The essay below is used with permission by my friend, Fr Michael Plekon
The Face of the Father in the Mother of God; Mary in
Paul Evdokimov's Theological Writing
by Michael Plekon
It would not be too much to say that the
Mother of God was always present to Paul Evdokimov,
not only in his theological writing, but also in his
diaconal work, in his family life, in his own prayer,
in all of his life. After all, he did say, many times
in his writings, "It is not enough to say prayers; one
must become, be prayer, prayer incarnate."[1] And
everything we know of Paul Evdokimov tells us that he
did just that, as we aphoristically say, "he practiced
what he preached."
In almost every text he devoted to Mary,
and there are a great many, Paul Evdokimov spoke of
her very much as did his contemporaries in Orthodox
theology, his own teachers Nicholas Berdiaev and
Sergius Bulgakov, and others such as Vladimir Lossky,
Leonid Ouspensky, Georges Florovsky, Alexander
Schmemann, John Meyendorff, Alexis Kniazeff, Elisabeth
Behr-Sigel, to mention just a few. Despite the
nuanced and marked differences among these theologians
of the Russian Diaspora, as Aidan Nichols points out
in his study, differences which erupted into polemics
and condemnations at times, there was common among
them a rediscovery of the beauty and richness of the
Church's Tradition.[2] This was not only a "return to
the sources" of the Fathers, the Liturgy, the icons,
but also the striving to express the Church's treasure
in new ways, creatively, with the joyous freedom of
the "eighth day." Such eschatological liberty,
however, can and did evoke both criticism and outright
attack. Though Bulgakov's work, particularly his
"sophiology," is often remembered as an extreme case
of such adverse reaction, even ecclesial judgment, (by
the Moscow patriarchate), similar reactions continue,
even today, to the threatening freedom in the writings
of such as Alexander Schmemann, and Paul Evdokimov as
well.
Two Images of the Mother of God
For Paul Evdokimov, as for Fr. Bulgakov
before him, the Mother of God was not merely a
mainstay of Orthodox veneration, but the true "joy" of
all creation," the "first" among those deified in the
coming of Christ, the "crown of dogmas."[3] As I will
claim here, for Paul Evdokimov, Mary is before all
else, an icon, both of the Holy Trinity's love and of
sanctified humanity. She is best known as the latter,
namely as the image of the Church, bearing, revealing
and offering Christ to the world, interceding with the
Lord for the Church, covering the Church with Christ,
as the various types of icons represent her: those of
the Sign, Hodigitria, Umilenie, Orans, Pokrov and
Deisis represent her. Quite a few theologians, East
and West, have lifted up Mary as a type of the Church
and of discipleship: Max Thurian, John Macquarrie,
Karl Rahner, among others, and it was Vatican Council
II's great accomplishment, in both Lumen Gentium, the
Constitution on the Church and in Gaudium et spes, the
Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, as
well as in the new Catechism of the Catholic Church
that she is so presented.[4] Even when there has been
disagreement on the development of theology and
devotion to Mary in the history of the Church,
particularly across Reformation lines, there has
nonetheless been profound convergence in faith about
Mary's role, particularly in the New Testament, as a
model of faithful discipleship, of evangelical
righteousness.[5] Documents from the ecumenical
dialogues echo such agreements, for example, that
between Lutherans and Roman Catholics in the USA.[6]
And the figure of Mary as model of Christian holiness,
as an icon of the Church, is to be found in many more
popular presentations.
The Mother of God as the New Eve, as the
type of the Church's holiness and that of the
individual Christian, is a leading image in Paul
Evdokimov's writing about her. Yet it is his
accomplishment as well to present Mary, following the
Tradition and his own teachers, as a "mysterious icon"
of the indescribable Father's love and paternity, of
the invisible Spirit's life-giving holiness, precisely
in her giving human birth to the Son. Mary is, for
Paul Evdokimov, a "faithful and authentic image," in
her maternity, of the Trinitarian mystery. As such,
she reveals much about the amazing philanthropy of
God. She embodies the "foolish love" of God for His
children, His emptying of Himself, becoming powerless,
a slave and suffering for us, the "Lamb immolated from
the foundation of the world,"--all of these are
profound "verbal icons" of God's self-sacrifice and
self-giving for the love of His creatures, images
beloved of Alexander Bukharev and Fr. Sergius
Bulgakov. They are lovingly, consistently employed by
Paul Evdokimov, who both echoed and expanded upon
their insights. If the divine philanthropy is at the
very center of Paul Evdokimov's theological vision,
then the Mother of God, as living icon, as embodied
expression of that love also stands very close to that
core.
