The Magnificat

The Magnificat (Luke 1:46–55), Mary’s song at the Visitation, is the oldest and most-used canticle of the Theotokos in the worship of the Church — sung at Orthros in the East and at Vespers in the West, and woven throughout of the Song of Hannah and the Psalms. This file sets out its place in the Gospel and the liturgy, its tapestry of Old Testament allusion, its theology of reversal, and the textual question of whether a few witnesses once attributed it to Elizabeth rather than to Mary.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle and Evangelist)

The Song at the Visitation

When Mary comes to Elizabeth and is hailed as “the mother of my Lord” (Luke 1:43), she answers with the canticle the Church has named, from the first word of its Latin version, the Magnificat: “My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour” (Luke 1:46–47). The song runs ten verses (Luke 1:46–55) and falls into two movements: first Mary’s praise for what God has done for her — “he that is mighty hath done to me great things, and holy is his name” (Luke 1:49) — and then the broader praise for what God does for the lowly and the hungry of His people, closing with the remembrance of His mercy “to Abraham and to his seed for ever” (Luke 1:54–55). It is the first and longest of the four canticles Luke gathers into his infancy narrative, alongside the Benedictus of Zechariah (Luke 1:68–79), the Gloria of the angels (Luke 2:14), and the Nunc Dimittis of Symeon (Luke 2:29–32) — songs that have furnished the daily office of the Church from antiquity.

A Tapestry of the Old Testament

The Magnificat is not freely composed so much as woven from the Scriptures Mary had prayed. Its closest model is the Song of Hannah (1 Samuel [LXX 1 Kingdoms] 2:1–10), the prayer of the once-barren mother who, having borne Samuel, sings that “my heart rejoiceth in the Lord” and that the Lord “raiseth up the poor out of the dust” and “the bows of the mighty men are broken, and they that stumbled are girded with strength” (1 Samuel 2:1, 4, 8). The whole shape of Mary’s song — exultation in God the Saviour, the reversal of the mighty and the lowly, the filling of the hungry — follows Hannah’s, and the parallel is deliberate: Luke sets the mother of the Christ in the line of the mothers of Israel (Brown, The Birth of the Messiah, 1993). Beyond Hannah the canticle is stitched from the Psalms and the prophets: “my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour” recalls Habakkuk 3:18; “holy is his name” echoes Psalm 110[111]:9 (LXX); “his mercy is on them that fear him from generation to generation” draws on Psalm 102[103]:17; “he hath holpen his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy” recalls the covenant promises of Psalm 97[98]:3 and Micah 7:20 (citations by LXX numbering; cf. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I–IX, 1981). The Magnificat is thus a mosaic of the Septuagint, the prayer of one steeped in the worship of Israel.

The Theology of Reversal

The heart of the song is its theology of the great reversal (Luke 1:51–53). God “hath shewed strength with his arm; he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts; he hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree; he hath filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he hath sent empty away.” Three antitheses — proud against lowly, mighty against humble, rich against hungry — announce the program of the whole Gospel that follows. For this reversal is precisely the signature of Luke’s Gospel: the Beatitudes that bless the poor and pronounce woe on the rich (Luke 6:20–26), the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19–31), the parable of the rich fool (Luke 12:13–21), the exaltation of the humbled publican over the self-righteous Pharisee (Luke 18:9–14). The Magnificat is the overture to Luke’s Gospel of the poor and the lowly: what Mary sings in chapter 1, the Lord enacts through the rest of the book (see The Spirit and the Poor; The Gospel of Mercy). The Fathers read the song as both personal and cosmic: Mary, the lowly handmaid lifted up to bear God, is herself the first instance of the reversal she proclaims, and the pattern of God’s whole dealing with the humble. Ambrose, whose Exposition of the Gospel of Luke (Expositio Evangelii secundum Lucam 2.19–30) gives the most influential patristic commentary on the canticle, draws from “my soul doth magnify the Lord” the lesson that every soul that believes both conceives and magnifies the Word of God, so that what is unique in Mary becomes the calling of every Christian soul (Ambrose, Expositio in Lucam 2.26–27; cf. Gambero, Mary and the Fathers of the Church, 1999).

The Magnificat in the Worship of the Church

The Magnificat has been from early times the daily canticle of the Theotokos in both East and West. In the Byzantine rite it is sung at Orthros (Matins) before the eighth and ninth odes of the canon, and after each of its verses the Church appends the refrain that has become inseparable from it: “More honorable than the cherubim, and beyond compare more glorious than the seraphim, who without corruption gavest birth to God the Word, the very Theotokos, thee do we magnify” (the Axion Estin / “More honorable” refrain; see The Festal Menaion, trans. Mother Mary and Ware, 1969). The song that prophesies “all generations shall call me blessed” (Luke 1:48) is thus crowned, every morning, with the very magnification it foretold. In the Western rite the Magnificat became the gospel canticle of Vespers, the climax of evening prayer, sung daily with antiphon and Gloria Patri (see Great Feasts for the wider liturgical setting; on the Marian devotion the canticle sustains, Women in Orthodoxy). Few texts of Scripture have been so continuously on the lips of the Church.

The “Elizabeth” Variant

A textual question attaches to the attribution of the song. [Disputed: the overwhelming manuscript tradition — Greek and otherwise — reads “And Mary said” (kai eipen Mariam) at Luke 1:46, and the Marian attribution is the established text; a handful of Old Latin witnesses (codices a/Vercellensis, b/Veronensis, l/Rehdigeranus) read “Elizabeth,” and Nicetas of Remesiana (early fifth century) is sometimes cited as knowing the canticle as Elizabeth’s, which led a few modern scholars (notably A. von Harnack) to argue the song was originally placed on Elizabeth’s lips. The standard discussion (Brown, The Birth of the Messiah, 1993, Appendix on the canticles; Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I–IX, 1981) judges the “Elizabeth” reading a minority Latin variant against the unanimous Greek tradition; some hold “Mary” original, others that the omission of any name in a putative source led to the divergence — but the Church’s text, East and West, reads “Mary.”] The dispute touches only the four Old Latin witnesses; in the Greek manuscript tradition there is no doubt, and the canticle has always been the Theotokos’s own.

References

The Holy Bible. Quotations follow the Authorized (King James) Version; Old Testament allusions cited by LXX numbering (Psalms, 1 Kingdoms).
Ambrose of Milan. Exposition of the Gospel of Luke (Expositio Evangelii secundum Lucam) 2.19–30. Commentary on the Magnificat; “every soul that believes both conceives and brings forth the Word.”
Brown, Raymond E. The Birth of the Messiah. Updated ed. New York: Doubleday, 1993. (The Lukan canticles, the Song of Hannah model, and the “Elizabeth” variant.)
Fitzmyer, Joseph A. The Gospel According to Luke I–IX. Anchor Bible 28. New York: Doubleday, 1981. (Text and Old Testament background of the Magnificat; the textual question at 1:46.)
Gambero, Luigi. Mary and the Fathers of the Church. Trans. Thomas Buffer. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999. (Ambrose and the patristic reading of the Magnificat.)
The Festal Menaion. Trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber & Faber, 1969. (The Magnificat and the “More honorable than the cherubim” refrain at Orthros.)