Dear Will Ryan,
You wrote:
> With regard to the original word which gave rise to this correspondence, "coredemptrix", it is a descriptive appellation which has not yet been subjected to the Western scholastic passion for definition, which the Orthodox tend to resist, and is not an article of faith for Catholics, though many would like it to be. Personally I hope it will remain as no more than one of the many poetic appellations of Mary in the litanies (who would want to define "Star of the Sea"?) and will never be dogmatically defined because although the underlying belief is not new or startling, the hopelessly neo-Latin term itself gives rise to both honest misunderstanding and deliberate misrepresentation.
Not so. "Stella maris" is a passing poetic trifle, as you say, but "coredemptrix" is a serious and complex theological construct which has grown in significance ever since it developed in Spain, and especially in the "French school" from the seventeenth century onwards. There is a VAST literature on what you ridicule as a "hopelessly neo-Latin term," and I indicated just a few items from this literature in that footnote I copied into a previous post on this list. In any case, forget about Wiki. Walk with the feet, not the fingers. Go into the library of any large Christian seminary in the West, go to the section on Mary, discover how huge it is, discover the books and the journals devoted entirely to Mary (my favorite is Marianum). Although I was once a devout Catholic, and although I have written a book about the Russian Orthodox version of Mary, I was astonished at the sheer quantity of publications on the Catholic version of Mary which I discovered here at the Gradu!
ate Theological Union in Berkeley. As for the possibility that coredemptrix will be "dogmatically defined," don't be dismissive. John Paul II spoke often about it in informal terms, and this has been studied by Father Arthur Burton Calkins. Keep an eye on Benedict XVI.
And another matter:
On Sep 10, 2010, at 2:31 AM, William Ryan wrote:
With regard to Daniel's Q.E.D., "Alice through the Looking Glass" springs to mind:
`When /I/ use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful
tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'
...
`That's a great deal to make one word mean,' Alice said in a
thoughtful tone.
`When I make a word do a lot of work like that,' said Humpty Dumpty,
`I always pay it extra.'
The bonus that Daniel is paying "deity" must be of Goldman Sachs proportions!/ /
Will
No again. Just check your OED. No bonus at all. My use of "deity" is acceptable by that dictionary's standards. Not to mention that an Orthodox authority like Lossky says (in English) that the Orthodox Mary is "deified." Perhaps this could lead to a discussion of the Orthodox notion of theosis, as well as apophatic theology.
Somewhere Father Michael O'Carroll (author of the encyclopedic THEOTOKOS, 1982) wrote that "God became a Jew." He was referring to Jesus. Was that not deification too? As an atheist, I would prefer to say that Jesus became God, or, keeping in mind the pagan Hellenistic/Roman context of early Christianity which Luciano Di Cocco and others have been referring to on this list, Jesus became a god. Well, then, Miriam of Nazareth became a goddess, that is, a woman deity.
With regards to the list -
Daniel R-L
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