The Mother of God: Icon of and for the Church
As St. Paul proclaims, "Christ is the
image (eikon) of the invisible God." (Coloss. 1: 15)
Christ is the way, the truth and the life, the light,
the bread of heaven, the door to the Kingdom, the
absolute image of the Father. Christ is the unique
one, the God-Man, who alone accomplishes the salvation
of the world through His death and resurrection.
However, as Paul Evdokimov constantly emphasized,
God's plan is never imposed upon humanity. According
to the Fathers, God can do everything except force us
to love him, to be saved. Rather, God always works in
and through the freedom and the striving of the human
person. Mary is the paradigm, the icon par
excellence, of that human liberty and assent. In the
economy of salvation, she embraces and expresses all
of God's intention for humanity, to paraphrase St.
John of Damascus' saying. In her humility and
obedience, Mary shows forth the suffering, kenotic,
even absurd or foolish love of God for His creatures,
aspects of the divine compassion of which Paul
Evdokimov sang in his writings.[7] As a creature, as
one of us, our sister, Mary uniquely mirrors both who
God is and what He does. This she reveals as she
shows us how a person is transformed by communion with
God.
Even before Vatican Council II's
astounding rediscovery of Mary's place in the Church,
as a type of the Church, as a sign of salvation, Paul
Evdokimov was heralding this double iconography of the
Virgin, her dual role in God's plan. Here in grateful
tribute and memory eternal to Paul Evdokimov, my
intention is not only to underline what can be read in
his texts, but to draw out the implications of his
understanding of the Mother of God for us, for the
still divided churches and for us and individual
disciples of the Lord in our lives.
The Mother of God in Tradition
Paul Evdokimov draws upon the whole of
the Church's Tradition in his writings on Mary. With
an evangelical spirit astonishing to non-Orthodox
Christians, he most insightfully presents the
Scriptures' communication of the Mother of God.
Without reference to the righteous of the Old
Covenant, Mary is incomprehensible in the New
Testament. Moreover, he emphasizes, as do the
Fathers, Mary's place within the people of God, her
essentially "ecclesial being" and her presence
throughout Christ's work of salvation. He repeats
and reflects upon the liturgy's images, acclamations
and intercessions of the Virgin. He perceptively and
lovingly explores the Mother of God in the icons.
Like other Orthodox theologians, he cites many of the
same voices in the preaching and teaching of the
Fathers and the Councils. Invariably, as his
colleagues, he would quote St. John of Damascus:"the
only name of the Theotokos is the Mother of God; this
name contains the entire mystery of the economy of
salvation." (The Orthodox Faith, III, 12) Like many
of his fellow theologians, he was also particularly
fond of Nicholas Cabasilas' beautiful Homily on the
Annunciation, especially the portion which speaks of
the synergy between the divine and the human, between
Father, Son and Spirit and the faithful servant, Mary:
The Incarnation was not only the work of the Father,
by His power, and by His Spirit, but also the work of
the will and the faith of the Virgin. Without the
consent of the Immaculate, without the agreement of
her faith, the plan was as unrealizable as it would
have been without the intervention of the three divine
persons themselves. It was only after having
instructed her and persuaded her that God took her for
His Mother and borrowed from her the flesh that she so
greatly wished to lend Him. Just as He became
incarnate voluntarily, so He wished that His Mother
should bear Him freely and with her full consent.
