Averil Cameron

The Early Cult of the Virgin

From “Mother of God; Representations of the Virgin in Byzantine Art”.

Edited by Maria Vassilaki.

First Part

T IS BOTH difficult and fascinating to attempt to trace the development in

Christian consciousness of the figure of Mary, the mother of Jesus. Her place
in the history of Christianity has been studied by countless theologians,
historians and art historians, and she has been and is the subject of devotion
and veneration to millions of the faithful all over the world. Mariology -the
study of Mary- is a recognized field of study, not only among Roman Catholics,
with its own very numerous publications, including journals, and its own
centers of research(1). This exhibition focuses on one particular aspect, the
figure of Mary as she appears as the Mother of God in Eastern Orthodox art,
but the history of Mary in the early period of Christianity, and indeed for many
centuries thereafter, is a shared one, not divisible between a Western and an
Eastern tradition. These were the formative centuries for the faith, and the
figure of Mary the mother of Jesus very quickly came to be seen as occupying
a pivotal position in the Christian understanding of the Incarnation of Christ.
As the faith spread and as it underwent critical stages of development, so also
did Christian understanding of Mary deepen and develop. Moreover, when
Christianity emerged as a major and public religion when it received imperial
support in the fourth century, both the nature of the faith and the role of Mary
were influenced by, just as they in turn influenced, the character of Late
Antique society and culture. While the most prominent doctrinal issues of
these centuries centered on problems of Christology, the figure of Mary was in
some ways also a touchstone for other developments. She attracted intense
interest and popular devotion, and pre-iconoclastic images of the Virgin and
Child greatly outnumber surviving or known images of Christ alone (2). It is
the purpose of this contribution to trace the stages by which this history took
shape.
n important development in the first category was to trace Mary’s descent
from the line of David, even though this is not made explicit in the Gospel
accounts (6). This provided the essential link for the lineage of Jesus between
the Old and the New Testament. In the second century, Justin Martyr and
Irenaeus of Lyons developed the concept of Mary as the second Eve, who
played a role in relation to Christ, the second Adam, parallel to that of the first
Eve in relation to the first Adam, and whose virtue would cancel out the
transgression of the first woman.(7) A passage in the latter's Demonstration
of the Apostolic Preaching encapsulates the several themes contained in this
comparison: “Adam had to be recapitulated in Christ, so that death might be
swallowed up in immortality, and Eve in Mary, so that the Virgin, having
become another virgin’s advocate, might destroy and abolish one virgin’s
disobedience by the obedience of another virgin”. Here we already find the
themes of Mary's crucial role in the Divine Economy (recapitulation), her
advocacy or mediation, her obedience, and her virginity. The emphasized
disobedience of Eve, and Mary's contrasting simplicity, obedience and virginity,
were themes pursued in detail by many later Fathers, with corresponding
implications for their views on women, sexuality and marriage.(8) Other
attempts to find Old and New Testament pointers to the role of Mary also
continued in later exegesis: Mary’s virginity found an Old Testament
foreshadowing in the reference in the Song of Songs to a hortus inclusus, ‘an
enclosed garden’,(9) and she was seen as the woman clothed with the sun in
the Book of Revelation.(10) In the second and third centuries there was still
as yet no clear doctrine about Mary, but Clement of Alexandria already likened
her in her purity, her love and her motherhood to the Church itself,(11) and
Origen too emphasized her virginity, her motherhood and her holiness; for
him, following Ignatios of Antioch, her betrothal and marriage to Joseph were
God's way of protecting her virginity from the world.(12) In contrast, while
accepting that Jesus’ descent from the line of David came through his mother,
Tertullian did not accept that Mary remained a virgin and has earned the
disapproval of Catholic scholars for seeming to be critical towards her.(13)
Nevertheless, even Tertullian accepted the virgin birth of Christ, and these
early testimonies in general, even without going into great detail, lay stress on
the mystery of Mary's status as the virgin mother of Christ, and on her
obedience to God's planned role for her in the salvation of the world. A
different type of writing altogether, which was to become extremely important
for later generations, was the apocryphal text known as the Protevangelium of
James, also of the second century. This expanded the bare details offered by
the Gospels into a charming narrative of Mary's own birth, infancy and
childhood, in which she too, like her Son, was marked out from before her
birth by God for her divine destiny.(14) This belongs within a wider group of
infancy narratives and stories of Mary's early life, and already contains many
of the features which were later to become so well known in visual art, and
especially in the Byzantine cycles of the life of the Virgin. Her parents are
