The hymnal elements visible in the New Testament (Luke 1:46–55, 2:29–32; Rev. 15:3–4, 19:1–8; Phil. 2:5–11; Col. 1:15–20; 1 Tim. 3:16) are among the earliest levels of sources still remaining there. When Paul quotes a hymn the Corinthian Christians were singing in the mid-forties of the first century, he does so in order to appeal to the theology present in what he considers a ‘traditional’ element of a church he wishes to instruct. This being so the Christological hymn must surely be among the very first genres of theology ever written down and practised for community catechesis. Despite years of the neglect of the implications, it has also become more and more unarguably evident, that Christian ‘interest’ in Mary the Mother of Jesus (which means theological interest given the nature of all the New Testament texts) was prominent from the outset too. The highly charged theological narratives in which Mary appears conform to the general character of the texts, that is, they are primarily Christological in nature. So, for example, the infancy narratives with their stress on the ‘virgin who is with child’, fulfilling in Mary the typology of Isaiah (Matt. 1:18, 23; Isa. 7:14), show Jesus as the fulfilment of prophetic hopes; the encounter of Mary with Elizabeth (Luke 1:39–56) shows how a greater ‘lord’ than the greatest of all prophets (John the Forerunner) can make Israel leap for joy; the Cana episode shows Mary hieratically initiating the revelation of the glory of the Saviour (at her word ‘he allowed his glory to be seen’, John 2:1–12) and the Calvary scene depicts her as Christ’s ultimate legacy, symbol of the Church whose care he passes on to his Beloved Disciple (‘Son behold your mother’, John 19:25–27). Each time she appears she bears a theological weight in relation to Christology. In short she fulfils in all her appearances her own words of self-witness to the angel of Annunciation: ‘See—the Handmaid of the Lord’ (Luke 1:38). In a New Testament environment where all characters with the exception of Christ himself are two dimensional, the Marian appearances add up to a phenomenally significant weight of importance for Mary in the primitive Church; much greater than anything comparable attributed to the Apostles, even though their respective struggle for pre-eminence and authority in the early communities did much to shape the redaction of the different evangelical accounts and the Pauline literature.1
It is no surprise, then, that Mary too is given one of the earliest hymns in the New Testament. This is the prayer of Hannah (1 Sam. 2:1–10) reset on her lips, and known ever since as the Magnificat, from its opening words ‘My Soul glorifies the Lord’.
And Mary said, ‘My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has regarded the low estate of his handmaiden. For behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed; for he who is mighty has done great things for me and holy is his name, and his mercy is on those who fear him from generation to generation. He has shown strength with his arm, he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts, he has put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of low degree; he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away. He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, as he spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and to his posterity for ever.’
(Luke 1:46–55)
This is a show-piece already in the Lukan text designed to place the birth story in the seamless woven cloth of scripture and its fulfilment. Hannah had been barren for many years and now had conceived a son (Samuel) who would be a great prophet. It is, we may notice, exactly an appropriate text for Elizabeth; but no, Luke breaks the symmetry of the scriptural ‘appositeness’ in order deliberately to refer this hymn to Mary. He strongly makes the point at this part of his Gospel that it is John, Elizabeth’s child who is the prophet, like David leaping for joy before the Ark of the Covenant (2 Sam. 6:14) and in this ‘new life’ proves she is no longer barren. Jesus is no prophet, Luke tells us, through Elizabeth, for she greets Mary with the title ‘Mother of my Lord’ (Luke 1:43). To this Mary responds with the Magnificat. So if we slow things down here, we can see that in a very rich set of allusions to the Old Testament, Luke has not simply been making careless allusive citations. He signals this first of all by not putting her Magnificat on Elizabeth’s lips at all, even though he has characterized her, by and large as Hannah the mother of a new Samuel who shall ‘go before’ the Lord ‘to prepare his way’. But before we read the Magnificat text, he signals to us a theological context: Mary is the Ark of the Covenant bearing within her, secret to all human eyes, but not hidden from his prophets (such as Hannah and Symeon in the Temple at the time of the circumcision and in this instance Elizabeth and John) the presence of the Lord. This title of Mary as Ark of the Covenant is