MOTHER OF THE LIGHT

prayers to the theotokos

translated by the v. rev. arch. maximos constas
Panagia Eleousa
 CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION.................................................................................ix
PRAYERS TO OUR ALL HOLY LADY THEOTOKOS
I. A Prayer to the Most Holy Theotokos...................................1
II. A Prayer to the Theotokos........................................................2
III. A Prayer to the Theotokos......................................................5
IV. A Prayer to the Theotokos.......................................................8
V. A Prayer to the Theotokos....................................................... 17
VI. A Prayer to the Most Holy Theotokos........................... 24
VII. A Prayer to the Theotokos
Before Receiving Holy Communion................................. 26
After Holy Communion........................................................... 30
VIII. A Prayer to the Theotokos................................................ 31
IX. A Prayer to the Theotokos....................................................32
X. A Prayer to the Theotokos.......................................................38
XI. A Prayer to the Most Holy Theotokos........................... 42
XII. A Prayer of Confession
to the Most Holy Theotokos....................................................... 46

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 mother of the light

XIII. A Prayer to the Most Holy Theotokos........................ 51

CANONS TO THE ALL-HOLY THEOTOKOS
St. Theodore the Studite
A Canon to the All-Holy Theotokos....................................55
St Methodios I of Constantinople
A Canon of Supplication to the Theotokos.................... 64
St. John of Euchaita
Hymns of Thanksgiving to the Theotokos...................... 71
NOTES ON THE TRANSLATION..............................................79

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 INTRODUCTION
The Theotokos in the Orthodox Church

T o understand the theotokos

is to understand the mystery of the
Church. Those, on the other hand, who
misunderstand the Theotokos, and who distort or
ignore her role and significance, fundamentally
misunderstand and distort the Christian faith as a
whole. Without continuous reference to the Theot-
okos in the history of salvation and in the life of the
Church, there can be no genuine devotion or theol-
ogy. Only a reductive and impoverished rendering
of the Christian faith could exclude the Mother
of God from the Church’s life and experience, in-
cluding its theology, which is faithful and inspired
reflection on the experience of salvation in Christ.
When we look at Scripture and the official theo-
logical teachings of the Church, the material on the
Theotokos appears at first glance to be rather limit-

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 mother of the light

ed. In the New Testament, she is mentioned in the

infancy narratives of the Synoptic Gospels. In the
Gospel of John, she appears only twice, at the wed-
ding in Cana, and again at the Crucifixion, though
John never mentions her name. The Old Testament
presents an even smaller number of passages, such
as Isaiah 7:14: “Behold a virgin shall conceive and
bear a son.” The official dogmatic statements of the
Church are equally lapidary. The Third Ecumenical
Council (Ephesus, 431) canonized the theological
title “Theotokos.” The Fifth Ecumenical Council
(Constantinople, 553) canonized the doctrine of
her “ever-virginity.” These Councils did not invent
these doctrines, but simply recognized what had
long been a part of the Church’s faith and practice.
To be sure, the seeming paucity of this material is
the result of a set of false assumptions, namely, that
Scripture and theological doctrines can be under-
stood in isolation from the devotional and liturgi-
cal life of the Church. All three—Scripture, theolo-
gy, and the worship of the Church—need to be seen
together as an organic, integral whole, like a living
organism composed of parts. To separate any one of
the parts from the others is to distort and destroy
each and all of them. To know them only in sep-
aration is never to know the whole. Theology and
worship illumine and inform each other, similar to
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 INTRODUCTION

