The Life of the Virgin by Stephen J. Shoemaker (review)

Shoemaker has done a great service for scholars both of Maximus the Confessor and the cult of the Virgin. This is the first complete Vita of the Virgin Mary that we have, and, as Shoemaker demonstrates, though it did not survive in its original Greek, it was an important source for the influential Vitae composed by Symeon the Metaphrast and John the Geometer in the tenth century. We have this remarkable text not in Greek, its language of composition, but only on account of a tenth/eleventh-century translation into Georgian made by Euthymios the Hagiorite, which survives in eleven known manuscripts. Thus, a serious language barrier prevented the majority of western scholars from accessing the text until Michel van Esbroeck’s 1986 edition and translation (CSCO 478 & 479). Still, as Shoemaker points out, there has been a curious lack of attention paid to this Life of the Virgin by scholars, Anglophone in particular (7), and it is with the intention of remedying this lack that he makes his offering.

In preparing his translation, Shoemaker took the opportunity to improve dramatically the condition of the text. One finds in the notes over 200 corrections made to the edition of van Esbroeck, based on three significant witnesses which Shoemaker was able to consult. Most of these corrections were of typographical errors, but he discovered a considerable number of poor readings and unnecessary conjectures as well. Any future study of the text will require these notes open alongside van Esbroeck’s edition. It is only to be lamented that Shoemaker was not able to check his corrections against the most important manuscript used by van Esbroeck, Tbilisi A-40, which would have put the text on even surer footing.

The translation itself is eminently readable. Shoemaker disavows any aspiration to “literary qualities” (5), yet his decision to stick closely to the syntax of the Old Georgian allows the poetic tendencies of the original to shine through in many places. Take, for example, a scene of the last supper: “Then the evil dinner companion became a traitor, and the deceitful disciple became the robber of his gracious master, and the feet washed by incorruptible hands ran to the Jews to sell the one who is without price” (102). He includes as an appendix to the translation a rubric found in one of the manuscripts for reading the Life liturgically.

The strength of Shoemaker’s introduction is a very thorough and original analysis of the question of the text’s authorship. He reviews the arguments that have been advanced for (van Esbroeck) and against (Kekelidze, Toniolo) Maximian authorship and, though he clearly finds more of substance in van Esbroeck, he admits that the matter is unresolved. Shoemaker counters many objections that have been raised to accepting the unanimous attribution of the manuscripts. He then offers his own source-critical assessment, according to which he confidently dates the text to the seventh century and finds good reason to prefer a date in the first half of that century—the season of Maximus’s flowering. However, he acknowledges that the question must ultimately be decided by specialists in Maximus’s thought, a title that he does not claim.

When the introduction turns to the text itself, Shoemaker unfortunately tells us more of what the Life of the Virgin is not about than what it is. His overriding concern is to inoculate the reader from seeing in the text an early Byzantine prototype for the Latin doctrine of Mary as Coredemptrix. This entails a long excursus on the incompatibility of Anselmian atonement theory with Greek “incarnational” soteriology (24–32), which seems out of place in an introduction meant to orient new readers to the text. An account of the historical and theological background to the work itself in support of a more positive Mariological interpretation might have effectively excluded the “misinterpretation” Shoemaker is so keen to head off, without venturing...