one the Early Church picks up very quickly and it appears many times in different Marian hymns. Secondly, by changing the speaker of the hymn from the expected parallel of Hannah/Elizabeth to Hannah/Mary the evangelist throws dramatic light on something that his narrative is moving on towards as the next major show-piece—the Birth narrative of the Saviour. In other words Mary, when she opens her prayer with ‘My Soul glorifies the Lord’ is teaching the next set of characters their lines: namely the angels who sing the second stanza of that same song in the heavens: ‘Glory to God in the Highest’. Just as in the Holy Holies of the Tabernacle/Temple, the Ark is the locus where angels congregate to glorify the Lord2 and testify to the Doxa-Kabod, so too, Luke is telling us, Mary is that earthly locus of the Shekinah, which John recognizes from the womb and Elizabeth testifies to in giving the title Meter Kyriou to Mary. This is a high ‘Christology of Presence’ rooted in one of the most important aspects of the Hannah–Eli meeting (which Luke is presupposing here and which explains why he makes the original and creative redactive changes to the scriptural parallels that he does) and that is the fact that it transpires around the holy place at Shiloh—‘type’ of the temple. Mary then, as the new Ark of the Covenant, emerges as something greater than prophet or priest in terms of witnessing to the identity of her Son. She is, as the Blessed One, first and foremost, the ‘Teacher of the Angels’. This aspect has not been largely noticed in the modern commentators. It was seen by the ancients very clearly3 and is reflected in what is perhaps the most commonly used of all the Marian hymns in the Eastern Church:
It is truly meet to bless you O Theotokos
Ever blessed, most pure, and the Mother of our God.
More honourable than the Cherubim,
And beyond compare more glorious than the Seraphim,
Undefiled you gave birth to God the Word.
Truly the Mother of God (Theotokos) we magnify you.4
From the opening words this is known as the It is Truly Meet. One sees the deliberate allusion to the Magnificat within it, especially the last line. If Mary is the angelic instructor (Paidagogos) first and foremost in the Lukan episode of the Hypapante (or The Meeting of Elizabeth and Mary as it is called liturgically), she is also shown to be the instructor of those on earth. It is why Luke continues the text of the Magnificat with the exultant song of how God has lifted up the Anawim, the poor and humble of this earth to be the recipients of his favour, and how he passed over the rich, the powerful and the proud. Modern readings of this Lukan passage have often been moved by the icon it presents of Mary as champion of the poor (something that the other great Marian hymn of the Eastern Church, the Akathist Hymn, also stresses). This is something the Johannine episode of the Cana narrative also suggests,5 and it chimes in with Luke’s own extensive use of the motif of holy poverty throughout his Gospel. But here in the Magnificat episode, his stress is that Mary first teaches the heavenly orders to sing of the glory, and then exemplifies how earthly creatures can manifest that glory, by initiating God’s compassion for the poor and simple of the earth. As such, it is an exact synopsis of her son’s Gospel which he shall eventually preach: the twofold command: to Love the Lord God with all one’s heart and all one’s soul, and to love one’s neighbour as oneself. That Mary carries such theological weight here as Pedagogue of angels and humankind is a major evangelical motif that commands attention. The Magnificat must stand, therefore, as the first and one of the greatest of all the Church’s Marian hymns; although it is one that needs to be interpreted from the standpoint of her title as ‘Teacher of the Angels’ and witness to the Church.
With the so-called Sub tuum praesidium (the original Greek reads: Ὑπὸ τὴν σὴν εὐσπλαγχνίαν) we come to the next most ancient Marian hymn. Its Greek title means Under your Protection or Beneath Your Mercy in the sense of sheltering there. It will grow in later centuries of the Eastern Church into the theme of the Protecting Veil of the Mother of God (her mantle spread out protectively over the faithful—a theme one also finds extensively in Latin Church iconography). The Latin variant of the title introduces praesidium—the concept of protective care derived from the notion of a strong defensive fort. The hymn is first found in a surviving Egyptian papyrus of the third century,6 lodged, since 1917, in the John Rylands Library of Manchester University. It probably arose as a liturgical hymn for the Feast of Theophany, and has been recorded in a classically formed script in what was once a significant manuscript sometime in the middle of that century when the Theotokos title (literally, ‘She who gives birth to God’) which appears within it, was being used by the Church as a missionary displacement of the cult of Isis ‘Mother of the god’ (Horus).
