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Homilies

St Photius the Great, tr. Mango, 1958

12. The Birth of the Virgin

IX

Of the Same Most-Blessed Patriarch Photius, Archbishop of Constantinople, Homily on the Nativity of our Most-Holy Lady, the Mother of God¹

Every festival and every celebration at which the concourse of the faithful is gladdened dispels mutual differences and quarrels, and brings together men of opposed opinions who have broken the bond of love by strife, by offering as it does the harmony of the chants as an invitation to the recall of concord. It also shows that the congregation are the creatures and handiwork of the same Lord and Creator; and, by indicating the equal dignity of the creation through the unity of worship, it soothes and calms down those who are bitterly irritated with one another, persuading them to think with moderation and humanity, and teaching them to look up all alike to the Creator’s hand and to consider themselves the same clay of creation. To this end, in my opinion, has the rule proper to Christians instituted the celebration of festivals: one shows Christ as He is born, another bears witness to His baptism, another has Him transfigured, another working miracles, curing men possessed by demons, giving sight to the blind, stemming torrents of blood, knitting together the lame and the paralysed, raising up the dead; finally, another exhibits Him as He is hanging on the cross, yet another as He is rising up and inaugurating our resurrection in visible deeds.

Thus, while each holy festival both affords the enjoyment of common gifts and lights up its peculiar glow of grace, the present feast honouring the birth of the Virgin Mother of God easily carries off the glittering prize of seniority against every competitor. For, just as we know the root to be the cause of the branches, the stem, the fruit and the flower, though it is for the sake of the fruit that care and labour are expended on the others, and without the root none of the rest grows up, so without the Virgin’s feast none of those that sprang out of it would appear. For the resurrection was because of the death; and the death because of the crucifixion; and the crucifixion because Lazarus came up from the gates of Hell on the fourth day, because the blind saw, and the paralytic ran carrying the bed on which he had lain, and because of the rest of those wondrous deeds (this is not the time to enumerate them all) for which the Jewish people ought to have sent up glory and chanted praise, but were instead inflamed to envy, on account of which they perpetrated the Saviour’s murder to their own destruction. And this because Christ, having submitted to baptism, and having released² men from their error, taught the knowledge of God in deed and word. The baptism was because of the nativity; and Christ’s nativity, to put it briefly and aptly, was because of the Virgin’s nativity, by which we are being renovated, and which we have been deemed worthy to celebrate. Thus the Virgin’s feast, in fulfilling the function of the root, the source, the foundation (I know not how to put it in a more appropriate way), takes on with good reason the ornament of all those other feasts,³ and it is conspicuous with many great boons, and recognized as the day of universal salvation.

For today the Virgin Mother is born of a barren mother, and the palace of the Lord’s advent is being decked out. Today the bonds of barrenness are loosed, and the locks of virginity are sealed. For inasmuch as a womb⁴ unfruitful and deadened for purposes of childbirth, brought forth unexpectedly a fair fruit, by that very fact the incorruptibility of virginity is assured, and the miraculous pregnancy is heralded by manifest deeds. To be sure, birth without a man is a marvellous thing, as is the preservation of virginity after the delivery; but a barren woman, made fruitful in her old age and giving birth, also surpasses the laws of nature, and heralds the Virgin’s giving birth, for the sake of which this miracle is wrought.⁵ Today Anna is shorn of the reproach of sterility, and the world reaps the crop of joy. Joachim is called the father of a child, and we receive by way of earnest the dignity of the adoption. Today the Virgin comes forth from a sterile womb, while barrenness overtakes the offspring of sin. The congregation of the Jewish Synagogue is bereaved, while from the womb of the Church her children appear, divinely increased and multiplied by Christ, the Bridegroom. The Virgin comes forth from a sterile womb, at a time when, had it been fruitful, her birth would have been strange. What a miracle! When the time of sowing had passed, then came the moment of bearing fruit. When the flame of desire had been extinguished, then the torch of childbearing was lit. Youth did not produce a flower, yet old age puts forth a shoot. When nature was in her prime, the belly was not seen to swell, yet the ever-virgin child is seen to be the offspring of a withered womb.

