The Assumption of the Virgin Mary

On November 1, 1950, the feast of All Saints, Pope Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli, pope 1939-1958) pronounced, before the immense crowd gathered in St Peter's Square, the dogmatic formula:

“By the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ, of the blessed apostles Peter and Paul, and by Our own, We proclaim, declare and define that it is a divinely revealed dogma: the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever-Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory.”^[9]

This formula fulfils the four conditions that the First Vatican Council (constitution Pastor Aeternus, July 18, 1870) had fixed for a pontifical act to be ex cathedra:

1. The pope speaks as universal pastor and teacher of the faithful (and not as a private teacher);
2. He defines a doctrine relating to faith or morals;
3. He engages the supreme authority of the Magisterium;
4. He imposes the belief on the whole Church.

That is precisely what Munificentissimus Deus does. The proclamation was preceded by a long preparation: in May 1946, by the encyclical Deiparae Virginis Mariae, Pius XII had asked the opinion of all the bishops of the Catholic world on the opportuneness and possibility of defining the dogma. Of the 1,232 bishops consulted, 1,210 replied favourably (98%) and 22 expressed reservations, essentially about opportuneness, not about the content^[10].

The typical Protestant objection is to say: “The dogma of the Assumption is not explicitly taught in the Bible, therefore it is a human invention.” This objection tacitly presupposes the Protestant principle of sola scriptura, which, as Lavagna has demonstrated elsewhere in his work, is itself indefensible. Lavagna recalls this in a note:

“The fact that a doctrine is not explicitly present in Scripture does not imply that it is false, since that would presuppose sola scriptura*, which we have already shown to be false. As long as the content of the doctrine is present in apostolic Tradition, that is sufficient for it to be able to belong to the deposit of faith.”*^[11]

That said, several scriptural indications converge towards the Assumption:

The biblical precedent: Enoch, Elijah, Paul

Lavagna notes:

“Contrary to what some think, there is nothing implausible in God raising a person body and soul to Heaven. He had already done so with Enoch, Noah's great-grandfather, and Elijah. Saint Paul also reports the transport of a man to Heaven.”^[12]

The texts in question:

• Gen 5:24: “Enoch walked with God, and he was no more, because God had taken him.” Taken up in Heb 11:5: “by faith, Enoch was taken up, so that he did not see death”.
• 2 Kgs 2:1-11: “Elijah went up to heaven in a whirlwind […] and he went up to heaven in a chariot of fire.”
• 2 Cor 12:2-4: Saint Paul mentions “a man, whether with his body, I do not know; whether without his body, I do not know, God knows, who was caught up to the third heaven”.

If God raised body and soul Enoch and Elijah, neither of whom was conceived without sin, it is coherent and even fitting that he did the same for the Immaculate Mother of God.

The typological argument: Mary as Ark of the New Covenant

The most striking scriptural argument is typological. Lavagna sums it up:

“We know that the corruption of the flesh after death is a consequence of original sin. Now, as Mary was free from all original sin and was ‘the privileged Ark’, it is logical that she was taken directly, body and soul, to Heaven. Indeed, in the unanimous Tradition of the Church, Mary represents both the new Eve and the Ark of the Covenant. Analogies must therefore be sought between the one and the other. The Ark of the Old Covenant was made of acacia wood, reputed inalterable, to such a point that the Greek version of the Septuagint translates ‘acacia’ outright as ‘incorruptible’ or ‘imperishable’. Consequently, if the old Ark of the Covenant could not be subjected to corruption, it was fitting that this should also be the case for the new one.”^[13]

This Old Ark to Mary typology is attested from Saint Ambrose (De institutione virginis, around 391-392) and constitutes one of the pillars of patristic Mariology.

Revelation 11:19 to 12:1: the Ark appears in Heaven

The most direct indication is found in the Revelation of Saint John, where verses 11:19 and 12:1 follow on immediately:

“And the sanctuary of God in heaven was opened, and the ark of his Covenant appeared in his sanctuary. […] Then a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, the moon under her feet, and a crown of twelve stars on her head.”^[14]

The link is striking: scarcely has it been said that “the ark of his Covenant appeared” than the following chapter describes “a woman clothed with the sun”, exactly the traditional iconography of the Assumption. For Tradition, the “woman” of Rev 12 is Mary herself, the “new Ark” raised bodily into heavenly glory. This exegesis, defended by Saint Albert the Great and Saint Bonaventure, and, subject to authenticity, by the commentary on Revelation transmitted under the name of Saint Thomas Aquinas, is explicitly taken up by Pius XII in Munificentissimus Deus (§ 27)^[15].

