§ 130. THE WORSHIP OF MARY.
sermon on Mary's assumption. The belief is based upon the story, told by Juvenal of Jerusalem to the emperor Mareian at the council of Chalcedon, 451, that three days after Mary's burial in Jerusalem, her coffin but not her body was found by the Apostles. Juvenal afterwards sent the coffin to the emperor.1 Even Augustine had shunned to believe that the body of the mother of our Lord saw corruption. The festi val of the Assumption was celebrated in Rome as early as the middle of the eleventh century.2 The synod of Tou louse, 1229, included the festival among the other church festivals at the side of Christmas and Easter. Thomas Aquinas spoke of it as being tolerated by the Church, not commanded.
The Ave Maria, " Hail Mary, thou that art highly favored, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb " made up of the words of the angelic salutation and the words of Elizabeth, Luke i : 28, 42, was used as a prayer in the time of Peter Damiani,3 and was specially expounded by Bonaventura and Thomas Aquinas. The petitionary clause, " Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and in the hour of death" appears in the sixteenth century and was introduced into the Roman breviary 1568.4 The so-called Ave, or Angelus, bell was ordered rung by John XXII. (d. 1334) three times a day. When it peals, the woman in the home and the work man in the field are expected to bow their heads in prayer to Mary.
In few respects are the worship and teaching of the Middle Ages so different from those of the Protestant Churches as in the claims made for Mary and the regard paid to her. If
1 Addis and Arnold, Cath. Diet., 6th ed., commend the tradition as in herently probable as no relics of Mary's body have ever been found.
2 Damiani, De Mirac., Migne, 145. 586. 8 De bono suffr., Migne, 145. 564.
4 According to Osar of Heisterbach, the Ave Maria took the place of sugar and honey in the mouths of nuns who repeated it on their knees daily fifty times and it tasted like honey. A priest who tried it found, after six weeks, that his spittle had turned to honey. Sermons, as quoted by Cruel, Gesch. d. deutschen Predigt, p. 284.
844 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1049-1294.
we are to judge by tlie utterances and example of Pius IX. and Leo XIII., the mediaeval cult still goes on unchanged in the Roman communion. And more recently Pius X. shows that he follows his predecessors closely. In his encyclical of Jan. 15, 1907, addressed to the French bishops, he says, " In full confidence that the Virgin Immaculate, daughter of our Father, mother of the Word, spouse of the Holy Ghost, will obtain for you from the most holy and adorable Trinity better days, we give you our Apostolic benediction." It was the misfortune of the mediaeval theologians to fall heir to the eulogies passed upon Mary by Jerome and other early Fathers of the early Church and the veneration in which she was held. They blindly followed, having inherited also the allegorical mode of interpretation from the past. In part they were actuated by a sincere purpose to exalt the glory and divinity of Christ when they ascribed to Mary exemp tion from sin. On the other hand it was a Pagan, though chivalric, superstition to exalt her to a position of a goddess who stands between Christ and the sinner and mitigates by her intercession the austerity which marks his attitude towards them. This was the response the mediaeval Church gave to the exclamation of St. Bernard, " Who is this virgin so worthy of honor as to be saluted by the angel and so lowly as to have been espoused to a carpenter ? " l The tenderest piety of the Middle Ages went out to her and is expressed in such hymns as the Mater dolorosa and the com panion piece, Mater speciosa. But this piety, while it no doubt contributed to the exaltation of womanhood, also involved a relaxation of penitence, for in the worship of Mary tears of sympathy are substituted for resolutions of repentance.