A REPLY TO DAVID BERCOT ON THE MOTHER OF GOD
Written by Vladimir Moss
A REPLY TO DAVID BERCOT ON THE MOTHER OF GOD
David
Bercot is a continuing Anglican who has produced a number of cassettes on
spiritual themes. In several of these, he criticizes the position of the
Orthodox Church from the point of view of what he considers the classical
Anglican via media – that is, a position midway between Protestantism,
on the one hand, and Orthodoxy and Catholicism, on the other. Bercot claims
that he was very sympathetic to Orthodoxy, but was put off by the attitude of
the Orthodox to the Mother of God, which he considers to be clearly contrary to
the teaching of the
I come now to Bercot’s third tape, on
Mary, the Mother of God. I find this the most interesting of Bercot’s tapes so
far, not because it is correct – I think it contains the same mixture of true
and demonstrably false statements as in the earlier tapes – but because it
points to a certain mystery of Divine Providence which has been little inquired
into. This is the mystery of why the veneration of the Mother of God, though
present in the
For I
accept that there is little written evidence for the veneration of Mary in the
Having said
that, I accept that the veneration of Mary takes a huge leap – not in dogmatic
development, but in sheer volume and extravagance of expression – in the fifth
century. For, as Andrew Louth writes, “while there are a few precious fragments
of evidence of early devotion in the East, it was only after the Synod of
Ephesus in 431 affirmed her title as Theotokos, ‘Mother of God’, that it
developed apace, while in the West it is not until the ninth century that there
is much sign of devotion to the Virgin.”[1]
The
question is: why did it take so long for the cult of the Mother of God to
develop? Bercot offers a typically modernist, psychologising explanation: the
post-Nicene Christians felt a need for a more feminine, less wrathful God, so
they elevated Mary to divine status on the analogy of the Great Earth Mother. I
find this explanation absurd. Does he mean to say that in the middle of the
fifth century the whole Church, from the Celts of Britain to the Copts
of Egypt, suddenly and without external pressure, abandoned its belief in the
Trinitarian God and went back to paganism?! Let us remember that, to my
knowledge, nobody throughout the whole Christian world objected to the veneration
of Mary except a few western heretics who denied the virginity of Mary and were
refuted in Blessed Jerome’s two books against Jovinian already in the fourth
century. It follows that if Bercot is right, the Saviour’s promise that the
Church would prevail against the gates of hell even to the end of the world is
wrong, and the whole Church fell away from the truth in the fifth century, only
to be recreated by a few continuing Anglicans 1500 years later!
I offer
another explanation. It is only a hypothesis, and I may well be wrong. But I
think it fits the fact much better than Bercot’s explanation, while removing
the necessity of concluding that the whole Church apostasised in the fifth
century – a conclusion that Bercot does not draw explicitly, but which must be
drawn if his argument is correct.
The
explanation consists in noting that the Third Ecumenical Council in Ephesus in
431, which established, as we have seen, that Mary was the “Mother of God”,
decreed that henceforth hymns to Christ and the Saints should always conclude
with a hymn to the Mother of God, a rule that is followed to this day in the
liturgical practice of the Orthodox Church. The Council’s decree naturally
stimulated a great deal of hymnography and iconography glorifying the Mother of
God. This does not mean that the cult of Mary became more important than that
of Christ, as Bercot quite wrongly asserts – a cursory examination of the
liturgical texts of the Orthodox Church demonstrates that all services begin
with prayers to one or other of the Persons of the Holy Trinity (Vespers and
Mattins, for example, begin with a prayer to the Holy Spirit), and that prayers
to God are far more frequent than prayers to the Mother of God and the Saints,
especially in the central service of the Divine Liturgy. But it is certainly
true that the veneration of the Mother of God became more prominent, in the
sense of more public, after the Third Ecumenical Council.
However,
the decrees of the Third Council provide only a partial explanation of the facts.
We still need to explain why the pre-Nicene Fathers said so little about the
Mother of God, and in language that was so restrained by comparison with what
came later. I think that the explanation is to be found in a principle that we
find exemplified throughout the history of Divine Revelation: the principle,
namely, that while the whole truth has been committed to God’s people from the
time of the apostles, certain aspects of that truth are concealed from the
outside world at certain times because a premature revelation of them would be
harmful to the acceptance of the Christian Gospel as a whole.
