Why is Christ’s Ascension still hidden in mystery?
Sacred Scripture offers only glimpses of the Ascension—leaving us to consider whether Christ ascended alone, or bore with him the redeemed souls that had risen after his death.
Sacred Scripture offers only glimpses of the Ascension—leaving us to consider whether Christ ascended alone, or bore with him the redeemed souls that had risen after his death.
Editor’s Notes
In this part, Fr. Coleridge tells us…
How the mystery of the Ascension reveals Christ’s triumph and our elevation with Him.
That Saint Paul saw the Ascension not merely as Christ’s glorification, but as the Church’s enrichment.
Why Scripture is silent on its splendours: to preserve the hidden majesty of what we are not yet fit to behold.
He shows us that Christ ascended not alone, but bearing souls in triumph and pouring grace upon His Church.
The Ascension
The Passage of Our Lord to the Father
Chapter XVII
St. Luke xxiv. 50-53; St. Mark xvi. 19, 20; St. John xx. 30, 31; xxi. 25.
Story of the Gospels, § 181
Burns and Oates, London, 1892
Silence as to the mystery of the Ascension
When we speak or think of the great mystery of our Lord’s Ascension into Heaven, we are naturally inclined to feel a void in the information which has been left us by the only Evangelist who has left us the slender amount of information concerning it which we possess. It is, as we know, the crowning event to us in the earthly history of our Blessed Saviour, and we are inclined to expect at least so much revelation of its glories as has been imparted to us concerning the mystery which resembles it most nearly in the Life of our Lord, namely, the mystery of the Transfiguration.
But on reflection we come to see that enough has been given us about the Ascension to satisfy the requirements of the faith, which here contents itself with the simple statement that He ascended into Heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of the Father.
It is perhaps a gain to us that we have no description of a marvellous and glorious Ascension, in which the bodily progress of our Lord from earth to Heaven is minutely described, in which we are told, what was no doubt the case, that He was accompanied and as it were escorted by thousands and tens of thousands of the holy angels, with every circumstance of rejoicing triumph, Heaven, as it were, pouring forth its inhabitants to meet the King of Glory, of Whom the Psalm with which we are so familiar speaks, and we might accompany Him in thought as He mounts up beyond the angels and archangels, beyond cherubin and seraphin, and all the hosts of the blessed, to present Himself in the Sacred Human Nature which He has taken and united to Himself, never henceforth to be divided from Him for ever, and in which He has wrought for us all what the Apostle calls eternal redemption.
Human eye could not have followed there without its powers being overwhelmed by the splendours of the Godhead, though the time is to come, as we believe, when we shall be able, having received the Beatific Vision in store for us, to behold the glories for which we are as yet unfit, but which the saints of God enjoy already, as the Church says:
‘Beholding their Redeemer face to face, and standing always in His presence beholding with happy eyes the most clear truth.’
That time, as we believe and hope, is yet to come for us all, and it might be an incongruous measure of a half-imparted bliss, if without some special and temporary condescension for some particular purpose of our Lord, as it were, to begin before the appointed time.
Scriptural statements
We may be sure that there is good reason why we are not told what belongs so naturally to the history of our redemption as the entrance of our Blessed Lord into the throne of His glory in Heaven, and in the meantime we are content to feed ourselves upon the few glimpses which are allowed us of these glories. We may place, therefore, as the termination of the work on which we have been engaged, the few shreds of information as to this subject which have been allowed to reach us, gathered from what has been said for us in Holy Scripture.
In the first place we are clearly right in thinking of the Ascension of our Lord as in this respect resembling His Resurrection, that in the case of each of these great mysteries, we are led by Sacred Scripture itself to the conclusion that both were wrought by our Lord, that the glory and victory might not terminate in Himself alone, but that He rose to the new life of the Resurrection and to the heavenly condition of the Ascended Saviour for us as well as for Himself.
The great Apostle, writing to the Ephesians, says, speaking of the greatness of the might of the power of God…
‘… which He wrought in Christ, raising Him from the dead, and setting Him on His right hand in the heavenly places, above all principality and power and virtue and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come…’
… adds later some words which seem to show us that he considers the intention of God towards us as meant to extend to the fruits and results of the Ascension also, as well as to those of the Resurrection, saying that:
‘… when we were dead in sins, God hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in the heavenly places through Christ Jesus, that He might show in the ages to come the riches of His grace, in His bounty towards us in Jesus Christ.’
In the mind of St. Paul there is no difference between the effects of the two mysteries of which we are speaking. They are both wrought in our Lord in the first instance, and the fruits of each are intended to pass on by lawful right to those for whom with Himself our Lord wrought the great victory.
St Matthew on the Resurrection
It is hardly necessary here for us to insist more at length on the truth which we are here urging, that our Lord ascended into Heaven that He might make us citizens of Heaven through and in Him.
It is more important for us at the present moment to make it clear, what seems to be the undoubted doctrine of Catholic writers, that both in His Resurrection and in His Ascension He did not rise or ascend alone. This truth as to the Resurrection is distinctly stated by the Evangelist St. Matthew, who tells us ‘that the graves were opened, and many of the saints that slept arose, and coming out of their tombs after His Resurrection, came into the Holy City, and appeared unto many.’1
Some Catholic writers, indeed, consider that the bodies of the saints here spoken of returned to the dead, and that it was only a temporary resuscitation that took place with them. But it seems to others, and perhaps the best authorities, that it was a real and permanent resurrection. The same belief exists in the Church with regard to the other mystery of which we are here speaking, the mystery of the Ascension.