the interaction of theory and practice. On its own,

however, theology can easily degenerate into a se-
ries of abstract intellectual propositions, incapable
of accounting for the exalted place of the Theotokos
in the devotional and liturgical life of the Church.
Scripture, too, apart from the experience of liturgy,
would have little to say about the Theotokos, being
unable on its own to disclose the mystery of the
Mother of God hidden in its holy pages.
This mysterious, hidden presence of the Mother
of God in Scripture and theology points to a still
deeper foundation. Devotion to the Theotokos has
always been an essential part of the Church’s inner
life, the heart and soul of its spiritual and mysti-
cal tradition. Here, too, we see the integral unity
of spirituality and theology, since the Church’s ex-
traordinary love for and devotion to the Theotokos
flows directly from the doctrine of the Incarnation.
But such devotion, precisely because it is a mystery,
has always been covered by the modesty appropriate
to the soul’s life of intimacy with God, and thus has
never been part of the Church’s public proclama-
tion. If, when preaching the good news of the Gos-
pel, St Paul “decided to know nothing among you
except Jesus Christ and him crucified,” (1 Cor 2:2)
this was not to the exclusion of a higher and hidden
form of teaching, for “among the perfect we speak
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 mother of the light

a message of wisdom—not the wisdom of this age,

but of the mysterious and hidden wisdom of God,
which He destined for our glory before time began.”
(1 Cor 2:7) Vladimir Lossky describes this well when
he says: “The Mother of God was never a theme of
the public preaching of the apostles. While Christ
was preached from the housetops and proclaimed
for all to know in an initiatory teaching addressed
to the whole world, the mystery of his Mother was
revealed only to those who were already within the
Church, only to the faithful who had received the
sayings of Christ, and who were pressing toward
the high calling of God in Christ Jesus. It is not so
much an object of faith as a foundation of hope, a
fruit of faith, ripened in tradition.”1
When we consider the nature and extent of the
spiritual architecture built upon this “foundation
of hope,” savoring the “ripened fruit of faith” ex-
pressed in the Church’s devotion to the Theotokos,
we see that it is at once so magnificent, so vast,
and so complex as to defy any attempt to organize
it into simple categories or concepts. Here a few
examples will be helpful. While most of us would
have difficulty naming even one miraculous icon of
Christ, miraculous icons of the Mother of God exist
1 Vladimir Lossky, “Panagia,” in The Mother of God: A Symposium, edit-
ed by E.L. Mascall (London: Dacre Press, 1959), p. 35.
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 INTRODUCTION

in staggering abundance. A recent attempt to cata-

logue the various Greek names and epithets of icons
of the Mother of God (e.g., Amolyntos, Glykophilousa,
Eleousa, Hodegetria, Kardiotissa, etc.) astonishingly
revealed the existence of well over one-thousand
such epithets, indicative either of iconographic
type, geographical region, or associated with the
many hundreds of popular shrines and pilgrimage
centers dedicated to the Theotokos.
The witness of the Divine Liturgy is even more
striking. On the morning when a Divine Liturgy is
celebrated, the priest enters the sanctuary only af-
ter he has opened its central gate and drawn aside
its veil, saying: “Open to us, O blessed Theotokos,
the gate of compassion, for hoping in you, we will
not be put to shame. Through you may we be deliv-
ered from all adversity, for you are the salvation of
Christians.” This is exactly the spirit of the prayers
collected in this volume. After the priest enters the
sanctuary, and while he is preparing the Holy Gifts
that will become the Body and Blood of Christ, he
places a small piece of bread, stamped with the let-
ter “M” for Mary, on the paten in honor of the The-
otokos, saying: “In honor and memory of our most
holy, glorious Lady the Theotokos and ever-virgin
Mary, through whose intercessions, O Lord, re-

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ceive this sacrifice upon your heavenly altar”—as if

the Liturgy itself could not take place without her
intercession. Finally, at the spiritual heart of the
Liturgy, the miraculous transformation of the Eu-
charistic Gifts into the Body and Blood of Christ,
the Mother of God is commemorated immediate-
ly after the consecration, when the whole body of
the Church turns to her in a moment of surpassing
gratitude and exhilarating praise.
To these outward, liturgical expressions of faith
and devotion, there is the corresponding inward re-
ality of the Theotokos as model of the spiritual life.
She is the type and paradigm of perfection for every
Christian, the archetype of the identity of their life
in Christ. If St John of Damascus can say: “In the
name of the Theotokos, the whole mystery of the in-
carnation is implied,” then we too can say that the
same name also implies the life of purity and vir-
tue that made the Incarnation possible. In this way,
the union of Christ and the Theotokos becomes the
model for the life of grace, beginning with the gift
of the Holy Spirit in baptism, the sacraments, and
the life of prayer and devotion. St Athanasios of
Alexandria, in his Letters to Virgins, sees the Mother
of God as the revelation of a whole new manner of
life and living, a life of grace beyond the law and
beyond nature. According to St Gregory of Nyssa,
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 INTRODUCTION

