Alexander Schmemann

3. The Age Of The Ecumenical Councils (50 pages)

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 47

Veneration of the Virgin Mary.

Since it is impossible to illustrate this development in all its complexity, let us take one example with very particular meaning for the Church: the gradual growth in the services of the veneration of the Mother of God, which plays such an important part in the liturgical life of the Church. This example is significant also because most historians of religion regard the cult of the Virgin Mary as indubitable proof of a metamorphosis within Christianity, the penetration of an ancient, almost primeval cult of the fertility forces in nature. Their main argument is that in the first centuries we see no special singling out of Mary, let alone a cult, which did not arise until the fifth century — just the period when Christianity became reconciled with the world.

Other historians, while they establish historical reasons for each of the Mariological feasts, the time it appeared, and the authors of the texts, still miss the main point: that what gives significance to the flourishing of these feasts of the Virgin is the growing strength of the Mariological theme in the content of the Church services.
Finally, the Protestants, as is well known, simply reject veneration of the Mother of God because it lacks “biblical basis.”

Yet it was precisely because of the biblical basis that this veneration arose; it is linked first of all with the Bible.
This biblical basis is the reflection of the Old Testament in the New, as I have just shown, and on the other hand, the discovery of even more profound meaning in the Old Testament in the light of the New. For example, the Feast of the Entrance of the Virgin into the Temple, which probably arose at the end of the seventh century and for which hymns written by St. Andrew of Crete have been preserved, has no formal biblical basis; the Gospel tells us nothing of any such event. Yet we need only read the liturgical texts of this feast in their original form (they have been significantly altered since then) to see the genuinely mystical insight or reflection that lay behind the feast.

If we constantly and prayerfully read Scripture, our attention is drawn continuously to new depths of meaning in it. Thus, the Temple at Jerusalem occupies an important position in both the Old Testament and the Gospel, and Christ compares Himself to this unique and sacred center of Judaism, the meeting point of all its religious life: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up . . .” He is speaking of the temple of His Body. But even from this it is clear that Christians could not help but regard the Old Testament Temple as a prefiguration of another religious meeting point, another unique and all-embracing center. The whole positive significance of the Temple was fulfilled in Christ — He was the new Temple, and this Temple is Man, his body and his soul.

 

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