The Dormition of the Theotokos

On 15 August, the last Great Feast of the Church year, the Church commemorates the Dormition — the “falling-asleep” (koimēsis) of the Mother of God, her burial by the apostles, and, in the received tradition, the translation of her body. The feast rests not on Scripture but on the transitus traditions of the fifth and sixth centuries; preceded by a strict two-week fast, it is the Theotokos’s own Pascha, her sharing in her Son’s victory over the tomb.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The feast that closes the year

Because the liturgical year runs from 1 September to 31 August, the Dormition on 15 August is the last of the Twelve Great Feasts in the annual cycle — so that the year both opens (with the Nativity of the Theotokos on 8 September) and closes with the Mother of God, the whole cycle enclosed within her life (Ware, “The Meaning of the Great Feasts,” in The Festal Menaion, trans. Mother Mary and Ware, Faber, 1969, Introduction; and see The Great Marian Feasts). The feast commemorates the koimēsis, the “falling-asleep,” of the Theotokos: her death, the gathering of the apostles to her bedside, her burial at Gethsemane, and — in the tradition the feast celebrates — the finding of her tomb empty and the translation of her body to heaven, her Son having received her soul and then raised her body to be with him (synaxarion and propers of the feast; The Festal Menaion, pp. 504–528).

The sources: the transitus traditions

The Dormition, like the Nativity and Entrance of the Theotokos, has no basis in canonical Scripture: the New Testament says nothing of the end of the Virgin’s life. The feast rests instead on the transitus (Dormition) traditions, a body of apocryphal narratives whose earliest surviving witnesses date from the fifth and sixth centuries, though they may draw on older material (Stephen J. Shoemaker, The Ancient Traditions of the Virgin Mary’s Dormition and Assumption, Oxford, 2002, chs. 1–2). [Apocryphal: the whole narrative of the Dormition — the apostles gathered from the ends of the earth, the deathbed at Jerusalem, the burial in Gethsemane, and the empty tomb — derives from the *transitus* literature, first attested in the fifth–sixth centuries, not from Scripture (Shoemaker, *Ancient Traditions*, chs. 1–2).] The Church receives these narratives as venerable tradition without treating them as documented history — the same disposition it takes toward the Protoevangelium feasts. The full account of the sources and the East–West divergence is given in The Falling Asleep; here the essential points are that the narrative content is apocryphal in origin, and that the feast’s dogmatic claim is carefully limited.

The fixing of the date to 15 August is credited to the Emperor Maurice (r. 582–602), who is reported to have established the feast for the whole empire on that day, though a Marian commemoration in mid-August is attested earlier at Jerusalem (ODB = The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. Kazhdan, Oxford, 1991, s.v. “Koimesis”; Shoemaker, Ancient Traditions, pp. 132–141). The feast spread through East and West and was among the four Marian feasts singled out at Rome by Pope Sergius I (687–701) (Liber Pontificalis, Life of Sergius I).

What the feast confesses — and what it does not

The dogmatic reserve of the Orthodox feast is important and is caught in its very texts. What the Church confesses at the Dormition is that the Theotokos truly died — she “fell asleep” as all mortals do — and that she was not abandoned to corruption but was raised by her Son and taken to be with him in glory, body and soul. The kontakion states it with precision: “Neither the tomb nor death had power over the Theotokos, who is ever watchful in her prayers… for being the Mother of Life, she was translated to life by the One who dwelt in her ever-virgin womb” (kontakion; The Festal Menaion, p. 528). Notice what the hymn does and does not say: it confesses the translation to life, and grounds it wholly in Christ (“by the One who dwelt in her womb”), but it does not make of the Virgin’s end an independent dogma. The Orthodox Church has never dogmatically defined the manner of the Dormition and the bodily translation in the way the Roman Catholic Church defined the Assumption as a dogma in 1950 (Munificentissimus Deus); the East holds the Dormition as a cherished tradition celebrated in the liturgy, not as a conciliar definition, and this is a real point of difference between the two, treated fully in The Falling Asleep (Shoemaker, Ancient Traditions, on the East–West divergence; and see St. the Theotokos).

The feast is, above all, the Theotokos’s own Pascha. Her death and translation are her personal participation in the resurrection her Son accomplished: she who bore the Conqueror of death is the first after him to share fully in the victory over the tomb, and so she is the pledge and image of what awaits all the redeemed at the general resurrection (Ware, in The Festal Menaion, Introduction; the paschal echoes of the Dormition hymns; and see Pascha: The Feast of Feasts). The feast that closes the year thus points forward to the End, showing in the Mother the destiny of the Church.

The Dormition Fast

The feast is preceded by the Dormition Fast, a strict two-week fast from 1 to 14 August — the shortest of the four annual fasting seasons but among the most austere, kept in most usage at the level of Great Lent, with wine and oil permitted only on weekends and fish only on the Transfiguration (6 August), which falls within it (Bulgakov, Nastolnaya Kniga, 1900, on the Dormition Fast; and see Fasting and Feasting). The fast is attested by the twelfth century and its duration was regularized at Constantinople in the twelfth century (the synod of 1166 addressed the mid-August fast) (ODB, s.v. “Koimesis”; and see The Great Marian Feasts). A distinctive service of the feast in Slavic and Athonite use is the Burial of the Theotokos — a rite modeled on the Lamentations of Great Saturday, in which a shroud (plashchanitsa) bearing the image of the reposing Virgin is carried in procession and lamented, making explicit the feast’s paschal parallel: as the Church buries and then finds empty the tomb of Christ at Pascha, so it laments and celebrates the Virgin’s falling-asleep in August (Bulgakov, Nastolnaya Kniga, on the rite; and see The Feasts across the Orthodox World). The afterfeast runs to the leave-taking on 23 August.

The icon

The icon of the Dormition is one of the most beloved and is a deliberate mirror of the icon of Pascha. The Theotokos lies on a bier at the center, surrounded by the apostles, who — according to the transitus tradition — were miraculously gathered from the ends of the earth to her repose; bishops and mourning women attend. Behind the bier stands Christ, in a mandorla of glory, holding in his arms a small figure wrapped in white swaddling bands — the soul of his Mother, which he receives as she had once received him as an infant (Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, SVS Press, 1982, on the Dormition icon; and see The Icon of the Feast). The reversal is the whole theology: the Mother who held the infant Christ is now held, as an infant soul, by her Son. Some icons add the apostle Thomas arriving late — a parallel to the Resurrection accounts, and, in the tradition, the occasion of the discovery of the empty tomb. The icon renders the paschal claim of the feast in a single image: death has become a falling-asleep, and the tomb a passage to life.

References

The Festal Menaion. Trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber & Faber, 1969. (The propers of the Dormition, pp. 504–528; the kontakion.)
Stephen J. Shoemaker. The Ancient Traditions of the Virgin Mary’s Dormition and Assumption. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. Ed. A. Kazhdan et al. Oxford, 1991 (s.v. “Koimesis”).
Ouspensky, Leonid, and Vladimir Lossky. The Meaning of Icons. Rev. ed. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1982.
Bulgakov, Sergei V. Nastolnaya Kniga. 2nd ed., 1900.
Liber Pontificalis, Life of Sergius I.