in his work On Virginity: “What took place bodily in

the undefiled Mary—when the fullness of the di-
vinity which was in Christ (cf. Col 3:9) shone forth
through her virginity—takes place spiritually in ev-
ery soul living a virginal life.” St Maximos the Con-
fessor, in his Responses to Thalassios, likewise teaches
that the Mother of God symbolizes the inner faith
of the believer, affirming that: “Just as the Word
created his own mother in order to be born, so too
He first creates faith within us, and then becomes
the son of that faith, through which He is embod-
ied through the practice of the virtues.”
With this we enter the mysterious place of the
soul’s intimacy with God, the mystery of human
transformation in Christ, and so move to a place
beyond ordinary speech and language. It is here
where we enter the place of prayer, devotion, and
doxology. It is here where the living presence of the
saints becomes palpable, where the Mother of God
emerges in all her tender maternal compassion, as
we surrender to a reality greater than ourselves, to
the reality of God manifested and revealed through
prayer, liturgy, and sacrament.
Prayers to the Theotokos
This volume contains thirteen prayers to the The-
otokos, together with three supplicatory canons
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by St Theodore the Studite, St Methodios of Con-

stantinople, and St John of Euchaita.2 The prayers
are taken from a group of writings attributed to
the fourth-century Church Father, St Ephraim
the Syrian. Popular in the Byzantine period, these
writings are not in fact the work of St Ephraim, but
were written in Greek by patristic and Byzantine
writers, whose names for the most part have been
lost or were never recorded. Today these writings
are described as the work of “Ephraim graecus,” or
the “Greek Ephraim,” to distinguish them from the
authentic works of St Ephraim written in Syriac.
These writings form a vast number of works that,
in their most recent edition, fill seven volumes, and
are second in number only to the works of St John
Chrysostom. Though these writings are difficult to
date, many of them were read by the learned patri-
arch, St Photios of Constantinople, and thus we can
safely assume that at least some of the texts in the
collection are at least as old as, and in some cases
likely older than, the ninth century.
The prayers to the Theotokos translated in this
book are deeply embedded in the life and experi-
ence of the Orthodox Faith, and express some of
2 References for the Greek texts of these prayers and canons, along
with information concerning their authors and contents, are provided
in the “Notes on the Translation” at the back of this volume.
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 INTRODUCTION

the Church’s most fervent devotion to the Mother

of God. A striking example of this can be seen in
Prayer XII. Though an anonymous prayer like the
others in this book, we are fortunate to know some-
thing about its history and use. The first few lines
of the prayer reproduce the words that St Mary of
Egypt addressed to the icon of the Mother of God
outside the church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jeru-
salem. Readers of the Life of St Mary of Egypt will
recall the powerful moment of her repentance and
conversion prompted by her inability to enter the
church, followed by her transformative encounter
with the Theotokos, so movingly expressed in her
prayer.
At some later point, presumably after the Life was
written, an anonymous writer took the first part of
St Mary’s prayer and used it to form the beginning
of Prayer XII. We will never know the names of all
the men and women who subsequently read this
prayer and experienced its grace, but we know the
name of one of them: St Gregory Palamas, who read
this prayer every day. In the Life of St Gregory Palamas
written by one of his close disciples, a conversation
is recorded in which St Gregory tells us:
Before I became a monk, when I was still living in my
father’s house, attending school and working in the pal-
ace, I had extraordinary faith in the Virgin Mother of
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 mother of the light