Let us take
as an example the most cardinal doctrine of the Church, the doctrine of the
Holy Trinity. The doctrine of the Trinity is implicit even in the first chapter
of Genesis, where we read of the Father creating the material and noetic
worlds through His Son, the Word of God, and with the cooperation of the Holy
Spirit, Who broods like a bird over the waters of the abyss. And in the
creation of man the multi-Personed nature of God is clearly hinted at in the
words: “Let Us make man in Our image…” (Genesis 1.27). And
yet the mystery is only gradually revealed in the course of the Old Testament,
and becomes fully explicit only on the Day of Pentecost in the New.
Let us take
another example: the doctrine of the Divinity of Christ. In the Synoptic
Gospels this mystery is only partially revealed, more emphasis being attaché to
the full Humanity of Christ. In the Gospel of John, however, the veil is lifted
with the words: “In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God. And
the Word was God… And the Word was made flesh” (John 1.1, 14), and it is
clearly explicit in the Epistles and in Revelation. So why did the
Synoptic Evangelists not declare the mystery openly? Because they did not know
it, as the Arians and modern heretics such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses would
have us believe? Of course not! The mystery is there, in Matthew, Mark
and Luke, for all those with ears to hear and eyes to see. So why is it
not made explicit in them as it is in John?
As always,
the Holy Fathers provide us with the answer. They explain that John wrote his
Gospel later, after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D., not in order to correct
the earlier Gospels, which were flawless in themselves, but in order to “fill
in the gaps” which they had left unfilled under the influence of the Holy
Spirit. The first three Evangelists faithfully reflect the general sequence of Christ’s
teaching in not immediately and explicitly proclaiming His Divinity, for which
the people (and even the apostles themselves) were not yet ready. Another
reason was that, as St. Paul says, “none of the princes of this world knew
[this], for had they known [it], they would not have crucified the Lord of
glory” (I Corinthians 2.8). This is confirmed by St. Ignatius the
God-bearer, a disciple of St. John, who says that certain facts were concealed
from the devil, such as the virginity of Mary[2],
because, had he known them, he would not have stirred up the Jews to kill
Christ and so bring about the salvation of the world. Moreover, we see from Acts
that the earliest sermons of St. Peter and St. Stephen also did not emphasize
the Divinity of Christ, but rather concentrated on His being the Messiah. One
step at a time: for the Jews, it was necessary to demonstrate that Christ was
the Messiah before going on (in private, perhaps) to the deeper mystery of His
Divinity. St. Matthew, who wrote in Hebrew for the Jews, undoubtedly followed
this method under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. And the same applies to
Saints Mark and Luke, who, though not writing exclusively for the Jews, had to
take the Jewish religious education of many of their readers into account.
After the fall of Jerusalem, however, when the power of the Jews had been
broken, and when Christian heretics such as Cerinthus arose, openly denying the
Divinity of Christ, a more explicit affirmation of the mystery became
necessary. And that was what St. John – who fled from a bath-house in which he
was washing in order not to remain under the same roof as Cerinthus - provided
in his writings.
Now let us
turn to the mystery of Mary, the Mother of God. As St. John of Damascus points
out, the mystery of Mary is the mystery of the Incarnation, and the glory of
Mary derives wholly from the glory of her being chosen to be the Mother of God.[3]
All the titles and honour we ascribe to her do not add to, but express that
original glory; they are a direct consequence of her being, in the words of St.
Photius the Great, “the minister of the mystery”.[4]
For only a being of surpassing holiness could have given her flesh to the
All-Holy Word of God, becoming the new Eve, as Saints Justin and Irenaeus point
out, to Christ’s new Adam.
But just as
the glory of Christ Himself was temporarily concealed for the sake of the more
effective long-term propagation of the Gospel, so the glory of Mary was
concealed – from the world, but not from the Church – until the time when it
was safe to reveal it, that is, when idolatry had been destroyed and the dogmas
of the Divinity of Christ and of the Mother of God had been defined in
theologically precise terms. Until that time, however, such a revelation would
have been dangerous, for in a world in which paganism was still strong, and
female goddesses, as Bercot points out, were common, many would have seen
Christ and His Mother as two gods – the Christian equivalent of Jupiter and
Juno. And indeed, as Bercot again rightly points out on the basis of the
writings of St. Epiphanius of Cyprus, in the fourth century there existed a
heresy which consisted in the worship of the Mother of God and the offering of
sacrifices to her. That is why the apostles and their successors preached to
the truths of the faith to the pagan world in a definite order, with each
successive stage beginning only when the previous stage was firmly established
in the minds of their hearers. First came the teaching about God, then about
the Incarnation of the Word and the Redemption through Christ; then about the
Church and the sacraments; and then about the Mother of God.