The text is elegant in its simplicity and classicism, and reads:
We take refuge beneath your mercy7 O Theotokos.
Do not despise our prayers in our need
But deliver us from all danger;
Only Pure, Only Blessed One.8
This short and succinct prayer9 has all the hallmarks of a genuine cry for help. It would not take us far afield to see it having special use in Egypt in the time of the several and remarkably savage church persecutions there; especially those of Valerian or Decius. Three titles of Mary are presumed here: the Mother of God, the Only Pure One (which in context reflects the doctrine of her Perpetual Virginity since the term is not merely moral in its usage) and her special status as the One who is Blessed among all women, derived from the Gospel account of Elizabeth’s acclamation of Mary in Luke 1:42. The prayer has enjoyed an enduring popularity in the Eastern Church, and has served as a matrix for other similar invocations. Perhaps the hymn most widely used today that is indebted to it is the invocation to the Theotokos Open to us the Gates:
Open to us the gates of your compassion O Blessed Theotokos.
In that we have placed our hope in you, may we never be confounded
Through you may we be delivered from all adversity;
For you are the salvation of the race of Christians.10
Here again the Theotokos title has come to be predominant and the opening stanza’s image of Mary is as a protecting fortress that, opening its doors—like widely embracing arms—gives safe harbour to those in danger. The prayer offers to her hopeful trust (pistis—the New Testament virtue of faith) as a gift of allegiance for her suzerainty; and moves from the opening title of Theotokos—the Mother of God who sheltered the Christ in all his vulnerability—to that of Mary as the Salus Populi, the safety (salvation) of the Christian Race; demonstrating no fear whatsoever in associating her work of mercy to the Church as part of the unique salvific energeia of her Son and Saviour.
Proklos, the fifth century archbishop of Constantinople, an elegant rhetorician and poet, probably originated the genre of Marian hymns which came to be called Chairetismoi. These take their name from the greeting ‘Hail’ (Chaire) given to Mary by the Archangel Gabriel. The genre is a series of ‘salutations’—derived from civic praises of the Emperor, or the cries of praise given to a military hero in the field. As a liturgical device they were thus comparable in form to the style in which, even to this day, Spanish believers cry out greetings and praises to the statue of the Madonna as it passes through the streets in Holy Week.11 In this new genre of Marian Panegyris these Byzantine Chairetismoi hymns represent a whole series of praises of Mary in her varied roles as provider of intercession (Deisis) for the Church. Apart from Proklos other notable composers of the Chairetismoi were Cyril of Alexandria, Basil of Seleucia, Chryssipos of Jerusalem, and Theodotos of Ancyra.12 As Limberis (1994: 85–97) has demonstrated, the Panegyreis of such salutation hymns make a significant connection of the tropes of imperial rhetoric (part of a long tradition of Epiphania acclamations rotating around the emperor’s court and civic processions) with the cultus of the Virgin. Those of Proklos are among the most skilfully worked. Here is a short extract:
And so we now acclaim Mary the Virgin Theotokos.
She is the unstained treasure of virginity.
She is the paradise of the Second Adam.
She is the workshop of the union of natures,
The festival of the covenant of salvation.
She is that bridal chamber wherein the Logos married all flesh.
She is the living thorn bush of our nature
Which the flame of divine birthpangs did not consume.
She is the refreshing rain-cloud, emitting Him bodily,
And is higher than the Cherubim.
She is the purest fleece, heavenly endewed,
Whereby the Shepherd clothed the sheep.
Mary: Servant, Mother, Virgin, Paradise.
