The Glory of the Summer Pascha, or, why “Dormition” means ”Death”
Correcting a Popular Misconception
I’m reproducing here, with light editing, a Twitter thread I put together today. Hence this article has more pictures than usual. 🙂 (Maybe I’ll post some other Twitter threads of mine here in the future, for the interest of those saner folk who Substack but who don’t X.)
The traditional use of the word “Dormition” for the event we celebrate on August 15th indicates that the Mother of God did in fact die prior to her resurrection and translation (assumption) into heaven. I’ve been getting the impression, however, that there may be widespread mis-catechesis on this point among many Catholics—perhaps Roman Catholics in particular. Many seem to have the impression that the Eastern tradition holds that our Lady fell into something like a “deep sleep” or coma prior to her Assumption. This is a misconception.
The way the word “dormition” is used in the Greek New Testament and in the liturgical tradition does not carry a meaning distinct from or other than “death.” It does not indicate a sort of deep sleep that is something short of biological death.
“But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep (κεκοιμημένων), that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope” (1 Thess. 4:13). The word for “asleep” here has the same root as the Greek word behind “dormition” (κοίμησης)—the Vulgate Latin here is “dormientibus.”
The word is used by St. Paul and the later Christian liturgical tradition not to imply an absence of biological death, but to emphasize that since Christ’s Resurrection, such death is no longer final. “Our friend Lazarus sleepeth (κεκοίμηται—dormit); but I go, that I may awake him out of sleep … Then said Jesus unto them plainly, Lazarus is dead (ἀπέθανεν—mortuus).” (Jn. 11:11, 14)
Hence it’s no surprise that the Greek word for “Dormition” – κοίμησης – is the root word of our English “cemetery.” And both Latin and Greek liturgical traditions use this word when praying for the departed: For example:
(a) The Roman Canon: “Memento etiam, Domine, famulorum famularumque tuarum, N. et N. qui … dormiunt in somno pacis”—“Remember also, O Lord, thy servants and handmaids, N. and N., who … sleep the sleep of peace.” (Ordinariate Missal translation).
(b) The Byzantine funeral office: “Ὅτι σὺ εἶ ἡ ἀνάστασις, ἡ ζωή, καὶ ἡ ἀνάπαυσις τοῦ κεκοιμημένου δούλου σου ___”—“For thou art the resurrection and the life and the repose of thy servant, ___, who has fallen asleep.” The language of “sleep” is ubiquitous in Byzantine funeral and memorial prayers, and this must be taken into account when interpreting the title of a Byzantine liturgical feast.
Pope Pius XII’s 1950 apostolic constitution on the Assumption, Munificentissimus Deus, quotes several Patristic or later sources referring to the death of the Mother of God.
Now it’s often noted that the actual dogmatic definition at the very end of the text does not explicitly mention her death, but only the completion of “the course of her earthly life.” But why would we not interpret the definition in light of everything else said and quoted in the same document? See, e.g., nn. 21, 29, and 35.
The point in many of these quotations and other Patristic sources on the Dormition is that the body of the Mother of God “did not see corruption in the tomb”—something the Fathers regarded as unthinkable. But even making that point presumes that she was indeed dead and buried prior to her Assumption.
Further, the Catechism of the Catholic Church (no. 966) quotes the Byzantine Rite’s troparion (apolytikion—dismissal hymn) for August 15th, including its explicit reference to her Dormition: “In giving birth you kept your virginity; in your Dormition you did not leave the world, O Mother of God.” And we’ve already seen from scriptural and liturgical sources how we’re to interpret this word in the hymnographic texts.
The textual evidence we’ve adduced is corroborated by the Church’s artistic tradition. The traditional iconography of the Dormition—in both East and West—symbolically depicts the occurrence of death by showing the separation of Our Lady’s body and soul: the body lies motionless on the bier; the soul is portrayed as an infant girl held lovingly in the arms of Christ her Son.
I emphasize: this is not merely the Eastern tradition. Here, for example, is Giotto (1267–1337):
…and Gherardo Starnina (d. 1413):
…and Niccolò Gerini (d. c. 1415):
If we interpret Pius XII’s dogmatic definition not just in context of the entire document in which it’s situated but also in context of the entire Church’s lex orandi, including liturgical texts and artistic depictions, we cannot but arrive at the conclusion that the Mother of God died before she was resurrected and translated to heaven body and soul.
This death was not because she needed to die: since she was untouched by original sin, she was not subject to the “wages of sin,” death. It was rather because, like her Son, she chose to submit to death—in order to follow as closely as possible that same path that her Son trod, and thus to be our perfect exemplar and intercessor after Christ.
