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The Scandal of the Assumption
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 August 2024
Extract
We should not be ourselves scandalised because the announcement of the definition of Mary's Assumption has scandalised many earnest and honest minds. Bather may we ask whether we have fully appreciated its significance if we ourselves are not in some measure shocked and disturbed. True, the Pope will tell us nothing that we have not always taken for granted as part and parcel of the Catholic faith; we have meditated upon it in the last two decades of the Rosary, we have celebrated unquestioningly every August 15th. Yet it is no obvious, easily credible commonplace which is to he formally proclaimed to be an article of our faith; rather does it tax and test our faith to the utmost, and present a crucial challenge to our profession of acceptance of the central Christian mystery.
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- Copyright © 1950 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Faber & Faber, 1948.
2 London, 1942.
3 Eranos Jahrbuch, 1948.
4 See c. G. Jung, Psycholonie und Alchemie, but cf. F. Sherwood Taylor, The Alchemists.
5 cf. Jung, op. cit, p. 540.
6 cf. St Thomas, Summa Theol. III, 3, 1: dicitur enlm (wsumere quasi ad si sumere ('to assume’ means as it were ‘to take to oneself'.).
7 These ancient Stoics were probably not so stoical, nor the Epicureans such epicures as we might suppose. But it is interesting that they represent two opposite solutions of the human flesh-spirit conflict: the Stoics the exaltation of universal Mind at the expense of the individual flesh and its parts and passions, the Epicureans the enslavement of the spirit for the refined satisfactions of the flesh.
8 St lreuaeus, The Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching, tr. and ed. J. Armitage Robiusou (1020), chap. 33.
9 A few somewhat technical theological points may here be suggested for meditation: 1. At the Incarnation, the three divine Persons ‘assume’ a created human nature (not a human person) into hypostatic union with the Person of the Son: Jesus Christ is one single Person, the Son of God, in two Natures, divine and human: (iod and man is one single Being (habct unum esse). At the Assumption of our Lady, the three divine Persons ‘assume’ a human person into the one glory of the one Godhead: her human personality, being and nature remain intact in their pure creatureliness. For all her supreme participation in the divine glory and vision, she eternally remains purely human in her nature and personality, and infinitely distinct from the eternal Godhead. 2. The mysteries of Christ (the Incarnation, Atonement, Resurrection, Asccnvion. etc.) are the mysteries of the Redeemer, although also prototypes (caustic r.vcmplarcs) of the processes through which we must attain redemption. But the mysteries of Mary arc exclusively those of the redeemed: the first and supreme specimen fif we may so express it) of the effects of Christ's saving work. It is ‘in view of the merits of Christ’ that the Church has defined her to have been conceived’ immaculate, and in virtue of the same merits and through the sole power of God she is assumed into heaven. 3. The doctrine of the Assumption, so far from encouraging, should therefore act as a safeguard against ‘Matiolatry’ or any derogation of the infinite all-sufficiency of Christ's merits and mediatorship, or any dilution of the Soli Deo gloria (Glory to God alone) principle. Her glory is entirely his, and none is her own independently of his. Participating in that glory she can in no way detract from it. nor distract us from it; nor can she in any way stand between it and us. The ‘particularity’ of her Assumption, body and soul, into the glory of the one God, ensures that in no sense does she become a Goddess, which can only moan some autonomous and superhuman power. Yet her exaltation by the one God ensures that she is raised above anything ever claimed for any Goddess, and entitles her to all the worthior attributes ever given to one. 4. Nevertheless there is a true and important sense in which the Assumption of our Lady may be called her Apotheosis, Divinisation, even her Deification, though such words must clearly be used only with understanding and caution. Most c'arly Fathers and many spiritual writers regularly use the words thcosis or deificatio for the final sanctification or glorification of all the predestined; somojnies they even called them Gods or God, e.g., in commenting on the words of the Psalm Eyo divi, dii cstis (I said, you are gods). St Thomas follows this usage (e.g., in Summa III, 1, 2, quoting St Augustine's ‘God became man thai Han might become God’), and he justifies and explains it in his careful analysis of the various analogous (i.e., essentially different but related) meanings of the ‘God’ in Summa I, 13, 9 & 10. Thus understood, the Assumption is in a supreme degree a ‘deification', effected, of course, not by the Pope or the Church (who only proclaim it). but by the one God himself (the Summum Anologalum). This 'deification' of a human person, though prior in time and importance in ( christian dispensation, and prototypical of that of the whole Mystical Body, does not seem to differ in kind from that to which God calls us all: it remain a ‘sharing’ or ‘participation’ of Godhead by a purely human being.
10 'God is our Mother', by S.M.A.. O.P.: May, 1945.
11 Especially perhaps in consideration of the ‘notion’ of the Father's innanscibililas:,but far more evidently than in Scholasticism in Eastern ‘apophatic’ (negative) theology.