Byzantine piety is known for its focus on the mother of God as intercessor for sinners before God and her son, Jesus Christ. Mary’s growing intercessory role in the ninth to eleventh centuries reflects broader trends in the literature and art of the Middle Byzantine period. These texts and images reveal a growth in affective piety, whereby Mary’s motherhood and compassionate nature were emphasized, making her a natural object for personal devotion. Such an accessible figure was believed to be uniquely placed to intercede between sinful believers and God or his son, Jesus. The development of affective piety in the Byzantine cult of Mary as intercessor prefigured the same trend in the medieval West by several centuries.
In this chapter, I present the evidence for the Byzantine cult of Mary as intercessor according to genre, and according to the chronological development of the cult. The genres discussed here include hymns, sermons, hagiography or saint’s lives, apocryphal texts pertaining to the life of Christ and his mother which had quasi-scriptural status, litanies used in the Orthodox liturgy, and artistic representations, including frescoes and icons. There was considerable regional and social variation across the Byzantine Empire in the early development of the cult of Mary the Theotokos, or God-bearer (Allen 2011: 85), and this too must be taken into consideration. The Byzantine portrayal of Mary’s powers of intercession is divided here into five genre groupings: (i) Syriac and Coptic Dormition Apocrypha; (ii) Greek and Syriac hymnography and homiletics; (iii) Middle Byzantine apocalypses; (iv) Orthodox icons and litanies that are used to this day; (v) Lives of the Virgin in Greek and Georgian versions. A recurring theme in the majority of these literary, liturgical, and artistic portrayals is the anti-Judaism that characterized the Marian cult from the sixth century onwards. The links between Mary’s access to God and her condemnation of the Jews will be explored in each section (Neil 2016).
Stephen Shoemaker has recently proposed that the doctrine of Marian intercession seems to have arisen in Dormition Apocrypha, fictitious accounts of the events surrounding Mary’s death, composed in Palestine at the beginning of the sixth century (Shoemaker 1999: 777), or even as early as the third (Shoemaker 2015). According to the tradition of these apocryphal texts, Mary did not die in the usual way, but ‘went to sleep in the Lord’. Whatever their date, the Dormition texts first appeared in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, and present the story of Mary’s falling asleep and being taken up to heaven, where she interceded with God the Father and the Son (her son) on behalf of sinners: Christians, but not Jews.
Mary’s virginity at the birth of Christ, based on the Christian reading of Isaiah 7:14 (‘therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, and shall call his name Immanuel’), was bitterly disputed by the Jews, increasing the mutual distrust between Jews and Christians (Peltomaa and Külzer 2015: 13 n.1; see further Külzer 1999: 261–2). This controversy provided perfect grounds for anti-Judaism in the Marian cult, a phenomenon which is usually characterized as having Western rather than Eastern origins. Stephen Shoemaker has shown that early versions of the Dormition of the Virgin were also radically anti-Jewish, portraying Jews as enemies of the state, deserving of divine punishment to be exacted by the state (Shoemaker 1999: 777, 823). Although the fictitious narratives of Mary’s death often differ greatly in detail, they are almost unanimous in their identification of the Jews as fierce enemies of both the Virgin, in particular, and the Christian faith more generally. With only one exception, the Dormition narratives indulge in anti-Jewish harangues and depict the Jews as harassing and attacking the Virgin, actions which invariably met with violent divine punishment. The association of Mary with eternal divine punishment of one group—the Jews—served to emphasize her potential for influencing the eternal salvation of another group, namely Byzantine Christians (Dehandschutter 1989). The Christian–Jewish conflict in the late-antique and Byzantine cults of Mary was naturally reflected in the emerging doctrine of Mary as intercessor, as we will see.
