Mary's Assumption From a Philosophical Point of View
On this, the 60th anniversary of the declaration of the Dogma of the Assumption (1st November, 1950), it is worthwhile recalling these great words. The following discussion is derived mainly from the then Bishop Fulton Sheen's The World's First Love (1953), chapter 11: "The Assumption and the Modern World”.
The author begins with the definition of the Immaculate Conception, which, he said, was made when the Modern World was born. For, within five years of that date, and within six months of the apparition of Lourdes where Mary said: "I am the Immaculate Conception", Charles Darwin wrote his Origin of Species, Karl Marx completed his Introduction to the Critique of the Philosophy of Hegel ("Religion is the opium of the people"), and John Stuart Mill published his Essay on Liberty. But the best blueprint for an ideal world that the spirit of the world could devise in the case of these thinkers, led to two world wars in twenty-one years, and the threat of a third. Darwin distracted man's mind from its Divine Origin by placing before it the promise of an unlimited future when he would become a kind of God. Marx was so impressed with this idea of inevitable progress that he asked Darwin if he would accept a dedication of one of his books.
Then, following Feuerbach, Marx affirmed not a bourgeois atheism of the intellect, but an atheism of the will, in which man hates God because man is God. Mill reduced the freedom of the new man to licence and the right to do as he pleases, thus preparing "a chaos of conflicting egotisms, which the world would resolve by Totalitarianism".
If these philosophers were right, and if man is naturally good and capable of deification through his own efforts, then it follows that everyone is immaculately conceived. The Catholic Church arose in protest and affirmed that only one human person is immaculately conceived, that man is prone to sin, and that freedom is best preserved when, like Mary, a creature answers Fiat to the Divine Will.
The Dogma of the Immaculate Conception killed the false optimism of the inevitable and necessary progress of man without God. Modern man watched in despair as war upon war followed. Hardly an indication of progress. Man, once having boasted that he came from the beast, now found himself to be acting as a beast.
Then came the reaction. The 'Optimistic Man' who boasted of his immaculate conception, now became the 'Pessimistic Man' who could see within himself "nothing but a bundle of libidinous, dark, cavernous drives". As in the definition of the Immaculate Conception, the Church had to remind the world that perfection is not biologically inevitable; so now in the definition of the Assumption, it had to give hope to the creature of despair. "Modern despair is the effect of a disappointed hedonism and centres principally around Sex and Death. To these two ideas, which preoccupy the modern mind, the Assumption is indirectly related".
The primacy that Sex is given today is due to a great extent to Sigmund Freud, who basically reduced human actions and customs to sexual impulses. Along similar lines, Freud was also obsessed with explaining what is known as "the Oedipus complex".
The other major concern of modern thought is Death. "The beautiful philosophy of being is reduced to Dasein (basically, ‘existence’), which is only in-der-Welt-sein (basically, ‘being in the world’). There is no freedom, no spirit, no personality".
Jean-Paul Sartre passes from a phenomenology of sexuality to that which he calls "nausea", or a brazen confrontation of nothingness. Nothing precedes man; nothing follows man. Whereas God had created the world ex nihilo, that is 'out of nothingness'; Sartre creates nothingness out of the world and the despairing human heart.
"Man is a useless passion".
Agnosticism and pride were the twin errors that the Church had to meet in the Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception; now it is the despair resulting from Sex and Death it has to meet in this hour.
When the Agnostics of the last century began to re-discover worldly pleasures, they became libertines. "But when pleasure diminished and made hungry where most it satisfied, the agnostics, who had become libertines by attaching themselves to the world, now began in disgust to withdraw themselves from the world and became philosophers of Existentialism. Philosophers like Sartre, and Heidegger, and others are born of a detachment from the world, not as the Christian ascetic, because he loves God, but because they are disgusted with the world. They become contemplatives, not to enjoy God, but to wallow in their despair, to make a philosophy out of it, to be brazen about their boredom, and to make death the centre of their destiny. The new contemplatives are in the monasteries of the jaded, which are built not along the waters of Siloe [beside Jerusalem], but along the dark banks of the Styx [the mythical river of Hades]".
From a philosophical point of view, the Doctrine of the Assumption meets the modern Sex-Death ("Eros-Thanatos") philosophy head on, by lifting humanity from the darkness of Sex and Death to the light of Love and Life. These are the two philosophical pillars on which rests the belief in the Assumption.
