Before considering the different ways in which modern Orthodox theologians have reflected on the place of Mary in the divine economy, it will be useful to give some account of the place that Mary plays in Orthodox worship and devotion. In contrast to Western theology, Catholic as well as Protestant, devotion to the Mother of God is deeply embedded in Orthodox worship and devotion. Prayer to the Mother of God occurs frequently and regularly in Orthodox worship. Repeated litanies are a prominent feature in all Orthodox services—the Divine Liturgy; the principal offices, Orthos (Matins), and Vespers; and sacramental services such as Baptism, Marriage, and the Funeral Service. Virtually all of these litanies close by calling on the Mother of God: ‘Commemorating our all-holy, pure, most blessed and glorious Lady, Mother of God and Ever-Virgin Mary, with all the Saints, let us entrust ourselves and one another and our whole life to Christ our God’. The blessing at the end of services mentions, after Christ, the Mother of God: ‘May Christ our true God, through the prayers of his all-pure and holy Mother …’ In the Divine Liturgy, after the epiklesis to the Holy Spirit, the priest censes the holy table, exclaiming: ‘Above all for our most holy, pure, most blessed and glorious Lady, the Mother of God and Ever-Virgin Mary’. This prominence of invocation of the Mother of God is reflected in the recommended forms of private prayer for morning and evening. In addition, there are special services of prayer to the Mother of God, notably the Akathist Hymn (a rather elaborate kontakion, dating probably from the sixth century), and the Paraklesis to the Mother of God. In modern use the Akathist Hymn forms part of Compline, and is a popular devotion on Fridays during Lent, while the Paraklesis is frequently celebrated publicly during the Dormition Fast (the fortnight before the Feast of the Dormition of the Mother of God, 15 August).
Throughout the Church Year, there are a whole sequence of feasts in honour of the Mother of God, the most important of which (the feasts of the Nativity, 12 September; the Entry into the Temple, 21 November; and the Dormition, 15 August) are included, along with the principal feasts of the Lord, among the ‘Twelve Great Feasts of the Lord and the Mother of God’. There are, however, many others, some observed with great devotion, such as the Feast of the Veil/Protection (both pokrov in Slavonic) on 1 October, and feasts connected with Mary’s garments, venerated as relics (2 July, 31 August). Furthermore, there are icons of the Mother of God: even in the second half of the first millennium there can be discerned various forms. For example, there is the Virgin Hodegitria, in which Mary points to her Son who is the Way (Hodos), or the Virgin, ‘Wider than the Heavens’, which depicts her as enclosing (symbolically in her womb) her Son. In addition there are icons of feasts in which Mary features: the Nativity of Christ, his Meeting in the Temple with the prophet Symeon (Purification or Presentation, in the West), the Crucifixion, the Ascension, Pentecost. In the second millennium, the forms of Marian icons multiply, especially in the Slav world, with each icon having its own feast-day (in the Russian tradition these different types of Marian icons run to around a hundred, at a conservative estimate).
All these feasts have their own services with their own texts, including verses of liturgical poetry, at least a troparion (or apolytikion, as it forms part of the dismissal rite at vespers) and kontakion, but in most cases with many more verses, including a canon (verses to accompany the canticles at Matins). These verses do not exhaust the liturgical verses in honour of the Mother of God: every day there are verses called theotokia, in honour of Mary, and on Wednesdays and Fridays stavrotheotokia (Cross-Theotokia, which meditate on some aspect of Mary’s sharing in her Son’s suffering on the Cross). There is, therefore, a very great deal of liturgical verse exploring the mystery of Mary and her Son. Much of it is very well-known (they are songs, sung to melodies) and it forms a treasury of imagery and reflection on Mary and her role in the divine economy, not simply in historical events two thousand years ago, but in the ‘eternal now’ of the liturgical present. It is accessible, not only to Orthodox theologians, but to the simplest of the faithful, who find in these verses imagery that gives shape to their understanding of the faith.
