www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life Books St. John Maximovitch: The Orthodox Veneration of Mary the Birthgiver of God

This review is from Amazon.com:

Book Description
This concise work is a classic exposition of how the Christian Church has venerated the Mother of God throughout the ages, and the chief errors which have attacked this veneration. It clearly tells why the Virgin Mary should be honored by all generations, but not considered a co-redemptress along with Jesus Christ, the only Savior of the world.
"For He hath looked upon the lowliness of His handmaiden; for, behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed." (Luke 1:48)

A right understanding of Jesus Christ, the Son of God is not possible without a right understanding of Mary, the Birthgiver of God. When her image is distorted, the image of her Son also becomes distorted.

The sources of Archbishop John's theology are, quite simply, Holy Scripture, the Holy Fathers (especially the great Fathers of the 4th and 5th centuries), and--most distinctively--the Divine services of the Orthodox Church. The latter source offers a clue to the practical approach of St. John to theology.

From Apostolic times, all who truly love Christ give veneration to her who gave birth to Him, raised Him and protected Him in the days of His youth. In THE ORTHODOX VENERATION OF MARY THE BIRTHGIVER OF GOD, St. John traces her veneration from the time of the Apostles to the present.

Excerpted from The Orthodox Veneration of Mary the Birthgiver of God by St. John Maximovitch, Seraphim Rose, John Maximovitch, Abbot Herman. Copyright � 1997. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
Having experienced all the difficulties of earthly life, the Intercessor of the Christian race sees every tear, hears every groan and entreaty directed to Her. Especially near to Her are those who labor in the battle with the passions and are zealous for a God-pleasing life. But even in worldly cares She is an irreplaceable helper.

I really appreciated the approach of this book towards the Holiness of the Theotokos. It is good reading for those interested in the Orthodox view of Our Theotokos.

In Christ,

Michael

You can read the book online:

The Orthodox Veneration of Mary the Birthgiver of God [ortodoks.dk]

I find his critique on the dogma of the Immaculate Conception interesting.

He refers to the contradictory statements of Saints Bridget of Sweden and Catherine of Siena on the Immaculate Conception, but he makes no mention at all to the apparitions of Saint Bernadette Soubirous in which the Theotokos confirmed that She is the Immaculate Conception only four years after the declaration by Pope Pius IX.

If Saint John knew about Saints Bridget and Catherine, he must have known about Saint Bernadette.
I find it odd that he would omit mention of the apparitions at Lourdes.

My guess would be that what the Theotokos may or may not have said to St. Bernadette would have no bearing on St. JM's conscience since he would no doubt consider the Lourdes apparition non authentic.

IMO, this book is the best defense of Marian devotion out there. Next time a Baptist friend calls you an idolater for praying to Mary, this is the book to give him/her!

It seems that St. John may have misunderstood the meaning of the Immaculate Conception... he deduced that it meant that it rendered sin impossible for the Mother of God, and that's not the case.

In the West, though, they say that she was free from concupisence-- sinful tendencies that are a result of original sin. If that's the case, though, then it would have been very easy for her to not sin-- and there's not much merit to that; I could avoid sinning too if I'd been preserved from concupisence. So it still sort of places her in super-human status.

But if the Mother of God WAS immaculately conceived, and she was therefore preserved from the effects of original sin, then she would not have died-- for death is one of those effects. Yet the West does not say that she never died.

However, both Catholicism and Orthodoxy teach that she WAS "immaculate", whether from birth or conception. so does it really matter?

Just me rambling...

God bless,

Karen

Absolutely, and with all respect for their concerns, post-schismatic Orthodox sources as a means of gathering accurate Catholic teaching are generally most unreliable, and I could not advance them, at best, as anything but unreliable sources.

The one exception that I do trust as implicitly as any other individual source, for he did not speak out against anything but medieval nominalism and humanism, is St. Gregory Palamas.

That is NOT to say that I do not recognize exceptionally Catholic teachings in other Orthodox theologians and spritual writers. Father Dumitru Staniloae comes to mind immediately as does Bishop Hilarion's The Mystery of Faith. I do recognize these wonderful spiritual men and their work.

It is just that they and others often deny that what they teach is also what the papal Church teaches as well.