named as Joachim and Anne, and the birth as a divinely sent answer to their
prayers for a child; Anne receives a visitation from an angel who tells her that
she will conceive. Anne vows her child to God, and the baby is born, and takes
her first steps at only six months old. Anne sings a song of joy and, like many
parents in similar circumstances in later saints’ lives, she and Joachim present
her at a young age to be brought up in a holy place, in their case in the Jewish
temple, where she is marked out by the priests as the subject of prophecy
and is fed by angels. A husband, Joseph, is found for her at the appropriate
time of puberty when she must leave the temple, but this is in fact a way of
guarding her virginity, which is later, after Christ's birth, attested by the
midwife and her assistant Salome, who appear in so many Byzantine Nativity
depictions. The individual elements from which this story is constructed are
clearly recognizable, though little is known of its composition or early
circulation. One of its chief concerns was certainly to underline the theme of
Mary’s virginity. Nevertheless it also provided an imaginative scenario for the
background and childhood of the Virgin which complemented the laconic
statements in the canonical Gospels and which was to have tremendous
appeal to subsequent generations.
The date and origins of the first Christian art, especially the art of the
catacombs, remain highly controversial, but it seems that scenes of Jesus and
Mary in the Roman catacombs did not appear before the late third or fourth
century, and even then they are few in number.(15) When Mary does appear it
is typically in scenes of the Annunciation or the Adoration of the Magi, which
also feature, though here in Roman imperial style, in the surviving fifth-
century mosaics in the Roman church of Santa Maria Maggiore.(16) It took
the major strides in Christian church building, which followed the support of
the Church by Constantine and his successors in the fourth century, before
Christian schemes of decoration developed, and even then depictions of the
Virgin were extremely slow to become established. As a female figure of
Christian devotion one might say that she was outranked by Thekla, the
virginal heroine of the late second-century Acts of Paul and Thekla, whose
important shrine at Meryemlik, near Silifke in Isauria was visited by the
pilgrim Egeria in the late fourth century.(17) his comparative lack of
representation of the Virgin in visual art makes the proliferation of images of
the Virgin and Child from the sixth century onwards all the more remarkable;
it would seem then that, despite the Protevangelium and despite her
increasingly important role in doctrinal debates, the personal veneration of the
Virgin known to later generations was not yet the norm, even in the fourth
century. It is in practice only after the Council of Ephesus and the recognition
of her title as Theotokos in AD 431 that we find the real development of the
cult of the Virgin which was to find expression in the sixth century in particular
in the establishment of Marian feasts, increasing numbers of images of the
Virgin for both private and public use, stories of her appearances and of
miracles performed by her, and a new note of Marian spirituality struck by
such key literary texts as the Akathistos Hymn and the kontakia of Romanos
the Melodos.
First, however, we must consider the place of the Virgin in the great debates
of the fourth century and in the writings from what has often been called the
golden age of patristic literature. Two main aspects need to be borne in mind:
first, the complex relation of the theology of the Virgin and the general trend
towards asceticism in fourth century Christianity, and second, the increasingly
prominent role which the figure of the Virgin came to play within the
Christological debates which so dominated the fourth and fifth centuries. In
practice, the two aspects often interlocked. Mary was cited as a perfect
example of ascetic virginity, especially of course for women, while the
identification of the exact physical details of the birth of Christ became more
and more critical to ascetic debates. At the same time, it was Mary who was
seen as having made possible the union of two natures in Christ, which now
became the central issue of several centuries of intense Christological
argument. Indeed, on one reading of Byzantine Iconoclasm, the discussions
which took place in the eighth and early ninth centuries about the possibility
of depicting the divine marked the final struggle in this Christological debate.
As the human mother of Christ the figure of Mary necessarily lay at the heart
of these doctrinal arguments, and while they were willing to whitewash or
destroy her images even the Iconoclasts drew back from attacking her own
status and holiness.(18) The roots of these debates, as of the proliferation of
images of the Virgin before and after Iconoclasm, belong in the patristic
thought of the fourth century to which we must now turn.
While the impulse towards asceticism in both pagan and Christian thought
itself began much earlier, the beginnings of its formalization as a way of life
for Christians are generally put at the end of the third century, whether as
organized monasticism or in more individual forms.(19) Not long afterwards
