Happy Feast of the Assumption, everyone.
Mary is assumed body and soul into heaven as the first fruits of the
Resurrection, and heaven and earth rejoice at the sight. We are celebrating the
day in full Madonna House festive style, which I will tell you about tomorrow,
God willing.
Meanwhile, I thought for my blog today I
would share a bit of my licentiate
thesis on the theme of the Assumption. It’s a bit longer than usual, and
just a bit ‘high brow’, but it’s a while since I had anything like that on the
blog, and highbrow or not, it’s really such a beautiful dogma of our faith,
ancient in origin, recent in infallible promulgation, entirely joyful and
lovely. So, after the jump, here it is:
Of the 1950 promulgation of the dogma,
Ratzinger writes:
We were enthused that
in an age which has rediscovered the future and is filled with faith in
progress; an age which refuses to be tied to the past… an age in which the
human person seems to be a being of the future… that in such an age the Church
did not bid us turn our gaze to the past as might have been expected of her.
Instead, she turned us
to the future by interpreting the human person—and this on the basis of her faith—as a being who is yet to come,
a being with an endless future, a being who can attain full stature only by
advancing.
We were enthused that
in an age which has rediscovered matter and this earth of ours and has no place
for any flight to a world beyond, but loves the earth, cleaves to it, seeks to
taste all its preciousness, and wants to live by and of the earth, the Church
again did not respond with an anathema. Instead, she intoned a hymn to the
earth and its permanence. Once again, she spoke more magnanimously and more
forcefully of the earth’s glory than we ourselves would dare have done.[1]
In Mary’s standing as the one who, wholly
as creature, transcends death and dissolution, the pathway out of futility into
hope is made clear in its finality. It is the path described earlier in the
book—embodied freedom abandoning
itself in faith to God.
By surrendering her physicality to God so
that He could make her fruitful, Mary embodies personally the reconfiguration of
human life that salvation has worked, a reconfiguration that removes the
ambivalence of mortality and defeat that hangs over the whole of human history
and establishes man as truly immortal by the grace of the risen Christ. Mary, by giving birth to Life itself,
stands in her assumed glory as the sign and actual attainment of this reality.
Ratzinger writes:
The way human life is,
implanted in a world where death is the condition of life, birth is always
ambivalent, simultaneously a dying and a becoming… birth is part of death, it happens under the sign of
death, and points to the death that it in a certain sense anticipates,
prepares, and also presupposes… now if Mary is really the one giving birth to
God, if she bears him who is the death of death and is life in the full sense
of the word, this being the mother of God is really a ‘new birth’: a new way of
giving birth inserted into the old way.” [2]
In terms of the translation of this victory
over death from Mary to the Church, Ratzinger links death to the very project
of self-determination that pervades modernity. Death results from the futile
attempt to secure one’s own life in independent and autonomous being (cf. Gen
3).
Mary, in her self-abandonment to God, has
nothing of death in her; she is wholly alive. The redeemed individual, insofar
as he or she renounces the project of self-determination, is open to receive
the life from above that bears him or her over the frontier of death. Ratzinger
again:
We are mortal due to
the usurped autarchy of a determination to remain within ourselves, which
proves to be a deception. Death, the impossibility of giving oneself a
foothold, the collapse of autarchy, is not merely a somatic but a human
phenomenon of all-embracing profundity.
Nevertheless, where
the innate propensity to autarchy is totally lacking, where there is the pure
self-dispossession of the one who does not rely upon himself (= grace) death is
absent, even if the somatic end is present. Instead the whole human being
enters salvation, because as a whole, undiminished, he stands eternally in
God’s life-giving memory that preserves him as himself in his own life.[3]
Finally, Mary assumed into heaven body and
soul communicates the ultimate reality and goodness of human life. Her whole
person is carried intact into an unending communion with God and hence unending
life. This implies that the whole of the human person has an eternal value and
destiny: “Heaven means that God has a place for human beings and gives them an
eternal existence.”.[4]
The bodily nature of the Assumption further
communicates a continuity between the life of earth and the immortal life to
come. “Who and what we are now” and “who and what we are to become” are seen,
in the Assumpta, as one continuous personal identity. And this identity
is ultimately sustained and rendered valid and real not by the effort of man or
the cleverness of man, but by the gracious love of the Father which embraces
man and lifts him up beyond himself. One last quote from Ratzinger:
Anyone whom God loves never ceases
to be. In him, in his thinking and loving, it is not just a shadow of us that
continues in being; rather, in him and his creative love we ourselves, with all
that we are and all that is most ourselves, are preserved immortally and
forever in being. It is his love that makes us immortal…
The Assumption means…
that God knows and loves the entire person which we are now. The immortal is
that which is now growing and developing in our present life… what is
imperishable is whatever we have become in our present bodily state; whatever
has developed and grown in us, in our present life, among and by means of the
things of this world. “Christianity promises that what has transpired on this
earth will be eternal. Nothing of what is precious and valuable to us will be
lost… this final and abiding world will be the fulfillment of this earth of
ours.[5]
The rest of my thesis can be found
here, if you like.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.