I plan to reprint during this Marian month, bit by bit (because it is a very dense piece of Byzantine rhetorical theology and repays careful study section by section) a passage of a homily which, I feel, has an interest as explaining, from a Byzantine point of view, why our Lady should be deemed Mediatrix of All Graces. The author was S Gregory Palamas, sometimes thought of as a defender of the Orthodox theological tradition against 'Latin error' (Greek at PG CLI 472C sqq).
Just as through [Mary] alone, [Christ] came to be with us and was seen upon earth and dwelt among men - he who before her was invisible to all - so, unto the coming endless age, every advance of divine enlightenment, every revelation of divine mysteries, and every kind of spiritual gift, cannot be encompassed (achoreton) by any without (choris) her. She it was who first received the fulness of him who fills all things, and made him encompassable by all, distributing powerfully to each, proportionately according to the measure of the purity of each: so that she is the treasury (tamieion) and Controller (prytanis) of the riches of the Godhead.
I welcome comments, both on the theology and on my attempt to render the highly mannered Greek in comprehensible yet faithful English.
Unaccountably, last Friday's Vatican list of world-wide shrines of our Lady omits her great Shrine at Tinos. Or is "da confermare" the Italian for Tinos?
Outside of Italian shrines, the Vatican list has a maximum of one shrine per country. Thus Lourdes is the only French Marian shrine represented. Greece is a country not represented at all.
ReplyDeleteThank you dear Father. Prayers for your health. Rumored that John Paul II was willing to define the triple definition advocate , mediatrix and co-redemptrix ?
ReplyDeleteYour comments ? God bless
Might it be possible that JPII's death before he ever defined the triple definition was a sign that God didn't want it to be defined? Perhaps it never will be defined although I've always hoped it would be.
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