Significantly, it was probably during this same fifth century that
serious Christian reflection began on Mary’s status after her death. Around
377, Epiphanius of Salamis remarks, in his antiheretical collection called the Panarion
(“medicine chest”), that, despite the practices of various groups honoring
places connected with Mary’s life and death, the details of her death—or even
whether she died and was buried at all—remain uncertain. But by the end of the
fifth century, the conviction seems to have been forming—probably first in
communities that strongly affirmed Christ’s divine identity and distanced
themselves from the “two-natures” dogmatic formula in the Council of Chalcedon—that
Mary had in fact died in peace in Jerusalem, surrounded by the apostles and
other heroes of the faith, that she had been solemnly buried, and that her tomb
was found empty three days later. These traditions confirmed the general sense
of believers that Mary had been raised up to heaven to share fully in her
divine Son’s risen life. This story, in its general outlines at least, is
hinted at somewhat obscurely by the Pseudo-Dionysius in chapter 3 of his On
the Divine Names, written probably around 500. Although the various later
forms of this narrative differ widely in detail, and although none ever became
normative as narratives for the mainstream Christian churches, the Marian
liturgical celebration on August 15 soon became focused on Mary’s holy death
and subsequent entry into glory, that is, on what the Byzantine tradition has
called her “dormition” or falling asleep. This feast was apparently extended to
the whole empire during the reign of the emperor Maurice (582-602), and became
for later Byzantine Christianity a central symbol of Christian hope for life
after death and for the full redemption of the human person. By the end of the
eighth century, Mary’s death was celebrated and preached as a mystery of faith
in the Latin West as well. With the general acceptance of this feast of Mary’s
redemption and glorification, in fact, Mary’s theological position had shifted
from being a necessary guarantor of the human reality of Jesus’s flesh,
personal proof of the genuineness of the World’s incarnation, to being a person
with a continuing role in assuring Christians of their own salvation.
Our best guide to the significance of this new Marian feast in the
late patristic period is not the narratives of her death and burial, and of the
discovery of her empty tomb—narratives that, despite their wide distribution,
were always regarded with skepticism by Church authorities—but the formal,
rhetorically elaborate homilies for the feast that have come down to us from
Byzantine preachers of the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries: authors like
Andrew of Crete, Germanus of Constantinople, and John of Damascus. Andrew of
Crete, for instance, acknowledges more than once in his trilogy of sermons for
the feast that the “mystery” celebrated as Mary’s dormition “has not, in the
past, been celebrated by many people,” and that there is no mention of it in
the New Testament. So Andrew and the other ancient homilists express their
understanding of what actually happened at Mary’s death with great caution: it
is “a mystery that exceeds the power of speech,” and event that “exceeds the
bounds of our ignorance” and, like everything connected with the ultimate form
of human salvation, is best “honored by silence.” Andrew of Create expressly
declines to speculate on the process by which Mary’s body was “transformed”
from its mortal state, its existence as a corpse, to its present “supernatural
structure (logos) that lies beyond all words and all knowledge of ours.”
His sense of the central message of the feast, however, is unmistakable: Mary
has died in a spirit of utter faith and trust, has been laid reverently in a
tomb by the Apostles and other “original” followers of her Son, and now shares,
as a complete human person, in the state of eschatological fulfillment in which
we all hope to share, as a result of the death and resurrection of Christ. (Brian
E. Daly, “Woman of Many Names: Mary in Orthodox and Catholic Theology,” in Biblical
Interpretation and Doctrine in Early Christianity: Collected Essays [Grand
Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2025], 91-93)
