The Dormition

This section treats the end of the Virgin’s earthly life and the two places where the Marian traditions of East and West most clearly diverge in frame. It sets out the Orthodox feast of the Dormition — her falling-asleep, burial, and bodily translation — with strict attention to what Scripture records and what tradition hands down, and it sets the Roman dogma of the Immaculate Conception beside the teaching of the Church, reporting Rome’s position accurately and in its strongest form — as a dogma the Orthodox Church has examined and not received.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Dormition (Greek Koimēsis, “falling asleep”; Slavonic Uspenie) is the crown of the Marian year and the last of the great feasts of the Church calendar. It is also a test case for the collection’s method: nearly everything the Church sings and depicts of the Virgin’s death comes not from Scripture but from later tradition and the apocryphal transitus literature, and the first file below pins each element to its earliest datable attestation. The second file turns from East–West difference in the manner of glorification to the sharper doctrinal difference of 1854 — the Immaculate Conception — and shows how that disagreement follows from the prior divergence over ancestral and original sin.

File	Focus
The Dormition: The Falling Asleep of the Mother of God	The tradition of Mary’s peaceful death, the gathered apostles, Christ receiving her soul, the Gethsemane burial, and the empty-tomb / bodily-translation narrative; the source-critical fact that none of it is in Scripture; the transitus literature (Pseudo-John, Pseudo-Melito) and the disputed dating (Shoemaker); the Dormition homilies of John of Damascus, Andrew of Crete, and Germanus; the meaning of the “Pascha of the Mother of God”; and the feast of 15 August.
East and West: The Immaculate Conception	The Roman dogma defined by Pius IX in Ineffabilis Deus (1854), its medieval background (Scotus, Bernard, Aquinas), and the Orthodox rejection — framed as a difference downstream of ancestral versus original sin. Rome’s case in its strongest form, proponents named; the Orthodox non-reception stated as the position of the Church (METHODOLOGY §4.1).

File

Focus

The Dormition: The Falling Asleep of the Mother of God

The tradition of Mary’s peaceful death, the gathered apostles, Christ receiving her soul, the Gethsemane burial, and the empty-tomb / bodily-translation narrative; the source-critical fact that none of it is in Scripture; the transitus literature (Pseudo-John, Pseudo-Melito) and the disputed dating (Shoemaker); the Dormition homilies of John of Damascus, Andrew of Crete, and Germanus; the meaning of the “Pascha of the Mother of God”; and the feast of 15 August.

East and West: The Immaculate Conception

The Roman dogma defined by Pius IX in Ineffabilis Deus (1854), its medieval background (Scotus, Bernard, Aquinas), and the Orthodox rejection — framed as a difference downstream of ancestral versus original sin. Rome’s case in its strongest form, proponents named; the Orthodox non-reception stated as the position of the Church (METHODOLOGY §4.1).

The Dormition

Contents

See Also