Homilies and Hymns, Volume 2

Thus, the Church of the East professes two natures in Christ, namely, divine and human, united inseparably and eternally in the person of the Sonship. It rejects the term "Mother of God" used for the virgin Mary, and "God died" also applied to the death of Christ by the Theopaschites. And the reason for this rejection has been so clearly stated by Mar Audishau in the book of Marganitha Pearl, where he says:

"First, if the virgin Mary is the 'Begetter of God' and the name God, we know, denotes Father, Son and Holy Spirit, then she brought forth the Trinity and not the only Son.

"Secondly, if the virgin Mary is the 'begetter of God' and He whom she brought forth suffered, died and was buried, as the four evangelists testify, either you hold that he died in reality (and who really dies has no power whatever to revivify others or himself, but must remain in death for ever) and thus you declare false the saying that He rose again: or else you hold that He died by hallucination, and in the same way rose again (in which case He could not have arisen in reality) then the hope of the resurrection is vain, since hereby the saying that 'He has raised up with Christ' is made void.

"Thirdly, if the virgin Mary is the 'Begetter of God' and Peter testifieth of Him whom she brought forth, saying: 'Thou art Christ the Son of the Living God,' then according to your statement she is not the Begetter of Christ, but the Begetter of His Father, and Christ is her grandson, not her son, and she is the mother of His Father. Who then is the mother of Christ?" (Marganitha pp. 41-42.)

THEORIES OF NEUTRAL WITNESSES

In the process of our writing this introduction, we were informed of a translation into English of two homilies, the Qurbana Eucharist/Offering and the Baptism, namely; Exposition of the Mysteries, titled, The Liturgical Homilies of Narsai, by J. Armitage Robinson, Dean of Westminster, published by the University Press, Cambridge, England.

In this translation the author has made an exhaustive study of these homilies and made his comment in a lengthy critical apparatus: . . .

"Ritual Splendour. At the very beginning of his exposition of the Mysteries Narsai strikes a note which when we have read him, we find to be perfectly just. He is going, he says, 'to reveal the beauty of their glory' (p. 1). And in truth the prominent and characteristic feature of the liturgy as he describes it, is for us today a revelation, as existing already before the end of the fifth century, of a highly developed ritualism which in the West was reached only by slow degrees and in the lapse of centuries. The picture which he draws for us of the altar surrounded by a crowd of richly dressed ministers (p. 4), the lights, the incense, the waving fans (pp. 4, 12), the genuflexions and bowings (p. 23), bring up before our mind the medieval mass in a western cathedral of the fourteenth century."