Well did she? Did the Mother of God fly into the heavens, body and soul, like the shuttle from Cape Canaveral? Pope Pius the Twelfth said she did and proved it by saying so infallibly in 1950. The Eastern Orthodox on the other hand combine a certain mystical fuzziness about it with a liking for an apocryphal sixth-century farrago on the subject which begins as follows: 'As the all-holy glorious Mother of God and ever-virgin Mary, as was her wont, was going to the holy tomb of our Lord to burn incense, and bending her holy knees, she was importunate that Christ our God who had been born of her should return to her...and while she was praying, it came to pass that the heavens were opened, and the archangel Gabriel came down to her and said: "Hail, thou that didst bring forth Christ our God! Thy prayer having come through to the heavens to Him who was born of thee, has been accepted; and from this time, according to thy request, thou having left the world, shall go to the heavenly places to thy Son, into the true and everlasting life."' A little later in this account we learn that Our Lady asked for the presence of the holy apostles at her passing, and so they were borne on clouds by a whirlwind to witness her departure. Hence the ikons which show them getting a good view of the proceedings from somewhere in mid-air.
Well, scripture says something almost as fantastic about Elijah and perhaps Enoch as well, and I can't help feeling that if it's good enough for them, it's good enough for the Mother of God. But it does, I think, push my capacity for belief just a bit too far. And it makes me fairly indignant as well. Why does every detail have to be rewritten by the (fairly dim) light of human piety? And why does the lily have to be so thoroughly and comprehensively gilded? As the Russian Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky observed, 'The authors of the apocryphal writings often alluded imprudently to mysteries about which the Church had maintained a prudent silence...The Mother of God was never a theme of the public preaching of the apostles...While Christ was preached on the housetops in a catechesis addressed to the whole universe, the mystery of the Mother of God was revealed only to those within the Church.'
Even King James the First said that the Blessed Virgin was far above all God's creatures, and the assumption, whether literally true or not, is surely a celebration of that fact. To whatever glory human beings are destined (and that is surely to do with their sharing in the divine nature, as in 2 Peter) Our Lady is already there. St Gregory Palamas described her as the Boundary between the Created and the Uncreated, which seems all right to me. But to quote Lossky again, 'Let us therefore keep silence, and let us not try to dogmatize about the supreme glory of the Mother of God.'
Carl, if you can believe in the Christ rising from the dead, and raising others from the dead, and the transfigeration, why does Mary's escape from this earth cause you to say 'stretching belief too far'. This would have been one of the easier wonders performed, would it not?
ReplyDelete