The emergence of Lent and Holy Week
It was once commonly assumed that the 40-day period of pre-paschal preparation for baptismal candidates, penitents and the Christian community in general, known as ‘Lent’ (Quadragesima or Tessarakoste, i.e., ‘forty’), had its origin as a gradual backwards development of the short preparatory and purificatory fast held before the annual celebration of Pascha.1 According to this standard theory, the one- or two-day fast before Pascha (as attested by Tertullian in De ieiunio 13–14) became extended to include:
• the entire week, later called ‘Great Week’ or ‘Holy Week’, beginning on the preceding Monday;
• a three-week period (at least in Rome) including this ‘Holy Week’; and, finally,
• a six-week, 40-day preparation period assimilating those preparing for Easter baptism to the 40-day temptation of Jesus in the desert.
That this pre-paschal period finally became 40 days in length in the fourth century has traditionally been explained by an appeal to a shift in world-view on the part of the immediate post-Constantinian Christian community. That is, instead of an eschatological orientation to the imminent parousia of Christ little concerned with historical events, sites and time, the post-Constantinian context of the fourth century reveals a Church whose liturgy has become principally a historical remembrance and commemoration of the past; a liturgy increasingly splintered into separate commemorations of historical events in the life of Christ. As the primary and most influential proponent of this theory of fourth-century ‘historicism’, Gregory Dix explained it thus:
The step of identifying the six weeks’ fast with the 40 days’ fast of our Lord in the wilderness was obviously in keeping with the new historical interest of the liturgy. The actual number of ‘40 days’ of fasting was made up by extending Lent behind the sixth Sunday before Easter in various ways. But the association with our Lord’s fast in the wilderness was an idea attached to the season of Lent only after it had come into existence in connection with the preparation of candidates for baptism.2
As Robert Taft and John Baldovin have demonstrated,3 however, the historical situation cannot be explained adequately as a simple interpretive shift from a pre-Nicene eschatological orientation to a fourth- century historical one. ‘Eschatology’ and ‘history’ are not mutually exclusive. As we have already seen with the Quartodeciman Pascha,4 both eschatological orientation and the celebration of Pascha on the exact date of Christ’s Passion, 14 Nisan, could go together. Recent scholarship on Lent, most notably by Talley5 and even more recently by Nicholas Russo,6 has necessitated revising previous theories based on this assumption of historicism. We can no longer speak of a single origin for Lent but, rather, of multiple origins for this period, which in the fourth-century post-Nicene context become universally standardized and fixed as the ‘40 days’ that have characterized pre-paschal preparation ever since.
Whenever and however Easter came to be universally celebrated on a Sunday in Christian antiquity, third-century sources indicate that the two-day fast on the Friday and Saturday before the celebration of Pascha was becoming a six-day pre-paschal fast in Alexandria and Syria.7 Although this extension has often been interpreted as the initial stage in the development of the 40-day Lent (since this week is included in the overall calculation of Lent in later liturgical sources), this six-day preparatory fast is better interpreted as the origin of what would come to be called ‘Holy Week’ or ‘Great Week’ throughout the churches of the ancient world. Talley observed that within the later Byzantine tradition Lazarus Saturday and Palm Sunday divide Lent, which precedes them, from the six-day pre-paschal fast of Great Week, which follows, and these days were known already in fourth-century Jerusalem.8 Rather than being related specifically to the origins of Lent, therefore, the two-day (or one-week) fast in these third-century sources (with the possible exception of Apostolic Tradition 209) seems to have been an independent preparation of the faithful for the imminent celebration of Pascha itself. Already in the pre-Nicene Didascalia Apostolorum, this fast is related, chronologically, to events in the last week of Jesus’ life. In other words, the Holy Week fast, properly speaking, is not Lent but a pre-paschal fast alone, which overlaps with, but should not be confused with, that longer preparatory period that comes to be known as Lent.
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1 See Adolf Adam, The Liturgical Year: Its History and Meaning after the Reform of the Liturgy (New York: Pueblo 1981), pp. 91ff.; Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (London: Dacre 1945), pp. 347–60; Patrick Regan, ‘The Three Days and the Forty Days’ in Maxwell E. Johnson (ed.), Between Memory and Hope: Readings on the Liturgical Year (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press 2000), pp. 125–41; Pierre Jounel, ‘The Year’ in A.-G. Martimort et al. (eds), The Church at Prayer 4 (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press 1986), pp. 31–150, here at pp. 65–72.
2 Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy, p. 354.
3 Robert Taft, ‘Historicism Revisited’, in Robert Taft, Beyond East and West: Problems in Liturgical Understanding (2nd edn, Rome: Edizioni Orientalia Christiana 1997), pp. 42–9; John Baldovin, The Urban Character of Christian Worship, OCA 228 (Rome: Pontifical Oriental Institute 1987), pp. 90–3.
4 See above, pp. 39–45.
5 Thomas J. Talley, The Origins of the Liturgical Year (New York: Pueblo 1986; 2nd edn, Collegeville: The Liturgical Press 1991), pp. 163–238; and ‘The Origin of Lent at Alexandria’, in Thomas J. Talley, Worship: Reforming Tradition (Washington, DC: The Pastoral Press 1990), pp. 87–112 = Johnson, Between Memory and Hope, pp. 183–206.
6 Nicholas Russo, ‘The Origins of Lent’ (PhD dissertation, University of Notre Dame 2009).
7 On this see above, pp. 52–5.
8 Talley, The Origins of the Liturgical Year, pp. 176–214. See also Talley, ‘The Origin of Lent at Alexandria,’ pp. 97–108.
9 See above, pp. 78–9.