In defence of a dated Assumption

Better late than never

The Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, Norfolk, UK

“There is no one in existence,” St John of Damascus began to preach, “who is able to praise worthily the holy death of God’s Mother, even if he should have a thousand tongues and a thousand mouths.” Had he heeded his own advice, his homily would have been cut rather short. As it is, he permits his single tongue and mouth to preach his second sermon on the Dormition of the Theotokos.

Known better in the West as the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, this feast is kept on 15 August. You will not, however, find it marked in the Kalendar of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer or any of its predecessors, despite the retention of other key Marian celebrations. It is hard to argue that the doctrine commemorated, namely that Our Lady passed into the presence of God without undergoing death, has any clear warrant in Scripture, and it cannot be discerned in the earliest Apostolic tradition. The great Anglo-Catholic scholar-priest Father Darwell Stone, author of the still insuperable 1900 Outlines of Christian Dogma (a revised edition of which I have nearly completed for Nashotah House Press), wrote in his 1926 The Faith of an English Catholic:

Signs are not wanting that a few Anglo-Catholics believe that, after the death of the Blessed Virgin, her body was assumed into heaven so that she, both in body and in soul, is now in glory at the throne of God. Such an opinion, though widely held both in the East and in the West, has never been made to be of faith in any part of the Church; and the vast majority of Anglo-Catholics probably either reject it or regard it as one of those matters for the decision of which there is no sufficient evidence.

Nonetheless, he avers, “it is natural and right to commemorate the death of the Mother of our Lord, as of other saints; and ... in accordance with the ancient custom which became universal, the fifteenth of August is an appropriate day.” This is not to say that Fr Stone considered Our Lady just one saint among many. The Theotokos is, after all,

“not only the greatest of the saints, but also she has the unique position and privilege that she is the only being in the universe to whom the title Mother of God can be applied.”

Fr Stone shares the modern concern to establish the historical facticity or otherwise of the event before deducing dogma from it. To minds formed in the modern West, this may seem an eminently sensible approach. If we cannot demonstrate that the Resurrection of Christ actually happened, then the doctrine of the General Resurrection has no grounding; likewise, if we have no “evidence” that Mary was assumed into heaven, we should not dedicate a day to proclaiming the doctrine.

A key moment in the development of this way of thinking was the Reformation. One of the many motivations behind the Reformation was to establish by appeal to Scripture and reason what elements of Christian tradition were later and superstitious innovations to the pristine Apostolic faith. The Enlightenment is an heir to this Protestant scepticism.

Already by Fr Stone’s day, the respectable approach to Holy Scripture was that of criticism and demythologisation, a development which Stone himself firmly resisted. Nonetheless, his 20th-century Englishman’s approach to the Dormition is quite different from that of the 7th-century Damascene, and the character of that difference has implications for the way we see and interact with the world today.

Poetic Realism

We with Western-formed minds tend today to differentiate form and content to such an extent as to conceive of the two as almost independent of one another. We like to think, for example, that a single underlying message might be conveyed by a variety of different media. We believe in the possibility of accurate translation. I wonder sometimes to what extent this isolation of form from content was influenced by St Thomas Aquinas’ introduction of Aristotle’s substance-matter distinction via the Eucharist into mainstream Western metaphysical assumptions: the notion that something may appear to be one thing, but in fact, despite all appearances, conceal something completely different. This problem extends well beyond the bounds of sacramental theology. It raises such questions, for example, as whether one might physically conform to one sex but another in metaphysical substance, a mediaeval expression of the supposed sex-gender dichotomy.

For now, I want to stick to something more straightforward: the difference in the form of theological discourse between Fr Stone and St John of Damascus. St John theologises on the Dormition by preaching; Fr Stone, by dogmatic speculation. If the key word in Fr Stone’s passage above is “evidence,” that of St John is “praise.” Fr Stone seeks to establish the propriety of a certain act of praise, the celebration of a feast, by recourse to empirical verification. His use of Scripture is for the purposes of verification. St John uses Scripture, too, but quite differently. Throughout his sermon, he weaves a tapestry of Old Testament foreshadowings of the Blessed Virgin Mary to provide a typological rationale for her Dormition, and uses this tapestry to name and so venerate her: Second Eve, Burning Bush, Abraham’s Tent, Jacob’s Ladder, Fertile Mountain, Ezekiel’s Closed Gate, Perpetual Help, Dwelling-place of Our Lord, Fragrant Urn for the Manna, Fountain in Zion, Ark of God. Because she is all these things, it makes sense for her to take her place with her Son as highest of saints. There is an element of prayerful speculation here: if bodily assumption was possible for Enoch and Moses, how much more so should it be for the one who suffered in bearing and in burying her son, whose heart was pierced as she saw Him die?

