The name Theotokos stresses the fact that the Child whom Mary bore was not a “simple man,” not a human person, but the only-begotten Son of God, “One of the Holy Trinity,” yet Incarnate. This is obviously the corner-stone of the Orthodox faith. Let us recall the formula of Chalcedon: “Following, then, the holy Fathers, we confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ… before the ages begotten of the Father as to Godhead, but in the last days, for us and for our salvation, the selfsame, born of Mary, the Virgin Mother of God, as to Manhood” [the translation is by Dr. Bright].
The whole emphasis is on the absolute identity of the Person: the Same, the Self-same, unus idemque in St. Leo. This implies a twofold generation of the divine Word (but emphaticably not a double Sonship; that would be precisely the Nestorian perversion). There is but one Son: the One born of the Virgin Mary is in the fullest possible sense the Son of God. As St. John of Damascus says, the Holy Virgin did not bear “a common man, but the true God,” yet “not naked, but incarnate.” The Same, who from all eternity is born of the Father, “in these last days” was born of the Virgin, “without any change” (De Fide Orth., 3. 12).
There is here no confusion of natures. The “second” is just the Incarnation. No new person came into being when the Son of Mary was conceived and born, but the Eternal Son of God was made man. This constitutes the mystery of the divine Motherhood of the Virgin Mary. For indeed Motherhood is a personal relation, a relation between persons. Now, the Son of Mary was in very truth a divine Person. The name Theotokos is an inevitable sequel to the name Theanthropos, the God-Man. Both stand and fall together.
The doctrine of the Hypostatic Union implies and demands the conception of the divine Motherhood. Most unfortunately, the mystery of the Incarnation has been treated in modern times too often in an utterly abstract manner, as if it were but a metaphysical problem or even a dialectical riddle. One indulges too easily in the dialectics of the Finite and the Infinite, of the Temporal and the Eternal, etc., as if they were but terms of a logical or metaphysical relation. One is then in danger of overlooking and missing the very point: the Incarnation was precisely a mighty deed of the Living God, his most personal intervention into the creaturely existence, indeed, the “coming down” of a divine Person, of God in person.
Again, there is a subtle but real docetic flavor in many recent attempts to re-state the traditional faith in modern terms. There is a tendency to overemphasize the divine initiative in the Incarnation to such an extent that the historic life of the Incarnate itself fades out into “the Incognito of the Son of God.” The direct identity of the Jesus of history and the Son of God is explicitly denied. The whole impact of Incarnation is reduced to symbols: the Incarnate Lord is understood rather as an exponent of some august principle or idea (be it the Wrath of God or Love, Anger or Merry, judgement or Forgiveness), than as a living Person.
In both cases the personal implications of the Incarnation are overlooked or neglected — I mean, our adoption into true sonship of God in the Incarnate Lord. Now, something very real and ultimate happened with men and to men when the Word of God “was made flesh and dwelt among us,” or rather, “took his abode in our midst” — a very pictorial turn indeed: eskinosen en imin (John 1:14).
~Adapted from Archpriest George Florovsky, The Ever-Virgin Mother of God, (http://www.fatheralexander.org/booklets/english/maria_florovsky_e.htm).
