500-1000 A.D.
St John Damascene (died 749 A.D.) recorded that at the
Council of Chalcedon in 451, the Emperor and Empress Marcion and Pulcheria
expressed a wish to take custody of the body of Mary. They were told by St
Juvenal, Bishop of Jerusalem, that Mary died in the presence of the apostles
but that her tomb, when opened at the request of St Thomas, was found to be
empty. The apostles concluded that she had been taken up to heaven bodily.
From this we can see that by the mid-400s there
were churchmen, probably a small minority, who had accepted that
Mary had been taken up to heaven shortly after her death. St Juvenal
presented it as historical fact to the Emperor and Empress. Neither he nor any
other churchmen, however, had committed the belief to writing. That didn’t
happen until about three centuries later.
St John Damascene was the first major churchman to
advocate the doctrine of the Assumption in writing and under his own name. During his lifetime the teaching was also promoted
in the wider church by St Gregory of Tours and St Modestus of Jerusalem.
Near the end of the 500s, at a shrine near Jerusalem,
a feast was being celebrated on August 15 each year called the ‘Dormition of
Our Lady,’ It had begun in the mid 400s as the ‘Commemoration of the Mother of
God.’
In the late 700s, Pope Sergius introduced the Feast in
Rome. From there it spread quickly throughout western Europe.
Pope Adrian I (772-795 A.D.) changed the name of the
Feast from the Dormition of Mary to the Assumption of Mary. This was a very
significant shift in emphasis toward the key point of the doctrine, which is
that Mary was taken up to heaven bodily by her Son.
The Feast of the Assumption was made an official part
of the Divine Office by Pope Leo IV (847-855). From that time, the Assumption
was recognized by many as true teaching, though it was not yet defined as
dogma.
Before about 1000 A.D. the practices of devotion to
Mary varied from individual to individual. Statues of Mary were not placed in
churches and there were no widely recognized forms of devotion to Mary. These
had to wait until the beginning of the second millennium. (Paul Flynn, Dormition?
[London: Creative Christian Publishing, 2019], 63-64, emphasis in bold added)
Belief in the Assumption was nearly universal since it
had been officially included in the Divine Office in the 800s, but it was still
treated as an open theological issue. Christians could believe or not believe
in the Assumption without thereby being treated as heretics. (Ibid., 65)
