The most familiar fact about the cult of the Virgin in the Greek Church is that at an early date it accorded her the title of Theotokos—God-bearer, or Mother of God. The two pieces of evidence most often adduced consist first of the occurrence of this title on a papyrus normally dated to the third or at least the fourth century, and secondly of a decree of the First Council of Ephesus (431).
In 1938 there was published an Egyptian papyrus in the John Rylands Library that was immediately recognized as containing, in a slightly damaged form, the earliest known text of the Marian prayer known in Latin as Sub tuum praesidium. The restored text runs:
Under your mercy we take refuge, Theotokos. Do not overlook our petitions in adversity but rescue us from danger, uniquely holy one and uniquely blessed one.1
The evidence of the letter forms was taken to point to a date in the third century. What was startling about this discovery was less the early use of the title than prayer being addressed to the Virgin at this early date; it was conceded that it would be prudent to propose a slightly later dating, well into the fourth century.2 More recently, however, the evidence of an early date in the letter forms has been subjected to serious questioning. Apart from the general point that papyrologists are now more hesitant in their dating of letter forms in literary papyri than they used to be, it has been argued that the most unusual shape of the letter alpha on the papyrus, as well as the curious thickening of the ends of many vertical strokes, have their closest parallels in Coptic literary papyri of the eighth and ninth centuries (Förster 2005: 106–7). If we add this to the oddity of the early dating, since there is no other evidence of the Sub tuum praesidium before the sixth or seventh century, it would clearly be imprudent to regard this papyrus any longer as reliable evidence for the greater antiquity of this prayer.
As regards the supposed decree of the Council of Ephesus, defining that the Virgin is Theotokos, the earliest text I know that refers to it is Canon 1 of the Quinisext Council of 691–2, which states, ‘We confirm the teaching issued by the two hundred inspired fathers at Ephesus … as we glorify the one who gave birth to him [Christ] without seed, immaculate, ever-virgin, properly and truly Theotokos.’3 Now the Acts of Ephesus form a vast collection of authentic documents dating to the time of the council—records of sessions, letters, and treatises. You can read them from beginning to end, and you will find no hint of such a decree. Nestorius, who had criticized the use of the Theotokos title, was indeed condemned at the first session of the council (22 June 431), but the verdict pronounced upon him, convicting him of ‘holding and preaching impiety’, makes no mention of the Virgin and simply says that he had ‘blasphemed’ against Christ.4
It is true that the same first session of the council which condemned Nestorius also gave its formal approval to Cyril of Alexandria’s Second Letter to Nestorius, and that this letter states that the ‘holy fathers … confidently called the holy Virgin “Theotokos”’ (Second Letter 7).5 But this is not a doctrinal definition. What of Cyril’s Third Letter to Nestorius? This asserts more roundly, ‘Since the holy Virgin gave fleshly birth to God united to flesh hypostatically, for this reason we declare her to be Theotokos’ (Third Letter 11).6 And the first of the Twelve Anathemas (or Chapters) that conclude the letter runs:
If anyone does not profess that Emmanuel is in truth God and that therefore the holy Virgin is Theotokos (for she gave fleshly birth to the Word from God made flesh), let him be anathema.7
This raises the question whether this Third Letter was also formally approved at Ephesus. During the council the bishops who formed a rival council round John of Antioch, and who accused this Third Letter of Apollinarianism, did indeed make the claim that Cyril’s council had approved this letter.8 But it is in fact doubtful whether it was even read out at Cyril’s council: it comes in the acts of the first session of the council, but as a clumsy insertion, and certainly there is no evidence that the council adopted it as its own teaching.9 Now, the Definition of the Council of Chalcedon (451) gave formal approval to ‘the conciliar letters of the blessed Cyril’, meaning the two letters by Cyril that were read out at the council, namely his Second Letter to Nestorius and the letter he wrote to John of Antioch in 433 accepting the so-called ‘Formula of Reunion’.10 These were ‘conciliar’ in the sense that they were seen to encapsulate the teaching of the Council of Ephesus, even if that to John of Antioch had in fact been written eighteen months later. However, by the mid-sixth century, the standing of the Third Letter to Nestorius had risen to such a height that it was generally assumed that it had been formally approved at both Ephesus and Chalcedon (Price 2009 I: 66–71).
