Reflection on Mary in the Fathers is a tantalizing issue for modern scholarship. On the one hand there is plenty of evidence, but on the other hand it is curiously episodic. Some of this evidence is found in the dogmatic reflection of the Fathers; some is rather found in popular devotion and prayer. Clearly the relationship between these two is important, but it is (at least for the early centuries) often quite difficult to discern now what this relationship amounted to. A further important factor concerns the intermittent nature of what evidence we have. It is striking—and this is true of much in the patristic period—that although modern scholarship is concerned to trace development, none of the sources we can consult seem aware of any development. It is therefore extremely hazardous to assume that the earliest evidence for any doctrine or practice is evidence for the earliest occurrence of such a doctrine or practice, indeed it is unlikely that this is the case, and it is for precisely this reason that any such doctrine or practice is almost invariably presented as traditional. This is very annoying for the canons of modern scholarship, but cannot be ignored.
This chapter is a somewhat general chapter, with more specific areas dealt with in other chapters, so it will inevitably encroach on these other chapters, namely, most of the chapters in Part I, as well as the later chapters on Mary in hymnody, Eastern and Western. This chapter will proceed thus: first, a recollection of the biblical sources for Patristic reflection on, and devotion to, Mary; secondly, a discussion of the role allotted to Mary in second-century theology; thirdly, alongside that, discussion of the second-century Protevangelium of James and some consideration of apocryphal literature in general, in so far as it impinges on patristics; finally, some discussion of developments in the fourth century up to the Christological controversies that surrounded the Œcumenical synods of the fifth century and beyond.
This really consists of two kinds of material: first of all, the role Mary plays in the Gospels and elsewhere in the New Testament; secondly, the way in which the Old Testament is drawn into reflection on Mary. The infancy narratives in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke both tell the story of Jesus’ birth to a young Jewish virgin called Mary. They are, however, very different, although it did not prove very difficult to regard them as complementary and conflate them. Matthew told a story in which Joseph, the betrothed of the Virgin Mary, is central, recounting his doubts, the visit of the Magi and their meeting with Herod, the flight of the Holy Family to Egypt, and the subsequent attempt by Herod to kill the baby by a massacre of all the children of the region under two years old. Luke told the story more from the perspective of Mary, beginning with an account of the announcement of the conception of John the Baptist to the priest Zacharias and his wife Elizabeth from a family related to that of the Virgin Mary. Mary receives a visit from the angel Gabriel in the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, announcing to Mary that she, still a virgin, is to bear a child named Jesus. Luke’s story continues, telling of Mary’s visit to her kinswoman Elizabeth before the birth of John the Baptist, the birth of John the Baptist, then the journey of Joseph and the pregnant Mary to his ancestral home, Bethlehem, where Mary gives birth, laying her son in a manger, and they are visited by local shepherds. There follows the circumcision of Jesus on the eighth day; then the purification of Mary and the presentation of Jesus in the Temple, in accordance with the Mosaic law, and his encounter with the prophet Symeon, as well as a prophetess Anna, before they return to their home town of Nazareth in Galilee. Luke’s account ends with the pilgrimage of the family to Jerusalem when Jesus is twelve years old, and his staying behind among the teachers in the Temple, amazing them with his learning.
Although Matthew is important for the confirmation of Luke, and his accounts of Joseph’s doubts, the Magi, the flight into Egypt (understandably of exceptional importance for Coptic Christianity) and the massacre of the innocents, it is Luke’s account which provides most substance for subsequent reflection on the role of the Virgin Mary in the Incarnation. This is manifest is several ways. First, in the attention paid to the Virgin’s consent to God’s request through the angel—Mary is not just involved in God’s plan for the redemption of human kind, but actively cooperates with God. Secondly, the way in which Luke echoes the style of the Greek Septuagint in his infancy narrative indicates the continuity between the whole history of Israel and the new thing of the Incarnation—Mary is a faithful Jewish woman. Her faithfulness is underlined by the role of the Temple, both in Mary’s belonging, at least collaterally, to a priestly family, and to the importance attached to the Temple in the accounts of the circumcision, and especially to the encounter between the baby Jesus and the aged prophet Symeon who prophesies that a sword shall pierce the soul of the Virgin. A further point is emphasized by its being repeated by the Evangelist. Mary has a contemplative attitude to the events in which she takes part: twice, after the visit of the shepherds and episode in the Temple on their visit for the Passover, Luke comments that Mary ‘kept all these sayings/events (ῥήματα) in her heart’ (‘pondering them’: Luke 2:19, cf. Luke 2:51). Mary is not just caught up in the events subsequent to her assent to God, but in some way participates in them, making them inward to herself.