While the early apocryphal tradition depicts Mary as clearly biased towards her Christian children, a rather different picture of Mary the intercessor is presented in the hymns of Romanos the Melodist, writing in Constantinople. Romanos was the official liturgical voice of the imperial administration of Justinian (518–65), in whose reign an increasingly apocalyptic mindset possessed his Byzantine subjects. Amid rising fears that the end times were fast approaching, Mary was increasingly valued as a potential intercessor on the terrible Day of Judgement (Peltomaa 2015: 135). The orthodox could expect deliverance ‘by the prayers of the holy Theotokos and Virgin’, while the non-orthodox had no hope at all: ‘the villains who dilute Thy holy wine with water / the ones who always water down Thy dogma / are condemned to Hell fire’ (Hymn 34.21.2–9).1
Although the prayers of Mary usually occur in the final verse of Romanos’ hymns and follow a set formula (Barkhuizen 1991), two examples stand out from the rest. The first occurs in his hymn entitled On Mary at the Cross, when Mary agrees to intercede for Adam and Eve, who are stuck in Hades. The Crucified Jesus himself gave her the task of interceding for her ancestral parents, which she accepted: ‘[S]o do not weep, mother / but rather cry this: “Have mercy on Adam / and take pity on Eve / my son and my God”’ (Hymn 19.9.7–10).2
In Romanos’ second hymn On the Nativity, a weeping Mary undertakes to intercede with her son for ‘her ancestors’, the lamenting Adam and Eve, ‘for the mother shone forth in pity, being compassionate’ (Hymn 2.10.1–8).3 These kontakia make a strong case for Mary the mother and God-bearer as universal intercessor, and are based on the idea that only Mary (the second Eve) could advocate for the first Eve (Peltomaa 2015: 132).
Many scholars have looked to Syriac homiletics to explain the influence on Romanos of the idea of Marian intercession, rare in Greek homiletics. The question of Syriac influence on Romanos is much debated, but some influence from the homilies of Jacob of Serug (d. 521) seems beyond doubt (Gador-Whyte 2013: 85 and n.25). Jacob’s 700 verse homilies offer some particularly striking examples of Mary’s compassionate intercession. Jacob’s lengthy festal homily for the feast of Christ’s Nativity contains twelve couplets, sung in the voice of Mary, who calls for people to celebrate the new creation that was introduced by the Nativity (Jacob of Serug, On the Nativity 1).4 Adam and Eve are among those whom she summons to give praises to God, and with them people everywhere: ‘On this day let the people in all confines [of the world] give thanks because they were scattered among all kinds of religions [or: all forms of idolatry] but they are gathered by you’ (Jacob of Serug, On the Nativity 1, lines 993–4).5 Next, the Houses of David and Adam, the dispossessed heir, are singled out for special mention. This is not, strictly speaking, Marian intercession but it is a universalizing call by Mary to recognize God’s creative power and majesty, with no exclusivity or anti-Jewish rhetoric about it. Marian intercession is more evident in other homilies of Jacob and the Syriac Passing of Mary (Horn 2015: 160–8), which shows the same universalizing spirit, even though it conveys some anti-Jewish details in its portrayal of Mary’s lamentation at the cross, where the Jews are said to have been looking to kill her. In the large corpus of Syriac translations of the Greek homilies of Severus of Antioch, patriarch of the city from 512 to 518, Mary is a persecutor of heretics. As a virulent opponent of the Council of Chalcedon (451), Severus believed these to include Manichees, Apollinarians, Nestorius, Eutyches, and others (Severus, Sermons 14, 36, 63, & 94).6 There are also several instances of anti-Jewish polemic. First, ‘the Jews’ disbelieved Mary’s virginity; although he may mean by this the Chalcedonians, whom he calls Jews elsewhere in his homilies (Sermon 83).7 Second, the ‘bloodthirsty’ Jews would have killed Mary if they had known of her conception by the Holy Spirit (Sermon 94)8 or if they had recognized her as the mother of Christ at the foot of the cross (Sermon 77).9 Third, the wine of Cana is interpreted as the Jewish teaching in the synagogues, which was ‘running out’ (Sermon 119).10 There are only two occasions of Marian intercession in Severus’ homilies, while there are many more in the hymns of the same author, a difference which Allen rightly attributes to the demands of genre: hymns were more amenable than homilies to an immediate approach to the Theotokos (Allen 2015: 187). Severus the hymnographer is then an exponent of affective piety, while Severus the preacher is much less so.
A century before Severus, Proclus of Constantinople (d. 446) was the first known preacher to emphasize Mary’s identity as the human mother of the human Jesus, in contrast with the divine paternity of Jesus’ divinity. Somewhat surprising is the fact that literary images of Mary as intercessor, as indeed the use of the epithet ‘Theotokos’, are virtually absent from sixth- and seventh-century Greek homilies (Allen 2011). There is a notable exception to be found in a sixth-century homily on the Feast of Mary’s presentation of the eight-day-old Jesus at the Temple, known as the Hypapante. This exceptional homily comes from the pen of Abraham of Ephesus and contains a single reference to Mary as Theotokos (On the Hypapante 2).11 In the genuine part of Abraham’s second surviving homily, the author also attacks Jews and heretics. At the end of Abraham’s second homily is a passage devoting lavish praise to Mary, which stands in stark contrast to the sober language used earlier in the homily. In this passage, which some scholars believe to be a later addition to the homily (e.g. Allen 2011: 81), Mary is assigned an intercessory role. The logical connection between two concepts, that of the Theotokos as intercessor, and the culpability of the Jews, was recognized by the redactor of Abraham’s homiletic collection, who placed his first and second homilies side by side.
