Veneration of the Mother of God according to the mind of the Holy Orthodox Church

The most characteristic feature of church piety, in contrast to non-church piety, that is, Protestant or sectarian, is undoubtedly the veneration of the Mother of God. In Orthodox worship, with all the richness and diversity of its composition, it is hardly possible to indicate any rite, even the shortest and most private, in which there would not be an appeal to the Mother of God, either with glorification of Her, or with prayer for help and intercession, or with thanksgiving for such intercession and help. The veneration of the Mother of God undoubtedly has a solid basis in the tradition of the Ancient Universal Church. It is enough to remember that it was preserved in societies that separated from the Church during the period of the Ecumenical Councils, moreover, in such societies that, it would seem, had no particular interest in preserving this veneration, for example, the Nestorians, Monophysites and the like. Of course, there we see only the beginnings or, rather, the remnants of the universal veneration of the Mother of God, which did not receive full development due to the very logic of these heresies. But it is even more conclusive that they were preserved despite this logic. True to its primordial tradition, the Orthodox Church does not seem to find words to adequately glorify the Mother of God, and knows no boundaries for Her glorification. For our Church, the Mother of God is “the highest of all creatures of heaven and earth,” “more honorable than the Cherubim and more glorious than the Seraphim.” Accordingly, the intercession of the Virgin Mary, in its significance and power, stands out from a number of other intercessions. We sing: “Do not entrust me to human intercession (and such is the intercession of all saints), but intercede and have mercy.” In the service for the Dormition of the Mother of God (where the glorification of the Mother of God reaches, one might say, its apogee) it is directly said: “Your glory is divine,” that is, befitting God, characteristic only of God. I. The basis for such an unlimited exaltation of the Mother of God for our Church is not only the, so to speak, external, objective service of the Mother of God to the salvation of the human race, not only the fact that the Virgin Mary became the Mother according to the flesh of the Son of God. This extraordinary service of the Mother of God corresponded to Her inner dignity, Her moral perfection, the highest degree, the limit of holiness that is only accessible to a human being under the influence of God’s grace. This, I think, is the inner meaning of the aspiration of the church teaching about the ever-virginity of the Mother of God. Virginity at the birth of the Infant of God was a gift from God. In her later life, the Virgin Mary made this gift of God her personal feat and in this way, with the assistance of God’s grace, she achieved the highest perfection, including Herself in that bright host of God’s special chosen ones, which are spoken of in the 14th chapter of the Apocalypse. The spectator sees 144 thousand chosen ones surrounding the Lamb and following Him, “Wherever He goes” (v. 4); they are the firstborn of God and the Lamb; they are “without blemish before the Throne of God” (v. 5). “These are those who have not been defiled with their wives; they are already virgins.” Of course, what is meant here is not physical virginity in itself. The devil is not at all subject to carnal falls, but this does not make him a saint. What is meant here is the special integrity of the soul, completely attached to the Lord, so much so that it does not allow any desire, any attachment to come between the soul and its beloved Lord. Such a soul lives entirely and always with the Lord and for Him. Naturally, such a soul becomes worthy and capable of perceiving special revelations of God, inaccessible to others: “... no one could learn the song that 144 thousand chosen ones sang” (v. 3). Another conclusion for souls so inclined: “...if you abide in Me, My words will abide in you; If you want it, ask, and it will be done for you” (John 15:7). That is, the teaching about the ever-virginity of the Mother of God not only reveals to us the path by which She ascended to the heights of perfect holiness, but also provides justification for our faith in the special power of the prayers of the Mother of God. It would be too human to think that this power depends on carnal kinship. Even for people, such a motive is not always justified. Undoubtedly, the first place here should be, so to speak, the kinship of souls: the complete, undivided devotion of the Mother of God to Her Heavenly Son as God and the Organizer of the Kingdom of God, Her complete unification of Her destiny with the destinies of this Kingdom. As abiding in the Son and preserving His eternal verbs in Herself, the Mother of God has the boldness to ask the Son and receives what she asks. II. The doctrine of the ever-virginity of the Mother of God is not accepted by everyone. Many even from those non-church members who believe with us in the seedless birth of the Son of God from the