An Exposition of the Teaching of the Orthodox Church Concerning the Mother of God (Part 2)

The Mother of God, having conceived and given birth to the God-man, became above all holy men and holy angels. According to the explanation of the blessed Gregory of Sinai, the Mother of God was the unique rational vessel into which God dwelt by His very essence. Other holy men, though they become partakers of the Divine nature by the action of the Holy Spirit in them (2 Pet. 1:4) and dwellings of the triune God (Jn. 14:23), do so in an entirely different manner than the Mother of God, who alone received God the Word for His incarnation. Such reception of God is evident to be unique, exclusive, unprecedented, inaccessible to either holy men or holy angels, belonging to the Mother of God alone. As the God-man for the tribe of saved elect took the place of Adam and became their progenitor, so the Mother of God took the place of Eve for them and became their mother. As the God-man is the King of Heaven, the King of all men and angels, so the Mother of God is the Queen of Heaven, the Queen of both men and angels.

The Mother of God was born from holy and righteous parents, Joachim and Anna, was the only fruit of their marriage, requested with many prayers and tears; was born after a prolonged childlessness of her parents, was born after being foretold to her parents by an angel, was born when her parents were already of very advanced age. The circumstances of the birth of the Mother of God are very similar to the circumstances of the birth of the holy John the Forerunner, described in the first chapter of Luke’s Gospel. The birth of John, the holy Orthodox Church sings thus: “Let us praise the Forerunner of the Lord, whom the righteous Elisabet bore from barren loins, yet not without seed. For Christ alone passed through the impassable as without seed. Barren Elisabet bore John, yet not without a husband did she bear him. But Jesus, the pure Virgin bore by the overshadowing of the Father and the Divine Spirit. Yet from the barren one appeared a prophet and preacher without seed, both Forerunner and witness.” Similar to this the holy Church thinks and confesses of the Mother of God. The barren and aged Anna bore to Joachim a daughter, but to God—a Mother, yet she bore her not without seed: she took the seed into her womb from her husband, the righteous old man Joachim. Born from holy spouses, the Virgin became a vessel chosen and consecrated by God, into which God-Word dwelt, in which this Word—Creator of all visible and invisible things—by the good pleasure of the Father and with the cooperation of the Spirit, served as seed through His creative power and became incarnate. The God-man born of Mary made the Virgin a Mother, and kept the Mother a Virgin. God and Creator of the Virgin became her Son, remaining her God and Creator; having become her Son, He became her Redeemer and Saviour. The first Adam without the participation of woman produced a woman; the Ever-Virgin without the participation of a man conceived and bore the New Adam. With all the greatness of the Mother of God, her conception and birth were accomplished according to the common law of humanity; consequently, the universal confession of the human race concerning conception in iniquity and birth in sin belongs to the Mother of God as well. The humble and gracious Mary pronounced this confession for the hearing of the whole world! Sensing the presence of the desired Saviour in her womb, she, from the action of spiritual, gracious joy, pronounced a confession in the following wondrous and remarkable words: “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour: for He has regarded the lowliness of His handmaid; for behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed” (Lk. 1:46-48). The Mother of God confesses before all mankind in the Gospel, read by all men, that the God born of her is at the same time her Saviour. If God is her Saviour, then she was conceived and born in sin according to the common law of fallen humanity. God is the Creator of both angels and men: but He is the Saviour of men alone; as for the angels who have not undergone the fall, He is their Lord, but not their Redeemer and not their Saviour. Recognition of God as a Saviour by a rational creature is at the same time a recognition by that creature of its own perdition. The Virgin Mary was conceived and born in perdition, in the fall, in the bonds of eternal death and sin, born in a state common to all the human race. Her bearing of God, the Saviour of her and of all men, bestowed upon her a greatness exceeding the greatness of sinless angels, who have not tasted spiritual death and have not needed a Saviour.

