No Hymen Required: Reconstructing Origen's View on Mary's Virginity

Origen of Alexandria's works contain a seeming contradiction concerning Mary's virginity. He affirms multiple times that Mary remained a virgin after Christ's birth and throughout life, yet one of his homilies on the Gospel of Luke declares that Christ "opened the womb" of h...

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Autore principale: Kelto Lillis, Julia 1982- (Autore)
Tipo di documento: Elettronico Articolo
Lingua:Inglese
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Pubblicazione: Cambridge Univ. Press 2020
In: Church history
Anno: 2020, Volume: 89, Fascicolo: 2, Pagine: 249-267
Altre parole chiave:B Mariology
B Jerome
B Origen
B Virginity
B Virgin Mary
Accesso online: Volltext (lizenzpflichtig)
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Riepilogo:Origen of Alexandria's works contain a seeming contradiction concerning Mary's virginity. He affirms multiple times that Mary remained a virgin after Christ's birth and throughout life, yet one of his homilies on the Gospel of Luke declares that Christ "opened the womb" of his mother - an action many readers equate with destruction of virginity. How can Origen claim that Mary remained virginal if her hymen tissue was no longer intact? Scholars commonly solve the problem by characterizing his thought as self-contradictory or by concluding that he prioritizes Mary's lack of sexual experience over her loss of physical intactness. This essay resolves the contradiction more fully through attention to divergent models for female genital anatomy that circulated in antiquity. Origen, like most thinkers during and before his time, probably did not believe that female virgins have hymens. For him, the terminology of "closed" and "opened" wombs refers not to virginity but to fertility. Scholarly readers have been misled by certain other authors' uses of this vocabulary and by Jerome's Latin translation of the homily, which draws on a different anatomical model. For Origen, Mary is a virginal mother not in spite of a broken hymen, but without possessing a hymen in the first place.
ISSN:1755-2613
Comprende:Enthalten in: Church history
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1017/S0009640720000657