It is perhaps of value to give a brief taste of what is found in this treasury of liturgical song. This, for example, is sung in the days up to Christmas:
Get ready, Bethlehem, Eden has been opened to all. Rejoice, Ephratha, because the tree of life has blossomed from the Virgin in the cave. For her womb has been shown to be the spiritual paradise, in which is the divine plant; eating of which we shall live—and not died like Adam. Christ is born, raising up the image that once fell.
(Apolytikion for the Forefeast of the Nativity: 20 December, Menaion (December) 1993: 360)
This verse sets the coming Nativity of the Lord in the context of the history of salvation and its expectation. Alluding to Micah 5:2, the expectation is set in the context of Genesis 2–3, the Virgin Mary being seen as the source of the new tree of life, the Cross, through which the fallen image (of Gen. 1:26) is raised up (this looking at the cave and the cross synoptically, as it were, is typical of the pre-Christmas verses).
This verse, the ‘dogmatikon in the first tone’, is sung on Saturday evenings as part of an eight-week cycle:
We hymn Mary the Virgin, the glory of the whole world, engendered from humans, bearing the Lord, the heavenly portal, the song of bodiless ones, the adornment of the faithful. For she has been shown to be heaven, God’s temple. She has broken down the middle wall of enmity, introducing peace, and opening the King’s palace. Seizing her, therefore, as the anchor of faith, we have an invincible champion, the Lord born from her. Take courage, then, take courage, People of God, for he wages war against the enemies as almighty.
(Saturday Vespers, Dogmatikon Tone 1: Paraklitiki 1994: 17–18)
Or, an example of a stavrotheotokion:
Having endured many pangs in the crucifixion of your Son and God, O Pure One, you groaned, weeping and lamenting: Woe is me, my sweetest child, how you suffer unjustly, when you wanted to redeem Adam’s earthborn offspring! Therefore, all-holy Virgin, we beseech you in faith, to bring to fulfilment for us this work of mercy.
(Tuesday vespers, tone 2, stavrotheotokion to the aposticha: Paraklitiki 1994: 192)
Or the apolytikion and kontakion for the feast of the Dormition, which contain in essence the meaning of the Feast:
In giving birth you retained your virginity; in falling asleep you did not abandon the world, O Mother of God; you passed over into life, for you are the Mother of Life; and by your prayers you deliver our souls from death.
Nor tomb nor death overpowered the Mother of God, unsleeping in her prayers, unfailing hope in intercession; for as Mother of Life she has been taken over into life by him who dwelt in her ever-virgin womb. (Menaion [August] 1993: 195, 201)
It is no exaggeration to say that Orthodox worship and devotion is drenched in invocation of Mary, the Mother of God. This is in some contrast to Catholic worship in the West: Newman, in his reply to Pusey’s accusation that Mary more or less replaced Jesus in Catholic worship, was able to claim that ‘The Mass again conveys to us the same lesson of the sovereignty of the Incarnate Son; it is a return to Calvary, and Mary is scarcely named in it’ (Newman 1891: 95). This density of devotion to Mary provides the foundation for the ways in which Orthodox theology approaches the mystery of the Mother of God.
The rest of this chapter will look at the variety of ways in which Mary’s place in the divine economy has been considered among modern Orthodox theologians. We shall look mostly at Russian theologians, paying attention to those who have most to say about the Mother of God; we shall look, too, at the great Romanian theologian, Fr Dumitru Stăniloae. It is perhaps surprising that Greek theologians do not appear, but it seems that the Mother of God is largely tangential to their concerns, notwithstanding the depth of devotion to the Panagia among the Greek Orthodox.