The holy parents of the Mother of God, being of advanced age and having mortified their flesh by many and prolonged ascetic struggles, did not undergo, consequently, during their conjugal union those strong passionate sensations which are inevitable for people in the bloom of youth and vigor, with a disposition of soul far removed from the devout disposition in which the righteous Joachim and Anna were. However, their union took place according to the common order of human union, the order that appeared after the fall and as a consequence of the fall. By her conception and birth the Mother of God became a partaker of original sin and the sinful poison with which the whole human race was infected in the forefathers. Born of righteous parents, the Mother of God herself conducted a most righteous life. Purity and humility were her chief virtues. She engaged constantly in meditation on God, prayer, reading and study of Holy Scripture. She was not only without mortal sins, but without any deed or word openly contrary to the Law of God, in which She was trained, which She studied and constantly studied. Despite, however, the righteousness and blamelessness of life which the Mother of God conducted before receiving with the Apostles the Holy Spirit, which brought her Christian perfection, sin and eternal death manifested their presence and dominion in Her. We see proofs of this in the Gospel. Thus, before being illumined by the Holy Spirit, her mind, like the minds of the holy Apostles, remained in darkness, and She did not understand the words of the twelve-year-old Saviour, which He spoke to her in the Temple (Lk. 2:49-50). The holy John Chrysostom, explaining the Gospel of Matthew (Mt. 12:46-49) and of John (Jn. 2:1-11), shows with complete satisfaction how the old man was revealed and acted in the Mother of God. Eternal death and sin, planted in human nature, could not but manifest themselves. Such is the precise and true teaching of the Orthodox Church concerning the Mother of God in relation to original sin and eternal death, which infected and encompassed the whole human race.

The descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Ever-Virgin was accomplished twice. The first time the Holy Spirit descended upon Her after the annunciation pronounced by the Archangel Gabriel, purified Her, pure according to human understanding, made her graced-pure, capable of receiving God-Word into herself and becoming His Mother. Her virginity was sealed by the Spirit: She, who up to that time had kept herself free from every thought and sensation of lust, became inaccessible to these thoughts and sensations. Thus it was fitting that the Virgin should be, appointed as She was to serve God in a manner incomparably more intimate than the service of the cherubim and seraphim. She was not only to conceive and bear the God-man, but to spend her whole life in the closest relations with Him. She nursed Him at her breast; in her arms He spent His infancy and childhood, with her He spent His youth until the fullness of manhood, until thirty years of age, when He revealed Himself to the world as the promised Redeemer of the world. But also during the three and a half years in which the Lord preached salvation to men, the Mother of God was very often with Him, as can be seen from the Gospel. The Holy Spirit at His first descent upon the Most Holy Virgin made Her capable of such a supreme ministry, worthy of this supreme ministry. The second time the Holy Spirit descended upon the Virgin on the day of Pentecost, when He descended upon the holy Apostles, with whom the Mother of God remained inseparably after the Ascension of the Lord into heaven (Acts 1:14). Then the Holy Spirit destroyed in Her the dominion of eternal death and original sin, raised Her to the high degree of Christian perfection, made Her a new person according to the image of the Lord Jesus Christ. The Lord, having trampled down death by death and having raised in Himself and with Himself the human race, first of all granted a resurrection of the soul to His most pure Mother and to His Apostles on the day of Pentecost. This resurrection of the soul, which the holy John the Theologian calls the first resurrection (from the first death, from death by sin, over which the second death, that is, eternal perdition, no longer has power (Rev. 20:6)). To some it may seem incomprehensible why at the first descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Virgin the destruction of eternal death in her was not accomplished. We answer: this destruction of eternal death was the fruit of redemption: before redemption was accomplished, it could not take place. Thus also the holy Apostles, though they received before their renewal various gracious gifts, such as healing sicknesses, casting out demons, and raising the dead, but the destruction of eternal death, the transition from the old man to the new, from a soulish state to a spiritual state was accomplished for them on the day of Pentecost, was the consequence of redemption (Jn. 7:39).

