How Often The Church Fathers "Demeaned" Mary

Boniface Ramsey, in his translation of the sermons of Maximus of Turin, refers to passages in which Maximus "demeans" Mary (The Sermons Of St. Maximus Of Turin [Mahwah, New Jersey: Newman Press, 1989], n. 1 on p. 365). Given Roman Catholicism's history of claiming that Mary is God's greatest creation, that she was sinless throughout her life, that she cooperated with Jesus' work in the world at every moment of her life, and so on, it doesn't take much to say something that demeans Mary from a Catholic perspective. For example:

"Simply Literal" Scripture Interpretation Long Before The Reformation

Critics of Protestantism often make much of the large amount of allegorizing in the church fathers' interpretations of scripture. But there was a lot of diversity in how scripture was interpreted, including interpretive approaches of a more literal nature, long before the Reformation. Though Jerome allegorized a lot, he acknowledged that other people in his day didn't:

"In the Scriptures, the words are not simply literal, as some think." (in Thomas Scheck, trans., St. Jerome: Commentary On Isaiah [Mahwah, New Jersey: The Newman Press, 2015], p. 938, Letter 18A:12)

You often come across comments like those in pre-Reformation sources. Whether they name who they have in mind or not, they refer to a diversity of interpretive methods and interpretations. Even among those who allegorized a lot, there was a lot of variation in terms of how they did so, the extent to which they did it, etc. There's diversity among those who interpret scripture more literally as well.

The wood between the worlds

There's a sense in which The Chronicles of Narnia and The Space Trilogy are Christian allegories, although Lewis resisted that classification: 

https://triablogue.blogspot.com/2016/10/is-lewiss-fiction-allegorical.html

Here's another way we might draw the distinction: a necessary element of allegory is for an allegory to be set in our world. The Pilgrim's Progress is set in our world; likewise, Dante's comedy is set in our world, according to medieval cosmography. 

By contrast, Narnia represent a parallel universe. Narnia, Charn, and English represent parallel universes in a multiverse. The wood between the worlds exists outside any particular world. Likewise Aslan's Country exists outside individual worlds. Although the worlds are separate, it's possible to travel from one world to another. 

So, for instance, The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe illustrates how Christian theology might play out in a fallen world with a different world history and talking animals. 

The Space Trilogy is superficially different. However, the Mars and Venus of The Space Trilogy were never meant to be astronomically realistic descriptions of Mars and Venus as they exist in our universe. So they're not allegorical in the sense that they're not set in our world, but a different kind of world. Perelandra is not an allegory of the Fall because it belongs to a universe with a different world history than the Venus of our own universe.  

Of course, there's a sense in which they are allegorical because they are fictional, and their theology derives from the real world in which Lewis exists. And they are products of his imagination. So we might say the stories are allegorical from a viewpoint outside the world of the stories, but are not allegorical from a viewpoint inside the world of the stories. 

Fortunatianus' Commentary On The Gospels

There have been some media stories lately about the recent discovery and English translation of a fourth-century patristic work that was previously lost. For the background, see my Facebook post here. Having read the English translation, I want to expand upon that post. All numbers that follow in parentheses will be references to page numbers in the English translation just linked.

The media and the document's English translator, Hugh Houghton, have given a lot of attention to the highly allegorical nature of Fortunatianus' interpretation of the gospels. The allegorical approach supplemented a grammatical/historical one rather than replacing it. See, for example, Fortunatianus' comments affirming the historicity of the magi giving gifts to Jesus (18), the miracles Jesus performed (65), the miraculous events around the time of Jesus' death (95), etc. He harmonizes Jesus' genealogies (6-7). He refers to how Matthew, as an evangelist, "is not permitted to lie or deceive" (10). He tells us that John received "careful guidance" from the Holy Spirit when writing and "knew all secrets" (100-101). Fortunatianus sometimes tells us that an alleged allegory in scripture is referring to something supernatural, like the virgin birth (80), or is referring to something else that critics of Christianity often reject, so how can such allegorizing be equated to a rejection of such beliefs? And so on. Ironically, some of the places where Fortunatianus is most explicit in affirming the historicity of the gospels are when writing about accounts whose historicity surely would be rejected by people in the media and elsewhere who are appealing to his allegorizing. But since he is so allegorical in his interpretation, another point ought to be made on that subject.

The allegorizing discredits itself. It sinks from its own dead weight. If you want to see how superior grammatical/historical interpretation is and the unverifiable and dangerous nature of allegorical interpretation, read a work like Fortunatianus' commentary. Here are a few examples: