The Church Year and Kalendar
9781465636430
200 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
The Church’s Year, as it has been known for many centuries throughout Christendom, is characterised, first, by the weekly festival of the Lord’s Day (a feature which dates from the dawn of the Church’s life and the age of the Apostles) and, secondly, by the annual recurrence of fasts and festivals, of certain days and certain seasons of religious observance. These latter emerged, and came to find places in the Kalendar at various periods. In order of time the season of the Pascha, the commemoration of the death, and, subsequently, of the resurrection of the Saviour, is the first of the annual observances to appear in history. Again, at an early date local commemorations of the deaths of victims of the great persecutions under the pagan Emperors were observed yearly. And some of these (notably those who suffered at Rome) gradually gained positions in the Church’s Year in regions remote from the places of their origin. Speaking generally, little as it might be thought probable beforehand, it is a fact that martyrs of local celebrity emerge in the history of the Kalendar at an earlier date than any but the most eminent of the Apostles (who were also martyrs), and earlier than some of the festivals of the Lord Himself. The Kalendar had its origin in the historical events of the martyrdoms. So far the growth of the Kalendar was the outcome of natural and spontaneous feeling. But at a later time we have manifest indications of artificial constructiveness, the laboured studies of the cloister, and the work of professional martyrologists and Kalendar-makers. To take, for the purpose of illustration, an extreme case, it is obvious that the assignment of days in the Kalendar of the Eastern Church to Trophimus, Sosipater and Erastus, Philemon and Archippus, Onesimus, Agabus, Rufus, Asyncretus, Phlegon, Hermas, the woman of Samaria (to whom the name Photina was given), and other persons whose names occur in the New Testament, is the outcome of deliberate and elaborate constructiveness. The same is true of the days of Old Testament Patriarchs and Prophets, once, in a measure, a feature of Western, as they are still of Eastern Kalendars. But even all the festivals of our Lord, save the Pascha, though doubtless suggested by a spontaneous feeling of reverence, could be assigned to particular days of the year only after some processes of investigation and inference, or of conjecture. Whether the birthday of the Founder of the Christian religion should be placed on January 6 or on December 25 was a matter of debate and argument. Commentators on the history of the Gospels, the conjectures of interpreters of Old Testament prophecy, and such information as might be fancied to be derivable from ancient annals, had of necessity to be considered. The assignment of the feast of the Nativity to a particular day was a product of the reflective and constructive spirit. It is not absolutely impossible that ancient tradition, if not actual record, may be the source of June 29 being assigned for the martyrdom of St Peter and St Paul; but a more probable origin of the date is that it marks the translation of relics. Certainly the days of most of the Apostles (considered as the days of their martyrdoms) have little or no support from sources that have any claim to be regarded as historical. They find their places but gradually, and, it would seem, as the result of a resolve that none of them should be forgotten. Commemorations which mark the definition of a dogma, or which originated in the special emphasis given at some particular epoch to certain aspects of popular belief and sentiment, have all appeared at times well within the ken of the historical student. Thus, ‘Orthodoxy Sunday’ (the first Sunday in Lent) in the Kalendar of the Greek Church is but little concerned with the controversies on the right faith which occupied the great Councils of the fourth and fifth centuries.