In Constantinopolitan preaching of the eighth and ninth centuries, and especially after the restoration of icons in 843, there are an increasing number of instances of Mary as Theotokos and intercessor (Cunningham 2015: 142–7). A prime example from the early eighth century is found in the first and second homilies on the Dormition of Mary by Germanos, Patriarch of Constantinople (Homily 1and Homily 2).12 Germanos’ homily On the Consecration also calls on Mary to intercede for sinners, calling her the ‘consolation of Christians’ and ‘the breath and life of Christians. … Who, after your Son, cares for the human race as you do?’ (On the Consecration, 9–10).13 Similar themes occur in the hymns on the Nativity of the Theotokos by Andrew of Crete (d. 712 or 726), John of Damascus, and Pseudo-Germanos.14 The ninth-century bishop George of Nicomedia was also an occasional preacher on the human virtues and sorrows of Mary (Tsironis 1998). So how and why did the intercessor on behalf of all humanity become the exclusive intercessor for the tormented souls of Christians by the ninth or tenth centuries, when the first surviving Apocalypses appeared?
Psychagogic literature, or guided tours of a soul through the next world, flourished in the Middle Byzantine period, from the ninth to eleventh centuries. Jane Baun reminds us that the Greeks entertained no notions of descent or going down to a world under this one; it was rather a case of going outside this world to the ‘other world’ (Baun 2007). Before the Christian tradition, beginning with the Apocalypse of Saint Paul in Late Antiquity, there was a strong Jewish tradition of psychagogy in the pseudepigrapha. In the late-antique texts, equal attention was given to the reward of the righteous as to the punishment of sinners. By contrast, the medieval Byzantine tradition dwells on the punishments, and thus exaggerates the need for the Theotokos to intercede between God and humanity. The new perception of God as capricious and remote made Mary’s intercession all the more necessary. Baun maintains that medieval visions placed a greater emphasis on intercession ‘because they construe[d] the Other World almost exclusively in terms of the grim realities of judgement, purgation, and punishment’ (Baun 2007: 97). Let us turn now to the presentation of Marian intercession in two apocalyptic visions from the Middle Byzantine period.
The first vision—although not perhaps first chronologically, the date being impossible to determine more precisely than the ninth to eleventh centuries—is the Apocalypse of the Theotokos Concerning the Punishments. The text presents the Theotokos’ journey to the other world, where she acts as an intercessor for Christian souls in torment. She specifically excludes Jews from her intercessions, however. The other, The Apocalypse of Anastasia, is from the mid-tenth century, and tells a nun’s vision of heaven and the punishment of sinners there, for whom ‘prophets and apostles and martyrs’ entreated (Homburg 1903, translated by Baun 2007: 416). In this text, the Theotokos was one of many intercessors for the sinful.
The sins punished in the Theotokos vision range from the serious to the trivial: ‘eavesdropping, slandering, quarrelling, fornicating, ploughing or reaping beyond their furrow, weighing falsely, or taking interest’ (Tonning 2008: 740). Those guilty of failing to wake on Sundays were punished by being seated upon clouds of fire, and those who failed to rise on the entry of the priest were relegated to fiery benches (Apocalypsis Theotokou).15 The only excuse for not going to church on Sundays was if one’s house was on fire on all four sides. Eternal punishments awaited those who committed incest with their close relations or godparents, those who consorted with demons, denied Christ or their baptism, women who killed babies, and ‘the Jews who crucified our Lord Jesus Christ’, all of whom were consigned to the everlasting ‘outer fire’ (Apocalypsis Theotokou).16 There are clearly two classes of person here: redeemable Christians in the dress circle suffering intermediate, temporary punishments, and those beyond the pale. Mary views the former group, the Christians, as ‘her children’, and calls upon the Archangel Michael to ‘command the armies of the angels and raise [her] up to the height of Heaven and break [her] through into the presence of the invisible Father’ (Apocalypsis Theotokou §26), where she sways a reluctant ‘Master’, first not to forsake those who call upon her name (Apocalypsis Theotokou §26), and then to grant respite to all souls in torment during the fifty days of Easter (Apocalypsis Theotokou §29). This is a God who is, as Tonning observes, angry, distant, and imperial (Tonning 2008: 741). Baun argues for an Eastern provenance for the Theotokos text at some remove from the centre of imperial administration, possibly central Greece, Crete, Macedonia, or Cappadocia (Baun 2007: 233–5).