It is this that must surely lie behind the assertion of the Quinisext Council (cited above) that Ephesus issued such a definition. By the end of the ninth century conciliar synopses had appeared that gave an account of the work of all the major councils, and here the dominant role of the Third Letter and its anathemas becomes explicit. One of the fullest of these, the Collection and Account of all the holy ecumenical and local Councils, includes in its account of the Council of Ephesus the full text of the Twelve Chapters contained in this letter, on the grounds that they were issued by the council as a decree. The text of the Chapters is prefaced by the following statement:
For a fuller refutation of Nestorius’ blasphemy and a clearer explanation of the faith and profession concerning Christ our God, the sacred council drew up and issued [a compilation] by Cyril of Twelve Chapters.
(Hoffmann and Brandes 2013: 84.53–7)
It is manifest that this ascription of the Twelve Chapters to the Council of Ephesus was a myth, which has no support in the authentic conciliar Acts. We must still inquire why Ephesus did not in fact issue a formal definition that the Virgin is Theotokos, even though such a decree would have completed the condemnation of Nestorianism. The reason for the lack of such a definition and indeed of any positive doctrinal decree is clear from another decree of the council, dated in the Acts to 22 July.11 Nestorius stood accused not only of heresy but of imposing on converts being received into the Church a new-fangled creed different from that of Nicaea. The reaction of the council (meaning the assembly of bishops on the side of Cyril) was to issue a canon, later known as Canon 7 of Ephesus, of which the key clause runs as follows:12
The holy council lays down that no one is allowed to produce or write or compose another creed beside the one laid down with [the aid of] the Holy Spirit by the holy fathers assembled at Nicaea.
At Chalcedon in 451, when the officials sent by the emperor to chair the council told the bishops that they were required to produce a new definition of the faith, they protested strongly (albeit unsuccessfully), claiming that this canon ruled out not merely new forms of the creed but any new doctrinal definition (Price and Gaddis 2005 II: 11).13
The point that Cyril and his council was making was not merely that it was against the canons to produce new doctrinal definitions, but that, in contrast to the dangerous speculations of Nestorius and his allies, the teaching of Cyril remained firmly loyal to the original Nicene faith. His most successful and influential contribution to the debate was his Second Letter to Nestorius, in which he pointed out that the subject of the second clause of the Nicene Creed, which speaks of Christ’s incarnation and passion, is ‘one Lord Jesus Christ the only-begotten Son of God … true God from God, begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father’. Therefore even the fully human experiences of birth, suffering, and death are to be ascribed not to some combination of Godhead and manhood as their subject, but directly to the divine Son and Word. It is this, the letter argues, that justifies calling the Virgin Theotokos, Mother of God, since the one born of her (according to the creed) was the divine Son himself. But this claim to strict fidelity to the creed would have been undermined if it had been formally defined that the Virgin is Theotokos, since the creed does not use this expression.
Later ecumenical councils, from Chalcedon to Constantinople III (680–1), recognized that protecting the Nicene faith required new definitions that aimed at clarifying the Nicene Creed. In this new context the restraint exercised at Ephesus ceased to be comprehensible. The council was understood (not incorrectly) to represent the victory of Cyril and his Christology. His Third Letter to Nestorius had proved an embarrassment in the fifth century: it had been fiercely attacked at the time of Ephesus and was pointedly ignored at Chalcedon. But by the mid-sixth century, in the context of a dominance of what we call Neo-Chalcedonianism or Cyrillian Chalcedonianism, this letter was regarded as one of Cyril’s most important doctrinal utterances. It was natural to assume that it was one of Cyril’s ‘conciliar letters’ stemming from the Council of Ephesus and canonized at Chalcedon. The first of its ‘Twelve Anathemas’ (or Chapters) with its hailing of the Virgin as Theotokos was singled out because of the mounting devotion to the Mother of God. We have seen how a presumed approval of the Chapters at Ephesus came to be understood as a formal issuing of the Chapters by the council, adopting them as its own decree.14 This is the origin of the myth, still frequently repeated today, that the Council of Ephesus defined that the Virgin is Theotokos.
