Oecumenius, Rev. 12 & Mary as Queen

19. The vision wishes to give us a fuller description of the things concerning the Antichrist, of whom it has made a brief mention in what has gone before. The incarnation of the Lord, by which the world was subjected and made his own, became the occasion for the raising [of the Antichrist] and the endeavors of Satan. For this is why the Antichrist will be raised up: so that he may again cause the world to revolt against Christ, and persuade it to turn around and desert to Satan. Since again the Lord’s physical conception and birth marked the beginning of his incarnation, the vision has brought into some order and sequence the events which it is going to explain, by starting its explanation from the physical conception of Christ, and by depicting for us the Mother of God.

(2) For why does he say, And a portent appeared in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet? He is speaking of the mother of our Savior, as I have said. Naturally the vision describes her as being in heaven and not on the earth, as pure in soul and body, as equal to an angel, as a citizen of heaven, as one who came to effect the incarnation of God who dwells in heaven (“for,” he says, “heaven is my throne”),³² and as one who has nothing in common with the world and the evils in it, but wholly sublime, wholly worthy of heaven, even though she sprang from our mortal nature and being. For the Virgin is of the same substance³³ as we are. The unholy doctrine of Eutyches, that the Virgin is of a miraculously different substance from us, together with his other docetic doctrines, must be banished from the divine courts.

(3) What is the meaning of saying that she is clothed with the sun, and has the moon under her feet? The divine prophet Habakkuk says in prophesying about the Lord, “The sun was lifted up and the moon stood still in its position for light.”³⁴ He calls our Savior Christ, or perhaps the preaching of the gospel, “the sun of righteousness.”³⁵ When this was exalted and increased, he says, the moon, that is, the law of Moses, stood still, and no longer grew in size. For after the appearance of Christ it no longer received proselytes from the nations as before, but experienced annulment and diminution.

(4) Perhaps you could imagine that here the holy Virgin is being protected by the spiritual sun. For this is how the prophet, too, speaks of the Lord when he says about Israel, “Fire fell upon them, and they did not see the sun.”³⁶ And the moon, that is, their worship according to the law and their way of life according to the law, inasmuch as it has been brought down and much reduced, is under her feet, overcome by the evangelical splendor. He well named the requirements of the law the moon, since they were brought to the light by the sun, that is, Christ, just as the actual moon is given light by the actual sun.

(5) In line with this explanation, it would have been more consistent to say that the woman was not clothed with the sun, but that the woman clothed the sun contained in her womb. But in order to show in the vision that even when the Lord was conceived, he was the protector of his own mother and of all creation, the vision said that he clothed the woman. In the same way the divine angel said to the holy Virgin, “The Spirit of the Lord will come upon you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.”³⁷ Overshadowing, protecting, and clothing all have the same meaning.

(6) He says, And on her head, a crown of twelve stars. For the Virgin is crowned with the twelve apostles who proclaim the Christ while she is proclaimed together with him.

(7) He says, She was with child, and she cried out in her birth-pangs, in anguish for delivery. Yet Isaiah says about her, “before the woman in labor gives birth, and before the toil of labor begins, she fled and brought forth a male child.”³⁸ Gregory, also, in the thirteenth chapter of his Interpretation of the Song of Songs talks of the Lord “whose conception is without intercourse, and whose birth is undefiled.”³⁹ So the birth was free from pain. Therefore, if, according to such a great prophet and the teacher of the church, the Virgin has escaped the pain of childbirth, how does she here cry out in her birth-pangs, in anguish for delivery?

(8) Does not this contradict what was said? Certainly not. For nothing could be contradictory in the mouth of the one and the same Spirit, who spoke through both. But in the present passage you should understand the crying out and being in anguish in this way: until the divine angel told Joseph about her, that the conception was from the Holy Spirit, the Virgin was naturally despondent, blushing before her betrothed, and thinking that he might somehow suspect that she was in labor from a furtive marriage. Her despondency and grief he called, according to the principles of metaphor, crying and anguish; and this is not surprising. For even when blessed Moses spiritually met God and was losing heart—for he saw Israel in the desert being encircled by the sea and by enemies—God said to him, “Why do you cry to me?”⁴⁰ So also now the vision calls the sorrowful disposition of the Virgin’s mind and heart “crying out.”

(9) But you, who took away the despondency of the undefiled handmaid and your human mother, my lady mistress, the holy Mother of God, by your ineffable birth, do away with my sins, too, for to you is due glory for ever. Amen.