1. Love. The Assumption affirms not Sex but Love. St. Thomas, in his inquiry into the effects of love, mentions ecstasy as one of them. In ecstasy one is "lifted out of" one's body. Love, like fire, burns upward, since it is basically desire. It seeks to become more and more united with the object that is loved.
If God exerts a 'gravitational' pull on all souls, given the intense love of Our Lord for His Blessed Mother which descended, and the intense love of Mary for Her Lord which ascended, there is created a suspicion that love at this stage would be so great as "to pull the body with it". Given further an immunity from original Sin, there would not be in the Body of Our Lady the dichotomy, tension, and opposition that exists in us between body and soul.
Love in its nature is an Ascension in Christ and an Assumption in Mary. Once the earthly love has fulfilled its task, it disappears, as the symbol gives way to reality. The Assumption is not the killing of the 'Eros' but its transfiguration through 'Agape'. That is to say, the Assumption does not imply that love in a body is wrong, but it does hold that it can be so right, when it is Godward, that the beauty of the body itself is enhanced. Our Age of Carnality, which loves the Body Beautiful, is lifted out of its despair, to a Body that is Beautiful because it is a Temple of God.
With one stroke of an infallible dogmatic pen, the Church lifts the sacredness of love out of sex without denying the role of the body in love.
2. Life. Life is the second philosophical pillar on which the Assumption rests. Life is unitive; death is divisive. Goodness is the food of life, as evil is the food of death. Errant sexual impulses are the symbol of the body's division from God as a result of Original Sin. Death is the last stroke of that division. Wherever there is sin, there is multiplicity: hence the Devil says, "My name is Legion; there are many of us" (Mark 5:9). But life is immanent activity. The higher the life, the more immanent is the activity, says St. Thomas Aquinas. The plant drops its fruit from a tree, the animal drops its kind from a separate existence, but the spiritual mind of man begets the fruit of a thought which remains united to the mind, although distinct from it. Hence intelligence and life are intimately related. God is perfect life because of perfect inner intellectual activity.
The Assumption challenges the nothingness of the philosophers of death in a new way. The greatest task of the spiritual leaders of today is to save mankind from despair, into which Sex and fear of Death have cast it. The world that used to say, "Why worry about the next world, when we live in this one?" has finally learned the hard way that, by not thinking about the next life, one cannot even enjoy this life. When optimism completely breaks down and becomes pessimism, the Church holds forth the promise of hope. "Threatened as we are by war on all sides, with death about to be rained from the sky by Promethean fires, the Church defines a truth that has Life at its centre .... As the world fears defeat by death, the Church sings the defeat of death".
As modern materialists teach that man has only a body, but not a soul, so the Church answers: "Then let us begin with a Body". "As the mystical body of the anti-Christ gathers around the tabernacle doors of the cadaver of Lenin, periodically filled with wax to give the illusion of immortality to those who deny immortality, the Mystical Body of Christ bids the despairing to gaze on the two most serious wounds earth ever received: the empty tomb of Christ and the empty tomb of Mary".
In 1854 the Church spoke of the Soul of the Immaculate Conception. In 1950 its language was about the Body: the Mystical Body, the Eucharist, and the Assumption. With deft dogmatic strokes the Church is repeating St. Paul's truth to another pagan age:
"Your bodies are meant for the Lord". There is nothing in a body to beget despair. Man is related to Nothingness, as the Philosophers of Decadentism teach, but only in his origin, not in his destiny. They put Nothingness as the end; the Church puts it at the beginning, for man was created ex nihilo. The modern man gets back to nothingness through despair; the Christian knows nothingness only through self-negation, which is humility. The more that the pagan "nothings" himself, the closer he gets to the hell of despair and suicide. The more the Christian "nothings" himself, the closer he gets to God. Mary went so deep down into Nothingness that She became exalted. "He has regarded the humility of His handmaid". And Her exaltation was also Her Assumption.
Eventually the definition of the Assumption will cure the pessimism and despair of the modern world. Freud, who did so much to develop this pessimism, took as his motto: "If I cannot move the Gods on high, I shall set all hell in an uproar". That uproar which he created will one day be stilled by a Lady as powerful as an "army drawn up in battle array". The age of the "body beautiful" will eventually become the age of the Assumption.
