Annemarie Weyl Carr

Mother of the Lamb

Arts & Literature

“Byzantine icons, fruit of Byzantium's distinctive material theology, exert an unexpected claim on our attention now. Matthew Milliner explores the vast, evolving afterlife of one great icon, variously known as the Virgin of the Passion or Our Lady of Perpetual Help. Welding the events of a passionate and violent era to his own passionate response to the icon, Milliner roots the image in the circumstances of its earliest surviving rendition: a fresco of consummate artistry painted on the island of Cyprus in the immediate wake of its Crusader conquest. Wrenched forever from its parent culture of Byzantium, an empire triumphant for centuries under the aegis of a conquering Mary, Cyprus saw the birth of a new image of Mary. Here a half a millennium's ardent Marian veneration, expressed in Byzantium's radiant theology of liturgical worship and holy imagery, was distilled into a new image of Mary for a coming half-millennium of inexorable imperial decline. It is an image of sustained and compassionate sorrow. Milliner unfolds the image's many theological dimensions--Trinitarian, sacramental, ecclesiological, and emotional--and then traces the paths by which it traveled from a small Mediterranean island on the verge of an encroaching Islam to the heart first of Orthodoxy and then of Roman Catholicism, and from there into the hearts of people literally across the entire globe. The book's early chapters vivid with evocations of Byzantium's luminous and beautiful forms of worship give way by the end to earnest inquiries about this image's message for issues of contemporary faith: social justice, political violence, ecumenism, the role of women in a faith system that revolves around a figure like Mary. The book is written with energy and clear theological conviction, and it reveals how simple and yet how deeply complex a creation like the Virgin of the Passion is. Readers must not slight the endnotes. They are dense with interest.”