After partly completing the vision of our universal lady, the holy ever-virgin Mary, Mother of God, he proceeds to give us another vision, saying,

2. And another portent appeared in heaven; see, a great red serpent, with seven heads and ten horns, and seven diadems upon his heads. (2) His tail swept away a third of the stars of heaven, and threw them down to the earth. And the serpent stood in front of the woman who was about to bear a child, that he might devour her child when she brought it forth; (3) she brought forth a male child, one who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron, but her child was caught up to God and to his throne, (4) and the woman fled into the desert, where she has a place prepared by God, so that she might find shelter there for one thousand two hundred and sixty days (Rv 12.3–6).

3. At the start of the explanation of the vision it was said that the vision, in its wish to set out in greater detail the facts about the Antichrist, begins with the conception and birth of the Lord, which was why that vandal had been chosen by the universal foe and enemy of all to enslave again those who had been gathered together by the Lord. So it must now be said that the vision, in its wish to explain in detail all that concerns the Antichrist, reverts to the original event preceding the beginning already mentioned—I mean the birth of the Lord. This concerns Satan, and the way he was thrown down from heaven, even though he says this more clearly in the following vision, when he adds that he had also plotted against the Lord. In this way he laid some kind of prior foundation on which to build the future explanations of the Antichrist’s affairs and his deeds.

(2) After this preface, we must move on to consider the text. He says, And another portent appeared in heaven: in this way the account is hitting at Satan, the prince of evil, because, although he was a heavenly being, on account of his rebellion he has become an earthbound crawler. He depicts him in heaven so that the apostate might know from what state he has fallen and where he now is.

(3) He says, And see, a great red serpent: he calls Satan a serpent because he is crooked. For that is what Isaiah, too, calls him, saying, “against the serpent, the crooked snake.”¹ He is red because he is blood-sucking and irascible.

(4) With seven heads and ten horns, and seven diadems upon his heads: the prophet knew well enough that he is many-headed. So he says of God, “You crushed the heads of the serpent; you gave him as food for the peoples of Ethiopia.”² They say that he is many-headed since seven indicates many (as has been said more than once) as one who makes many crafty starts and designs against humankind by which he enslaves them; for the diadem is the symbol of tyranny.

(5) The ten horns symbolize his immense power. For ten is a perfect number, and the horn is a sign of power. For [Scripture] says, “My horn shall be lifted up as the horn of a unicorn.”³ And anyone who reads the book of Job can discover that he is powerful.⁴

(6) He says, And with his tail⁵ he swept away a third of the stars of heaven, and threw them down to the earth. For he cast down with himself a very great number of the angels, persuading them to rebel with him against God, and so he has made the heavenly beings earthy, and those who were bright as stars he has turned into darkness. With his tail means that he has done this by means of his uttermost and hindmost trespasses; for when he first considered his mad rebellion, and then went on consciously to nurture it in the arrogance of his purpose, he thus came to destroy the rest too.

(7) He says, And the serpent stood in front of the woman who was about to bear a child, that he might devour her child when she brought it forth. These are some of the events concerning the Lord: when he was to be born, the one who was planning to bring his power to an end carefully watched his opportunity so that when the Virgin gave birth he might destroy the child. So he did not miss his opportunity but stirred up Herod to destroy the manly male child, who had nothing weak or womanish about him. For “before the child knows how to call ‘father’ or ‘mother,’” Isaiah proclaims to us, “he will take the wealth of Damascus and the spoil of Samaria in the face of the king of Assyria.”⁶

(8) And who this one is who was born, this male child, reveal to us, John, more clearly. He who is, he says, to rule all the nations with a rod of iron. You have plainly told us, divine seer, that he is our savior and Lord, Jesus the Messiah. For he had been promised by his own Father, “Ask of me, and I will give you the nations for your inheritance, and the ends of the earth for your possession; you will rule them with a rod of iron, you will dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.”⁷

(9) And, he says, her child was caught up to God and to his throne. But the poisonous serpent was lying in wait and provoked Herod to destroy the children in Bethlehem, because [he thought] he would at all events find the Lord among them. But the child, by the forethought of his Father, escaped the plot. For Joseph heeded a divine warning to take the child along with his mother and escape to Egypt as Herod was about to seek the child’s life.

(10) And the woman fled into the desert, where she has a place prepared by God, so that she might find shelter there for one thousand two hundred and sixty days. So while the child was rescued from the serpent’s plot, was the woman given over to destruction? No, but she, too, was rescued by the flight into Egypt, which was desert and exempt from Herod’s plot. And there she lived, he says, and was sustained for one thousand two hundred and sixty days, which comprise almost three and a half years. The Mother of God spent all that time in Egypt until the death of Herod, after which an angel’s divine message brought them back to Judaea.