So some Orthodox faithful not only say that we teach things which we do not, they deny that we teach things that we do. Makes it difficult to have a discussion on occasion, you might imagine.

I find it astounding that I listen to Orthodox clergy and faithful saying what they say about Catholic teaching, and then turn around and watch the MP collaborating with heretics on moral issues. Collaborating with heresy is collaborating with evil.

Makes no sense to me. Well actually it does but I do not think people are thinking it all the way through. Might have to take back some silly accusations and assertions, if they do. Might even have to consider resumption of communion.

Catholic doctrinal theology is the root, the tap root, of Catholic moral theology.

Best, however difficult, for Catholics to seek the Church's teaching in the doctrinal statements of the Church and in the teaching of her monastic saints and doctors. But even that takes great discernment and a good teacher or two in one's lifetime.

I think I'll address the rest of your very perceptive posting in another post for both of these issues are related but important on their individual merit.

Eli

Dear Eli,

Much to my dismay and disappointment I must agree with you on this statement.

In Christ,
Alice, who is a cradle Orthodox

An old axiom: "Not everything a canonized Saint says or does is canonizable".

Perfect timing!

Please do not let anyone think that I have anything but the utmost regard and genuine affection and Christian love for St. John the Wonderworker. I have a particular and gifted heart-connection to his spiritual patrimony and love those who came before and have come after. An icon touched to his dear incorrupt body sits next to my bed side. St. Seraphim sits on a window ledge above my kitchen sink.

We leave the tares with the wheat and never curse the harvest, much less the Harvester. The truth is never merciless.

My own receive the same scrutiny using the same principles. The quality of mercy is not blind.

Eli

Never need for disappointment on the part of those whose hearts are open. Never. We are who we are and we all grow in a lifetime with the grace of God and the love of our brothers and sisters.

There are good reasons for Orthodoxy to approach the papal Church with caution. Very good reasons.

Eli

Agreed. However, I can never justify misinformation being presented as fact. It drives me crazy.

I appreciate your kind words, but I do not take offense easily...being objective and accepting one's own faults and shortcomings, (Orthodox)as well as the faults and shortcomings of others,(Catholics) is the only way to pursue unity.

In Christ,
Alice

These are perfectly legitimate things to think about. I will try to address some of it here but I don't think I have the mind today to put together something that will exhaust the possible angles to this business of being conceived personally Immaculate, so we may go a couple of rounds on this.

The Catholic Church teaches that the Theotokos was conceived personally free from the stain of original sin. What does that mean? the stain of original sin.

The stain of original sin at a personal level means that we are disintegrated after the occasion of the ancestral sin. So what does that mean? we are disintegrated?

We are no longer perfectly integrated body and soul, heart and mind. The knowledge of good and evil has come into our awareness fully and so we are not only separated from God as a consequence of disobedience, but we are also torn apart internally.

We are now engaged in an internal war between the disordered inclination to evil and the natural inclination to the good.

No longer whole, no longer integral in our being, though we are still good, for all creation is inherently good.

But the knowledge of good and evil allows us to see and be attracted, in a disordered way, to evil. I say "disordered" because an attraction to evil is outside of the natural order of Creation.

These are the direct consequences of the willful act of disobedience that opened the consciousness of every human being from Adam and Eve to you and to me, to that which we call evil.

So our Baptismal theology tells us that we are cleansed of all sin at the time of our Baptism. If we are adults, we are cleansed from any sins actually committed and we are healed, by grace and the redeeming acts of the Son of the Living God, by the power of the Holy Spirit, of the separation between ourselves and our Creator, our Father.

The death that is a direct consequence of the ancestral sin is a spiritual death.

Physical death is a secondary consequence, as a result of our being separated from God's providence, from our original place in God's providence, which was Paradise.

We die twice in this place. We die to sin in Baptism, and we die to the bondage of this world at the transitional time of our leaving this life and entering everlasting life.

The Immaculate Conception of the Theotokos, the person Mary the Mother of God, means that she was made a whole person, with her will fully turned, by grace, to the good, in conformity with the will of the Father. What happened to her at her birth, happens to us at our Baptism.

The Theotokos could receive God's grace from the very moment of her becoming, where you and I had to wait for our Baptism to be healed and made whole so that we could recognize the good to which our whole nature is oriented. Baptismal waters cleanse and purify. These are also all Orthodox teachings though I have heard them loudly denied by some.