Quite often, Orthodox theologians point
out the relative silence of the Tradition of the
Church with respect to the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Sergius Bulgakov, Georges Florovsky, Vladimir Lossky
and Alexander Schmemann note this, yet go on to write
beautifully of her place as the most holy one in the
mystery of the Church.[8] Alexander Kniazeff's
numerous essays on the Theotokos eventually filled an
entire volume.[9] While there should not be a
separate theology of Mary, one cannot fully express
the faith of the Church without speaking of her, as
Fr. Bulgakov frequently pointed out. Of course, there
are numerous exceptions to this silence regarding
Mary, for example, the Council of Ephesus defining her
as Theotokos, essentially a Christological confession
of faith. There is her place in the liturgy, in the
texts of the Office and the Eucharistic Liturgy for
many feasts, several of which are distinctly her own,
such as her Nativity (8 September) and her Dormition
(15 August). When she is seen, in the icons, she is
always with her Son, as Paul Evdokimov has said:
Mariology as inseparable from hagiology is an organic
part of Christology. In the theology of the Fathers,
the veneration of the Virgin is the exact opposite of
all the sentimental amplifications and deviations of
"Mariolatry"; there is no need for the latter, because
true veneration expresses what is immeasurably
greater, the immanent core of the Incarnation.[10]
Sometimes, much is made of her silence in
the Scriptures, but of course, the Mother of God not
only speaks words of great significance, she is the
one who is constantly present at crucial instances of
Christ's saving work. She does the will and work of
the Lord. In her fiat, in her assent and cooperation
with the power of the Holy Spirit and the love of the
Father, Mary makes the Good News human, giving birth
to God as one of us.[11] Mary is not totally silent.
She can be called a "prophet" of the Lord, as
American Lutheran theologian Robert Jenson has called
her, in the procession of other righteous women of the
Old Covenant, such as Hannah, whose song she sings,
though in a new and different key: the Magnificat.(Lk
1: 46-56)[12] Mary is no mere passive receptacle of
God's grace. It takes her "Yes" for the synergy to
commence, for the Incarnation to begin the work of
salvation, completed in the Cross and Resurrection.
From her body, the Lord takes a body and becomes one
of us, to save us.
Mary is a model of faithfulness, like
her sisters and brothers, the righteous ones of the
Old Covenant before her. Yet she is more, for God
works through her, becomes present in her as in no
other person. Paul Evdokimov repeatedly quoted the
Dogmatikon in the third tone: "Without the assistance
of a father on earth, you have given birth to the One
who was born without a mother in heaven." Further, he
constantly noted, "The close correspondence between
the two mysteries is easily seen. To the fatherhood
of the Father in the divine sphere corresponds the
motherhood of the Virgin in the human."[13] Not only
does she personally become the place and the means of
the Incarnation, she is as personally involved, as
intimately entwined with God's coming to earth as is
imaginable and thensome. She is no mere passive
instrument of God's work, but both a recipient and a
participant in this salvation, for this is, according
to the Scriptures, how God always acts with and
through His servants. Thus, she becomes the sign, the
singular human icon of God and His philanthropy, and
this emphasis of Paul Evdokimov bears special meaning
for us today.
From the earliest Fathers, he also shows,
Mary is a type of the Church. So, when we see her in
the Hodigitria or Umilenie icons, particularly that of
the Mother of God of Vladimir, his favorite, pointing
the way to Christ, so close to Him in tender love that
she merges into Him, we are, Paul Evdokimov tells us,
seeing exactly what the Church is. We are looking at
how we as members of the Body, as ecclesial persons,
are one with the Lord. This mingling of His flesh and
ours in the Mother of God is what St. John Chrysostom
describes as the reality of Eucharistic communion.
The Mother of God thus is a sign of the central
mystery or sacrament of the Church, a type of the
Church's very relationship with the Lord.
Mary is the most pure, the all-holy. Paul
Evdokimov constantly stresses that there is both the
holiness given her by the Holy Spirit and that of her
own struggle to hear and follow the Word. Mary is
presented in the New Testament, particularly in the
opening chapters of St. Luke's Gospel, as one of the
"ancestors of God," one of the righteous of the Old
Covenant, and she is surrounded by such as these:
Zechariah, Elisabeth and their son, John the Baptist,
Joseph her husband, the priest Simeon and Anna the
prophetess in the Temple, as well as her own parents,
remembered in deutero-canonical and liturgical
texts.[14] Mary is revealed as a person of intense
prayer and communion with God. The angel Gabriel
greets her as "full of grace, blessed among women."