5. As though in a continual return to the starting-point, as already described, the vision now plans to describe an earlier beginning which had indeed been partly mentioned previously, as it prepares to tell us about the Antichrist; for the first beginning of the acts of the Antichrist was Satan’s fall from heaven. The Lord, too, says of this, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven.”⁸

(2) What, therefore, does it mean, And war arose in heaven? The divine Scripture says that Satan raised up his neck against God,⁹ that is, stretched up an arrogant and stubborn neck against him and planned to revolt. But God, inasmuch as he is naturally good and long-suffering, was forbearing towards him. The divine angels, on the other hand, did not put up with the arrogance of their master, and drove him out of their company. He now says that Michael, one of the great rulers among the angels, made war against Satan and those under him.

(3) And Satan did not prevail in the war against him, nor was there any place of refuge found for him, or any dwelling in heaven, and he was thrown down to the earth. He either actually suffered this, or because he had been stripped of angelic and heavenly rank, he was brought down to an earthly frame of mind.

(4) Then, as though taking vengeance on God because of his fall, as he could not injure God, he injures God’s servants, human beings, and leads them astray and tries to get them to revolt from God, thinking that in this way he would injure the master himself.

6. And I heard a loud voice in heaven, saying, “Now has come salvation and power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ, for the accuser of our brethren has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God. (2) And they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, and they did not love their lives even unto death. (3) Rejoice then, O heaven and you that dwell therein! But woe to the earth and the sea, for the Devil has come down to you in great wrath, because he knows that his time is short” (Rv 12.10–12).

7. Therefore, the holy angels, intimating their own joy which they had at the destruction of Satan, sing a song of victory to God. They said, he says, Now have come salvation and the kingdom, and the power of God has shone out, and the authority of his Christ, showing that it is all-powerful. For by its cooperation, he says, we have conquered the enemy, and the accuser of our brethren, who accuses them day and night before our God, has departed from us.

(2) What modesty of the holy angels! How they imitate their own master! They call human beings their brothers. And why is this amazing, when our common master did not refuse to call them this when he said, “I will tell of your name to my brothers; in the midst of the congregation I will praise you”?¹⁰

(3) But why do they say of Satan, “He went away”? He was deprived of his dignity. There was no longer any room for him to stand before God, and to accuse human beings.

(4) And he says, they themselves took vengeance on him in equal measure, and they conquered him who seemed to be invincible in venturing even against God. And they conquered by using as support and help the precious blood of Christ and the word of those who bore testimony to him, which they chose before their own lives.

(5) After this, he says, Rejoice, all you angels of God, now that you have been delivered from the bitter sphere of Satan.

(6) He says, Woe to the earth and the sea, for the Devil has come down to you in great wrath, because he knows that his time is short. And “if he was going to harm the earth and the sea by the descent of Satan,” someone might ask, “Why did he come down?” The answer is that for those who are self-controlled and have their hope in God, not only has it not been for their harm, but in fact for their benefit. He is exercising them like a gymnastic trainer, making them more acceptable by temptations and hardening them like iron. But he does harm the sluggish and fainthearted, who perhaps, even when the tempter was not around, were bad in themselves because they had turned their passions into their nature.

(7) When they say, Woe to the earth and the sea, they do not mean, “woe to most of those who dwell on the earth and on the sea,” but those who are earth and “ashes,”¹¹ according to Scripture, those who are earthbound in their mind,¹² as well as the capricious and perplexed and mentally unstable. For it is these that our common enemy attacks and enslaves in their weakness, as they willingly succumb to his tyranny.

(8) He says, He knows that his time is short: for the time is short, from the fall of the Devil until his judgment and just deserts, when compared to eternity. For the same reason, too, the patriarch Jacob, even though he was a hundred and thirty years old, said when asking something of Pharaoh, “few and evil have been the days of the years of my life.”¹³

8. And when the serpent saw that he had been thrown down to the earth, he pursued the woman who had borne the male child. (2) But the two wings of the great eagle were given to the woman, so that she might fly into the desert, to her own place, where she is to be sheltered for a time, and times, and half a time from the presence of the snake. (3) The snake poured water like a river out of his mouth after the woman to sweep her away with the flood. (4) But the earth came to the help of the woman, and the earth opened its mouth and swallowed the river which the serpent had poured from his mouth. (5) Then the serpent was angry with the woman, and went off to make war on the rest of her offspring, on those who keep the commandments of God and bear testimony to Jesus (Rv 12.13–17).