The only bridge from God to humankind:
Awe-inspiring loom of the whole wide world
On which the robe of Union was ineffably woven.13
Proklos’ images are frequently striking and vivid. He was a theologian intimately involved with the great Christological controversy of the fifth century, that clash between Cyril of Alexandria and Nestorius of Constantinople.14 The latter had denied the validity of the title Theotokos to Mary. He had said that, ‘strictly speaking’,15 Mary was not the Mother of God, but the Mother of Christ, or Jesus, for God had no mother, being unoriginate. To call her God’s Mother, he argued, was a dangerously loose devotion of the unlearned. Cyril of Alexandria’s defence of this title made it into an official dogma of the Church, when it was validated at the Council of Ephesus in 431. Cyril’s riposte to Nestorius was that if Mary is not ‘strictly speaking’ the Mother of God, then it follows that ‘strictly speaking’ the one who was born from her is not God. Cyril took Nestorius’ reluctance to affirm the Marian title as the give-away sign that Nestorius could not accept that the Incarnation meant a full union (henosis) of Godhead and humanity in Jesus. The Incarnate union, in other words meant that the Divine Eternal Word became flesh in time, and that Jesus was none other than God-the-Word-enfleshed. This idea is beautifully encapsulated in Proklos’ image of the Virgin being the womb that weaves together divinity and humanity in Jesus—the seamless garment of the High Priest. His other strikingly vibrant images cascade her high titles together to produce a sense of excited ‘accumulation’ in the hearers. She is the be-dewed fleece of scripture (Judg. 6:38), the typological sign of salvation to come. She is a workshop (the image evokes the Byzantine enamellers who fused elements together inseparably), the cloud that gives the rain of the presence of God, the marriage chamber where humanity and divinity were united in love, the thorn bush the flames could not consume (evoking the bush in which Moses saw the theophany of his God). After Proklos most of these titles were commonly used of her, and several appear in the iconographic tradition related to Mary, especially that notion of her as the Unconsumed Thorn Bush.
Romanos, a native of Syrian Emesa, flourished as the leading hymnographer and cantor of Constantinople around 540, moving to the capital as a deacon from Beirut, renowned for his musical and poetic gifts, and dying there sometime after 555. He is one of the greatest poets of the Byzantine tradition and a leading exponent of the Syrian ‘Kontakion style’ of hymnody, which was a religious sermon expanding on biblical ideas, and chanted musically. An expansion of the biblical idea or story was drawn out literarily so that the greater narrative could serve as an ongoing commentary. Basically the Kontakion (metrical sermon) was a musical midrash on the text: similar to the manner of Ephrem’s earlier exercises in metrical theology. Romanos has eighty Kontakia in his surviving opera.16 Some of his poems are considered masterpieces of world literature.17 The following extract from his great poem On the Nativity of Christ will give a flavour. The prelude and first stanza are still sung today as part of the Eastern Church’s Christmas offices. For many years after its composition it was sung at the Imperial Christmas Day banquet in Constantinople. Most of the poem takes the form of a dialogue between The Mother of God and the Magi, whose visit to the newborn Child is celebrated in the Byzantine rite on 25 December, rather than 6 January which is when the Western Church celebrates the visit. The basic Gospel text behind all of this is, of course, Matthew 2.1–14; but the additional details fill out the story in the manner of an ancient mystery play. The Virgin often voices the deeper aspects of the ‘Mystery’ of the Incarnation (because of her prophetic insight) and in her articulation of them she becomes the pedagogue of the Church for the significance of her Son.
The following gives seven stanzas out of the original twenty four:
On the Nativity: Prelude
Today the Virgin gives birth to One who is above all being,
And Earth offers a cave to One who cannot be approached.
Angels with shepherds give glory,
And Magi journey by a star, for to us there has been born
A little Child, who is God before all ages.
1Bethlehem has opened up Eden,
Come, let us see; we have found delight in secret,
Come, let us receive the joys of Paradise within the cave.
There the unwatered root18 blossoming forgiveness has appeared.
There is found the undug well19 from which David once longed to drink.
There a virgin has borne a child—
And this has straightway quenched both Adam’s and David’s thirst.
And so, let us hasten to this place where there has been born
A little Child, who is God before all ages.
2The Father of the Mother gladly becomes her Son.
The Saviour of children is laid as a child in a manger.
She who bore him muses on him, and says,
‘Tell me, my child, how were you sown, and how were you planted in me?
I see you, my flesh and blood, and yet I am amazed,
Because I give suck and yet am unwed.
And though I see you in swaddling clothes,
I know still that the flower of my virginity is sealed,
For you preserved it when you chose to be born,
A little Child, who is God before all ages.’
4As she spoke such words in secret,
Praying to the One who knows all secrets,
She heard the Magi looking for the child.
At once, the Maiden cried to them, ‘Who are you?’
And they answered her, ‘And who are you, that you have borne such a Child?
Who is your father? And who is she who bore you?