(Lk 1:28) The Lord is truly with her, as his use of
the Hebrew salutation confesses. She ponders what God
does in her heart, not just at this tumultuous moment,
but all through her life. (Lk 1:29, 2:19,51,
11:28,13:20, 14:11, Acts 1:14) She says "Yes" to the
Lord's messenger and to His plan for her, despite her
own circumstances and fear. Later, her Son will
praise her as one who hears the Word and keeps it,
lives it.
Mary is not merely an observer, but a
participant in and recipient of the acts of Christ,
the work of salvation. From the Bethlehem cave of
her own birthgiving, to the epiphany to the Magi and
the world, at the Cana wedding feast's first sign of
the kingdom, beneath the cross, some would say at the
empty tomb, certainly amid the apostles in the upper
room at the Pentecost descent of the Spirit, Mary is
present. Her falling asleep and assumption into the
heavenly kingdom parallels the Lord's own ascension.
What happens to Mary is what will happen to us.
Christ's Pascha from death to life makes the Pascha of
Mary, the Pascha of the Church and of each Christian
possible.
"If the Holy
Spirit-Panagion-hypostasizes, personalizes divine
holiness, Mary-Panagia-would personalize human
holiness," Paul Evdokimov points out.[15] Mary's
holiness, as ours, is, in the first place, God's gift.
The angel greets her as "full of grace," and tells
her that the Holy Spirit will come upon her and the
power of the Most High overshadow her. The impossible
becomes possible, with God, but only through Mary's
free fiat. The holiness of the Lord and the holiness
of this woman meet in what Paul Evdokimov calls
"perfect synergy." Mary receives God, giving Him a
body, a family, a home here on earth, so that He
really is Emmmanuel, God-with-us. This was the desire
of the Lord in His immense philanthropy from the
creation--to pitch His tent and live with Adam and
Eve, with Abraham and Sarah, in the Ark of the
Covenant, in the Temple. Constantly rejected, He is
welcomed by this young woman and her "Yes," and He
begins to live in our house, our body, our time.
All of what has been thus far said of Mary
does not begin to exhaust what Paul Evdokimov wrote
and taught about her. To read the texts in which he
contemplates the Mother of God is much like being
present in church, participating in the liturgy
itself. One is surrounded by the faces of the saints,
at whose head Mary stands. One sees her iconographic
image, presenting Christ to the world, joined
completely in communion with Him, arms outstretched in
intercession for all. One hears all the titles and
names of Mary, from the Akathist, the troparia,
kondakia, canons and hymns of the feasts: burning
bush, holy mountain, gate of paradise, holy book,
candlestick of the light of the world, crown of
dogmas, archetype of the feminine; of new life, of
fulfilled holiness, of the royal priesthood, of
ontological chastity, of virginity and motherhood.
The experience of the Mother of God in his writings in
like that of a waterfall of beauty pouring down,
washing and cooling. The Mother of God covers all
with the veil (pokrov) of her prayer. In his most
important monographs, whether on the sweep of
Orthodoxy, on marriage, on woman and salvation, on
God's beauty communicated in the icons and the
liturgy, on the spiritual life and path of holiness,
not only is there a chapter or section reserved for
the Mother of God, rather she is always and everywhere
present, precisely as in the church or in the liturgy.
She is not the Center but constantly clings to Him,
urges us to do whatever He tells us. (John 2: 5)
The Mother of God as Icon of God: The Face of the
Father in the Face of the Mother
So, for Paul Evdokimov, Mary is clearly
the image of humanity transformed by the Holy Spirit
and freely working with Him. She is an icon of the
Church's identity and of the vocation of each
Christian. Yet, as he perceptively shows us, Mary is
more, and it is precisely as an icon of God that she
brings treasures of the divine mystery to the Church
and the world with unusual power, with nuances that
we may have forgotten or not even known.
To be more specific, Mary shows us a God
whom our unbelieving, iconoclastic or indifferent age
seldom sees. Now Paul Evdokimov never saw modern
society as simply secular and negative. His vision
was not negative but always hopeful, presuming, as
Kierkegaard beautifully put it, goodness and love in
the neighbor. Over and over again, in this same
disillusioned and skeptical culture, even in serious
atheistic negations, he perceived the hunger for
truth, freedom and beauty, in short the desire for
God. So Evdokimov points to the suffering God who is
powerless before us, who empties Himself out in the
love of creation, redemption and sanctification, but
who will not constrain anyone to love Him in return.
