As you know, we and he and many of our holy brothers met together for a vision of that mortal body, that source of life, which bore God. James, the brother of God, was there. So too was Peter, that summit, that chief of all those who speak of God. After the vision, all these hierarchs chose, each as he was able, to praise the omnipotent goodness of that divine frailty.
Pseudo-Dionysius, “The Divine Names,” pg. 49 – 131 in Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works. trans. Colm Luibheid (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 70.
And a great portent appeared in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars (Revelation 12:1).
Death; humans have had to wrestle with it and its implications since the beginning of history. Even before humans were in the world, the power of death held sway over the cosmos. Humanity was brought into the world in part to develop it from within and to provide a meaning for death. We were to be intercessors, mediating the world’s needs to God, and to bring forth the blessings of God upon the earth; through us, God’s grace could have transfigured the world, and death would have held no sting. Humanity, foreordained to bring about this universal transformation, seemed to lose itself through the sin of Adam and Eve. Death had become our master, instead of being mastered by us. Man’s sin was an action both within and outside of time; outside of time, it is universal, in time, it is individual.[1]
Because of sin, the meaning imparted upon death was that of a curse, and the existence of the dead was understood to be that of ghastly shades, barely partaking of any of the glory of creation. The dead were to inhabit a realm of forgetfulness, abandoned by God. “I am reckoned among those who go down to the Pit; I am a man who has no strength, like one forsaken among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, like those whom thou dost remember no more, for they are cut off from thy hand. Thou hast put me in the depths of the Pit, in the regions dark and deep. Thy wrath lies heavy upon me, and thou dost overwhelm me with all thy waves. Selah. Thou hast caused my companions to shun me; thou hast made me a thing of horror to them. I am shut in so that I cannot escape; my eye grows dim through sorrow. Every day I call upon thee, O LORD; I spread out my hands to thee. Dost thou work wonders for the dead? Do the shades rise up to praise thee? Selah. Is thy steadfast love declared in the grave, or thy faithfulness in Abaddon? Are thy wonders known in the darkness, or thy saving help in the land of forgetfulness?” (Psalm 88: 3 – 12). Or, was the Preacher says, “For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing, and they have no more reward; but the memory of them is lost” (Eccl. 9:5). Through sin, life’s meaning is shown to us in death as that of meaningless existence. “Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity” (Eccl. 1:2)
All violent mutilation of an other is an attempt to establish this meaningless of life through force, to direct the powers of sin and attempt a final annihilation of someone else. Through such action, a killer tries to establish the meaningless of the other’s existence by not giving them a chance to find meaning for their life. It tells them and the world, “We are better off without your; your life is nothing.” Responding to such killers in kind, trying to rub them out out of existence, only continues their point, changing whom it addresses but not what is said; we tell them that their life is meaningless, and the world is better off without them. A meaningless death for one thus becomes the means by which we can enforce a meaningless death for another, creating a cycle of death, a culture of death, and without establishing meaning in life, this cycle can only continue until all life is annihilated.
It is here that the death and resurrection of Christ comes into play. Jesus, as the God-man, fulfills man’s responsibility to the earth, allowing for its physical and spiritual transformation. Through grace, he allows us to act as his co-workers, to do the work we were meant to do, that is to provide meaning to the world, transfigure it, and make it eternally valuable. The call of stewardship given to Adam and Eve was given to them not because they would suceed in themselves but because that call would be fulfilled by their seed in Jesus Christ. And so Jesus has provided for us a way to find meaning in death, in our death, even if others take life from us. For he took the most meaningless form of death unto himself, using it to reconfigure death from within, making what was meaningless meaningful. The descent into hades allows hades to be more than an abyss without end: it can become the gateway to eternal life, to glorification. “So the souls of the saints will go through the gates of the underworld, as we have explained, ‘for the disciple is not above his master’ (Mt 10:24). […] They shall pass through [those gates] – listen carefully! – not to be destroyed, but to be examined and initiated there into the strange mystery of God’s plan of salvation: I mean the descent into the underworld which Jesus, the source of our life, willingly accomplished for our sakes, having undergone death on a cross even though he was himself above both suffering and destruction.“[2] Christ has turned the sting of death around, and has made out of death what humanity was meant to make out of it, that is, he has made it the way to eternal glory. Through participation in his death, death can now be meaningful; biological death can now be used to establish eternal meaning for life, a meaning it was meant to provide. Through grace, through the work of Christ in his overcoming of the abyss, we can be raised up, our bodies transfigured in spiritual glory. “So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body” (1 Cor. 15:42 – 44).
