Mary, the long-awaited of mankind
By M. l'abbé Gagey | 14 May 2025
From his notes on the third article of the Apostles’ Creed in the Catechism of the Council of Trent, Vol 1 (1905), appearing for the first time in English.
If one were to believe the enemies of Christianity, one could excavate the traditions anterior to the coming of Jesus Christ, to examine the primitive beliefs of the human race, without finding a single clear text, a single true testimony proving that the Long-Awaited of the nations was to be born of a woman who united the sweet name of mother with the glorious honour of virginity.
Of course, even if it had pleased God to reveal nothing in advance on this point, even if He had not made known beforehand the glorious prerogatives of Mary, the inalterable virginity of the Mother of the Saviour would have been no less a certain and incontestable fact for us; we would have welcomed this dogma with no less happiness. It is so beautiful! It exhales a perfume of such suave fragrance! It promotes virtue so persuasively! It works prodigies of innocence and purity on this corrupt earth every day!
But finally, let us see if this voice is as mute as they would like to claim in the antiquity of man’s beliefs, customs and institutions. Let us start by asking the reason for the signal honour hitherto accorded to virginity by all the peoples of the world. Joseph de Maistre writes:
“Although marriage is the natural state of man in general, and even a holy state according to an opinion just as general, we nonetheless see a certain respect for virgins break in on all sides; they are seen as superior beings, and when they lose this quality, even legitimately, they seem degraded. In Ancient Greece, betrothed women owed a sacrifice to Demeter for the expiation of this sort of profanation. The law of Athens established mysterious rites relating to this religious ceremony. Women observed them diligently and feared the wrath of the goddess if they neglected to conform to them.
“Virgins consecrated to God are found everywhere and in all ages of the human race. What is better known than the vestal virgins? The Roman Empire rose with the cult of Vesta and, with it, it fell. In Athens, as in Rome, the sacred fire was kept by virgins. Such virgins have been found in other nations, notably in the Indies and in Peru, where it is remarkable that the violation of their vows was punished with the same fate as in Rome. Virginity was considered a sacred character, equally pleasing to the emperor and to the Divinity. In India, the Laws of Manu declare that all the ceremonies prescribed for marriage only concern virgins; those who were not were excluded from all legal ceremony. The voluptuous legislator of Asia (Mahommed) himself said, ‘The disciples of Jesus remained virgins without being commanded because of their desire to please God. The daughter of Josaphat remained a virgin. God inspired her with His spirit; she believed in the words of her Lord and in the scriptures. She was of the number of them that obeyed.’”1
In Gaul, the druidesses were honoured as saints because of the perpetual virginity that they observed. The famous virgin Veleda enjoyed an immense authority among the Germans, who considered her a great prophet; they entrusted to her the running of public affairs — an astonishing thing! We find these honours given to virginity even in the heart of nations who regard sterility with opprobrium. De Maistre goes on to say that the homages which surround this virtue everywhere must have their root somewhere; but where? Assuredly not in the moral principles and practices of antiquity! One could never create or maintain this universal respect for virginity under the empire of the corrupted mores of those times and with those ideas, which made woman a being without dignity: degraded and almost uniquely destined to serve the brute passions of men, who could never be persuaded of their importance. From this angle, no rational explanation is possible.
With the knowledge furnished by Christianity, however, everything is easily explained. In effect, one must admit, as the Church does, that in distant epochs, certain divine oracles predicted that a virgin would bring into the world the long-awaited Liberator of all nations. Straight away, the value and esteem that has always beenn attached to virginity is conceived without difficulty. There is a reason that this is most natural and most logical. One clearly sees that humanity, if it was aware of these oracles, must heap its honours and veneration on all virgins because it was from their ranks that the Redeemer must come.
Indeed, when a hypothesis gives an far more rational and plausible explanation than any other that one might substitute, to so great a fact as the universal respect for the virginal state, one wonders whether this hypothesis is not as good as proved.
But besides this argument, which certainly lacks neither justice nor strength, we can add demonstrations far more direct and conclusive; we can establish in a positive manner that primitive peoples everywhere have venerated some prodigious person born, or to be born, miraculously of a virgin.
To start with the Hebrews, what do we find at the heart of their traditions? More than seven hundred years before Jesus Christ, Isaiah proclaimed, before the court of King Achaz, the virginal motherhood of her who would give birth to the great liberator of the children of Abraham. “Behold,” he said, “a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and his name shall be called Emmanuel (‘God with us’).”