Virgin object to it. At the same time, they usually refer to the mention in the Gospels of the brothers and sisters of the Lord Jesus and hasten to interpret these references in the sense that here we are not talking about the half-brothers and sisters of the Lord, that is, not about the children of Joseph from his other wife, but about the children of the Mother of God. This means that, having once become the Mother of the Incarnate Son of God, the Virgin Mary then led an ordinary family life and even had children from Joseph. In this completely unacceptable and even blasphemous thought for the Orthodox consciousness, objectors do not see anything incongruous. On the contrary, in their opinion, this removal of the Mother of God into the crowd of ordinary people emphasizes the entire exclusivity and uniqueness of the personality of the God-Man Himself and the fact that He is and remains the only Accomplisher of our salvation. And besides, God’s establishment and blessing of family life against monastic hobbies are once again confirmed. Even from the lips of one spiritual representative of Orthodox theological science (now long deceased), I had to hear, although not directly negative, but rather unstable, a judgment about the ever-virginity of the Mother of God. According to him, one thing is essential and important for our faith - that the Lord was born in the flesh from the Virgin Mary, and whether She was an Ever-Virgin or later became a married woman and gave birth to children is more or less indifferent. The denial of ever-virginity does not seem to affect our faith. Such reasoning reminds me of a story about the Finns. It seems that in some places in Finland, believers refuse to consider Great Friday a day of fasting and mourning and spend it as the most joyful holiday: in feasts, dancing, and so on. “Christ’s death brought us freedom from curse and death. Why should we cry? If anything, one cannot deny these reasonings their logical consistency. But we must not forget that in the Kingdom of God the moral law is the same immutable and all-determining law as the logical laws in our thinking. Therefore, the moral inconsistency of any human thoughts about the Kingdom of God is no less an undoubted sign of their falsity than logical inconsistency. This criterion immediately allows us to see that our conscience is not mistaken in warning us against the reasoning just given. Despite their outward logical fidelity to dogma, they conceal within themselves a fundamental perversion of Christianity, crude egoism, thinking only about benefits and indifferent to the price at which this benefit is acquired. The same must be said about the reasoning regarding the uselessness or indifference for faith of the ever-virginity of the Mother of God. First of all, the divine establishment of marriage is so undoubted for the church consciousness that it does not need new confirmation by the example of the Mother of God. Meanwhile, this divine establishment does not at all change the nature of marriage as a temporary institution, the significance of which is limited only by the limits of present earthly life. In the “life of the next century,” according to the Savior, “they neither marry nor commit violence, but are like the angels of God in heaven” (Matthew 22:30). As the completion of everything, this future life (or, in other words, the Kingdom of God) should serve as the last and highest goal of a person’s aspirations, subordinating all earthly goals to itself. Therefore, there are inevitably, in particular, cases where serving the Kingdom of God may require that a person sacrifice his marriage life for his sake. The Apostle Paul very persistently taught that marriage is permissible for everyone. Sometimes he even considered marriage more useful or saving than celibacy (for example, for young widows [see: 1 Tim. 5:14]). But for himself and precisely for the sake of his apostolic ministry, “so as not to put any obstacle to the gospel of Christ” (1 Cor. 9, 12), he chose a celibate life. For the sake of the same service to the Kingdom of God, the Forerunner was celibate. All the more natural is such a sacrifice on the part of the Virgin Mary, called to a ministry that is absolutely exceptional in its height and grace. After the Virgin Mary had already accepted this ministry and became the Mother of the Son of God according to the flesh, married life for Her was not only psychologically unnatural, but also morally prohibited. In fact, our Church very persistently requires that parish clergy be married before ordination. However, after ordination, marriage becomes a crime for the clergyman, leading to defrocking. Obviously, in the first case, a person ascends from the lowest to the highest and does not commit any violation in moral progress. In the second, he, “laying his hand on the forehead 1,” took upon himself the service of the Kingdom of God, “looks back,” and turns to the organization of his earthly affairs. He “left his first love” (Rev. 2:4) and therefore “was not guided into the Kingdom of God” (Luke 9:62). How many times greater would the “fall” of the Virgin Mary be if, after everything that had happened