It is not, however, simply the infancy narratives that provided material for subsequent reflection. Other events in her life recorded in the Gospels are important, too: two events, especially, in the Fourth Gospel. The first is her involvement in the Wedding at Cana in Galilee, where she points out to her Son the lack of wine, and bids the servants to obey him (John 2:3–5), and secondly the episode at the foot of the Cross, where Jesus makes her mother to the beloved disciple and gives her the beloved disciple as her son in his stead (John 19:26–27). Hoskyns comments in his commentary on the fourth Gospel:
The Church proceeds from the sacrifice of the Son of God, and the union of the Beloved Disciple and the Mother of the Lord prefigures and foreshadows the charity of the Ecclesia of God. Mary, the Mother of the Lord, becomes the mother of the faithful …, and the Beloved Disciple here seems to denote the ideal Christian convert. (Hoskyns 1940: 631)
Mary’s involvement in the Resurrection of Christ seems passed over in silence; various Maries are mentioned, but it seems clear that none of them was the mother of Christ (despite later patristic tradition). Nevertheless, it was not long before an appearance of the risen Christ to his mother became part of the general belief of Christians. The events mentioned in the Fourth Gospel gesture to Mary’s role as intercessor with her Son and also to her becoming in some sense ‘mother’ to the beloved disciple, perhaps understood as the archetypal disciple. The Old Testament itself came to be seen as indicating the place of Mary in the divine economy (we shall see more of this later). Of particular importance here is the way in which the Temple plays such a prominent role in Luke’s infancy narrative hints at Mary herself as the fulfilment of the Old Testament temple, since she became, as the result of her assent to God, a living temple, one in whom God physically dwelt, one who discloses God to all humanity.
One of the ways in which the Apostle Paul expresses the victory of Christ over death, a victory that extends in principle to the whole human race, is by drawing a parallel between the first Adam of Genesis 2–3 and Christ as the second Adam. So, for example, in I Corinthians: ‘Now Christ has been raised from the dead, the first-fruits of them that slept. For since death came through the human, so through the human came the resurrection of the dead. For just as in Adam all died, so in Christ shall all be made alive’ (I Cor. 15:20–22), and goes on to contrast the ‘first man Adam’ and the ‘last Adam’ (I Cor. 15:45). In the second century we find this parallel between the first Adam and Christ the second Adam extended to embrace the first Eve and Mary the second Eve. So in the Dialogue with Trypho, Justin Martyr says that the Son of God:
became man through the Virgin, so that just as disobedience took its beginning from the serpent, so in the same way it might be brought to an end. For Eve, being a virgin and incorrupt, conceiving through the word, gave birth to disobedience and death; Mary taking faith and joy at the glad tidings of the angel Gabriel, because the spirit of the Lord was to come upon her and the power of the most high to overshadow her, and thus the one born of her is the holy Son of God, answered, ‘Be it to me according to your word’. And so, this one was born of her, about whom we have shown so many of the Scriptures to speak, through whom God destroyed the serpent and those humans and angels who had become like him.
(Dialogue with Trypho 100, Opera 1842: II.336–8)
This expresses the parallel between the virgin Eve, whose disobedience brought death, which was overthrown by the obedience of the virgin Mary. The passage also dwells on Mary’s response of faith and joy to the message of the angel as the cause of this reversal of fortune. The same notion is found in other second-century writers, such as Melito of Sardis, Irenaeus, and Tertullian. Irenaeus, however, adds a further aspect:
Just as [Eve] was led astray by an angelic word, so that she fled from God, having betrayed his word, so [Mary] received the good news through an angelic word that she might bear God, obedient to his word. For if [Eve] was disobedient to God, [Mary] was persuaded to obey God, so that the virgin Mary became advocate for the virgin Eve. And just as the human race was bound to death by a virgin, so it was saved by a virgin, virginal disobedience being equally balanced by virginal obedience.
