“As in the definition of the Immaculate
Conception, the Church had to remind the world that perfection is not
biologically inevitable, so now in the definition of the Assumption, it has to
give hope to the creature of despair. Modern despair is the effect of a
disappointed hedonism and centers principally around Sex and Death. To these
two ideas, which preoccupy the modern mind, the Assumption is indirectly
related”.
Fulton J. Sheen
This first piece on the
Assumption is taken from The Catholic
Weekly:
The Assumption of Our Lady – 15 August
By
-
August
12, 2011
Monday, 15 August the Church celebrates the Feast Day of the Assumption
of Our Lady when according to our faith, the Holy Mother, “having completed her
course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory”.
Although defined as an article of faith by Pope Pius XII just over half
a century ago, the Assumption of Our Lady into heaven has been accepted from
back to the earliest of Christian times.
The Assumption signals the end of Mary’s earthly life and marks her
return to heaven to be reunited with Jesus. While the bodies of both Jesus and
Mary are now in heaven, there is a difference between the Assumption and the
Resurrection.
Where Jesus arose from the tomb and ascended into heaven by his own
power, Mary’s body was taken up to heaven by the power of her Son.
For this reason we use different words to describe each event. One is
the Ascension of Christ and the other, the Assumption of Mary.
Historical Background
Although some scholars insist there is no historical data to prove the
historical fact of the Assumption, apart from faith there is also strong and
reasoned data to support the event.
1.Firstly at no time in history
has Christendom venerated a grave or tomb of the Blessed Virgin.
2.Until the 5th century of
Christianity there was not even a legend concerning her place of burial.
3.There is absolutely no relic of
Our Lady’s body in existence; nor has any person or city ever claimed
possession of such a relic. From the earliest times of the Church, the faithful
venerated the remains of the Saints. Relics of the Apostles and of thousands of
martyrs are preserved in shrines and caskets. The sacred remains of Mary could
not have been lost or neglected.
4.In the first sixteen centuries
of Christianity no reputable theologian or school of theology ever questioned
the dogma of the Assumption.
In addition there was also the solid and deep-rooted conviction among
the first Christians that something extraordinary happened to Our Lady at the
moment of her departure from this life. This found expression in writings,
sermons, devotional practices, and prayers to Mary “assumed into heaven”, and
was followed by churches, religious orders, cities and nations across the world
dedicating or consecrating to her under the title of Assumption.
The Assumption of Mary Feast Day dates back to earliest Christian
times
The first believed to have asked what had happened to Mary’s body was St
Epiphanius, a 4th Century bishop who devoted himself to the study of Mary’s
death and believed Our Lady did not die but instead was recalled to heaven.
The feast day of this holy and momentous event stems from the middle of
the 5th Century when the Commemoration of the Mother of God was celebrated each
year on 15 August in a shrine located near Jerusalem.
More than 100 years later, the feast also commemorated the end of Mary’s
sojourn on earth and was known as the “Dormition of Our Lady.”
The feast was introduced to Rome in the 8th Century by Pope Sergius and
from there it spread rapidly throughout western Europe, with Pope Hadrian later
giving the Feast Day its official name as the Assumption of Mary towards the
end of the Century.
Dogma and Definition
When Pope Pius IX defined the dogma of the Immaculate Conception in
1854, it drew attention to the possibility of a dogmatic definition of the Assumption.
Both are truths not found explicitly in the Bible which was when many
petitioned the Apostolic See for an immediate definition.
Between 1849 and 1940 more than 2,500 petitions were received from
bishops and superiors or religious orders across the world of which more than
73% came from the Catholic hierarchy. Finally on 1 November in the Holy Year,
1950, the day after the closing of the International Marian Congress in Rome,
Pope Pius XII solemnly defined the dogma of the Assumption of the Blessed
Virgin Mary into heaven.
This great event took place in St Peter’s Piazza in the presence of 40
Cardinals, 500 bishops, thousands of priests and more than a million of the
faithful.
“Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body
and soul into heavenly glory,” Pope Pius told the masses.
For many, the most telling verification of the Assumption can be found
not only in learned theological studies or definitive doctrinal statements, but
in the medium of Mary’s many apparitions which the Church has declared worthy
of belief. Where these apparitions have appeared have become beloved Holy
shrines visited by millions each year and include the Shrines of Our Lady at
Guadaloupe, Lourdes and Fatima.
