We know that it started: 1. After Christianity was made the official religion of the Empire, and (more specifically) 2. After the Council of Chalcedon We know, furthermore, that by the time one gets to the 7th Ecumenical Council (787), 3. The practice seems to have been already well established. So 500-700 is when it happened. The beginning of this period was the reign of Justinian, who outlawed paganism. So there's your answer: streams of pagans pouring into the Church and continuing their old practices under the cover of "Christianization". As Calvin put it: The reason the origins are somewhat obscure is because the practice began extra-liturgically and then later gradually made its way into the official liturgy.
There was already Christians gathering and worshipping around the relics of martyrs in the very early church such as in the Catacombs of Rome. Even St. Ambrose brought relics into his church because his congregation demanded it. I imagine that is where it started.
If you read at the end I state that is where I think it starts. I agree with you that it started as a devotional practice before moving into the church proper. That is my guess where it starts.
Curiously enough the first Mary prayer found in a papyrus is in Egypt, where isis was worshipped as a mother goddess, and she was also called mother of god and queen of heaven. Uncanny coincidence
I found an even more devastating passage from https://www.anglican.net/works/adam-hill-the-cry-of-england-against-the-sins-of-sodom-1595/ Sorry I don’t knjow how to paste it with all the formatting
For those interested in the interfaith dimension of this, the Qur’an’s critique of the practice, for example, is devastating: It is indeed a great question. Why on earth would God allow a split monarchy, the destruction of the northern kingdom, the conquest and exile of the southern kingdom, and the Maccabean revolt, to stamp out once and for all any cultural tendency among the Jews to show reverence to any person except God, only to will the practice back into existence when the very Gentiles from whom the Jews were to be distinguished began streaming into the Church? That doesn’t make any sense.
They will just use the fact that Muslims are against it to paint it as a genuine Christian practice, like Icon veneration.
Well, historically speaking, they would be correct. If aliens from outer space arrived to do a survey of Earth as part of their research on interstellar religious behavior, their finding would be that since the vast majority of Christians pray to saints and honor two- or three-dimensional images of them, those who don’t practice it must be the anomalous outliers. As John Henry Newman put it: Besides, the Qur’anic question is a perfectly legitimate one in its own right. The answer that “those [who practice invocation of saints] aren’t real Christians” would be understandably met with skepticism. It’s a real problem.
lol but funny enough he needed to come up with development of doctrine in order to explain later Roman practices
Yet Rome rejected Newman’s theory. The thesis itself is quite fascinating. It has a lot of similarities with Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, yet predated Darwin’s work by 14 years. Prior to Newman, doctrinal development was assumed to be merely logical/conceptual. (The doctrine of the Trinity, for example, falls into the “logical development” category.) Newman’s theory was one of “organic”, non-logical development. Thus the veneration of the saints came to exist in the Church, not because of some concept “hidden” within the Scriptures that came to be logically worked out over time (e.g., “incarnational” spirituality or whatnot, or veneration of the Holy Spirit “by extension”), but rather because religion itself requires some concept of mediatorship between God and human beings and, once this aspect of Christ’s person (which is not limited to his humanity on this view) began to be deemphasized in favor of his eternal being and equality with the Father, the new “emptiness” of the mediator “space” demanded to be filled, and was, just as hotter climates will favor genes that produce greater resilience to heat and thus will result in more heat-tolerant populations over time. This has nothing to do with logical development. It’s about certain tendencies in religion being “hard-wired”, as it were, and how they adapt themselves to logical developments, just like natural selection producing something new and unexpected by working on a given pool of genes. Once one adds the assumption that these religious tendencies were also willed by God, the legitimacy of the practice in question is all but assured. It is thus a theory of legitimate yet non-logical (but not illogical) development. And, Newman’s theory may very well be right as an explanation of doctrinal development. But just as Darwin’s theory cannot tell you what kind of animal is the “right” kind, simply be explaining how various animals developed, neither can Newman’s theory on its own tell us which Christianity (if any) is the “correct” version. Logically, Newman’s theory seems to imply a kind of pluralism and seems to have faint echoes of Hegel in it. Theoretically, as long as one can show historically that each later development fulfilled a function performed by a different doctrine or practice in the past, any development might be legitimate. So one would be looking for either (1) the disappearance of a “function” altogether, or (2) the appearance of an altogether new one, to determine whether a given development is legitimate. The bare content of the development itself won’t tell us that.