(Adversus Haereses V.19.2, 1857: II.376)
The idea of Mary as advocate for Eve is found again in Irenaeus’ On the Apostolic Preaching:
And just as through a disobedient virgin man was struck and, falling, died, so also by means of a virgin, who obeyed the word of God, man, being revivified, received life. … For it was necessary for Adam to be recapitulated in Christ, that ‘mortality might be swallowed up in immortality’; and Eve in Mary, that a virgin, become an advocate for a virgin, might undo and destroy the virginal disobedience by virginal obedience. (Apostolic Preaching 33, 1997: 61)
This makes clear that, for Irenaeus, Mary shares with Christ the work of recapitulation.
Alongside this explicit reflection on the place of the Virgin Mary in the divine economy, we find in the second century reflection about the Church as Virgin Mother which, although it makes no explicit reference to Mary, can hardly be regarded as without any such reference at all. The beginnings of such reflection can be traced back to Paul who, just after his only, oblique reference to Mary, when he speaks of God’s Son as ‘born of a woman, born under the Law’ (Gal. 4:4), goes on, in his parable of Abraham’s two sons, to identify the heavenly Jerusalem as the ‘barren one’ of Isaiah’s song of the Suffering Servant, who is to break forth into song, because of the abundance of sons she has born: those who have been born through baptism into Christ’s death, the fruits of his passion (cf. Gal. 4:26–31). This notion of the Church as Virgin Mother, the barren woman who as a result of Christ’s passion conceives children of God is picked up by several second-century writers. The Church appears to Hermas as an old woman, old because ‘created the first of all things, … for whose sake the world was established’ (Hermas, Vision 2.4.1 [2.8.1], Shepherd 1956: 7) and then in successive visions as a younger and younger woman, finally ‘“adorned as if coming forth from the bridal chamber”, all in white and with white sandals, veiled to her forehead, and a turban for a headdress, but her hair was white’ (Vision 4.2.1 [4.23.1], Opera 1956: 20). This picks up another Pauline theme of the church as a spotless virgin that the apostle says he will present to Christ (I Cor. 11:2–4). A similar theme is found in II Clement, where the statement in Genesis 1:26 that God made the human ‘male and female’ is interpreted of Christ and the Church, both having existed ‘from the beginning’ (II Clement 14.2, 1970: 77). The same theme is picked up again in Tertullian, who asserts that ‘As Adam was a figure of Christ, Adam’s sleep was a figure of the death of Christ, who was to sleep a mortal slumber, that from the wound inflicted in his side might be figured the true Mother of the living, the Church’ (De Anima 43.10, 1947: 60).
The most striking illustration of the theme of the Church as the Virgin Mother is to be found in the account of the martyrdom of the Christians in Lyons and Vienne, preserved in Eusebius’ Church History. The central figure is Blandina, a young slave girl, an epitome of weakness in the ancient world. After countless tortures, Blandina was spread-eagled on a post and exposed to the wild animals; she hanged there ‘in the form of a cross’, and by her fervent prayer she encouraged other fellow-Christians who were undergoing persecution. In her suffering with Christ, Christ is manifest to all in Blandina. A day or so later, Blandina is again brought into the arena to be tortured for confessing her faith in Christ. The letter comments that her sufferings and those of her fellow-Christians:
were neither idle nor fruitless; for through their perseverance the infinite mercy of Christ was revealed. The dead were restored to life through the living; the martyrs brought favour to those who bore no witness, and the virgin Mother experienced much joy in recovering alive those whom she had cast forth stillborn. For through the martyrs those who had denied the faith for the most part went through the same process and were conceived and quickened again in the womb and learned to confess Christ … (Martyrs of Lyon 45, 1972: 77)
Further torments followed to the final stage when those who remained faithful to Christ were to be dispatched by the sword:
The blessed Blandina was last of all: like a noble (εὐγενής: well born—and she a slave!) mother encouraging her children, she sent them all before her in triumph to the King, and then, after duplicating in her own body all her children’s sufferings, she hastened to rejoin them, rejoicing and glorying in her death as though she had been invited to a bridal banquet … (Martyrs of Lyon 55, 1972: 79)
In Blandina, the slave-girl, there is seen Christ, whose sufferings she was sharing, but as a noble mother, encouraging her children, she represents the Church, as virgin Mother, giving birth to those who had earlier been still-born in their apostasy. These evocations of the Church as Virgin Mother are silent as to the Virgin Mary, and yet the parallel with her whose soul was pierced with a sword, according to Symeon’s prophecy, is all but tangible.