The term came into prominence and sparked one of the most famous doctrinal debates in the history of the Church when the Syrian monk Nestorius became bishop of Constantinople in 428. He was soon accused by monks in Constantinople and by their ally and abettor Bishop Cyril of Alexandria of rejecting the Theotokos title. He certainly criticized the term, sometimes in strong terms. Writing to Pope Celestine, he said he had employed ‘both anger and leniency’ in dealing with ‘heretics’ who called Mary ‘Theotokos’ (First Letter to Celestine 2).15 The same attitude, more diplomatically expressed, comes in texts he wrote for circulation in the East, writing (for example) to Cyril of Alexandria, ‘According to the more precise nomenclature the holy Virgin should be called Christotokos [Mother of Christ] rather than Theotokos’ (Second Letter to Cyril 7).16 Did he have the Church of Antioch behind him? Early in the controversy, Bishop Acacius of Beroea reported to Cyril that Bishop John of Antioch had referred to the Theotokos title as an ‘adventitious and unacceptable expression’ (Letter to Cyril).17 But this soon changed. When Celestine wrote to John criticizing Nestorius, John wrote to Nestorius urging him to accept the Theotokos title, on the following grounds:
This term has been rejected by none of the teachers of the church; they who have used it are many and distinguished, while those who have not used it have not criticized those who have. (Letter to Nestorius 4)18
How can we account for this change of mind? John says in the same letter, ‘I have written this letter when in the company of many of the most God-beloved bishops and lovers of your piety’. These bishops included the learned Theodoret of Cyrrhus (in northern Syria), and we may presume that it was Theodoret who had set John right on the previous use of the word.19 Nestorius replied to John, sending him a sermon in which he had now said, ‘What we preached before on the blessed and holy Virgin, using a short designation [Christotokos], we shall now repeat with the use of more explicit names, namely that the holy Virgin is both Theotokos and anthropotokos’ (that is, both Mother of God and mother of a man). This double designation had been used already by both Theodore of Mopsuestia (the real author of what we call ‘Nestorianism’) and Theodoret.20 That Nestorius thought that the Theotokos title, when used on its own, did less than justice to Christ’s human nature is clear, but at least he no longer accused the title of fomenting heresy.
John’s statement that the Theotokos title had been widely but not universally used by the fathers was accurate. When had the term first come into use? The church historian Socrates, writing in the mid-fifth century, tells us that Origen (d. 254) in his commentary on the Letter to the Romans ‘gave an ample exposition of the sense in which the term Theotokos is used’ (Ecclesiastical History VII. 32.17).21 Unfortunately the original Greek text of this work is lost. The extant Latin version by Rufinus abbreviated the original, partly because he could not lay his hands on the complete text; in any case, an excursus on the Greek term ‘Theotokos’, for which there was no ideal Latin equivalent,22 was a natural candidate for omission. But the term is not used anywhere in the extant writings of Origen, and this must leave us uncertain whether he ever used it. The earliest undisputed use in an extant text is by Bishop Alexander of Alexandria in 325 (Letter to Alexander of Thessalonica);23 only slightly later are the occasional uses of the word in Eusebius of Caesarea (d. c. 340) and other contemporaries (Lampe 1961: 639). It is, however, striking that in all these instances the use of the word is incidental, and it is not explained or justified. The implication is that by the time of the Council of Nicaea (325) the term was already a generally recognized term, not requiring explanation, even if its use was still comparatively infrequent.