But art thou puzzled, O man, that a barren woman gave birth? Or rather, seekest thou to belittle the wondrous fact, at which thou too shouldst wonder even as we?⁶ And how, arguest thou, could a barren woman give birth? For if she is barren, she cannot give birth, and if she does give birth, she is not barren. How can dried-up breasts gush with streams of milk? For if old age is unable to store away blood, how can the teats whiten into milk what they have not received? How does a deadened womb bring to maturity, quicken, encompass and feed the foetus? Such arguments dost thou devise against thyself and thy salvation? In what capacity? For thou couldst not be of the faithful who are worthy of the miracle. Nay indeed, the faithful person will never be misled into disbelieving those things by which faith is established, but the Jew will.⁷ Yet what of Sarah—or did that escape thee? Did she not have in Isaac a child of her old age and barrenness? If Anna confuses and disturbs thy mind, Sarah should rather do so since she came first. If the former be the cause of thy hesitation, dost thou not perceive that thou art rejecting the latter from thy kinship, and cutting the roots whereof thou art the branch, and art proved to have departed from Jewish laws?⁸

As for me, if I said⁹ that the birth had happened by a natural concatenation, and then invited thee to agree, the woman’s barrenness, her old age, nature itself would rightly¹⁰ have aroused difficulty in reasoning. But if I represent it as an act of divine grace, why dost thou force grace to be subservient to nature, of whom she has always been the mistress? Dost thou accept Adam to have been moulded out of clay and produced without natural birth,¹¹ dost thou accept Eve to be the offspring not of intercourse but of a rib, yet being unable to ascribe these things to natural law?¹² For the successive multiplication and birth of men, keeping as it does a different order of procession, does not permit us to believe the procreation of those to have been the work of nature, nor, on the other hand, contrary to nature. For it is the origin of men’s natural constitution. Therefore it is the work of divine decree and power. What then? Thou grantest the Godhead to have had at that time the power to do even the most unbelievable of things, and thou dost not arm natural law against its Creator; now, however, as if convicting of advanced senility that most omnipotent and perfect power, thou declarest it too weak for these wonders; though, schooled as thou art in those that went before, thou shouldst more fittingly have accorded the same unhesitating faith to the latter as well. Nay, he who will doubt could not even be a Jew—if he were a Jew¹³—but a pagan in his mind and judgment.

So thou disbelievest that a child was born of a barren woman, and scoffest at it, thou who imaginest men to be the children of putrefaction,¹⁴ who hast invented dragon teeth to be the wombs from which thy ancestors sprang¹⁵ (would that thou who sayest such things proved them¹⁶ to be their tombs!), who commandest¹⁷ stones to become men,¹⁸ drawing the lineage of thy forefathers as befits thyself, and tracing it to ants’ blood?¹⁹ These things thou believest, although they are utter nonsense, and thou hast no advocate anywhere, neither in grace, nor mind, nor nature, nor sensation, nor other men’s opinion, nor thine own, nor anything else, except thy shamelessness and folly, and yet thou cherishest them and preachest them. But that which conflicting opinions confirm, forced by truth to speak the same language, whereof sight and sensation are the first witnesses, and which is corroborated, apart from the aforesaid instances, by many similar events of antiquity, that thou attemptest to ridicule and make light of? I do not mean to say that we ought to speak proudly of our beliefs on account of the fact that the pagans have preached such gross absurdities,²⁰ nor—far from it—that light should be brightened by darkness, or truth to stand with the help of lies, or faith to be supported by error; but that it was altogether not permissible for them, who had sunk as far below as we are above nature, to honour and admire unnatural things which can in no manner be substantiated, while trying to undermine by misleading speech what is far above telling and nature, and what even recently martyrs’ tombs sometimes miraculously testify, when need requires it and Providence so dispenses.²¹ Consider this also: is our nature not governed by its affects, by sickness, old age, even by youth that has not yet reached maturity or makes in some other way for impotence in procreation?²² And the astonishing thing is, had not familiarity robbed it of its strangeness, that youth itself, in which a man comes to be a father,²³ prevents him for a while from becoming a father. What then? Is nature to be overcome by these affects, if not by some other affect that is an offscouring of nature,²⁴ and shall grace, which formed nature, not be able to repair her? Is old age to chill and dry up the fountains of generation, and cannot the Creator warm and irrigate that which has grown old? Shall nature bear easily the fate to which she has not yet been reduced (for her time is not yet), and the worse plight into which she is being dragged down,²⁵ and shall not the Creator easily at His will restore her to the state in which He set her at first? Dost thou disbelieve my words? Thou doest well. For these things do not resemble, not by far, thy noble metamorphoses, which I will enumerate to thee; or rather, it is thy task to recount them, that thou mayest have more opportunity in thy most edifying stories to be arrogant towards us. Tell us of the human poplars, from whose eyes drips the mythical amber,²⁶ whence thou drawest thy wealth of silliness. Enumerate thy laurel-trees²⁷ and palm-trees,²⁸ thy nightingales and swallows,²⁹ thy musical swans³⁰ and halcyons,³¹ and thy friendly dolphins.³² Sing of thy³³ androgynous Tiresiases that they may resolve the strife of the gods, worthy of the latter’s wantonness; who, moreover, having given a greater share of pleasure to the goddess, were rewarded with punishment for their outspokenness.³⁴ Dost thou wish me to remind thee of the sea-voyaging bulls, steered by love for an unfortunate girl,³⁵ the lengthy absences, the many journeys, and the residences very far from Olympus? I am silent about the rest. Nor is it, I think, proper for the unguent of faith to be mingled with the mire of error, or the light of piety to be insulted with the deep murk of impiety. Wherefore, bidding a definite farewell to this tedious nonsense and chatter, and pitying for their folly those who are in a flutter about these things, while abominating their imposture, let us now proceed with the initial course of our speech.