Aside from Pascha, no feast of the Church better represents this truth than that of the dormition and assumption of the Theotokos. It is for this reason why it is one of the greatest and most important Marian celebrations. For it shows us, through Mary, how biological death and eternity were meant to be related. Her death led directly to her glorification; her innocence did not undermine biological death, but rather, included it, for biological death is not contrary to purity. Sadly, her dormition has been misunderstood by many in the West. Some believe that she did not die, despite what Catholic tradition has consistently said on the matter.[3] There are two reasons for this: they do not understand the implications of the immaculate conception, and they misread the declaration of the assumption in Munificentissimus Deus. The first mistake comes from the confusion of biological with spiritual death; they think that if Mary is without sin, she cannot die, since sin is what brings death. However, the death made by sin is spiritual death, not biological. Mary’s death does not lead to spiritual ruin, but glorification. It leads to her eternal glory, and makes final her place in the heavenly kingdom. Indeed, it is surprising that anyone could ever suggest that those without sin cannot biologically die – because, of course, the whole point of Christianity is that Jesus, without sin, died. The second reason people deny her death comes from the so-called silence of it in Munificentissimus Deus. People argue that because Pope Pius XII, in declaring the assumption, did not declare her death, he left the discussion open as to whether or not she died.[4] The problem with this is that such a reading ignores the context in which Pope Pius XII made the declaration; for he established it through tradition, from sources which made it clear that the assumption is related to the death of Mary. “All these proofs and considerations of the holy Fathers and the theologians are based upon the Sacred Writings as their ultimate foundation. These set the loving Mother of God as it were before our very eyes as most intimately joined to her divine Son and as always sharing his lot.“[5] Poor hermeneutics ignores this fact, and therefore ignores the tradition behind the dogma. It is only in this way can it argue from silence, and it is in this way, it fails to appreciate or grasp Munificentissimus Deus. For the assumption of Mary into heaven is about the resurrection of the Theotokos after her death; it shows us that the work of Christ has indeed opened the gates of hades; he has opened them so that death can now lead to her to glory, and not meaningless defeat. “She who bestowed life ascends to the transformation which is rebirth, and enters the place where life begins and never ends, a place far from all the conditions and complications of matter and the passions. Now, finally, her visible frame rises up from the visible world and is joined to the spiritual in a spiritual way: something only he understands who first joined matter and spirit together, then separated them to rejoin them again – if I may speak boldly and touch upon the intangible!“[6]
The Theotokos, the humble servant of the Lord, did not think of herself as greater than her son; she willingly followed him in all things, even death. But this death is for her natural; sin has no part in it, therefore, sin cannot hold her back from glory. Raised up in heaven, she is queen, looking down upon us. “Now the Mother of God shuts her material eyes, and opens her spiritual eyes towards us like great shining stars that will never set, to watch over us and to intercede before the face of God for the world’s protection.“[7]Thus, it is of no exaggeration for Germanus to say, “Truly – I say again, and with thanks – you were not separated from the Christian people when you passed from us; you were not taken far off from this corruptible world, O life of our common incorruption, but you come close to those who call upon you, you are found by those who faithfully seek you.“[8]This truth we find established in the liturgical celebration of the dormition, where the faithful sing, “In giving birth thou didst preserve thy virginity; in falling asleep thou didst not forsake the world, O Theotokos. Thou wast translated to life, O Mother of Life, and by your prayers you deliver our souls from death” (Troparian of the Dormition). Through the assumption of Mary we are shown that death indeed has been conquered by death, and the sting of death, the uselessness of death, is no more (although this does not mean that taking the life of another is acceptable; the martyr’s victory is still a victory through defeat, but their killer is still guilty in trying to make their victim meaningless).
