Brian E. Daly on the Dormition and Assumption of Mary (1998)

  

Our first witness to such an interest is the heresy-hunting Cypriot bishop Epiphanius of Salamis, who spent most of his industrious and strident career in the neighborhood of Jerusalem. In chapter 78 of his heresiological handbook, the Panarion, completed around the year 377, Epiphanius is arguing against a group he calls the Antidikomarianitai or “opponents of Mary,” who deny her perpetual virginity. He makes the point that Jesus would not have confided his Mother to the care of the Beloved Disciple, as we read he did in John 19, if she had a house and family of her own. He then goes on to deny that John took Mary with him on his missionary journeys—apparently to prevent clerics of his own day from offering this as a precedent for keeping house with their own female companions—and suggests that she was not living with him at the end of her life. He adds that if one searches the Scripture carefully,

 

one will find neither the death of Mary, nor whether she died or did not die, nor whether she was buried or was not buried … Scripture is simply silent, because of the exceeding greatness of the Mystery, so as not to overpower people’s minds with wonder.

 

Referring then to the passage in Apocalypse of John 12, where a woman who bears a child is carried away to the desert to escape the attacks of the dragon who wars against God’s people, Epiphanius adds:

 

It is possible that this was fulfilled in Mary. I do not assert this definitively, however, nor do I say that she remained immortal; but I also will not say definitively that she died. For the Scripture goes far beyond the human mind, and has left this point undecided because of the surpassing dignity of that vessel [of God] …

 

Later on in the chapter, while combatting the theories of another heretical group, whose failing seems to have been an excess, rather than a defect, of reverence for the Virgin—the “Collyridians,” a women’s sect who, Epiphanius says, regarded her as a goddess and celebrated a quasi-Eucharistic liturgy in her honor—the Cypriot bishop makes the same self-consciously inconclusive point:

 

If the holy Virgin died and was buried, her falling-asleep was honorable and her end holy; her crown consisted in her virginity. Or if she was put to death, according to the Scripture, ‘A sword shall pierce her soul,’ her fame is among the martyrs and her holy body should be an object of our veneration, since through it light came into the world. Or else she remained alive; for it is not impossible for God to do whatever he wills. In fact, no one knows her end.

 

Epiphanius’s very caution here—his refusal to decide whether Mary died a holy death and was buried, or in some mysterious way has remained alive, perhaps in the same way as Enoch and Elijah in the Old Testament, who were said to be taken up to heaven—suggests at least that the question had become an open one in late fourth-century Palestine, and that the strong devotion to Mary that characterized the Syrian and Palestinian Churches had already begun to lead believers there to wonder whether her end was not in some way more wonderful and more glorious than that of other Christians.

 

In the half-century that followed the Council of Chalcedon, the figure of Mary emerged like a comet in Christian devotion and liturgical celebration throughout the world. Spurred on, perhaps, by the powerful role of royal women in the fifth-century Byzantine court and drawn inevitably by the Christological controversies of the age to consider Mary’s role in the story of salvation, Byzantine writers began to focus on Mary now not simply as the one who gave flesh to God’s Word, but as an object of veneration in her own right: as queen and patroness, and as a participant in the glory and the heavenly mediatorship of her risen Son. Contemporary with this new relationship to Mary came a growing interest in the wonderful character of her life’s end, which seems to have found its first written narrative expression among those communities of Syria and Palestine, in the late fifth century, which opposed as irreligious the Council of Chalcedon’s description of Christ as a single individual existing in two unmingled and functioning natures, the human and the divine—a point to which we shall shortly return.