From all that has been said above, the absurdity of two opposite teachings of the West is evident, of which the teaching of the Papists attributes to the Mother of God a conception outside original sin, similar to the conception of the Saviour, while the teaching of the Protestants does not recognize the Virgin as Ever-Virgin. Truth is devoid of all exaggerations and diminishments: it gives to everything its proper measure and its proper place.

One must not think that the dogma of the conception of the Mother of God outside original sin (immaculata conceptio) is a recent novelty among the Latins. At present the dogma has only been officially accepted, proclaimed by the Pope. Bergier, a writer of the eighteenth century, says: “According to the general belief of Catholics (Papists, Latins), Mary is without any sin. By the word conception immaculee (immaculate conception) we explained that, although the Church has not formally decided that Mary was without original sin, yet this is a belief founded on Holy Scripture and on constant (Church) Tradition.” In the article immaculee conception Bergier pronounces the same teaching even more decisively. He says: “According to the general opinion of Catholic theologians, the most holy Virgin Mary, Mother of God, was preserved from original sin when She was conceived in the womb of her mother. This belief is founded on the opinions of the holy Fathers, most worthy of respect.” Which Fathers does the Latin writer bring forward? Only Latin ones, already belonging to the West which had fallen away from the East. He cites the Council of Trent, which determined in the fifth session that all children of Adam are born defiled with original sin, but that this determination does not extend to the Holy Virgin; cites the Council of Basel in 1439, the Council of Avignon in 1457, which recognized this teaching as inerrant and belonging to the Church. The determination of the Council of Basel was accepted by the University of Paris, as a result of which the theological faculty of the university made in 1497 a determination by which no one could be admitted to the degree of doctor unless he previously obliged himself by oath to confess the accepted dogma about the Mother of God. These facts, while not at all confirming the teaching of the Papists for the sons of the Orthodox Church, show only that the heretical teaching about the Mother of God crept in, along with many others, into the Western Church more than four centuries before our time. Bergier in his articles to confirm the new dogma cites two writers belonging to the ancient universal Church, Origen and the blessed Augustine, having said, however, not a word about the new dogma. Origen in the sixth homily on the Evangelist Luke says that the expression “full of grace” in Scripture is used only once with relation to one Mary. But this does not at all touch upon the new dogma of the Papists; this is recognized by the whole Church. The grace of God, as we have set forth and explained above, received by the Ever-Virgin, incomparably surpasses both in quality and in abundance the grace which other holy men have been granted and which the holy angels possess. The blessed Augustine (Liber de Natura et Gratia) says: “We know that she (the Mother of God) received abundant grace to overcome sin in all its forms.” And these very words do not at all confirm the dogma of the Papists! They contradict it: only one who has sin living and acting within himself has need and is capable of receiving abundant gracious power to overcome sin. The holy Orthodox Church, as was set forth above, has always confessed and confesses that the Holy Spirit descended upon the Virgin pure, descended upon an unwedded bride—thus the Church names the Mother of God—made the pure Most Pure, made her pure by nature Most Pure beyond nature, graced-pure—full of grace, having received for her nourishment and enjoyment the grace of the Holy Spirit. The abundant tasting of Divine grace alienated the Virgin from carnal pleasure, inspired in her a complete and decisive aversion to it. Such the rational temple of God should be, the spiritual heaven, the throne of God, His holy of holies. A false thought ordinarily gives birth to a chain of other false thoughts. The Papists, having recognized the Mother of God as free from original sin, recognized her as free from all sin, entirely sinless, consequently, as needing neither redemption nor a Redeemer. The gracious Ever-Virgin herself, the Mother of God, closes the mouths of the blind-minded heretics and fanatics, confessing the God born of her as her Saviour. The Papists, in attributing sinlessness to the Mother of God, thereby show their distrust of the almightiness of God. But the Orthodox Church glorifies the omnipotence and majesty of God, who made her who was conceived and born in sin incomparably higher than the cherubim and incomparably more glorious than the seraphim, who have never known sin and are constant in holiness. “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour”, pronounced the gracious Virgin in answer to Elizabeth, when Elizabeth, at the prompting of the Holy Spirit, proclaimed in a loud voice that the Ever-Virgin is the Mother of God (Lk. 1:43). The Most Holy Mary by her words not only stops the mouths of the Papists, who rob God for her of the significance of Saviour—stops the mouths of the Protestants, who attribute her spirit’s delight not in God but in carnal lust. In contrast to the dogma of the Papists, the Protestants, sworn enemies of New Testament virginity, assert that the holiest vessel and temple of God, the Mother of God, after giving birth to the God-man, violated her virginity, became a vessel of human lust, entered into relations with Joseph as a wife, and had other children. A terrible thought; a thought at once bestial and demonic; a thought most blasphemous! It could be born only in the depths of profound depravity! Only a desperate and rejected adulterer can pronounce it and continue to pronounce it! Only those who have so fallen away from the image and likeness of God to the likeness of beasts, that they can have and only have a conception of human nature solely in its debased, beast-like state, can receive and assimilate it. To confirm this monstrous thought, the ignorant and wretched blasphemers appeal to the Gospel.

