Response to Jerome's Response to Helvidius - Part 20

Jerome wrote a response to Helvidius regarding the virginity of Mary.  This post is the twentieth in a series of responses to what Jerome wrote.

Jerome wrote:

I now direct the attack against the passage in which, wishing to show your cleverness, you institute a comparison between virginity and marriage. I could not forbear smiling, and I thought of the proverb, did you ever see a camel dance? “Are virgins better,” you ask, “than Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who were married men? Are not infants daily fashioned by the hands of God in the wombs of their mothers? And if so, are we bound to blush at the thought of Mary having a husband after she was delivered? If they find any disgrace in this, they ought not consistently even to believe that God was born of the Virgin by natural delivery. For according to them there is more dishonour in a virgin giving birth to God by the organs of generation, than in a virgin being joined to her own husband after she has been delivered.” Add, if you like, Helvidius, the other humiliations of nature, the womb for nine months growing larger, the sickness, the delivery, the blood, the swaddling-clothes. Picture to yourself the infant in the enveloping membranes. Introduce into your picture the hard manger, the wailing of the infant, the circumcision on the eighth day, the time of purification, so that he may be proved to be unclean. We do not blush, we are not put to silence. The greater the humiliations He endured for me, the more I owe Him. And when you have given every detail, you will be able to produce nothing more shameful than the cross, which we confess, in which we believe, and by which we triumph over our enemies.  

Notice well that in this point, Jerome is fundamentally inconsistent with the notion of in partu virginity.  Instead, we see Jerome embracing Helvidius' picture of a natural, bloody childbirth, not rejecting it.  I think he missed Helvidius' point, but that's ok.  The point is that if you accept that Mary's birth canal let Jesus path through, you should not think it some harm to Mary that Joseph knew her after.

-TurretinFan