The short treatise, called by scholars since the early modern period The Protevangelium of James, is a kind of prequel to the canonical Gospels, telling the story of the Virgin Mary from her conception to the birth of Christ and the massacre of the innocents. It presents a number of paradoxes. Among the most obvious are: its early date (second century) combined with its highly developed Mariology; its clumsy prose style combined with what seems a highly sophisticated philosophical culture; a story consisting of artless narrative episodes, which are yet freighted with an elaborate symbolism, that is, however, nowhere explained but rather taken for granted. These paradoxes seem to be inherent in the work, and bear some consideration. The first paradox—its early date and developed Mariology—can be made more precise: the themes introduced in the Protevangelium are precisely the themes we find developed in the explosion of Marian reflection and devotion in the fifth century, notably in homilies of Proklos, Patriarch of Constantinople. One might indeed say that the Protevangelium represents in narrative form the themes celebrated in encomiastic form by Proklos and others. The other two paradoxes mentioned point to something remarkable about the work, which may, I suggest, have a bearing on its place in the development of devotion to and reflection on Mary. For the convergence of such a simple literary style and such evident learning in a text that, in virtually each pericope, begs for explanation and development seems to require a context that can only be described as esoteric. It is esoteric not in the way it is almost universally taken—a secret, whispered teaching, to be traced back to Jesus and one or other of the (generally less well-known) apostles, which is independent of the public tradition of the Church, and indeed intended to undermine it (the sense in which Irenaeus took appeal to secret tradition, in which he is followed by most modern scholars, most recently by Guy Stroumsa: see Louth 2016). What I envisage by ‘esotericism’ is rather that in early Christian circles, as in later circles, there were groups of Christians who wanted to enter more deeply into the inner meaning of the Scriptures (what would later be called the ‘mystic’ meaning). The texts that served their purpose would not yield their real meaning to those not initiated; they would need explanation; they would contain symbolism, and retelling to familiar events that cry out for explanation—and such a text is the Protevangelium of James. Esotericism, in this sense, might be thought peculiarly appropriate among Christians seeking to understand more deeply Mary’s role in the divine economy, given Luke’s depiction of her as one who ‘kept these things, pondering them in her heart’ (Luke 2:19): Mary, for them, was not only the part of what they sought to understand, but also an example of one engaged in such meditation.
We cannot, however, enter into divining such explanation now; what we can do is point to the themes that serve to elucidate the mystery of the woman who became the mother of Jesus. The dominant theme is evident from the text itself, and gains further support from its pseudonymous author, namely James the Lord’s Brother. What we know about him, apart from the little revealed in the New Testament, is that he was closely associated with the Temple: he was a Nazirite, who was alone ‘permitted to enter the Holy Place, for his garments were not of wool but of linen’, that he spent so much time on his knees in prayer ‘that his knees grew hard like a camel’s’ (all recorded by Hegesippos and preserved by Eusebius: Historia Ecclesiastica 2.23.6, 1926: 170). Mary is brought up in the Temple, kept preserved from contact with the profane earth after her first seven steps at the age of three; ‘danced on her feet’ on the ‘third step of the altar’; only leaving the Temple, on the approach of puberty, being assigned by lot to Joseph, a wealthy and generous man, when from the rod given him a dove flies out and settle on his head (the symbolism here becoming appropriately entangled). Another link with the Temple is provided in the account of the Annunciation: as Mary receives the angel she is engaged in spinning the scarlet and purple thread for the new veil of the Temple. This is the veil that will be torn in two at the death of her Son; the veil that, according to Heb. 10:20, is the flesh, the flesh that is beginning to be fashioned in her womb, even as she replied to the message of the angel. It is the imagery of the Temple that is later plundered in the fifth century to bring out the significance of Mary: ‘the untarnished vessel of virginity, the spiritual paradise of the second Adam, the workshop of the union of natures, the market-place of the contract of salvation, the bridal chamber in which the Word took the flesh in marriage, the living bush of human nature which the fire of a divine birth-pang did not consume …’ (Proklos, Homily 1.1, 2003: 137)—all imagery associated in one way or another with the Temple, as a place of union between the human and the divine, and a place of sacrifice.
