This workshop, to be held in three sessions, will explore the reception and reshaping of patristic themes concerning the Virgin Mary in the Byzantine theological and liturgical tradition between the sixth and tenth centuries. Following...
moreThis workshop, to be held in three sessions, will explore the reception and reshaping of patristic themes concerning the Virgin Mary in the Byzantine theological and liturgical tradition between the sixth and tenth centuries. Following official recognition of Mary’s important role as ‘Theotokos’ (‘God-bearer’) at the council of Ephesus (431), liturgical and popular devotion to the Virgin developed rapidly from the late fifth century onward. The first session of the workshop will deal with hymnography between the sixth and ninth centuries, starting with the imaginative contribution and enduring influence of Romanos the Melodist. The second session will examine the homilies associated with the Marian feasts that were being introduced into the liturgical calendar between the sixth and eighth centuries. In the third and final session, our attention will turn to a corpus of largely unstudied hagiographical texts that were composed in honour of the Virgin Mary in the ninth and tenth centuries. The narrative strategies, biblical exegesis, and theological preoccupations of these Lives differ in significant ways from conventional liturgical treatment of the Virgin; however, these texts also reveal influence from earlier apocryphal, patristic, and historical sources to a degree not evident in the liturgical material. The development of doctrine and devotion concerning the Virgin Mary in the Late Antique period has been heavily studied in recent years, sometimes creating the impression that later contributors had little to offer, short of repeating traditional formulas. It is the aim of this workshop to prove that Byzantine writers, working creatively within a variety of literary and liturgical genres, continued from the sixth century onward to develop new theological insights, literary techniques, and spiritual reflection on Mary, the Mother of God.
My paper:
Mary as «scala caelestis» in Eighth and Ninth Century Italy
The ‘crypt’ of the abbot Epiphanius (824-42) in the monastery of San Vincenzo al Volturno (Isernia, central Italy), in the former Langobardia Minor, displays what is usually recognized as the most important painted cycle in the early medieval southern Italy. The present paper concentrates on an image of the Virgin depicted in the vault of the apse. She sits on a throne, holding a book where is written «beatam me dicent,» a quotation from the Magnificat hymn (Luke 1,46-55) – the words with which Mary, after the Annunciation, addressed her cousin Elizabeth. The throne, the crown, and five archangels paraded in the lower section of the vault as celestial guardians, make her appear as the Queen of Heaven ruling with her Son, who is depicted on a throne above her in the vault. The painted cycle of the crypt has been analysed by generations of art historians, among whom Pietro Toesca (1904) was the first to trace a connection between its contents and the writings of the Gaulish author Ambrosius Autpertus († 784), a monk, briefly abbot, and a renowned theologian active at San Vincenzo al Volturno in the second half of the eighth century. Toesca explained the scene of the Virgin in the vault with a passage of Autpertus’ Sermo de adsumptione sanctae Mariae, where Mary, after her transitus is presented as «super angelos elevatam cum Christo regnare», as «reginam caelorum» with Him as «regem … angelorum». Autpertus quotes the Magnificat in the same context, celebrating the humility of Mary that made her the «scala caelestis,» i.e. the ladder to Heaven from which God descended to Earth – thus adopting a new metaphor for describing her role in the history of Salvation. In the West, before Autpertus, the word scala is to be found indeed in a great number of western Church Fathers. But in Ambrose, in his contemporary Zeno of Verona and in Jerome, ladder appears with reference to the Cross; in Jerome and Zeno with reference to the concordance of the two Testaments; in Augustine, Jerome, Cassiodorus, Caesarius of Arles, Isidore and Bede with reference to Jacob’s ladder. As for Bede, in another passage, when recalling the teaching of Benedict of Nursia, he says that the rungs in Jacob’s ladder are made of humility, since humility is the way to spiritual perfection in the monastic mentality. Benedict of Nursia had in fact written in his monastic Rule that the ladder represents our terrestrial life, and only by having a humble heart can the ladder be raised by God to Heaven. It appears then that the early Western monastic interpretation of Jacob’s ladder as a ‘ladder of humility’ that represents the difficult ascent to God, in the doctrinal landscape of Autpertus overlapped with the Byzantine metaphor of Mary as ‘ladder to Heaven,’ a metaphor widespread by the Akathistos and by the early eighth-c. Byzantine homiletic production. But historians of theology has not investigated the origins of Autpertus’ phraseology, notwithstanding the fact his above-mentioned homily is the earliest extant original homily in Latin for the feast of the Dormitio celebrated on the 15th of August.
In the array of epithets and metaphors developed by the eastern tradition on Mary, she is called «joy of all generations» in the famous hymn Akathistos (IX, 17), which was known and sung also in the West by Greek-speaking communities. The main iconophile writers of the early eighth century connected the Magnificat to the moment of the transitus in their homilies on the Dormitio. Among them, Andrew of Crete declared the Magnificat as the most suitable praise for Mary. John of Damascus observed that Mary truly predicted that she would be called blessed by all generations, not from the moment of her death but from the moment of the conception of Christ, and that death has not made her blessed, but she has made death glorious, destroying its horror and showing death to be a joy. Germanos of Constantinople asked the Virgin to guide the steps of his mind with her ready hand on the ladder to Heaven, she who rightly said that all generations of men and women would call her blessed. Although the modalities of transmission of early iconophile homilies to the West have not been investigated, it remains the case that Autpertus adopts the same phrasing, metaphors, epithets to describe Mary, her Assumption into Heaven, her role in the history of Salvation. These homilies need to be seen as the missing link between Eastern Mariology and Autpertus, who is generally acknowledged as the first Western medieval Mariologist. This paper is aimed at illustrating how the literary image of Mary taken up to Heaven developed by early iconophile authors in the East has been received a few decades later in the West by Autpertus, and how this literary image was eventually translated in visual imagery in Autpertus’ monastery in the years 824-42, pre-dating the earliest examples of the image of the Dormitio/Koimesis in which Mary is shown on her death bed surrounded by the Apostles. This will be accomplished not through a mechanical comparison of the painted image to earlier theological writings, but by trying to reconstruct the modalities of circulation of theological concepts between East and West in the period of the ‘image struggle’, their influence on the religious mentality, and their ‘translation’ into visual imagery.
