The Great Marian Feasts

Four of the Twelve Great Feasts of the liturgical year belong to the Mother of God: her Nativity (8 September), her Entrance into the Temple (21 November), the Annunciation (25 March), and her Dormition (15 August). This file sets them in the order of the Church year, which begins on 1 September, and marks with care which rest on the canonical Gospels and which come to us only through the Protoevangelium of James and the transitus tradition — for two of the four have no basis in Scripture at all.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Twelve Great Feasts and the Marian Four

The Orthodox liturgical year is organized around the Twelve Great Feasts (the Dōdekaorton), which, together with Pascha “the feast of feasts” standing above all counting, structure the fixed and movable calendars alike (Kallistos Ware, “The Meaning of the Great Feasts,” in The Festal Menaion, trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware, London: Faber, 1969, Introduction; see also ../../orthodoxy/06-liturgical-life/great-feasts.md). Of the Twelve, four are commemorations of the Theotokos. It is a point of some theological weight that the Church year itself is framed by her: the first of the great feasts after the New Year (1 September, the Indiction) is the Nativity of the Theotokos on 8 September, and the last is her Dormition on 15 August — so that the annual cycle opens with her birth and closes with her repose, the whole enclosed within her life (The Festal Menaion, Introduction).

This framing is not sentimental. The governing principle of Orthodox Mariology is that every Marian feast is anchored in Christ: the Church honors the Mother because of the Son, and each of her feasts is finally a celebration of the Incarnation and its economy of salvation (see ../03-the-dogma-of-the-theotokos/the-council-of-ephesus-431.md, where the title Theotokos is defined as a Christological safeguard, and ../../orthodoxy/03-dogmatic-theology/theotokos.md). The hymnography bears this out: the festal texts are relentlessly doxological and Christ-centered, praising the Virgin always as the one through whom “the Sun of Righteousness” dawned upon the world (Nativity troparion; The Festal Menaion, pp. 98–108).

Nativity of the Theotokos — 8 September

The Church year’s first great feast celebrates the birth of the Virgin Mary to the aged and childless Joachim and Anna, whose long barrenness was answered by the promise of a child dedicated to God.

[Apocryphal: the entire narrative — the names Joachim and Anna, the barrenness, the angelic annunciations to the couple, and the birth of Mary — derives from the *Protoevangelium of James* (c. 150), not from canonical Scripture, which nowhere names the Virgin's parents or records her birth]. The Protoevangelium (also called the Infancy Gospel of James) is a mid-second-century composition; its account of Joachim’s rejected offering, Anna’s lament, and the birth of Mary supplies the whole content of this feast (Protoevangelium of James 1–5; Ronald F. Hock, The Infancy Gospels of James and Thomas, Santa Rosa: Polebridge, 1995, pp. 32–41; Bart D. Ehrman and Zlatko Pleše, The Apocryphal Gospels: Texts and Translations, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 31–71, dating the text to c. 150). See the full treatment in ../05-what-scripture-attests-and-what-tradition-adds/the-protoevangelium-of-james.md.

The feast is attested in the Christian East from the sixth century: St. Romanos the Melodist (d. c. 556) composed a kontakion for it, and a church of St. Anne existed at Jerusalem by that period (The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium [hereafter ODB], ed. A. Kazhdan, Oxford, 1991, s.v. “Nativity of the Virgin”). At Rome, Pope Sergius I (687–701) prescribed a litany for the Nativity of the Virgin among the four Marian feasts he singled out (Liber Pontificalis, Life of Sergius I). The troparion voices the feast’s Christological purpose plainly: “Your Nativity, O Theotokos, has proclaimed joy to the whole world, for from you dawned the Sun of Righteousness, Christ our God” (The Festal Menaion, p. 105). The birth is celebrated not for itself but as the near approach of the Incarnation.

Entrance (Presentation) of the Theotokos into the Temple — 21 November

The feast commemorates the tradition that Mary, at the age of three, was brought by her parents to the Temple in fulfillment of a vow, received there by the priest Zechariah, and thereafter nourished by the hand of an angel while she dwelt in the Holy of Holies.

[Apocryphal: the Entrance rests entirely on the *Protoevangelium of James*; there is no canonical basis whatever. The Temple's actual arrangements, moreover, admitted no such residence of a young girl in the sanctuary — the narrative is theological iconography, not historical report]. The source is Protoevangelium of James 7–8, which describes the three-year-old set on the Temple steps, received by the priest, and fed by an angel (Hock, Infancy Gospels, pp. 45–49; Ehrman and Pleše, Apocryphal Gospels, pp. 49–53).

Of the four Marian feasts this is the latest to enter the calendar. It is attested in the Christian East only from the later period — homilies survive from St. Germanos I of Constantinople (patriarch 715–730), and the feast’s establishment is often connected with the dedication of the Nea church of the Theotokos at Jerusalem (543) (ODB, s.v. “Presentation of the Virgin”; Mary B. Cunningham, Wider than Heaven: Eighth-Century Homilies on the Mother of God, Popular Patristics Series 35, Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2008, pp. 20–29). In the West it never held the status it acquired in the East: it was adopted late (14th century in the papal court), removed from the Roman calendar by Pope Pius V in 1568, and only restored by Sixtus V in 1585 (ODB, s.v. “Presentation of the Virgin”). The Byzantine hymnography reads the Entrance as the entry of the living Temple into the temple made with hands: “Today the Theotokos, the Temple that is to hold God, is led into the Temple of the Lord” (troparion; The Festal Menaion, pp. 164–178).