BTW personally I think Newman’s theory has some serious problems. My only purpose in quoting Newman was to demonstrate that understanding tradition as the “democracy of the dead” heavily stacks the deck against Protestantism. Thus the question of ecumenism toward other Christians vs. ecumenism toward the other monotheistic faiths turns out to be a zero-sum game. In other words, ecumenism confined within Christianity necessarily means further accommodating functional polytheism, which moves one further away from rapprochement with the stricter traditions of monotheism outside Christianity.
Wow that’s very interesting! I wonder why Rome rejected it though, it would surely explain a lot. It seems like you think that praying to Saints is sort of polytheistic? From what I have seen, it’s very complicated. Christianity started as a religion of the persecuted, and a religion where people thought the second coming was imminent. They were almost eager to die for the faith. Everyone around them starts seeing these brave martyrs dying for Christ, and they have faith one day their bodies will be resurrected. Their bodies will rise from the very spot they are buried. There starts the veneration of relics. These peoples souls are now in heaven, they have won the crown of life for being martyrs. They have their own “merits” in heaven. Augustine already by the 5th century talks about the established practice of celebrating the Eucharist at the martyrs graves. It’s bad enough that it looks like they’re worshipping the martyrs to the pagans. I don’t think it was only the influx of pagans. The early Christians were always eccentric, it just got worse over time. After the Christians stopped being persecuted, then they had no more martyrs to venerate. So then they start turning to Mary and Paul and Peter and whatnot, and clearly isis the pagan goddess seems to have some play in it too. It’s amazing to me how men like Augustine didn’t realize that if pagans thought the church was worshipping the martyrs at the grave, maybe they should stop doing that so it doesn’t look like that. lol. You always hear EO and RCs tell you about how the apostles said to follow the traditions they taught as an argument against sola scriptura. It’s funny they think their traditions were taught by the apostles. The fact is the apostles didn’t teach relic and icon veneration and processions, and they clearly didn’t teach to pray to Saints in heaven. It’s amazing once again how the apostles said to hold fast to the traditions they taught them, and here they are a few centuries later introducing new traditions. Although I will say in acts people got healed by aprons and rags Paul touched. That’s sort of proto relic veneration. From that it’s not hard to see how relic veneration developed, and image worship isn’t too far off. It seems this all was bound to happen. Whether it’s right or not is another subject. But you’re right, most Christians in the world pray to Saints and venerate images. The Protestant cause doesn’t look very convincing to them, since they are ok with these practices developing outside from what the apostles taught. If God willed people to be healed through Paul’s relics who am I to say no? I just think the practice got out of hand when they started attributing powers to the items themselves. Faith works miracles, not the relic.
I think my views in this area are a little nuanced. Firstly I think it is OK for a Christian to ask another Christian to pray for them or with them. Secondly I think that Jesus conquered death. So if I deny the possibility of praying with and asking saints to pray for me, I get the sense that I am robbing the cross of some of its power to defeat the enemy that broke into the world through sin. At the conclusion of the Eucharist rite we pray THEREFORE with Angels and Archangels, and with all the company of heaven, we laud and magnify thy glorious Name; evermore praising thee, and saying: Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of hosts, heaven and earth are full of thy glory: Glory be to thee, O Lord most High. Amen. I think we need to stop talking about praying to, and start talking about praying with.