Such a God is problematic for many believers. Mary's
window into God thus presents difficulties for some,
for whom God reflects more their own thinking than the
One who is always making things new, the One who is
often doing what we least expect or want, in his
absurd passion for us, the manikos eros of Nicholas
Cabasilas, to which Paul Evdokimov repeatedly refers.
Put differently, there is always resistance to God as
He really is, and the tendency to make God over, into
our own image and likeness. As God's icon, Mary works
against these inclinations.
Just before his falling-asleep, Paul
Evdokimov had presented a paper on the Holy Spirit and
the Mother of God, Panagion et Panagia, to the French
Mariological society. This essay, rightfully
described as dense and profound, was Evdokimov's
fullest and, as it turned out, last statement on the
Mother of God. It remains a challenge and great
reward to the reader, an important piece of
theological proclamation. I have found that it is
most helpful to read it alongside the much simpler and
beautiful chapter in L'art de l'icône: théologie de la
beauté, (pp. 217-223), an essay which invites us to
see Mary as a singular, "living icon" of God's love
for mankind in the Vladimir icon. Yet, as it
happened, Paul Evdokimov added to the conclusion of
the original essay, which he intended as a more
"contemplative, iconographic " precision of what is an
"ultimate mystery."
"The Holy Spirit Himself has no place, no
location of incarnation except the unique, most
extraordinary person to receive His presence, Mary,"
Evdokimov writes. "According to the christological
dogma specified by the 7th Ecumenical Council, in
Christ, the God-Man, we affirm the duality of nature
in which the human manifests the divine. Christ's
humanity is the "epiphanic icon" of his divinity." In
the revision completed on the eve of his death Paul
Evdokimov continued:
The Father is enveloped in the silence of apophasis;
it is this hidden face of the Father that the Son and
Spirit reveal to the world. The absolute Subject, the
Father, reveals in His Son the Meaning which becomes
the Life through the Spirit. Now, the Theotokos, in
her Maternity, translates this trinitarian mystery
into the human dimension as a faithful and authentic
image. It is in this sense--which itself rests upon a
hidden revelation--that Mary is the mysterious icon of
the Father.. The iconographic canons forbid any
representation of the Father, who is the Inconceivable
and Indescribable One. The Theotokos receives the
breath of the Spirit and her maternity enables us to
contemplate in silence the divine Paternity, the Face
of the Father. A Marian hymn exalts her as the human
being who, the deified new creature, fully
participates in the divine being according to grace:
"Let us the faithful sing, the Glory of the universe,
the Door of Heaven, the Virgin Mary, Flower of the
human race and Theotokos, Birth-Giver of God, She who
has become Heaven and the Temple of the Divine."[16]
Paul Evdokimov insists, even in these few
lines, that one can only approach such a hidden and
great mystery obliquely, through images that are
impossible to render more precisely. What is said
here of Mary, what one can also hear in the liturgy,
as he cites in the hymn, what one can see, in the
Vladimir icon, for example, cannot be torn out of the
whole, the broad and deep Tradition of the Church.
There is much that the churches are
beginning to learn anew about Mary's humanity, her
womanhood in particular, about how God always uses our
identity and possibilities for His work of
transformation. A modest renaissance of interest in
and understanding of the Mother of God is taking place
here and there in the churches. Reformation churches,
from whom she has long been absent, are again
reappropriating the "glory of creation." The Mother
of God is present, especially in her icon, in numerous
sanctuaries, from Taizé to Anglican cathedrals to
Lutheran parish churches to Reformed retreat centers,
and in countless homes. Anglican and Lutheran
churches have restored Mary to the liturgical
calendar. Many questions, stemming from conflict and
change within the churches, are also being directed at
Mary simply because of who she is in the plan of
salvation and the life of the Church. Elisabeth
Behr-Sigel writes most elegantly about some of these
challenges.[17] Not surprisingly but sadly, for an
eminent Lutheran theologian such as Robert Jenson,
Mary scarcely comes up for consideration in his
masterful review of ecumenical dialogues and the
reasons for their frustration.[18] Such deeply
contested issues as the nature of the sacraments,
especially the Eucharist, the nature of the ordained
ministry, the place of women and men in the people of
God,[19] and even the very nature of the Church
herself-- in all of these, the figure and the
significance of the Mother of God are crucial sources
of truth.