Another reason for attributing the Protevangelium to James was that it seeks to make clear who the ‘brothers of the Lord’ were. Joseph is presented as an elderly widower, with a family by his earlier marriage (precisely for this reason, the ancient Latin version of the text vanished after being savagely attacked by Jerome, for whom Joseph, too, was celibate). Origen in his Commentary on St Matthew (10.17, 2018: I.50) quotes the ‘Book of James’ in support of this view for which there is good evidence anyway (see Lightfoot 1881). The Protevangelium is also early evidence for the doctrine of Mary’s perpetual virginity: Salome demands proof by inserting her hand, which is burnt as with fire—an episode alluding directly to Thomas’ placing his hand in the wounds of Christ (John 20:24–9), which Clement of Alexandria seems to have known. Later on, when the cult of Mary begins to develop, the Feasts of Conception of the Mother of God (9 December in the East), her Nativity (8 September), and her Entry into the Temple (21 November) all are derived from the Protevangelium.
As already remarked, there seems a curious hiatus in evidence for Mariology between the Protevangelium and the developments of the fifth century: a gap of two whole centuries and a bit! In truth, it is not as dramatic as that: there is scattered, and important, evidence from the third and fourth centuries (cf. Gambero 1999: 59–230). It is, however, all incidental to something else, almost invariably the Incarnation. So, for example, Athanasius in De Incarnatione emphasizes the virginal conception in connection with the Incarnation: the Word ‘took our body, and not simply that, but from a pure and unspotted virgin ignorant of a man, a body pure and truly unalloyed by intercourse with men’ (De Incarnatione 8, 2011: 66). On the one hand, the Word assumed our humanity, he became one of us; but the humanity he assumed was from a virgin, ‘pure and unspotted’ [ἐξ ἀχράντου καὶ ἀμιάντου… παρθένου], since it was God the Word who fashioned his humanity from the virgin Mary. This striking assertion of Mary’s purity and sinlessness is not, however, really concerned with Mary herself, but with the Incarnation. If there is any contribution to Mariology to be found in Athanasius it is to be found in the way in which he draws the Virgin Mary into his promotion of the ascetical way of life in the fourth century. It is not that Mary is the cause of the growing popularity of asceticism, rather that Mary is enlisted by Athanasius in his promotion of the ascetic way of life. However, for Athanasius the prominence of virginity is something he traces back to Mary’s virginity: it belongs to the New Covenant, and is peculiar to it—he claims that ‘Paul himself did not learn about it through the Law, but rather through the lifestyle of Mary’ (quoted by Brakke 1995: 52). This recruitment of Mary for the ascetic movement apart, what we have found with Athanasius is generally true for this period: it is difficult to put together what one might call the ‘Mariology’ of any of the third- or fourth-century Fathers; there is what one might call ‘Mariological reflection’, but it is usually tangential to Mary herself.