Almost all modern Orthodox thinking on the Mother of God has been articulated in conscious reaction against developments in modern Catholic theology. This has two aspects. First, a reaction against the promulgation as such of dogmas about the Mother of God, a sense that the mystery of the Mother of God is, and is meant to be, surrounded by silence. If there are to be dogmas, this is dogma in the sense St Basil the Great gives the term, in contrast to the public teaching of the Church, designated by kerygma, dogma as ‘what is sacred about the mysteries, to be preserved in silence’ (Basil, De Spiritu Sancto, 27.66, 1968: 482; see Ware 1998). The second, and more specific, aspect is a rejection of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary, proclaimed a dogma by the Catholic Church in 1854. Bulgakov (1871–1944), in his reflection on the Mother of God, manifests both these reactions, indeed his first discussion of Mariology, The Burning Bush (1927), begins with a critical examination of the Catholic dogma of 1854 (Bulgakov 2009: 3). Nearly half of the book is concerned with Mary’s personal sinlessness: whether she is free from original sin, with an explicit discussion of the dogma of 1854. Only then does Bulgakov move on to his presentation of Orthodox veneration of the Mother of God (the subtitle of the work), which he draws largely from the liturgical tradition of the Church—‘the liturgy which is actuated by the Holy Spirit and which expresses the prayed life of dogma’ (Bulgakov 2009: 5). It is, however, worth noticing at the outset the main thrust of his critique of Roman Catholic Mariology. This critique is mainly directed, not so much at the tenets of such Mariology but at the notion of natura pura, pure nature, that was important for the kind of scholasticism that Bulgakov had encountered in the west. (It is important to remember the date of this critique, 1927, not only long before Vatican II, but even before the movements that were to lead to that council, as well as before the papal proclamation of the doctrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin in 1950.) Pure nature was conceived of as nature in itself, untouched by God, and without any orientation towards God. The notion had evolved in the context of the western understanding of nature and grace, going back to Augustine: the idea of pure nature was deemed necessary to preserve the notion of the gratuity of grace, to prevent any idea that nature, in itself, could naturally evoke the response of God’s grace. Bulgakov’s fundamental objection to this, although he expresses it mainly in an allusive rather than any direct way, is that the idea of nature untouched by God is fundamentally unchristian: if nature is created by God, it is profoundly touched by God, and however distorted it might be as a result of the Fall, so long as it exists, it exists because created by God—and therefore touched by God, loved by God. So we find Bulgakov saying that in Paradise ‘God came in the cool of the day to converse with the human being, as with a friend, and this “conversation” was no donum superadditum [no specially added gift] in relation to his incorrupt nature; on the contrary, this divine communion was given and set in it’ (Bulgakov 2009: 17). His rejection of the notion of pura natura is, it seems to me, an aspect of his profound sense of the holiness of nature; it is a fault in us, because of the fall, to experience nature bereft of God, the reality is quite other. (This criticism of the notion of pura natura seems an anticipation of Henri de Lubac’s rejection of the notion in his Surnaturel, 1946, for which he was censured.) Elsewhere, Bulgakov gives another reason for the Orthodox rejection of the Immaculate Conception, namely, that it seems to separate Mary from the human race. In contrast, Bulgakov and many other Orthodox theologians see Mary as the goal of the history of Israel, the fulfilment of its deepest hopes and longings, the ‘beauty of Jacob’ (ἡ καλλονὴ ᾽Ιακώβ: Ledit 1976: 32–3, n.5), not someone severed by divine act from her human heritage.
There is, however, another motive behind Bulgakov’s doctrine of the Mother of God, for it is intimately bound up with his teaching of Sophia, the Wisdom of God: a doctrine that proved extremely controversial and for which he was condemned by the two Russian jurisdictions to which he did not belong (the Moscow Patriarchate, and the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad). Sophiology has a long tradition in Russian thought, drawing on several traditions—esoteric mystical traditions, associated with names such as Boehme and Angelus Silesius, which constitute one of the sources of German Idealism; strands of the German idealist tradition, especially Schelling; and traditions, peculiar to Russia, that associate the Wisdom of God with the Virgin Mary, both liturgical (Russian Churches dedicated to Holy Wisdom, that observe their dedication on feasts of the Mother of God, her Nativity or her Dormition) and iconographical (in which Wisdom is represented by the Mother of God herself). For Bulgakov the association of Sophiology and Mariology is bound up with his concern for what one might call the ‘in between’, the region between God and the created cosmos. Rather than keeping them radically apart, as the Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo can be conceived as entailing, Bulgakov is concerned to explore the frontier between the uncreated God and the created cosmos, a frontier conceived of equally in terms of Sophia and of the Mother of God.
