Bogoslovni Vestnik (Dec 2022)
Emotional Representations of the Gospel in the Development of Mary’s Biography in the Early Church of the East
Abstract
This article examines the innovations that occurred with the affective turn in the veneration of Jesus and Mary based on the Gospels, which describe the life and ministry of Jesus and the role of Mary, the Mother of God, in the life of her son Jesus, especially in his Passion. The Passion, Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus represent the culmination of the Gospel biographies of Jesus and his mother Mary. The descriptions of the Passion of Jesus represent an elementary natural challenge for the believer to emotionally relive the events of the Passion. Thus, devotional writings of various genres such as homilies, apocrypha, hymns, apocalypses, prayers, meditations, and revelations based on emotional participation in the passion of Jesus and the compassion of Mary have been produced in the Christian Church since the 2nd century. Some of these writings have been lost, others have survived only in translation into an older language. An example of this is the earliest known biographical work on the Virgin Mary, the 7th-century Life of the Virgin, which covers all periods from Mary’s conception to her Assumption and was written in Greek, but survives only in a Georgian translation. Maximus the Confessor (580‒662) is named as the author of this work at the beginning, and Euthymius is given as the translator into Georgian at the end of the work. An analysis of The Life of the Virgin in the historical context of the Church in the East and the West shows that the Church in the East had, centuries earlier than the Church in the West, a pervasive “affective piety” based on a deeply felt and emotionally engaged expression of Mary’s compassion for Jesus’ suffering and death on the cross. The result was extended meditations on the Gospel narrative that served as a stimulus for the faithful to deepen their religiosity. The sources of the genres vita Christi and planctus Mariae known so far from the Church in the West indicate that a comparable penetration of ‘affective piety’ in the West began to take hold in various genres from the end of the 11th century onwards, culminating in the Baroque era. In relation to the indications in the Gospels, The Life of the Virgin by Maximus the Confessor brings at least three important innovations that are interrelated: The highly creative portrayal of Mary’s deep compassion for her suffering son Jesus; the reference to Mary’s active intervention in Jesus’ public ministry and, after his ascension, in the ministry of the Church; the repeated exhortations to the faithful to venerate Mary, the Mother of God, as their intercessor; and the frequent portrayal of the negative role of the Jews in the Passion-in terms of their envy, their malice, their apostasy, and most dramatically in the portrayal of the murderers of God. The main aim of the paper is to show, by analysing the text of the Life of the Virgin in intertextual relations, the above-mentioned innovations, which have arisen on the basis of religious experience in the interaction of the natural and supernatural elements of biblical revelation. This opens the way to a more comprehensive understanding of the development of Mary’s biography in later centuries and, in parallel, to a more comprehensive understanding of the development of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism in Europe.
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