Rome rejected the theory, if my memory is correct, because it made the Papacy to be one of the things that developed, rather than the divine institution that was guiding the whole process. My own view is that legitimacy of the practice of invocation of the saints is tied not only to how it’s understood but also to what the intent is that underlies it, i.e., is it meant as a form of direct address, or is it a kind of poetic expression of hope? The role of the Virgin Mary in this schema is (1) to be the example Christians should follow in this life, i.e., being completely receptive to God’s will, and (2) to show us what what we can and should hope for regarding the next life (this is the reason for all the descriptions of her as queen of heaven, and of her place of glory, etc. In this line of thinking, she is already where the rest of the Christians who have/will depart(ed) this life will be following the Last Judgment. As a poetic description meant to foster piety, this seems legitimate. As a literal prayer to her to hear, answer, and act as it were in the place of God, the practice seems illegitimate.
I am definitely more comfortable saying praying with. But can I ask, do you pray specific requests “with” them? Like for example, saying “mother of God pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.” To me that is a general request, and sort of poetic because she’s already praying for us. So it’s sort of like joining ourselves to her prayer and acknowledging the fact she is in heaven praying for us, and a hope that we may one day be there too. But most people pray for specific things, like, I don’t know, Mary pray so I can get a job promotion tomorrow or some other specific thing. Do you do that? And if you do how do you express that as praying with them? Just trying to understand how this all works
Lol yeah that’s right. They maintain the papacy existed in the early church. But they could easily use development doctrine for something else. I guess all their claims must be guided by the divine To be honest when I see some of the early church proof of praying to Saints, I’ve often asked myself if it’s poetic. Like the supposed inscriptions on tombs asking for prayer. It’s one thing to write it down in hope and another to actually address them in prayer. But this subtlety seems insignificant to others. It’s very interesting the point you bring up about Mary. The greatest thing about her is her faith. What great faith must one have to give birth to the word incarnate! As Augustine said: “Mary was more blessed in accepting the faith of Christ than in conceiving the flesh of Christ. To someone who said, “Blessed is the womb that bore you,” he replied, “Rather, blessed are they who hear the word of God and keep it.”Finally, for his brothers, his relatives according to the flesh who did not believe in him, of what advantage was that relationship? Even her maternal relationship would have done Mary no good unless she had borne Christ more happily in her heart than in her flesh.” It seems to me a lot of Mary veneration has gone way off course from this. Mary is now this perfect creature that none of us can possibly strive to be and whose help we need in order to intercede with Christ. They say she is our mother but never our sister. The truth is sadly she’s not something to look forward to anymore, because all the Mary venerators believe her to be better than any of us dirty human beings. Mary is sinless. How could we possibly compare? I never thought about her title of queen of heaven as a share of the glory we should strive for in the kingdom of God. My issue with this is that Mary is looked as someone that Jesus “listens” to because she is his queen mother. I’m not comfortable with making God subject to a created being. Christ is no longer a child and he is no longer bodily on earth. I feel as though the relationship between Mary and him now is of a creature and her God, not of mother and son anymore. I could be wrong though. What do you think? As for the poetic part of prayers, I don’t think anyone in the modern day actually thinks it’s poetic. They address Mary asking her to pray to God for them. It’s not a hope, but a direct request. I’m very curious as to what prayers you’d be willing to say? Poetically, of course Also it’s just sad how Jesus literally points out the best quality of Mary is her faith, something we can all strive for, and not her status as the mother of God, something none of us will ever be able to have. It’s almost like he’s telling us to see her as an example rather than an all powerful mother queen. Almost like he knew it was going to happen…
While Newman’s development of doctrine did take time becoming accepted, in the 20th century it increasingly became more and more the reigning paradigm, until it was finally formally enshrined at Vatican II. Today of course it is the super-dogma that is on the lips of every liberal, conservative, and traditionalist. Whatever stripe of RC you are, you’ll fervently believe the development of doctrine. Thus, the Roman church as we have it now, has forever more become a church of progressive development and ever further updates.
I don't really do shopping list prayers. One of my common refrains is Lord, in the darkness, let your light shine. Pray is not so much aligning God's desires with ours, so much as aligning our desires with his. I have been comfortable with the Angelus, including the collect that concludes it, as a reasonable and not extreme ancient prayer. I really think Mater Dei was not an especially helpful translation of theotokos and I believe it has generated much angst.