Humanity therefore, having, long been enslaved by the power of ancestral sins, the birth of its daughter, heralding Him who shall remove these sims, gives³⁶ manifest signs of our deliverance from that domination and our release from servitude. Wherefore Adam, too, along with Eve, having cleansed themselves of the ancient stains of their transgression, and putting off the sullenness of despondency, gladly join the choir of the Virgin’s feast with a confident voice and face, or rather, they are become its leaders. For they, through whom the seed of sin had become ingrown in the whole race and had perverted it, are especially fit, once the seed has been uprooted, to lead the joyful choir, to seek out and call together their descendants. Since, moreover, the disease of the trespass has been transmitted from the first transgressors down through all men, and since everyone needs the same treatment; since universal salvation is being founded today with the Virgin’s birth, it was fitting that we should organize a common festival of all nations, and strike up public songs of thanksgiving transcending our world, since universal salvation requires thanks that transcend our world. Let us send up songs of thanksgiving because Adam is re-created and Eve is renovated with him, because the curse is abolished, and our nature, putting off the dead leathern mask of sin, is remoulded after the pristine dignity of the Lord’s likeness. Let us send up songs of thanksgiving and organize public choirs, because, coming forth from a sterile womb, the Virgin sanctifies the sterile womb of nature and grafts into its fruitlessness the fruitfulness of virtue. For in lending to the Lord and Husbandman of the world the streams of her stainless blood to moisten the whole desiccated lump, she fittingly receives on that account the blessing of fruitfulness. The ladder leading up to heaven is being built, and earthly nature, leaping over her proper boundaries, comes to dwell in the heavenly tabernacles. The Lord’s throne is being prepared on earth, earthly things are sanctified, the heavenly hosts are mingled with us, and the Wicked one, who first deceived us and was the contriver of the plot against us, has his power crushed, as his wiles and devices rot away.

Who will be able to tell God’s wonders?³⁷ What words will express the might of what is above words? Will not every mind³⁸ be numbed in extending its comprehension to the magnitude of the facts? God formed man³⁹ in the beginning, moved by an ineffable wealth of love, the work of His own hand, graciously giving him to bear the Creator’s image—the handiwork indicating the nobility of the flesh, the image that of the spirit. A garden, agreeable and lovely, had been planted eastward,⁴⁰ breathed over by the unfading flowers of its meadows, abounding in various seasonable fruit of plants, while rivers which flowed in the middle and watered the face of the plain with their clear stream lent to the place an extraordinary beauty. In this spot the Creator settled the work of His Lordly hand, appointing him master of everything, and showering him abundantly with every good thing. Thereafter He brought forth into being a companion from the rib of the ineffably born, that she might know the lender, wherefrom she had been taken, to be the head,⁴¹ and look up to him with her obligation in mind, and that through their natural bond the bond of concord⁴² should abide with them. Having bestowed on man the enjoyment and mastery over everything in the garden, and since it was also meet for him who was entrusted with so great an authority to be disciplined and trained with some command, God appointed a law unto him, in accordance with which it was not difficult to live, nor yet altogether easy to keep on guard, and whereby either reward or culpability was dispensed. For, having explicitly marked off from the rest a tree with fair bloom, He gave out a command decreeing not to eat of that alone. But a wicked beast, the instigator of evil, whose deed caused him to be named the Slanderer, eyed man jealously from the very creation. Using as a tool another beast of those that crawl, and addressing alluring and seductive words to the woman, with a great sprinkling of blasphemy against the Lawgiver, he persuaded the woman, and through her the husband, to neglect the command, and to eat whereof it had been decreed to abstain. They forthwith transgressed against the order, and were deprived of all their gifts, which was the plotter’s goal; for to this end his whole device had been contrived. From this point on, as the transgression spread from the ancestors to their descendants, the plotter held our whole race enslaved in his power.