*****
This second piece on the
Assumption was written by, then (1952) Bishop, Fulton J. Sheen:
The
Assumption and the World by Bishop Fulton J. Sheen
The definition of the Immaculate Conception was
made when the Modern World was born. Within five years of that date, and within
six months of the apparition of Lourdes where Mary said, "I am the
Immaculate Conception," Charles Darwin wrote his Origin of Species, Karl
Marx completed his Introduction to the Critique of the Philosophy of Hegel
("Religion is the Opium of the people"), and John Stuart Mill
published his Essay on Liberty. At the moment the spirit of the world was
drawing up a philosophy that would issue in two World Wars in twenty-one years,
and the threat of a third, the Church came forward to challenge the falsity of
the new philosophy. Darwin took man's mind off his Divine Origin and fastened
it on an unlimited future when he would become a kind of God.
Marx was so impressed with this idea of
inevitable progress that he asked Darwin if he would accept a dedication of one
of his books. Then, following Feuerbach, Marx affirmed not a bourgeois atheism
of the intellect, but an atheism of the will, in which man hates God because
man is God. Mill reduced the freedom of the new man to license and the right to
do whatever he pleases, thus preparing a chaos of conflicting egotisms, which
the world would solve by Totalitarianism.
If these philosophers were right, and if man is
naturally good and capable of deification through his own efforts, then it
follows that everyone is immaculately conceived. The Church arose in protest
and affirmed that only one human person in all the world is immaculately conceived,
that man is prone to sin, and that freedom is best preserved when, like Mary, a
creature answers Fiat to the Divine Will.
The dogma of the Immaculate Conception wilted and
killed the false optimism of the inevitable and necessary progress of man without
God. Humbled in his Darwinian-Marxian-Millian pride, modern man saw his
doctrine of progress evaporate. The interval between the Napoleonic and
Franco-Prussian Wars was fifty-five years; the interval between the
Franco-Prussian War and World War I was forty-three years; the interval between
World Wars I and II, twenty-one years. Fifty-five, forty-three, twenty-one, and
a Korean War five years after World War II is hardly progress. Man finally saw
that he was not naturally good. Once having boasted that he came from the
beast, he now found himself to be acting as a beast.
Then came the reaction. The Optimistic Man who
boasted of his immaculate conception now became the Pessimistic Man who could
see within himself nothing but a bundle of libidinous, dark, cavernous drives.
As in the definition of the Immaculate Conception, the Church had to remind the
world that perfection is not biologically inevitable, so now in the definition
of the Assumption, it has to give hope to the creature of despair.
Modern despair is the effect of a disappointed
hedonism and centers principally around Sex and Death. To these two ideas,
which preoccupy the modern mind, the Assumption is indirectly related.
The primacy of Sex is to a great extent due to
Sigmund Freud, whose basic principle in his own words is: "Human actions
and customs derive from sexual impulses, and fundamentally, human wishes are
unsatisfied sexual desires. ... Consciously or unconsciously, we all wish to
unite with our mothers and kill our fathers, as Oedipus did unless we are
female, in which case we wish to unite with our fathers and murder our
mothers." The other major concern of modern thought is Death. The
beautiful philosophy of being is reduced to Dasein, which is only
in-der-Weltsein. There is no freedom, no spirit, and no personality. Freedom is
for death. Liberty is contingency threatened with complete destruction. The
future is nothing but a projection of death.
The aim of existence is to look death in the eye.
Jean-Paul Sartre passes from a phenomenology of
sexuality to that which he calls "nausea," or a brazen confrontation
of nothingness, toward which existence tends. Nothing precedes man; nothing
follows man. Whatever is opposite him is a negation of his ego, and therefore
nothingness. God created the world out of nothingness; Sartre creates
nothingness out of the world and the despairing human heart. "Man is a
useless passion."
Agnosticism and Pride were the twin errors the
Church had to meet in the Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception; now it is the
despair resulting from Sex and Death it has to meet in this hour. When the
Agnostics of the last century came in contact with the world and its three
libidos, they became libertines. But when pleasure diminished and made hungry
where most it satisfied, the agnostics, who had become libertines by attaching
themselves to the world, now began in disgust to withdraw themselves from the
world and became philosophers of Existentialism. Philosophers like Sartre, and
Heidegger, and others are born of a detachment from the world, not as the
Christian ascetic, because he loves God, but because they are disgusted with
the world. They become contemplatives, not to enjoy God, but to wallow in their
despair, to make a philosophy out of it, to be brazen about their boredom, and
to make death the center of their destiny.
The new contemplatives are in the monasteries of
the jaded, which are built not along the waters of Siloe, but along the dark
banks of the Styx.