Whatever the immediate roots of sophiology in Western esoteric thought (of which Bulgakov was well aware and made no attempt to disguise), God’s Wisdom, Sophia, as forming the frontier between God and the cosmos is an idea rooted in the Old Testament Scriptures, especially the books of Wisdom, Proverbs, the Wisdom of Ben Sirach, and the Wisdom of Solomon. In these books Wisdom manifests herself as God’s co-worker in the task of creation, as well as the route by which human seekers of God find their way back to God by following holy Wisdom. This biblical Wisdom is in between God and the created order; as uncreated Wisdom she manifests God’s face to the world, as created Wisdom she leads human kind to God. It is in this context that Bulgakov develops his reflection on the Mother of God. Indeed Sophiology and Mariology are so bound together in his thought that in his late work, The Orthodox Church, in which he made a determined attempt to avoid the controversial theses of Sophiology, when he came to the Mother of God, he could not but express his thinking in sophiological terms:
In her is realized the idea of Divine Wisdom in the creation of the world, she is Divine Wisdom in the created world. It is in her that Divine Wisdom is justified, and thus the veneration of the Virgin blends with that of the Holy Wisdom. In the Virgin there are united Holy Wisdom and the Wisdom of the created world, the Holy Spirit and the human hypostasis. Her body is completely spiritual and transfigured. She is the justification, the end and the meaning of creation. She is, in this sense, the glory of the world. In her God is already ‘all in all’. (Bulgakov 1935: 139)
Often quoted in this context, by Bulgakov and others, is a phrase from St Gregory Palamas’ homily on the Dormition, where, towards the end, he speaks of Mary as being alone μεθόριον… κτιστῆς καὶ ἀκτίστου φύσεως, ‘frontier between created and uncreated nature’ (Oration 37.15, 2015: 407), precisely the role allotted to Sophia by Bulgakov.
The assimilation of Sophia to the Mother of God has another important dimension, for Sophia stands in relation to God as female to male, as does the Mother of God to her Son. As far back as II Clement the assertion in Genesis that God made human kind in his image, making him male and female (Gen. 1:27), has been interpreted of Christ and the Church: ‘I do not think that you should be ignorant that the Church is the living body of Christ, for Scripture says, “God made human kind male and female”; the male is Christ, the female is the Church’ (II Clement 14.2, 1970: 77). Bulgakov sees the fulness of the image of God, manifest in both male and female, as realized in Christ and his Mother. Male and female, Bulgakov argues, are not simply sexual, they are primarily spiritual principles: ‘the male is truth in beauty, the female beauty in truth’. He concludes:
Hence the Lord Jesus Christ, perfect God and perfect human, truly became human and assumed all human nature; in the image of his humanity He is joined inseparably with His Most Pure Mother and is Son not only thanks to His divinity, as the Only-Begotten of the Father, but also thanks to His humanity as Son of the Mother, born of her by the Holy Spirit. (Bulgakov 2009: 82)
In her relationship to Christ, Mary in some way echoes the relationship of the Holy Spirit to Christ (who, in the formula often evoked by Bulgakov, proceeds from the Father and rests in the Son): as Christ is God Incarnate, born of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, so Mary is pneumatophore, bearer of the Spirit. The dyad Christ–Mary is related to, and indeed founded on, the dyad Son–Spirit. What is distinctive about Mary’s role in the dyad she forms with her Son is manifest in her feminine qualities: ‘This warmth natural to the cult of the Virgin comes from her humanity and her feminine nature’ (Bulgakov 1935: 140: Bulgakov goes on to comment on the ‘coldness of atmosphere of some Protestant churches’, which he puts down to a lack of sensitivity to Mary’s warmth, and which he associates with Protestant ‘forgetfulness’ of the Mother of God). As we have