That you have become mother and nurse of this son without a father.
On seeing his star we understood that there had appeared
A little Child, who is God before all ages.
5For Balaam laid before us precisely the meaning of his prophecy
When he said that a Star would dawn;
A Star that quenches all prophecies and auguries;
A Star that resolves the parables of the wise,
All their teachings and their riddles;
A Star more brilliant far than any star
That has ever appeared, since He is the Maker of all the stars,
of whom it was written of old, that from Jacob, there dawns
A little Child, who is God before all ages.’
6When Mary heard these astounding words,
She bowed down and worshipped the child of her womb.
With tears, she said, ‘My Child, how great is all that you have done
For me in my poverty; for see, Magi are outside seeking you.
Kings of the East seek your face, and the wealthy of your people beg to see you;
For truly your people are those to whom you have been made known as
A little Child, who is God before all ages.
7Because these are your people, my Child,
Bid them enter under your roof,
That they may see rich poverty, luxurious penury.
I have You as my glory and pride, and this is why I am not ashamed.
You are the grace and beauty of my dwelling and myself.
Nod and let them enter. My poverty does not worry me;
I hold you as the treasure that these kings have come to see,
For kings and Magi know that you have appeared as
A little child, who is God before all ages.’20
The style of Romanos, as we can see above, typically combines immense pathos (the Virgin’s tears, her feelings of anxiety before hosting the visitors) with strong and striking paradoxes juxtaposed together for greatest effect: a helpless infant who is God before all ages; power in weakness, riches in poverty, glory in lowliness. The closely played antitheses explicitly illustrate the Cyrilline Christology of the Incarnate Union of God-in-Man and Man-in-God, where all the properties of each nature are made as one21 in the one and selfsame personal subject of the Word of God: Godhead incarnated in time and suffering no loss, and manhood deified yet not taken away. Throughout the hymn Mary appears as a strong and resourceful thinker, a reflective theologian, who having ‘seen the mystery’ becomes the Psychopompos (or ‘Initiator into mysteries’) of the Church who will hear this song chanted at the liturgy. The poem’s stress is regularly and insistently on the manner in which Mary informs the people of Christ that they are, through the Christ mystery, truly made into the ‘people of the Lord’, the Church of the redeemed.
Perhaps the most famous example of Chairetismoi hymns known today is the anonymous Great Akathist (Akathistos Hymnos)22 a long and beautiful hymn which begins with the dramatic conceit of the Logos commanding the Archangel Gabriel to descend to earth to announce Chaire! (‘All Hail’) to the Virgin. The poem develops on the Annunciation story.23 The angel travels quickly to earth, but the Logos, without informing him of his plans, makes his way even more speedily into the womb of the Virgin where he begins to assume flesh; and when the angel arrives and begins his rehearsed greeting, he is astounded to ‘see through’ Mary’s body and witness the amazing act of his Lord’s apparently surprise decision to materialize within a womb. At this point, instead of continuing with his well-known biblical ‘lines’ of ‘Hail Mary’ the angel of the Akathist stammers out a massively long series of: ‘All hail to you who are …’ and so forth. A long series of titles and attributes are rehearsed and explored within the Akathist, and there is a recurring refrain, celebrating the paradox of the ‘Unwedded Bride’, which suggests a relation of this type of literature to the Epithalamium motifs of early Byzantine secular song related to the Bridal passage to a new home. The regular emphasis throughout the Akathist on Mary’s warrior-virtues as Promaches (her protection of the race of Christians and of the capital of New Rome in particular) show how much the genre of imperial court panegyric has also influenced the hymn. The concept of the Mother who protected the vulnerability of the Lord of All, seemed naturally to extend to her ‘glorious’ (en doxa, or eschatological) protection of the flock of that Lord, the Church.
