The Calendar

Part I

Paul, writing to the Galatian churches, delivers a stinging rebuke, 'You observe days and months and seasons and years.'(Galatians 4:10-11), implying that according to the gospel he had delivered to them they had been redeemed from a state of slavery to the powers of the cosmos but were now reverting both to that bondage and to slavery under the Law. J. Louis Martyn comments that the Galatians having been known by God in the revelation of Jesus Christ 'are now behaving as though Christ had not come, thereby showing that they do not know what time it is.'(Galatians, Anchor Bible 1998, page 418).

In this essay we trace the changes in the usage of the Christian calendar, superimposed as it was upon the civil calendar, up to the mediaeval period. While the Reformation churches abolished much of the mediaeval understanding of the Christian calendar, nineteenth and twentieth century movements have succeeded in restoring some of the old catholic usages. We ask here if there is an alternative way of using the calendar which does not appeal to either catholic or protestant presuppositions and has more in common with the New Testament understanding that God's 'time' has invaded the cosmos in the life, death and vindication of Jesus Christ.

A progress of calendars

Calendars have always been essential to remind us what time it is, what day it is, in relation to the recurring seasons of the year. But throughout the growth of the calendar in the West, from the early Roman times, there have been ways of manipulating it in political, religious and superstitious ways. The early Roman lunar calendar dating from the foundation of Rome in c 753 BC had only ten months, beginning with the spring moon in March and ending about 300 days later in December. The 60 days following December were disregarded as they were considered not worth calculating, as 'nothing happened' during the darkness of winter. But it was not long before a twelve month year was brought in with the intercalation of an extra month every two years to keep in step with the seasons. Even numbered days in a month however were considered unlucky and another change was made giving all the months except February an odd number of days. Politics then entered into the calculation of the year, as January 1st, instead of March 25th, was made the beginning of the year because that was the day when elected consuls entered their civil duties. All this chaos ended in 45 BC when Julius Caesar promulgated a solar calendar with the months as we have them today and an extra day was added after 23rd February every four years to keep in step with the seasons. Seven months were given 31 days and the remaining four, except February, were given 30 days. For the time being the division of the month into three sections of Kalends, Ides and Nones remained. It would be another three centuries before the week was introduced by Constantine in 315, having been impressed with the Christian observance of the first day of their week as a day of worship. But by the 16th century the year had slipped away from the seasons through too many leap years being inserted on account of an error in Caesar's calculations. He had figured the solar year as 365&1/4 days but the actual orbit of the earth is 11 minutes and 14 seconds short of that figure. In 1582 it was in the interest of the Roman Catholic church to stop the festival of Easter drifting further and further away from the Spring Equinox. Pope Gregory XIII rectified this in the new calendar of 1582 when the proper intercalations of the leap years was fixed permanently. The beginning of the year had also drifted from the original January 1st as the church in the sixth century had chosen March 25th as the beginning of the year on the feast of the annunciation.(The details in this paragraph have been taken from articles by Elisabeth Achelis, Journal of Calendar Reform, 1954)

The Christian calendar

It was into this fluid system of marking the days of the year that the church began noting commemorations in its worship. To begin with there were only two commemorations. The first being Sunday, or The Lord's Day, commemorating the resurrection of Jesus. The second is the annual celebration of Easter which, in the first three centuries was a single, unified celebration, at once of the passion and death and the resurrection of Jesus in a vigil on the Saturday/Sunday following the paschal moon. There is no other commemoration regularly celebrated in both East and West until the middle of the fourth century. Epiphany seems to have been the first, followed by Christmas which originated in the West, probably at Rome. Both feasts can be seen to be an attempt to counter pagan festivities connected with the winter solstice, and especially the birthday of the sun in Rome. Ascension was celebrated from the middle of the fourth century onwards as a historical feast on the fortieth day of the Fifty Days of Easter and the gift of the Spirit on the fiftieth. The season of Lent grew out of the fast before Easter Day and the preparation of candidates for baptism, eventually becoming the forty days fast of Lent. At the same time there was a move towards having a season of preparation for Epiphany in Gaul in the late fourth century and also in Spain, known to us as Advent, which became fixed in Rome as forty days calculated back from Christmas in the time of Gregory the Great at the end of the sixth century. All these observances gradually spread to other churches in the West together with other feasts of our Lord such as the Presentation of Christ in the Temple. While the festival of Easter changed from the fourth century onwards from a unified Vigil to a series of commemorations of the individual days of Holy Week (as we shall be describing later on) the other commemorations of the calendar seem to have remained distinctive, separate days and not involved in a sort of ritual historical progression from birth to Pentecost as happened later in the Middle Ages.

Changes in the mode of celebrating the calendar

The seeds of change in the later Middle Ages from independent feasts to a historically oriented annual cycle goes back in part to the revolution in the celebration of Easter at Jerusalem in the late fourth century. Jerusalem in the fourth century had become a popular place of pilgrimage. People would come from far away places to venerate and worship at the sites associated with Jesus. How it happened is not known but some have ascribed the exotic rites in Jerusalem at this time as being due to the genius of the bishop, Cyril. A good example is of one of the services held on the Friday before Easter Day in the later fourth century in Jerusalem. We owe this account to a pilgrim called Egeria. 'In the morning ... round about eight o'clock (there is brought to the bishop) a gold and silver box containing the holy wood of the cross.. All the people go past one by one. They stoop down, touch the holy wood first with their forehead and then with their eyes and then kiss it.... The whole time between midday and three o'clock is taken up with readings. They are all about the things Jesus suffered, demonstrating to all the people by the testimony of the Gospels and the writings of the Apostle that the Lord actually suffered everything the prophets had foretold ... You could hardly believe how every single one of them weeps during the three hours because of the manner in which the Lord suffered for us.'(John Wilkinson, Egeria's Travels, SPCK, 1973, page 138) Before this time there had never anywhere been a separate celebration of the passion on Good Friday apart from the Paschal celebration of Easter Day. Now pilgrims took these services and ideas back with them to their own parishes and dioceses, together with relics and so the new mode of worship spread widely and quickly within another two hundred years. Gregory Dix also comments on the Jerusalem liturgy that, '...it came to be thought primarily as the representation, the enactment before God, of the historical process of redemption, of the historical events of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus by which redemption had been achieved.' (G. Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy, Dacre Press, 1945, page 305)

It is not known when the idea of making the annual cycle of feasts and seasons of preparation into a definite historical annual cycle came about. Most probably, as with all the celebrations that had arrived spasmodically in response to both theological and social concerns, it was a gradual process happening here and there in various provinces until it came to be in the 13th century the full blown historical cycle which lasted everywhere until the sixteenth century. Beginning with Advent, this was a re-run of the redemption made once for all in Christ. It was at this time that the idea arose of the calendar having not simply one centre at Easter but two foci - the movable one at Easter and the fixed one at Christmas. It was a way of bringing to mind the essential elements of faith and gave to the year a sort of direction and purpose. What was portrayed in the stained glass windows of the great churches was now enacted in every town, village and hamlet as a way of life organised by the ritual of the church. It was not without its hazards most particularly as a breeding ground for superstitious ideas. As A. D. Nock wrote, 'The eucharist, a meal and thanksgiving linked to the symbolic act by which Jesus made his disciples willing partners in his death, became the re-enacting of that death. Medieval piety developed the drama of Holy Week with increasing realism and in the domain of the Greek church the popular attitude still is that at every Eastertide Christ rises, and that if he did not the crops would not grow.'(A.D.Nock, Conversion, OUP, 1969, page 234 )

Go to Part II