By Eirini Panou
By the tenth century, the Protevangeliοn of James had inspired the inclusion of three feasts into the Church calendar of Constantinople: Mary’s Conception (by Anna), the Nativity of Mary and the Entry of Mary into the Temple. These three events, recorded only in the Protevangeliοn, not only constitute official commemorations of Mary’s childhood, also acknowledge her parents’ contribution to the work of the Divine Oikonomia.
In her work on Marian homilies, Cunningham argued that ‘it is difficult to reconstruct the history of the introduction of special feast days in honour of Mary into the liturgical calendar, owing to the lack of liturgical and historical sources about the period approximately before the ninth century’. Nevertheless, scholars have argued in favour of the inclusion of Marian feasts as early as the seventh century, which has led to conflicting views on the date when these feasts actually began to be celebrated in the Byzantine capital. For this book, church calendars provide the most authoritative evidence for the establishment of these feast days, whereas homilies and hymns only reveal a movement toward this end: as we do not know where they were delivered, some of the homilies might simply reflect provincial liturgical traditions. For this reason calendars, rather than the giving of homilies, will be considered conclusive enough to verify the disseminated celebration of Mary’s early life in the Byzantine capital.
The Conception of St Anna / the Kissing of Joachim and Anna: significance of the feast
According to the Protevangelion, Anna was unable to conceive for many years; thus after the rejection of their gifts by the High Priest, she and her husband prayed until an angel announced to them that Anna would conceive a child. In Byzantine homilies the Conception of Anna is regarded as ‘the beginning and the reason of all goods and that is why respect should be paid and one should rejoice’, writes George of Nikomedia in the ninth century. The tenth-century Patriarch Euthymios wonders whether there is a Marian feast greater than the Conception of Anna, when Mary’s parents were going to give birth to the one who gave birth to the creator of heaven and earth. The same concept is attested to in Andrew Levadenos’s fourteenth-century iamb on Mary’s Nativity, where Andrew writes that of the all feasts which honour the child of the Virgin, this is the most important. Levadenos’s comment underlines the two central doctrines for the celebration of Anna’s Conception and cult in Byzantium, Mariology and Christology. Mary’s conception by Anna confirmed the salvation of humanity, prepared for the advent of Christ and led to the freedom of humanity from sin with the destruction of Adam and Eve, a concept already seen in the sixth-century Nativity kontakion of Romanos the Melodist. However, despite references of homilists suggesting otherwise, the feast was not celebrated as widely as the Nativity and the Entry of the Virgin.
Scholarly views on the development of the feast
According to Kyriakopoulos, the feast became known after 860 from the homiletic work of George of Nikomedia. In fact Kyriakopoulos sees a tendency in hymnology from the fifth century onwards to establish the feast, but provides no conclusive evidence for this. Graef, relying on the work of Andrew of Crete, maintained that the feast was established at the end of the sixth or in the course of the seventh century, possibly, it seems, due to the desire of Eastern theologians to complete the cycle of Marian feasts. However, Andrew of Crete lived at the end of the seventh and the beginning of the eighth century, not in the sixth century. Similarly, Jugie – relying on Andrew of Crete – argues that the feast was celebrated in the seventh century in some areas. Jugie associates the feast with the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, although he acknowledges the different treatment of this issue by the Eastern and the Western Church. Cunningham, following Jugie, acknowledges the importance of the homiletic activity of Andrew of Crete or of Kosmas Vestitor as proof of the existence of the feast, but argues that the earliest evidence for the celebration of the Conception is an eighth-century homily by John of Euboea, when the feast was ‘not widely celebrated or even known’. Cunningham repeats a view that was first expressed by Amand, who saw the homilies of John of Euboea as testimony to the celebration of Anna’s Conception.
One of the feasts that John of Euboea records in his homily on the Nativity of Mary is the Conception of Anna, but, as Cunningham has argued, his choice of feasts ‘reflects the liturgical rite of a provincial, rather than Constantinopolitan, parish’, because the Entry of Mary and Palm Sunday are excluded. Or, as this book will argue, this could be because the Entry was introduced a century after John of Euboea. I should note that the late widespread celebration of the Conception (if it ever reached that point) one century after John of Euboea is implied by George of Nikomedia’s first sermon on the Conception of Anna, which is dedicated to the message (‘χρηματισμός’) the homilist wishes to convey to his congregation to explain the theological significance of the feast. George of Nikomedia writes that the feast was celebrated ‘majestically’, which of course does not mean that it was in fact universally celebrated in the ninth century. The reference to a feast as being of majestic character is a recurring motif in Byzantine homiletics, as first mentioned by Pseudo-John of Damaskos and Andrew of Crete in their Nativity homilies. We are more inclined to think that for George of Nikomedia the feast should be celebrated in a majestic way because of its importance for the soteriological work of God, as shown at the beginning of this section. To support this view, Euthymios of Constantinople (tenth century) informs us that the feast of Anna’s Conception was still considered a minor one. Thus it is apparent that the Eastern Church never accepted the Conception of St Anna as a major Marian feast, and that it remained secondary compared with other feasts of the life of Mary. In art, it is also true that the scene of Mary’s Conception was depicted less often than the Nativity and the Entry and was first attested to in Cappadocia only in the tenth century, later than the other two. Nevertheless, as mentioned, the feast marks the inception of the soteriological plan of God, which is why it featured in many calendars.
Celebration in Constantinople
The feast, which is missing from the ninth-century Kalendarium ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae and from the ninth-century codex (cod. 2) of the skete of St Andrew of Athos, is included in the ninth century Calendar of Naples (a compilation of a local calendar with a Byzantine one). It is also included in the tenth-century Synaxarion of Constantinople, in the Great Typikon of Constantinople (tenth century), the Menologion of Basil II, the eleventh-century hymnographic calendar of the Constantinopolitan Christophoros Mytilenaios, in the twelfth-century Constitutions of Manuel Komnenos and in the fourteenth-century Prochron ructum. It is noteworthy that the steadily growing prominence of the feast from the ninth century onwards shows that any effort to attribute an earlier introduction of the feast is not supported by available evidence. In Constantinople, the feast was, according to the Synaxarion, first celebrated in the tenth century in the church of the Chalkoprateia, which could explain the first appearance of the scene in Byzantine art during the same century.
Finally, multiple feast days in the Constantinopolitan Synaxarion relating to Mary’s life mirror liturgical traditions that were developed in Palestine, from where the majority of feasts originate. By the tenth century, on 9 December (nine months before the Nativity of Mary), when the Conception was celebrated in Constantinople, the feast day of St Anna and of John of Damascus was celebrated in Jerusalem.
Overall, the feast of the Conception of Mary by St Anna is important for the Divine Oikonomia since, according to homilists, it was the first step towards the salvation of humanity from sin. In the Synaxarion of Constantinople it is recorded from the tenth century in the church of the Chalkoprateia, and was increasingly celebrated in the following centuries.
From the book The Cult of St Anna in Byzantium, pp. 41-43.
