From the feriae of Rome to the ‘image of God’ in Genesis, right through to the Assumption of Mary: a brief European history of dignity and freedom.

The holiday that some countries enojy on August 15 (still called Ferragosto in Italy, from the ancient feriae Augusti) is a good opportunity to have some serious fun with words. Ancient words often hold a history that is far longer than the customs they refer to today.

Let’s take a holiday, a public holiday. The Romans’ feriae were days set aside for sacred purposes and removed from ordinary activities, marked on the public or private religious calendar. Our Ferragosto also preserves the memory of the Feriae Augusti, although the Christian 15 August has since taken on an entirely different meaning.

Linguistic history has, however, produced a slight paradox: in today’s Italian, ‘ferie’ (holidays) are precisely the vacation days, whilst a ‘giorno feriale’ (working day) is the normal working day.
Without claiming to offer an etymological explanation, we might allow ourselves a slight poetic stretch: the Christian tradition has, in a sense, universalised the concept of the festival.
The sacred no longer depends on the privilege of a sovereign or on sacrifices offered to the gods, but becomes part of the very definition of the person.

All kings, and all queens

To understand just how ancient this revolution is, however, we need to take a step back. ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness,’ says Genesis 1:26; and the following verse clarifies: ‘God created man in his own image […] male and female he created them’ ( Gen 1:27).

The term is ’adam: the human being, humanity, prior to the distinction between man and male, for which the subsequent account will use ’ish.
It is therefore not the man, in Genesis 1, who is created in the image of God, with the woman subsequently acquiring that dignity: both originally belong to the same imago Dei.

This fact stands out even more clearly against the backdrop of the ancient Near East. In Mesopotamian and Assyrian royal ideologies, the privileged relationship with the divine belonged pre-eminently to the sovereign, who could be described as the image or representative of the deity.

In this way, Genesis achieves something culturally remarkable: it democratises royalty.

What elsewhere characterises the king is attributed to human beings as such and, with a crucial clarification, without distinction of sex.
Man and woman are, to use a deliberately anachronistic image, king and queen at the very same moment, because both derive their dignity from being created in the image of the same King.

The rib that conquered art

However, the Book of Genesis contains two accounts of creation that do not entirely correspond. In the second – the famous ‘rib’ story – the sequence is different: first the man appears, then the woman is taken from his side (Gen 2:21–23). It is this account, in particular, that has captured the European imagination.

For centuries, painting, sculpture and iconography have established a powerful sequence: first Adam, then Eve, followed immediately by the tree and the serpent. From early Christian iconography right through to Masaccio and Michelangelo, this sequence has almost spontaneously become our way of ‘seeing’ Genesis. This was further reinforced by the Greek legacy, which had come to regard the male body in particular as the paradigm of human harmony, as in Polykleitos’ Doryphoros.

This is why Raphael’s Madonna of the Sistine Chapel takes on particular significance: the female figure embodies that synthesis of balance and movement characteristic of the classical canon. It is almost as though Western art were restoring to women, on a visual level, a regal dignity that the first chapter of Genesis had recognised in them from the very beginning.

It is not a question of transforming an ancient text into a contemporary statement on gender equality: that would be anachronistic. But it would be just as incorrect to overlook what the text actually says: the divine image takes precedence over any hierarchy between the sexes. The New Testament takes this insight a step further, stating even more explicitly: ‘There is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus’ (Letter to the Galatians 3:28).

Herein lies one of the great paradoxes of European history. Christian Europe has experienced hierarchies, discrimination and rigidly class-based societies, yet it has continued to enshrine in its founding texts a principle capable of judging them: dignity takes precedence over rank.
Before being a king or a subject, a man or a woman, rich or poor, every human being bears an image that no institution has bestowed upon them and that no institution can completely take away from them.

It is one of the distant cultural roots — without drawing simplistic genealogies — of what modern Europe would come to call the universal dignity of the person. Our holidays can therefore remind us, for a day, that we do not need to be emperors to possess a regal dignity. Biblically speaking, we are all emperors. And empresses.