to Her, She had turned into an ordinary married woman. After all, she was not only chosen to be the Mother of the Lord, but also voluntarily accepted such a service (“Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be unto me according to thy word” [Luke 1:38]). As for the Gospel references to the brothers and sisters of Jesus (who, by the way, are not called children of the Virgin Mary anywhere in the Gospels), the key to understanding these references is given by the story of the holy Evangelist John about how the Lord, hanging on the Cross, entrusted him, John, with His Mother, and him with Her. The Lord would have no reason at such an hour to divert His attention to concerns about His Mother if He were not Her Only Son and if Her relationship with Him did not fill Her entire soul without a trace. With the death of such a Son, the Mother of God lost not only Him, but also the very meaning of Her life. That is why She needed special care and that is why she was entrusted to John, also a virgin (it is not for nothing that this name was approved in the Church for almost one of them), that is, who also completely gave up his soul to the Lord. If Mary had other children, firstly, Her attitude towards Her Firstborn would have been different, and She would not have remained lonely and homeless with the death of the Firstborn: Her children would have been Her natural caregivers. Yes, it would even be inappropriate for John to tear the mother away from the children and take her “into his own.” Only the Ever-Virgin, “exceeding the purity of the Angels,” as our Church sings, needed the care of Her Divine Firstborn and could be the subject of this care even at the hour when “all was already accomplished” (John 19:28). Catholics share with us a particularly reverent faith in the prayers of the Mother of God and surround the Virgin Mary with no less glorification, but they find that our existing such exceptional exaltation of the Mother of God does not find sufficient grounds for itself in Orthodox teaching. How can one apply to the Mother of God the names “Most Holy, Most Pure, Most Immaculate” and similar ones, how can one consider Her to be “exceeding the purity of the Angels”, assimilate to Her even “Godly glory”, and at the same time think that the Virgin Mary, by Her birth, shares with all of us, sinners, all the consequences of our origin from Adam? Catholics think to fill this deficiency with their doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. In view of the completely exclusive purpose of the Virgin Mary, She is removed from the ordinary offspring of Adam and becomes a kind of new being, higher than man - as if a new creation of God, created specifically to be the Mother of the incarnate Son of God. That is why the Virgin Mary surpasses all creation both in holiness and purity, and in glory. We are not concerned here with an analysis of this Catholic teaching. Let us confine ourselves to the observation that this teaching in its final conclusions shakes the fundamental dogma of faith about the Economy of our salvation through the true incarnation of the Son of God - it shakes, firstly, because it threatens to dissolve the unity of nature between us and the God-Man, and on this unity the entire Economy stands; secondly, an exception was made for the Virgin Mary from the general law: She receives purity as a property of Her nature, and not as a gift of grace, which presupposes the participation of her free will, as a moral feat on her part. If such, albeit the only, exception turned out to be possible, if in general integrity can be obtained apart from arbitrariness, then the question arises: why not extend this exception to all the descendants of Adam? But then, was the incarnation of the Word of God absolutely necessary for our salvation? Apart from the dogmatic danger of Catholic teaching, it does not affirm or justify the glory given to Our Lady in the Church, but rather limits this glory and warns against excess. Innate, involuntary purity, like any natural perfection, in itself has no moral value, and most importantly, it is the perfection and purity of the creature. The higher such integrity is and the greater the surprise and admiration it evokes in us, the greater the danger of going beyond the proper limit and worshiping the creature instead of the Creator. For example, the glory of the Son of God and in the thoughts of Arius infinitely surpassed the glory of all creatures. But, considering the Son of God a creature. Arius, of course, could not call His glory “beautiful” even in some conventional sense, so as not to cross the established limit, or at least not to give others a reason for such a transition. Undoubtedly, the same fears, and even to an even greater extent, would have been experienced by the Church during the glorification of the Mother of God, if the Virgin Mary had risen above the human race with Her purity by nature. Reproaches against polytheism, in particular that the pagan cult of the Mother Goddess is being revived in the veneration of the Mother of God, directed at Catholicism by Protestants and freethinkers, will probably turn out to be not as far