The term ‘Akathist’ derives from the Byzantine Greek, meaning ‘Not sitting down’. In other words it started off life as a processional hymn. It was composed sometime around the sixth century. Some have tried to list it as a work of St Romanos the Melodist, but there are stylistic differences to his work. It may be from the century after him. The original poem received the addition of an elegant proemium composed by Patriarch Sergius of Constantinople in the seventh century. He wrote this to celebrate the occasion he led the hymn in a procession around the great walls of the city while a siege was raised against them by Slavic tribes and the Emperor was elsewhere with his armies. The Patriarch brought out the Veil (Maphorion) and other relics of the Holy Virgin that were kept (up to the era of the Fourth Crusade) in the Imperial Church at Blachernae, and circled the battlements singing the Akathist with all the people. The invading armies withdrew without offering battle, and from that time this has always been a favoured hymn for times of trouble. To this day the Feast of the Virgin’s Protecting Veil (Pokrov) is celebrated with much attention in the Slavic Orthodox lands. The Byzantine Greek Orthodox world sings the Akathist to the Virgin on the Fridays of Lent, and many Eastern Christians recite it regularly in private prayer. It has thus become one of the most well-known prayers of the Orthodox. It features, as a kind of illustrative sub-text, in countless frescoes and icons of the Virgin, throughout the Eastern Christian world. This immense popularity has led to the Akathist becoming a literary matrix for several other types of long hymnic prayers: Akathists, for example, to Christ, or to the angels and saints. The poem is too long to do other than offer a short example here:
(Proemium of Sergios)
Our grateful thanks, O Mother of God,
I dedicate to you: our city’s songs
Of victory, to our Unconquered Champion,
Who has redeemed us from such woes;
Whose power is invincible,
Freeing us from all distress
That we may cry to you:
Hail Unwedded Bride!
Oikos I24
An angel of the highest rank
Was sent from heaven above
To say to the Virgin: ‘All Hail!’
But at his bodiless salutation, Lord,
He saw you slip into the body’s form.
He stood astounded and amazed,
And cried out to her saying:
Hail The Cause of radiant joy
Hail The Ending of the curse.
Hail Lapsed Adam’s restoration.
Hail Redemption of the tears of Eve.
Hail Height Unscaleable, beyond our grasp.
Hail Depths Profound, beyond angelic sight.
Hail Imperial Throne.
Hail Bearer of the One who bears all things.
Hail Star heralding the Sun.
Hail Womb of God’s own enfleshment.
Hail Through whom creation is renewed.
Hail Through whom the Creator himself became a child.
Hail Unwedded Bride.
Kontakion II
The holy maid, knowing her own purity,
Spoke brusquely to the angel in reply:
‘This strange thing you have to say
Is hard for my soul to comprehend!
What can you mean by virginal conception;
Crying out like this?’ Alleluia.
Oikos II
And the Virgin said to the ministering angel,
Trying to grasp knowledge beyond knowledge:
‘How can a son be born from a womb that is chaste.
Tell me that?’ And the angel himself was filled with fear
And this he cried out in reply:
Hail Initiate of the secret council.
Hail Faith demanding silence.
Hail First miracle of Christ.
Hail Pinnacle of all his teachings.
Hail Ladder of Heaven, by which he descended.
Hail Bridge that carries us to heaven.
Hail Outstanding Miracle of the angels.
Hail Scourge of lamentation for the demons.
Hail Ineffable Mother of the Light.
Hail Guardian of the secret mystery.
Hail Wisest among all the wise.
Hail Enlightener of faithful hearts.
Hail Unwedded Bride. (McGuckin 2011: 35–7)
The poem, by its end, lists hundreds of titles of Mary, outlining in the process the entire Marian theology of the Eastern Church. It joins together acclamations of Mary’s great role in salvation history, with appreciations of her moral purity and mystical apprehension. She is seen as having a specific and most elevated role as intercessor for the Church on earth and in heaven: an eschatological Deisis that places her higher than all the angels, even the Seraphim who circle the throne unceasingly. The Incarnation of God which is beyond the conception of a human mind because of the divine self-humbling it evokes, is mirrored in the poem by Mary’s courage to be an Unwed Bride. This kenosis on her part is matched by God’s exaltation of his most faithful servant to undreamed-of heights: greater than all the angels, all the prophets, all the Kings and Queens of Earth: the humble Maid of Nazareth who treasured the Word in her heart (Luke 2:19) and by whose obedience the salvation of the world was made active.
Innumerable other hymns in honour of the Virgin Mary are found within the offices of the Eastern Church, so that as each day passes, through every single office of prayer the Mother of God is praised and prayed to many times in each service. Here, to end, are a few of the more renowned hymns that are in daily use. The first will be recognized, certainly by all Catholics, as the Greek equivalent of the Hail Mary, but in the Eastern Church it is known as Virgin Theotokos Rejoice and has a slightly different ending.