 

This story of Mary’s glorious end, which was to become common coin by the end of the sixth century, appears in a variety of earlier forms that are difficult to date with certainty. Most scholars agree that the oldest extant witness to the story is provided by a group of Syriac fragments in the British Library (the documents Michel van Esbroeck labels S 1) describing the burial of Mary, the reception of her soul by Jesus, and the transferral of her body to Paradise, where it is buried under the tree of life—a narrative usually dated to the second half of the fifth century. The earliest Greek accounts—and the earliest known full narrative of Mary’s death—are the well-known Transitus Mariae attributed to John the Evangelist (van Esbroeck’s G 1) and a somewhat different text discovered by Antoine Wenger in a Paris manuscript and first published in 1965 (van Esbroeck’s G 2).¹⁸ Both these versions of the story, usually dated to the late fifth or early sixth century, provide a greatly expanded version of the Syriac narrative we have mentioned. Here Mary, living in or near Jerusalem, is informed by an angel that her death is near. She is then joined by the twelve Apostles, who are miraculously gathered from the ends of the earth. After a number of speeches by herself and her companions, she commits her soul into the hands of Jesus and dies. As the Apostles set about burying her body in a new tomb near Gethsemane, a Jew named Jephoniah tries to hinder the procession, and is temporarily deprived of the use of his hands. The apostles keep watch at her tomb for three days, and then realize that her body, as well as her soul, has been conveyed by angels to Paradise. In the text published by Wenger (“R” or G 2), Jesus actually joins the apostles at her tomb, and he and they accompany the angelic escort carrying her body to Paradise, where it is reunited with her soul.

 

Versions of this story abound in all the ancient Christian languages, some of them probably of the same antiquity as the texts we have mentioned. There are also versions of it in the works of two major theologians from late-fifth-century Syria, both of whom are usually identified with the moderate wing of the anti-Chalcedonian movement: Jacob of Serug and the Pseudo-Dionysius. The latter’s work On the Divine Names contains a famous, if somewhat enigmatic passage alluding to the occasion when the supposed author, his “divine guide” Hierotheos, and the other “inspired hierarchs” of the Apostolic Church, including Peter and James, had gathered “to gaze at the body that was the source of our life, the vessel of God,” and joined together in an ecstatic outpouring of divinely-inspired hymnody. Jacob of Serug’s vast corpus of verse-homilies includes a sermon of 110 lines on the subject of Mary’s death and glorious reception into heaven, which was delivered—according to its Syriac title—at a synod of non-Chalcedonian bishops at Nisibis in 489. Jacob, too, depicts Mary’s elaborate burial on the Mount of Olives by Jesus and the Twelve; he evokes the jubilation of all nature at her entry into glory, describes her visit to Hades, where she summons all the patriarchs and prophets to share eternal life with her, and portrays the solemn reception of her soul by Christ, who crowns her as queen before all “the celestial assemblies.” It is interesting to note that neither Ps.-Dionysius nor Jacob of Serug suggests that Mary’s body shared in her glorification; in Jacob’s homily, her body apparently joins those of her ancestors in the realms of the dead, to await resurrection. Nevertheless, for both these authors her death is a moment of mystery, parallel in some ways to the death of Jesus, and a time of unique recognition of her holiness by her Son and the heavenly powers. For Jacob, it even means the beginning of a new role for Mary, similar to that of Jesus, as cosmic ruler and herald of renewed life for all the faithful.

 

By the second half of the sixth century, it is clear that the story of Mary’s transition from earth to heaven had come to be accepted as part of Christian tradition in both the Chalcedonian and the non-Chalcedonian Churches of the East. Sixth-century travellers’ accounts of Christian Jerusalem now refer to a basilica at the site of her tomb. We know that the basilica near Gethsemane was venerated as the place of Mary’s death by the time of the “Piacenza Pilgrim,” around 570. The oldest extant Coptic homily (C 5) celebrating the feast of her assumption into heaven, on August 15, by the anti-Chalcedonian Patriarch Theodosius of Alexandria, dates from 566–67 and explicitly locates the wonderful event at Gethsemane. The Georgian lectionary of Jerusalem, based on a Greek original compiled sometime between the end of the fifth and the end of the eighth century, clearly identifies the old memoria of the Theotokos on August 15 as the feast of her “migration” to heaven, and specifies that it is celebrated at “the building of the emperor Maurice at Gethsemane”: presumably at the fifth-century basilica, restored during the reign of Maurice (582–602), which by then was recognized as the spot where both her burial and her assumption took place. Most important, perhaps, is the laconic testimony of the fourteenth-century historian Nikephoros Kallistos Xanthopoulos that the same Emperor Maurice fixed August 15 as the date for the Churches of the whole Empire to celebrate Mary’s Dormition. By the last two decades of the sixth century, the story of her glorious passage from earth to heaven had clearly become the central theme of this important Marian feast, and its celebration in Jerusalem was just as clearly localized at the restored Church at Gethsemane. By this time, too, the supposed site of her residence and of her actual death seems to have been shifted to the fourth-century basilica on Mount Sion, and part of the Dormition festival may have taken place there as well.