These two basic ideas of modem thought, Sex and
Death, are not unrelated. Freud himself hinted at the union of Eros and
Thanatos. Sex brings death, first of all because in sex the other person is
possessed, or annihilated, or ignored for the sake of pleasure. But this
subjection implies a compression and a destruction of life for the sake of the
Eros. Secondly, death is a shadow which is cast over sex. Sex seeks pleasure,
but since it assumes that this life is all, every pleasure is seasoned not only
with a diminishing return, but also with the thought that death will end
pleasure forever. Eros is Thanatos. Sex is Death. From a philosophical point of
view, the Doctrine of the Assumption meets the Eros-Thanatos philosophy head
on, by lifting humanity from the darkness of Sex and Death to the light of Love
and Life. These are the two philosophical pillars on which rests the belief in
the Assumption.
1. Love. The Assumption affirms not Sex but Love.
St. Thomas in his inquiry into the effects of love mentions ecstasy as one of
them. In ecstasy one is "lifted out of his body," an experience which
poets and authors and orators have felt in a mild form when in common parlance,
"they were carried away by their subject." On a higher level, the
spiritual phenomenon of levitation is due to such an intense love of God that
saints are literally lifted off the earth. Love, like fire, burns upward, since
it is basically desire. It seeks to become more and more united with the object
that is loved. Our sensate experiences are familiar with the earthly law of
gravitation which draws material bodies to the earth. But in addition to
terrestrial gravitation, there is a law of spiritual gravitation, which
increases as we get closer to God. This "pull" on our hearts by the
Spirit of God is always present, and it is only our refusing wills and the
weakness of our bodies as a result of sin which keep us earth-bound. Some souls
become impatient with the restraining body; St. Paul asks to be delivered from
its prison house.
If God exerts a gravitational pull on all souls,
given the intense love of Our Lord for His Blessed Mother which descended, and
the intense love of Mary for Her Lord which ascended, there is created a
suspicion that love at this stage would be so great as "to pull the body
with it." Given further an immunity from Original Sin, there would not be
in the Body of Our Lady the dichotomy, tension, and opposition that exists in
us between body and soul. If the distant moon moves all the surging tides of
earth, then the love of Mary for Jesus and the love of Jesus for Mary should
result in such an ecstasy as "to lift her out of this world."
Love in its nature is an Ascension in Christ and
an Assumption in Mary. So closely are Love and the Assumption related that a
few years ago the writer, when instructing a Chinese lady, found that the one
truth in Christianity which was easiest for her to believe was the Assumption.
She personally knew a saintly soul who lived on a mat in the woods, whom
thousands of people visited to receive her blessing. One day, according to the
belief of all who knew the saint, she was "assumed" into heaven. The
explanation the convert from Confucianism gave was: "Her love was so great
that her body followed her soul." One thing is certain: the Assumption is
easy to understand if one loves God deeply, but it is hard to understand if one
loves not.
Plato in his Symposium, reflecting the Grecian
view of the elevation of love, says that love of the flesh should lead to love
of the spirit. The true meaning of love is that it leads to God. Once the
earthly love has fulfilled its task, it disappears, as the symbol gives way to
reality. The Assumption is not the killing of the Eros, but its transfiguration
through Agape. It does not say that love in a body is wrong, but it does hold
that it can be so right, when it is Godward, that the beauty of the body itself
is enhanced.
Our Age of Carnality which loves the Body
Beautiful is lifted out of its despair, born of the Electra and Oedipus
incests, to a Body that is Beautiful because it is a Temple of God, a Gate through
which the Word of Heaven passed to earth, a Tower of Ivory up which climbed
Divine Love to kiss upon the lips of His Mother a Mystic Rose. With one stroke
of an infallible dogmatic pen, the Church lifts the sacredness of love out of
sex without denying the role of the body in love. Here is one body that
reflects in its uncounted hues the creative love of God. To a world that
worships the body, the Church now says: "There are two bodies in Heaven,
one the glorified human nature of Jesus, the other the assumed human nature of
Mary. Love is the secret of the Ascension of one and of the Assumption of the
other, for Love craves unity with its Beloved. The Son returns to the Father in
the unity of Divine Nature; and Mary returns to Jesus in the unity of human
nature. Her nuptial flight is the event to which our whole generation
moves."
