Against Helvidius: On the Perpetual Virginity of Blessed Mary 16–24

Now what we are trying to show is how the sons of his aunt Mary, who at first did not believe and afterwards believed, are called the Lord's brothers. It could well be that one believed at once while the others remained unbelieving for a long time; and that this was the mother of James and Joses, that is, Mary of Cleophas, the wife of Alphaeus, and that she is the one called Mary the mother of James the less. If she had been the Lord's mother, he would rather have called her his mother, as in all places, and would not have wished her to be understood as the mother of another by calling her the mother of others. But in this part I do not pull the rope of contention: let Mary of Cleophas be one woman and Mary the mother of James and Joses another, so long as it is agreed that Mary the mother of James and Joses is not the same as the Lord's mother. "And how," you say, "were they called the Lord's brothers if they were not brothers?" You shall now be taught that in the divine Scriptures people are called brothers in four ways: by nature, by nation, by kinship, by affection. By nature: Esau and Jacob, the twelve patriarchs, Andrew and Peter, James and John. By nation, in the sense that all Jews are called brothers among themselves, as in Deuteronomy: "If you buy your brother, a Hebrew man or a Hebrew woman, he shall serve you six years, and in the seventh year you shall let him go free from you." And in the same book: "You shall surely set over yourself a ruler whom the Lord your God chooses, one from among your brothers; you may not set over yourself a foreigner, who is not your brother." And again: "If you see your brother's calf or his sheep straying on the road, do not ignore them; you shall surely bring them back to your brother. And if your brother is not near you, and you do not know him, you shall gather them into your house, and they shall be with you until your brother seeks them, and you shall give them back to him." And the apostle Paul: "I could wish," he says, "that I myself were accursed from Christ for my brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh, who are Israelites." Further, those are called brothers by kinship who are of one family, that is, patria, which the Latins render paternitates, when from one root a great crowd of descendants spreads out, as in Genesis: "And Abraham said to Lot: Let there be no quarrel between me and you, and between my herdsmen and your herdsmen, for we are men who are brothers." And there: "And Lot chose for himself the region of the Jordan, and Lot moved from the east, and they separated each from his brother." And certainly Lot is not Abraham's brother but the son of his brother Haran. For Terah begot Abraham and Nahor and Haran, and Haran begot Lot. And again: "Abraham was seventy-five years old when he left Haran. And Abraham took Sarah his wife and Lot his brother's son." But if you still doubt that a brother's son is called brother, take an example: "When Abraham heard that his brother Lot had been taken captive, he counted his home-born servants, three hundred and eighteen." And after describing the slaughter in the night attack, he added: "And he brought back all the cavalry of Sodom, and brought back Lot his brother." Let these suffice to prove what we have said. But lest you quibble at any point and wriggle out like a slippery snake, you must be bound with the chains of testimonies, so that you cannot hiss in complaint and say you were defeated by twisted arguments rather than by the truth of the Scriptures. Jacob, son of Isaac and Rebecca, when he had gone to Mesopotamia fearing his brother's plots, came near and rolled the stone from the mouth of the well and watered the sheep of Laban his mother's brother. "And Jacob kissed Rachel, and crying out with his voice, he wept, and told Rachel that he was her father's brother and that he was Rebecca's son." See, here too, by the same rule as above, a sister's son is called brother. And again: "And Laban said to Jacob: Because you are my brother, you shall not serve me for nothing. Tell me what your wages are to be." So when twenty years were completed and he was returning to his homeland with his wives and children, without his father-in-law's knowledge, Laban overtook him on Mount Gilead. And when he had searched for the idols Rachel was hiding and had not found them in the baggage, Jacob answered and said to Laban: "What is my fault, and what my offense, that you have pursued me, and that you have searched all my goods? What have you found of all your things? Put it here before your brothers and my brothers, and let them judge between us two." Answer: who are these brothers of Jacob and Laban who were present then? Esau, Jacob's brother, was certainly absent, and Laban the son of Bethuel had no brothers, apart from his sister Rebecca.

