This video answers the following questions posed to me:
-Do the Orthodox pray to Mary and use the rosary?
-Does this practice a large emphasis in their devotion?
-Do they also pray to other saints and the angels?
-Do you say prayers for the dead?
I am an Orthodox catechumen, so my answers may not be perfect. Also, my responses are not prepared. If you think clarifications are necessary, please comment.
Orthodox Christian Theology 
So how do you explain asking Mary to strengthen you? How is that comparable to talking to others?
Good question, Alistair. From what I can tell from the prayers to Mary, if you read the whole prayer, it is through her prayers to God that these things occur.
However, there is some rather more grandiose language in the spiritual writings of monks. I am reading a book by Elder Ephraim and he says things in passing like, “He worked hard to receive the heavenly reward from the Panagia [Mary].” I find this sort of emphasis hard to stomach, and I’d rather chalk it up to my lack of closeness to God and His people than to impugn an Orthodox writer, but I think we need to often field these questions to the people composing these things instead of condemning them because we all know they do not believe the Theotokos is God. So, I cannot possibly defend every grandiose statement ever made because I do not know the intent behind them all, but the prayers themselves are pretty tame and tend to explain themselves if one reads them in an orthodox manner (that is, Mary is not God and her power is in her petitions to our God.)
God bless,
Craig
Craig–
Honestly, no disrespect intended, but what does it mean to read this type of prayer “in an Orthodox manner”?
You’re fairly steeped in Eastern dogma by now, and yet you don’t comprehend the need for such over-the-top rhetoric in prayer. Can’t you, at the very least, impugn these Orthodox writers for potentially causing those with less maturity and/or piety to stumble? These are not private prayers but disseminated far and wide.
Also, how is it in any way ” noble” or “spiritual” to pray contrary to established doctrine? How could such a practice indicate closeness to God? Do these monks know something the church itself doesn’t know?
In my own personal prayerlife, grandiose prayers do not come easily for God, let alone to the saints. If you read the prayers, they praise God for the majority of the prayer and ask one short petition. So, a lot of the grandiose style may pour of from a soul who is on fire for God that he can speak in such glowing terms to the Lord and to his people in prayer.
That being said, I think it is fairly obvious that the growth in the practice of petitioning the saints and the development in the language in the prayers mostly developed in the fourth and fifth centuries. I think it is untenable to assert that the doctrine of asking a saint for prayer was something that was not apostolic–I just wrote an article about that. However, I think the historical evidence does not merit that it was a huge historical practice either. After all, Peter might have wrote about Paul after he was dead and he does not offer a prayer to him. Clement likewise writes about the death of martyrs and names them, but does not ask for prayers in his letter. The emphasis in the practice has most certainly changed, even if the practice (as I assert) was Apostolic and a Jewish holdover.
IN the fourth and fifth centuries there arose two issues–the need for mass catechesis and debate over Christology. Prayers, hymns, and creeds were the instruments of mass catechesis. Further, debate over Christ dragged his mother into the fight. So, I honestly think the emphasis on Mary grew (not that all the essential dogmas did not already exist) as a way of addressing Christological truths. After all, if Christ was really man and really God, then He really had a mother who gave birth to God–so now let’s repeat that all the time in our prayers and hymns. A small practice then became a somewhat large practice that became inseparable from Christianity itself.
Before we balk at this, it is worth considering that if we look at the development of the Creed from the time of St Ignatius and Irenaeus to its form at Nicea and Constantinople, it is obvious that they added a whole lot of stuff about Jesus Christ and then the Holy Spirit to address fourth century doctrinal debates. I mean, the Scriptures barely speak of pneumatology–and neither to the pre-Nicene fathers in great detail. So, there is nothing wrong with a growth in emphasis **if its true.**
This is what it appears happened with prayers to the saints.
God bless,
Craig
Craig, it seems to me that this is the most reasonable explanation for the relative silence concerning martyrs and saints in the apostolic fathers and earlier post-apostolic fathers.
From what we know from a sermon of St. Augustine, bishops at his time were offering correctives concerning the cult of the saints. Exactly what the excesses were is not entirely clear but what we know for sure is that they were not saying that venerating them was idolatry.
From St. John Chrysostom’s sermons we gather the same information, namely, that some of the faithful were doing improper things at the tombs of the martyrs (i.e. gluttony, drunkenness, etc.). What we don’t hear from Chrysostom is that this is idolatry, and we would.
The only explanation I find for this is that there was an expansion of the cult of the saints that resulted in the Church teaching the faithful through akathists and troparia, instead of letting it be a private devotional practice that could lead to abuses. I believe this is why the earlier fathers don’t really mention these practices.
At the time of fathers like Sts. Justin Martyr and Irenaeus persecution hadn’t exploded like it did before St. Constantine (which would lead to the Church having a wealth of martyrs to raise up as examples to follow for the people). Before this, it seems reasonable to conclude that venerating the saints played a much smaller part in the liturgical life of the Church. It may have consisted of praying for the departed and asking them to pray for us still in this life (as far as the liturgical rite is concerned). Later on it will grow and make it necessary for the Church to develop a “martyrology” to explain what is going on with these men and women that were killed cruelly while confessing the Faith.
I could be wrong here, but this is what I think happened.