service files 15aug noted.md

INTRODUCTION

At the end of Matins will be found the text of the Polyeleos for the feast, that is to say Psalms 44, 135 and the Selection of verses, together with the short Doxastikon and Theotokion, as sung on the Holy Mountain.

We warmly recommend a most valuable collection of patristic material concerning this feast, On the Dormition of Mary. Early Patristic Homilies, translated by Fr Brian Daley, recently published by . It contains a dozen homilies never previously fully translated into English, including the sets of three homilies by St Andrew of Crete and St John of Damascus.

ON THE 15TH OF THE MONTH

C ommemoration of the Falling Asleep of our Most Holy Lady, the Mother of God and Ever-Virgin Mary. [1]

[1] The texts of the feast are based, for the most part, on the apocryphal accounts of the Dormition, of which the most important is the Greek account, attributed to St John the Divine. All the texts state clearly that the Mother of God died a natural death, but that her body was subsequently raised to the glory of heaven. In the Greek account after three days, but in the Coptic after some six months. The story of the Apostles’ being brought to Bethlehem on clouds from the ends of the earth is in the Greek account. The account in the Synaxarion also contains elements that are found in the Latin account. The cryptic allusion to the event in Dionysius the Areopagite’s *De Divinis Nominibus* 3 has also influenced some texts.