Do Catholics and Orthodox Believe the Same Thing About the Assumption of Mary?

One of the most significant, and interesting, living theologians is the Anglican theologian N.T. Wright, former bishop of Durham. Last year, Wright wrote in Time Magazine that we get Christianity all wrong when we imagine it’s about escaping earth and going to heaven, and that for the earliest Christians, “the point was not for us to ‘go to heaven,’ but for the life of heaven to arrive on earth. Jesus taught his followers to pray: ‘Thy kingdom come on earth as in heaven.’” In other words, we’re striving for that die in which we can say, “Behold, the dwelling of God is with men. He will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself will be with them” (Rev. 21:3). That’s the Christian promise: not the destruction of the body or of physical creation, but its radical renewal and transformation.

What Wright Gets Right

I think Wright’s argument is mostly correct. One of the perennial foes of Christianity is a sort of radical dualism that treats the spirit as good and the body as bad (and it’s easy to understand how one might misread Romans 8 in this way, for instance). Jesus confronts this idea by declaring that “there is nothing outside a man which by going into him can defile him; but the things which come out of a man are what defile him” (Mark 7:14), and explaining that “out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a man; but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile a man” (Matt. 15:19-20). After all, the origin of sin wasn’t from a material being, like an animal, but from a spiritual one, a fallen angel. And what greater affirmation of the inherent worth of material creation can we find than the Incarnation itself? “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).

Despite this, this sort of persistent rejection of the body and matter is widespread.  To take just one example, plenty of Catholics (as well as plenty of Evangelicals, even folks like John Piper to Ravi Zacharias) have “quoted” C.S. Lewis approvingly for supposedly saying, “You do not have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.” That quotation is a false one, and more to the point, a heretical one that Lewis would have denied. Lewis actually believed that “as image and apprehension are in an organic unity, so, for a Christian, are human body and human soul.” In other words, you are the union of body and soul, and the message of Christianity is that Jesus took on flesh to redeem both. The real Lewis’ position is the position of two thousand years of Christian teaching, but it says something that so many of us hear the fake Lewis quotation and assumption that is the Christian teaching.

What Wright Gets Wrong

Having said this, there is plenty to criticize within Wright’s basic case, particularly when he turns his sights against the Catholic vision. In particular, I want to address his arguments against the Assumption of Mary (today) and Purgatory (next time). The arguments in question are laid out in his book For All the Saints? Remembering the Christian Departed, and the relevant excerpt is available in full here.

His first argument is simply that Scripture and the early Church are silent on the matter. That’s an argument from silence, and not a particularly strong one. Why? Well, considering the fact that (at least according to the traditional dating) virtually all of the New Testament was written while the Virgin Mary was still alive on earth, it’s hardly surprising that there were no reports of an event that had not yet happened, just as we’re not surprised that we don’t see historical accounts of the Resurrection in the Old Testament.

The one book that seems to have been written after the Assumption is Revelation, and that’s where we find a mystical vision of the Mother of Jesus enthroned in Heaven (Rev. 12). It’s fine to say that’s an allegory of the Church and/or Israel (such a belief isn’t contrary to saying that it’s also a depiction of Mary), but it does mean that we find what appears to be a reference to the assumption of Mary in the only book in which we might expect to find it. The Church Fathers treated Mary as “the type of the Church” (to use St. Ambrose’s language), so it needn’t be a question of Mary or the Church being assumed into heaven.

But I’m more fascinated by Wright’s second argument against the Assumption, which is a strange one:

And we might note that the Eastern Orthodox churches, on this as on some other things, agree with the Reformers here against the Latin west. Though attempts are made to align the ‘dormition’ of Mary (her ‘falling asleep’, i.e. her death) with her ‘assumption’, the two are in fact significantly different. The Orthodox say Mary died, and that her body is resting and will eventually be rejoined with her soul; the Romans say she didn’t die, and that both her body and soul are already in heaven.