seen, prayer addressed to Mary forms a large part of Orthodox devotion, both public and private; this Bulgakov sees as a response to her maternal and feminine nature. Bulgakov delights in the image of Mary holding her protecting veil over the world, an image celebrated liturgically on 1 October, the Feast of the Protection/Veil of the Mother of God. In late Russian iconography, this veil is often depicted as an omophorion, the broad stole with crosses worn by a bishop (probably a confusion of maphorion, veil, and omophorion); this leads Bulgakov, and others in the Russian tradition, to entertain some sort of participation by Mary in her Son’s priesthood (expressed, however, in very guarded tones). Another dimension of Bulgakov’s reflection on the Mother of God focuses on way in which she is not always depicted in relation to her Son (although, in truth, this is quite rare, late, and likely owing to Western influence). She is called Ἡ Θεόπαις, the ‘daughter of God’, and in much Orthodox Marian devotion Mary is seen in relation to God as bride, the ‘Eternal Bride’, as Bulgakov puts it: the refrain of the Akathist Hymn is precisely, Χαῖρε, Νύμφη ἀνύμφευτε, ‘Hail, Bride unwedded’. In this way, the Song of Songs is applied to Mary: ‘The Song of Songs is also a song about Mary and the Logos, as about every soul seeking its heavenly Groom and joining with Him. The Virgin Mary, Mother of God and Bride of God, is the image of every soul in its relation to the Logos, in its ecclesialization’ (Bulgakov 2009: 103–4). Bulgakov goes on to comment that ‘this Old Testament Song contains the most New Testament part of the whole canon’, and in a footnote comments that the Song of Songs ‘is never read at the Divine Liturgy. … At the same time the church’s liturgy is saturated with it, its images became the most intimate and usual in ecclesiastical use’ (Bulgakov 2009: 105 and n.39: the same is true of the Apocalypse, never read, and yet its imagery is all pervasive, and especially important for Bulgakov). One aspect of Mary’s relationship to God is the way in which Bulgakov, along with other Orthodox theologians, sees Mary as in some sense the person of the Church, the person the Church is in its relationship to God: ‘The Mother of God, as the personal revelation of the Holy Spirit, is the heart of the Church, its so to say personal expression …’ (Bulgakov 2009: 109).
The dyad of Christ and his Mother plays an important role in Bulgakov’s eschatology. In his discussion of the Parousia, he is concerned to stress the role of Mary in the Parousia; she is not judged, but pleads with her Son for mercy for the human race—mercy, not forgiveness (Bulgakov 2002: 488). Part of the justification of this is, Bulgakov maintains, the iconographic tradition (as at several points in both his Sophiology and his Mariology). Another aspect of this is that, if Mary does not await the Parousia as one awaiting judgement, what is her role in the Parousia? Bulgakov’s suggestion is that she has her own Parousia, related to, but independent of her Son’s. This Parousia (or these parousiai?) occurs ‘not later than the Parousia of Christ’ (Bulgakov 2002: 412); that is, before: Bulgakov seems to relate Mary’s parousiai with her appearances throughout Christian history. These parousiai point to the personal relationship Mary develops with those who turn to her, those, like St Sergii and St Serafim, who are ‘one of her race’. In these parousiai and in her pleading with her Son at the Final Judgement, she manifests the role she has achieved as ‘Spirit-bearer’:
The heart of the Mother of God, the Spirit Bearer, is pierced by the sword of hell because of her compassionate love; and her maternal intercession is effected starting with the Dread Judgment, which is the beginning, not the end of the judgment. And the ‘Mother of God’s way of sorrow’, revealed to the vision of the Russian people, continues. (Bulgakov 2002: 515)
Bulgakov’s last work, The Bride of the Lamb, left incomplete, ends with the words:
She, the Spirit-Bearer, is Spirit and Bride, manifesting in Her very being the image of the hypostatic Spirit of God.
