AW: [SEELANGS] AW: [SEELANGS] Coredemptrix

[Olga Meerson]

Rolph, you are absolutely right, if calling Mary a coredemptrix and believing She is a deity is the same thing. But it is precisely in attitude to terms that the Orthodox and the RC differ so much. The word seems merely silly to the Orthodox while to the "other Christian denominations" it may sound like an abomination--because these other denominations have inherited RC attitude to definitions and keep fighting against them. Xomiakov was right: Protestantism could not have emerged were it not for the peculiarly Catholic mentality. See, we the Orthodox believe that Mary has participated in our redemption by giving flesh to God, sharing it with Him as His Mother, and therefore suffering immensely when He suffered. But that (participated in Redemption) is predication, not a term for definition. The switch from one to the other has caused not only abominations in theology but many weird and silly tendencies in contemporary philosophy--operating, after the Germans (Kant mostly, a!
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ost exclusively with nominal terms, not verbal predications. It (the Kant and Post-Kant philosophy) is interested in processes and phenomena, therefore in nouns (hence terms as neologisms) and their more precise adjectival definitions, at best (usually, nominal monstrosities like "coredemptrix--be that Latin, German, or Greek)--not in who does what to whom, or even what acts which way when. O, the good old days of Socrates! But he already started trying to define basic abstractions--virtue, love, etc... On the other hand, without him, we would not have had St. Basil the Great of Caesarea--one of my favorite poets. But then again, I prefer his liturgical writings--in the form of a long and beautiful NARRATIVE on creation and Redemption--to his speculative ones. With the exception of comparing the rain of God's mercy to Danae's golden rain. But this in no way means that he believed Zeus was a deity! His comparison was in the predication of the act of God's (true and One!) merc!
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that makes the creation fruitful. Not knowing the difference between dry nominal definitions and poetry's predicating metaphors causes many heresies or silly points, as well as new disciplines in philosophy. Nowadays, "scientific" language requires that people first lose all sense of the poetic. Then they could say that the Orthodox believe Mary is a deity or that every word of the Bible is literally true--rather than saturated with powerful tropes intelligible to contemporaries (fundamentalisms of all sorts, following all sorts of bibles). All of these outcomes amount to one simple truth, noted by Mandel'stam in his persecutors: "Ia ponial: oni prosto ne liubiat stixov!"    Basil's is the logic of poetry and metaphor, liuke that of Orthodox liturgical poetry and poetics. when the Mother of God is compared to the Red Sea because she opened and closed for the salvation of Israel, or to the Red Bush because She contained God without being consumed by Him, or even to the Temple!
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because--yes!-- She is one, but only because what matters about the Temple IS its function, the sole definition of its identity. Concluding that the Mother of God was seen by "those primitives" (it still is) as a sea of sorts (not the Red one, and not in that very function, as in Exodus!) is both too narrow and too broad--as is usually the case with trope-deaf people. That, incidentally, was the way Freud read tropes, a typical representative of our modern trope-deaf sciences and philosophies.  

Sorry for sounding too tempestuous: I consider this topic the reason I engaged in poetics in the first place.
olga

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