I say that the argument is strange not because it’s unusual for modern theologians to doubt or deny the Assumption (it isn’t), but because his particular argument is so obviously false. It’s true that Mary’s dormition (her death, or “falling asleep”) is distinct from her assumption (her body and soul being united to Christ in heaven), but it’s not true that the Orthodox Church denies the Assumption of Mary.

Do the Orthodox deny the Assumption?

From the Orthodox Church of America’s website:

The feast of the Dormition or Falling-asleep of the Theotokos is celebrated on the fifteenth of August, preceded by a two-week fast. This feast, which is also sometimes called the Assumption, commemorates the death, resurrection and glorification of Christ’s mother. It proclaims that Mary has been “assumed” by God into the heavenly kingdom of Christ in the fullness of her spiritual and bodily existence.

Similar explanations can be found on the website of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, as well. Or you could consider the numerous Orthodox churches and cathedrals named in honor of the Assumption of Mary. Or you could consider St. John of Damascus, a Church Father venerated as a Saint in both Orthodoxy and Catholicism, who preached numerous homilies on the Assumption for the feast of the Dormition.
Or you could simply look to the Orthodox Liturgy itself: on August 14^th, the eve of the Dormition / Assumption, the Orthodox pray, “The Mother of God is about to rise in glory, / ascending from earth to heaven. / We ceaselessly praise her in song as truly Theotokos.”

(By the way, the Coptic Church believes the same thing as the Catholics and Orthodox – the chief difference being that they celebrate the Dormition and Assumption on two separate days, whereas the Orthodox and Catholics celebrate them as one feast).

Do Catholics deny the Dormition?

Nor is it true that the Catholic Church says that Mary didn’t die. Pius XII, in dogmatically defining the doctrine of the Assumption of Mary, made clear that it doesn’t mean (as Wright claims) that Mary didn’t die. In fact, he quoted the sacramentary that Pope Adrian I (772 – 795) sent to Charlemagne, which said, “Venerable to us, O Lord, is the festivity of this day on which the holy Mother of God suffered temporal death, but still could not be kept down by the bonds of death, who has begotten your Son our Lord incarnate from herself.” Instead, as Pius explains, the doctrine means that by a singular grace, Mary “was not subject to the law of remaining in the corruption of the grave, and she did not have to wait until the end of time for the redemption of her body.”

In support, Pope Pius quotes Saints like St. Francis de Sales (“What son would not bring his mother back to life and would not bring her into paradise after her death if he could?”) and St. Alphonsus Ligouri (“Jesus did not wish to have the body of Mary corrupted after death, since it would have redounded to his own dishonor to have her virginal flesh, from which he himself had assumed flesh, reduced to dust”) who take it for granted that Mary did die, but that her body didn’t see corruption in the tomb.

Conclusion

My point today isn’t to make a full-throated defense of the doctrine of the Assumption, although I think that can be done. It’s merely to say that many of the arguments against the Assumption (even by smart theologians like Wright) are bad, and false, and obviously so. It’s a popular claim for traditionally-minded Anglicans to claim that they’re preserving part of the universal Church’s Tradition against the weird aberrations of Medieval Catholicism or some such. But these claims aren’t true. Anyone denying the Assumption should know that they’re not siding with the Eastern Orthodox against the Roman Catholic West. They’re rejecting the solid consensus of both the East and West that Mary, at the end of her life, was taken body and soul into heaven, and that her body didn’t see corruption in the grave.

One final point: whether Wright agrees with the Assumption of Mary or not, the point I wish he could recognize is that the Assumption is the repudiation of the whole anti-material, anti-body vision of the afterlife that he seems to ascribe to Catholicism. That is, the whole point of the doctrine of the Assumption is that God doesn’t just save Mary’s soul, He saves her body, and that He does this as a sign for the rest of us that by our union with Christ, we can look forward to bodily resurrection.

Mary doesn’t just discard her body like an old husk. It’s preserved from corruption precisely because the body is good. It’s a bit tragic that, in the midst of a book in which Wright labors to make this exact point about the body / matter / creation, he wages an ill-founded war against the doctrine that (after the Resurrection) does the most to defend it.