Her imitation of His own death and resurrection is expressed by the Byzantine liturgical tendency (in some places at least) to celebrate Dormition in a manner that imitates the ceremonies and hymns of Holy Saturday. Thus:
And this teaching that her dormition and subsequent bodily translation (μετάστασις) to heaven was a free and complete following of her Son’s paschal mystery is all but made explicit by Pope Pius in Munificentissimus Deus, where he notes that the Fathers explicated
not only that the dead body of the Blessed Virgin Mary remained incorrupt, but that she gained a triumph out of death, her heavenly glorification after the example of her only begotten Son, Jesus Christ—truths that the liturgical books had frequently touched upon concisely and briefly. (no. 20)
And this is precisely what’s presented in the earliest full hagiography of the Mother of God, a text unanimously attributed in the sources to St. Maximus the Confessor. And even though this attribution is disputed by some modern scholars, still, the theological significance and richness of this early text speaks for itself:
By the grace of the apostles and by the command of their Lord, God, and Master, they brought the holy and immaculate body of their queen from Zion to Gethsemane and placed it in a tomb, as Joseph and Nicodemus once did the body of the Lord Jesus.
And as the Lord of glory arose on the third day, so also now on the third day the body of his holy Mother was not found in the tomb, but it had been translated whither her Son wished. She was buried as one of the dead according to the order of nature, and she was translated as the Mother of God, in order to confirm and make credible the Resurrection of the Lord born from her and his assuming of the nature that he had put on from her, and to confirm our ascension and incorruptibility that truly will come later.1
He goes on:
And she was wondrous, because as her soul ascended to heaven without her body, so her body also without her soul, so that she showed to her Son and his servants both communion and separation. She ascended to heaven by the grace and assistance of her Son before the general resurrection to draw our attention to the coming resurrection. She was assumed completely, but first her holy soul separately, when she gave it over to the Lord, and then the immaculate body, as the Lord willed.2
And just as Our Lord ascended to heaven as our high priest, “ever living to make intercession for us” (Heb. 7:24) as our “only mediator and advocate” (1 Tim. 2:5), so too Our Lady, in Christ, — in Him, that is, who told His disciples “You will do greater things than I because I go to the Father” (cf. Jn. 14:12) — has also passed beyond the veil of death, has entered already into the eternity of the Age to Come, and there she is become our Mediatrix in the one and only Mediator, her Son. Again, St. Maximus:
Now a second mediator has gone forth to the first mediator, a devout human being to the incarnate God, a second offering of our nature to the Father after the first one who was himself sacrificed one time on behalf of all (cf. Heb 10.12), and she is ever living to intercede on behalf of those who approach God through her.3
Russian Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky (some aspects of whose theological vision I’m less than enthusiastic about) sums up this entire mystery beautifully:
We have said above that in the person of the Mother of God it is possible to see the transition from the greatest holiness of the Old Testament to the holiness of the Church. But if the All-Holy Mother of God has consummated the holiness of the Church and all holiness which is possible for a created being, we are now dealing with yet another transition—the transition from the world of becoming to the eternity of the Eighth Day, the passage from the Church to the Kingdom of God.
This last glory of the Mother of God, the eschaton realized in a created person before the end of the world, henceforth places her beyond death, beyond the resurrection, and beyond the Last judgment. She participates in the glory of her Son, reigns with Him, presides at His side over the destinies of the Church and of the world which unfold in time, and intercedes on behalf of all before Him who will come again to judge the living and the dead.
This supreme transition, by which the Mother of God rejoins her Son in His celestial glory, is celebrated by the Church on the day of the Feast of the Assumption. On that day the Church thinks of a death which, according to her inner conviction, could not but have been followed by the corporeal resurrection and ascension of the All-Holy. It is hard to speak and not less hard to think about the mysteries which the Church keeps in the hidden depths of her inner consciousness. Here every uttered word can seem crude, every attempt at formulation can seem sacrilegious.4
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St. Maximus Confessor (att.), The Life of the Virgin, no. 27, Stephen J. Shoemaker, trans., (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), p. 153. Edited.
Ibid.
Ibid., no. 28, p. 154.
Vladimir Lossky, “Panagia,” in In the Image and Likeness of God (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001), pp. 208–209.
Thanks to Blonski for alerting me to this article
The wonderful artist and art historian Hilary White describes how the West's focus changed: https://open.substack.com/pub/hilarywhite/p/the-dormition-or-the-assumption-of?r=b9mq5&utm_medium=ios
In case you have to be a subscriber to read the whole thing (she's worth it!), here's a key quote: "[T]he loss of the Dormition - the death - of Mary in most depictions stripped away the reminder that Mary truly died and was “assumed” by her Son. What remained was the image of a queenly figure rising, seemingly under her own power, an unbroken ascent from life on earth to a heavenly throne, all of which constitutes a subtle but significant visual distortion of the mystery."