Intercession and Legacy

The Mother of God is honored in Orthodoxy above all creatures, but the honor takes the concrete form of asking her prayers. This file sets out the theological basis of her intercession, its place in daily prayer and the offices, her role in personal devotion and the Jesus Prayer tradition, her titles of protection and patronage, and — held honestly alongside the Protestant objection — a closing assessment of her unique place as the highest of creatures and the model of the deified human person.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

If the hymns are how the Church sings its Mariology, intercession is how it lives it. The Orthodox faithful do not chiefly think about the Mother of God; they ask her — dozens of times a day, in the same breath as they pray to Christ, “Most Holy Theotokos, save us.” Understanding what that petition means, and does not mean, is the key to the whole legacy of Marian devotion in the East.

The theological basis of her intercession

Marian intercession rests on the doctrine of the communion of saints. The departed righteous are alive in Christ — “God is not the God of the dead, but of the living” (Luke 20:38) — and their prayers avail: “the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much” (James 5:16), and in the Apocalypse the elders offer before the throne “golden vials full of odours, which are the prayers of the saints” (Revelation 5:8). To ask the Theotokos to pray is an act of the same kind as asking a living fellow-Christian to pray — differing only in that she stands nearest the throne of her Son. The Church asks her prayers because she prays with and for the Body of which she is the foremost member; she does not replace Christ.

This is why the tradition holds the intercession of the saints together with the confession that there is “one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5), and finds no contradiction. Christ’s mediation is the redemptive mediation of the Cross, by which He alone reconciles God and man; the saints’ intercession is prayer within that reconciliation, made possible by it and dependent on it, the same mutual intercession that St. Paul everywhere asks of the living (Romans 15:30; 1 Thessalonians 5:25). The petition “Most Holy Theotokos, save us” is understood accordingly. It does not make her a second redeemer; it is elliptical for “save us by thy prayers” — a usage the tradition treats as the same figure by which Scripture can say that a minister will “save” those who hear him (1 Timothy 4:16; 1 Corinthians 9:22). The saints, and the Theotokos above them, “save” only in the derived sense of interceding with the one Saviour. This distinction — intercession, not redemptive mediation — is the constant note of Orthodox theological exposition of Marian devotion (Vladimir Lossky, “Panagia,” in In the Image and Likeness of God [Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1974]; Sergius Bulgakov, The Orthodox Church, rev. ed. [Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1988], ch. on the veneration of the Mother of God).

What distinguishes the Theotokos among all who intercede is the boldness of her intercession — her parrhesia (παρρησία), the freedom of speech before God that belongs to her as His Mother. The hymnography returns constantly to the theme that a mother’s petition to her Son carries a unique confidence: she “has motherly boldness toward Him.” Her intercession is not greater in kind than any saint’s, but it is uniquely bold in its ground, because of the relation named in her title.

Her place in daily prayer and the offices

The Mother of God is not commemorated occasionally but continually. At every Divine Liturgy she is remembered first among the saints — “especially our most holy, most pure, most blessed and glorious Lady, the Theotokos and ever-Virgin Mary” — at the great intercession after the consecration, and the Axion Estin magnifies her at the same point (see the hymns file). Through the daily offices her Theotokia answer every “Glory to the Father” with a “Both now and ever,” so that praise of the Trinity is repeatedly turned toward the Virgin through whom the Son took flesh. At Vespers the faithful sing “Rejoice, O Virgin Theotokos” (Θεοτόκε Παρθένε, χαῖρε) — the Eastern counterpart of the Western “Hail Mary,” built from Gabriel’s greeting and Elizabeth’s (Luke 1:28, 42) and closing “for thou hast borne the Saviour of our souls” — sung three times at the blessing of the loaves at Great Vespers. And the refrain “Most Holy Theotokos, save us” recurs at compline, at the Paraklesis, and in the rule of private prayer. The sheer frequency of Marian troparia means that no Orthodox Christian prays for long without addressing her.

The Theotokos in personal devotion and the Jesus Prayer

Marian devotion also has its place in the interior, ascetic tradition. While the Jesus Prayer is addressed to Christ, the hesychast tradition surrounds it with invocation of the Mother of God, and many prayer rules pair the Jesus Prayer with a short Marian invocation (“Most Holy Theotokos, save us,” or the “Rejoice, O Virgin Theotokos”). In Russian piety this took the developed form of the “Rule of the Theotokos” — the recitation of “Rejoice, O Virgin Theotokos” one hundred and fifty times, in imitation of the Psalter, a devotion popularized in the twentieth century by St. Seraphim of Sarov’s tradition and by elders such as St. Seraphim’s successors and, in the diaspora, promoted by figures associated with the Optina and Athonite revivals. Alongside it stands the proliferation of Marian akathists — new hymns composed on the model of the original Akathist and addressed to the Theotokos under the titles of her wonderworking icons, an especially rich feature of Slavic devotion.