There are countless examples of this kind in the divine books. But not to be long, I will return to the last part of the division, that is, that people are also called brothers by affection, which is divided in two, spiritual and common. Spiritual, because all we Christians are called brothers, as here: "Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brothers to dwell in unity." And in another psalm the Savior says: "I will declare your name to my brothers." And elsewhere: "Go, tell my brothers." Common, because all of us, born from one father, are joined to each other in equal brotherhood. "Say," he says, "to those who hate you: You are our brothers." And the Apostle to the Corinthians: "If anyone who is called a brother is sexually immoral, or greedy, or an idolater, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or a robber, with such a one do not even eat," and other things like these. Now I ask by which of these ways you understand the Lord's brothers in the Gospel to be so called. By nature? But Scripture does not say so, calling them sons neither of Mary nor of Joseph. By nation? But it is absurd that a few of the Jews should be called brothers, when all the Jews who were there could have been called brothers by this rule. By the affection of human right and of the spirit? But if so, who were more his brothers than the apostles, whom he taught privately, whom he called mothers and brothers? Or if all are brothers because they are human, it was foolish to announce as something special, "Behold, your brothers are seeking you," since all human beings in general are brothers by this right. It remains, then, that according to the explanation above you understand that they are called brothers by kinship, not by affection, not by the privilege of nation, not by nature: just as Lot was called Abraham's brother and Jacob Laban's; just as the daughters of Zelophehad receive an inheritance among their brothers; just as Abraham himself had his sister Sarah as wife. For he says: "She is truly my sister on my father's side, but not on my mother's"; that is, she is his brother's daughter, not his sister's. Otherwise, how could it be that Abraham, a righteous man, should take his own father's daughter as wife, when, with the first human beings, Scripture for the sake of chaste ears does not even name this, preferring that it be understood rather than spoken; and when God afterwards ordains by law and threatens: "Whoever takes his sister, his father's daughter or his mother's, and sees her nakedness, and she sees his nakedness, it is a disgrace; they shall be cut off before the children of their people. He has uncovered his sister's nakedness; he shall bear his sin."

Most ignorant of men, you had not read these things; and leaving the whole sea of the Scriptures, you turned your madness to an outrage against the Virgin, after the example of the man of whom the stories tell that, being unknown to the public and unable to think of any good deed by which to become famous, he set fire to the temple of Diana. When no one revealed the sacrilege, he himself, it is said, came forward into public, shouting that he had set the fire; and when the leading men of Ephesus asked why he had wanted to do this, he answered: "So that, since I could not become known to everyone by good, I might do so by evil." Greek history tells this. But you have set fire to the temple of the Lord's body; you have defiled the sanctuary of the Holy Spirit, from which you want a team of four brothers and a heap of sisters to have come forth. Finally, joining your voice with the Jews, you say: "Is not this the carpenter's son? Is not his mother called Mary, and his brothers James and Joses and Simon and Judas, and are not all his sisters with us?" "All," you add, is not said except of a crowd. Who, I ask you, knew you before this blasphemy? Who reckoned you worth two pennies? You have got what you wanted: you have become famous by a crime. I myself who write against you, though I live in the same city as you, do not know, as they say, whether you are white or black. I pass over the faults of language with which your whole book teems. I say nothing of your ridiculous opening. O the times! O the morals! I do not seek eloquence; you have none yourself and asked for it from your brother Craterius. I do not, I say, demand polish of tongue; I seek purity of soul. For among Christians it is a great solecism and fault to say or to do something shameful. I come to the end, and I close you in with a horned question, and will deal with you as though I had done nothing above: the Lord's brothers were so called in the same way as Joseph was called father. "Your father and I," she says, "have been looking for you in sorrow." It is the mother who says this, not the Jews. And the evangelist himself reports: "And his father and mother were marveling at the things that were said about him," and the like, which we have already listed, in which they are called parents. And lest you perhaps plead the variety of copies, since you have most foolishly persuaded yourself that the Greek manuscripts are corrupted, I come to the Gospel of John, in which it is written most plainly: "Philip found Nathanael and said to him: We have found him of whom Moses in the law and the prophets wrote, Jesus the son of Joseph, from Nazareth." This is certainly contained in your copy. Answer me: how is Jesus the son of Joseph, when it is agreed that he was begotten of the Holy Spirit? Was Joseph truly his father? Dull as you are, you will not dare to say so. Or was he supposed to be? Then let the brothers be supposed in the same way as the father was supposed.

