The Symbolism of Mary in Images of the Hospitality of Abraham

Here is a hymn to the Virgin Mary, a ‘Theotokion’ from the Canon of Sunday Orthros, tone 1, in the Byzantine Rite:

Rejoice, O well-spring of grace! Rejoice, O ladder and door of heaven! Rejoice, O lampstand and golden jar, thou unquarried mountain, who for the world gavest birth unto Christ, the Bestower of life!

And from the great hymn to the Virgin Mary, the Akathist, Ikos 3:

Rejoice, O Table laden with mercy in abundance!

We can see a pattern here: Tradition compares Mary to anything that is adjacent to God, facilitates His work, or contains Christ and the Eucharist.

In the first hymn, the ladder is a reference to the ladder which Jacob sees in a dream(Genesis 32, 24-30), by which angels ascend and descend as God speaks from above, symbolising a connection between heaven and earth. A lampstand is a more generic symbol: it bears the flame of the lamp, the light which represents the Light of Christ. And the unquarried mountain from which came the unhewn stone, representing Christ, as referred to in the Book of Daniel, is also a symbol of the Virgin. 

Consider now these paintings of the Biblical episode known as the Hospitality of Abraham, recounted in Genesis 18, 1-10. These first two are traditional Russian icons, the one on the right by the famous painter Andrei Rublev.

There is no direct depiction of Mary in these. However, the scene is interpreted as an allusion to the Eucharist held within jars on the altar, and the table upon which the meal is served is likened to an altar. The three strangers, who are subsequently revealed as angels from heaven, are traditionally interpreted as symbols of the three persons of the Trinity. Some contemporary commentators see in the Rublev the shape of a chalice, traced by the right edge of the left figure and the left edge of the right figure. I will admit that while I am happy to consider that the golden chalice, which is painted on the table, is an allusion to the Eucharist that the artist intended, I am not convinced that the second was more than a feature of good and balanced compositional design, intended to mimic rhythmically the shape of the chalice. Hence, it draws our attention to it through a graceful convergence of lines.

Regardless of what we think about this more modern interpretation, by connecting even the more conservative interpretation of the imagery of all images of the Hospitality of Abraham with the hymns given above, it is fair to say that if we think of the Golden Jar in the painting as the vessel containing the Bread of the Blessed Sacrament, then the table is the “Table laden with mercy in abundance,” that is, laden with Christ, present in the Eucharist. And we now see Mary symbolised within these paintings as both table and chalice.

Here is a much earlier representation of the Hospitality of Abraham, a 5th-century mosaic in the basilica of St Mary Major in Rome:

And another Russian icon of the Hospitality, painted by an anonymous artist in the 14th century:

And a 13th-century Gothic illumination from the French Psalter of St Louis:

In all of these, we can see the Eucharistic, and therefore also the Marian, symbolism within it. 

However, if we examine a painting of the same scene by Rembrandt, even though it is a beautiful work, the symbolism is lacking. I see no golden jar or any attempt to portray a table which might be interpreted as an altar. Rembrandt was a Protestant, so it is not surprising that this is missing.

Offspring of Arius in the Holy of Holies: Recent False Claims about the Roman Rite

Detail of French MS, ca. 1360–1370 (Master of Jean de Mandeville; full image here)

Imagine my surprise when I read, in the second installment of the (now finished) five-part series at Church Life Journal by Drs. Cavadini, Healy, and Weinandy [CHW], the following claim:

Significantly, while the faithful [before The Council] knew and believed that the one God is a Trinity of persons, their liturgical and personal prayer often primarily consisted of praying to the one (generic) God. Only after Vatican II, with the revision of the rite and the use of the vernacular, did the faithful become more cognizant of the trinitarian nature of the liturgy and of their own ability to pray in a trinitarian manner.

Apart from the authors’ remarkable ability to know intimately how millions of Catholics prayed and engaged with the liturgy prior to the 1960s — and in particular, their ability to know that widely-available and popular devotional materials, explicitly Trinitarian in content, in fact must not have been used by anyone who bought them — together with their crystal-ball glimpse into the Trinitarian literacy of modern Catholics (which I am sure a Pew Research survey could quickly establish, together with their literacy in Eucharistic doctrine) and their intimate Trinitarian prayer lives, we should, with discipline, zero in on the central claim: that it was specifically “the revision of the rite and the use of the vernacular” that brought about this renaissance in Trinitarian knowledge and prayer.

