Pulchra Ut Luna: Some Reflections On The Marian Theme In Muslim-Catholic Dialogue

Journal of Ecumenical Studies, Summer-Fall, 1999 by Tim Winter

Many historians have viewed the Augustinian position that sin is an inherited moral stain as the reactive child of radically negative Manichean views of the physical world, as well as of the gnostic and other late-Hellenistic dualisms. [29] By affirming the unmediated and nonredemptive operation of grace, the Qur'an effected a return to more Semitic conceptions of soteriology and also to a strategy toward the world closer to that held by the Socratic philosophers than to the more pessimistically world-denying ethos of much later Greek thinking. Its insistence that human recalcitrance may be adequately overcome by a penitent "turning" (tawba), once the heart is softened by consideration of God's "signs" (ayat) both in nature and in a written disclosure of the divine will, was among the most fundamental of the transformations it wrought in the territories it overran in the formerly Christian Near East. It unfastened the anti-naturalist knot linking body, woman, and nature that Augustine had tied [30] and, taki ng its cue from the life of its founder, fully dissociated married sexuality from sin. Married heterosexual wrongdoing, as for Plato and Aristotle and also for the Jewish consensus, was no different from any other vice inasmuch as it consisted in divergence from a golden mean into either excess or deficiency. Indeed, Islam added to Plato's understanding of aphrodisia as a natural and necessary experience that secures the perpetuation of the species the further justification that it offered a foretaste of the delights of Paradise. [31] The eroticized Garden of the Qur'an, moreover, appeared to contrast sharply with the Christian scriptures' assurance that "one shall neither marry nor be married, one will be like the angels in heaven." [32] For Islam, the proleptic sign of a lived anticipation of the Reign of God was sexuality, where in the Christian context it had been celibacy.

In this fashion, the concept of the superior virtue of celibacy and virginity and of the ideal marriage as remaining "sine carnali commixtione" (Aquinas) could gain no significant purchase in a religious culture nurtured on the qur'anic account of the Fall. Moreover, the Augustinian confidence that "the evils of sex were particularly identified with the female" [33] was further undermined by the ambiguity of the Islamic scriptural account of the close of the "prologue in Heaven," which in the Qur'an appears as the fault of a decision made by both Adam and Eve and is only particularly associated with Eve in the hadith and historiographic literature. [34] Hence, there has been no Muslim conception of Mary as a second Eve, whose freedom from concupiscence constitutes the necessary matrix for the Savior who redeems humanity from original sin and, thereby, as in the famous play on words in the hymn Ave maris stella, changes Eve's name: mutans Evae nomen. [35]

The Qur'an's apparent affirmation of the Virgin Birth thus bears a radically diminished and altered significance, which offers the believer no clues about the route to salvation. The patristic Virgin had been constructed against the background of the older Hellenic topos of a virgin mother, such as Artemis, who engendered a divine child, [36] in order to emphasize the remarkable status of Christ, but had introduced a new element by taking the virgin birth as a radical condemnation of concupiscence and as the justification for a celibate and ascetical life, so that "Mary's life is a rule of life for all." [37] Islam preserved the belief in her virginity but did not make the inference that human sexuality is suspect. It contrived to revere her within a set of wider and rarely challenged assumptions in hagiography, which, as Tor Andrae has shown, typically regarded the virginal state as an obstacle rather than an aid to the life of the saints. [38] The point of reference was the Prophet himself, who had married several wives and whose perfection is seen by Muslim piety as unproblematically confirmed rather than compromised by his sexuality. A number of hadiths attribute to him the view that the sex act with one's spouse, if done in a considerate spirit, will be rewarded at the eschaton. [39]