And about Her it is said in the final words of
the New Testament:
‘And the Spirit and the Bride say, Come.
And let him that heareth say, Come!
Even so, come, Lord Jesus!’
(Bulgakov 2002: 526)
I have devoted a lot a space to Bulgakov’s meditations on the Mother of God because it seems to me that they occupy a more important place in his theology than in that of any other recent Orthodox theologian. He was nevertheless controversial, and his reflection on the Mother of God cannot be separated from his sophiology, indeed it is intimately bound up with it. Vladimir Lossky (1903–58) was one of his most determined opponents in the ‘quarrel over Sophia’, as he called it in the dossier he drew up over the controversy. His theological œuvre is much smaller than Bulgakov’s, but even so what he has to say about the Mother of God is quite slender. Nevertheless, despite his opposition to Bulgakov we shall find that they have many themes in common, woven however into a much less rich tapestry.
Many Orthodox theologians discussing Mariology mention the silence of the dogmatic tradition about Mary. Only one title can claim direct conciliar authority, and that is Θεοτόκος, ‘Birth-giver of God’, popularly in English ‘Mother of God’ (although the claim that the Council of Ephesus of 431 explicitly conferred this title has met recently with scholarly doubt—see Price (I.4) in this volume). Other titles, Παναγία, Ἄχραντος, are used in conciliar statements, but rather taken for granted, than directly affirmed. This conciliar reticence is taken as acknowledging the mystery surrounding the Mother of God, to be preserved in silence. Almost all Orthodox theologians considering Mary quote (usually in a truncated form) a sentence from St John Damascene’s chapter on Mary in his On the Orthodox Faith: ‘Whence rightly and truly we name the holy Mary Theotokos; for this name expresses the whole mystery of the economy’ (Expositio fidei 56 [Latin enumeration: III.12], lines 37–8, 1973: 135).
The succinct conciliar title, then, yields a rich crop: the ‘whole mystery of the economy’. This is the first patristic quotation in Lossky’s essay, ‘Panagia’, coming after a meditative recounting of the evidence, largely silent, of the Gospels, in which he brings out the relationship between the person of the Mother of God and the Tradition of the Church, and through this attempts ‘to see the glory of the Mother of God beneath the veil of silence of the Scriptures’ (Lossky 1974: 199). For the Damascene, the title Theotokos expresses the whole mystery of redemption, because that mystery requires that God be born of a woman; that woman, then, is truly the one to give birth to God, Theotokos. Lossky’s development of John’s quotation is somewhat different. For him, the divine economy, which enables the human to participate in the Incarnation, cannot be ‘unilateral’—‘it is not a matter of the divine will making a tabula rasa of the history of humanity’:
In this saving economy, the Wisdom of God is adapted to the fluctuations of human wills, to the different responses of men to the divine challenge. It is thus that, through the generations of the Old Testament righteous men, Wisdom ‘has built her house’: the all-pure nature of the Holy Virgin, whereby the Word of God will become connatural with us. The answer of Mary to the archangel’s annunciation … resolves the tragedy of fallen humanity. (Lossky 1974: 202)
Lossky makes more of Mary’s willing acceptance of God’s request than we find in the Damascene; he emphasizes her role as co-worker with God. (It is striking that, for all his rejection of Bulgakov’s sophiology, Lossky himself brings the Wisdom of God into his account of Mary’s role in the divine economy.) Lossky goes on to emphasize how deeply Mary belongs to her heritage of the Old Testament, and notes the way in which Orthodox liturgical texts speak of David as ‘the ancestor of God’ and Joachim and Anna as the ‘holy and righteous ancestors of God’ (Lossky 1974: 203). In common with all Orthodox theologians, Lossky deplores the Catholic dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary as separating Mary from her Jewish heritage. Lossky makes much of the Eve–Mary parallel (‘Eva–Ave’) that goes back to SS. Justin Martyr and Irenaeus; Mary can only be understood in relation to the history of humanity, and especially the history of Israel. Lossky also draws a parallel between the Holy Spirit and the Mother of God. He draws attention to the presence of the Mother of God with the disciples after the Ascension, and her presence with the Apostles at Pentecost (often, although not invariably, depicted in the icon of Pentecost): of this he says, ‘She