Why Our Lady remained after Christ’s Ascension
Did Our Lady ascend with Christ, and return in obedience and love for the infant Church?
Did Our Lady ascend with Christ, and return in obedience and love for the infant Church?
Editor’s Notes
In this part, Fr. Coleridge tells us…
How Mary may have shared in her Son’s triumph at the Ascension in a hidden, heavenly way
That her choice to remain on earth reflects the highest charity and likeness to Christ
Why tradition permits contemplation of her silent role in the Church’s earliest days
He shows us that even without explicit scriptural record, the instincts of faith can glimpse the mysteries of Mary’s glory.
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
Fr Coleridge’s notes on the conclusion of his labours
The writer had proceeded thus far with the conclusion of his work, when he became aware that the time was approaching when it would be necessary no longer to struggle against the gradual failure of power of which he had already felt more than one symptom.
It therefore seemed better to leave the concluding chapter, and to try to supplement it with a few paragraphs which he might cull, on the subject of which he had intended here to speak at some little length, taken from a work which he had published some few years ago.
The subjects of these paragraphs are the traditional inclusion of the Blessed Virgin in the number of the saints who are thought to have formed some of the number of those who accompanied our Lord in His triumphant ascent to Heaven on the day of His Ascension, and on another kindred point with regard to the Providence of our Lord, by which it was arranged that the Blessed Mother should remain on earth for, it is believed, as long as fifteen years after the glorious Ascension of her Son.
The great triumph in Heaven
This picture of the heavenly triumph of our Lord belongs to our theology, as the account of His taking possession of His Kingdom which has had and shall have no end. The taking possession of a Kingdom is a magnificent solemnity which happens once, while the continuance of that possession, and the exercise of the royal power which is then assumed, last as long as the life of the Eternal King.
But it is but reasonable to suppose that the ceremony, if we may so speak, of the “possession,” was great and glorious and august in a degree becoming the dignity of the King, and that no feature that belonged naturally to the rights and majesty of His Person and to the circumstances under which the Kingdom had been gained could have been absent therefrom. The description of the Ascension in the Psalms bears out this supposition.1
The Princes are told twice over to lift up their gates, that the King of Glory may come in. It must have been an occasion the heavenly pomp and splendour of which thrilled the whole host of the angels with astonishment, awe, and the purest and intensest joy.
Conjecture as to the saints who may have accompanied him
These truths cannot but raise considerably our ideas about this entrance of our Lord in His Sacred Humanity into the Heavenly Kingdom which He had won by His Passion.
We see Him accompanied by a large company of His redeemed, some in body as well as in soul, some only in soul. Heaven is already the possession of the children of men. When the commentators on Sacred Scripture try to imagine who may have been the saints who accompanied our Lord in their glorified bodies, they naturally enough include among them the nearest relatives and friends of our Lord, such as St. Joachim, St. Anne, and the blessed Joseph.
At such an enumeration the Christian reason pauses, as if struck by the absence of a name which it instinctively feels ought to be there. What if, as some contemplatives tell us, the Blessed Mother accompanied her Son to take possession of her glory, derived from His?
In forming an estimate of such conjectures, we must first of all be secure that, although they may be no more than conjectures, they are at all events in perfect harmony with Christian and theological reason.
The Ascension of our Lord was His solemn taking possession, not only of the throne of glory at the right hand of the Father for Himself, but also of the Kingdom of Heaven for the whole multitude of the redeemed. It was the achievement of our Lord in His Human Nature, in the Body and the Soul which He had taken to His own Person when He became Man. It was the triumph of His Sacred Humanity, by the merits of which it is that Heaven has been won for us, won for us in soul and body both.
As has just now been said, the Christian commentators have been guided by a beautiful instinct in their determination as to some particular saints who may have accompanied our Lord in body and in soul both. Who are these saints? They are, or at least among them are, those who are dearest and closest to His Sacred Humanity itself.
How can we see the beauty of this imagination, if it be but an imagination, without also seeing the Blessed Mother of our Lord, of whose substance His Body was formed, who bore Him in her womb, nursed Him at her breasts, and was so ineffably united to Him during the whole of His earthly course, was incomparably nearer and closer to Him than any of the nearest and closest of the saints? She was the greatest trophy, so to say, of His work on earth, in life and death, for she had a larger share in its fruits than all the saints together.
How is it possible, therefore, for the Christian intelligence not to long to know that, as she had been so inseparable from Him in His Passion, so also she had her own unique share in His triumph?
But why would we think this? And does it involve any theological problems?
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