The Cult, East and West

The breadth of the veneration of St. Marina the Great Martyr (Margaret of Antioch) — among the broadest of any saint in Christendom, and the firmest fact about her. This file surveys the two branches of the one cult: Marina’s immense and fervent veneration across the Orthodox East, and Margaret’s standing in the Latin West as one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers and one of the most popular saints of the entire Middle Ages. The breadth of this cult is, as the methodology section argues, the real evidence the Church weighs — a veneration far better attested than anything the legendary Passio narrates.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Great Martyr; virgin-martyr); with the Western reception of Margaret of Antioch

The Eastern Cult

In the Orthodox East, Marina is venerated as a Holy Great Martyr (Megalomartys) with great fervor across the Greek, Slavic, Romanian, Georgian, Antiochian, and other Orthodox worlds. Her feast on 17 July is widely kept (see Feast and Customs); churches and monasteries are dedicated to her; her icon — the conquering maiden with the demon and the hammer — is among the recognizable images of the iconostasis (see The Virgin Hammering the Demon); and her relics, above all the hand at Vatopedi on Mount Athos, are objects of pilgrimage and devotion (see The Relics). She is invoked as a protectress, particularly of women and of those in childbirth, and her veneration is woven deep into the popular piety of the Orthodox peoples.

The strength of the Eastern cult is the more striking for the legendary character of her record: Marina is venerated as fervently as saints far better documented, and her standing as a Great Martyr is in no way diminished by the source-critical reserve the scholarship places on her Passio. This is precisely the phenomenon the methodology section analyzes — a cult firm and broad on a legendary base — and the Eastern veneration of Marina is one of its clearest instances (see The Cult Without a History).

The title under which the East venerates her is itself worth weighing, for the rank of Great Martyr (Megalomartys) is not lightly given. It is reserved in the Orthodox calendar for a comparatively small company of martyrs whose combat was held to be of surpassing severity and whose intercession the Church found surpassingly powerful — George, Demetrios, Theodore, Catherine, Barbara, Panteleimon, and a handful of others. Marina stands in that company, and to stand in it is to stand among the most exalted of the non-apostolic, non-hierarchical saints. The breadth of her Eastern veneration is therefore not merely popular but liturgical and ranked: she is named in the dismissal hymns, kept with festal solemnity, and set in the iconostasis among the great. Her cult, moreover, is genuinely pan-Orthodox and not the property of any one people: the Greeks keep her with particular fervor, but she is venerated no less among the Slavs (as Marina or, in the Russian and Ukrainian usage, often Margarita), the Romanians, the Georgians, and the Arabic-speaking Orthodox of Antioch — the very see to which her legend attaches her. That a saint of legendary record should hold a rank this high and a veneration this wide across every Orthodox nation is the strongest possible witness to the point the methodology section presses: the cult, not the documentation, is the firm thing, and Marina’s cult is firm at the very summit of the calendar (Bibliotheca Sanctorum, “Marina”; see Feast and Customs).

The Western Cult: Margaret of Antioch

In the Latin West, the same saint, venerated as Margaret of Antioch, became one of the most popular saints of the entire Middle Ages. Two facts mark the breadth of her Western cult.

First, she was numbered among the Fourteen Holy Helpers (Quatuordecim Auxiliatores) — the group of fourteen saints venerated together, especially in late-medieval Germany and Central Europe, as powerful intercessors in particular needs (Margaret’s being childbirth and the perils of women) (Bibliotheca Sanctorum, “Margherita di Antiochia”; the Fourteen Holy Helpers tradition). To be among the Fourteen was to stand in the front rank of the West’s most invoked saints, the helpers to whom the faithful turned in their gravest necessities.

The character of the Fourteen as a group throws Margaret’s standing into relief. The Auxiliatores were not a random assembly but a working roster of crisis-intercessors, each assigned to a particular peril — Christopher against sudden death, Barbara against death without the sacraments, Blaise against ailments of the throat, and so through the list — to whom one prayed precisely in extremity. The grouping gained enormous traction in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, propelled in part by the plague years, when the demand for powerful and specialized intercession was acute; and Margaret held within it one of the most universally needed offices, the safe deliverance of women in childbirth. Her companions in the Fourteen were among the most famous saints of the calendar, and to be enrolled with them was to be enrolled among the very most invoked names of the late-medieval West — not a saint of local or specialist devotion but one of the household names of European Christendom, prayed to wherever the Fourteen were painted together on a church wall or carried together in a litany (Bibliotheca Sanctorum, “Margherita di Antiochia”).

Second, her cult was vast and pervasive in a way few cults matched. Through the diffusion of her legend — above all by the Golden Legend, the most-read book of the later Middle Ages after the Bible (see Marina and Margaret, East and West) — Margaret became a fixture of Western devotion, art, and life. Churches beyond counting were dedicated to her; her image, usually with the dragon, filled altarpieces, windows, and manuscripts; her legend was retold in Latin and every European vernacular; and her name, Margaret, became one of the commonest of all women’s names across Latin Christendom, a token of how universally she was loved (Bibliotheca Sanctorum, “Margherita di Antiochia”; Larson 2002). Her patronage of childbirth made her, with the Virgin and St. Anne, among the saints most constantly invoked in the most dangerous hour of women’s lives (see The Protectress in Labor).

