Download PDF | The Cult Of The Mother Of God In Byzantium Texts And Images Routledge ( 2016)
361 Pages
Preface
The papers in this volume were mostly delivered at a conference held in August 2006, as the concluding segment of a research project sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) on ‘The Mother of God in Byzantium: Relics, Icons, and Texts’. Under these auspices, Mary Cunningham assessed the corpus of eighth- and ninth- century homilies on the Virgin Mary, translating and providing commentaries on those that she believes authentic. The results of this work appeared in her book, Wider Than Heaven: Eighth-Century Homilies on the Mother of God (Crestwood NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2008).
Mary also hopes to publish a larger study in which these works will be contextualised, mainly in literary and theological terms, in the future. We are also currently working on a joint book that will juxtapose literary with visual aspects of the Virgin’s cult, focusing especially on the intersection between images of the Theotokos and the long-standing cult of relics during the eighth and ninth centuries. My own initial concerns were focused on the confused position of the Theotokos in later Byzantine reports about what we now call iconoclasm (‘iconomachy’, the image struggle, to the Byzantines). As all Byzantinists know, the early seals of Leo III followed established imperial tradition and depicted the Virgin Mary.1 And, whatever his later activities may have been, Leo is not normally accused of denying the importance of the Virgin and her relics. Leo’s son, Constantine V, however, is sometimes portrayed in later sources as being opposed to both. Theophanes the Confessor, who wrote in the early ninth century, treated Leo as an orthodox and pious ruler, but accused Constantine V of renouncing the divinity of Christ and arguing that Mary was not the Mother of God.2 So far as we can tell, this was a (probably deliberate) misrepresentation, but it is worth examining its inspiration.
This seems to have been Constantine’s Questions (Peuseis), the core ideas of which were soon afterwards elaborated in the definition (horos) of the iconoclast Council of 754.3 This text mooted the basic iconoclast premise that an image of Christ shows only his human nature, and thereby denies his divinity; it then targeted images of the Virgin, saints, prophets and apostles. The central argument here was that those who believed that ‘simple mortals’ (like Mary) could be represented – since there was not a problem with conflating the human and divine – were ill-advised. Images of the Virgin Mary were unnecessary, and an insult to her memory, for she lived eternally beside God.4 That is to say, Mary’s death and assumption into heaven had received widespread acceptance by the Church from about the late sixth century onward. But although the iconoclasts rejected images of the Virgin, they did not refuse to honour her; if anything, Mary’s status increased.5 As Paul Magdalino has noted, the final session of the iconoclast council of 754 was held at Blachernai – a site firmly associated with the Theotokos – which scarcely suggests a lack of reverence to the Virgin Mary.6
The impact of ‘iconoclasm’ on the ways in which the Byzantines thought about the Theotokos was most pronounced after the debate was over, when the victorious pro-image faction apparently realised that their trump card – the visibility of the human Christ, which meant that portraits of Jesus confirmed the validity of the Incarnation (and iconoclasts, by saying that Christ could not be represented, were thereby denying the Incarnation) – meant that an emphasis on the Virgin as Christ’s human mother underscored their main point in a dramatic and – as the so-called nuclear family became increasingly the norm in the ninth century – socially appropriate way. The epithet meter theou (‘Mother of God’) first appears in the ninth century, and coincides with imagery stressing the Virgin’s emotional interaction with her son.7 As Stephen Shoemaker demonstrates in this volume,8 Mary’s emotional life was not invented sui generis in the wake of iconoclasm, but her new role in Orthodox dogma meant that it took on an increased importance after 843, and profoundly affected Marian verbal and visual imagery thereafter. This puts our research into a broader context, and that was also the aim of the conference recorded here. The conference papers began by looking at fifth- and sixth-century antecedents for the cult of the Theotokos in the Holy Land and in Constantinople, then turned to its acceleration and diffusion, with particular emphasis on the development of feast-days, epithets, relics and icons. Our aim was to develop and expand the important work gathered at the Athens conference of 2001, published in M. Vassilaki, Images of the Mother of God.
Perceptions of the Theotokos in Byzantium (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), as well as that of the conference held that same year in Chester, published in R.N. Swanson, ed., The Church and Mary, Studies in Church History 39 (Woodbridge, Suffolk and Rochester NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2004). This aim was realised: the papers published here open up new perspectives on virtually all facets of Mariological study, from the archaeological and visual to the textual and performative. As we discussed drafts of the contributions that follow with their authors, two issues recurred repeatedly. First, despite the huge amount that has been published on the Mother of God over the past decade, there remain large areas of Marian study that remain unproblematised. For example, although there is general (though not universal) agreement that the ‘cult’ of the Virgin occurred much later than was once believed – there is an increasing consensus that the ninth or tenth century seems more likely than the fifth or sixth – it remains the case that there are numerous pre-iconoclast monuments to and portraits of the Virgin, and their character is uncertain: were they simply commemorative, did they respond to local cults, or did Mary play some as yet unexplored role? Second, while we are increasingly aware of why the Byzantines venerated the Virgin in particular ways, the registers or levels of that veneration remain unstudied: why were particular groups, at particular times or in particular places (for example, the monks at Mount Athos) drawn to the Mother of God? How does veneration of the Virgin intersect with the hierarchies of gender and status? The papers in this volume have brought us closer to responding to some of these issues, and both Mary and I would like to thank our contributors for pushing Marian studies beyond its sometimes comfortable boundaries; we are also grateful for their patience with us as we bombarded them with questions along the way.
A few remarks about editorial practices that we have adopted in this volume are in order here. As regards the spelling of names, we have chosen to use Greek rather than Latin transliterations, except when a name is more commonly used in its anglicised form, as in ‘John Chrysostom’ or ‘Constantine V’. In every chapter except for that of Margaret Barker, we have cited the Old Testament using Septuagint rather than Hebrew numberings (as in the case of the Psalms especially). There is not complete consistency throughout the volume in the choice to use the Greek font or transliterations when citing Greek texts or words.
The various contributors have made different choices with respect to this problem; we hope nevertheless that there is consistency within their separate chapters. We would like to take the opportunity to thank the AHRC for funding both our research and the conference that generated this volume, the British Academy for a generous conference grant, and John Smedley at Ashgate for his usual patience and good humour. Emily Corran spent one summer helping with the editing of the papers. In addition, I thank my past and present ‘gender’ postgraduates – Eve Davies, Andriani Georgiou, Polyvios Konis, Kallirroe Lindardou, Eirini Panou – and, as always, my husband Chris Wickham. Leslie Brubaker
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