In what contexts did this term appear before the Nestorian controversy? Writers from Eusebius of Caesarea onwards use the term as a simple equivalent of ‘Mary the Virgin’, without placing any theological weight on it. What more significant uses of the term do we find? It was used both in contexts which insisted that it was truly God who became incarnate, and in contexts that insisted that God truly became incarnate. Examples of the former are to be found in Eusebius of Caesarea (Contra Marcellum II.1)24 and Gregory of Nazianzus (Epistle 101:16)25 and of the latter in Athanasius (Contra Arianos III.33),26 and Epiphanius of Salamis (Ancoratus 75.6).27
Nestorius’ acceptance of the Theotokos title came, however, too late to rescue him from attack. His critics in Constantinople did not drop their campaign against him, and opposition to him throughout the world of the Eastern Mediterranean and in Rome as well had already been powerfully launched by Cyril of Alexandria. Why was the title so important to Cyril? It is striking that he had used the term only once in his earlier writings.28 Add to this the fact that Cyril did not discuss or attempt to promote an actual cult of the Virgin, involving ritual and invocation, and the charge is invited that Cyril had little interest in the doctrinal issue in itself, but leapt at this opportunity to discredit Nestorius, just as thirty years earlier Theophilus, his uncle and predecessor as bishop of Alexandria, had contrived the deposition and exile of John Chrysostom, the previous bishop of Constantinople of Syrian origin. This may suggest that the chief anxiety of the see of Alexandria was that it might be upstaged in the Christian world by Constantinople, which had become the permanent residence of the emperor and the court at the end of the fourth century.
But this would be to do Cyril an injustice. The heart of his concern was that casting doubt on the belief that Mary as Theotokos had given birth to God was to cast doubt on the most basic tenet of the Christian faith, namely that Christ is God. He wrote to Bishop Juvenal of Jerusalem that Nestorius ‘professed clearly that the holy Virgin is not Theotokos, which is a manifest statement that Emmanuel, in whom are our hopes for salvation, is not truly God’ (Epistle 16).29 In a letter to the clergy and laity of Constantinople, he argued that the Theotokos title is essential to express the one subject in Christ, and that therefore it is the Word himself who conquered death by dying on the cross (Epistle 18).30
Cyril’s first contribution to this debate was a substantial ‘letter to the monks of Egypt’, in fact intended for general circulation, not least in Constantinople itself. Cyril argues that it is customary to treat a mother as the mother of the whole child who is born, even though (as Cyril states and clearly believed) the mother provides only the matter for the body, while the soul is directly created by God (Epistle 1.20).31 But he is well aware that this does not take us far enough. Instead he appeals with effect to the famous second chapter of St Paul’s Letter to the Philippians: ‘Christ Jesus, being in the form of God, did not think it robbery to be equal with God, but emptied himself by taking the form of a servant and being born in the likeness of men’ (Phil. 2: 6–7, discussed by Cyril, Epistle 1.22–6).32 As Cyril argues, it was not the manhood that ‘emptied itself’, for it had not existed before the Incarnation, let alone been divine; it was rather the very Godhead of the Word. The phrase cannot refer to a change in the divine nature itself, but must mean that it was truly the Word who became man, who as the sole subject in Christ took on himself the humble status of a human being, even to the extent of being the one (and not merely in the one) who suffered on the cross. And if the Word himself is the one who suffered on the cross, it is also the Word himself who was born of Mary, making Mary Theotokos, Mother of God. The personal identity of Godhead and manhood in Christ was essential for Cyril, since on it depends the fact that Christians, through reception of the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist, receive in themselves Christ’s victory over death and participate in his Godhead, being made ‘gods’ by grace (Russell 2004: 191–204). The whole scheme of salvation unravels if the Virgin is denied the title of Theotokos.33
This theme found notable expression in the sermon that Cyril delivered at Ephesus immediately after the condemnation of Nestorius at the first session of the council. Since the greater part of the sermon is devoted not to the dignity of the Virgin but to a diatribe against Nestorius, it does not quite deserve its reputation as ‘the most famous Marian sermon of antiquity’ (O’Carroll 1982: 113).34 But the opening of the sermon is certainly remarkable:
