St Mary of Egypt: How Did a Long-time Libertine Suddenly Come to Feel Shame?

On Mercy Towards the Fallen

What is true repentance? Which feelings does it awaken within us, and what else does the Great Canon teach us on the day of the commemoration of Saint Mary of Egypt? Archimandrite Savva (Mazhuko) offers his reflections.

There are two peculiar details in the biography of Saint Mary of Egypt that have always baffled me. First, how could a twelve-year-old girl who had given herself over to debauchery, plunging into that whirlpool of depravity, never once feel the pangs of conscience? Indeed, her Life emphasises this very natural carelessness in sin, which characterised the future desert ascetic. Dostoevsky gives us Sonya Marmeladova; Maupassant has Madame Tallow-Ball and other characters, often drawn directly from life, who, despite their “unconventional” way of living, were at least aware that they were wallowing in mire and indulging in vile acts. Mary of Egypt, meanwhile, was living in Alexandria at the end of the fifth century – a city filled with Christian churches and holy sites, with renowned ascetics dwelling nearby in the desert. Yet Mary lived as though in a pagan age, a “child of the fields,” as if the Gospel had never been proclaimed to the whole world.

Second, how did her eyes suddenly open? How could shame stir in a woman who had lived dissolutely for so many years? Where could this shame even have come from? It is a miracle. It is a calling to serve. And the venerable saint then spent seventeen years in the desert to atone for her seventeen years of sin.

These two questions are more than mere literary or theological curiosities. Year by year, I meet ever more people who quite sincerely do not understand what sin is, people who seem morally insensible. I myself do not know how to explain the nature of sin; I am not even sure it can truly be explained. Nor was Saint Mary given any lecture about morality or the observance of God’s commandments. Instead, the Lord would not allow her to enter the church, and for reasons unknown, that resistance from the holy place suddenly opened her eyes.

Was Mary a ‘fallen woman’? To fall, one must first be standing on something. But this young girl grew up in sin. Was there even a height from which she could have fallen?

In monastic terminology, “fall” (падение) is a technical term. It denotes a particularly grievous sinful act. In ascetic texts, this word most often describes the violation of the vow of chastity. A person was standing—and suddenly fell. Human beings walk on two legs; animals on four; serpents creep upon their bellies. But the sense of “fall” is yet more dramatic: the Greek word ptosis—which we translate as “fall”—can also refer to those slain in battle. Ptosimos means “one who has fallen, been struck down, killed; a corpse.” Thus “falling” and “the fallen” come from the language of warfare.

A Christian fights “against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12). Before a monastic tonsure, the abbot, as though testing the novice’s resolve, flings the scissors at the novice’s feet. The novice picks them up and decisively places them in the abbot’s hand. This is done thrice. Then the abbot gives a “final warning” before the tonsure:

“Behold to Whom you promise yourself, to Whom you are drawing near, and whom you renounce.”

To receive the monastic tonsure is to challenge the devil openly—to enter into direct combat. Yet the monastic tonsure is patterned on the Sacrament of Baptism. Every Christian is a soldier of Christ, which places us in the line of fire, under attack from the enemy, with the real possibility of ending up among the fallen.

A fall is not necessarily death, but a deadly wound. One can remain alive in a fallen state. Sin, however, is a “black hole” that drains the human will to live. It can transform a vibrant, cheerful person into a carrier of death, a walking corpse among the living.

There is no true joy in sin—no life in it. Only illusion and deceit. And should a miracle occur, causing one’s eyes to open, the first sight is a corpse: I am that corpse among corpses. I live by habit, I move by inertia, yet life has long since slipped away—evaporated, vanishing unnoticed. I am not merely dead; I am the one who inflicted a mortal wound upon myself. While I was being destroyed, I was helping my tormentors. I took their side. I was the one who called them.

The lament of a fallen man on the battlefield, mortally wounded yet still able to cry out for help—this is the essence of the Canon of Saint Andrew of Crete. In the fifth week of the Fast, this penitential hymn is repeated once more, this time in its entirety. That beautiful service begins already in the morning, for on Wednesday at the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts, the famous Twenty-Four Penitential Stichera of Saint Andrew of Crete are sung.

These stichera are greatly cherished in monasteries, and connoisseurs of the church typikon await them each year. They consist of twenty-four brief prayers, each ending with the same refrain:

“O Lord, before I perish utterly, save me.”

This is a cry for help, a dying man’s appeal, the outcry of the fallen:

I stand at the brink. I am on the very edge. The abyss draws me in.
“O Lord, before I perish utterly, save me.”

The reading of the Canon is called “Mary’s Standing” (Mariino Stoyanie) because, much like Saint Mary, we traverse several stages of repentance: from the “carelessness of debauchery,” so often characterised by blindness and insensitivity to our sins, to the stage of “awareness of one’s own sin,” leading to a stunned awe before the image of the Most Pure Virgin—the icon of purity and holiness.

Yet this “awareness of sin” and thirst for purity do not exhaust the work of repentance. There is also a third stage: the willingness to make atonement. The Good Thief, who defended Christ and received forgiveness and the promise of Paradise from Him, was dying under the blazing sun, tormented by inhuman suffering. He accepted his suffering as atonement. Hence his words:

“We receive the due reward of our deeds.”
(cf. Luke 23:41)

Genuine repentance and the realisation of one’s fall do not give rise to despair; they awaken a readiness for labour, for another battle, for atonement.

Saint John Climacus wrote a most important teaching:

“A sign of fervent repentance is that a person considers himself worthy of all the visible and invisible sufferings that come upon him—and even greater ones.”
(Ladder, 5:38)

For the seventeen years she spent in debauchery, Saint Mary laboured seventeen years in the desert: “We receive the due reward of our deeds.” This effort is not for God’s benefit—God forgives us at once, no matter how many times we fall. Rather, this labour of atonement is required by us, for our own sake. Not all of us are ready for such a feat; not everyone has the fortitude and determination for it. Climacus speaks of the willingness to accept sufferings and illnesses without complaint or resentment, in order to expiate one’s falls. Thus, the Lord entrusts us with the work of our own purification. Such, indeed, is the purpose of our afflictions.

Yet even the willingness to make atonement does not complete repentance. The chief lesson taught by the penitential Canon is compassion—mercy toward the fallen, which likewise extends to oneself.

A person who truly repents, who has indeed embarked on the path of repentance, is characterised by kindness, mercy, and forbearance. Such a penitent has experienced both the fall and the rising, has known the breath of death when only the faintest drop of life remains. Such a person can empathise with other fallen souls, and who can say whether God sometimes allows our falls precisely so that we become gentler and more compassionate?

Translated by The Catalogue of Good Deeds
Source: https://www.pravmir.ru/arhimandrit-savva-mazhuko-mariino-stoyanie-put-ot-rasputstva-k-svyatosti/