Why the Bible says no more

Lavagna also answers the objection of New Testament silence with a simple historical argument:

“The fact that the Assumption is not mentioned in Scripture is perhaps explained by the fact that Mary was probably around 48 years old at the crucifixion of her Son; one may suppose that, if she had lived more than 80 years, she would still have had to be alive after most of the texts of the New Testament had been written. It is therefore not surprising if the Bible is silent on this subject.”^[16]

The writing of the New Testament extends, according to academic consensus, from the 50s (Paul's first letters) to the 90s-100 (Revelation and the Johannine epistles). The date of Mary's Dormition / Assumption would be situated, according to Tradition, around the years 47-58, that is, in the middle of the writing of the New Testament. It is therefore historically normal that the evangelists did not have to mention an event which had not yet taken place, or which had only just taken place without yet having crystallised theological reflection.

One of the strongest arguments in favour of the Assumption is paradoxically an argument a silentio of considerable scope. The primitive Church testified, from the 2nd century, to an intense devotion to relics: bones, garments and fragments of the holy martyrs were preciously preserved, venerated, exchanged between local Churches, deposited in eucharistic altars (a practice taken up at the Second Council of Nicaea in 787).

Now, as Lavagna observes:

“The Catholic Church has judged it remarkable that no one has ever claimed to possess relics of Mary (a notable fact since devotion to relics spread very quickly in the primitive Church).”^[17]

And he adds, relying on the medievalist Stephen J. Shoemaker (University of Oregon), the reference specialist on ancient Marian traditions (Ancient Traditions of the Virgin Mary's Dormition and Assumption, Oxford University Press, 2002):

“Another indication is that the first Christians had the habit of collecting the bones of the martyrs and saints, but none of these relics has been found for Mary.”^[18]

No city has ever claimed to be the depository of Mary's bodily relics. This argument a silentio is all the more striking in that we know of the rivalry between Ephesus and Jerusalem over the place of Mary's death, yet neither of the two cities ever claimed to possess her occupied tomb. That is exactly what one would expect if the Virgin had indeed been “assumed body and soul into heavenly glory”.

At least seven major patristic witnesses (including the five cited by Lavagna, completed here by Saint Germanus of Constantinople and Saint Andrew of Crete, presented below in paraphrase) speak openly of the Assumption from the 6th to the 8th century. This tradition crystallises a received belief, not a theological innovation. Here are the textual quotations:

Saint Gregory of Tours (538-594)

Bishop of Tours, historian of the Franks and one of the greatest Merovingian hagiographers, in The Eight Books of Miracles, Book I:

“The apostles laid her body on a bier, placed it in a tomb and kept watch over it while awaiting the Lord. And behold, the Lord stood before them; and the holy body having been raised, He ordered that it be carried to heaven in a cloud, where henceforth, united to her soul, [Mary] rejoices with the elect of the Lord.”^[19]

And further on:

“But Mary, the glorious Mother of Christ, who is believed to be a virgin both before and after she bore him, has, as we said above, been translated to Paradise, amid the singing of angelic choirs, where the Lord had preceded her.”^[20]

Pseudo-Timothy of Jerusalem (6th-7th century)

In a Homily on Simeon and Anna:

“Consequently, the Virgin is immortal to this day, seeing that he who had dwelt in her transported her into the regions of her assumption.”^[21]

Saint Modestus of Jerusalem (537-634)

Patriarch of Jerusalem (630-634), witness and restorer of the holy places after the Persian invasion (614), in his Encomium in Dormitionem Sanctissimae Dominae Nostrae Deiparae Semperque Virginis Mariae (PG 86-II, 3306), § 14:

“As the most glorious Mother of Christ, the Saviour our God, author of life and immortality, she is made alive, in an eternal incorruptibility of her body, by the very One who raised her from the tomb and took her up to himself, as he alone knows her.”^[22]

Theoteknos of Livias (7th century, † around 650)

Palestinian bishop, in a Homily on the Assumption:

“It was fitting […] that the most holy body of Mary, the God-bearing body, receptacle of God, divinised, incorruptible, illumined by divine grace and full of grace, […] should be entrusted to the earth for a moment and raised to heaven in glory, with her soul pleasing to God.”^[23]

Saint John of Damascus (around 676-749)

Doctor of the Church, the last of the great Eastern Fathers, in Encomium in Dormitionem Dei Genitricis Semperque Virginis Mariae, Homily II, § 14 (Greek text in the Patrologia Graeca, vol. 96, col. 741):

“It was necessary that She who had preserved her virginity unstained in childbearing should preserve her body without corruption even after death.”^[24]

In the same homily (§ 18, PG 96, col. 748), the Damascene also reproduces an ancient Eastern account reporting the dispute around the empty tomb, where the apostle Saint Thomas, having arrived after the others, asks to see the body of the Virgin; on opening the sepulchre at Gethsemane, the apostles find only the funeral bands, the body having been transferred to Heaven^[25].