In contrast to the Vision of the Theotokos, the Vision of Anastasia (Apocalypsis Anastasiae §42) is very pro-Emperor Nicephorus II Phokas (963–9), who was murdered by John Tzimiskes. The power of Mary to intercede is no less successful here than in the previous text, but here, her intercessory power seems to lie in the fact that she was Jesus’ virgin mother, ‘wholly undefiled’. Jesus sends Anastasia back to earth with the message: ‘I wanted to destroy you utterly from the earth, but through the entreaty of my wholly undefiled mother … I was reconciled’ (Apocalypsis Anastasiae §48).17 In a reminder that not all shall be saved, Christ adds, that ‘whosoever does not believe these things, and blasphemes, shall have the curse of the 318 God-bearing Fathers, and his portion shall be with Judas and with those who cry out, ‘Away with him, away with him, “crucify him!”’ (Apocalypsis Anastasiae §50).18 Here the power of the ‘God-bearing fathers’ at the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea (325 ce) to impose curses is opposed to the God-bearer’s power to intercede. Judas, the ultimate traitorous Jew, remains beyond redemption.
Important questions have been raised over whether the punishments witnessed by the Theotokos and the nun in the Vision of Anastasia were eternal or temporal, and whether they took place in Hell, Hades, or some sort of purgatory (Tonning 2008: 740). The idea of purgatory is not now accepted in the Eastern Orthodox Church since the matter was settled at the Council of Florence in 1438 to 1439, after some 200 years of debate. Little has been studied about Byzantine attitudes to purgatory before the discussions with the Latins began in the thirteenth century (Morris 2002: 128). However, it may well have leaked across from the West where it was instigated by Gregory the Great at the end of the sixth century. Certainly in Paul Evergetinos’ Synagoge there were many borrowings on this subject from Gregory’s Dialogues, especially Book 4 (Collins 1990; Laggis 1992–93: 1.343–58; Louth 2013). Cunningham suggests that the different audiences may explain the difference between the ‘heterodox’ presentation of Mary in the popular genre of apocalypses, which were read privately, and other, more orthodox, public genres such as homilies and hymns, which were more likely to have been used in church liturgies, although she admits this hypothesis remains to be tested (Cunningham 2015: 151).
The Western doctrine of purgatory developed in parallel with a popular belief originating in Egypt in tax posts where government tolls were collected on goods for trade (telonai). The soul had to pass through a number of these (up to 22 by the tenth century) on its way to heaven, each being a reckoning for a certain set of sins. In the fifth century Cyril of Alexandria once preached in terrifying detail on the five toll-gates where the sins of each of the five senses were interrogated, from one’s youth to the moment of death (Cyril of Alexandria, Homily 1419).20 On the day of judgement, fierce, monstrous, and merciless demons ‘as black as Ethiopians’ would accuse those souls who had committed sins of the tongue either knowingly or carelessly (e.g. those guilty of lying speech or gossip or false oaths or ribald laughter or gluttony or bold kisses or cheeky songs), while good angels defended those souls who were to be rewarded for right speech, singing psalms of praise, etc. At the Council of Florence, some Greek theologians—such as Gennadios Scholastikos—were happy to accept that these stages of interrogation were the equivalent of purgatory (Constas 2001: 105–9). However the differences between the East and West prevailed in the end.
Christian apocalyptic literature was generally anti-Jewish, with its emphasis on the anti-Christ who would present himself as the new messiah, the one for whom the Jews were waiting. Apocalyptic literature like that of Pseudo-Methodius, his Apocalypse being only the best known of a dozen examples from western Syria, flourished in the sixth and seventh centuries as a response to the many crises that beset the Byzantine world, both internally and externally.