…
It is therefore clear that, according to Isaiah, the Messiah was to have a virgin for Mother. Give ear to the echoes of tradition: rather than falling upon deaf ears, these prophetic words were recollected with care, they were retold in the succession of ages; all generations of the ancient Synagogue heard them and understood. Pursue them through the centuries, through the generations of antiquity, and you will hear them repeat that their Liberator would be born not in the way of other men, that his birth would be mysterious, supernatural. To their eyes, the Messiah is the dew which descends from before Yahweh, without the cooperation of any son of Adam, it is the stone cut from the mountain without the work of any man. His Mother is the beautiful rose, the glory of Jericho, that no sacrilegious hand, no audacious breath, has withered; it is the heavenly woman who, having carried him in her chaste womb, must remain intact until her death, like the closed word of the prophecy.2
Such ideas and traditions were so widespread at the moment of the birth of Jesus Christ that, when Saint Matthew cited the words of the prophet to confirm the belief in the miraculous conception of the divine Master in the womb of Mary, not only did no voice rise up in Judea to reproach the Evangelist for having falsified the sense of the Scripture and making Isaiah say that which he had not said, but there was not even a sign of surprise. No one — neither friend nor enemy — thought to accuse him of having taken the words of the son of Amos in anything but their true sense.
But is Isaiah the first to speak of the marvellous birth of the Messiah and of the Virginal Maternity of her Mother? No. All this is known long before him. His beautiful prediction had for its goal only to refresh and fortify this precious memory. As Father Berthier says:
“The Jews had to have been forewarned that the Mother of the Messiah would be a virgin. Otherwise the prophet would not have told them, ‘Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and his name shall be called Emmanuel.’ This nation must have expected in this circumstance the coming of the Messiah,”3
If you are wondering whence the Jews had drawn their beliefs on this point, here is our answer: God, in promising a Liberator to our first parents immediately after the fall, expressed himself thus: “I will put enmities between thee (Satan) and the woman” — or according to the paraphrase of Father de Carrières‚ “I will put eternal enmity between thee and the woman, between thy seed and her seed …” But what then is this seed of the woman? What are these roots which would see an irreconcilable enmity between themselves and the seed of Satan? Are they each one of us by any chance? Alas, we, the ill-fortuned posterity of Adam, are born children of wrath, slaves of sin, subjects of the devil. And so, in the course of our unhappy lives, how many times do we extend our hand to him whom we should have held in perpetual hatred, how many times do we give ourselves again to him? How many times do we deliver ourselves to his partisans? It is not between us and him therefore that the enmity is indestructible. However, the word of God cannot err. It is necessary therefore that there be born of the woman a descendant whose alliance with Satan would be even more impossible than the alliance of light and darkness. So who would this privileged descendent be? It would be Him who came from the woman, not in the way of other men, but in an exceptional and totally marvellous manner: He who would be born of the woman, but of the woman alone, without the cooperation of any man.
This is the true and complete signification of the first messianic oracle; a signification which was perfectly understood from the beginning, which alone has produced and explains, in a most natural way, the traditions that we find everywhere in antiquity, and which have such a striking resemblance to the tradition of the Hebrews on the Messiah. And so you do not think that this perspective is personal to us, we will let a well-known authority speak in our place. Father Orsini says:
“In these ancient times which touch the cradle of the world, when our first fathers, forsaken and trembling in the majestic shadow of Eden, listened to the thundering voice of Yahweh, Who condemned them to exile, labour and death in punishment for their insane disobedience, a mysterious prediction, in which the bounty of the Creator broke through the fury of the angered Lord, came to be revealed to the broken spirits of these two fragile creatures who, like Lucifer, had sinned by pride. A daughter of Eve, a woman of virile courage, was to crush the head of the serpent underfoot and to regenerate a culpable race forever …
“Thence comes the tradition among the antediluvian generations that a virgin, beautiful and pure like the light, repairs by her divine childbirth, the evil that the woman had done. This consoling tradition, which revealed the hope of a fallen race, was not effaced from the memory of men during their great dispersion across the Plains of Shinar; they carried this sweet and distant hope with them over the mountains and seas. Later, when the primitive religion began to be weakened, and the ancient traditions were enveloped in clouds, that of the virgin and of the Messiah almost alone endured the march of time and was raised up on the ruins of the ancient beliefs lost in the fables of polytheism, like the evergreen sapling growing amidst the debris of what was once Babylon the Great.
“Search from north to south and from sunset to sunrise the diverse regions of the globe; excavate the religious annals of peoples … One will find the virgin-mother at the heart of almost all theogonies.
“In Tibet, Japan and a part of the eastern peninsula of India, it is the god Fo who, to save men, is incarnated in the womb of the nymph Lhamoghiuprul, the young betrothed of a king, the most beautiful and most holy of women. In China, it is Xiwangmu, the most popular of the goddesses, who conceives by the simple contact with a water lily. Her son, raised under the poor roof of a fisherman, becomes a great man and works miracles. The lamas say that Buddah was born of the virgin Mahāmāyā. Sommonokodom, the prince, legislator and god of Siam, was to become incarnate, by divine operation, in the womb of a virgin.”4
Always and everywhere, it is the Spiritus Sanctus superveniet in te; et virtus Altissimi obumbrabit tibi.
See also by Mgr Gerbet:
Born of the Virgin Mary (1), (2) and (3).
On the vocation and mission of Catholic priests
Notes