Footnotes
[1] It is true that the Genesis story of creation and the scientific understanding of history appear to contradict one another, but that is, in part, because they are of different genres, representing different ways of understanding the world. Science looks to empirical history and tries to reconstruct it (therefore, scientific analysis will never be able to provide a complete account of what has happened in the past, because what it provides will always be a reconstruction, and it will always have those problems which come from such historical reconstructions). Genesis provides a theological understanding of the place humanity has in world history (but must not be seen as a scientific presentation of what happened). Christians must believe that there was a “first man” and a “first woman” (and why would it hard to believe this?). Their formation from the earth must be understood, as the sciences show, evolutionarily; their parents would not be seen as human though they were being humanized (and close to human). In that evolutionary process, God (and the human spirit) was involved. God had a special plan for humanity. In the formation of the first man and woman, God established a relationship with them which differed from the rest of creation, a relationship with them which included grace; they could have kept to that grace, but did not (think of Adam and Eve’s births as types of immaculate conception; as types, they are similar to but not exactly the same, for what they did with that grace differed from what Mary was to do: Mary was to accept it and turn towards God while Adam and Eve would eventually turn away from it and unto themselves). If they had followed God’s commands and kept themselves perfectly in communion with God, that grace would have spread throughout the world. Humanity was meant to act as co-creators, beautifying creation through God’s grace. Instead, we abandoned our relationship with God, and sought to find our end in ourselves alone. Rather than interceding for creation and providing for its transfiguration, we became its spiritual executioner, cutting it off from grace. Death became a snare, and took us into spiritual nether-lands, full of sorrow, full of regret. One could ask: would the original man and woman have died if they did not forsake God? Biologically, the answer seems to be yes; but the meaning of that death would have differed just as the meaning of death differs for humanity now that we live in the light of Christ’s death and resurrection. Death would have led directly to glorification; the end of life would have established human fidelity. Our death and entrance into eternity would have proved our fidelity to the last. Without an end, without this biological death, there could have been no final proof of our faithfulness. Nonetheless, this biological death must not be confused with spiritual death, as the Genesis story shows (Adam did not physically die after taking the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil). It is the spiritual death which comes to us from the original sin. Death, which could have become full of meaning, became meaningless, leading us further away from God.
Many other questions can and do come up. Among them is this: Why was the world made as it is, that is, why was there any kind of biological death at all? Many theological answers have been suggested. What has been said above, following Rahner, can be quite pursuasive: it is to say that infinite, temporal existence without end would be meaningless; the world is a world of testing and proving who we are. Having a natural end to temporal existence allows us to make life meaningful. It allows us to create for ourselves a who that lives instead of a mere what which goes through the motions. What we do in time demonstrates who we are in eternity, but to do that, we have to have a final presentation of ourselves to make that eternal presentation of ourselves. But this, so far, has kept the discussion with ourselves, with humanity. Things get tougher once we move beyond the human realm of existence. We can say that, in part, there should be an end for all things in temporal existence so they too, like us, can make for themselves an eternal representation of what they are. But looking at the whole of creation, is this how we can interpret death as it existed before the advent of humanity? All life seems to have been in conflict, in some fashion or another, with other life and the world they lived in; sentient beings fought against one another, and in that conflict, suffered greatly. What explanation can we have for this? Why was there such suffering, such cruelty, in death? Does this not demonstrate the meaninglessness of death, the kind which has been suggested came about because of the fall of man? Buddhism clearly understands the problem, and Siddhartha struggled to find an answer: there is no beginning to suffering, only an end. Should we look at it this way? What would that say about God? The Christian must look for an answer to this problem.