It has been suggested by Averil Cameron that the cult practice of inducing Mary’s intercession via icons arose in the sixth century as a desperate response to desperate times (Cameron 1978: 101–2). During the attempted siege of Constantinople by combined Avar-Slav and Persian forces in 626, Mary was the intercessor par excellence (Cameron 1978: 79–80, 104). The Marian cult certainly received a boost on that occasion from the perambulations of the people, who were led by Patriarch Sergios (610–38) around the walls of the besieged city. Until recently, it was commonly held that Sergios carried aloft an icon of the Theotokos, the protectress of the city. However, pointing to the absence of any contemporary historical witnesses, Pentcheva argues that such use of Marian icons in litanies did not occur until the second half of the tenth century (Pentcheva 2002: 9–12, 15–22; 2006: 37–8). The feast of Mary’s Nativity was celebrated in Constantinople on 8 September. Early hymns used on that feast were a kontakion (hymn) by Romanos and another attributed to Patriarch Germanos I of Constantinople. The earliest, eleventh-century manuscript of Pseudo-Germanos’ hymn (kanon) for this occasion ends with a prayer linking Mary’s power to intercede with her proximity to the Incarnation: ‘[May she] pray without ceasing for her servants, because God the Logos dwelled in her and was ineffably born in flesh from her’ (Simic 2018).21 The inclusion of this hymn reveals that the cult of the Virgin included a strong element of requesting Marian intercession in the celebration of this feast, at least in Constantinople.
Pentcheva’s findings are in line with those of Vassilaki and Tsironis, just two of the scholars who have noted the emergence of an increasingly affective devotion to Mary in the eighth to eleventh centuries (Vassilaki and Tsironis 2000; Tsironis 2005). This affective piety promoted the idea of a more compassionate and humanistic Virgin, as witnessed in the literature and art of the Middle Byzantine tradition. An example is the Georgian Life of the Virgin that is attributed to Maximus the Confessor by Shoemaker (2005, 2012), following Michael van Esbroeck (1986). The attribution of the Life to the seventh-century monk Maximus has now been conclusively dismissed in favour of composition in the post-iconoclast period some 250 years later (Booth 2015). Greek Lives of the Virgin by John the Geometer and Symeon the Metaphrast also appeared between 900 and 980 (Booth 2015: 186–90).
The Georgian translation of the Life of the Virgin was made by Euthymios the Athonite in the early tenth century, and is the earliest witness to the original Greek text. At the end of chapter 5, Mary’s power to intercede for her friends, ‘the souls of the saints’, is second only to that of Jesus, who entered the Holy of Holies first as a forerunner on behalf of humanity (cf. Heb. 9:12). ‘So also,’ the author concludes, ‘the all-holy mother of the Lord entered into the heavenly resting place before all, and the other souls of the saints are led there subsequently by her intercession’ (Shoemaker 2012: 40). The text, like the other Lives of the Virgin, was used liturgically, with the above passage being read in the Monastery of Mar Saba near Bethlehem on 8 September, the Nativity of the Virgin, according to an eleventh-century guide to liturgical readings in that monastery (Shoemaker 2012: 163) and also on 25 July, the Dormition of Anna, the mother of Mary, and on 21 November, the feast of the Presentation of the infant Mary in the Temple.
Such written and artistic sources emerged in the Middle Byzantine period as a direct result of the iconoclastic controversy. Before the condemnation of icons in the reign of Emperor Leo III, representations of the Virgin emphasized her queenly status and pictured her gazing imperiously at the viewer. An example is the encaustic icon of the Virgin and Child from St Catherine’s Monastery on Mt Sinai, dating to c. 600 and therefore one of the few icons to have survived the destruction of icons during the iconoclast period from the mid-eighth to mid-ninth centuries. The Virgin is seated on a throne with the Christ child on her knee, guarded on each side by the warrior saints George and Theodore Stratelates, with angels standing behind them. The Triumph of Orthodoxy, when icon veneration was restored by Empress Theodora II in 843, spawned a new generation of icon-writers who imprinted Mary as ‘the Lamenting’, gazing lovingly at her son as a baby, or sorrowfully contemplating the Crucified Jesus on the Cross. These images were useful visual reminders of the basis for the doctrines of both Marian intercession and the Incarnation. It was Christ’s circumscription in human flesh that justified his depiction in material images, according to the triumphant iconophiles. The late ninth-century patriarch of Constantinople, Photios, gave a homily on the mosaic of the Virgin in the great church of Hagia Sophia in which he describes her as gazing tenderly at her son, even though the surviving fresco shows that her gaze was directed towards the viewer (Photios, Sermon 10).22 The Virgin of Tenderness had not yet appeared in Byzantine iconography but was to proliferate in the tenth century (Tsironis 2005: 96), based on the written authority of Photios’ tenth homily. In the Late Byzantine period, the Mother of God embracing her son (Glykophilousa) became a popular icon, and from the eleventh century ‘the most dramatic and intense images’ of the bond between the human mother and her human son were selected for inclusion in the Orthodox liturgy (Tsironis 2005: 99).