There are, however, significant glimpses, not least a prayer, preserved in a papyrus, now in the John Rylands Library in Manchester, written in a third-century hand: ‘Under your mercy we take refuge, Theotokos, do not overlook our petitions in adversity, but rescue us from dangers, only holy, only blessed one’ (The Sub Tuum Praesidium). It is perhaps the earliest example of the title, Theotokos (‘one who gave birth to God’), ascribed to Mary (it is possible that Origen used it), and its importance is hard to under-estimate, for it is not just an example of designating Mary as Theotokos, but a prayer, a petition, for rescue from afflictions. The title itself is found not infrequently in fourth-century theologians, although there its connotation is primarily in relation to Christ (for further detail about the title, see Price, I.4 in this volume). The first of the Fathers to reflect very much on Mary would seem to be St Ephrem the Syrian (c.306–73), who initiates what appears to be a tradition of prayerful celebration of Mary (cf. Brock 1994), of which this is an example:
Your mother is a cause of wonder: the Lord entered into her
—and became a servant; He who is the Word entered
—and became silent within her; Thunder entered her
—and made no sound; there entered the Shepherd of all,
and in her He became the Lamb, bleating as He comes forth.
(Brock 1994, 19)
Ephrem is important for understanding the development of Marian devotion, not that he is typical, nor (so far as one is aware) influential on Christianity in the patristic period, but because we know that the context in which he composed his verse was a liturgical context: his poems were composed to be sung by a group of women whom he trained as a liturgical choir—precisely the kind of ‘esoteric’ group I have posited in relation to the Protevangelium.
Recently, Stephen Shoemaker has sought to demonstrate that this hiatus between the Protevangelium and Proklos is more apparent than real. He explores devotion to, and reflection on, Mary in the apocryphal undergrowth of the second to the fifth centuries (Shoemaker 2016). Here, he finds a good deal of evidence of the importance of Mary, although mostly to groups whom it is difficult to regard as belonging to the mainstream of the Church. There he finds ample evidence for regarding Mary as the mother/teacher of divine mysteries in works such as the Gospel of Mary and the Gospel of Philip, and other works regarded by modern scholarship as ‘gnostic’ (it is important to note that ancient use of the terms, γνῶσις, γνωστικός, is largely Orthodox, or at least not unambiguously heretical). Shoemaker points to the floating connotation of the several Marys mentioned in the canonical Gospels, important for the way in which later traditions are often significantly plaited (on the conflation of the Mary’s and its significance, see, too, Behr 2006: 115–40). Much of the rest of Shoemaker’s book turns to the traditions about the dormition and assumption of Mary, contained in works often difficult to date precisely, finding a rather different picture of Mary from the figure of the submissive virgin in the Protevangelium and the Church Fathers. Instead, this is a view of Mary as one celebrated for her knowledge of cosmic mysteries and her influence on her son, not so much the Mother of God, as Shoemaker puts it, but the mother of the Great Cherub of Light. Shoemaker also discusses the growth of a cult of Mary found in the development of the Marian Feasts of the Christian Year, virtually all of which have their roots in apocryphal literature. Much of this, however, crosses what is often regarded as a kind of caesura in the history of Marian doctrine and devotion: the beginning of the fourth century and the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon.
Before we get there, it is perhaps important to notice developments that belong to the end of the fourth century. In an immensely rich paper, that sheds much light on the celebration of the Mother of God throughout the Byzantine period, Krastu Banev (2014) points to a significant transition that took place at the turning of the fourth century into the fifth. Around this time, there occurred a change in the way in which the images of daughter and queen in Ps. 44: 10–11 were interpreted (‘Daughters of kings are in your honour; the queen is present at your right-hand, clothed in many colours, shot through with gold. Hear, daughter, behold and incline your ear, forget your people and the house of your father’). Throughout the fourth century daughter and Queen are regularly interpreted of the Church (Athanasius, in his Letter of Marcellinus, is an exception); from the fifth century these images were applied to Mary. I would interpret this, less as a radical change, and more as the way in which the imagery of the Virgin Mother who gives birth to Christians through the passion of Christ began to be seen in a synoptic way: what had previously looked like two traditions of understanding the image of the Virgin Mother, though each invoking the other, by allusion, at least, were now held together. Banev quotes from Proklos, ‘the entire miracle of the Virgin birth is hidden in the shadows’ (Homily 2.9, cit. Banev 2014: 93): it is as if the shadows no longer obscure and divide, but hold together different aspects of the mystery/miracle.