Archbishop Lefebvre in one of many flourishing preconciliar missions run by the Holy Ghost Fathers in Africa; sadly, their liturgy did not help them much in their conquest of the continent for Christ.

In my book Resurgent in the Midst of Crisis, published in 2014 — a book frequently reviewed, and easily available, for those with a taste for liturgical studies — I devote one of the chapters to documenting the systematic removal of Trinitarian and Christological confessions from the reformed liturgy, demonstrating that the vernacular rite Catholics were given after 1969 was far less centered on the mystery of the Trinity than the Tridentine liturgy to which the faithful were accustomed (especially from the unofficial vernacular versions they would have encountered in widely-used hand missals — unless CHW somehow know, once again, that the millions of copies of such missals that were sold over many decades were never actually used by anyone).

Given the magnitude of this claim — that, essentially, the Church had allowed her faithful for centuries to be deficient in their knowledge and devotion to the Trinity (!) — it seems opportune to share this chapter online, in the interests of making the truth better known.

Offspring of Arius in the Holy of Holies

(Chapter 6 of Resurgent in the Midst of Crisis, Angelico, 2014)

In the New Testament two basic “orientations” of prayer are displayed and inculcated: first and foremost, in keeping with Jewish tradition, prayer addressed to “God” or “Lord” (into this category may also be placed the altogether novel way in which our blessed Savior intimately addresses his “Father,” as we see, for example, in the farewell discourses in the Gospel of John), [1] and occupying a secondary but still important place, prayer addressed to Jesus Christ himself.

To the former and more familiar Jewish practice, Jesus adds a new and crucial element that concerns the very essence of the revelation he embodies: God is to be invoked in Jesus’ name, for the Son of God is now the Son of Man, the one and only Mediator between God and man, through whom all our prayers ascend to the Father and all his graces are given to us in the Mystical Body. Hence the Lord teaches his disciples: “You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide; so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you” (Jn 15:16), and again: “Truly, truly, I say to you, if you ask anything of the Father, he will give it to you in my name. Hitherto you have asked nothing in my name; ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be full” (Jn 16:23–24). Such teachings are the revealed foundation of the Church’s custom of concluding her prayers per Christum Dominum nostrum, a formula we already see frequently in St. Paul, whose letters are full of liturgical language: “I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you, because your faith is proclaimed in all the world.” [2]

Nevertheless, our Lord also taught his disciples to address him, the Son and Savior, in prayer: “Whatever you ask in my name, I will do it, that the Father may be glorified in the Son; if you ask me anything in my name, I will do it” (Jn 14:13–14). [3] When Jesus says: “You call me Teacher and Lord; and you are right, for so I am” (Jn 13:13), he affirms that his followers are right to turn to him as the ultimate authority, the Holy One of Israel. Events, especially miracles of healing, confirmed the truth of these words. “The centurion answered him, ‘Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof; but only say the word, and my servant will be healed’” (Mt. 8:8). [4] “The crowd rebuked them, telling them to be silent; but they cried out the more, ‘Lord, have mercy on us, Son of David!’” (Mt. 20:31). There are the words of the thief: “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom” (Lk 23:42), and the words of the doubter: “My Lord and my God!” (Jn 20:28).

Pietro da CORTONA, The Stoning of St Stephen (c. 1660)

Again, the spontaneous exclamations of the early Christians are a precious witness that Christ, as true God, was the addressee of many prayers, not only a mediator through whom one had access to the Father. “As they were stoning Stephen, he prayed, ‘Lord Jesus, receive my spirit’” (Acts 7:59). “To the church of God which is at Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints together with all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Cor 1:2–3). More important than any one verse, however, is the general tenor of a number of texts, for example chapter 10 of the Epistle to the Romans, where St. Paul writes:

If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. . . . The scripture says, “No one who believes in him will be put to shame.” For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and bestows his riches upon all who call upon him. For, “every one who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved.” (vv. 9, 11–13)

Here, in typical rabbinic fashion, the Apostle to the Gentiles weaves together citations from the Old Testament that are manifestly speaking about the one true God, the God of Israel, and applies them to Jesus Christ. In this way he is not only clearly asserting Christ’s divinity, but also urging the Christians who receive his letter to confess this mystery with their lips (a reference to liturgical worship) and to invoke Jesus as God in their prayers.