In the end, I believe this is precisely
what Paul Evdokimov was aiming at in his theological
teaching about Mary, to come closer to the truth she
embodies about God, the Church, and the Christian
life. Much of what he wrote has to do with the latter
two realities, just as the New Testament, the writings
of the Fathers, the liturgy and the icons all present
Mary as the type or icon of the Church and the model
of discipleship. Clearly, too, there is no lack of
disagreement on these. Mary's submitting herself, in
freedom and love, to God's will, her association with
the 'anawim, the weak and poor of the Lord, her
choosing the asceticism and martyrdom of the life with
God--none of these are images popular or attractive to
current sensibilities. Yet, in the wonderful Gospel
inversion, that turning upside down of what we think,
could it not be that Mary becomes, in the Holy
Spirit's infinite wisdom, exactly the anti-typical
image of God that wounds our sensibilities, those in
the secular culture as well as those within the
Church?
Mary, Human Theophany of Divine Philanthropy
For me, this was Paul Evdokimov's profound
realization and his intention in bringing forward this
unusual, even threatening and dangerous understanding
of the hidden face of the Father, revealed by the
Spirit, in the face of the Mother of God. Over the
years, my own children have grasped something of what
Paul Evdokimov was driving at. When asked about the
icons in our home, they point to both the icons of
Christ Pantocrator and the Theotokos and say, quite
simply, "That's God!" Precisely because of all my
theological training and ecclesiastical experience, I
do not work from such theological depth as this 12
year Paul and 9 year old Hannah, but I am certain Paul
Evdokimov did. His eyes were well focused on the
beauty of the Kingdom. What child-like simplicitas
can perceive frightens many a mature mind. Yet it is
just such openness and immediacy that the Holy Spirit
wants to nurture in us, through the liturgy,
scriptures, prayer and in the icons, so that we may
recognize the theophany of Divine Beauty everywhere,
Christ filling all things, all doors opening to the
Kingdom.
In the face of the Mother of God, we see
the face of the Father, who did not need to, but
wanted to create us. After we had turned away, He
still wanted to save us and bring us back to Him. In
the Vladimir Mother of God's unfathomable, deep look
and communion with her Son, Paul Evdokimov saw the
identical gaze, the mutual love of the Father, Son and
Spirit for each other and then for us, as captured by
St. Andrei Rublev in his incomparable icon of the
Trinity. Mary reflects the Trinity's self-emptying,
passionate love for man, the "foolish love" which
Cabasilas and Evdokimov wrote of, the love that will
not compel the beloved, the love that pursues,
suffers, becomes powerless, small, even apparently
absent and silent, so as not to threaten or
coerce.[20] God comes down, as Evdokimov echoes both
the Fathers and the liturgy, so that we can come back
up--to Him, to our full stature. Whether in the Old
Covenant, or now in the New, God keeps faith in us,
pursues us, constantly seeks our good--all of this
much more than we do for ourselves or each other. In
true Gospel inversion, Mary shows us a God far more
magnanimous than we believe or even like Him to be.
In the Theotokos, the God who seems so ordinary as a
mother, who seems so small, as this poor woman, is
nonetheless immense, "greater than the heavens," as
Mary herself is described.
The symmetry is perfect, as it should be.
In the face of this poor, humble woman, Mary, God is
revealed in His astonishing poverty and submissiveness
to us whom He loves. To be sure, she is a suffering
servant, neither a powerful, statuesque goddess nor
the "Sophia" figure some would have as an alternative
or even replacement for Christ. In the sorrow that
frames her face, we also perceive the truth found in
no other world religious tradition, that out of love,
God chooses to be submissive, to suffer for and with
His children. That God should be shown by a human
face, yes, the face of Christ, the God-Man, but also
by a woman's face, that of His Mother, this is at once
a great scandal and revelation to some Christians who
would look down upon women. Such all too easily
forget the great testimony of the scriptures and
liturgy. They overlook the unique proclamation and
embodiment of God by Mary, His Mother, and the witness
of all the other holy righteous women, Sarah, Hannah,
Judith, Deborah, Elisabeth, Mary Magdalen, to name
only a few.
