In the last installment of this article, I presented some of the thoughts of Maximus which are the foundation for Eastern Christian spirituality. Maximus stated, in deification man achieves the supreme goal for which he was created. This goal, already realized in Christ by a unilateral action of God’s love, represents both the meaning of human history and a judgment over man. It is open to man’s response and free effort. By God becoming human in the Person of Jesus Christ, He gave us an opportunity to cooperate with Him in transforming ourselves ever more into His image and likeness. By becoming a human, God modeled for us how to live in order to spiritually grow and become more like Him, thus allowing for a deeper union with Him. We must always remember that God, out of love for us, took the initiative to show us how to live.

Truly closely connected with our understanding of God’s incarnation – God becoming man – is our understanding of Mary, His Mother. The only doctrinal definition on Mary to which our Byzantine tradition was/is formally committed is the decree of the Council of Ephesus which called her the Mother of God or Theotokos. This decree is, obviously, Christological in nature and not Mariological. Nevertheless the decree corresponds to the Mariological theme of the New Eve, which has appeared in Christian theological literature since the second century and which testifies, in the light of the Eastern view of the Adamic inheritance, to a concept of human freedom more optimistic than that which prevailed in the West. (You will recall that in the   Eastern Church the Adamic inheritance is mortality and not sin).

But it is the theology of Cyril of Alexandria, affirming the personal, hypostatic identity of Jesus with the pre-existent Logos, as it was endorsed in Ephesus, which served as the Christological basis for the tremendous development of piety centered on the person of Mary after the fifth century. God became our Savior by becoming man; but this humanization of God came about through Mary, who is thus inseparable from the person and work of her Son. Since in Jesus there is no human hypostasis, and since a mother can be mother only of someone, and not something, Mary is indeed the mother of the incarnate Logos, the Mother of God. And since the deification of man takes place in Christ, she is also – in a sense just as real as man’s participation in Christ – the mother of the whole body of the Church – our mother.

The Reformation in the West brought about a denial of Mary as God’s Mother. The Eastern Church, true to Ephesus, has never denied this truth and only addresses Mary as the Mother of God.