popular culture

C. G. Estabrook galliher at alexia.lis.uiuc.edu
Mon Jan 20 09:54:50 PST 2003


Someone thought it funny when I once said that I read LBO for the theological discussions, but we've concretized the hyperbole, I think, Catherine. Nevertheless, thanks for your response; here are three comments:

[1] The question that came up was the role of virginity (not the Virgin) in the vast social movement that is Christianity, and I suggested that the congeries of motives, interests, ideas and concerns that pertained to the subject needed a variety of intellectual tools to disentangle -- including, for a topic both psychic and somatic, attention to unconscious aspects, hence the reference to psychoanalysis.

[2] It would be a highly unorthodox opinion to consider the mother of Jesus divine. The debate about her role as theotokos ("God-bearer" -- the more usual Western Christian phrase, as scandalous in its way, is "Mother of God") was a debate about the nature of Jesus, whom orthodox Christianity came to consider at once entirely human and entirely divine. The term, in use since the 3rd century, was attacked in the 5th by those (Nestorians) who, so to speak, wanted to divide Jesus a bit. So the argument was only secondarily about Mary.

[3] "Mariolatry" is a pejorative -- it means erroneously offering divine honors to Mary. Groups said to hold that view were condemned in the early church (4th century) and by the RC church in the 18th century. In the 16th century and afterwards, Protestant attacks on Catholic notions of human solidarity called technically "the communion of saints" (not just about saints) included the charge that Catholics commit mariolatry, although the word doesn't seem to appear in English until the 17th century. --CGE

On Tue, 21 Jan 2003, Catherine Driscoll wrote:


> ...I don't get the reference to psychoanalysis...
>
> ...theotokos was massively contentious because for some it erased the
> divinity of the Virgin and made her a vessel only and for others it
> made her godlike because mortal flesh could not bear God -- that was
> only possible for Christ...
>
> ...I can't recall a date for "mariolatry" but I think it's quite late
> but yet as a polemical debate reprises debates around the separation
> of the Roman and Greek churches...



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