The role of the Golden Legend in this diffusion deserves to be stated exactly, because it is the engine of the Western cult’s breadth. Jacobus de Voragine’s compilation, assembled in the late thirteenth century, became the single most copied and most read collection of saints’ lives of the entire later Middle Ages, surviving in many hundreds of manuscripts and, after the invention of printing, in edition upon edition in Latin and in every major vernacular. To be given a chapter in the Legend — as Margaret was, in the entry “St. Margaret” — was to be carried into the devotion of all literate Christendom and, through preaching and the visual arts that drew on it, into the devotion of the unlettered as well. The Legend’s telling of Margaret fixed the dragon-and-demon episodes at the center of her Western image and supplied the matter that altarpiece, window, and sermon then multiplied; the wildfire spread of her cult and the wildfire spread of the book are very nearly the same phenomenon (Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, “St. Margaret,” trans. Ryan; Larson 2002). The very popularity of the name Margaret is a measure taken from this diffusion: a saint whose name parents across Europe chose for their daughters in such numbers, generation after generation, was a saint woven into the fabric of ordinary Christian life — not merely admired but lived with, named after, prayed to by households who knew her story from the book and her face from the church wall.

One Cult, Two Branches

It is essential — and it is the framework this collection holds throughout — to read these two great devotions not as two cults to be compared but as the two branches of one cult (established in Marina and Margaret, East and West). The Marina venerated on Athos and the Margaret venerated in a German parish among the Fourteen Holy Helpers are the same saint; the dragon of the Greek icon and the dragon of the Western altarpiece are the same dragon; the Eastern childbirth-devotion and the Western birth-girdle invoke the same intercessor. The immense breadth of the cult is the breadth of a single veneration spread across both halves of Christendom under two names.

That breadth is, as the methodology section argues, the firmest fact about Marina and the real ground of her veneration. The historian cannot establish that a shepherd-girl of fourth-century Antioch existed; the historian can establish, beyond any doubt, that she was venerated — East and West, on the Holy Mountain and in the Latin parishes, in icon and altarpiece, in the dedications of churches and the names of women — with a fervor and a universality matched by few saints in the calendar. The cult is the evidence; and the cult of Marina/Margaret is one of the great cults of the undivided and the divided Church alike (see The Cult Without a History).

This is the very inversion the source-critical hagiographers urged the Church to make: to stop treating the legend as the foundation and the cult as its by-product, and to see instead that the cult is the bedrock and the legend a later growth upon it. Delehaye’s enduring lesson was that for a great many of the early martyrs the historically secure datum is the fact of veneration — a name kept, a feast observed, a shrine resorted to — while the dramatic Passio is a later literary elaboration, often built to fill a silence the veneration had left (Delehaye, Les légendes hagiographiques). Marina/Margaret is among the clearest cases the principle has, precisely because her cult is so vast and her legend so frankly fabulous: the dragon she is swallowed by and the demon she beats down are manifestly the matter of pious romance, yet the veneration that surrounds them is as solid and as universal as any in Christendom. To weigh the two rightly is not to subtract from the saint but to find her where she truly stands — not in the unprovable biography but in the undeniable devotion of half the world.

A Cult Across the Schism

There is a final significance to the breadth of this cult. Marina/Margaret was venerated in the East and the West before the schism and continued, under her two names, after it — a saint loved by Orthodox and Catholics alike, her legend and her dragon and her childbirth-patronage shared across the divide (on the two traditions, see Orthodox and Catholic). She belongs, with the other great pre-schism saints, to the common patrimony of the undivided Church, and her cult is one of the threads that still runs through both halves of a divided Christendom. The one saint with two names is, in this sense, an emblem of a unity older than the division — venerated whole, East and West, as the Great Martyr who overcame the dragon and brings women safely through their travail.

See Also

References

  • Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 8, “Marina” and “Margherita di Antiochia.” Rome: Istituto Giovanni XXIII, 1966–1967. (The Eastern and Western cults; the Fourteen Holy Helpers; the popularity of the name; the breadth of the veneration.)
  • Larson, Wendy R. “The Role of Patronage and Audience in the Cults of Sts Margaret and Marina of Antioch.” In Gender and Holiness: Men, Women, and Saints in Late Medieval Europe, ed. Samantha J. E. Riches and Sarah Salih, 23–35. London: Routledge, 2002. (The breadth and audience of the Western cult.)
  • Jacobus de Voragine. The Golden Legend, “St. Margaret.” Trans. William Granger Ryan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. (The diffusion of the legend that carried the Western cult.)
  • Delehaye, Hippolyte. Les légendes hagiographiques. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1905. (The cult as the firm historical datum where the legend is not; the method this collection follows.)