The Church
displayed a similar reticence with regard to another of her cardinal doctrines
– that of the Body and Blood of Christ in the Eucharist. When the Lord first
expounded this mystery, many even of His disciples left Him (John 6.66).
It is not surprising, therefore, that the Church should have refrained from
preaching this doctrine from the roof-tops, and kept it even from the
catechumens, or learners, until after they had actually partaken of the
sacrament. And as with the Divinity of Christ, so with the sacraments, the
Church’s teaching is only sketchily outlined in the Synoptic Evangelists, but
more fully expounded later, in the Gospel of John. And it is only in the Gospel
of John that we find certain events in which the Mother of God played a prominent
part: the marriage in
In all these
cases, the Church’s early reticence was not the product of some kind of
esotericism in the Gnostic sense, but a prudent desire to give her children the
meat of the Word only after they have been strengthened on the milk, the
rudiments of the Gospel. For to entrust people with the holy mysteries before
they are ready for them is like giving pearls to “swine” – they will trample on
them by interpreting them in their own swinish, carnal way. Thus the doctrine
of the Mother of God, while always known to the Church, was not preached openly
until the world had become solidly Christian.
An
illustration of the wisdom of this principle is found in the life of St.
Dionysius the Areopagite, the disciple of
If the
Catholics have become like the pagan Greeks in their Mariolatry, the
Protestants have embraced the opposite, Jewish error in refusing to see
anything special in the Holy Virgin, even denying her holiness and virginity.
To be fair to Bercot, he never descends to such blasphemy, and is willing to
accept both her virginity and her exceptional blessedness. He does not even
object to the term Theotokos, or Mother of God, although, revealingly,
he never uses it himself.
But Bercot
displays a definite Protestant bias and superficiality in his interpretation of
those passages in the Gospel in which Christ speaks to or about His Mother. In
all these passages (Matthew 12.46-50; Luke 2.48-49, 8.19-21; John
2.4, 19.26-27), Bercot sees Christ as “putting down” His Mother, as if He
needed to suppress an incipient rebellion on her part, an attempt to impose her
will upon Him. Nothing could be further from the truth. Although the Orthodox
do not believe in the absolute sinlessness of the Mother of God, at any rate
before Pentecost, and admit that she may have had moments of doubt, hesitation
or imperfect comprehension, there can be no question of any conflict between
her and her Son. Christ was not so much rebuking His Mother in these passages,
as teaching a general truth which the carnally and racially-minded Jews very much
needed to absorb: the truth, namely, that closeness to God depends, not on
racial affiliation, but on spiritual kinship. Moreover, when He said, “My
Mother and My brethren are those who hear the word of God and keep it” (Luke
8.21), He was not excluding His physical Mother from the category of those
close to Him. On the contrary, it was precisely because she, more than anyone,
knew the word of God and kept it, thereby acquiring spiritual kinship with God,
that Mary was counted worthy to give birth to God in the flesh.
That is
also why Christ entrusted the Holy Virgin to
Bercot
makes another error of interpretation when he says that Mary was not one of the
first witnesses of the Resurrection. The oral tradition of the Church,
confirmed in the writings of St. Gregory Palamas[5],
affirms that Mary was in fact the very first person to see the Risen Christ,
being none other than the person whom the Evangelists call “Mary, the mother of
James and Joses” (Matthew 27.56) and “the other Mary” (Matthew
27.81, 28.1). For the sons of Joseph, the Betrothed of Mary, were James, the
first bishop of
Bercot is
again wrong in asserting that the Lord was rebuking Mary at the marriage of
Bercot
displays a similar obtuseness when discussing the fact that Mary was not
present at the Last Supper. Since the Passover meal was a family occasion, he
says, Mary’s absence shows that the Lord was “putting her in her place” and
placing his bonds with the apostles above all carnal bonds. Well, it is true,
as we have seen, that the Lord often emphasizes the superiority of spiritual
bonds to carnal ones. But Mary was most closely related to Him, as has already
been said, both spiritually and by blood.