God, to whom I was assiduously devoted with fervent

love and hope. At the start of each day, I considered
nothing more important than to stand before her holy
icon and to recite, with great compunction of heart,
that prayer which is so great in its thoughts and words,
and which is filled with so much confession, repen-
tance, and supplication, the initial magnificent lines of
which were spoken by that wondrous Egyptian woman.
St Gregory’s description of this prayer as being
“filled with so much confession, repentance and
supplication” is an apt description not only of the
prayer in question, but also of all the prayers col-
lected in this book. Though these prayers are the
work of multiple authors, they form a cohesive
and coherent group. On the one hand, they are all
characterized by a profound spirit of contrition,
compunction, sorrow for sins, and the desire for re-
pentance. On the other hand, they demonstrate un-
wavering confidence in the mercy and compassion
of the Theotokos, for which they express tremen-
dous gratitude, and celebrate the joy of forgiveness
and salvation secured through her prayers.
In all these prayers, the Theotokos appears as the
invincible protector and supreme intercessor of
Christians. From a very early time this view came
to predominate among the Orthodox faithful. In-
tercession is present in the fourth century, acceler-
ated into the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries, and
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 INTRODUCTION

flourished in the profusion of Marian feasts and

liturgical celebrations of the later eighth and ninth
centuries. Prior to this latter period, the iconoclasts
had attacked not just icons, but the veneration of
saints, their relics, and devotion to the Theotokos
in particular. The Church responded by consolidat-
ing these devotional commitments, and bestowed
upon them even greater importance. While all the
saints pray and intercede on behalf of others, none
of them can claim the unique “boldness of speech”
that belongs to the Theotokos, for she alone is God’s
mother. As these prayers repeatedly point out, a
mother’s requests carry special force with respect
to her son. “He is obliged to honor your requests,”
as one prayer reminds her, “since He was the one
who said: Honor your father and your mother.” (Ex
20:12)
Another remarkable feature of these prayers is
the intensity of religious feelings they express, in-
cluding the often extreme self-abasement of the
writers, who grieve and lament over their sins, and
engage in uncompromising self-criticism. The in-
tense spiritual states and conditions described in
these prayers—tears, lamentation, grief, self-re-
crimination—are not the subjective broodings of a
morbid psyche, and have nothing to do with psy-
chological neurosis or mental illness. Instead, these
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are the expressions of a godly and transformative
sorrow, which Christ Himself encouraged and
blessed, saying: “Blessed are those who mourn, for
they will be comforted.” (Matt 5:4)
As strange as it may sound, these are the prayers
of saints. Having been purified and cleansed of sins
in their souls and bodies, the saints exist in a peri-
choretic union with God, who fills them with His
divine, uncreated energies. They have been trans-
formed by grace and possess the fruits of the Spir-
it—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, and good-
ness—but their consciousness, which has been
expanded to embrace God Himself, has simultane-
ously become acutely conscious of the corruption
of human nature. The words of the apostle Peter,
when he first encountered Jesus, “Lord, depart from
me, for I am a sinful man,” (Lk 5:8) are the genuine
acknowledgment of one’s unholiness in the face of
the holy. Thus, the intense language and imagery
of so many of these prayers are the expression of
a truly healthy soul, paradoxically poised between
sorrow for sin and joy for salvation.
And this brings us back to the character of the
Greek writings ascribed to St Ephraim, which are
remarkable for their spirit of compunction and re-
pentance, painting so many incomparable pictures,
as it were, of the broken and contrite heart. On
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Mount Athos, young monks are given the follow-
ing advice: “If you want to learn perfect obedience,
read John Klimakos. If you want to acquire com-
punction, read Ephraim the Syrian.” To be sure,
the works ascribed to St Ephraim had a decisive
impact in shaping the conscience of the Church
in its expression of “joy-making sorrow,” which is
the chief characteristic of Orthodox life in Christ.
The prayers to the Theotokos collected under his
name are some of the most profound and beautiful
prayers of their kind, and it is a blessing to make
them available to the faithful.

V. Rev. Arch. Maximos Constas

Feast of the Dormition, August 2018

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