While only rarely reflecting explicitly on liturgy, French philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) gave sustained attention to several themes pertinent to the interpretation of worship, including ...metaphor, narrative, subjectivity, and memory. Inspired by his well-known aphorism, "The symbol gives rise to thought," Liturgical Theology after Schmemann offers an original exploration of the symbolic world of the Byzantine Rite , culminating in a Ricoeurian analysis of its Theophany "Great Blessing of Water." .
The book examines two fundamental questions: 1) what are the implications of the philosopher's oeuvre for liturgical theology at large? And 2)how does the adoption of a Ricoeurian hermeneutic shape the study of a particular rite? Taking the seminal legacy of Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann (1921-1983) as its point of departure, Butcher contributes to the renewal of contemporary Eastern Christian thought and ritual practice by engaging a spectrum of current theological and philosophical conversations.
Andrew Louth examines all the traditions on which Denys' work draws: the Fourth Century Greek theologians, pagan philosophy and Syrian Christian thought. The corpus of Denys the Areopagite appeared ...in the sixth century and have since been deeply influential on Christian thinking both in East and West. Who their author was remains a mystery but in this book Professor Louth documents and comments on his compelling vision of the beauty of God's world and his revelation, together with his profound awareness of the ultimate mystery of the unknowable God who utterly transcends all being.
It is significant that the notion of Virgin Mother occurs in the early centuries in two separate contexts: Mary as Virgin Mother is part of the typological parallelism of Eve and Mary; the Church as ...Virgin Mother is also found more or less contemporaneously. There is, however, no apparent link between these themes until the end of the fourth century, when texts hitherto interpreted of the Church (notably Psalm 44) begin to be applied to Mary, thus bringing the two traditions together. This early reflection provides a fruitful background to understanding the place of Mary in modern Orthodox ecclesiology. Bulgakov's reflection on Mary is deeply bound up with his sophiology; for Sophia, the Wisdom of God, Mary, the Mother of God, and indeed the Church inhabit what one might call an 'in-between' realm, linking the uncreated God with his creation. Another ecclesiological theme involving Mary occurs in connection with the question: Who is the Person of the Church, as Bride and Virgin Mother? Is this just a personification, or is it more? All the Orthodox theologians discussed in this article, Bulgakov, Lossky and Evdokimov, affirm that the answer to the question 'Who is the Church?' is in fact 'Mary'.
