The History of the Feast of the Assumption

·THE HISTORY OF THE FEAST OF THE ASSUMPTION THERE are many feasts of the Blessed Virgin in the Calendar of the Yvestern and Eastern Churches but of them all the Feast of the Assumption is the greatest and most important. Some regard it as the oldest feast of Our Lady and apparently with good reason. At the present time when attention is directed so much to the doctrine of the bodily Assumption of the Mother of God into heaven it is most opportune to look into the history of this feast, which bears witness to the venerable antiquity of devotion to Mary, as the ever-Virgin and Mother of God. It illustrates in many ways the whole background of the veneration of Saints in the early Church and the manner of the liturgical observance of their dies natalis. Besides that it exemplifies the early Christian attitude toward church-building and the honors paid the tombs of the saints, and brings to life many aspects of the entire Liturgy of the Church. It is well to observe at the outset that the cultus paid the Mother of God by the Church existed long before the institution of any feast in her honor. This veneration was expressed by the building of churches dedicated to Mary by Constantine who is said to have built three churches to her in his new capital on the Golden Horn. Grisar is of the opinion that there was a church dedicated to the Blessed Virgin in Rome long before the Basilica of Saint Mary Major, generally regarded as the oldest church of our Lady in Rome. This is the church of Santa Maria Antiqua and is regarded by Grisar as the oldest church known to have been dedicated to our Lady not only i:n the Eternal City, but in the world.1 There was another 1 Grisar, History of Rome and the Popes in the Middle Ages, Vol. I, no. 168. 118 THE HISTORY OF THE FEAST OF THE ASSUMPTION 119 ancient church dedicated to our Lady at Ephesus which we know existed at the time of the Council there in 481, and there seems to have been still another at Jerusalem which we will have occasion to refer to later on in this article. There is no certain or definite evidence of a liturgical cult of the Blessed Virgin before the fifth centm:y, and all efforts to discover any traces before that time have failed. But when we remember that the feast of Christmas can be traced to the fourth century it is not surprising that the liturgical cult of Mary should be later. Such veneration is the product of time, of slow maturing and ripening. The decree of the Council of Ephesus in 481 proclaiming Mary as Mother of God gave impetus to honoring her in the Liturgy. The keeping of the festivals of the saints grew out of the solemn commemoration of the dies natalis of the martyrs, which took place at their tombs and was closely related to the place of their burial. Later on this commemoration was extended to the other classes of saints-virgins, confessors, widows. For this reason the place of the death and burial of the Blessed Virgin. is of great importance here, because as far as anyone can see the liturgical cultus of the Mother of God followed the same rule; it began with the commemoration of her dies natalis. In the course of time many names have been given to what we call now the Feast of the Assumption. It is interesting and even necessary to consider them because they have been so diverse and various and because of the almost complete changes in meaning they have undergone. The Greeks called it koimesis, or " Falling Asleep," which the Lati:p.s translated literally into dormitio or pausatio; sometimes they replaced it by transitus or depositio. Strictly speaking the first two refer to the death of the Blessed Virgin, but we must beware of a too narrow interpretation of the word, because these words,in practice included the idea, not only of the death but also the resurrection and the assumption. The same is true of...