He Called Paula the Mother-in-Law of God

So I would not have you distress yourself too much about these points, or expose yourself needlessly either to penance or to condemnation. But there is a matter of real importance on which I can neither excuse nor defend you. It is a statement you made openly, which is not only pagan but beyond all paganism and impiety: the statement in the treatise I mentioned above, that God has a mother-in-law. Has anything as profane or as impious as this been said even by any of the pagan poets? It would be foolish to ask whether you find anything of the kind in the holy Scriptures. I only ask whether “your” Flaccus or Maro, or Plautus or Terence, or even any writer of satires, among all their unclean and immodest sayings, has ever uttered such an outrage against God. No doubt you were led astray by the fact that the girl to whom you addressed the treatise was called the bride of Christ, and so you thought that her mother according to the flesh might be called the mother-in-law of God. You did not remember that such things are said not according to the order of the flesh, but according to the grace of the spirit. For a woman is called the bride of Christ because the Word of God is united with the human soul in a kind of mystical marriage. But if the girl’s mother is related to Christ by this spiritual bond, she herself should be called the bride of Christ, not the mother-in-law of God. As it is, you might as well go on to call the girl’s father God’s father-in-law, and her sister his sister-in-law, or call the girl herself God’s daughter-in-law. The fact is, you were so eager to appear a perfect master of the eloquence of Plautus or of Cicero that you forgot that the apostle speaks of the whole church, parents and children, mothers and daughters, brothers and sisters, all together, as one virgin or bride, when he says, “I determined this very thing, to present you as a chaste virgin to one man, that is, Christ.” But you boast that you follow the Introduction not of Paul but of Porphyry; and since Porphyry wrote his impious and sacrilegious books against Christ and against God, you have fallen, through his introduction, into this abyss of blasphemy. [a]