Methodios of Olympus composed his Symposium, a dialogue on virginity
conceived as a Christian counterpart to Plato's famous dialogue of that name
on the nature of eros.(20) Its heroine, tellingly, is not the Virgin Mary but a
virgin called Thekla. But Mary’s reputation did benefit from the growing
literature on virginity, which included commentaries on the Song of Songs as
well as treatises on the topic itself.(21) She was seen as a model of virginity,
and her own virginity was prefigured by female figures in the Old Testament.
(22) According to Cyril of Jerusalem, the Virgin provided an ideal of virginity
which rendered the lives of those who possessed it like the life of angels.(23)
The privileging of virginity also lay behind fourth-century writing about
marriage, and again the chaste marriage of Mary and Joseph provided a
touchstone. For Augustine, it proved that it was not sexual relations but
consent that constituted a marriage.(24) The few Scriptural references to
Mary were also interpreted according to ascetic principles(25) and Augustine
was only one of several authors who were at pains to explain that the
references to Mary as gyne, at Galatians 4:4 and John 2:4, did not necessarily
imply that she was a married woman in the full sense of having had sexual
relations with her husband.(26)
This issue did pose difficulties; Basil of Caesarea, for example, admits that
Matthew 1:25 might imply the reverse, but concludes that the universal
confidence of Christians in the continued virginity of the Theotokos is sufficient
to establish it as truth.(27) Jerome's opponent Helvidius had also taken the
commonsense view of the text, and Jerome vigorously refuted it in his treatise
against him.(28) Equally, according to Jerome, only John, himself the virginal
disciple, was worthy to be entrusted with the care of the Virgin Mary at the
Crucifixion.(29) For many fourth-century writers on virginity, for instance
Gregory of Nyssa, the opening chapters of Genesis were crucial; sexuality, and
even marriage itself, could be seen as a punishment for Eve’s transgression,
symbolized in the ‘coats of skins’ with which Adam and Eve were clothed on
their expulsion from the Garden of Eden.(30) It was an essential part of the
argument of Gregory's treatise On Virginity that it was the virginity of Mary,
the Mother of God, that cancelled out death, which had come to mankind
through the sin of Adam and Eve. It was equally important to argue, as for
example Jerome and John Chrysostom did, that Adam and Eve had been
virginal while in Paradise; correspondingly, although John Chrysostom also
produced practical arguments in favor of virginity and against the troubles and
distractions of marriage, Mary's virginity was logically required in order to
balance the equation. It was logically necessary too, according to Gregory of
Nyssa’s interpretation of the Song of Songs, that Mary the virgin should give
birth in joy, in contrast with Eve, whose sin had condemned her and all other
women to give birth in sorrow.(31) Moreover, it was important, as we have
seen, that Mary should have remained a virgin in partu, that is, even during
and after the birth of Christ. This mystery caused Gregory of Nyssa to liken
her in a homily to the Burning Bush, which burned but was not consumed, an
analogy which found its way into many later icons of the Virgin.(32) But it was
Jerome who debated the matter in the most minute detail, both in his treatise
against Helvidius and in his later defensive arguments after the condemnation
of Jovinian, who had taken the opposite position.(33) Even so, he cannot
explain the mystery, and is compelled to leave it as such.
here was as yet no ‘Western’ or ‘Eastern’ position on the doctrine of the
Virgin.(34) Ambrose, Bishop of Milan from 373/4 until 397, is one of the most
important Marian writers of the fourth century, author of treatises on virginity,
on virgins and on the dedication of a consecrated virgin, and of many
references to Mary in his other works.(35) He expresses attitudes and views
on the Virgin similar to those expressed by the Eastern Fathers, including
some of the devotional and indeed emotional language that is so apparent in
Ephraim the Syrian and later Byzantine writers. Mary is an example for all
virgins, although truly the Mother of God; she is also the type of the Church.
But for Ambrose the figure of Mary had a crucial local importance, both in his
defense of consecrated virgins against considerable contemporary opposition
and in his arguments against what he saw as incorrect doctrine about the
Incarnation. He was also deeply engaged with the problem of human
sinfulness and sexuality, a debate to which the virgin birth was of critical
importance.(36) Later in his life he addressed the contemporary debate about
Mary’s perpetual virginity, which he passionately defended. It symbolized for
him not only the true nature of Christ, but also the purity of the Church and
the ideal of virginity which he energetically promoted against much opposition
as a social and ecclesiastical aim.(37) His praise of Mary therefore belonged,
at least in his later years, in a context of intense social as well as theological
debate about the place of virginity in family life and in the Church generally, a
debate which deeply concerned the noble families of Rome and Milan and
which is apparent in the writings of Jerome, Ambrose and Augustine.

