The Ceremony of Death
What happened to the Blessed Virgin Mary at the end of her earthly life? The English poet Coventry Patmore (1823-1896), a convert to the Church, has a striking couplet in a poem that is addressed to Mary, called “The Child’s Purchase.” Talking of her Assumption, he writes: Holding a little thy soft breath,/ Thou underwent’st the ceremony of death.
With these words, Patmore deftly wove together two strands of thought that we find in the saints and great theologians who have written about this subject. The first strand is that a separation of body and soul took place for Mary, as for all others. The second is that in her case there was nothing painful or punitive about it. It was, rather, a “ceremony”: that is, something gracious and full of meaning.
One often hears it said that when Pope Pius XII defined the Assumption in 1950, he left it an open question whether or not our Lady died. But that is not quite accurate. It is true that in the very words of the definition, he made no mention of a death. This is not surprising, since it was only her Assumption that he intended to propose to the Christian faithful for their belief. But earlier in the bull of definition, Munificentissimus Deus, he quotes various authorities that do speak of a death, and he does not distance himself from them. For example, the missal sent by Pope Hadrian I to Charlemagne in the 8th century contains a collect for the Assumption that begins: “The feast of this day, O Lord, is venerated by us, in which the holy Mother of God underwent temporal death, but could not be held by the bonds of death.” This prayer, called the Veneranda from its first word, was used in the Roman liturgy for centuries, and it is still found today in the Dominican missal. It is noteworthy, also, that in the Byzantine rite, the first chant for the Matins of August 15th declares: “Thy death, O Immaculate one, became the bridge to an eternal and better life.”
Such prayers find support in the writings of the Fathers of the Church. St. Augustine, for example, speaks of our Lady, as “a virgin when giving birth, a virgin when dying” (On Catechizing the Unlearned, 22.40). St. Ephraim the Syrian, called “the Harp of the Holy Ghost,” writes: “The Virgin gave birth, and she kept her virginity intact. Rising she gave milk to her child and she remained a virgin. She died, and the seal of her virginity was not broken.” In a difficult passage, in which some people have seen an allusion to the Assumption, St. Gregory of Nyssa writes: “To speak of Mary the mother of God, death which reigned from Adam until her (yes, until her, since death existed for her too); … death, having struck against the fruit of her virginity as against a rock, was crushed; it broke itself against Mary” (On Virginity, 13).
In the early centuries it was difficult to speak openly of the Assumption, for fear that the pagans might either ridicule the doctrine or else assimilate Mary to one of their goddesses. The first authors who do speak clearly take for granted that the bodily Assumption of Mary was preceded by a separation of body and soul. Thus, Theoteknos, a bishop of Palestine preaching around the year 550, declared: “It was fitting that her all-holy body should be carried by the apostles in company of the angels, and, after being placed for a short while in the earth, should be raised up to heaven in glory with her soul so loved by God.” St. John Damascene, in a homily for the Assumption preached probably in Gethsemane, in a church believed to have been built on the site of her tomb, explains: “In order to be clothed with immortality she must first put off mortality.”
The later authors echoed this consensus. St. Thomas Aquinas, summarizing the belief of Catholics in his commentary on the Hail Mary, writes simply: “We believe that after death she was raised up and brought to heaven.” The Jesuit theologian Francisco Suarez, in the twenty-first of his Disputations on the Mysteries of Christ, states that there is no doubt but that a death took place. According to a more recent Spanish Jesuit, Fr. Joseph Aldama, who compiled the treatise on Mariology for the useful manual Sacrae Theologiae Summa, the first author to deny that Mary experienced the separation of body and soul was an anonymous Italian writer of the 17th century. It’s not surprising, then, that the excellent nineteenth-century German theologian Matthias Scheeben could write: “According to the constant and general acceptation of the Church, that Mary really died is an established fact” (Mariology, II.151).
Why were things so arranged? Doubtless, because in this way also, our Lady wished to be conformed to her Son. So, St. John Damascene, in his sermons on the Assumption, notes that the Lord of nature Himself did not reject the penalty of death. St. Alphonsus Liguori spoke in a similar vein: “God was pleased that Mary should in all things resemble Jesus; and as the Son died, it was becoming that the Mother also should die.” He adds another reason: “Moreover, since He wished to give the just an example of the precious death prepared for them, He willed that even the most Blessed Virgin should die, but by a sweet and happy death.” Scheeben, for his part, speaks of the need that she should not appear to be greater than her Son.
Yet as she was unlike others in her conception, so was she unlike them in the ending of her mortal life. For one thing, she could not die, as we must, in consequence of original sin, since she had none. So Cardinal Newman, in his fine sermon On the Glories of Mary, writes: “Though she died as well as others, she died not as others died. She died, but her death was a mere fact, not an effect; and when it was over, it ceased to be.”
This difference between her and the other children of Adam means that there has been a natural reluctance to use the word “death” in Mary’s regard, even on the part of those authors who are clear as to the fact. Thus, St. John Damascene, imagining the apostles gathered round her tomb, declares: “I will not call thy sacred transformation death, but rest or going home” (Third Homily on the Dormition).
After all, if our Lord preferred to say of Jairus’s daughter and of His friend Lazarus that they were simply “sleeping,” and if St. Paul spoke to the Thessalonians of “those who have fallen asleep,” how much more is such a way of speaking appropriate to her! The later Greek Fathers, in fact, such as St. Germanus, patriarch of Constantinople, and St. Andrew, archbishop in Crete, used the divine sleep into which Adam was cast in the Garden as an analogy for the ending of our Lady’s earthly life.
A fine example of this way of speaking is found in the sermons of a Catholic bishop from Syria called Theodore Abou-Qurrah who died in the year 820. Writing in Arabic, he declared: “As the first man was despoiled of his rib as he slept, so the God-bearer as in sleep gave up her most holy soul to God” (Opuscula, 37).
Finally, how was this separation of body and soul brought about, in her unique case? Not by sickness or from the weakness of old age, both of which things would have been unfitting to her who is the spouse of the Life-giver, the Holy Ghost. Suarez draws a comparison with Moses, who died “by the simple will and choice of God’’ (Deut. 32:49). Especially from the Middle Ages onward, spiritual writers have liked to emphasize that Mary did not simply accept God’s will in humble obedience; rather the separation of body and soul was actually caused by the greatness of her love and desire. Yet it was not accompanied with any sensations of violence. May we perhaps compare it to the way that a fully ripened fruit comes from its branch at the first touch of the farmer’s hand?
St. John Damascene had already said: “She died an extremely peaceful death.” St. Francis de Sales in his Treatise on the Love of God develops the thought in this way: “Just as iron, if not hindered, is drawn strongly but sweetly by the magnet, and the attraction increases according as it is drawn more close to it, so the Blessed Virgin, being in no way hindered in the operation of the love of her Son, united herself to Him in an incomparable union, by sweet, peaceful, and effortless ecstasies.”
He concludes with a phrase that defies adequate translation: O mort amoureusement vitale! O amour vitalement mortel! (“Oh what a death, alive with love! Oh what a love, so lively as to make for death!”)
Image Sources
TITLE IMAGE: The Assumption of the Virgin, 1475-76, by Francesco Botticini (National Gallery London), shows three hierarchies and nine orders of angels, each with different characteristics.
BELOW: The Assumption of the Virgin, by Bergognone (Ambrogio di Stefano da Fossano), between 1500 and 1523, Metropolitan Museum of Art.