In the end, both ways of praying are given a succinct endorsement in the solemn words of Jesus that have echoed down the centuries: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me . . . He who has seen me has seen the Father” (Jn 14:6, 9). By saying that he is the way, he self-effacingly presents himself as Mediator, the Word made flesh, the only way to reach the Father; by saying that he is truth and life, consubstantial with the Father, he presents himself as he truly is in the Father’s glory — namely, as the Son who, together with the Father and the Holy Spirit, lives and reigns, one God, forever and ever. Hence, there can never be any tension, much less contradiction, between praying to the Father and praying to Jesus. For Jesus is Emmanuel, God-with-us, and whoever sees or speaks to him has seen or spoken to the Father.

Icon of the angelic visitors to Abraham, representing the persons of the Trinity

In regard to ways of praying, it comes as no surprise that traditional liturgies of all rites, Eastern and Western, closely adhere to the witness of the New Testament and the practice of the ancient Church. The classical Roman liturgy — viewed in terms of ethos, ceremonial, spirituality, and the dogmatic theology expressed in the texts — shares much more in common with the Byzantine liturgy than it does with the Novus Ordo Missae. [5] Perhaps nowhere is this fact more obvious than in regard to the presence, in liturgical texts and ceremonies, of solemn Trinitarian affirmations and their counterpart, a thoroughgoing Christocentrism.

Indeed, there could hardly be a more insistently Christ-confessing liturgy than the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. In this liturgy there is a constant hymning both of Christ as the one true God and of the indissoluble unity of the Trinity: “Let us commend ourselves and one another and our whole life to Christ our God”; “For You, O God, are gracious and You love mankind, and to You we render glory, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, now and ever and forever.” Right before the Nicene Creed is recited, the priest sings: “Let us love one another, so that with one mind we may profess” — and the people finish his sentence: “The Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, the Trinity, one in substance and undivided.” Immediately after the consecration the priest sings: “We offer to You Yours of Your own, on behalf of all and for all,” to which the people respond: “We praise You, we bless You, we thank You, O Lord, and we pray to You, our God.” One of the most beautiful texts in the Divine Liturgy is an ancient hymn that perfectly illustrates the point we are making:

O only-begotten Son and Word of God, Who, being immortal, deigned for our salvation to become incarnate of the holy Mother of God and ever-virgin Mary, and became man, without change. You were also crucified, O Christ our God, and by death have trampled death, being One of the Holy Trinity, glorified with the Father and the Holy Spirit, save us.

The Byzantine liturgy is overflowing with such texts, boldly confessing the divinity of Christ and the perfect unity of Father, Son, and Spirit.

Now, even if the classical Roman liturgy, with its comparative sobriety and simplicity, is not “overflowing” in the same way as Eastern liturgies tend to be, it too conveys the same theological message, and with many of the same expressions and gestures. It clearly belongs to and derives from the same ancient Christian heritage, where chanting the praises of the divine Word-made-flesh and falling in adoration before the Most Holy Trinity were the pith and purpose of liturgical life.

In marked contrast, the Novus Ordo Missae displays an insistent “Patricentrism” or generic Theocentrism that is characteristic of no historically well-established liturgical rite. In its official texts and ceremonial the Novus Ordo exhibits what can only be called a certain Arianizing appearance or tendency. [6] The presbyter Arius of Alexandria (ca. 256–336), after whom the heresy of Arianism is named, taught that Jesus Christ is not truly and properly divine, but rather, a highly exalted creature and specially favored servant of God — a “son” or “god” by grace, not by nature.

St Athanasius Triumphs over Arius, by Jacob de Wit (after Peter Paul Rubens); public domain image from the website of the Netherlands Institute for Art History (RKD).

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