 

From all the extant narrative material, as well as from the earliest homilies for the feast of the Dormition, it is also clear that by the time of Maurice’s decree, the mystery being celebrated on August 15 was universally understood as including both Mary’s death and her resurrection. The stages by which this understanding of the event evolved, if it was an organic evolution at all, are far from clear; questions about the possibility of her bodily translation, as we have seen, haunted Epiphanius in the fourth century, and the absence of bones in the tomb venerated as hers must have fueled such speculation. Simon Claude Mimouni has recently suggested that the late-sixth-century understanding of Mary’s end may reflect a compromise between two wings of the anti-Chalcedonian movement, in which both the celebration and its narrative core had their original home: compromise between the Julianists or “aphthartists,” who seem to have held that the pristine purity of the flesh Jesus took from Mary exempted that flesh—in him at least, and perhaps in her as well—from the necessity of dying, and the more moderate Severans, who held that Jesus’ humanity—and thus Mary’s, too—shared all our natural qualities, including mortality. In Mimouni’s view, as the Emperor Justinian continued to push all parties in the Christological disputes to work towards a common position, Severans and Julianists may have come to agree that Mary did indeed die, but was almost immediately raised in body and taken to heaven, because of her unique dignity as mother of the Son of God. The Chalcedonian Justinian—who himself is reported to have adopted the “aphthartist” view of Jesus’ humanity at the end of his life, and who was an enthusiastic promoter of Mary’s cul¹—may well have been responsible for securing the universal acceptance of this understanding of her final glorification.

 

In any case, it is striking that precisely in the period in which the ancient Church was most engaged in reflection and debate about the person of Christ—between the First Council of Constantinople, in 381, and the Second, in 553—both doctrine and devotion concerning his Mother seem to have evolved most fully. The formulation of the Mystery of Christ’s person ratified at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 represented a compromise between the Antiochene and Western approaches, on the one hand, with their insistence that the unity of the divine and the human in the one person of the Son of God involved no diminution in him of the active reality of either of those “natures,” and the approach of Alexandrian writers, shared by most Eastern monks and faithful, on the other, which emphasized the overpowering and transforming effect of the Son of God’s personal presence in Jesus, even while they affirmed the completeness of his humanity. Love of Mary, attentive focus on her in private and liturgical prayer, recognition of her divine prerogatives as mediator and queen, ultimately even the attribution to her of a full share in her Son’s triumph over death and bodily entry into the glory of God, all seem to have grown rapidly during the fifth and sixth centuries as a kind of by-product of the Alexandrian emphasis on the divine identity of Christ’s person and the divinization of his humanity by its assumption into the inner life of the Triune God, as the Son’s own body and soul. The strongly unitive, God-centered picture of Christ so widely shared in the Eastern Churches of the fifth century, which led first to widespread popular rejection of the Chalcedonian formula of faith and later to its careful nuancing and interpretation, at Justinian’s urging, by the official Church at the Second Council of Constantinople, was fundamentally an expression of faith, after all, in God’s active and transforming presence in the human sphere, and of hope in the ultimate divinization of all humanity. The early Church’s veneration of Mary, the sense of her unique immersion into the Mystery of salvation because of her unique nearness to Christ, beginning in litanies of fulsome praise and ending in the feast of the Dormition, is really part of this growth in understanding of Christ himself, and in drawing out its spiritual and liturgical implications. (Brian E. Daily, “Introduction,” in On the Dormition of Mary: Early Patristic Homilies [Popular Patristic Series 18; Crestwood, N.Y.: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1998], 5-12)