In any
case, the Last Supper did not require the presence of Mary for a quite
different reason. At this Supper the Lord introduced the fundamental sacrament
of the New Testament Church, the Eucharist, and Himself performed the sacrament
as the eternal High Priest of the New Testament, being a priest not after the
order of Levi, but of Melchizedek. He as the Priest offered Himself as the
Victim to Himself and the Father and the Holy Spirit as the Receivers of the
Sacrifice. And He wished the apostles to be present because they also were to
be priests according to this new and higher order, and would themselves offer
the same Sacrifice of Christ’s Body and Blood, saying: “Thine own of Thine own
we offer unto Thee…” But Mary, being a woman, was not and could not be a
priest.
Not that
Mary’s ministry was any less important than the apostles’. On the contrary:
without the ministry of the Virgin at the Incarnation neither Christ’s ministry
at the Cross and Resurrection, nor that of the apostles after Pentecost, would
have been possible. For if the apostles, through the priestly gift bestowed on
them, multiplied the Church to the ends of the earth, the Virgin, having given
birth to the High Priest Himself, and having been made the Mother of His
closest disciple at the Cross, may be said to have given birth to the Church as
a whole, to be the Mother of the Body of which He is the Head to all
generations. Indeed, in a deeper sense the Virgin is not only the Mother of the
Church but the Church herself; for if Christ is the New Adam and the Head of
the Church, and Mary is the New Eve and “flesh of His flesh”, then through the
mystery of marriage the Virgin (i.e. the New Eve or the Church) is the
Body and Bride of Christ…
It is in
the context of this mystical relationship between Christ and the Holy Virgin
that we must understand the extraordinary epithets that the Church bestows on
her, such as mediatress and Queen of Heaven.
At this
point, however, it is important to distinguish the Orthodox position from that
of the Roman Catholics and from that of certain Orthodox who have been infected
by the Romanist point of view. Contrary to the Romanist teaching, the Holy
Virgin was conceived in original sin, and therefore was as much in need of
salvation as any other mortal. Moreover, as St. John Chrysostom says, it is
possible that she committed some actual sins, although these could only have
been minor ones resulting from her less that perfect knowledge of the ministry
of her Son before she received complete enlightenment at Pentecost. The
salvation of the world was effected by Christ alone, the only Mediator between
God and man, for He alone is both God and man. At the same time,
Christ could not have become man without the cooperation of a human being who
was both humble enough to receive the Word of God into her flesh without being
destroyed by Him, and believing enough to consent to the mystery without
doubting: “Be it unto me according to they word” (Luke 1.38). For, as
Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow says, “In the days of the creation of the
world, when God was uttering His living and mighty ‘Let there be’, the word of
the Creator brought creatures into the world. But on that day, unparalleled in
the life of the world, when divine Miriam uttered her brief and obedient: ‘Be
it unto me’, I hardly dare to say what happened then – the word of the creature
brought the Creator into the world.” In this sense, the Virgin, too, can be
called a mediatress insofar as she mediated our salvation. To say, as Bercot
does, that Christ could have effected the salvation of the world in some other
way if the Virgin had refused is to indulge in idle hypothesizing which
illumines nothing. For the fact is that the Virgin did not refuse and God did
not choose another person or another method.
Now, having
entered into such an extraordinarily intimate union with God, and with such
enormous consequences for the whole of created being, who can doubt that the
Virgin has become deified, “a partaker of the Divine nature”, as St. Peter puts
it (II Peter 1.4), “on the border between the created and uncreated
natures”, as St. Gregory Palamas puts it?[7]
And, this being so, who can doubt that all her petitions are granted by God,
that her “mediation” before God, in the sense of intercession for mankind, is
always heard? It is not that what she demands she always gets, as the Romanists
blasphemously say; for that would imply that the creature can dictate to the
Creator, the pot to the Potter. No: the Virgin is always heard by God because,
being in complete harmony with His will, she never asks for anything that is
contrary to His will. Like the perfect wife, she both knows the will of her
Husband and wills it herself, so that she neither compels Him nor is herself
compelled by Him “Whose service is perfect freedom”. For “where the Spirit of
the Lord is, there is liberty” (II Corinthians 3.17).
