Mary Magdalene

Abstract

We are not to be found among the stones, we have been the stream. And it b the stream, not the colliding boulders, that make up a life. Without the torrent, the boulders do not clash, nothing moves or is bound anywhere. The stream. is the life energy that sets events to reeling and colliding. If the boulders are big enough, they may momentarily impede the stream, but the stream, life, is the energizing power. -Loren Eiseley     

Mary Magdalene: Lover of the Dying and Resurrecting God-Man

Like Isis, Ishtar, and Inanna, Mary Magdalene mourns the death of the god she loves, and when he resurrects, she celebrates his renewal. Through her intense feeling experience of personal and spiritual love, she represents the feminine side of the death and resurrection phenomenon that plays a realizing role in the humanization of the god-image and likewise of individuation.

Although the Judeo-Christian fathers excluded any sign in their orthodoxy that Yahweh and Christ may have had love partners, archeological evidence and Gnostic texts point to the possibility that they did. In our era, with the psychological perspective that C. G. Jung heralded, we can reconsider and integrate the role of the Eros principle that was split off from our god-image, concretized, and banned along with the “evil” of the flesh.

The emergence of Mary Magdalene in popular culture as the “Holy Grail” or vessel of Christ's child reflects the intense yearning in the psyche for the feminine principle to participate in the continuing incarnation of the god-image, and for the divine feminine–masculine partnership to realize itself in personal, human experience.     

The Saint

Today, within the Christian culture, the celebrity has replaced the idea of the saint. Very strangely, the celebrity is the dire opposite of the classic notion of the saint. Even more strikingly, the idea of celebrity runs contrary to Jesus' teachings. Of course, in Jesus' day, there were no celebrities, as we know them today. What passed for celebrities in his day were the rich and wealthy. They were the ones that everyone looked up to and admired, but Jesus tells us that they are actually the most unfortunate, and that wealth is the most dangerous of any of the idols that possess us and keep us from the fullness of life God has for us.     

Saint Paul School of Theology

Summary

Saint Paul School of Theology has an endowed program in aging studies. Aging materials have been integrated into the curriculum of both the M.Div. and D.Min. degrees. The program is headed by a tenured and trained gerontologist.     

The Image of Mary

Abstract

This article explores the significance of the shifting styles of image by which Mary has been presented in the history of Christian devotion. It begins with an account of how power became attached to static forms of her iconography and their association with a miraculous character as not made by human hand. In Western devotion the impact of artistic imagination on this convention opened the way for exploration of more creative modes of interpretation that offer other expressions of ambiguity, but that are also capable of manipulation. The ambiguity revealed by artistic imagination and manipulated in the Counter-Reformation is explored as a subversion of social and ecclesiastical structures of power in nineteenth-century Europe. Finally, images of human identity that belong to the nature of what is assumed from Mary in the incarnation are considered in questions about how her image might function disturbingly today as a source of power.     

The medieval theory of consequence

The recovery of Aristotle??s logic during the twelfth century was a great stimulus to medieval thinkers. Among their own theories developed to explain Aristotle??s theories of valid and invalid reasoning was a theory of consequence, of what arguments were valid, and why. By the fourteenth century, two main lines of thought had developed, one at Oxford, the other at Paris. Both schools distinguished formal from material consequence, but in very different ways. In Buridan and his followers in Paris, formal consequence was that preserved under uniform substitution. In Oxford, in contrast, formal consequence included analytic consequences such as ??If it??s a man, then it??s an animal??. Aristotle??s notion of syllogistic consequence was subsumed under the treatment of formal consequence. Buridan developed a general theory embracing the assertoric syllogism, the modal syllogism and syllogisms with oblique terms. The result was a thoroughly systematic and extensive treatment of logical theory and logical consequence which repays investigation.     

The Professor and the Saint

I review James E. Dittes' scholarship on St. Augustine through the perspective of my experiences as a student in his seminar on The `Theologies' of Freud and Jung, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Throughout this review, I emphasize Dittes' personal engagement with Augustine, and note his unabashed introspection as a mode of theological reflection.     

The Ecclesiology of Saint Maximos the Confessor

Abstract

Maximos wrote no work expressly on the Church, the nearest being his work, the Mystagogia, on the Divine Liturgy. This article explores the notion of the Church presented in the Mystagogia, which focuses on the action of the Divine Liturgy, and the way in which what happens in the Church is reflected at every level of reality, from the transcendent reality of God, through the manifold unity of the cosmos, to the depths of the human soul. This vision of the Church — at once cosmic, eschatological, eucharistic and ascetic — is then related to Maximos' views on the institutional Church, as revealed in a few works preserved and related to his struggle for Orthodoxy during the monothelite controversy. These views concerned the place of the priestly hierarchy, especially the papacy, and also the claims of the Byzantine emperor to involve himself in doctrinal matters.