But now that the discourse has sailed clear of the rocks and the rough places, the sails must be spread and we must rush upon his epilogue, in which, appearing learned to himself, he calls Tertullian as a witness and sets out the words of Victorinus, bishop of Pettau. Of Tertullian I say no more than that he was not a man of the Church. Of Victorinus I assert what I asserted of the evangelists: that he spoke of brothers of the Lord, not sons of Mary; and brothers in the sense we explained above, by kinship, not by nature. But we are wasting our time on trifles, and, leaving the spring of truth, we chase the little streams of opinion. Could I not set in motion against you the whole line of ancient writers: Ignatius, Polycarp, Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, and many other apostolic and eloquent men, who, holding these same views, wrote volumes full of wisdom against Ebion, Theodotus of Byzantium, and Valentinus? If you had ever read them, you would be wiser. But I think it better to answer the points one by one briefly than to lengthen the volume by lingering too long.

I now attack the passage in which, comparing virginity and marriage, you wanted to be eloquent. We laughed at you as in the proverb: "We see a camel dancing." You say: "Are virgins better than Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who had marriages? Are not little ones formed every day in the womb by the hands of God, so that we should rightly blush to think that Mary married after the birth? If this seems shameful to them, it remains that they do not believe that God was born through the genitals of a virgin either. For on their view it is more shameful that God was born through a virgin's private parts than that a virgin married her own husband after the birth." Add, if you like, the other indignities of nature: the womb swelling for nine months, nausea, delivery, blood, swaddling clothes. Picture to yourself the infant wrapped in the usual covering of membranes. Bring in the hard manger, the infant's wailing, the circumcision on the eighth day, the time of purification, so that he is shown to be unclean. We do not blush, we are not silent. The humbler the things he suffered for me, the more I owe him. And when you have gone over everything, you will bring forward nothing more shameful than the cross, which we confess and believe, and in which we triumph over our enemies.

But just as we do not deny what is written, so we reject what is not written. We believe that God was born of the Virgin because we read it. We do not believe that Mary married after the birth because we do not read it. Nor do we say this in order to condemn marriage, for virginity itself is the fruit of marriage, but because we are not permitted to suppose anything rashly about holy men. For by this kind of reasoning from possibility we could argue that Joseph also had several wives, because Abraham had several and Jacob had several, and that the Lord's brothers were from these wives, which many invent with a rashness more bold than pious. You say Mary did not remain a virgin; I claim more for myself: that Joseph himself also was a virgin through Mary, so that from a virginal marriage a virgin son might be born. For if sexual immorality does not befall a holy man, and it is not written that he had another wife, and he was the guardian rather than the husband of Mary, whom he was thought to have, it remains that he who was found worthy to be called the Lord's father remained a virgin with Mary.

