Alexander Schmemann

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

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 48

We have already noted the significance of this contrast between the two temples — the Temple at Jerusalem and that of the Church “not made by hands”: the Body of Christ — for Christian Church buildings. The Christian reflection did not stop with this, however. In a time when the Church was growing in its understanding of Christ’s humanity, amid the tension of all its spiritual forces, it inevitably included in its reflection the Person from whom Christ had received His humanity, His Body. If God had chosen a Man to be His Temple in the future, then the Virgin Mary was such a temple of God in a most particular and literal sense, “for what was born from Her is holy.” Her body was a temple erected by the Old Testament itself, by all its sacredness, its expectation of salvation, its faithfulness to God, which made possible the union of God with Man, and in this sense She is the fruit of the Old Testament Temple, of that link with God, which the Temple expressed. If this is so, then reflection reaches out to the relationship between this living temple and that other one whose significance, as the only center and source of salvation and union with God, Christ came to “fulfill” by His Incarnation: “The all-pure Temple of the Savior . . . today is led into the Temple of the Lord,”[17] and in this entry the final meaning of the Temple is revealed and it in turn is transcended.

One may object that this would be a feast for an “idea” which had become encrusted with “myth.” This is both true and false. The concept is based on an undoubted historical fact, the entry of the Virgin Mary, like every Jewish girl, into the Temple at Jerusalem. True, the fact has not been documented, but it is beyond doubt, since it is self-evident: clearly in any case Mary entered the Temple and was in the Temple. While the liturgical formulation of events narrated in the Gospels is guided of course by the narrative itself, here in the divine service the historical fact is gradually surrounded with poetic or symbolic details that emphasize the significance the Church has found in it. Fundamentally this is just a theological unfolding of the Scriptures and of all the meanings inherent in them — a reflection of the realities of Christianity.

The same may be said of the other feasts of the Mother of God, which gradually developed into a whole Theotokos cycle, paralleling the liturgical cycle of John the Baptist. There was no “metamorphosis” only the development of the original experience of the Church. It is enough to read the very earliest texts of the services for the Mother of God to be convinced that veneration of her not only did not eclipse the Christocentrism of the early Church, or introduce any neopagan elements into Christianity, as certain scholars — even Christian ones — assert; but is on the contrary wholly rooted in the Church’s reflection of the image of the Savior as God and Man.

Veneration of the Mother of God quickly colored the whole Church service, and this perhaps reveals one of the most profound aspects of the Christianization of the world at that time. From those centuries when the Christian seed was only beginning to grow, and few changes for the better were outwardly apparent in morals, in society, in social and governmental ideals — when, on the contrary, a pronounced barbarization of the world might even be observed — the image of the Mother, from whom all humanity gained sonship on the Cross, an image of complete purity, meekness, love, and self-abnegation, reigns forever over this world. The Church’s experience of the Mother of God is profoundly Christian, or more accurately, it is human in a Christian way. In this experience dogmatic understanding is permeated with a sympathy utterly delicate and personal — in it attention is focused for the first time on the meaning of one’s personal life, and it penetrates into the depths of the human image and elevates it to divine radiance. The veneration of the Mother of God, the first fruit of the Church’s exploration of the dogma of Christ’s God-Manhood, is the source of the tenderness and sensitivity that Christianity introduced into human consciousness. And the world which sensed so palpably the protection of this maternal love, which could sing of it and deck it in such beauty, was a world already profoundly Christian regardless of all its sins and imperfections.

 

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Reference address : https://www.ellopos.net/elpenor/schmemann-orthodoxy-3-councils.asp?pg=48