Saint Germanus of Constantinople (around 634-733/740)

Patriarch of Constantinople (715-730), defender of images against Byzantine iconoclasm, author of homilies on the Dormition (PG 98, col. 340-372). In paraphrase: he teaches there that the tomb could not retain the Mother of God and that she has her place beside her Son in glory^[26].

Saint Andrew of Crete (around 660-740)

Archbishop of Crete, one of the greatest Byzantine hymnographers, contemporary and doctrinal companion of John of Damascus. His homilies on the Dormition (PG 97, col. 1045-1109) nourish the liturgical office of August 15 in the East. In paraphrase: he presents the Dormition of the Mother of God there as a passage towards God, and not as a dissolution in death^[27].

Lavagna concludes:

“Let us add above all that a great number of Church Fathers believed in the Assumption. […] Despite the schism of 1054, the Orthodox Church believes in the Assumption and celebrates it, like the Catholic Church.”^[28]

Summary table of the patristic witnesses

The following table summarises the principal patristic witnesses who, from the 6th to the 8th century, attest the bodily Assumption of Mary as a received tradition, not as a theological innovation:

Historical finding: seven major patristic witnesses, spread over three centuries (6th to 8th), from Frankish Gaul to Byzantine Palestine, converge on the bodily Assumption. This convergence receives an earlier liturgical and iconographic tradition, of which the accounts of the Transitus Mariae are a narrative witness: their oldest preserved and discussed recensions date at the earliest to the end of Antiquity, the 5th to 6th centuries according to Shoemaker (2002)^[29].

The argument a silentio on the absence of Marian relics (cf. previous section) finds an archaeological confirmation south-east of Jerusalem, in the Kidron Valley, at the foot of the Mount of Olives. There stands today the Church of the Tomb of the Virgin (Mariamgrab), a cruciform domed building built in the 12th century by the Crusaders above a Byzantine crypt dated to the 5th century^[30].

According to the tradition transmitted by Saint John of Damascus in his Encomium II in Dormitionem (§ 18, PG 96, col. 748), himself reporting an earlier account attributed to Saint Juvenal, Patriarch of Jerusalem (died around 458):

“Emperor Marcian and Empress Pulcheria having asked Saint Juvenal, Patriarch of Jerusalem, where the body of the Mother of God was, the holy bishop replied that at the prayer of the apostles gathered at the death of the Virgin, her tomb had been opened on the third day; the apostles found the funeral bands intact but did not find the body. The holy Mother of God had been transferred body and soul to heavenly glory.”^[31]

This account reaches us transmitted by Saint John of Damascus in the 8th century, who attributes it to Juvenal of Jerusalem on the occasion of the Council of Chalcedon (451). Its historical authenticity is debated: it counts as a tradition reported in the 8th century, not as a direct testimony of the 5th century nor as a living memory of the primitive Church.

The Franciscan excavations of the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum, conducted by Fr Bellarmino Bagatti, OFM, and published with Frs Michele Piccirillo and Alberto Prodomo (New Discoveries at the Tomb of Virgin Mary in Gethsemane, SBF, Collectio Minor no. 17, Jerusalem, 1975; later update by Fr Eugenio Alliata in the Liber Annuus, 2006)^[32], confirmed that the Byzantine crypt situated beneath the Crusaders' church encloses a funeral building cut into the rock from the 1st century, conforming to the type of Jewish tombs with kokhim (loculus) of the Second Temple period. The tomb never contained a body claimed to be that of the Virgin, a remarkable fact in view of the intense medieval trade in secondary Marian relics (veil, hair, virginal milk) whose fragments all the Churches of East and West disputed. The body of Mary, however, is claimed nowhere.