In Mary, the achievement and expectation
of natural religion is shattered by divine revelation.
As the Western Church is fond of confessing, finitum
capax infiniti, the finite can contain the infinite,
equally affirmed in the Eastern liturgy. The God who
made all, cannot be contained by anything, so loves us
that he bends very low, becomes very small, not just a
baby, not just a human being, but a slave, one to be
rejected, despised, tortured, executed. The Cross is
very much present in the face of the Mother. She
embodies the face of the Father who suffers His Son to
undergo the cross, the face of the Son who suffered
and died on it, and the face of the Spirit who
conquers through the cross, to paraphrase Filaret of
Moscow's great preaching on Holy Friday.[21]
We immediately recognize the Mother of
God. Most people say, "Madonna," the "Mother and
Child," or "Blessed Mother," at least here in America.
So synonymous with being human is the mother as the
giver and sustainer of life, that despite all abuses
and exceptions, we acknowledge the truth of maternal
love from our own experience and that of countless
others around us. The image of the mother comforting
her crying, frightened child in the middle of the
night, assuring that everything is all right is what
my own teacher, the American theologian and
sociologist Peter L. Berger called a "prototypical
human gesture," a "signal of transcendence."[22] And
there is no lie in this, Peter Berger quickly adds,
even if there are many things wrong, either with the
child or with the world outside. How often have we
seen this icon repeated amid death and destruction,
not only in the horror of the past but in the terror
of the present: Rwanda, Sarajevo. Even in our lives
of relative peace and comfort in New York or Paris,
but in circumstances of suffering, this same image,
whether involving an actual mother, a father, a
spouse, sister, brother, friend or neighbor--this
embrace of tenderness and communion, this "kiss of
peace" as the liturgy calls it--hearkens back to what
Mary is and does and what she represents, God's
philanthropy. The mother gives the certainty that at
another level, that of ultimate reality and truth,
that of God, everything is all right. This is what
the face of the Mother of God says to us, what she
gives us, the truth of God's face, of His seeking us
to save us, whom He so greatly loves.
It is not a new foolishness, not a trendy
stumbling block which the Gospel presents. The
Incarnation has always been so and always will be just
that, as assault on our sensibilities. But we know
that the Incarnation is more than the disturbing
intrusion of God into our existence, His "getting
under our skin." It is the action beyond which there
is no greater, the supreme gesture of solidarity with
us even God could make. Of the numerous gifts given
us in the Church, surely the Mother of God is both the
greatest and the smallest. Perhaps all that is
essential could be said without explicitly mentioning
her, as one often hears it put by Christians of the
Reformation churches. If so, then why all the fuss
about her? With great ecclesial love, Paul Evdokimov
echoes the conviction of Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, his
teacher, that without Mary, something human is missing
from the life of the Church and from God. After all,
the scandal and wonder is that God has a Mother. Paul
Evdokimov's faithful and loving theological writing is
not only praise of Mary but revelation. The divine
plan could not have unfolded without her fiat and her
cooperation. The grace bestowed on her was met with
the boundless love of her obedience, her living out of
the Word. She is what she did, and thereby leaves us
a unique pattern of and for holy living. She is not
only the one who made the Incarnation possible, she is
a sign of the continual presence of God-with-us, a
witness to the enduring power of the Word made flesh.
Yet she also becomes a window into the
wonder of God's love for us, a door through which the
light and the life of the Kingdom, of the Holy
Trinity, engulfs us. It was Paul Evdokimov's great
accomplishment, along with so many other gifts he gave
to the Church, to hold out to us in our time the
Mother of God as a true theophany, a real showing of
God in His doing, in His loving us. This Paul
Evdokimov did, as he did in all his work, with
absolute faithfulness to the truth of the Tradition,
but moreover, with even greater love and joy. His
love for the Mother of God is a sign of his love for
the Lord. Eternal be his memory.
Michael Plekon is associate professor in the
department of sociology/anthropology and religious
studies of Baruch College of the City University of
New York. He was a pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran
Church in America, and is now with his family in the
Orthodox Church of America (OCA), preparing for the
priesthood.
[1]Sacrement de l'amour, p. 83. I want to express my
gratitude to Fr. Michel Evdokimov for much help in my
study of his father's work and for the opportunity to
share some of that here.
