August and the Assumption

AUGUST, the month which is now drawing to its close, means different things to different people — the school holidays, the "silly season," Bank Holiday Monday. There is something for everybody, including your chronicler: far me the point of August is that it is the month in which we celebrate one of the great feasts of the Church, the Assumption.
,This feast is much more than a celebration: it constitutes a stumbling-block, a scandal in fact, to many Christians. This should not surprise — Marian doctrines since the definition of the Virgin as Theotokos, Mother of God, at the Council of Ephesus in the year 431, have been a source both of strength and of division in the Church.
The definition of Ephesus constituted the exaltation not only of the Mother but of the Son: what was ultimately protected in the definition was the belief in the divine personality of Jesus. The definition of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception by Pio Nono in 1854 was a logical step in the development of Marian devotion but it has been the source of constant misunderstanding ever since.
The movement for the definition had gathered pace in the seventeeth century, but it was the appearance of the Blessed Virgin to the young novice Catherine Laboure at the convent of the Sisters of Charity in the Rue du Bac in Paris in 1830 which gave it the final impetus.
Readers will recall that the vision included the inscription 0 Marie, concue sans pease, priez pour nous qui aeons recours a vows. (The chapel at the Rue du Bac incidentally is open daily to visitors and has an aura of holiness to this day which is almost tangible and very un-Parisian.) Pio Nono himself came to the Papal Throne with a strong personal devotion to the Virgin Mary and the definition was one of the high points of his pontificate, commemorated by the beautiful pillar which he caused to be erected in the Pizza di Spagna in Rome, crowned by an effigy depitcing her as she appeared in the Rue du Bac.
Pius IX set an important precedent in the manner of the definition of 1854 which was closely followed by Pius XII when he came to define the sister doctrine of the
Assumption in 1950; both Popes made the definition ex sese, on their own authority, but only after the widest con
sultations among the episcopate had shown overwhelming majorities holding the beliefs and favouring the. definitions.
The definition of the Assumption as an article of faith came as a shock and surprise to many despite the antiquity of the feast both in the East and West. There is, of course, no direct scriptual warranty for the Assumption, and the first Father of the Church whom we know subscribed to the doctrine was St Epiphanisu (c310-400). However, the feast dates back to the beginning of the fifth century and was celebrated with even greater solemnity in the East than in the West.
It was in the East, after all, that the event occurred, and pilgrims can visit the spot high above Ephesus in Asia Minor where the Assumption is said to have happened: (I visited the little house myself some years ago, as well as the tomb of my patron, St John the Evangelist, who is buried at the foot of the hill, and while I arrived dubious I came away convinced.)
The difficulty of the Assumption for many people lies in its particularity. An icon of the Blessed Virgin floating artistically heavenwards surrounded by a cloud of angels is one thing: the image of an actual woman of flesh and blood being lifted up and translated into the next world is quite another. To many it is at this point that the borderline between faith and superstition is crossed.
The difficulty is that what may or may not have been a fact has become a matter for faith. Yet the scandal of particularity is one that attaches to the whole of the Chris-. tian religion: the synoptic evangelists were intent on placing Jesus in his historical setting: St Luke, for example pinpoints the exact moment of the Lord's birth by reference to the census of Caesar Augustus.
What, for that matter, could be more particular than the resurrection of the Lord himself? The whole doctrine of the resurrection of the body in which we profess our faith is an affirmation of belief in the particular. If one can believe in that, one can believe in anything! The ultimate significance of the Assumption, however again like other Christian truths lies not in its particularity — although givien our humanity this is an essential preliminary — but in its universality. As the late Fr Victor White, OP, put it in a famous article on the Assumption published in 1950: "The rehabilitation of nature and of woman, and the redemption of our body, is completed, but also pre-typified, in the taking of Mary, body and soul, into the glory of the divinity."
The woman, the feminine, is an intrinsic part both of human nature and of religion, and in the Assumption one finds not only an actual historical incident but the embodiment of an archetype hidden in the depths of the psyche. The archetype is a living one and it is no accident that the Eastern Church which has retained Mary has retained its catholicity while in the Protestantism of the West the expulsion of Mary and of Catholcism went hand in hand, to be painfully brought back into the Church of England together (on this point Faber was surely right) at the time of the Oxford Movement.
The Assumption may well prove to be of the deepest ecumenical significance, forming a bridge to reunite East and West; not only the two branches of the Church but also Eastern and Western religion. Perhaps the definition will lead the Church to closer consideration of the deep mystery of the Motherhood of God. As Fr Victor wrote a quarter of a century ago: "As Christ ascending to Heaven leads the way to God our Eternal Father, perhaps Mary, assumed into the same Heaven, will lead us to deeper knowledge and love of God our Eternal Mother."