs can best be attended to. But for a miraculous twinkle-of-light separation of bodies, I really have no intuitions about appropriate places. A barn does seem an awfully lowly place for the Son of God to make his first appearance, but if a mountaintop, an olive grove, or a synagogue had been suggested as more suitable than a room in an inn, this would have seemed perfectly plausible to me. Identification and compassion morph into uncomprehension and strangeness when the central physical event is changed into something so alien.

And what does it mean, either in the Isaiah passage (if that does refer to the Virgin Birth) or, more importantly, in Luke, to suggest that she “brought forth” the child? The Catholic Encyclopedia quote makes the child himself into the active agent; the body through which he passes seems purely passive. But that is not how Scripture tells it. She brought forth her son, just as a laboring mother brings forth a child. It is possible, of course, that Our Lord might have been miraculously born, while Our Lady somehow actively participated in the miracle. But this idea, surely, draws our minds far into bizarre imaginings. One almost begins to feel that the text is misleading, if it truly describes something so unique and unfamiliar with language we immediately understand in a very different way. Why, if something so extraordinary happened, did the Evangelist decline to describe it at all? Though not by any means conclusive, Luke’s words seem to me to imply all that would normally be implied when we say that a woman brings forth a child.

In the end, I don’t think we have any grounds to be very sure of exactly the manner in which Our Lord was born, and a healthy humility will encourage us to admit our ignorance. Possibly it is unhealthy to think too much about it, and yet, as I have tried to show, I think it does very naturally matter to us whether the means by which God came into the world resemble the familiar human event of birth. For centuries, laboring women have cried to the Blessed Virgin for aid, comforted by the belief that she knows, from her own experience, their pains. This is a fully Catholic way to think; we are often encouraged to plead for the intercession of one whose earthly experience would enable him specifically to sympathize with our troubles. But if Our Lord was supernaturally and painlessly born, the laboring mother might do better to direct her pleas to St. Anne or St. Elizabeth or others. Our Lady has no more firsthand experience with her plight than does St. Joseph or St. Peter. This seems to me like a real loss, considering that she is in some sense most fully and truly a Mother.

I understand the reasons why the early Fathers or the Schoolmen might have insisted on the miraculous birth of the divine child, but when I read the tracts of those contemporary Catholics who get particularly incensed about it today, I am suspicious. What really infuriates some, I think, is the sense of indignity that they attach to ordinary childbirth; they do not like to imagine the Queen of Heaven in such a position. One has the suspicion that they would be similarly upset by the image of the Blessed Mother changing diapers or scrubbing dirty pots. This is understandable, but reminds me too much of the reaction Muslims tend to have towards our accounts of the Passion and the death of Our Lord. It is difficult to explain to them that this is the deep and awful mystery of Christianity: a God became man, and passed of his own will through the greatest indignities imaginable, and through is passing left a bridge from those depths back to a life of holiness. Presumably something similar, on a smaller scale, could be said of his mother. She was willing to suffer ordinary pains and indignities. That’s what so wonderful and awe-inspiring about the whole idea of God With Us. And of course, it is precisely her willingness to endure all things humbly and patiently, that makes her now so perfectly suited to be our Regina Coeli.

I humbly submit all my reflections to the correction of authorities higher than myself (and of course, I have no authority of any kind, over anyone.) But until it is shown to me that I am straying into heresy, my Christmas meditations will be made sweeter and more poignant by imagining the Holy Family on Christmas night, welcoming the Son of God through a process at least somewhat similar to that by which the rest of the children of men come to dwell on Earth.

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