Virgin Theotokos rejoice, Mary full of grace,
The Lord is with you, blessed are you among women,
And blessed is the fruit of your womb,
For you have borne the saviour of our souls.25
One of the praises, used in the daily prayers of the laity, and drawn from the Divine Liturgy of St Basil, is the lovely hymn All Creation Rejoices in You:
All creation rejoices in you, who are full of grace,
The assembly of angels and the race of men,
O holy temple and spiritual paradise,
The boast of virgins from whom God was made flesh
And became a child; our God before the ages.
He made your body into a throne
And your womb he made wider than the heavens.
All creation rejoices in you, who are full of grace.
Glory to you, glory to you, glory to you.26
Once again the exaltation of Mary as the glory of the heavens and the earth is set within the liturgical context of her drawing together the Church around the mystery of the Incarnation of God. She herself is the temple and the paradise: both Ark and Eden, wherein both angels and humans encounter the Divine Word. The final images raise the idea of her as a throne. This was adopted first in the Egyptian Church to be an apologia against Isiac religion. Here the statues of Isis often showed her in the form of a throne—sitting with the god Horus on her lap and showing the child to his worshippers in her role as the regent mother of the divine Pharaoh. The Christians wrested this iconography away from them and applied it to Mary, to show that she was the throne of Christ; the true ‘Shower of the Way’,27 for one who was the only ‘Way and the Truth and the Life’ (John 14:6). The notion that she is wider than the heavens (Platytera) reflects the biblical texts that speak of God as the ‘One whom the heavens cannot contain’, let alone any earthly temple (1 Kgs 8:27; 2 Chr. 6:18). Mary, in conceiving the Divine Word, Maker of all the earth, is thus proven to be ‘Wider than the heavens’ for she contains within the small space of her womb the One who is greater than those heavens. Her greatness, once again, is a reflection of her servant role in facilitating the Lord’s humble kenosis in his saving Incarnation.
In the same Liturgy of St Basil and at Pascha, the Theotokion hymn after the consecration gives a vivid account of the angel who personally announces to Mary the news of the Resurrection of her Son. It is always sung to a very joyful melody in the Eucharist:
The Angel cried to the Lady full of grace:
‘Rejoice! Rejoice! O Pure Virgin, and again I say: Rejoice!
Your Son is risen from his three days in the tomb,
And with himself he has raised the Dead.
Rejoice all you peoples! Shine! Shine! you New Jerusalem,
For the glory of the Lord has shone upon you.
Now exult, exult and be glad O Zion!
Be radiant most pure Theotokos in the Resurrection of your Son.’28
The vast amount of other hymns and verses chanted or recited in honour of the Blessed Virgin in the liturgical, patristic, poetic, and prayer books of the Eastern Church would take up many hundreds of pages to expound: so great is the devotion to Mary the Mother of God in the Eastern tradition. These examples, however, are among the most famous of the prayers and hymns, and we can see in all of them a strong focus on Mary’s exalted role as the hieratic priestly intercessor for the Church, the sign (in her exalted humility) of the saving power of the Incarnation, and the glorious witness of the joy of the Resurrection.
Let us finish this short introduction with one of the most refined pieces of poetry (Awed by the Beauty) that is used in the daily night prayers of the Eastern Church and which simply rests in the conception of Mary’s radiant loveliness. The angel Gabriel is here imagined as being sent to a virgin of the house of Israel, and coming to earth he prepares to deliver his message to this unknown maiden. But when he actually sees her, her loveliness of soul (which his bodiless eyes see first and foremost) staggers him (just as the angel of the Akathist Hymn is staggered by the encounter with Mary into a series of stammered ‘All Hails’) and so he sings this little hymn as a testimony to her holiness, a midrashic expansive exegesis really of that foundational evangelical testimony to her status as ‘Full of grace’. It will be a good piece to end with:
Awed by the beauty of your virginity
And the exceeding radiance of your purity
Gabriel stood amazed and cried out to you O Mother of God:
‘What praise can I offer you that is worthy of your beauty?
With what title shall I address you?
I am at a loss and bewildered
And so I shall greet you as I was commanded:
Hail you who are full of grace.’29