Marina in Orthodox Piety

The place of St. Marina the Great Martyr in the living devotion of the Orthodox faithful: her icon on the iconostasis, her intercession invoked across the Orthodox world, the patronage and protection sought from her — for women, for childbirth, against the assaults of the demons — and her standing as one of the great and beloved Great Martyrs of the Eastern Church. This file gathers the threads of the cult into an account of how Marina is venerated in the everyday piety of the Orthodox peoples.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Great Martyr; virgin-martyr)

A Beloved Great Martyr

Among the Great Martyrs of the Orthodox Church, Marina holds a place of particular affection. She is venerated across the Greek, Slavic, Romanian, Georgian, Antiochian, and other Orthodox traditions; her feast on 17 July is widely and warmly kept (see Feast and Customs); churches, monasteries, and chapels without number bear her name; and her icon — the conquering maiden with the demon and the hammer — is a familiar presence in the Orthodox world (see The Virgin Hammering the Demon). She is, in the popular piety of the Orthodox peoples, one of the most loved of the women-martyrs, her name borne by countless Orthodox women and her intercession sought in a wide range of needs.

The affection she commands is the more notable for the legendary character of her record (set out in The Historical Core). The Orthodox faithful do not venerate Marina because they have weighed the evidence for her Passio and found it sound; they venerate her because the Church has received her as a Great Martyr and because, through her, the grace of God has been found at work — the very dynamic the methodology section analyzes (see The Cult Without a History). Her cult is a living thing, carried in the prayers and the icons and the names of the people, independent of and prior to any source-critical assessment of her legend.

The Intercessions Sought

Marina is invoked across the Orthodox world for a range of needs, and the pattern of her intercessions follows the shape of her legend. She is sought above all as a protectress of women and as the patroness of childbirth and safe delivery — the office that grew from the dragon-bursting legend and remains the most tender of her devotions (see The Protectress in Labor). Expectant mothers commend themselves to her; her relics — the hand at Vatopedi foremost (see The Relics) — and her icons are resorted to for her protection through travail.

She is invoked, too, against the assaults of the demons — the office that flows from her prison-victory over the bound demon and from the iconography of her hammering it down. The saint who, in the legend, trampled and overcame the demon is sought as a powerful helper against the spiritual powers of darkness, an intercessor for those troubled by demonic assault and a model of the soul’s victory over the enemy in the strength of Christ (Greek Passio; Bibliotheca Sanctorum, “Marina”). The two great intercessions — for women in childbirth and against the demons — are the legend’s two prison-victories (the dragon and the demon) carried into the prayer of the faithful.

It is worth pausing on how exactly the pattern works, because it illustrates a general feature of the way a cult takes its shape. The intercessions sought of a saint are not assigned at random; they grow from the narrative the tradition tells about her, the legend furnishing the images on which the prayer then fastens. Marina’s Passio gives her two scenes of victory in the prison cell — the bursting of the dragon and the binding of the demon — and these two scenes, read by the faithful as figures of deliverance, become the two great offices of her intercession (Greek Passio; on the pattern, Larson, “The Role of Patronage and Audience,” in Gender and Holiness). The childbirth-patronage is the dragon-scene made tender; the deliverance-from-demons is the demon-scene made militant. The same legend that the source-critic reads as fabulous romance the praying Church reads as a storehouse of consoling images, and it is from that storehouse that the living devotion draws. To trace the intercessions back to the legend is therefore not to debunk them but to understand them: the prayer rests on the Church’s reception of the saint, and the form the prayer takes is given by the story (see The Womens Saint).

Beyond these two governing offices, Marina is sought more broadly as a helper of women in every estate of life — of the young woman, of the wife, of the mother, of the widow — and as a patroness whose own legend, that of a shepherd-girl who confessed Christ before a Roman magistrate and held her confession through every torment, speaks to the courage asked of ordinary believers in ordinary trials (Bibliotheca Sanctorum, “Marina”; Greek Passio). The breadth of her patronage is itself a measure of the breadth of her cult: a saint invoked for one narrow need is a minor saint, but Marina is invoked across the whole compass of a woman’s life and against the whole array of the soul’s enemies, and that range is the mark of a Great Martyr held in the first rank of popular devotion.

The Icon in Devotion

Marina’s icon is central to her veneration, and it is venerated as the Orthodox venerate every holy image — not as an end in itself but as a window to the saint it represents, the honor passing to the prototype (see Icons and Iconoclasm). Before her icon the faithful pray; on her feast the icon is set out for veneration, adorned and censed; and the distinctive image of the maiden subduing the demon makes her presence in the church unmistakable. The icon carries her cult into the daily life of the parish and the home, the saint present to her people in the image the tradition fixed.