One of Lavagna's most striking arguments concerns the first Protestant reformers themselves, who, before anti-Roman polemic hardened their positions, continued to receive the doctrine of the Assumption:

“Those who claim that it is a 20th-century invention are mistaken. For example, the Protestant reformer Heinrich Bullinger had affirmed in 1539: ‘The pure and immaculate Virgin Mary, the temple of the Holy Spirit, had her holy body carried to heaven, by the angels.’”^[33]

Heinrich Bullinger (1504-1575) is not just any theologian: he is Zwingli's direct successor in Zurich, the author of the Second Helvetic Confession (1566) which remains one of the major confessional texts of Reformed Calvinism. His recognition of the Assumption in 1539, that is, 22 years after Luther posted the 95 theses, demonstrates that this doctrine was considered part of the common Christian Tradition before polemical radicalisation.

Lavagna cites this source from Trent Horn, The Case for Catholicism (Ignatius Press, 2017), p. 336, who reports this affirmation of 1539, whose Latin text is read in Bullinger's De origine erroris libri duo (Zurich, 1539)^[34]. Horn notes, however, that Bullinger subsequently expressed less assurance on this doctrine (“though he expressed less confidence in the doctrine later in his life”): the adherence of 1539, prior to confessional hardening, was therefore not his constant position. But Bullinger is not isolated: before anti-Roman polemic hardened positions, Martin Luther himself preached on the Assumption at least until 1522, without condemning it, although he finally rejected the opportuneness of the dogma out of methodological hostility to the principle of magisterial authority, not out of rejection of the content^[35].

This partial continuity between Catholicism and early Protestantism is explained: it was not the doctrine of the Assumption that divided the Reformation of the 16th century, but the principle of magisterial authority which would make it possible to define such a dogma. The debate of 1950 will therefore be ecclesiological before being Mariological.

Beyond the main objection of “New Testament silence”, several other difficulties are regularly raised against the dogma, by evangelical Protestants, critical rationalists, and even certain ill-informed traditional Catholics.

Objection 1: “Pius XII invented a dogma without ecumenical consensus”

Answer: The objection ignores that the definition of 1950 was preceded by a universal consultation of the episcopate, the broadest consultation in the recent history of the Magisterium.

From May 1, 1946, by the encyclical Deiparae Virginis Mariae, Pius XII asked the opinion of all the bishops of the Catholic world on two questions:

1. Are you favourable to the definability of the dogma of the Assumption?
2. Do you personally ask, with your clergy and your people, that it be defined?

Of 1,232 bishops consulted, the replies gathered in August 1950 by the Sacra Congregatio S. Officii were: 1,210 placet in favour (98.2%), 22 placet iuxta modum (reservations about opportuneness, not content), 0 doctrinal non placet^[36]. The Dominican theologian Yves Congar, a contemporary of the consultation, sees in it the most explicit and vast episcopal consensus of modern times: not a solitary decision of the pope, but the formal culmination of a faith already universally shared^[37].

The theologian Hubert du Manoir, SJ, in his reference work Maria. Études sur la sainte Vierge (Beauchesne, 1949-1971, 8 vols.), stresses that from 1849, a century before the definition, the Catholic episcopate consulted by Pius IX for the Immaculate Conception had already sent up the Marian petition for the definition of the Assumption^[38].

Objection 2: “The tomb at Ephesus contradicts that at Jerusalem”

Answer: This objection deserves serious examination because two competing traditions exist: one situates Mary's Dormition at Jerusalem (with her koimēsis on Mount Zion and her tomb at Gethsemane), the other at Ephesus (with the house of the Virgin at Panaya Kapulu, rediscovered in the 19th c. from the visions of Anne Catherine Emmerich, and recognised as a place of prayer by Leo XIII in 1896).

The decisive point for the argument of the Assumption: neither of the two traditions claims Mary's body. Whether the Dormition took place at Jerusalem or at Ephesus, no city has ever claimed to possess her bones. That is what is unique: for all the other venerable figures of the 1st century (the apostles, Saint Stephen, the holy women), cities on the contrary dispute the relics. The argument a silentio holds whatever the place of the earthly death^[39].

Objection 3: “The Transitus Mariae are apocrypha: nothing can be founded on them”

Answer: The objection commits a fundamental methodological confusion.

The Transitus Mariae, a corpus of around sixty recensions in Greek, Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopian, Latin, Armenian, Georgian and Arabic, are indeed apocrypha (in the technical sense: non-canonical pseudepigraphical works)^[40]. Their oldest preserved and discussed recensions date at the earliest to the end of Antiquity, the 5th to 6th centuries according to Shoemaker (2002).