It is generally agreed that the beginning of the fifth century saw a dramatic development in Mariology, witness to which are the homilies of Proklos, the Akathist Hymn (fashionably dated to the time of Proklos, although the arguments seem to me unconvincing [by Peltomaa 2001], and a sixth-century date seems to me more plausible), and the Kontakia of Romanos the Melodist (on whom, and his celebration of Mary in particular, see Arentzen 2017). This was eventually accompanied by the emergence of Feasts in honour of Mary. Earlier than the fifth century, there seems to have been a feast of ‘Mary Theotokos’ on 15 August, and another feast of Mary associated with Christmas, either the Sunday before or after (now, in the East, the day after). Feasts commemorating the Annunciation to Mary (25 March), her Nativity (8 September), and her Purification or Christ’s Presentation in the Temple (2 February, called the ‘Meeting’ [with Symeon], Ὑπαπαντή, in the East), all emerged in the sixth century, at the end of which the Emperor Maurice officially made 15 August the date of the Feast of the Dormition; these feasts were accepted in Rome in the course of the seventh century (Bradshaw and Johnson 2011). With these feasts, began a tradition of homilies celebrating these feasts, which continued through to the eighth century, when it reached its zenith, although there are later Marian homilies (see Daley 1998, Cunningham 2008). These feasts are also celebrated in liturgical poetry—kontakia and, from the eighth century, canons—such liturgical celebration probably being bound up with the emergence of icons of these feasts. (Later on, Tsironis detects what she calls a ‘filtration process’, where themes, in this case the theme of the Virgin as Christ’s tender mother, originated in poetry, then entered iconography, before entering the liturgical life of the Church: Tsironis 2004: 91.)
It is also generally asserted that this explosion of Marian devotion was in response to the proclamation of Mary as Theotokos at the Council of Ephesos in 431. Recently, this explanation has been called in question, notably by Richard Price, who points out that it is erroneous to say that Mary was proclaimed Theotokos at the council, as nothing of the sort took place (see Price 2004, and other articles of his). If Ephesos is not the council of the Theotokos, then the council cannot have inaugurated a new stage in devotion to the Mother of God. There was certainly some kind of change as the fifth century progressed, as Banev (2014) indicates, in particular a focusing on Mary of the motherly role of the Virgin Church, hardly absent in the early centuries, but not located in an individual woman. But perhaps it is not very tightly associated with the Christologically-inspired title of Theotokos.
Devotion to Mary certainly became more prominent. The Church Year changed its character from the fifth century onwards. The Marian feasts are only part of the transition from a Church Year consisting of little more than weekly celebrations of the Resurrection on Sundays, coupled with an annual celebration of the Christian Pascha. The Church Year became increasingly intensely populated (although in the East it never overshadowed the ancient Resurrection-Paschal structure as happened much later in the West) and the Marian feasts became a prominent aspect of the liturgical cycle. In this way, they were bound up with the celebration of the Nativity of Christ, and therefore became ‘fixed feasts’ (fixed calendrically, as is the Feast of Christ’s Nativity), as opposed to the movable feasts associated with the Christian Pascha. The Akathist Hymn, that Banev memorably calls ‘that veritable cathedral of Marian devotion in sound’, is quite unparalleled in its concentrated praise of Mary, and ushers in a devotion to Mary that focuses, not so much on her role as Theotokos, but her role as virgin bride of God: as made clear in the refrain, Χαῖρε, Νύμφη ἀνύμφευτε, ‘Hail, Bride unwedded!’. As Arentzen has shown in his fine study of Marian themes in Romanos’ Kontakia, Romanos presents the Mother of God in a new light, by shifting attention away from Christ himself to focus on Mary as a virgin, but not as an ascetic virgin, rather what he calls a ‘civic virgin’, one presented as ‘both a Constantinopolitan lady and an exceptional maiden of the divine realm’ (Arentzen 2017: 166). The addition to the original Akathist Hymn of the prooimion (probably by Patriarch Sergios), Τῇ Ὑπερμάχῳ Στρατηγῷ (‘To the champion leader’), hailing Mary as the protector of the Queen City, was not in the least incongruous.