St John’s theological method here owes much to his beloved forefather who wrote under the spiritual patronage and name of St Dionysius the Areopagite. Dionysius insists that since ultimately, it exceeds the capacity of words to define God, the only proper use of language vis à vis God is that of praise - in his word, hallowed by both pagan Platonic and Christian use, “hymning.” Dionysian theology is hymnology. The lex orandi is very much the lex credendi, and the whole cosmos is at prayer.

St John is applying the same approach to the mysterious way in which, he reasons, one so blessed as to be called Mother of God must have passed from her life on earth to union with her Son. The approach is one of adoration, and it is this adoration which forms our reason, rather than the other way round. So, he ends his third Homily on the Dormition so:

Let us go in adoring, and learn the wondrous mystery by which she is assumed to heaven, to be with her son, higher than all the angelic choirs. No one stands between Son and Mother.

Moderns may get a better sense of this Dionysian “hymnic” approach to knowledge by thinking of it in terms of poetry and music, the core ingredients of the hymn. Even if, as C.S. Lewis quipped, the poetry is often fifth rate and the poetry sixth, both poetry and music stand as counterexamples to purely empirical approaches towards knowledge. Good poetry and all music defy the possibility of translation. Their medium and their message are indivisible. One can make some attempt at translating a poem into a foreign language, in other words substituting one “form” for another, but the nuances of the content, the gaps between the words, will be quite lost. Shakespeare in Swahili is only just Shakespeare. I am sure the same might be said of Swahili verse Englished. And if this is true of poetry, a verbal art, it is even more so of music. One can spend as much time as one likes describing a melody or symphony to someone in words, but they will not know it until they hear it. The knowledge is immediate. Repeat listening will be needed for deepening that knowledge, and it cannot be translated. Music is irreducible.

St John was entirely capable of writing dogmatic treatises. The author of a voluminous book titled An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith can hardly be accused of intellectual fluffiness. And yet even in his chapter therein on the genealogy and sinlessness of Mary, he does not touch on the question of her Dormition. This is one of those matters on which he seems willing to speak only in the language of awed praise. It is a matter for homily rather than dogmatics.

The sceptic here may see this as a cop-out, but it has sound philosophical pedigree. St John and St Dionysius were formed in the intellectual world of Platonism. When Plato wished to express truths which exceed the capacity of reason, he had his interlocutors speak in myth, or what he called “probable tales.” Plato’s deployment of, for example, the myth of Er in the Republic, the entire creation myth of the Timaeus, or the various likely tales in the Symposium are all of this mystagogical character. Like music, myth is told to reach the depths of the heart that mere reason cannot plumb, and therein to find the very roots of truth coiling. The truth is intuited in the gaps between the words, the blank page which surrounds the images they paint.

St John’s homilies on the Dormition are grounded not in syllogism but in meditation which then yields praise. It is comparable to St Anselm’s fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding. But the method is justifiable only if there is a reality on which to meditate. For St John, the reality of God as transcendent Good, Beauty and Truth, is a given, mediated through the words of Holy Scripture and the collective discernment of Holy Church. For him, prayerful meditation on Scripture gives access to ultimate and unchanging truth, which is always compatible with reason, but precedes and undergirds it. The dogma of the Assumption or Dormition for St John is justified neither by syllogism nor empirical verification, but by compatibility - like a Platonic “probable tale” - with the reality of the Good expressed in Scripture and in the cosmos. One might call this an approach of “poetic realism,” a somewhat more readily intuited equivalent of Fr Hans Boersma’s “sacramental ontology,” wherein the reality of such intangibles as goodness or truth exceeds verbal definition or empirical verification, but is known rather through meditative orientation towards their hidden source, and expressed by images, verbal and musical, in songs of praise.