[2]Theology in the Russian Diaspora: Church, Fathers
and Eucharist in Nikolai Afanas'ev (1893-1966),
Cambridge University Press, 1989.
[3]The Mother of God is the focus in many of Paul
Evdokimov's writings, both essays in journals and
monographs. In this essay, I have concentrated on the
writing aboiut the Theotokos in the following
principal works: La femme et le salut du monde (1958,
republished DDB, 1978), L'orthodoxie (1965,republished
DDB, 1979), La prière de l'Église d'Orient (1966,
republished DDB1985), L'art de l'icône, théologie de
la beauté, DDB, 1970) and the essays, "La sainteté
dans la tradition de l'Église orthodoxe" and "Le
saint Esprit et la Mère de Dieu," in La nouveauté de
l'Esprit, (Abbaye de Bellefontaine, 1977 ).
[4]See Max Thurian, Mary, Mother of the Lord and
Figure of the Church (London, 1963), John Macquarrie,
Mary for All Christians (London, 1990), Karl Rahner,
Mary, Mother of the Lord (NY, 1963).
[5]Mary in the New Testament, Raymond E. Brown, Karl
P. Donfried, Joseph A. Fitzmyer, John Reumann, eds.
(Mahwah, NJ, 1978)
[6]The One Mediator, the Saints and Mary, Lutherans
and Roman Catholics in Dialogue VIII, George Anderson,
J. Francis Stafford, Joseph A. Burgess,, eds.
(Minneapolis, 1992).
[7]L'amour fou de Dieu (Paris, 1973). While this
collection contains the essay thus titled with
Cabasilas' phrase, manikos eros, the motif of God's
astounding philanthropy runs throughout Paul
Evdokimov's entire body of work.
[8]See Sergius Bulgakov, Le buisson ardent (Paris,
1987), The Orthodox Church (Crestwood, NY,
1988),Georges Florovsky, The Ever Virgin Mother of
God, London, 1949, Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical
Theology of the Eastern Church (Crestwood, NY, 1976),
"Panagia," in In the Image and Likeness of God
(Crestwood, NY, 1985), Alexander Schmemann, The
Presence of Mary (Mt. Herman, CA, 1988) and The
Celebration of Faith, vol. III, The Mother of God and
Her Feasts (Crestwood, NY, forthcoming).
[9]La Mère de Dieu dans l'Église Orthodoxe (Paris,
1990).
[10]La Femme et le salut du monde, pp. 190-191. The
chapters on the Mother of God in this study are among
Paul Evdokimov's richest.
[11]See my essay, "Mary and Mediation: The Mother of
God as Icon of and for the Church," forthcoming in One
in Christ.
[12]"An Attempt to Think about Mary," dialog, vol. 31,
Fall 1992, pp. 259-264.
[13]La Femme, p. 217.
[14]See the fine studies by John Breck, "Mary in the
New Testament," and "The Face of the Spirit," Pro
Ecclesia, vol. II, no. 4, Fall 1993, pp. 460-472 and
vol. III, no. 2, Spring 1994, pp. 165-178.
[15]"La saint Esprit et la Mère de Dieu," p. 256.
[16]"Le Saint Esprit et la Mère de Dieu," pp. 277-278.
[17]"Mary, the Mother of God: Traditional Mariology
and New Questions," in The Ministry of Women in the
Church (Redondo Beach, CA, 1991), pp. 181-216.
[18]Unbaptized God: The Basic Flaw in Ecumenical
Theology (Minneapolis, 1992).
[19]See the document of the same title printed as an
appendix in E. Behr-Sigel's above-noted book, a
document signed by close to 40 clergy and laity of the
French Orthodox community, a document very much in the
theological spirit of Paul Evdokimov.
[20]The Life in Christ (Crestwood NY, 1974), pp.
162ff, esp. p. 164. L'amour fou de Dieu, pp. 35-39,
91-107, Le buisson ardent, pp. 135-167.
[21]Sermons and Discourses (St. Petersburg, 1873),
quoted in Alexander Schmemann, The Eucharist
(Crestwood NY, 1988, p. 104.
[22]A Rumor of Angels (Garden City NY, 1970), pp.
52-57.