Titles of protection and patronage

The names by which the Theotokos is invoked are overwhelmingly names of protection. She is the “Champion Leader” (Ὑπέρμαχος Στρατηγός) of the Akathist proem; the “Protection” (Σκέπη; Slavonic Pokrov) of Christians, whose sheltering veil is celebrated in the feast of the Protection; “quick to hear” (Γοργοϋπήκοος), the Athonite icon-title of the Virgin swift to answer prayer. From the wonderworking icons come a whole litany of appellations — “Joy of All Who Sorrow,” “She Who Is Quick to Hear,” “the Unfading Rose,” “Directress” (Hodegetria), “Tenderness” (Eleousa), “the Inexhaustible Cup” — each attached to a particular image and its remembered mercies (see the treatment of the wonderworking icons in the icons section of this collection). Her patronage extends over cities (Constantinople above all, whose deliverances were credited to her), over monasteries, and over whole nations; Mount Athos itself is called “the Garden of the Theotokos” (Περιβόλι τῆς Παναγίας), held in Athonite tradition to be her earthly domain and dedicated to her alone. Russia’s dedication of itself to the Protection of the Mother of God, and the countless churches raised under her titles, extend the same pattern of national and civic patronage.

The Protestant objection and the Orthodox reply

The objection. Protestant critics argue that Marian intercession, whatever its stated theory, obscures the unique mediation of Christ (1 Timothy 2:5) and the sufficiency of direct access to God through Him (Hebrews 4:16). When the faithful address prayer to Mary constantly, call her “our hope” and their “salvation,” and sing “save us” to her, the distinction between asking her prayers and treating her as a mediatrix of grace becomes (on this reading) practically invisible, and honor due to Christ is redirected.

The Orthodox reply. Orthodoxy answers that intercession and redemptive mediation are categorically different acts, and that its own texts everywhere refer her prayers to Christ: she is asked to “intercede,” to “beseech,” to “pray to thy Son,” never to save by her own power. When the hymns say she “saves,” they mean the derived “saving” of intercession, the same sense in which Scripture lets a man “save” others by his ministry (1 Corinthians 9:22; 1 Timothy 4:16). The sole redemptive mediation of Christ is affirmed without reserve; her intercession is a participation in His Body’s life, not a rival to it. Orthodoxy grants that individual piety can grow disordered but holds the remedy to be catechesis in the distinction, not the abandonment of a veneration practiced since antiquity. (The objection is stated here in its strongest form, as fairness requires; the reply is the teaching of the Church, not one side of an open question. The fuller treatment is in The Place of the Mother of God.)

Her unique place, assessed

The Mother of God stands at the summit of the communion of saints: the highest of creatures, venerated above every other, the one whom the tradition dares to set on the boundary between the created and the uncreated — “more honorable than the Cherubim and beyond compare more glorious than the Seraphim.” Yet the same tradition never forgets the other half of the truth. She is a creature, herself redeemed by her Son, glorified because of Him and not apart from Him, dependent on the grace she received. Her greatness is a receptivity: she is great because she said “be it unto me according to thy word” (Luke 1:38) and so became the place where God entered the world. In her the tradition sees the model of the deified human person — what grace can make of a creature wholly surrendered to God — and the icon of the Church herself, the bride who bears Christ to the world. To venerate her rightly is to be carried past her to her Son; and the whole legacy of Orthodox Marian devotion, from the Akathist to the daily “Most Holy Theotokos, save us,” is finally a way of confessing the Incarnation on one’s knees.

References

Lossky, Vladimir. “Panagia.” In In the Image and Likeness of God. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974.
Bulgakov, Sergius. The Orthodox Church. Rev. ed. Trans. Lydia Kesich. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1988 (veneration and intercession of the Mother of God).
Ware, Kallistos (Timothy). The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 1993 (intercession, the communion of saints).
Pomazansky, Michael. Orthodox Dogmatic Theology. Trans. Seraphim Rose. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1984 (veneration of the Theotokos and the saints).
A Prayer Book for Orthodox Christians and the Horologion (the daily commemorations, “Rejoice, O Virgin Theotokos,” and the Rule of the Theotokos).
Speake, Graham. Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002 (“the Garden of the Theotokos”).