who by the power of the Holy Spirit received the divine Person of the Son of God in her womb, now receives the Holy Spirit, sent by the Son’ (Lossky 1974: 206). Mary has a representative role in relation to the Church: ‘only the Mother of God, through whom the Word was made flesh, will be able to receive the plenitude of grace and to attain unlimited glory, by realizing in her person all the holiness of which the Church is capable’ (Lossky 1974: 207). Mary is all-holy, Panagia. In his Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, Lossky discusses what might be called the ‘person of the Church’. For him, the Church as the bride of Christ, perfected as one in the Spirit, belongs to the age to come. And he reflects:
Thus, it would seem that until the consummation of the ages … the Church will have no hypostasis of her own. … And yet, to say this would be to fail to perceive the very heart of the Church, one of her most sacred mysteries, her mystical centre, her perfection already realized in a human person fully united to God, finding herself beyond the resurrection and the judgment. This person is Mary, the Mother of God.
(Lossky 1957: 193)
Who is the Church? Lossky’s answer is: Mary, the Mother of God. This leads us on to another aspect of his Mariology, in which he draws on Palamas’ homily on the Dormition:
Just as when God wished to make an image of all beauty, and to demonstrate his power in this matter purely to angels and humans, he thus made [Mary] all beautiful, and gathering together all the ways in which he had embellished creation, he made her a common world of everything good, both visible and invisible, or rather he revealed her as uniting in herself all loveliness, divine, angelic, and human, as a nobler beauty to embellish both worlds, rooted in the earth, reaching up to heaven and beyond, through her assumption now from the tomb into heaven, uniting things below with things above, embracing the whole of creation with the wonders surrounding her. (Oration 35.10, 2015: 404, cit. Lossky 1957: 194)
Mary, the all-beautiful, unites the divine, angelic, and human realms, constituting, as Palamas says later on in the homily (also quoted by Lossky), ‘the boundary of created and uncreated nature’ (Oration 35.15, 2015: 407).
Fr Dumitru Stănilaoe (1903–93), one of the most influential Orthodox theologians of the twentieth century, treats Mary explicitly in the section of his dogmatic theology (called in English, The Experience of God: Orthodox Dogmatic Theology) concerned with Christ. The section is called ‘The Uniqueness of the Virgin Mary, the Theotokos (Mother of God)’, and yet, in its ten pages, there is little more than a rather technical discussion of Christology; the few remarks on the Mother of God hardly detach themselves from his predominantly Christological concern. However, in the final volume, concerned with eschatology, there is a lyrical account of the Mother of God in the section concerned with ‘The Communion of the Righteous’. The prayer of the saints for us is an aspect of the communion that reaches through the barrier of death, overcome in the Resurrection. ‘More united with Christ than all the saints, and therefore high above all saints and angels, is the Mother of the Lord’ (Stăniloae 2013: 89). Her divine maternity in a certain way identifies her with her Son, so that ‘her “courage” toward Him is greater than that of all the saints, and her love to us reflects Christ’s ultimate love for us’. Stăniloae continues:
In the Lord’s Mother we have in heaven a motherly heart, the heart that has thawed more than any other toward her Son. It beat and is beating upon the door of His heart for His purpose, which is our salvation, for salvation is not a matter of justice, but of love between God and human persons. This human love has become fervent, has reached its high point, by being concentrated in a motherly heart and manifesting itself through it. The incarnate God takes into account this heart of the Mother who became our Mother, because she is His Mother. She is the most precious gift that humanity has offered to God, but she is a gift through which God rewards us with his innumerable gifts … (Stăniloae 2013: 89–90)
Stăniloae goes on to quote from one of the verses sung at vespers for the day after Christmas (the Synaxis of the Mother of God):
What shall we offer you, Christ, because you have appeared on earth as a human for us? Each of the creatures made by you makes you a thank-offering: the angels a hymn; the heavens the Star; the Magi gifts; the Shepherds their wonder; the earth a cave; the desert a manger; we offer the Virgin Mother. O God before the ages, have mercy on us.