Resplendent is the assembly I see, with all the holy men eagerly assembled, summoned by holy Mary, Theotokos and ever-Virgin. Even though I was in great distress, the presence of the holy fathers has changed that into joy. Now is fulfilled in us that sweet saying of the psalmodist David, ‘Behold! What is good or what is delightful, compared to brethren dwelling in unity?’ [Ps 132:1]. Rejoice, therefore, with us, holy and mystic Trinity that has summoned all of us here to this church of Mary Theotokos. Rejoice with us, Mary Theotokos, the venerable treasure of the whole world, the inextinguishable lamp, the crown of virginity, the sceptre of orthodoxy, the indestructible temple, the container of the Uncontainable, the Mother and Virgin, through whom in the holy gospels is pronounced blessed ‘he who comes in the name of the Lord’ [Mt 21:9]. Rejoice, you who contained the Uncontainable in your holy and virginal womb, through whom the holy Trinity is glorified and worshipped throughout the world, through whom heaven is glad, through whom angels and archangels exult, through whom demons are put to flight, through whom the devil the tempter fell from heaven, through whom the fallen creature is received back into heaven, through whom the whole creation, caught in the madness of idolatry, has come to the knowledge of the truth, through whom holy baptism comes to those who believe, through whom is the oil of gladness, through whom churches have been founded throughout the world, through whom nations are led to repentance. Why should I say more? Through whom the only-begotten Son of God has shone as a light ‘to those seated in darkness and in the shadow of death’ [Lk 1:79], through whom the prophets spoke, through whom the apostles proclaim salvation to the nations, through whom the dead are raised, through whom kings exercise their rule. … Who among men is able to describe the much-hymned Mary?
(Cyril, Homily 4)35
The attribution to the Virgin of the whole work of salvation may rightly be seen as the climax in the development of the theme of Mary as Theotokos, Mother of God. If she is able to bestow this on her devotees, what is beyond her power to bestow? May we not turn to her in all our needs and necessities?
But this raises the question of whether a cult of Mary, involving regular recourse to her intercession, is to be found at Ephesus, or in Cyril, or indeed in any of the Church Fathers in the patristic golden age from Nicaea (325) to Chalcedon (451). The passages standardly cited give evidence of a felt need (at least by virgins) to imitate the Virgin, of admiration for her, indeed (we may say) of devotion to her, but contain nothing to suggest that prayer to the Virgin was already a normal and recognized Christian practice.36 It is to be noted that the passage just cited says nothing of the power of Mary as intercessor or of our need to invoke her: what it is saying is that the whole scheme of salvation depends on the Incarnation, on God the Word taking flesh, and that in this supreme saving event the Virgin played an essential and indispensable role. The great glory of the Virgin is that without her contribution Christ would not have been born and no one would be saved. In the extensive writings of Cyril you will find nothing on Mary as intercessor or on the need to invoke the Virgin Mary in our prayers. This is not because he lacked devotion to her, but because his devotion to her was of a kind that placed her in a quite different category from that of the saints venerated in popular piety, whose role was to provide relief from the mundane trials of life, spectacularly through miracles of bodily healing.37
This point may be reinforced if we move on many centuries to the Miracles of Our Lady, of which there are innumerable collections and paraphrases from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. Quite unlike other miracle collections, the curing of the body plays no part in them. Equally exceptional is the way in which they are devoted to the salvation of souls—typically of people quite undeserving of salvation according to the Church’s rules, but rescued by Our Lady in return for devotion to her. The message of these texts is that a modicum of Marian piety makes up for any quantity of sin, and can shortcut the Church’s penitential system (Price 2001). Of course, in the context of later piety these texts stress the invocation and intercession of the Virgin. But they link up with Cyril of Alexandria and other preachers of his time such as Proclus of Constantinople (Constas 2003) in the role they attribute to Mary, as virtually Co-Redeemer (though this title is not used), certainly as the one who gave us our Saviour. This puts her in a quite distinct category from the run-of-the-mill saints who were constantly invoked in private prayer, whose shrines were centres of pilgrimage, and whose competence was on the humble level of attending to the earthly needs that dominate the horizons of suffering mankind in this vale of tears. To express embarrassment, as some Mariologists have done, on the rarity of reference to the Virgin as intercessor in the Fathers of the patristic golden age loses sight of the fact that the Virgin was not accorded this lesser dignity because a far greater one was bestowed on her.