Heortology : $b A history of the Christian festivals from their origin to the present dayKellner, K. A. Heinrich (Karl Adam Heinrich)
Religion
Heortology : $b A history of the Christian festivals from their origin to the present day
Kellner, K. A. Heinrich (Karl Adam Heinrich)
Church year; Fasts and feasts
Maria, or Miriam, is the Greek form of Miryam, a name over the etymology
of which many opinions were held in antiquity. Eusebius explains it
to mean “illuminatrix una vel illuminans eos, aut smyrna maris vel
stella maris.”[569] St Peter Chrysologus and St John Damascene derive
it from the Syrian _mar_ (feminine _martha_), lady, which appears
also in the Roman breviary along with the other explanation, “stella
maris.” In the Middle Ages this was the usual, and even yet is the
favourite, explanation. O. Bardenhewer maintains that the only derivation
permissible is from מָרָא, fat or stout, in the sense of the imposing
or stately one. Those to whom Bardenhewer’s derivation does not commend
itself will be glad to hear that Professor Macke has had the happy
thought to refer back to the first bearer of the name, Miryam, the sister
of Moses, and to derive the names of both brother and sister from the
Egyptian. In Egyptian it would be: _Meri jom_, which would be equivalent
to Friend of Water, or Bride of the Sea, and so approaches more to the
meaning of _Stella Maris_.
2. The Presentation of our Lady in the Temple[570] (Præsentatio B.M.V.,
21st November). The story that Mary at the age of three years was brought
by her parents to the temple in fulfilment of their vow, there to be
educated, appears only in apocryphal writings,[571] but it fell in so
completely with the ideas of religious, both in ancient and modern times
in East and West, that it was not long before it asserted its influence
on the cycle of our Lady’s Feasts. The commemoration appears officially
for the first time in the constitution of Manuel Comnenus, published in
1166, as a fully recognised festival on which the law courts did not sit.
The date is the same as at the present day.[572] The feast was introduced
into the West by a French nobleman, Philip de Maizières, who spent some
time at the Court of Gregory XI. at Avignon in 1371 as representative
of the King of Cyprus. He represented the manner in which the day was
celebrated in the East in such a way as to move Gregory to ordain it as
one of the festivals of the Papal Court. It soon made its way in other
places also—in Navarre in 1374, in Treves in 1381, in Metz in 1420, in
Cologne and elsewhere. In Rome it was introduced by Sixtus IV., and an
office for it was added to the Roman breviary without its recitation
being imposed (_inter festa ad libitum_ and _pro quibusdam locis_). It
was only Sixtus V. who, in 1585, ordained it for the whole Church after
it had been for a time suppressed by Pius V. The original office was
altered under Clement VIII. Although the feast at first was regarded as
unimportant, it attained in Prussia to the rank of a feast _in foro_,
and this in an unexpected way, in 1893. It falls in Prussia on the third
Wednesday in November, and occupies a position midway between the movable
and immovable feasts.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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