The Sacred Embrace of Jesus and Mary: The Sexual Mystery at the Heart of the Christian Tradition

by Jean-Yves Leloup

Church of...

early Lutherans and J...

In reading his Confessions, we discover a man who suffered from the unpredictable and irresistible power of sensual desire and w...

expelled man from the empire...

In his eyes, sexuality was the great source of sin and even beca...

Thus Augustine transformed sex into

a pollution that excludes us from the temple, instead of a benediction that allows us to enter it.

(In the time of Jesus, an unmarried rabbi could not enter the Temple or ...

The sexual act was acceptable only when the inner intention was procreation; nothi...

In addition, the only utility of woman alongside her husband was to help him in th...

And I do not understand why one would exclude this finality. If woman were not given to man for the goal of engendering children, then for what other help?

Here we already detect the causal chain that leads from contempt for sexuality to contempt for woman.

Original Fear

What do all these accounts say about the unhappy experience

that has damaged relations between m...

To be free of fear of the Other—in this case, the other sex—demands a return to original trust,

which is more ancient than original fear.

It means a return to Paradise, a return to the real in preference to the ideal and our ideas and ...

“You say that Mary did not remain a virgin? Well, I say that Joseph himself was a virgin, and that the virgin Christ was born from a marriage of virgins.9

The lack of any scriptural justification for this view did not

prevent its propagation, even to the Council of Trent, which proclaimed: “If anyone claim that it is not a better and happier thing to dwell in virginity and celibacy than to be mar...

Does this mean that Jesus himself might have to be anathematized? “[ Jesus] said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh . . . What there...

In any case, for the Council of Trent it was anathema to speak of the sexuality of Jesus Christ, to say that he was not “born of a marriage of virgins.”

On an unconscious level, we are surely still suffering from the repercussions of this prohibition.

Let us recall the account of the Annunciation in the Gospel of Luke: Mary, expressing good common sense, points out to the angel that if she brings a child into the world, it must be with the “help” of a man; yet she does not know a man.b

“The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God.”12

According to traditional rabbinical interpretation of this language, the shadow of God is matter, the body of light.

Another more magical and miraculous interpretation avoids the whole matter of the shadow and says that Christ was born directly from the Holy Spirit and the (literally) Virgin Mary.

This was to be the interpretation adopted by most churches,

But there is a mystical Christian tradition that has never forgotten t...

sense of Mary’s v...

It turns out that the antisexual doctrines of Augustine and Jerome are not derived from the gospels so much as from the Letters of Paul of Tarsus, in which he says that “It is good for a man not to touch a woman”—in

in clear discord with the book of Genesis, in which it is said that “It is not good (lo-towb) that man should be alone.”

Thus marriage without love is better than love without marriage.

If the depths of a man’s fear of sex can be measured by the depths of his mistrust of woman, then it is clear that St. Paul had

his problems in this domain. But then, what authority can be accor...

In Christ there are only human beings, individuals, whether they happen to be of the male or female sex.

this, we rediscover the authentic atmosphere of the gospels, in which sexuality is not construed as negative:

Yet perhaps it is especially through the sacred union of man and woman that the fullness of Union is manifested in the love that John calls agape.

The failure of this union at this “all too human” level of the war of the sexes will lead only to discord and dualism at all the other levels.

In truth, it is upon the “middle way” that we find ourselves.

This means that such a person cannot be the disciple of the highest freedom and of an entirely different kind of love.

It

is not human laws and conventions that shall reign over us, but the call of the Spirit and obedience to ...

there are those who

have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven.17

Again, it is a mistake to take these words literally. “The letter kills, the Spiri...

Cyril of Alexandria spoke of pneumatike eunoukia, or “s...

What is important to remember in any interpretation is that the Creator and Savior of nature does not ask for the mutilation or denial of nature.

“Christ has not come to abolish, but to fulfill,” and “I have come so that you may have life, and life in abundance.” Sexuality is not to be repressed, but integrated and transcended, making it subservient to the love of the Holy Spirit.