(Last sticheron, Vespers, 26 December: Menaion [December] 1993: 524)
Stăniloae goes on to elaborate on the power of the Virgin’s intercession, and the veneration that we offer her: veneration that exceeds that we offer the saints, hyperdulia (an expression unusual in Orthodox theology, more characteristic of the West).
Paul Evdokimov (1901–70), although a little older than Vladimir Lossky, can reasonably be considered after him, as most of his theological œuvre was published after Lossky’s early death in 1958. In his L’Orthodoxie (1959), Mary is treated in one of the sections on ecclesiology, ‘L’aspect mariologique de l’Église’, although there is reflection on the Mother of God in many other sections; there is a further discussion of Mary in his late essay, ‘Panagion and Panagia: The Holy Spirit and the Mother of God’ (originally published in 1970, from an incomplete draft on which he was working before his death).
The section in L’Orthodoxie begins with the quotation from John Damascene we have already encountered and follows that with a host of patristic references to the Eve–Mary parallel, ecclesiological references to the Church as Virgin Mother in parallel to Mary, and further references in which a parallel is drawn between paternity and maternity: including Cyprian’s ‘You cannot have God for your Father if you no longer have the Church for your mother’ (De Unitate, 6, 1971: 66–7). He caps this with a liturgical verse: ‘How can we not wonder at your theandric giving-birth, All-August One? For without having experience of a man, All-Spotless One, you bore in the flesh the Son without a father, him who from before the ages was begotten from the Father without a mother …’ (Dogmatikon for Saturday vespers in tone 3: Paraklitiki 1994: 251). ‘To the paternity of the Father in the divine corresponds the maternity of the Theotokos in the human, a figure of the maternal virginity of the Church’ (Evdokimov 1959: 149). Along with this goes a parallelism between the Holy Spirit and Mary—evident in the title of the essay—the All-Holy Spirit and the All-Holy Virgin, Panagion and Panagia. Evdokimov is keen to draw lessons about gender from these parallelisms—Holy Spirit and Mother of God, Mary’s virginal motherhood, and the Father’s divine fatherhood, and draws attention to the parallelism of the divine fiat of creation and Mary’s fiat that enables re-creation—although they are somewhat vitiated by his stereotypical attitudes to gender. Like most other Orthodox theologians, he lays stress on the place of silence in considering the Mother of God, remarking that ‘[t]he dogmatic precision of the subject of Mary shows in a certain silence the same mystery with the Holy Spirit. Both are relatively late and belong to nearly the same period’ (by which he means, I think, the fourth/fifth century: Evdokimov 2001: 165). He suggests a difference between ‘dogma’ and ‘dogmatic fact’, the latter ‘truth experienced liturgically’ (Evdokimov 2001: 166). In the last words of this essay, reconstructed after his death from his notes, Evdokimov declared:
It is in this sense—which itself rests upon a hidden revelation—that Mary is the mysterious icon of the Father. The iconographic canons forbid any representation of the Father, who is the Inconceivable and Indescribable One. The Theotokos receives the breath of the Spirit, and her maternity enables us to contemplate in silence the divine Paternity, the face of the Father. A Marian hymn exalts her as the human being who, as the deified new creature, fully participates in the divine being according to grace: ‘Let us the faithful sing the Glory of the universe, the door of heaven, the Virgin Mary, Flower of the human race and Theotokos, she who has become heaven and the temple of the divine.’ (Evdokimov 2001: 173)