Mary and the Fullness of the Human Image

15 August allows us to add one final point. And here, first and foremost, we must avoid a misunderstanding: nothing in the foregoing detracts from the autonomy and greatness of the Jewish tradition. It is the text of Genesis itself, within its own Jewish context, that achieves that extraordinary universalisationof the imago Dei. Christianity receives this legacy; it does not invent it.

But perhaps, through Mary, it endows them with a particularly powerful symbolic significance.

Whilst misunderstandings regarding the original equal dignity of men and women may indeed have persisted throughout Christian history — partly due to the immense popularity of the second account of creation — the figure of Mary introduces an element that is difficult to ignore: in the Christian faith, it is a woman who represents the human being brought to their highest fulfilment.

Not a female deity set in opposition to a male God, of course. Mary remains entirely a creature. And it is precisely this that makes the point theologically interesting: what is glorified in her is her humanity.

The Assumption extends this insight to the body. Mary does not attain glory by abandoning her physicality, nor by symbolically ceasing to be a woman: she is assumed ‘in body and soul’. John Paul II’s Redemptoris Mater speaks of the Assumption as the definitive fulfilment in Mary of the effects of Christ’s redemption (*Redemptoris Mater*, 41).

In this sense, the Assumption can be seen almost as a return to the first page of Genesis. There, the image of God was attributed to human beings as ‘male and female’; here, according to the Christian faith, it is a woman who embodies the eschatological fulfilment to which human beings are destined.

It is not a Christian correction of a flaw in Judaism, which on this point needs no correction. Rather, it is a development arising from within the Christian interpretation of that same biblical heritage: the kingship granted to man and woman in the beginning finds its most powerful embodiment in the Queen assumed into heaven.

A dogma that leaves room for interpretation

Finally, there is a second paradox in the Assumption.

The dogma was proclaimed by Pius XII on 1 November 1950 in the Apostolic Constitution Munificentissimus Deus, but belief in the Assumption did not originate at that time. The tradition concerning Mary’s glorious destiny was very ancient, and in the East the feast of the Dormition of the Mother of God had been celebrated for centuries.

The year 1950 therefore marks not the birth of a new doctrine, but its solemn definition. And it is precisely the wording chosen by Pius XII that is of interest: Mary, ‘having completed the course of her earthly life’, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory (Munificentissimus Deus, 44).

Those words define the Assumption but do not dogmatically establish whether Mary passed through death. John Paul II would explicitly recall this in 1997: Pius XII did not wish to solemnly affirm Mary’s death as a truth to be accepted by all believers. The tradition of the Dormition, and therefore of Mary’s death, is in fact much older; the view that she passed into glory without dying emerged much later. However, the dogmatic definition does not require this question to be treated as an article of faith.

Here, then, is a particularly interesting paradox: a belief that has been cherished and celebrated for centuries is, at the very moment it is formulated with the utmost dogmatic solemnity, expressed by distinguishing between what must be affirmed and what may remain open to interpretation.

We might call it a principle of precision within freedom: not relativism, because something is affirmed; not uniformity, because not everything is imposed.

Perhaps this seemingly innocuous Ferragosto thus becomes a small European parable. Europe often vacillates between two mirror-image fears: that a strong identity will inevitably lead to exclusion, and that plurality will dissolve any shared identity. Its finest history, however, suggests a third possibility.

The Book of Genesis attributes a shared dignity to men and women and bestows upon the whole of humanity a kingly dignity that other cultures tended to concentrate in the sovereign. The Christian tradition, moreover, sees in a woman the human being who has attained, in body and soul, the fullness of her destiny.

And a twentieth-century Catholic definition shows, at least in this instance, that establishing what unites us does not necessarily mean defining everything on which we might differ.

From the Roman feriae to the Christian feast, from Genesis to Raphael, from Jerusalem to Rome and from Rome to modern Europe, a simple thread emerges: dignity is not the privilege of a select few, and unity does not require everyone to be the same.

It’s not a bad idea for Ferragosto.