Although this affective piety ‘prefigured parallel developments in the Marian and Christological devotion of the high medieval West’ (Booth 2015: 200), that is not to say that the medieval West eschewed anti-Jewish rhetoric; rather they adopted it with great enthusiasm, and with tragic consequences for later generations of Jews. It should be noted, however, that the Gospel of the Birth of the Virgin Mary, an apocryphal Latin text probably from the ninth century, does not display any such bias against the Jews, but this may be explained by the fact that its narrative of Mary’s career stops soon after the birth of Jesus, and did not deal with his death (De Nativitate Mariae).23
One could consider Mary’s selective intercession as characteristic of her humanity, her prejudices an endearing aspect for Byzantine readers. Certainly in the climate that dominated in Constantinople at the time of writing, anti-Judaism would not have been worthy of note. The Byzantine sense of being besieged only increased with the pressure of Islamic military victories from the 630s onwards, a context in which the cult of Mary as intercessor flourished in Constantinople and beyond. In this context, religious identity boundaries inevitably hardened, and there was a series of attempts to impose baptism on Jews in the sixth and seventh centuries. Maximos the Confessor was one who opposed Heraclius’ moves towards the forced conversions of Jews in c. 632, claiming that compulsory baptism would dilute Christian purity, hastening the advent of the Antichrist (Maximos, Epistle 8).24 As Shoemaker observes, ‘The late sixth and early seventh centuries bear witness to increasing violence between Jews and Christians in the East, in the context of generally increasing social and religious unrest in the region’ (Shoemaker 1999: 782). The emphasis on eternal punishment of the Jews in psychagogic literature, and in general in apocalyptic literature from the seventh century onwards, seems to have been an inevitable development.
This chapter has focused our attention not just on Mary’s role as mediator of the prayers of the faithful, but also on Mary’s role as a selective intercessor for souls in torment. In answer to the question of whether her discrimination against Jews in the texts reflects a standard anti-Judaism to be found in other Marian hymns and homilies of the Early and Middle Byzantine periods, or whether it is characteristic of the apocalyptic genre per se (Alexander and Abrahamse 1985), we have discovered that the anti-Jewish tendency, although more pronounced here, was also found in early Marian literature. There may also have been significant differences over time within a single text tradition. For example, the four different versions of the Greek of the Apocalypse of the Theotokos gave varying emphases to Christ’s anger towards the Jews and the imminence of the Eschaton, an area which would repay further study (Baun 2007: 59).
In the original tradition of the oriental churches, as represented by Jacob of Serug in Syria and Romanos in Constantinople, the God-bearer was a generous and inclusive intercessor on behalf of those of all other religions, and especially the ancestral religion of the Jews. In sixth-century Asia Minor, by contrast, two current ideas—anti-Judaism and the Theotokos as intercessor—sometimes came together in preaching, as we have seen in Abraham of Ephesus’ homily on the Hypapante. In summary, we can say that the theme of Marian discrimination in intercession reflects an anti-Judaism found in some Marian hymns and homilies of the Early and Middle Byzantine periods, such as sixth-century Ephesus, but is not the standard in the hymns and homilies of John of Damascus, Andrew of Crete, or Germanos (or Pseudo-Germanos) of Constantinople.
The Theotokos of Anastasia’s other-world tour and of the Apocalypse of the Theotokos seems to have taken her exclusionist cues from the tradition of Byzantine apocalyptic literature that flourished in the sixth and seventh centuries, anti-Judaism being a common feature of the genre. It is impossible to generalize on the basis of only two surviving witnesses, but their edifying descriptions of Christian souls being punished with temporary torments in the Byzantine apocalypses were made more powerful when contrasted with the negative exemplar of Jewish and other souls whose judgement was final and everlasting.
We have seen that there is considerable variation across the genres of Byzantine cultural production surveyed here: Mary is a frequent intercessor in Byzantine hymns, but rarely in homilies of the same period; she is on occasion a universal intercessor in Syriac liturgical poetry, but an anti-Jewish judge of humanity in Greek apocalyptic three or four centuries later. The related ideas that the Theotokos could intercede with her son for sinful Christians, and that she would not have wanted to intercede for his so-called murderers, the Jews, seem to have reinforced each other to justify discriminate intercession by the Byzantine Mary. This is merely the shadow side of the emergence of affective piety in the Byzantine devotion to Mary the compassionate mother and intercessor that flourished first in the Middle Byzantine period, and later in the high Middle Ages in the West, in both written and artistic sources.