Somebody mentioned the Assumption of Mary, and I wondered what the Orthodox thought and looked it up. They called it the Dormition and the Wikipedia reference mentioned this book, which the University library had on hand. The book is based on Shoemaker's doctoral thesis and is pretty heavy going, with a highly academic style, barbs at other scholars, footnotes galore and parallel versions of the stories in the appendices.
Catholics decided in 1950 that Mary went to heaven either directly without dying or after a resurrection (it wasn't entirely explicit which). The natural reaction of a Protestant is “where'd that come from?” Shoemaker contributed this volume to a body of scholarship surrounding the oldest stories of Mary's death—-which come from about the 5'th century.
He emphasizes that there are no records of anything dealing with her death before this.
His approach to the various stories of her assumption/resurrection/whatever is basically literary. He categorizes the stories based on literary affinity (Bethlehem narratives involve a second house for Mary outside Jerusalem at Bethlehem, Palm narratives have her being given a magic palm branch, etc) Some are clearly later, and have been sanitized of some of the heterodox features of the earlier works.
His analysis claims that the various categories of stories arose independently and do not derive from each other. The earliest, in his view, is the Palm group of stories, several of which are prefaced with a prologue explaining how the absence of a record of Mary's death had prompted the writers to go in search of the true story. He takes this (and I agree) to mean that there was no agreed-on story of Mary's death during the previous centuries—and I take that to mean that none existed; that any record of Mary's fate was lost and never recovered.
The various categories of story don't agree with each other, of course, and even within a category there are disagreements on the nature of Paradise that translate in modern theological categories into either an immortal Mary (never died, taken directly to heaven) or resurrected Mary taken to heaven. As he points out, these modern categories are not the most relevant ones to apply to the 5'th century texts.
And about those texts—the early ones (before sanitizing) are gnostic through and through, with secret knowledge and obscurities galore. They are not Gospel—not even close—and are very heavy going. Pius fiction, yes. Gnostic mysteries, yes. (He doesn't like to use the word “gnostic,” but the themes of hidden knowledge needed for salvation are quite strong and that's the gnosis of gnostic.) The attitude towards mystery is completely different from the canonical writings (except the Revelation of John, which is excusable as prophecy). Chesterton had his Father Brown say: "Real mystics don't hide mysteries, they reveal them. They set a thing up in broad daylight, and when you've seen it it's still a mystery. But the mystagogues hide a thing in darkness and secrecy, and when you find it, it's a platitude."
Shoemaker agrees that there must have been some prior (now completely lost) source from which all these collections came, but does not speculate on what it might have been. So I will.
The disagreements about details within a category like Palm suggests that the source wasn't specific—perhaps laconic in description. The fact that different categories stride off in such different directions suggests that the authors felt free to embellish (gnostic writers seem to have had an extremely elastic notion of “historical fact” to begin with), or perhaps even constrained to elaborate. The various authors filled in from within their own local interests. And this original, not preserved by anybody, may not have been written down at all. It was widespread, whatever it was.
I'd guess the original was a song—necessarily unspecific about all the details. Mary was already something of a big deal, and if someone were to write a popular song it would undoubtedly inspire writers to come up with longer stories to fill in all the details.
In any event, these stories are valueless for documenting anything about Mary. They tell a little of what gnostics thought about her, but that's of little use.
If you're curious about the topic, read the book, or another in the field.
No comments:
Post a Comment