But the Church does not found the dogma on the authority of these apocrypha: she relies on the convergence of four independent strands:

1. Liturgy: the feast is celebrated before precise theological formulation (5th c. at Jerusalem, 6th c. at Byzantium, 7th c. at Rome).
2. Apostolic Tradition transmitted orally, attested by the convergent patristic convergence of the 6th to 8th c.
3. Biblical typology (Ark, Woman crowned of Rev 12) interpreted by the Fathers.
4. The universal sensus fidei of the Christian people, recognised by Pius XII (Munificentissimus Deus §§ 12-13)^[41].

The contribution of the Transitus is historical, not doctrinal: they testify that the belief was widespread in Eastern Christian communities at the end of Antiquity, the 5th to 6th centuries according to Shoemaker (2002). But their role is not that of a source of authority: it is that of a narrative witness to the diffusion of this faith.

Objection 4: “The dogma contradicts Heb 9:27: ‘it is appointed for men to die once and after that comes judgment’”

Answer: The objection presupposes that the Assumption would deny Mary's death. Yet the dogmatic formula of 1950 remains prudently indeterminate on this point. Pius XII uses the expression “having completed the course of her earthly life” (expleto terrestris vitae cursu), deliberately chosen to leave open the question, discussed among theologians, of whether Mary knew a true death followed by an anticipated resurrection, or whether she was assumed without knowing death.

The theologian Aloïs Müller, in Marie, Mère et Reine selon le Magistère (Cerf, 1965), sums it up:

“The dogmatic text does not settle the question of Mary's death. It defines the bodily and glorious Assumption, body and soul, while leaving theologians free to discuss whether this glorification was preceded by a true passing.”^[42]

Majority position of Catholic tradition (Byzantine Tradition, Saint John of Damascus, Lumen Gentium § 59: “perdurato terrestris vitae cursu”): Mary knew a true death, but her body did not know corruption in the tomb, and she was immediately raised and assumed, a glorious anticipation of the general resurrection. This position respects Heb 9:27 without difficulty: Mary dies and is judged by her Son, but her resurrection is anticipated.

Objection 5: “The Assumption is a pagan copy of Greco-Roman apotheoses”

Answer: The objection comes from the historico-critical school of the 19th century (R. Bultmann, M. Dibelius, M.-J. Lagrange critic). It assimilates the Assumption to Roman apotheosis (the Senate “divinising” the deceased emperor, like Augustus in AD 14 or Marcus Aurelius in 180) or to Greek catasterism accounts (Heracles, Astraea, Ganymede).

The comparison does not hold, for four decisive reasons:

1. Roman apotheosis is juridical: it is the Senate that decrees the divinisation of the emperor, a human act. The Marian Assumption is strictly divine initiative: Mary is not divinised, she is transferred bodily by grace.
2. Roman apotheosis concerns the soul alone: the emperor's body is burned, and it is only his genius that goes up to heaven. The Catholic Assumption on the contrary affirms bodily assumption, the exact opposite of pagan soul/body dualism.
3. The typology is Jewish, not Greek: Enoch (Gen 5:24), Elijah (2 Kgs 2:11), Moses (according to the Testament of Moses, Jewish traditions) precede and prepare the Assumption. The background context is Old Testament, not Hellenistic.
4. The dating contradicts the hypothesis of a simple pagan copy: the oldest preserved recensions of the Transitus Mariae emerge, according to Shoemaker (2002), in Syria, Palestine and Egypt at the end of Antiquity, the 5th to 6th centuries, in Eastern Christian milieux, and not as a borrowing from Greco-Roman apotheoses^[43].

Objection 6: “The silence of the Fathers of the first five centuries is suspect”

Answer: This “silence” is in large part an optical effect of the selection of sources.

First, several ancient witnesses exist, simply more discreet than the great homilies of the 7th to 8th c.:

• Saint Epiphanius of Salamis (around 315-403), in the Panarion (haeresis 78, § 11, around 376), remains agnostic on Mary's end: in faithful paraphrase of the text cited by Carol, Mariology II, pp. 139-140, Scripture is silent, we do not know whether she died nor whether she was buried, and her end is unknown. Epiphanius is therefore not a positive witness to the Assumption^[44].
• Saint Ambrose of Milan (339-397), in De institutione virginis (chap. 14), teaches the Mary as new Ark of the Covenant typology which directly prepares the doctrine of incorruption^[45].
• Saint Ephrem the Syrian (around 306-373), in his Hymns on the Nativity 11 and 12, has Mary say that the Child she bears bears her. The Catholic Encyclopedia notes this image as seeming to suggest a translation; it does not sing, in these hymns, a glorious transfiguration of Mary on her departure from this world in clearly assumptionist terms^[46].

