Mary: The Archetype of Mankind

Virtually all Christian doctrine—the precise, conceptual formulation of the Church\u27s faith and experience—developed as response and reaction to various mutilations and distortions of that faith, to heresies in the literal meaning of the Greek word airesis —choice, i.e. reduction; therefore, deformation. Hence, one of the best ways to recover the essential meaning of this or that particular doctrine is to see it precisely in relation to the heresy it denounced, the question it answered. We live today in a world full of heresies : arbitrary choices and arbitrary reductions. Not only is it truly a broken world, with a broken vision and a broken knowledge, but its deep tragedy lies in this: that each fragment resulting from that brokenness is affirmed and experienced as the whole truth, each reduction is announced as wholeness. Of this tragical reductionism Christians are more guilty than anyone else; for instead of healing it by the light and the power of the catholic, i.e., precisely whole, all-embracing and total vision, they themselves—for the sake of a superficial relevance —so often surrender to partial and broken reductions of this world. The best example here is precisely Mariology. While some Christians make of it the very symbol of their staunch conservatism and live in the nostalgia of its medieval splendor, many others, indeed the majority, quietly abandon it as something precisely medieval, archaic, and therefore non-essential for what they want to be a new encounter of Christianity with the modern world. And they do it because they do not ask: to what eternal question is the Mariological experience of the Church the answer; of what basic—explicit or implicit—heresy is it the overcoming and the refutation

The Historical Road Of Eastern Orthodoxy

New Yorkviii, 343 p.; 21 c