I think it is really stretching it to say that te Orthodox Church, a unified body of Apostolic Catholic Churches in Communion with the Patriarch of Constancinople, ever made such a claim as part of its official teaching.
In fact, the EOC has only one dogma, one official doctrine, about Panagia: that she is the Birth-giver of God, Theotokos. The rest, as exemplified in our Divine Liturgy, is simply a relfection of our devotion to her.
If anything, an Orthodox believer would find it difficult to relate to her if she were ontogically different from the rest of us.
"If anything, an Orthodox believer would find it difficult to relate to her if she were ontologically different from the rest of us."
Now there's an exactly correct observation.
A few years back, my late father-in-law lay dying during Great Lent. My wife, a former Congregationalist, spent her evenings at church for the chanting of the Akathist. Sitting and standing there in tears, she poured out her heart to Panagia and those devotions were very comforting to her. I suspected I knew why, but I asked her anyway. She said that Panagia knew what it was to suffer and loose someone so very close to her so she could relate to where my wife was right then as a woman facing loss. My wife could never have felt that way about or have made such a connection to a "goddess".
The following from my previous post would seem to indicate this:
But especially on the feast of her conception (December 9 in the Byzantine Church) is her immaculateness stressed: "This day, O faithful, from saintly parents begins to take being the spotless lamb, the most pure tabernacle, Mary..."; "She is conceived...the only immaculate one"; "or "Having conceived the most pure dove, Anne filled...." [References: From the Office of Matins, the Third Ode of the Canon for the feast; From the Office of Matins, the Stanzas during the Seating, for the same feast; From the Office of Matins, the Sixth Ode of the Canon for the same feast.]This also agrees with the following statement from Orthodox Wiki:
The Orthodox Church does not accept the teaching of the Immaculate Conception, but has also always believed that the Virgin Mary was, from her conception, filled with every Grace of the Holy Spirit in view of her calling as the Mother of Christ our God.I will leave for the moment how being filled with Grace from the moment of her conception does or does not differ from the Catholic idea of the Immaculate Conception. For the now can we agree that Mary was indeed, unlike the rest of us, conceived filled with Grace?
"does any Divine Liturgy, or Hours, or any of the Father, say that she was purified at the moment of her conception."
I have studied the texts of the feast of the Conception of the Theotokos carefully, repeatedly, and extensively.
There is no question in my mind that there is no evidence whatsoever in the texts to support the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception as conceived (pun intended) by Roman Catholicism.
There is some shared terminology that could allow a Roman Catholic to read the I.C. into a few bits (as Petrosius's quotations demonstrate.) Unfortunately for those who would wish to do this, there are some fundamental problems.
1. Orthodox Christians believe that *all* humans are conceived without any spot or stain in the sense that there is no sin deserving of punishment present at the time of anyone's conception. All, including the Theotokos, are born with the effects of the ancestral sin -- i.e. the tendency to corruption and death. The Theotokos was born exactly the same as we are, and she grew old and died because the effects of the ancestral sin were present in her body.
2. We call the Theotokos immaculate because of her immaculate life. Orthodox hymnology is timeless, so characteristics that were manifested at the end of her life can be transferred to the beginning of her life. Consider the obvious fact that the hymnology refers to her as the Theotokos, etc. Obviously, this does not mean that she had already borne Christ. A future characteristic or event is transferred timelessly to the time of her conception in the hymnology.
3. If the Church were teaching the Immaculate Conception in the hymnology of the Eastern Church, then (besides the obvious point that the Eastern Church would know this about her own hymnology and have theology reflecting it) this is such a momentous thing that we would expect the hymnology to be filled with explicit, repeated statements of the wonders of the Immaculate Conception. Anyone who is even a little bit familiar with Orthodox liturgics and hymnology knows this to be true. Nothing is left to chance in our services -- nothing of any importance whatsoeveris left open to the possibility of misinterpretation.
Quite the contrary, the repeated themes of the hymnology of that feast (I'm so familiar with it that I don't even need to pull the book off the shelf to pontificate) emphasize two things: the miraculous nature of her conception to an elderly couple thought to be barren; and the fact that she would grow up to be the mother of Jesus Christ.
If the circumstances surrounding her conception were unique in the history of humankind, as the I.C. dictates, the hymnology would read very, very differently.