Does the Praise of Mary Infringe on the Worship Due to God Alone?
Fr. John Meyendorff
Feast of the Entrance of the Theotokos into the TempleAnno Domini 2019, November 21
Anno Domini 2019, November 21
Thus the Mother of God is “the source and root of the race of liberty” (Hom. 14); her body – temple of God – is “the medicine which saves our race” (Hom. 37); “alone, placing herself between God and the whole human race, she made of God a son of man and transformed men into sons of God” (Hom. 37; cf. Hom. 53); “the Virgin Mother alone dwells on the frontier between created and uncreated natures, and those who know God recognize also in her the habitation of the infinite” (Hom. 14; cf. Hom. 53; Hom. 37); it is from her that “the Saints receive all their sanctity” (Hom. 37): “no one can come to God except through her … for it is only through her mediation that He has come to us, that He appeared on earth and dwelt among men” (Hom. 37); being thus at the center of the story of salvation the Virgin is “the cause of events before her time, the leader in the sequence of events thereafter, and the distributor of eternal blessings; she is the thought of the Prophets, the chief of the Apostles, the prop of the Martyrs, and the foundation of the Doctors … she is the summit of the achievement of all that is holy” (Hom. 53); “all divinely inspired Scripture was written for the sake of the Virgin who begat God” (Hom. 57). She enjoyed the particular privilege of being the first to see the risen Jesus (Hom. 18). The temple at Jerusalem was the “type” of Mary, for she is the true “place of God” (Hom. 53), the true throne of the Lord, “for there where the King sits, there is His throne” (Hom. 53); she is the receptacle of the treasure which God granted to men (Hom. 53), the tongs which the Seraphim used to take up the live coal which touched the mouth of the prophet Isaiah, prefiguring the Incarnation (Hom. 57). These epithets applied to Mary, for all their rhetorical and lyrical quality, all refer to her part in the Incarnation; therefore they do not infringe on the worship due to God alone, but rather bear witness to an extremely Christocentric form of piety and conception of history; worship of the Mother is indeed addressed to the God-Man whom she bore. It is only when one considers that worship outside the precise concept of divine Maternity that one strays beyond the biblical and traditional domain.
~Fr. John Meyendorff,
A Study of Gregory Palamas
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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