from the truth as Catholics would like it to be. III. The Orthodox Church does not accept the Catholic fabrication about the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary, and if it calls Her conception immaculate, it is by no means in a special, but in a relative sense, in which any other birth from pious parents through their prayers and the blessing of God can be called - a birth in which the dominance of carnal lust is almost eliminated. Our Church, faithful to the Word of God and universal tradition, seeks the basis for the glorification of the Mother of God not at the beginning of the earthly life of the Mother of God, not in Her conception, but, on the contrary, in Her Dormition, at the end of her earthly career, when all Christian ascetics in general, “who have finished their course and kept the faith,” expect for themselves a “crown of righteousness” from the righteous Judge (2 Tim. 4:7-8). With her “behold the servant of the Lord,” having expressed her will to accept the service of God as the virgin Mother of the Son of God, the Virgin Mary remained faithful to this service until her last breath and, through the feat of ever-virginity (the spiritual content of which was explained above), reached, with the assistance of the grace of God, the extreme limit of holiness accessible to man and created beings in general. This arbitrarily achieved holiness made the Virgin Mary both worthy and capable of receiving that exceptional “crown of righteousness” that the Judge-Son awarded Her and which gives Her, even after death, to continue serving as the Mother of God and “to save Her inheritance forever.” We are talking about the ascension, or taking, of the Mother of God into Heaven with her body, which serves as the theme of the Orthodox Church service for the Assumption, especially the so-called rite of burial of the Mother of God (under August 17, church style). Translated into specific language, ascension means that after Her bodily death, the Mother of God not only entered the life of the next century with an immortal soul, but also the flesh of the Mother of God, having become like the flesh of the Risen Lord Jesus Christ, has already experienced that change from corruption to incorruption, which awaits other people only after the general Resurrection. It is sown, says the Apostle, “in corruption, and raised in incorruption; sown in humiliation, raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in strength; the spiritual body is sown, the spiritual body is raised” (1 Cor. 15:42-44). This is the recreation of fallen human nature - the goal and fruit of the Coming of the Son of God into the world, His suffering, death and Resurrection. In the Mother of God, the Church sees “the Head of mental creation (re-creation)” (Akathist to the Most Holy Theotokos), that is, the beginning of the spiritual re-creation of humanity, as if the first case or example of such re-creation. In other words, in the Mother of God the most longed-for aspirations of Christianity have actually found their first fulfillment. Her example is the guarantee of our resurrection and re-creation. This is the glory of the Mother of God and this is why it is so joyful for believing souls to always mentally contemplate and sing of this glory. Undoubtedly, this glory is many times greater than the glory that Catholics want to give to Our Lady with their teaching about the Immaculate Conception. Let us not forget that the reconstruction of human nature is combined with its deification. The Lord Jesus Christ is called this: “carnal divine perception” (prayer before Communion 2), that is, the human nature He assumed with soul and flesh. Moreover, not only the own human nature of the God-Man is deified: all who are one with Christ will also be partakers of deification in soul and body. For example, in the canon, at Matins on Maundy Thursday, the Lord is represented as saying the following words to the disciples: in the next century, “as God will be with you, O gods,” (4th Canto, Troparion 3). This means that our Church does not exaggerate at all, but, on the contrary, very accurately characterizes the glory of the Mother of God when, in the service of the Dormition, she sings: “Thy glory is divine.” The doctrine of glorifying the bodily nature of the Mother of God after Her Dormition seems to many to be unimportant for faith, like the doctrine of ever-virginity. I remember that the defenders of rapprochement with the Old Catholics called this teaching a later tradition, not related to the teaching of the Undivided Church and therefore unnecessary for the Old Catholics. Let us assume that the details of the poetic disclosure of this topic may belong to a later time. But the topic itself is so closely connected with the undoubtedly universal extreme veneration of the Mother of God and is so necessary for understanding this veneration that the very doctrine of the ascension of the Mother of God has undoubted universal roots. Metropolitan Sergius September 8 (21), 1932 Ralo (Church Slav.) – plow, plow. – Note. ed. Follow-up to Holy Communion, prayer of St. Simeon Metaphrastus, 3rd. – Note. ed. You might be interested in: