The Sash of the Theotokos

Bound to the tradition of Thomas at the Dormition is the tradition that the Theotokos, as she was taken up, gave the late-arriving apostle her sash or belt — the zone, the cincture — as a pledge and a relic; this Cincture of the Theotokos is honored in the Church, its chief portion treasured at the Monastery of Vatopedi on Mount Athos, and a feast of the Placing of the Sash is kept on August 31. This file sets out the tradition of the giving of the sash, the relic and its veneration, and weighs the provenance and attestation of both.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle)

The Giving of the Sash

The tradition develops naturally from the Dormition narrative (see Thomas and the Dormition). As the Theotokos was borne up to her Son, the tradition relates, she let fall — or deliberately gave — her sash (Greek zone, “girdle, belt, cincture”) to the apostle Thomas, who alone was absent at the burial and arrived as she was being translated; the sash served at once as a comfort to the grieving apostle, as a token to the other apostles of what he had witnessed, and as a relic for the Church (the developed hagiographical and liturgical tradition; Festal Menaion and the Athonite tradition). The motif parallels and reinforces the empty-tomb tradition: just as the apostles opened the tomb for Thomas and found the Mother of God’s body gone, so the sash given into his hands is the tangible pledge of her bodily glorification — a relic of the one whose body was not left in the tomb. In the iconography of the Dormition and of the “Giving of the Sash,” Thomas is shown receiving the cincture from the Theotokos descending or ascending in glory.

The Relic and Its Veneration

The Cincture of the Theotokos (the Holy Zone or Holy Belt) is a relic honored across the Orthodox world, and its principal portion is treasured at the Holy Monastery of Vatopedi on Mount Athos, where it is one of the monastery’s most precious possessions and is venerated by countless pilgrims; portions and traditions of the sash are also associated with other places in the history of the relic’s transmission (the Vatopedi tradition; Festal Menaion). The Byzantine tradition records the relic’s presence at Constantinople — kept in the church of the Theotokos at Chalkoprateia and associated with the imperial city’s protection — and the feast and the relic’s history are bound up with the Byzantine cult of the Theotokos as defender of the City (the liturgical tradition of the feast; cf. The Theotokos). The relic is venerated by the faithful as a contact with the Mother of God and is especially associated with prayers for childbearing and for the protection it is believed to extend; such associations are reported here as the devotional tradition attached to the relic, not as adjudicated history (METHODOLOGY §3.5).

The Feast of the Placing of the Sash

The Church keeps a feast in honor of the relic: the Placing of the Honourable Sash (Cincture) of the Theotokos, commemorated on August 31 — the last day of the ecclesiastical year in the Byzantine calendar — which celebrates the depositing (placing) of the sash in its shrine and the veneration of the relic (the Menaion for August 31; Festal Menaion). The feast’s hymnography praises the Theotokos and the precious girdle as a “robe of incorruption” and a protection for the faithful, and it is the liturgical anchor of the cincture tradition in the Church’s year. The feast attests the antiquity and firmness of the veneration of the relic in the Byzantine Church, even as the narrative origin of the sash — its giving to Thomas at the Dormition — belongs, like the Dormition narrative itself, to the later hagiographical and liturgical tradition.

Provenance and Attestation Weighed

As with the Dormition narrative, honesty requires distinguishing the secure from the traditional. What is securely attested is the veneration of a relic of the Theotokos’s sash in the Byzantine Church from an early date — the feast of the Placing of the Sash on August 31, and the relic’s association with Constantinople (Chalkoprateia) and later with Vatopedi, are well-established elements of the liturgical and Athonite tradition (Festal Menaion; the Vatopedi tradition). What is late hagiographical tradition is the specific narrative that the sash was given by the Theotokos to Thomas at the Dormition: this depends on the same fifth–sixth-century-and-later Dormition (Transitus) literature and its developments that carry the empty-tomb motif (Shoemaker 2002; see Thomas and the Dormition). [Disputed: the veneration of a sash/cincture relic of the Theotokos is securely attested in the Byzantine liturgical tradition (the feast of August 31; the Chalkoprateia and Vatopedi traditions), but the narrative that the sash was given specifically to the Apostle Thomas at the Dormition belongs to the later hagiographical and iconographic development of the Dormition apocrypha (Shoemaker 2002 on the *Transitus* literature) and is not a datum of the apostolic age; it is received as liturgical and devotional tradition, not as history.] The collection therefore venerates the relic and keeps the feast with the Church, reports the tradition of the giving to Thomas as the beloved hagiographical tradition it is, and refrains from asserting the narrative as historical fact.

The Two Relics, the Two Confirmations

There is a coherence in the way the tradition gathers around Thomas. At the Resurrection, the wounds of Christ were offered to his touch, and his confession sealed the Gospel (see My Lord and My God). At the Dormition, the empty tomb was shown to him and the sash given into his hands, and his witness confirmed the Theotokos’s translation. In each case the apostle who would not, or did not, believe at second hand is given a tangible pledge — the wounds, the empty tomb, the sash — and becomes through it a witness for the whole Church. The sash, like the empty tomb, is in the tradition’s logic the relic that answers Thomas’s need to see and to touch, and through him answers the Church’s. The collection holds this beautiful pattern as the tradition’s theology, while keeping its historical claims pinned to their (late) attestation.

See Also

References

  • The Festal Menaion. Trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber & Faber, 1969. (The Dormition; the Placing of the Sash, August 31.)
  • Shoemaker, Stephen J. Ancient Traditions of the Virgin Mary’s Dormition and Assumption. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. (The Transitus literature underlying the Dormition and sash traditions.)
  • John of Damascus. Homily II on the Dormition. In On the Dormition of Mary: Early Patristic Homilies, trans. Brian E. Daley. Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1998.
  • The Menaion, August 31 (The Placing of the Honourable Cincture of the Theotokos). (The feast and its hymnography.)