Marian Piety and the Nestorian Controversy

Abstract

Conventional wisdom on the Nestorian controversy has long held that the dispute was over Christ rather than Mary, that the attribution of the title Theotokos (or God-bearer) to the Virgin became a battlefield not because the status of Mary was a lively issue but because of its implications for the doctrine of the Incarnation. Associated developments in Marian piety have been seen as a consequence of the approval of the title at the ecumenical Council of Ephesus (431) rather than its cause. The confidence with which this has been repeated reflects, one may suspect, both a prejudice that Christology was a more worthy subject for debate than Mariology and a presumption that theological debate among bishops must be more important than developments in popular piety where lay women played a leading role. We may therefore be grateful to a series of recent writers who have called the conventional wisdom into question and argued that the main cause of the controversy, as it developed in Constantinople, was a development in Marian devotion during the preceding quarter century.