2. Life. Life is the second philosophical pillar
on which the Assumption rests. Life is unitive; death is divisive. Goodness is
the food of life, as evil is the food of death. Errant sex impulses are the
symbol of the body's division from God as a result of original sm. Death is the
last stroke of that division. Wherever there is sin, there is multiplicity: the
Devil says, "My name is Legion; there are many of us." (Mark 5:9.) But
life is immanent activity. The higher the life, the more immanent is the
activity, says St. Thomas. The plant drops its fruit from a tree, the animal
drops its kind for a separate existence, but the spiritual mind of man begets
the fruit of a thought which remains united to the mind, although distinct from
it. Hence intelligence and life are intimately related. Da mihi intellectum et vivam. God is perfect life because of
perfect inner intellectual activity. There is no extrinsicism, no dependence,
no necessary outgoing on the part of God.
Since the imperfection of life comes from
remoteness to the source of life and because of sin, it follows that the
creature who is preserved from Original Sin is immune from that psychological
division which sin begets. The Immaculate Conception guarantees a highly
integrated and unified life. The purity of such a life is threefold: a physical
purity which is integrity of body; a mental purity without any desire for a
division of love, which love of creatures apart from God would imply; and
finally, a psychological purity which is immunity from the uprising of
concupiscence, the sign and symbol of our weakness and diversity. This triple
purity is the essence of the most highly unified creature whom this world has
ever seen.
Added to this intense life in Mary, which is free
from the division caused by sin, there is still a higher degree of life because
of her Divine Motherhood. Through her portals Eternity became young and
appeared as a Child; through her, as to another Moses, not the tables of the
Law, but the Logos was given and written on her own heart; through her, not a
manna which men eat and die, but the Eucharist descends, which if a man eats,
he will never die.
But if those who commune with the Bread of Life
never die, then what shall we say of her who was the first living Ciborium of
that Eucharist, and who on Christmas day opened it at the communion rail of
Bethlehem to say to Wise Men and Shepherds: "Behold the Lamb of God Who
taketh away the sins of the world"?
Here there is not just a life free from the
division which brings death, but a life united with Eternal Life. Shall she, as
the garden in which grew the lily of Divine sinlessness and the red rose of the
passion of redemption, be delivered over to the weeds and be forgotten by the
Heavenly Gardener? Would not one communion preserved in grace through life
ensure a heavenly immortality? Then shall not she, in whose womb was celebrated
the nuptials of eternity and time, be more of eternity than time? As she carried
Him for nine months, there was fulfilled in another way the law of life:
"And they shall be two in one flesh."
No grown men and women would like to see the home
in which they were reared subjected to the violent destruction of a bomb, even
though they no longer lived in it. Neither would Omnipotence, Who tabernacled
Himself within Mary, consent to see His fleshy home subjected to the
dissolution of the tomb. If grown men love to go back to their homes when they
reach the fullness of life, and become more conscious of the debt they owe
their mothers, then shall not Divine Life go back in search of His living
cradle and take that "flesh-girt paradise" to Heaven with Him, there
to be "gardenered by the Adam new"?
In this Doctrine of the Assumption, the Church
meets the despair of the world in a second way. It affirms the beauty of life
as against death. When wars, sex, and sin multiply the discords of men, and
death threatens on every side, the Church bids us lift up our hearts to the
life that has the immortality of the Life which nourished it. Feuerbach said
that a man is what he eats. He was more right than he knew. Eat the food of
earth, and one dies; eat the Eucharist, and one lives eternally. She, who is
the mother of the Eucharist, escapes the decomposition of death.
The Assumption challenges the nothingness of the
Mortician philosophers in a new way. The greatest task of the spiritual leaders
today is to save mankind from despair, into which Sex and Fear of Death have
cast it. The world that used to say, "Why worry about the next world, when
we live in this one?" has finally learned the hard way that, by not
thinking about the next life, one cannot even enjoy this life. When optimism
completely breaks down and becomes pessimism, the Church holds forth the promise
of hope. Threatened as we are by war on all sides, with death about to be
rained from the sky by Promethean fires, the Church defines a Truth that has
Life at its center. Like a kindly mother whose sons are going off to war, she
strokes our heads and says: "You will come back alive, as Mary came back
again after walking down the valley of Death." As the world fears defeat
by death, the Church sings the defeat of death. Is not this the harbinger of a
better world, as the refrain of life rings out amidst the clamors of the
philosophers of death?