9. The present account is a repetition of what has already been said. He does not say that after the serpent saw that he had been thrown down to the earth, he immediately pursued the woman, but since the serpent saw the troubles in which he was immersed, and that he had fallen out of the angelic rank, he became exceedingly bitter against human beings, and pursued the woman who had borne the savior of humankind, in order to destroy her. He pursued the woman, since he knew that the one who was born of her was too powerful to be captured. He was moved with envy against human beings because of their salvation by the Lord. He could not bear such a great reversal, by which he himself had been thrown out of heaven, and human beings by their virtue had gone up from earth to heaven.

(2) He says, But the two wings of the great eagle were given to the woman, that she might fly into the desert, to her own place, where she is to be sheltered for a time, and times, and half a time, from the presence of the snake. He says that the woman was not handed over to Satan, but fled into the desert. This is Egypt, as was said earlier.

(3) So it was that the prophet sought “wings like those of a dove,” to “fly away and be at rest in the desert.”¹⁴ But more powerful wings of the great eagle were given to the all-holy Virgin. He means by the wings of the eagle the intervention of the divine angel, who exhorted Joseph to take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. By this intervention it was as though they reached Egypt on the wings of an eagle. So the serpent, failing in this plot, which he had arranged through Herod, devises another plot against the Virgin, the destruction of her son, and so accordingly he goes on to describe the Lord’s cross and death.

(4) He says, The serpent poured water like a river out of his mouth after the woman, to sweep her away with the flood: the divine Scripture means allegorically by the river temptation or trial, saying somewhere through Jonah, “You cast me into the depths of the heart of the sea, and the rivers surrounded me,”¹⁵ and again in the words of the Lord, “the rain fell, and the rivers rose up, and the winds came, but they did not throw down the house which had been founded upon the rock.”¹⁶ Therefore, he calls her trial over the passion of the Lord a river, so that through this, he says, he might drown the Virgin. And truly, by what happened to the Lord and the intensity of her sorrow, the serpent had the power to fulfill his purpose. What does Simeon say to her? “And a sword will pierce your own soul, too, so that the thoughts of many hearts may be laid bare.”¹⁷

(5) But, he says, the earth came to the help of the woman, and the earth opened its mouth and swallowed the river which the serpent had poured from his mouth onto the woman. That the earth swallowed the river indicates that the earth had accepted the trial, that is, the killing of the Lord. But the earth’s help did not consist in this, but in restoring the Lord again; for he came to life again after three days, trampling upon death, since it was impossible for him to be held by it,¹⁸ since he was “the author of life,” according to blessed Peter.¹⁹ To construe it in this way, one must read a full stop after the earth came to the help of the woman. Then, as though in answer to the question, “in what manner did it help?” it swallowed up the river, that is, it received in itself the Lord after the plot against him, and again restored him, and this is how it gave its help.

(6) Since, therefore, the serpent also failed to achieve his second plan, what more is there for him to do? He pursued those called sons and brothers of the Lord—that is, the faithful—for these, he says, are the offspring of the woman; for the faithful are the sons and brothers of the Lord according to Scripture: “I will proclaim your name to my brothers,”²⁰ and again, “Here am I, and the children God has given me.”²¹ So then they also belong to his mother’s family; and the Devil made war on them, pursuing them and plotting against them, putting them to death through the tyrants and rulers of the earth, since they were testifying that the Virgin-born was God.

32. Is 66.1.

33. Greek, homoousios, the term used to describe the unity between God the Father and God the Word.

34. Hab 3.10–11.

35. Mal 4.2. Oecumenius appears to confuse Habbakuk with Malachi.

36. Ps 57.9.

37. Lk 1.35.

38. Is 66.7.

39. Gregory of Nyssa, Homilia in Canticum Canticorum 13.

40. Ex 14.15.

1. Is 27.1.

2. Ps 73.13–14.

3. Ps 91.11.

4. Jb 1.12.

5. Note the slight difference from the original quotation.

6. Is 8.4.

7. Ps 2.8–9.

8. Lk 10.18.

9. Cf. Jb 15.25.

10. Heb 2.12; Ps 21.23.

11. Gn 18.27.

12. Cf. Rom 8.7.

13. Gn 47.9.

14. Ps 54.7–8.

15. Jon 2.3.

16. Mt 7.25.

17. Lk 2.35.

18. Cf. Acts 2.24.

19. Acts 3.15.

20. Heb 2.12; Ps 21.23.

21. Heb 2.13; Is 8.18.