That is another teaching of the Church concerning revelation. Human creatures, by nature, seek to know God, seek to do God's will, seek to know the good.

What is not healed for any of us, by Baptism, nor by the gift of being conceived pure and whole and healed, is the fact that all human creatures are now aware of evil. Therefore we are still internally susceptible to temptation.

Temptation is NOT the same thing as a desire to turn toward evil. Temptation is the trigger mechanism for those desires BUT it is not equvalent to the passions or desires themselves.

That is why we are absolved of our sins in confession. We are not absolved of all temptation.

So even if the Immaculate Conception is oriented toward the good from the very beginning, she is not freed from temptations by any means. That does not mean that she is possessed of inordinate passions, or orientations toward evil.

Do you remember the teachings of the desert fathers that the greater the grace the more violent the temptations?

Far from being above us, the Immaculate Mother of God, is tormented far more profoundly because of her great gift of grace, and because her will is still free, she must choose the good, over and over again against great odds, against some of the worst internal temptations ever known to any human being.

THAT is the true logical conclusion to the theology of the Immaculate Conception. The one most aligned with the other truths of Scripture and Tradition that I memtioned here.

How much more difficult was it for her to forgive those who murdered her Son than it was for Him to forgive His murderers?

To God be all Glory!

Eli

Wow, Eli, you really hit the nail on the head!

God bless,

Karen

Thank you, Eli, for that wonderful post. The Mother of God did face temptations-- our Lord did too.

Other than this, I found St. John's book to be an excellent and beautiful explanation of the Orthodox veneration of the Mother of God.

God bless,

Karen

Pardon me if I'm a bit off-topic, since I've never read St. John's book, though I certainly intend to soon. Am I the only one who's seen statements on supposedly Orthodox websites that say the Theotokos was not free of sin? One in particular said our Lady had sinned when she spoke to her Son at the Wedding at Cana and her sin was the reason He addressed her as "Woman".

Everything I've ever read about our Lord's seeming rebuke of His mother at Cana suggests that by addressing her as "woman", He was confirming in Scripture that His mother was not just "a woman", but "The Woman", the "New Eve" who by her "fiat" opened the Gates of Heaven via her Son, the "New Adam". It is because of this, I believe in the truth of her christening as "co-redemptress" by the Catholic Church. It's also for this reason that I've signed the petition circulated by Vox Populi Mariae Mediatrici to have the Holy Father promulgate a final Marian dogma proclaiming the Theotokos to be the "Co-Redemptrix, Mediatrix and Advocate for the People of God."

I honestly do not understand Orthodox objections to the idea of this dogma. After all, as "Co-Redemptrix" the Mother of God is by no means equal to Our Lord, God and Savior Jesus Christ in her power to redeem mankind. In truth, without her Son, she has no merits at all. But her assent to the Father's plan to save His people by accepting her blessed role as the Mother of God does make her in a very real way the co-redeemer - or the assistant to the Redeemer if that's more theologically palatable - of mankind. To me, this would be not only a beautiful tribute to Our Lady, but would just make sense theologically.

OK, I can take it, who wants to tell me how I'm all wet?

God bless you all,

Sam

Hey Sam, glory to Jesus Christ!

I haven't seen such statements, but if you have, they aren't correct. The Orthodox position is that the Mother of God was free of sin (they call her "All-Holy"), though they reject the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. Here's why:

First of all, the Orthodox are much less reluctant to dogmatize beliefs that they don't see as essential to salvation.

Secondly, they don't see original sin as a "stain on the soul" as the Roman Catholic Church does; they have a different view on original sin that makes the Immaculate Conception nmake no sense; in their view, there was no "stain" for her to be free of.

Lastly, they say that the IC doctrine actually belittles the Mother of God rather than glorifies her, since her sinlessness is attributed to supernatural immunity rather than to perseverance on her part.

Personally, I have to agree on all three points.

Re "Co-Redemptrix", I think we've dogmatized the Theotokos to death already, and many non-Catholics already think we worship her. IMO, to add yet another unnecessary Marian dogma would only sow even more confusion than there already is.

God bless,

Karen