In his memorable account of his own conversion in the garden at Milan in 386,
Augustine records his personal debt to Ambrose, by whom he was
subsequently baptized, and the impact on him of the Latin translation of
Athanasios’ Life of Anthony, the classic ascetic text which had recently been
taken up in his circle.(38) From both sources he absorbed the enormous
importance attached to virginity, and despite already having a son by a loved
companion, who was now entering his teens, proceeded to take steps towards
living a life of chastity henceforth himself. Like Ambrose he wrote directly
about virginity, and in relation to Mary he emphasized her own free choice as
well as her membership of the Church as the mother of Christ, its Head. He
works with the idea of motherhood to attribute motherhood to the whole
Church, and to say of Mary that she is spiritual sister and mother to Christ as
well as his physical mother. (39)
Notes

1. Some idea of the scale is given by the notes and bibliography in

Gambero 1999 (a useful handbook to the texts compiled by a Roman
Catholic position). There is also much wide-ranging bibliography cited in
Pelikan 1996, a helpful general survey, though weaker on the Eastern side
and with some omissions, and see e.g. Theotokos. Graef 1985 is briefer
on the early period but has more on Byzantine developments.

2. Only five 6th-century items appear in this exhibition.

3. See below for the title Theotokos.

4. Ineffabilis Deus (Pius IX); Munificentissimus Deus (Pius XII).

5. For the latter, Gambero 1999,27-29, noting a similar general silence

on the part of the Apostolic Fathers.

6. Luke 2:4; Matth. 1:1-17; Luke 3:23-28.

7. Justin, ‘Dialogue with Trypho’ 100, PG 6,709-712; Irenaeus, ‘4dv.

Haer.’ 3, 22, 5, 19, PG 7, 959-960, 1175-1176.

8. Clark 1983, ch. 1; Pagels 1988.

9. Song of Songs 4:12.

10. Rev. 12:1.

11. ‘Paedagogus’ 1.6, PG 8, 300-301.

12. Origen, ‘Comm. on Gal.’, PG 14, 1298; ‘Comm. on John’ 32.16, PG

14,784; ‘Hom. on Luke’ 17.6-7, SC 87 1962), 256-58; ‘Hom., on Luke’,
6.3-4, SC 87, 144-146.

13. Graef 1985, 42-43; Gambero 1999, 59-66 (attributing Tertullian's

attitude to the ‘uncertain mentality’ of Christians towards her in the
early centuries).

14. Elliott 1993; Strycker 1961. The ‘Gospel of Thomas’ fills out the
‘missing’ years Jesus's childhood in much the same way.

15. Corby Finney 1994; cf. also depictions on arcophagi Lowden

1997,48-51.

16. Lowden 1997, 54-55.

17. for a description of the complex, Hill 1996, 208-225.

18. See the essay by Niki Tsironis, ‘The Mother of God in the
Iconoclastic Controversy’, in the present volume, 27-39.

19. In general Brown" 1988. The extraordinary intensity of the debate

can be seen in Clark 1999.

20. For Methodios, Brown 1988, 183-188; Cameron 1991, 177-178.

.

21. Briefly Clark 1999, 87-88.

22. Clark 1999, 89,104.

23. ‘Catechesis’ XII, 34, PG 33, 768-769.

24. ‘Catechesis’ XII, PG 33, 254.

25. In Tatian's earlier ‘SyriacDiatessaron’, or harmonization of the

Gospels, the problem was solved by omitting Mary's marriage to
Joseph altogether.

26. Clark 1999, 116-117.

27. Basil, ‘Homily on the Holy Generation of Christ’, 5, PG 31, 1468B.

28. ‘Against Helvidius’, 5, PL 23,198.

29. ‘Against Helvidius, 5, PL 23,165,202.

30. Gen. 3:21, a passage which gave rise to lively discussion. Clark
1986, 353-385; Cameron 1989, 184-205.
31. Greg. Nyss., ‘Comm. on the Song of Songs, 13, PG
44,1052D-1053B.

32. ‘Hom. on the Birth of Christ’, PG 46, 1133D-1156B.

33. For the latter, Hunter 1987, 45-64.

34. Contra Gambero 1999, 189 and passim.

35. Neumann 1962; Brown 1988, 353-356.

36. Brown 1988, 351-352.

37. Brown 1988, 357; 359-362 on the differing views held e.g. by
Jovinian.

38. For Augustine's famous account of his conversion see his

‘Confessions’, book 8.

39. ‘On Holy Virginity’, 5, PL 40, 399.