Virginal Dimension of Marital Love

In Communio of Summer 2008, Father Antonio Lopez writes in “Mary, our Certainty of Hope” of the primal human fear of final solitude and of Mary as the one who accompanies us, reflecting the love of God as the moon does the sun’s rays, and rooting our hope in absolute confidence, rather than anxiety, because God has already come among us, taking flesh within her womb. Mary teaches us the silence in which to pray “Come” as we long with her for the “undeserved miracle of God’s company” even as we already enjoy that holy company. Along the way, he reflects upon the virginal love of Mary, following his mentor Father Luigi Giusanni. This is a difficult and challenging concept as it moves well beyond the physical into a phenomenology of the interiority of love.

Virginal love:
- Is one that desires to possess the beloved (eros) but with an interior detachment that sets the beloved free (agape).
- Does not impose, but allows and invites a free and creative reception.
- Perceives and delights in the beauty of the beloved in selfless surrender and sacrifice.
- Affirms the other without the impulse to absorb or use her selfishly.
- Beholds and cherishes the beautiful that is gratuitously given in the being of the beloved, in obedience to the form and nature of that beauty, renouncing any urge to control or use from an extrinsic, non-contemplative vantage point.
- Is a reciprocal possession of each other as gift in openness to the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit.
- Allows us, like the woman caught in adultery and liberated by Jesus, to be completely free, completely ourselves, and yet completely possessed by our Lover.
- Allows union with distinction, rather than fusion into unity and thus dissolution of otherness.

Clearly, such virginal love is the inner form of any pure and genuine love: friendship, marriage, paternity or maternity, and filiality. Why does such beauty-perceiving, union-seeking, other-affirming, liberating love take the specific form of abstinence from romantic/erotic desire and procreation? This virginal love, embodied so perfectly in Mary, is a privileged share in God’s chaste, creative and redemptive love for us. He desires us, but not in the manner of sexualized pagan gods, rather with a liberty and gratuity that guarantees our own autonomy, freedom and capacity to freely reciprocate the love. The spirit of love, the Holy Spirit, is communion with pure distinction; it creates and allows distance, preserving the autonomy of both Lover and Beloved; and in our historic, temporal domain finds a privileged and specific expression in virginity as freely chosen abstinence from romance, sex and family.

Romantic and erotic longings are powerful and overwhelming; they spring from the very deepest needs of the needy human self; they tend by concupiscence to become possessive, selfish, angry and manipulative. In the Garden of Eden before the fall, we can imagine that eros and agape infused each other in a sublime nuptial communion. With sin, however, this union was broken and erotic love became identified with covetousness, deception, control and violation. The inner form or meaning of erotic love, however, will always be a movement into agape, selfless reception of and gift to the other in her distinctive beauty and nature.

Where does this leave married love? Nuptial love if it is to be and become free, total, faithful, and fruitful, must also be virginal. The romantic and erotic dimensions of love are terribly distinct from but not contradictory of the virginal dimension. In the honeymoon embrace, virginity is not lost, is not taken, and is not violated. Rather, it is freely given and (within the natural realm) fulfilled. The marital act is holy and sacramental because of the virginal dimension that is present by grace, even if more implicit than manifest. It is the virginal element that must grow with the marriage as the lovers encounter each other’s selfishness and all the challenges of family life. While the romantic and erotic will ebb and flow unpredictably according to their own rhythms, the virginal aspect purifies, strengthens and lightens the relationship and opens it up to hope.

Such a union is not closed in upon itself in a cycle of mutual selfishness and violation. Rather, the virginal opens the lover to see his beloved as completely free and other because she belongs first and foremost to God, in a relationship of eternal love. Her love affair with God is what defines her and so spousal love is secondary and contributory to that primal love affair. This transcendent dimension opens the lover to appreciate and embrace his beloved in all of her otherness: her maternity, her work and interest and gifts, her failings, idiosyncrasies and weaknesses. It especially allows the lover to see and serve his beloved in the mission entrusted to her by God. As seen in St. Joseph, such love evokes an obedience, a silence, a sacrifice, and a guardianship of the specific and unique vocation of the beloved in all its density, complexity, creativity, enormity, ambiguity, expectancy, fragility and mystery.

With the passing of years, of course, the romantic and erotic diminish along with youthful vitality, endurance and energy; but the passing of time and accumulation of experience can work to enhance the virginal dimension of love: the mutual acceptance and affirmation of each other, without selfish claim or possession. So we see that marital love is already in the beginning virginal; but this virginity is even more so its goal and destination. As physical energies lessen and psychic longings become transformed, virginal delight in each other develops and expands. No need for viagra or hormone therapy here! Rather, with the passing of libidinal energy and fecundity to the next generation, the spouses are free to deepen their guardianship of their shared and specific missions. Their pray life and its service of the young is especially reinvigorated with release from household responsibilities.

Within the Catholic economy, we rightly highlight the bipolarity and mutual fecundation of the celibate and married states. By contrast, Hindu tradition encourages the natural trajectory of marriage from the household stage into a monastic lifestyle of prayer, poverty, chastity and obedience. And so, we might synthesize these insights and marvel that spousal love, always grounded in the virginal, is destined to deepen and purify its inner form with the passing of time, the growth in experience, and the diminishment in physical strength. With John the Baptist, we pray “I must decrease so that you may increase.”

As so, at last, we will say like the guests at the Cana: “You have saved the best wine for now.” (John 2:10)