Genesis suggests humanity is guilty for this cycle of death, for turning the end of temporal existence into a curse by making it meaninglessness. But how can this be, since the cycle of death, the cycle of suffering, existed in time before humanity? Adapting some of Sergius Bulgakov’s notions on original sin might provide us a new way to find an answer to this question. He tells us that we must look at things in relation to eternity. What is played out in time is what is found in eternity, including the fall of humanity and the restoration of all things in Christ. “The history of fallen humanity as a prologue in heaven, and evil in a pure form (and not as a fruit of ignorance, misunderstanding, deception, and self-deception) first appears in the spiritual world,” Sergius Bulgakov. Bride of the Lamb. trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdman’s Publishing Company, 2002), 160. The angelic fall preceded the human and is the source for human temptation (but it must be said that the guilt of our fall is ours, for the action which made us fall is ours). The human spirit partakes of eternity, and therefore “pre-exists” its temporal entrance into the world; this pre-existence, this eternal spiritual existence, allows humanity to help shape the evolutionary process, to help in the creation of its own biological existence (if the Cappadocians could suggest our souls work in the formation of our bodies, can’t we say something similar for the human spirit and the formation of biological man?). This puts a human stamp on all life on earth, a stamp which will bear the marks of our fall. Our fall shapes the world and affects it, even if our temporal existence is later than the creation of the world (just as Christ’s grace is not limited to time, but can shape his own creation through the purification of the Theotokos, so the effects of Adam’s sin is not limited to time, but helps shape the creation of the first man). Biological man is developed through the evolutionary process, and yet biological man is developed by God through the agency of the human spirit. Humanity was a “shock to the system,” because its spiritual stamp guides the evolutionary process and is in this way beyond it, even though it works with it from within. Since time is the expression of eternity, then the human fall (which has a place in eternity) can affect the whole domain of time. “Thus the history of man begins not from below but from above, from fullness and harmony, when the spirit that proceeds from God enters the world,” ibid., 177. Originally, humanity was one, in its ideal, eternal state. “This original being of humankind as a unity is expressed in the doctrine of the proto-Adam, in whom ‘all were found.’ This formula expresses precisely the unity of human nature, which received its self-determination in the proto- and all-Adam,” ibid., 183. Sin destroyed this original communion of humanity, the all with the all; by it, relational persons find themselves closed-off to one another as they enter the world as ego-centric entities. Original sin, as expressed in Genesis, has a spiritual, non-temporal existence, because it touches the human spirit, but it also exists because the first man and woman, who mysteriously contained in themselves the whole human race, sinned. Finally, it must be said that this sin is repeated by us by our coming to be in the world itself, making us co-participants in the fall of Adam in a rather unique way (however difficult it is to grasp): “But such a personal fall, making us coparticipantsin Adam’s sin, did not take place within the limits of the world. It took place outside this world, or more correctly, at the threshold of our entry into the world,” ibid., 184. Thus, “This idea must be linked with the more general idea (see above) that man himself participates, in a certain sense, in his own origin, accepting his being from the Creator. And this acceptance is characterized not by monotonous sameness but by the individual qualifiednessof self-determination. Every person re-enacts Adam’s fall (with differences in modeand intensity). Every person repeats this fall, as it were, by his agreement to enter into a world damaged by Adam’s sin, thus accepting the infirm human nature, the sick flesh that already bears the seeds of death,” ibid., 184.
[2]St Andrew of Crete, “Homily II On the Dormition of Our Most Holy Lady, the Mother of God,” pgs. 117 – 136 in On The Dormition of Mary: Early Patristic Homilies. trans. and ed. Brian E. Daley, S.J. (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1998): 120.
[3]There are many sources which discuss the dormition and assumption of Mary. One basic text for the West is Blessed Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend. As Jacobus relates, not all sources for the feast are as credible as others; some, to be sure, are of questionable authenticity, yet even in them, the core story of what happened to Mary is to be found. John of Thessalonica, in a homily he gave in the7th century, explains why, “Do not be surprised at hearing that heretics have corrupted writings, since they have been caught doing similar things, from time to time, to the epistles of the divine Apostles and even to the holy Gospels! Yet we do not reject writings that contain the truth because of that fraud of theirs, so hateful to God; rather, we purify them of the bad seed that has been sown, and embrace what has truly been achieved for the glory of God by his saints, and commemorate these things in a way that pleases him and profits our souls,” John of Thessalonica, “The Dormition of Our Lady, The Mother of God and Ever-Virgin Mary,” pgs 47- 70 in On The Dormition of Mary: Early Patristic Homilies. trans. and ed. Brian E. Daley, S.J. (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1998): 48.
[4] See Pope Pius XII, Munificentissimus Deus, 44.
[5] Ibid., 38.
[6]St Andrew of Crete, “Homily I On the Dormition of Our Most Holy Lady, the Mother of God,” pgs. 103 – 116 in On The Dormition of Mary: Early Patristic Homilies. trans. and ed. Brian E. Daley, S.J. (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1998): 108-9.
[7]St Theodore the Studite, “Encomium of the Dormition of Our Holy Lady, the Mother of God,” pgs. 249 – 257 in On The Dormition of Mary: Early Patristic Homilies. trans. and ed. Brian E. Daley, S.J. (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1998): 250.
[8]Germanus of Constantinople, “Homily I On the Most Venerable Dormition of the Holy Mother of God,” pgs. 153 – 168 in On The Dormition of Mary: Early Patristic Homilies. trans. and ed. Brian E. Daley, S.J. (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1998): 158.
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