Olympic nominalism

Contrast with this the spirit of the age, at least in France, which was manifested at the recent Parisian Olympic Games. The stage was set, quite literally, from the outset with a strident challenge to the notion that things are what they seem. The bearded ladies and nudge-wink invitations to once taboo sexual liaisons conjured the spirit of carnival, a last antinomian Mardi Gras before the rigours of Lenten discipline. However, the carnival functions only in opposition: it is upheld by its opposite, and can exist only when there are absolute norms to transgress. As the Olympics continued into actual play, it became clearer that the opening ceremony was not a final fling before a return to usual disciplines, but a cri de coeur for the overthrow of those disciplines and the abolition of norms: for carnival to be the new norm. Women’s games became threatened by the involvement of those with masculine physiques, who may themselves have been innocent pawns, but were put to use in a political and ultimately metaphysical battle.

Why “metaphysical?” Because it was, whether consciously or not, a typically modern challenge to the notion that there is any absolute truth; or, to put it into metaphysical terms, that there are extra-mental abstract and intellectual realities. What I mean by this last expression is that such abstracts as truth, goodness or beauty have any reality independent of individual minds. For the sake of argument, let us restrict these minds to the human. The “realist” would say that these abstracts are indeed real in their own right, independent of human minds. In contrast, the default approach of western modernity is to say that these abstracts are merely words, or names, given by individual humans and defined solely by human consensus, without any independent reality. Goodness, truth and beauty are just names mapped onto things by human minds. This, the opposite of realism, is the position of “nominalism,” derived from the Latin word for “name.”

The division of gender from sex is a mild form of nominalism, suggesting a dichotomy between things and our “names” for them; the denial of even sex as anything other than a human and social construct is nominalism at its logical extreme, whereby the supposed commonality between any similar things (say, women or men) is entirely arbitrary. In this view, which is far from unrelated to modern individualism, all norms and categories are suspect, even oppressive; similarity is an illusion, only diversity exists. The result is atomisation.

I should be clear here that I do not see individualism, or indeed the Enlightenment, as entirely negative things. Nor do I mean to make an intellectual assault on people who have been harmed by the sexual norms of any given society. The crushing conformity of Communist countries is enough to show the importance of maintaining the individual as one unit of society. But when the individual becomes the only unit of society and the measure of things, problems begin. The finger is often pointed at Rousseau for this development (not least my finger), but one might point it with a heartier j’accuse at his later contemporary, the Marquis de Sade. The latter’s 120 Days of Sodom makes for stomach-turning reading – I have not managed to digest the whole thing word-for-word in its entirety, and do not intend to return to it if I can help it – but in a way, its portrayal of the abuse of individual power, particularly in the sexual realm, seems at least as perspicacious of modernity as Rousseau’s. In between their obscenities, his cast of churchmen and nobles preach proto-Nietzschean sermons to one another over dinner about the absolute powers of the libertine, whose rights over others are guaranteed by sheer power. All that matters is the pursuit of their own desires. For if reality and morality are governed only by consensus, there is nothing to stop the rich and powerful from forcing the assent that they desire, regardless of the consequences to their subjects. And so, we see the Enlightenment segue into the French Revolution, Communism and Fascism, all of which result from the exercise of absolute power, and all of which have ended in appalling exploitation, sexual and otherwise, including the massacres of pregnant women, forced abortions and sterilisations, mass incarceration and executions. These were directed at abolishing any collective units of society which might threaten the hegemony of the State, breaking down traditional allegiances to family and religion to ensure absolute “equality” of all. I do not think it an overstatement to see the influence of de Sade at work in the Olympic opening ceremony’s celebration of the revolutionary spirit.

More than an “invisible friend”

A dear friend of mine, Eliot Wilson, is an excellent and erudite conservative political blogger and confirmed atheist of the Dawkins and Fry old-school. Upset by what he sees as heavy-handed approaches by mostly Evangelical Christians to baptise his entire political movement, he recently penned a scathing Substack post arguing that conservatism does not need an “invisible friend.” So far as that goes, I agree. But God, whilst admittedly both invisible and, in Christ, my friend, is rather more than the sum of those two parts. As an invisible friend, He is unnecessary to the conservative movement, though even just as such may prove rather more useful to it than Dr Wilson allows. As the absolute metaphysical reality of unity, goodness and truth, however, I would suggest that God is necessary both to the conservative project and to human flourishing tout court.