And since I am going to say something about the comparison of virginity and marriage, I beg my readers not to think that in praising virgins I have disparaged marriage, or made any distinction of merit between the saints of the Old Testament and of the New, that is, between those who had marriages and those who have wholly withdrawn from the embrace of women; but rather that, according to the conditions of the times, they then were under one sentence, and we, upon whom the ends of the ages have come, under another. As long as that law remained, "Increase and multiply and fill the earth," and "Cursed is the barren woman who does not bear seed in Israel," all married and were given in marriage, and, leaving their parents, became one flesh. But when that voice thundered, "The time is short; it remains that those who have wives be as though they had none," cleaving to the Lord, we become one spirit with him. And why? Because "he who is without a wife thinks of the things that are God's, how he may please God; but he who is with a wife is anxious about the things of this world, how he may please his wife. And the woman and the virgin are divided: she who is not married thinks of the things that are God's, that she may be holy in body and spirit; for she who is married thinks of the things of the world, how she may please her husband." Why do you bark against it? Why do you resist? The vessel of election says this, "The woman and the virgin are divided." See how great is the happiness of her who has lost even the name of her sex: the virgin is no longer called woman. "She who is not married thinks of the things that are the Lord's, that she may be holy in body and spirit." The definition of a virgin is to be holy in body and spirit, since it does no good to have virgin flesh if one has married in mind. "But she who is married thinks of the things of the world, how she may please her husband." Do you think it the same thing to spend days and nights in prayer and to devote oneself to fasting, and to polish one's face for the husband's arrival, to mince one's steps, to feign endearments? The virgin does this so as to look plainer and to darken nature's good by neglect; the wife paints herself at the mirror and, to the insult of her Maker, tries to be more beautiful than she was born. Then infants prattle, the household is in uproar, children hang on her kisses and her mouth, expenses are reckoned, outlays prepared. Here the girded band of cooks pounds the meat; there the crowd of weavers murmurs. Meanwhile word comes that the husband has arrived with his friends. Like a swallow she flits through every corner of the house: is the couch smooth, have they swept the floors, are the cups adorned, is the dinner ready? Answer, I ask, amid all this where is the thought of God? And are these happy homes? Moreover, where drums sound, the pipe shrills, the lyre chatters, the cymbal clashes, what fear of God is there? The parasite glories in insults; the exposed victims of lust come in, and in their thin clothing are thrust half-naked before shameless eyes. In these things the unhappy wife either takes pleasure and perishes, or takes offense, and the husband is stirred to quarrels. Hence discord, the seedbed of divorce. Or if a house is found in which these things do not happen, which is a rare bird, still the very management of the house, the education of children, the needs of the husband, the correction of slaves: how should they not call one away from the thought of God? "It had ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women," says Scripture; after which it is said to Abraham, "Whatever Sarah says to you, listen to her voice." She who is not in the anxieties and pain of childbirth, who, the monthly flow of blood having ceased, has ceased to be a woman, is freed from God's curse; nor is her turning toward her husband, but on the contrary her husband is subject to her, and he is commanded by the voice of the Lord: "Whatever Sarah says to you, listen to her voice." And so they begin to be free for prayer. For as long as the marriage debt is paid, earnestness in prayer is neglected.

We do not deny that holy women are found among widows and among married women; but they are those who have ceased to be wives, who even in the necessity of marriage imitate the chastity of virgins. This is what the Apostle, with Christ speaking in him, briefly testified: "The unmarried woman thinks of the things that are God's, how she may please God; but the married woman thinks of the things of the world, how she may please her husband," leaving us a field for understanding on this point. Yet he lays no necessity or snare on anyone, but urges what is honorable, wishing all to be as he himself is. And though he has no command of the Lord about virginity, because it is beyond human beings, and it would in a way have been shameless to force people against nature and to say in other words, "I want you to be what the angels are" (which is why the virgin has a greater reward, since she despises what, if she did it, would be no sin), nevertheless in what follows he adds: "But I give advice, as one who has obtained mercy from the Lord to be faithful. I think therefore that this is good because of the present necessity, for it is good for a man to be so." What is this necessity? "Woe to those who are pregnant and nursing in that day." The forest grows up so that it may later be cut down. The field is sown so that it may be reaped. The world is already full; the earth does not hold us. Every day wars cut us down, diseases take us away, shipwrecks swallow us up; and still we go to law about boundaries? Of this number are those who follow the Lamb, who have not defiled their garments, for they remained virgins. Note what "defiled" means. I do not dare to explain it, lest Helvidius slander me. As for your saying that some virgins are tavern-keepers, I tell you more: there are adulteresses among them, and, what will surprise you more, clergy who are innkeepers and monks who are unchaste. But who does not at once understand that neither a tavern-keeping virgin, nor an adulterous monk, nor an innkeeping cleric can be what they are called? Is it the fault of virginity if a pretender to virginity is in a crime? For my part, to pass over other persons and come to the virgin: she who practices the trade of a shopkeeper does not remain a virgin in spirit, whether or not in body I do not know.

We have played the rhetorician and amused ourselves a little in the manner of declaimers. You forced us to it, Helvidius, you who, now that the Gospel is shining, want virgins and married women to be of the same glory. And since I suppose that, defeated by the truth, you will turn to disparaging my life and to abuse (for even silly women do this, wishing ill in corners to the masters who have defeated them), I say this in advance: your insults will be a glory to me, since with the same mouth with which you disparaged Mary you will tear me to pieces, and the servant of the Lord and his mother will alike experience your dog's eloquence.