Luther, who cast off monasticism and took a nun who had cast off monasticism as his concubine—the union of Luther with Catherine von Bora can be understood in no other way, as there is no evidence that the vows of virginity which they had given to God were returned to them—cries out against Christian virginity. All Protestants cry out against it together with Luther. They call virginity unnatural, contrary to the will, the blessing, the commandment of God, who after creating the first two humans immediately said to them: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” (Gen. 1:28). The Protestants can be answered with the words of the Saviour, spoken by Him to the Sadducees: “You are in error, not knowing the Scriptures nor the power of God” (Mt. 22:29). The Protestants, citing the words given above, did not notice that immediately after them the book of Genesis describes the virginity of the first two humans, in which they remained before the fall, not even understanding their nakedness, that they understood this nakedness and felt shame, a sign of the desire that appeared after the fall, and that the present relations of woman to man and her sufferings in childbearing are pronounced as a penalty for the transgression of God’s commandment (Gen. 1, Gen. 2, Gen. 3). The Orthodox Church recognizes virginity as natural to humanity, recognizing as human nature properly understood that nature in which man was created. The state of the fall in which all humanity now finds itself is an unnatural state, subnormal, contrary to nature. But since all humanity is encompassed by the disease of the fall, this state of universal disease can be called natural to fallen humanity. Thus the properties of disease are natural to the state of disease; they are unnatural to the state of health. In this case—we agree—virginity is already unnatural to humanity. For this reason there were very, very few virgins among the righteous of the Old Testament: both the patriarchs and most of the prophets had to submit to the yoke of marriage. Our Lord Jesus Christ, having raised up fallen human nature, restored virginity as well. He Himself was, according to His humanity, a most holy virgin; His Mother was a gracious, Most Pure Virgin. Virginity, natural to human nature in its primordial state, is unnatural to fallen nature, has been restored as a gift to nature renewed by the Saviour. “The gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord”, which is everything that constitutes our eternal salvation, our dignity, our perfection, which all is called by the common name “eternal life” (Rom. 6:23). And New Testament virginity is a gift of God, granted by the Lord, as the Lord Himself said of virginity: “Not all can accept this word, but only those to whom it is given” (Mt. 19:11). The gift of godliness (that is, the moral state most resembling that which our Lord Jesus Christ manifested) is given to those who desire it with all their heart and ask the Lord for it with the warmest prayers. Virginity is unnatural to fallen humanity, and therefore it cannot be obtained by personal efforts alone: personal efforts subdue the flesh, but true virginity is a gift of God as a result of constant, diligent, and often very prolonged prayer. True virginity consists not merely in bodily purity; but primarily it consists in the alienation of the mind from lustful thoughts and fantasies. The mind is not capable by itself of accomplishing renunciation of sin if divine power does not overshadow it. The struggle of the mind against sin constitutes that greatest labor in which the ascetic sheds many bitter tears, utters many deep and heavy sighs, imploring help and intercession from above. When the heart tastes spiritual sweetness, only then can it be torn from the enjoyment of carnal lust; without enjoyment it cannot be. “Love is repelled by love, and fire is extinguished by immaterial fire”, said the holy John of the Ladder. The multitude of virgins and maidens in the New Testament Church is beyond number by the mercy and compassion of our Saviour; but they came to the state of virginity by proving through constant, difficult, and prolonged struggle against the desires of the flesh their sincere desire for virginity. This can be seen from the lives of the great ascetic Anthony, Pachomius the Great, Symeon the Fool for Christ and many other greatest saints of God. But the Mother of God did not taste nor know the struggle with carnal desires: before desire could even act in her, the Holy Spirit descended upon her, sealed her purity, granted her gracious purity, granted her spiritual enjoyment to which her heart clung and from which it was never torn away. The holy Church calls the Mother of God an animate book which the Spirit sealed.

