Theotokos (Mother of God)

The Mother of God, the title the Third Ecumenical Council confirmed at Ephesus in 431: the One she bore is God, and to call her less is to divide her Son. The Church calls her ever-virgin, and in the litanies of almost every service our most holy, most pure, most blessed and glorious Lady, and asks her prayers more often than those of anyone else. The Fathers from Justin and Irenaeus on called her the new Eve, whose obedience undid the first Eve’s disobedience, and St Nicholas Cabasilas wrote that the Incarnation was the work not only of the Father, the Son and the Spirit but of the will and faith of the Virgin. The Church keeps her Dormition as a true death followed by her translation into heaven, body and soul, sung in the hymns of the feast without being defined as a dogma; it does not receive the Latin dogma of her Immaculate Conception, because it never taught the inherited guilt from which that dogma exempts her. Her icon stands to the left of the royal doors, and in the apse above the altar she is often painted as the Platytera, wider than the heavens, holding Christ.