But what of the Creator and Protector? Did He utterly overlook His creature, distressed and plunged in such great error, and constantly enslaved by his passions? By no means. For how could He have gladly suffered to see that which He had created with pride being led away captive and seduced? Wherefore, the oneness of the Trinity having, if it is permitted to say so, consulted with Itself (and it is permissible to say this of the re-creation, since it is said of the creation, “Let us make man in our image and likeness,”⁴³ with reference to the single purpose of the mind),⁴⁴ made disposition for the re-creation of the creature that had been crushed. It sought a man (for human kind had become grievously savage and desolate, and would not be brought back either by threats, or penalties, or laws, or prophets) possessing the same nature as ourselves, in whom could be seen the inviolate observance of the law, so that human kind, in seeing the ways of its kin and fellow, could imitate him, and so that the contriver of the plots against us should be deprived of his mastery by a lawful victory and struggle, by the same means through which he had gained his ascendency over us. It was needful, therefore, for one person of the Trinity to become man, to make it manifest that the re-creation too, like the creation, was Its own work. And it was altogether meet that He should be the Son on earth and not derogate from His celestial rank, who had been the Son from all eternity, in being and in glory. But it would have been impossible to be one of the sons⁴⁵ of men without incarnation. For incarnation is the road to birth, and birth is the conclusion of pregnancy, which, entailing as it does a mother, naturally requires that such a one be provided beforehand. So it was needful that a mother should be prepared down below for the Creator, for the re-creation of shattered humanity, and she a virgin, in order that, just as the first man had been formed of virgin earth, so the re-creation, too, should be carried out through a virgin womb, and that no transitory pleasure, even lawful, should be as much as imagined in the Creator’s birth: since a captive of pleasure was he, for whose deliverance the Lord suffered to be born.⁴⁶

But who was worthy to serve as the minister of the mystery? Who was worthy to become the mother of God, and lend flesh to Him who is rich in everything? Who then was worthy? Clearly it was she who this day strangely issued from Joachim and Anna, the barren root, whose nativity we are celebrating in splendour, whose birth is the prelude to the greatest mystery—I mean the birth of the Word in the flesh—, and for whom this public and holy celebration is held. It was needful, yea needful, that she who from the very cradle had by a superior reason preserved her body pure, her soul pure, her thoughts pure, should be marked out to be the Creator’s mother. It was needful that she who had been brought to the temple as an infant, who had trodden the untrodden places, should appear as a living temple for Him who gave her life. It was needful that she who had been born in a wondrous manner from a sterile womb, and had removed her parents’ reproach, should also make good the failure of her forefathers: for she, the descendant, was able to repair the ancestral defeat, who brought forth the Saviour of our race by a husbandless birth, and moulded His body. It was needful that she who had formed herself beautifully with spiritual comeliness should appear as a chosen bride, fitting for the heavenly Bridegroom. It was needful that she who with her virtuous ways, as with stars, had likened herself to the heavens, should be revealed to all the faithful as giving rise to the sun of righteousness. It was needful that she who had dyed herself once with the dye of her virginal blood should serve as the purple of the universal Emperor. Oh, what a miracle! Whom the entire creation cannot contain, the Virgin’s belly bears without being straitened. Whom the Cherubim do not dare to behold, the Virgin carries in her arms of clay. From the barren and fruitless womb comes forth the holy mountain, from which has been cut without hands⁴⁷ a precious cornerstone,⁴⁸ Christ our God, who has crushed the temples of the demons and the palaces of Hell together with their domination. The living and heavenly oven is being forged on earth, wherein the Creator of our clay, having baked the first-fruits with a divine fire and burnt up the crop of tares, makes unto Himself a bread of wholly pure flour.⁴⁹ But what is one to say, what would one not experience, sailing over the high sea of the Virgin’s gifts and achievements? One fears and rejoices, one is calm and excited, one is hushed again and cries out, one cowers and expands, sometimes drawn by fear, sometimes by love.

Having now given myself to the love rather than to the fear, I would gladly, as you know, come forward to you flowing with an abundant, even if useless,⁵⁰ flow of speech, enabled by the Virgin’s miracles to form lakes and flood over, and especially on seeing that you eagerly open your ears, while applying and consecrating your mind to the praise of the Ever-Virgin—that is, had I been at all initiated in the Virgin’s mysteries. But already time urges me on to other matters, to another manifestation of honour for the Virgin—I mean, to begin the mystical and bloodless sacrifice (since the recollection of the Son’s willing sufferings is an honour to the mother), which claims our attention, and over which it is high time to officiate.

But, O Virgin and Mother of the Word, my mercy-seat and refuge, who hast been strangely produced of a barren woman, and stranger still, hast brought forth for us fruit, the crop of life, do thou plead and mediate before thy Son, our God, and prove the singers of thy praises, after they have wiped off⁵¹ all filth and pollution, worthy of the heavenly bridechamber, to be eternally illuminated by the triple light of the supernal Trinity, and enjoying its marvellous and unspeakable sight, in Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom be all glory and power, for ever and ever. Amen.

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