As Communism teaches that man has only a body,
but not a soul, so the Church answers: "Then let us begin with a
Body." As the mystical body of the anti-Christ gathers around the
tabernacle doors of the cadaver of Lenin, periodically filled with wax to give
the illusion of immortality to those who deny immortality, the Mystical Body of
Christ bids the despairing to gaze on the two most serious wounds earth ever
received: the empty tomb of Christ and the empty tomb of Mary. In 1854 the
Church spoke of the Soul in the Immaculate Conception. In 1950 its language was
about the Body: the Mystical Body, the Eucharist, and the Assumption. With deft
dogmatic strokes the Church is repeating Paul's truth to another pagan age:
"Your bodies are meant for the Lord." There is nothing in a body to
beget despair. Man is related to Nothingness, as the philosophers of
Decadentism teach, but only in his origin, not in his destiny. They put
Nothingness as the end; the Church puts it at the beginning, for man was
created ex nihilo. The modern man gets back to nothingness through despair; the
Christian knows nothingness only through self-negation, which is humility. The
more that the pagan "nothings" himself, the closer he gets to the hell
of despair and suicide. The more the Christian "nothings" himself,
the closer he gets to God. Mary went so deep down into Nothingness that she
became exalted. Respexit humilitatem
ancillae suae. And her exaltation was also her Assumption.
Coming back to the beginning ... to Eros and
Thanatos: Sex and Death, said Freud, are related. They are related in this
sense: Eros as egotistic love leads to the death of the soul. But the world
need not live under that curse. The Assumption gives Eros a new meaning. Love
does lead to death. Where there is love, there is self-forgetfulness, and the
maximum in self-forgetfulness is the surrender of life. "Greater love than
this no man hath, that he lay down his life for his friends." (John
15:13.) Our Lord's love led to His death. Mary's love led to her transfixion
with seven swords. Greater love than this no woman hath, that she stand beneath
the Cross of her Son to share, in her own way, in the Redemption of the world.
Within three decades the definition of the
Assumption will cure the pessimism and despair of the modern world. Freud, who
did so much to develop this pessimism, took as his motto: "If I cannot
move the Gods on high, I shall set all hell in an uproar." That uproar
which he created will now be stilled by a Lady as powerful as an "army
drawn up in battle array." The age of the "body beautiful" will
now become the age of the Assumption.
In Mary there is a triple transition. In the
Annunciation we pass from the holiness of the Old Testament to the holiness of
Christ. At Pentecost we pass from the holiness, of the Historical Christ to the
holiness of the Mystical Christ or His Body, which is the Church. Mary here
receives the Spirit for a second time. The first overshadowing was to give
birth to the Head of the Church; this second overshadowing is to give birth to
His Body as she is in the midst of the Apostles abiding in prayer. The third
transition is the Assumption, as she becomes the first human person to realize
the historical destiny of the faithful as members of Christ's Mystical Body,
beyond time, beyond death, and beyond judgment.
Mary is always in the vanguard of humanity. She
is compared to Wisdom, presiding at Creation; she is announced as the Woman who
will conquer Satan, as the Virgin who will conceive. She becomes the first
person since the Fall to have a unique and unrepeatable kind of union with God;
she mothers the infant Christ in Bethlehem; she mothers the Mystical Christ at
Jerusalem; and now, by her Assumption, she goes ahead like her Son to prepare a
place for us. She participates in the glory of Her Son, reigns with Him,
presides at His Side over the destinies of the Church in time, and intercedes
for us, to Him, as He, in His turn, intercedes to the Heavenly Father.
Adam came before Eve chronologically. The new
Adam, Christ, comes after the new Eve, Mary, chronologically, although
existentially He preceded her as the Creator a creature.
By stressing for the moment only the time
element, Mary always seems to be the Advent of what is in store for man. She
anticipates Christ for nine months, as she bears Heaven within her; she
anticipates His Passion at Cana, and His Church at Pentecost. Now, in the last
great Doctrine of the Assumption, she anticipates heavenly glory, and the
definition comes at a time when men think of it least.
One wonders if this could not be the last of the
great Truths of Mary to be defined by the Church. Anything else might seem to
be an anticlimax after she is declared to be in Heaven, body and soul. But
actually there is one other truth left to be defined, and that is that she is
the Mediatrix, under Her Son, of all graces. As St. Paul speaks of the
Ascension of Our Lord as the prelude to His intercession for us, so we,
fittingly, should speak of the Assumption of Our Lady as a prelude to her
intercession for us. First, the place, Heaven; then, the function,
intercession. The nature of her role is not to call Her Son's attention to some
need, in an emergency unnoticed by Him, nor is it to "win" a
difficult consent. Rather it is to unite herself to His compassionate Mercy and
give a human voice to His Infinite Love. The main ministry of Mary is to
incline men's hearts to obedience to the Will of Her Divine Son. Her last
recorded words at Cana are still her words in the Assumption: "Whatsoever
He shall say to you, that do ye."
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