St Paul on the Ascension
This, as has been said elsewhere, seems to be reasonably implied from the language of St. Paul, who says of the mystery of the Ascension, that He should have been escorted to His throne by thousands and thousands of angels, may be taken for granted. But it is equally fair to believe that He was accompanied in His triumphant flight by thousands of redeemed souls.
The words of St. Paul of themselves imply two things, which are very important in their meaning—first, that our Lord at His Ascension ascended to Heaven with a large company of redeemed souls, as is thought in the Church, and secondly, that they were in the position of souls ransomed from some kind of thraldom, and brought with Him as the fruits of His victory—that is, delivered by their participation with Him from a state into which they had been translated, into the glories which He had won for them. It need hardly be said that this is just the idea given us by what devout Catholics believe as to the Ascension of our Lord.
Such Catholics expect that the general rising to the general Ascension to which we look forward will take place after the general Resurrection to which all look forward, though they do not believe it impossible that the Ascension, as the Resurrection, may have been anticipated in the case of some particular persons, according to the will of God, making them exceptions to the general law, for some particular purpose of the Divine counsels, by which they have been raised from the dead or called to the glories of Heaven before the common time, and they do not think that this is inconsistent either with Scripture or the decrees of God.
The grounds on which this exception may be supposed to rest are simply furnished by the considerations on which Christians form their opinion in the particular case as it comes before them.
This may be said in general on these famous words of the Apostle. His words in this short passage are very pregnant,2 and appear to us to contain an immensity of meaning in a very short compass. They comprise, indeed, both parts, as we may call them, of the mystery of the Ascension. Quoting from the Psalms, he says:
‘Ascending on high He led captivity captive, He gave gifts to men.’
The former sentence seems to mean to describe what we may call the earthly and visible part of that which took place, the latter portion contains something of the invisible consequences—the immense effusion of spiritual treasures bestowed upon the children of men in the great gift of the Ascension, which was bestowed in its fulness when the Holy Ghost was sent on the Day of Pentecost. St. Paul seems hardly able to contain himself as he enumerates these gifts, and the Divine objects for which they were given.
‘He gave some apostles, and some prophets, and some other some evangelists, and other some pastors and doctors, for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the Body of Christ, until we all meet into the unity of faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the age of the fulness of Christ, that henceforth we be no more children tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine by the wickedness of men, by cunning craftiness by which they lie in wait to deceive, but doing the truth in charity, we may in all things grow up in Him Who is the Head, even Christ.’
We might continue almost an indefinite length of time to draw out what St. Paul here pours forth as the great results of the Ascension. The whole passage, of which we have quoted only a part, might be expanded into a commentary on the benefits thus scattered abroad on mankind by our Lord in this mystery, and we should then have to add some account of the physical consequences of which the corporal part of our composite nature became a partaker by virtue of the Ascension.
But enough has been already said to show how large a place this mystery filled in the enlightened mind of the great Apostle, and the ample space he would have allowed to it if it had been his lot to attempt to explain to the men of his time all its benefits.
His strong words
We are much struck with the definiteness and distinctness with which the Apostle has arranged his words in the few lines which have been quoted, as if he had before him a perfectly clear meaning for every one of the special functions, so to call them, which he looked for from the gifts of the Holy Ghost as the result of the Ascension, when all these precious gifts were bestowed, and this is one of the many places in which St. Paul has left us only what we venture to think is a far too short exposition of the wonderful fruitfulness of our Lord’s work for us, of which indeed, in passages like that before us, he seems to feel the incompleteness of his own commentary.
He has more than one other passage, especially when he is dealing with the subject of the Holy Ghost, so kindred to that of the Ascension, in which his mind seems possessed by the greatness of what he has to say, and what he longs to communicate to his spiritual children.
Such passages are those in which he mentions his own very earnest prayer for the enlightenment of those to whom he is writing on the points which he is anxious to see them more in possession of the perfect knowledge which he desires to see in them, as when he says:
‘For this cause I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of Whom all paternity in Heaven and earth is named, that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened by His Spirit with might unto the inward man, that Christ may dwell by faith in your hearts, that being rooted and founded in charity, you may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth, and length, and height, and depth, to know also the charity of Christ, which surpasseth all knowledge, that you may be filled unto all the fulness of God.’
The Apostle has evidently before his mind an immense store of knowledge, brought into the world by the presence of the Holy Ghost, and of which the children of the Church are to be made possessors, to the great enrichment and enlightenment of the general body, and he is most anxious, and in continual prayer for, the diffusion of this revelation of the counsels of God, on the reception of which so much of their spiritual growth is intended to depend.
Sometimes he seems most eager for their advancement in the perception of the riches of grace connected with the work of the redemption wrought on the Cross, at other times he seems to have more near to his heart the special graces purchased according to the will of God, at the Ascension and the coming of the Holy Ghost at Pentecost.
But what of Our Lady at the Ascension? What should we think of the accounts that she ascended with Our Lord as well?
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St. Matt. xxvii. 52, 53.
Ephes. iv. 8.