Where there
is such perfect spiritual union and freedom, the distinctions between Master
and servant, even Creator and creature, become, if not less real than before,
at any rate less prominent. The Protestants are very jealous to preserve God’s
rights and sovereignty; but they forget that God Himself “emptied Himself” of
His Divine rights, and became a servant to His own creatures, so that they
should acquire His rights and privileges. As the Fathers say: “God became man,
so that men should become gods.” And the word “gods” means what it says – the
saints truly become gods by grace: “I said: ye are gods, and all of your sons
of the Most High” (Psalm 81.6; John 10.34). For if the Holy
Scripture calls Christians now, before they have become completely freed from
sin, “brothers” and “friends” and “sons of God”, of what great “weight of
glory” will they not be accounted worthy when they are completely freed from
sin, in the life of the age to come? And if this is true of all the saints, how
can it be denied of the Virgin Mother of God, she who even at the beginning of
her ministry was already “full of grace”, and who by offering herself as “the
minister of the mystery” made it possible for all men to become gods? And if,
as St. Paul says, the saints shall judge angels (I Corinthians 6.3), how
can it be hyperbole to say that she, the mother of all the saints in the
spiritual sense, is “more honourable than the Cherubim and beyond compare more
glorious than the Seraphim”? Indeed, if Christ, the New Adam, is the King of
Heaven, how can she, the New Eve, be denied her rightful side at His side as
the Queen of Heaven? For it is of her that the Prophet David spoke: “At Thy
right hand stood the queen, arrayed in a vesture of inwoven gold, adorned in
varied colours” (Psalm 45.8).
The mystery
of Mary is the mystery of the deification of man. The path she traversed from
humility on earth to glory in the heavens is the path that all Christians hope
to traverse. And while it was God’s will that she should remain in the
background until the ministry of her Son should be completed and firmly
established in the world through the teaching of the Fathers, so it is God’s
will now that her glory should be revealed and all generations call her blessed
(Luke 1.48); that all men should see the hope that is set before them
and strive for it with redoubled zeal. And to that end God has bestowed on her
the grace of miracles and the fulfillment of all the godly petitions that men
address to her, as is witnessed by thousands upon thousands of Christians in
all countries and generations. Only the blindest bigot could deny all these
witnesses, or ascribe them all to the workings of Satan. Or rather, only one
who is blind to the true depth of the mystery of which she was the minister,
would seek to detract from the glory of the Virgin...
Let me end, then, with a witness from the
Early, Pre-Nicene Church, that of St. Gregory the Wonderworker: “Thy praise, O
most holy Virgin, surpasses all laudation, be reason of the God Who took flesh
and was born of three. To thee every creature, of things in heaven, and things
on earth, and things under the earth, offers the meet offering of honour. For
thou has indeed been shown forth to be the true cherubic throne, thou shinest
as the very brightness of light in the high places of the kingdoms of intelligence,
where the Father, Who is without beginning, and Whose power thou hadst
overshadowing thee, is glorified; where also the Son is worshipped, Whom thou
didst bear according to the flesh; and where the Holy Spirit is praised, Who
effected in thy womb the generation of the Mighty King. Though thee, O thou who
art full of grace, is the Holy and Consubstantial Trinity known in the world.
Together with thyself deem us also worthy to be made partakers of thy perfect
grace in Jesus Christ, our Lord, with Whom and with the Holy Spirit, be glory
to the Father, now and ever and unto the ages of ages. Amen.”[8]
(Published in Living Orthodoxy, May-June, 1996,
pp. 8-14; revised June 18 / July 1, 2004, March 9/22, 2008 and May 13/26, 2010)
[1] Louth, Greek East and Latin West, Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2007, p. 198.
[2] St. Ignatius, Epistle to the Ephesisans, 19, 1.
[3] St. John of Damascus, First Homily on the Dormition, 12.
[4] St. Photius the Great, Homily on the Nativity of the Virgin.
[5] St. Gregory Palamas, Homily 18, on the Sunday of the Myrrhbearers.
[6] St.
Gaudentius, Sermon 9; P.L. 20, p. 900; in Thomas Livius, The
Blessed Virgin in the Fathers of the First Six Centuries,
[7] St. Gregory Palamas, Homily 14, on the Annunciation, 15.
[8] St. Gregory the Wonderworker, Homily 3, On the Annunciation.