Annunciation — 25 March

Alone among the four, the Annunciation stands on canonical Scripture: the Evangelist Luke records the archangel Gabriel’s message to Mary at Nazareth, her question, and her consent — the fiat, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to your word” (Luke 1:26–38). This is the moment of the Incarnation itself, the Word conceived by the Holy Spirit in the Virgin’s womb, and the Church treats it as such. See ../02-the-scriptural-witness/mary-in-the-gospels.md.

The date, 25 March, falls exactly nine months before the Nativity of Christ on 25 December, so that the calendar makes the conception and the birth cohere (ODB, s.v. “Annunciation”; The Festal Menaion, pp. 439–463). The choice was reinforced by an ancient computistical tradition that associated 25 March with the day of creation and with the day of the Passion, gathering creation, redemption, and Incarnation onto one date (see the discussion in Thomas J. Talley, The Origins of the Liturgical Year, 2nd ed., Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1991, pp. 91–99). The feast is old and universal; the Council in Trullo (692), Canon 52, which restricts the full Eucharistic Liturgy on Lenten weekdays to the Presanctified rite, is honored with an explicit exception for the Annunciation, on which the Divine Liturgy is celebrated even should it fall within Great Lent or on Great Friday (Quinisext Council, in The Rudder [Pedalion], trans. D. Cummings; The Festal Menaion, Introduction). Its kontakion is the great proem “To you, our leader in battle” (Tē Hypermachō), which it shares with the Akathist Hymn — a bond examined in ../09-hymnography-and-veneration/the-akathist-and-the-hymns.md. The troparion names the feast’s whole meaning: “Today is the beginning of our salvation, and the revealing of the eternal mystery” (The Festal Menaion, p. 460).

Dormition — 15 August

The final great feast of the year commemorates the falling asleep (koimēsis) of the Theotokos, her burial by the apostles, and — in the received tradition — the translation of her body. It is preceded by the Dormition Fast, a strict two-week fast from 1 to 14 August (The Festal Menaion, Introduction; the fast is attested by the twelfth century and was addressed at Constantinople in 1166).

The Dormition rests not on Scripture but on the transitus (Dormition) traditions, a body of narratives whose earliest surviving witnesses are of the fifth–sixth centuries; the canonical Gospels say nothing of the Virgin’s end (Stephen J. Shoemaker, The Ancient Traditions of the Virgin Mary’s Dormition and Assumption, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, chs. 1–2). The fixing of the date to 15 August is credited to the Emperor Maurice (r. 582–602), who is reported to have established it for the whole empire (ODB, s.v. “Koimesis”; Shoemaker, Ancient Traditions, pp. 132–141). The full account of the sources, the empty-tomb tradition, and the East–West divergence over what is claimed of the Virgin’s body is given in ../06-the-dormition/the-falling-asleep.md. The feast’s dogmatic reserve is caught in its kontakion, which confesses that “neither the tomb nor death had power over the Theotokos” while attributing the mystery to Christ, “the Giver of Life” (The Festal Menaion, p. 528).

A feast of the Lord, Marian in character: the Meeting (2 February)

One further feast of the Twelve is Marian in coloring yet classified among the feasts of the Lord: the Meeting (Presentation) of the Lord in the Temple, or Hypapantē, on 2 February, forty days after the Nativity of Christ. It commemorates the presentation of the infant Christ in the Temple and his meeting by the elder Symeon and the prophetess Anna (Luke 2:22–38), together with the Virgin’s own purification according to the Law. Because its central figure is Christ, the Byzantine tradition ranks it as a Despotic (dominical) feast, though its hymnography and its association with the Mother’s obedience to the Law give it a strongly Marian character (ODB, s.v. “Hypapante”; The Festal Menaion, pp. 405–437). The Latin West long emphasized its Marian aspect as the “Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary.”

Two rest on Scripture, two on tradition

The four Marian great feasts thus fall into two unequal classes. The Annunciation stands squarely on Luke; the Dormition rests on the transitus traditions; and both the Nativity and the Entrance of the Theotokos draw their entire narrative content from the Protoevangelium of James. Orthodox practice does not hide this. It celebrates the feasts as the Church’s living confession of the Incarnation, receives the Protoevangelium narratives as venerable and theologically fruitful without treating them as documented history, and refers every honor of the Mother back to her Son — which is why the hymnody of all four feasts speaks, in the end, of Christ.

See Also

References

  • The Festal Menaion, trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos (Timothy) Ware. London: Faber & Faber, 1969. (Introduction, and the propers for the Nativity of the Theotokos, the Entrance, the Meeting, the Annunciation, and the Dormition.)
  • Ronald F. Hock, The Infancy Gospels of James and Thomas. Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge Press, 1995.
  • Bart D. Ehrman and Zlatko Pleše, The Apocryphal Gospels: Texts and Translations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
  • Mary B. Cunningham, Wider than Heaven: Eighth-Century Homilies on the Mother of God. Popular Patristics Series 35. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2008.
  • Stephen J. Shoemaker, The Ancient Traditions of the Virgin Mary’s Dormition and Assumption. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
  • Thomas J. Talley, The Origins of the Liturgical Year, 2nd ed. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991.
  • The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. Alexander P. Kazhdan et al. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991 (articles: “Nativity of the Virgin,” “Presentation of the Virgin,” “Annunciation,” “Koimesis,” “Hypapante”).
  • The Rudder (Pedalion), trans. D. Cummings. Chicago: Orthodox Christian Educational Society, 1957 (Quinisext Council, Canon 52).
  • Liber Pontificalis, Life of Sergius I.