The Protestants find the foundation for their teaching in the Gospel. The Evangelist Matthew, they suppose, in narrating the relations of the Mother of God and Joseph, her betrothed, speaks of Joseph that he did not lie with the Virgin only until she bore the God-man, and this serves as an indication of union afterward. The exact words of the Evangelist, which the Protestants bring forward to support their opinion, are the following: “And” (Joseph) “did not know her” (Mary) “until she bore her firstborn Son” (Mt. 1:25). The blasphemers base their conclusion on the word “until”, which, in their opinion, expresses temporary abstinence from union and the thought of union that followed after bearing the firstborn, also on the word “firstborn”, which suggests the thought of further childbearing: according to the properties of the Russian language the above Gospel verse can be translated with complete accuracy thus: “Joseph did not know her, and she bore her firstborn Son.” It is evident that the words “Joseph did not know her” refer to the entire time of the Mother of God’s stay in Joseph’s house.

If one examines carefully the narrative of the Evangelist Matthew concerning the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ (Mt. 1:18-25), it becomes immediately evident that the Evangelist took all care to show clearly and accurately the birth of the God-man from a Virgin, without male seed. For this reason the Evangelist explains that the Virgin, betrothed to a man, having not known a man, was found to have in her womb that which is of the Holy Spirit; for this reason the Evangelist brings the testimony of the angel, who appeared to Joseph in a dream and assured him that the fruit in the Virgin’s womb is from the Holy Spirit; for this reason the Evangelist brings the prophet who foretold that the Virgin shall conceive and the Virgin shall bear a Son, the Saviour of the world; for this reason, speaking already of the very birth of the God-man, the Evangelist shows that Mary bore Him, being a Virgin, as also she conceived, being a Virgin. Circumstances concerning the person of the Mother of God herself and not constituting the principal subject which was described by the Evangelist, were left by him without clear explanation. The narrative of the Evangelist Luke concerning the birth of Christ has the same character. Passing over the perplexity of Joseph, the appearance to him of an angel in a dream, the holy Luke tells of the coming of the Archangel Gabriel to the Mother of God with the most joyful annunciation from God concerning her conception and bearing of the Son of God, recounts that Elizabeth, by the action of the Holy Spirit, recognized in Mary the Mother of God. The holy Luke, as also Matthew, calls Mary a Virgin betrothed to a man (Lk. 1:27), and the God-man born of her—her Son, her Firstborn (Lk. 2:7). The holy Luke did not make a similar exposition of circumstances concerning the Virgin herself; only indirectly from his narrative does it appear, as was said above, that the Virgin was without pain in giving birth to the God-man. And so in vain do the Protestants seek support for their blasphemy in the Gospel!