The Figure of Mary in the Pastoral Preaching of the Selected Fathers of the Church

In the existing literature on patristic Mariology, relatively little research has been done on the pastoral preaching of the Fathers of the Church due to the smaller number of such statements contained in their works. The early Christian writers, in the period of the formation of doctrine, including that of Mariology, in the face of the struggle against heresies, paid more attention to dogmatic solutions than to pastoral issues. In this paper, therefore, the image of Mary that these authors present for the imitation of the faithful is presented on the basis of selected representative works of early Christian authors related to everyday life and pastoral concerns. The texts of Origen, Jerome, Cyril of Jerusalem, John of Damascus, Zeno of Verona, Peter Chrysologus, Chromatius of Aquileia, allow us to see that in addition to the dogmatic dimension of their works there are also in them pastoral exhortations, of which the most important is one - to lead daily life of faith in imitation of Mary.