Next, the “silence” of the oldest Fathers is explained by their Christological priority. The 2nd to 5th centuries are obsessed by the great Trinitarian and Christological controversies: Nicaea (325), Constantinople (381), Ephesus (431), Chalcedon (451). Mariology is still in the service of Christology: the Virgin is above all defined as Theotokos, Mother of God, to defend the divinity of the Son. The explicit development of autonomous Mariology appears only after the major Trinitarian definitions.

That is exactly the classic pattern of the homogeneous development of dogma set out by Newman in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845): truths present implicitly in the apostolic deposit unfold slowly as questions arise. The relative silence of the first five centuries is therefore not proof of absence: it is the normal character of every doctrine that unfolds historically.

The Assumption is not an isolated dogma: it fits into the complete doctrinal coherence of the mystery of salvation.

Consequence of the Immaculate Conception

If Mary was preserved from original sin from her conception (dogma defined by Pius IX in Ineffabilis Deus, December 8, 1854), and if the corruption of the body after death is a direct consequence of original sin (Gen 3:19; Rom 5:12), it is theologically coherent that Mary was withdrawn from corruption in the tomb. Pius XII makes the link explicitly in Munificentissimus Deus (§ 5 and § 39).

Anticipation of the resurrection of bodies

The Catechism (§ 966), and Lumen Gentium (§ 59), present the Assumption as an anticipation and guarantee of the final resurrection of the just: “The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin is a singular participation in the Resurrection of her Son and an anticipation of the resurrection of other Christians”^[47].

Mary, “eschatological icon” of the Church

Vatican II, in Lumen Gentium (§§ 68-69), teaches that Mary is “the image and beginning of the Church which must have its fulfilment in the age to come”: what she already is, assumed body and soul in glory, the whole Church will be at the end of time^[48].

John Paul II, in his great Mariological catechetical cycle of Wednesday audiences (1995-1997), specifies this eschatological scope:

“Beside the risen Christ, there is a woman, his own mother: new Adam and new Eve, they both announce the final resurrection of bodies.” Saint John Paul II, general audience of July 9, 1997, devoted to the Assumption^[49]

Mary, firstfruits of the resurrection of glorified bodies

Thomist teaching on the four qualities of the glorified body, impassibility, subtlety, agility, clarity (Saint Thomas, Summa contra Gentiles IV, 84-86), finds in the Assumption its first realisation outside Christ.

The Catechism takes up this doctrine at § 999 (resurrection of bodies) and applies it explicitly to the Assumption at § 974: “Having completed the course of her earthly life, the Most Holy Virgin was assumed body and soul to heavenly glory, where she already participates in the glory of the resurrection of her Son, anticipating the resurrection of all the members of his body.”^[50]

Mary in the Divine Will: the Assumption as crowning of the Fiat

For the spiritual current issuing from the Servant of God Luisa Piccarreta (1865-1947), close to Ignispedia, the Assumption is not an isolated event: it is the natural crowning of a whole life lived in the Divine Will. Mary is the first creature to have lived always and without interruption in the divine Fiat, the “let it be done” by which God creates and acts, from her Immaculate Conception to her last earthly breath. Now to live in the Divine Will is not simply to do the will of God like an obedient servant: it is to receive the divine Will itself, which lives and acts in the soul. Her anticipated bodily glorification is the coherent consequence of this perfect communion of love.

The Mariological theology of the Divine Will illuminates the intimate link between the three great Marian privileges: Immaculate Conception (beginning without sin), divine maternity (centre of life), Assumption (glorious crowning). The three form a single coherent economy.

The article Mary in the Kingdom of the Divine Will develops this mystical dimension proper to the spirituality of Luisa Piccarreta.

The Assumption in Christian iconography

The iconography of the Dormition / Assumption crystallised in two great parallel traditions, Byzantine and Latin, whose convergence is itself an argument for the doctrine.

This transversal iconographic convergence (Byzantine East, Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque West) corroborates doctrinal continuity: there is no sudden invention in the 20th century, but uninterrupted transmission of a received faith, expressed now in a homily, now in an icon, now in monumental sculpture.

• The communion of saints and intercession
• The perpetual virginity of Mary
• Mary in the Kingdom of the Divine Will
• The Immaculate Conception
• Mary, Mother of God (Theotokos)
• Papal infallibility
• The Council of Trent

Main sources