The theology that governs this veneration is the theology the Seventh Ecumenical Council defined and the Synodikon of Orthodoxy proclaims: the honor (timetiké proskynesis) shown to the image passes to the one it represents, and is wholly distinct from the worship (latreia) due to God alone (see Icons and Iconoclasm). Marina’s icon is thus not a portrait — no portrait of a 3rd- or 4th-century shepherd-girl could exist — but a confession: the image confesses that she is a saint, that she stands now in the presence of God, and that her prayers avail for those who ask them. The very feature that makes her image arresting, the demon trodden underfoot and the raised hammer or cross, is itself a piece of theology in paint: it confesses the gospel paradox that the weak are made strong and the bound are made the binders, the maiden conquering the principality in the strength of Christ (see The Virgin Hammering the Demon). To venerate the icon is to assent to that confession and to ask the saint it names for her intercession.

This is why the legendary character of her record poses no difficulty for the veneration of her image. The icon does not certify the dragon or the demon as events; it certifies Marina as a saint and the victory over the powers of darkness as a spiritual truth (see The Cult Without a History). The faithful who kiss the icon do not thereby vouch for the historicity of the Passio; they honor the saint the Church has given them and confess the truth the image holds out. The distinction the whole of this collection insists upon — saint venerated, legend read as legend — is built into the very act of icon-veneration, which honors the prototype and not the narrated incident.

The Cult in Parish and Home

Marina’s veneration is not confined to the great relic-shrines or to the day of her feast; it is woven into the ordinary rhythm of Orthodox life at the level of the parish and the household. At the parish level, the many churches and chapels that bear her name keep her as their patron, her icon enthroned and her feast their panegyris or patronal festival; where her name is a parish’s title, the whole community gathers on 17 July, and her intercession is bound up with the common life of that congregation (see Feast and Customs). At the level of the family, her name is among the names most given to Orthodox daughters, and through the institution of the name-day — the keeping of one’s patron saint’s feast rather than, or alongside, one’s birthday — every Marina renews the bond with her namesake each year, the saint a presence in the family as the personal protectress of those who bear her name (Bibliotheca Sanctorum, “Marina”). The home icon, the lamp before it, the name borne and the name-day kept: by these ordinary means the cult of a great saint becomes a thread in the fabric of countless individual lives.

This domestic and parochial veneration is the cult in its most characteristic and most enduring form. The relics at Vatopedi and the proper hymnography of the menaion are its public and its liturgical face; but the saint is most truly “among her people” in the prayer of the expectant mother before the home icon, in the candle lit on the name-day, in the parish gathered for its patronal feast. This is the living cult the historian can establish with confidence — not the events of the legend, but the fact, breadth, and depth of the veneration — and it is the cult in this form, carried in the prayers and names and icons of the people, that the Church receives and ratifies (see The Cult Without a History).

Marina Among Her People

What emerges, finally, is a saint deeply woven into the fabric of Orthodox life — her name on the lips and in the families of the faithful, her icon on the walls, her feast in the calendar, her intercession in the prayers of women and of all who seek her help. This everyday, popular veneration is the cult in its living form, and it is the firmest thing the historian can establish about Marina: not the events of her legend, but the fact and the breadth and the depth of her veneration. The Orthodox faithful know Marina not as a problem in hagiographic source-criticism but as a beloved Great Martyr and a sure intercessor; and that knowing — the cult itself — is what the Church receives and ratifies in venerating her (see The Cult Without a History).

The discipline of this collection — reading the dragon as legend, weighing the relics as claims, stating the historical questions as disputes — is not in the least at odds with this living piety. It serves it, by placing the veneration where it truly rests: on the Church’s reception of Marina’s holiness, which no source-criticism establishes or overturns. The Orthodox who venerate Marina venerate a saint the Church has given; the scholarship touches the legend, not the saint; and the piety, rightly understood, is the surer for knowing the difference.

References

Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 8, “Marina.” Rome: Istituto Giovanni XXIII, 1966. (The Eastern cult, the intercessions, the breadth of the veneration.)
Greek Passio of St. Marina, BHG 1165–1167. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1957. (The prison-victories that shape the pattern of her intercessions.)
Larson, Wendy R. “The Role of Patronage and Audience in the Cults of Sts Margaret and Marina of Antioch.” In Gender and Holiness. London: Routledge, 2002. (How the legend furnishes the images on which the cult’s intercessions fasten.)