Conservatives of a classically liberal, Spectatorish persuasion may be convinced that a rational consensus about the common good is enough to hold society together. Experience increasingly suggests that this is not so. In his essay, Truth and Freedom, Pope Benedict identified two streams in the Enlightenment. One was the broadly French and atheistic stream characterised rather one-sidedly above, whose Olympian adherents "dream of total, absolutely unregimented freedom,” imagining that "reason ... is contrary to nature, and corrupts and contradicts it."  The other is the Anglo-Saxon stream, characterised “by a natural rights orientation and proclivity for constitutional democracy, which it conceives as the only realistic system of freedom.” Benedict, unlike certain modern anti-Enlightenment agitators, values human rights, seeing them as “political,” in that they protect the individual from the kind of state absolutism Ratzinger witnessed take hold of his own country, but also “metaphysical,” because of their implication “that there is an ethical and legal claim in being itself,” or that “nature contains spirit, ethos, and dignity.” While one might not need an “invisible friend” to guarantee one’s personal moral behaviour, what is lacking in modern political discourse is any absolute reason to attribute value to individual humans at all. Without this, the fundamentals of morality, including the basic taboo against killing fellow humans, are open to the highest bidder.

The aim of the Rousseavian, Sadistic Enlightenment is, Pope Benedict says, “to be at last like a god who depends on nothing and no one, whose freedom is not restricted by that of another:” in other words, to be something like Wilson’s idea of my “invisible friend.” But this is nothing like the Trinitarian God of the Christian tradition which  underpins the Western human rights framework: “the real God is by his very nature entirely being-for (Father), being-from (Son), and being-with (Holy Spirit).” It is because humans bear the image of the Triune God, specifically, and not some arbitrary deity, like a Flying Spaghetti Monster, that human rights make any sense. If we do not acknowledge our existence as mutually dependent on and inherent with that of others, but see ourselves solely as deracinated individuals existing in the freedom of glorious isolation, then there is no reason to accept the doctrine - for that is what is - of human rights at all. We are left instead with a freedom which, ironically, is always in competition with the freedom of others, and so becomes tentative at best, because dependent on others’ whims, and a form of slavery to those whims at worst: the climax of the Sadist’s dream. In the end, it proves no freedom at all, for “freedom to destroy oneself or to destroy another is not freedom but its demonic parody.” Can there be any doubt now that this is the sort of “freedom” with which conservatives are nowadays forced to contend? And do we really think that an appeal to consensus will suffice?

The only alternative is brute force to suppress political opposition. There are plenty of places in the world where one can get that if one wants it. If not, then one is faced with the question of which offers the greater possibility of a society where individual liberties are maintained: one in which all constraining norms are swept away by cynical appeals to reason and the value of human life thereby relativised, or one in which people are recognised as absolutely valuable in their own right precisely through the normative constraints of their inherent relationships with one another.

If one is not willing to make an absolute truth-claim about the value of the human, there is no escaping the former condition, or even justifying the alternative. I for one favour the latter, and see no more rational basis for it than the claim traditionally made by the Christian faith: that humans bear the image of the Triune God, and realise this image (restore its “likeness”) through walking the Way of the Cross. I maintain this not as an irrational belief, but as the fruit of sincerely, if all too often unsuccessfully, attempting to live such a life. If this means that must I live in the realm of the “probable tale,” then so be it. I think that my probable tale is a more rationally coherent basis for living than the nihilistic alternative. I think that it is more likely to be true. And I am quite convinced that, for all the harm that oppressive religiosity has undoubtedly caused, the vacuum of absolute truth in today’s West is demonstrably far, far more harmful.

So, give me poetic realism over Olympic nominalism any time. I would rather assent to the dated Assumption than to the scepticism that has dragged us into the spiritual and intellectual abyss of postmodernity. For as Pope Benedict concludes, “if there is no truth about man, man also has no freedom. Only the truth makes us free.”